Website and Software Services

Client Brief : A French Travel Site

This was a personal project of my own, and so close to my heart. A little background… I have owned a property in France for about 20 years and, until recently, had made it available for holiday rentals and had used this domain to essentially market the site. My wife and I now use the house more often and want to keep it for ourselves, so the question was : what to do with the website?

I didn’t want to lose the domain name and wanted to somehow retain, and perhaps improve, the good search engine traffic that the site was getting and so chose to redevelop the site as a general information resource that could be used by English-speakers who lived, worked, owned business or visited Western France. The site would essentially be a multi-contributor blog, and would hopefully attract advertisers with products or services available in the area. I realise that this is perhaps not a sound business justification on its own, but I also felt the site could showcase my own skills, attracting potential new clients looking for cost-effective, yet impressive blogging solutions, or french-related websites – for example, property sales or rentals.

The objective was to have a practical solution in place, including migration of existing website content to the new site, within 2-3 days of development time.

Our Solution

As you can see from the finished site we have built it to function as a sophisticated blog, with a nice slider control to display featured posts and images, and have also incorporated some mapping software so that the location of each post can be shown on a Google Map and associated with the post. This will help those visiting the area to quickly identify things that have been posted about the area they are visiting.

There are a lot of static pages too, which initially hold the content from the previous incarnation of the site, but which will ultimately be expanded to include more regional information.

Overall, we are delighted with the result and have already encouraged several people with an interest in the area to post content on a regular basis. The traffic to the site has increased in the two weeks since launch, and we expect this to keep climbing now with continual and varied contributions from our bloggers and from my efforts at link building and other techniques to get people to visit the site (and stay!).

Why not take a look at the finished website?

What does the client think?

As you might imagine – the client is very pleased and is looking forward to lots more new clients as a result

Other clients are pleased with us too…

Take a look at what our other clients say about our Website design and building, and about our web marketing services. we use the vouchforthis.com service so that you can be sure that these are real testimonials written by real people about the services we have actually delivered.

I note with interest that Microsoft have been forced to notify all of their Windows users across Europe that there are other web browsers they can use as an alternative to the ubiquitous Internet Explorer. They will do this by popping up a window to offer users the choice of a bunch of different browsers to install.

I’m sure that most users will continue to use IE or their favourite other browser, and that in notifying them of the choice nobody is expecting a mass move away from IE, but many users will be made aware of alternatives that they didn’t previously know existed. Let’s face it, there are many browsers around, all free, all easy to install, and most with the same, or similar, functionality and add-ons, and I would expect a decent number of people to at least try out a few of these browsers. Whether they stay with them or not is another matter, but they will try them out.

So, if you operate a website or blog, what might this mean to you? Well, at the moment around 70%-80% of your website traffic is probably from IE users, but have you tried looking at your website in any of the other browsers? I come across so many sites that don’t work as they should in these ‘alternative’ browsers, so if your site is one of these you could be impacting 20%-30% of your website visitors – and this is likely to increase as more users are encouraged to try out different browsers.

Our Recommendations

I don’t want to get into a discussion about which browser is best. I use Mozilla Firefox mostly, but IE often and Safari and Google Chrome occasionally. I am a PC user, rather than Apple, and am a web developer, and so it is important for me to try my sites out to make sure they work on different browsers. Typical website visitors probably do not move browsers so frequently. As browsers are easy to install I recommend that you try out a couple of alternatives and then stick with, and get used to, what looks best to you.

If you are a website owner, you really do need to check for yourself that all pages in your site work ok in at least the top 2 or 3 browsers that bring visitors to your site. If your site worked ok a couple of years ago it might not still work ok today! If you find problems then they should be easy for you or your website developer to resolve. Remember – all of the time and money you spend on improving your website, on marketing it, and on improving its Search Engine effectiveness, may be wasted on 20%-30% of your website visitors. Improving your cross-browser support may be the best website investment you can make right now. Take a look at your website stats / Google Analytics reports to see how many of your site visitors don’t currently use IE.

BBC news item about Microsoft having to notify Windows users about web browser alternatives

How to install a new web browser

Client Brief : Crowdwise.co.uk

To develop a website allowing registered members to answer questions that other members have added to the site and to add their own questions for others to answer. The idea for the site came from a book by James Surowiecki called “The Wisdom of Crowds”, where the author claims that you can obtain an accurate answer to any quantitative question by asking a large number of people from a variety of backgrounds what they think. The average answer may well be more accurate than the answer one might have obtained from a so-called expert.

The initial development budget was limited, due to the largely experimental nature of the project and no immediately obvious revenue-generating opportunities.

Our Solution

We set out with the aim of using as much readily-available opensource software as possible, in order to keep development costs within the budget agreed with the client, and chose to use :

• WordPress 2.9 to provide an easy to use, self-hosted, content management system
• Woothemes ‘Digital Farm’ theme
• WP-Polls plugin to provide the basis of our polling booth solution
• WP-Include plugin to allow us to integrate our own customised php code

Although using such an array of products gave us a great start, there was a lot of customising to do, mostly around the WP-POLLS plugin, which although it’s a great product and did 80% of what we wanted, it lacked a key bit of functionality. The client wanted questions to be asked that could be answered by members typing in a numeric value, with the average of all answers being displayed. WP-POLLS did not handle this, and only allows questions that can be answered by the memebr choosing from a number of pre-set answers.

Our solution was to modify the opensource code so that members could choose to create either a normal polling question (i.e. What is your favourite colour? Answers : Red, Blue, Green etc.) or a quantitative question (e.g. How many gold medals will Team GB win at the Winter Olympics? – where members can enter their own numeric answer). This presented a number of complications, especially when modifying the javascript code that controls the Ajax transformation when members answer the question.

Overall, we are pleased with the result. There are many opportunities to improve the design and web copy now that the site is launched, and we will be working with the client to address this over the coming months. In addition, we are considering the best ways to market the site to get it in front of a large audience. It is free, but users do need to register in order to add and answer questions.

Why not take a look at the finished website?

What does the client think?

Other clients are pleased with us too…

Take a look at what our other clients say about our Website design and building, and about our web marketing services. we use the vouchforthis.com service so that you can be sure that these are real testimonials written by real people about the services we have actually delivered.

Business-Scene is a comprehensive member website for small businesses, allowing them to create online profiles, add articles, classified adverts, press releases, contribute to forums, and to find and book onto local business networking events. Launched in 2006 Business-Scene now has 30,000 members from across the UK, lists over 10,000 business events, and now run their own Connections Events throughout the UK that attract many local business networks so that attendees can meet with a wide range of different networks all in the same room.

It’s early days for us, but we have started to dot some examples of wp-polls about the website. This is a WordPress plug-in developed by Lester Chan that allows WordPress users to easily insert multiple polls into their website. Each poll can have a question plus any number of answers. The poll owner gets to decide where to display the poll, and whether multiple answers can be selected. All active polls can be displayed, or you can choose individual ones, or even polls chosen at random, to display. each can have an expiry date or can be left to never expire. Votes cast can be displayed in a number of ways (including graphical).

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Take a look at some of our other Polls – we’re trying not to go bonkers with them!

If you use other poll or survey software on your site, let us know how you are finding it.

I love picking up scripts, plugins and widgets on the web that enhance the sites I am working on without my having to re-invent the wheel every time. Sure, some of them need a little tweaking to get them to do precisely what I want, but that generally means I can still provide great solutions for my clients far more cost-effectively than if the code were built from scratch.

“When a new car rolls off the production line, the component parts are never created from scratch but are parts that have been engineered for use in earlier models (and cars produced by other companies) and perhaps enhanced in some way to make the car lighter, faster, more energy efficient etc. Why should websites be any different? They too are formed from a collection of component parts.”

Many of these website components are “donated” by their developers, although there are generally conditions associated to the licence granted for their use. Some want recognition by getting their name in lights on your website; others ask for links (discrete or otherwise) to their own websites; some ask for voluntary donations. As a developer myself, I realise the considerable amount of work that goes in to most of these pieces of code. I also understand how much enjoyment can be had from building something that others find useful. I suspect that most users of the code snippets, widgets, plugins and scripts just take them, use them and don’t give another thought to the person who did the hard work – indeed, I have seen many posts on the forums or blogs of these developers where the users, happy to take and use the code, then complain when something doesn’t work quite as expected (even though the developer nearly always supplies it without guarantee).

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I am shortly going to start donating more often for the code that I use. This is only fair, and if more people did it, then as well as rewarding the developers for their efforts it would surely encourage them to make their widgets even better. In addition, I hope to feature some of the best widgets that I find – so check back frequently.

Here's my Avatar - stunning in its lack of originality!

Gravatar (which stands for “Globally-recognised Avatar”) is a service that provides globally-unique Avatars. Hmm, ok you say, but what is an Avatar in the first place?

Well, an Avatar (apart from being a film and a Hindu term referring to the appearance of a deity descended from heaven to earth) is a computer-users representation of him/herself or an alter ego (see Wikipedia definintion). Most avatars are far more ingenious than mine (see right), and are often graphical representations of an object representing the person rather than a plain old photo, but their purpose is basically to represent you in graphical form anywhere on the web where your posts and comments appear.

Gravatar takes things one stage further and enables you to register an image as ‘belonging’ to an email address. Then, wherever your email address is used to post website comment your Gravatar will appear too. WordPress, as well as many other blogging tools and other websites, will automatically look for a Gravatar for you when you post a comment, and display it next to your posts and comments. With one registration at Gravatar you can add any number of your email addresses and assign the same, or different, images to each email address (which might be useful if you have a serious, and a less serious, persona depending on the forum or blog you are contributing to).

Just in case you’re not convinced, there are apparently 29,000 avatar images served every second of the day! Now that’s impressive.

We have recently been converting an existing website into a WordPress 2.9, so that a good CMS can be provided for the website owner and so they can now easily incorporate their blog into the main site. It’s a neat solution for most websites where the owner wants to keep their main site and blog(s) together on the same domain and where they want complete control over the style and content without having to ask a costly developer to make changes every time they introduce a new product.

The complication with this website was that a couple of the pages in the existing site had some considerable PHP scripting code which also needed to be incorporated into the new WordPress site. There are plenty of widgets around to allow you insert blocks of PHP into WordPress pages, but none of these seemed to work for the code on the site we were converting, giving various parsing errors, problems picking up included files, and also problems passing data from a form inside the included php file. For completeness, the widgets we tried were Executable PHP Widget and Inline PHP.

After many hours struggling to get it working we eventually just stuck the php file inside an HTML iframe tag, set the width to 100% and the height big enough to cope with the entire page, and it worked like a dream first time. We have accepted that iframe isn’t universally supported by all users, but it is a good, time-effective solution to the problem.

Here’s the code you need….



<iframe src="yourphpfilename.php" width="100%" height="1500" scrolling="no" frameborder="0">
<p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p>
</iframe>

If you have managed to overcome this problem without iframe, please let us know

I’m always dabbling with things to do with the web, be it html, css, javascript, seo, php, mysql or whatever. Almost every day I am finding out new things which help me to build the next website or blog better than the last one. My “What I have learned today” blog is a little record of the problems I have had and the way I have resolved them, and of the useful things that I have found out that might just impact on a future (or past) project. It is primarily intended as a memory recall tool for me, but if it helps you too then that’s cool too! Why not drop us a line if you have found any of these posts useful.

I have been using curvycorners to display rounded boxes in a number of my websites and blogs for some time now with no problems. Recently, I have installed WordPress 2.9 and Woothemes (specifically the Optimize theme) and have started getting lots of popup warnings when running the pages which use curvycorners in IE8. The errors were along the lines of ‘Object ID unknown. Wait until curvyCorners has been loaded’. As the code worked perfectly well on my other sites, I assumed that something in my wootheme was tripping it up, and after a little research found that I could actually disable these alerts just by adding…

function alert() {};

…before my curvycorners.js file was called.

It really does work a treat, although I would have preferred to get to the bottom of the real problem