Following on from Richard’s demonstration of the broad share of the browser market that Internet Explorer has, it is worth noting that we developers and the designers still need to cater for the relic that is IE6. Whilst your everyday user will probably be using version 7 or 8 or more likely Firefox, the corporate sector are still tied to the old browser due to the massive project of rolling out a new version in a corporate environment.

ZDNet has this to say on the matter: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=31328

So, despite thinking that we should code to the latest browser technologies and new web standards, we should always keep in mind the clients main customer market and ask the question ‘what is the minimum browser that the site should cater for’.

One good reference site for all things that IE doesn’t comply with is here: http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer.html

According to Net Applications market share figures for January 2010 IE8 has just taken the world’s most used browser ‘top spot’ away from IE6.  The current top 5  and their market share now read as follows;

1. IE8 - 22.31%
2. IE6 - 20.07%
3. Firefox 3.5 - 17.01%
4. IE7 - 14.58%
5. Firefox 3.0 - 5.29%

The change in fortunes for IE6 is thought to be generally due to the decline in use of Windows XP.

We’ve recently been forwarded an email from an ‘SEO Company’ who approached one of our clients touting for business. Whilst I have nothing against healthy competition, I do get slight aggrieved by is the manner in which the approach is made. Fortunately, at Miromedia, we regularly report progress of our campaigns to clients - which in-turn demonstrates the true and current position of a website - and not the fabricated position in these ‘Spam’ style approaches. The first sentence alone gives the game away - typically ‘Excuse me for my unusual approach’. In fact, this is not unusual. It’s absolutely usual of someone fishing for business through spamming prospects. Surely, the most ethical and demonstrative way to generate business when you’re in the line of SEO, is via appearing highly ranked in search results - as Miromedia do. Not forgetting word-of mouth from our very happy roster of clients of course. After all, if they weren’t happy, then surely they wouldn’t be forwarding these to-good-to-be-true approaches would they?

It seems the new Apple iPad has completely polarised opinion, as always, on  what people think a new product like this should do and what it actually does do. The general consensus from those that do not like it seems to be that it is nothing more than an enlarged iPod Touch; basically the same but with a bigger screen so what is the point. Why not just buy a NetBook or a laptop if it is a question of size and ease of use? Read the rest of this entry »

This week has been dominated by this, Apple’s new iPad; bridging the gap between smartphones and NetBooks. I personally think that it is a good idea and an extremely nice looking piece of kit. But as we every new product for Apple, opinion is wide ranging from this: http://scobleizer.com/2010/01/28/a-16-year-olds-view-of-apples-ipad-ifail/ to this: http://speirs.org/blog/2010/1/29/future-shock.html. I am much more in line with the latter of these two posts although from speaking to other people about it you are either for or against it, there is no middle ground with any Apple product and this is definitely no exception.

In between waiting for Steve Jobs’ Keynote speech and then subsequently ogling of the iPad pictures on the website we have also come across these:

Someone has final simulated Windows 3.1 in a browser using only HTML and CSS! Not entirely sure why, but hey it’s quite cool.

W3C’s interactive cheatsheet.

SEOMoz have this easy to follow step by step to find out exactly how many pages on your site are indexed in Google.

Almost at the end of January already, seems like only yesterday I was tucking into Christmas day dinner. Oh well, here’s this week’s best bits from the blog site, enjoy.

Smashing Magazine’s very long and informative post about how to design and build newsletters without losing your mind explains many of the problems with today’s email marketing campaigns and how to avoid them. It also has a lot of very useful links to tools for proofing your eshots and making them consistent across browsers and also as accessible as possible.

This collection of website pricing table showcases various method for visually explaining price structures for products. Many different ways to show similar information but each with their own style and impact.

Design Shack’s showcase of e-commerce sites done right.

Firefox 3.6 was released during the week. Download it now and start taking advantage of its improved performance and stability as well as the new Personas to personalise your browser.

More cross browser compatibility resources. Particularly of interest is SuperPreview which is Microsoft’s app to allow developers to view page rendering on the various different browser types.

During our recent work on a number of Magento websites we have uncovered (as many people have) the problem where Magento will not correctly sort the product searches by price. The scenario is this:

1. You do a search on your site for something, say “Glass TV Stands”

2. Magento returns a list of matching products in sorted by Relevance. You want to find the cheapest so you select ‘Price’ from the drop down and voila…

3. Nothing happens. At least nothing happens relting to the list being sorted by price.

Outcome: Sorting by price in Magento does not work!!

After  a number of days investigating this problem, my esteemed colleague, Roland has a fix. Now this fix may look fairly simple and inocuos but it took a lot of function searching and code trawling to find.

In the file:

App\code\core\mage\catalog\model\resource\eav\mysql4\product\collection.php line:1155

Change thus:

/*
$this->getSelect()->joinLeft(
array('_price_order_table'=>$this->getTable('catalogindex/price')),
"{$entityCondition} AND {$storeCondition} AND {$groupCondition} AND {$attributeCondition}",
array()
);*/
$this->getSelect()->joinLeft(
array('_price_order_table'=>$this->getTable('catalogindex/price')),
"{$entityCondition} AND {$storeCondition} AND {$attributeCondition}",
array()
);
$this->getSelect()->order('_price_order_table.value ' . $dir);

And everything in the world is right again.

Feel free to comment on whether this fix has worked for you.

(It’s all in the fold).

Earlier in the week I came across this article from cxpartners entitled The myth of the fold. The post details their findings from eye tracker testing to understand how users scan and view a web page and how the layout of content affects how the page is used.

In essence their findings show that with appropriate design the fold is not a barrier to the user experience; given the right visual clues a user will scroll a web page to discover content below the fold. These days almost all mice come with some form of scroll wheel so it is much more likely for a page to be scrolled before moving onto the next page.

Of course your web page should always contain the most pertinent information as high up on the page possible but this does not mean you have to cram everything above the fold just to get it into your users eyeline.

I have this morning received a presentation from a company in our arena of the Marketing, Online and New Media space. Within this presentation a ‘new word’ was used time and time again. The word in question? IMPACTFUL. Now, being a fan of the English language and it’s continued progression, my immediate reaction was to reference in Google.

In my opinion, the first description was quite apt - of which can be seen at the following URL (or by typing ‘impactful’ into Google.co.uk) http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=impactful
or can be seen below…

“A non-existent word coined by corporate advertising, marketing and business drones to make their work sound far more useful, exciting and beneficial to humanity than it really is. This term is most frequently used in “team building” seminars and conferences in which said drones discuss the most effective ways to convince consumer zombies to purchase crap they clearly do not need or even want.”

In summary, the use of this word clearly demonstrates a distinct lack of vocabulary from the writers point-of-view. Maybe the use of words like, ‘effective’, ’successful’ or maybe ‘has impact’?

Ian

Morning all.

It is the end of another week and time for some more of the best blogs we’ve been reading this week.

The first is from Woorkup and gives Best practices and tips for developing websites for the iPhone. This has been handy for me personally as I’ve been working on an iPhone version of Miromedia’s site which we are planning for launch in Q1 of this year.

Next up is a post from makeuseof.com. This one gives a very clear breakdown of the steps for creating RSS feeds for your site. I used this to create the Miromedia News Feed so it does work.

This post about the influence of the Swiss Style on web design is very interesting and covers a number of aspects where the Swiss Style impacts the modern web site from layout and colour to font styles. Although the post itself may look quite long there are a large number of images to illustrate the various points made in the text and give examples of some of the artists work.

Ever wanted to setup new shops in Magento? Why not read this article about how to setup multiple Magento shops.

SEOmoz are putting together a set of Search Engine Optimisation Best Practice guides. These are currently up for peer review and will be added to over the coming months.

Here’s an interesting website performance post from dynaTrace which is definitely worth a look

Away from work and with the imminent return of Herr Schumacher to Formula 1, I came across this old, bit interesting YouTube clip analysing the Schumacher driving style. For me he is up there as a potential champion for 2010, despite being the oldest on the grid his talent is unquestionable and in the 3 years since his retirement I don’t believe he will have lost any of his edge or aggressiveness.