January 26, 2010
(It’s fixed now, I’m pleased to say)
Having noticed we weren’t getting many enquiries through our contact form, I did a quick test this morning and to my dismay saw an error message on the CAPTCHA field, even though I’d typed it correctly. What could be going wrong?
Read how the form got broken and how I fixed it ...
January 25, 2010
What’s the best colour for your headlines? If you make your contact form bigger will more people use it? Should a call to action be left- or right-aligned? If you are trying to make decisions like these about the design of your site, it can be hard to come to definite conclusions. Two designs may look equally attractive, but which will have more impact on visitors?
In this post I discuss a new plugin that will help you to carry out split testing on a self-hosted WordPress site, so you can arrive at such decisions using actual data rather than relying on guesswork.
read more about split testing and the Little Split Test plugin
January 14, 2010
Facebook allows users to create “Business Accounts”. Having read the applicable terms, why any sane person would want to do this beats me.
read more about why Facebook business accounts are a lousy idea
December 29, 2009
What’s a “custom tag page”? Generally when you click on a tag link in a cloud such as that in the sidebar of this site or at the bottom of an article, you’ll be taken to a page that lists all the articles having that tag. From an SEO perspective this is less than ideal, because in web searches the tag page will have to compete with other pages which have a lot more relevant content. In this article I show how to create custom tag pages that have much more search engine appeal.
Read how to create a better custom tag page in WordPress
November 15, 2009
We wanted our portfolio to be slick and individual so when we commissioned our new site design I asked the designer to create something specifically for it. She came up with something that looked great – all I had to do was to make it work. My tool of choice was JQuery, a powerful Javascript library that is packaged with WordPress.
Read more about how to use JQuery to build an interactive gallery
October 29, 2009
As you may notice, this site has just gone live with a new design. We will very much appreciate your thoughts and comments.
The design, by Amanda Vlahakis at Truly Ace, has been built as a custom WordPress theme based on Carrington JAM, which proved to be an ideal base for clean-sheet theme development.
September 27, 2009
Often when working in a PHP-based CMS you find that you want to zebra-stripe a list or table of items but the CMS’s template system makes that hard to achieve. Typically you might be styling the items individually without any way of knowing their relative positions in the containing list or table.
One solution is to use Javascript to do the zebra striping for you, but actually it’s quite easy to achieve the same result in PHP (with the addition of some simple CSS), thereby avoiding the overhead of loading additional Javascript.
read more: the code to zebra stripe in PHP
June 28, 2009
I’ve recently worked on a couple of requirements for clickable maps which I think would be of potential interest. As visual aids, maps can be very attractive but they present some technical challenges to the developer.
read more about creating clickable maps
March 11, 2009
Websnapr Field is a little module I’ve written which uses the Websnapr service to generate web page thumbnails in a page. If you have a field which is a URL pointing to an external site, you can choose to display it as a snapshot of the page pointed to.
(more…)
December 31, 2008
As a web developer, I frequently have reason to curse web graphic designers. That’s not because I don’t appreciate their talents. I love working on great looking designs and I have a lot of respect for those who can create them. But designers don’t always understand the limitations of technology, and how their decisions can make life hard (or easy) for developers. So here’s 10 tips for how to create and document designs in a way that will earn you much developer love.
(more…)
