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;
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?
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.
What is the world coming to? Footballers are always quoted as being on another planet and not in touch with reality. Training in the morning, playing computer games in the afternoon.
So it was even more of a surprise, than normal, that Rio Ferdinand has quoted the resent figures ‘online advertising is now bigger than TV advertising’.
My thoughts on this:- Finally the message is getting out. In reality, businesses are waking up to the fact that online marketing represents a more measurable & accountable way to spend your marketing budget.
The more people know the better.
I came across an old article this morning which was asking for feedback on web navigation design. In my opinion, it demonstrates how the Internet has matured over the last few years with regards to navigation, design (or over design) and how search engines and search engine optimisation has had an overwhelming influence on interface design.
Whats more, it highlights the early failings of web design and how the industry got caught in the gold rush of aesthetics rather than usability. As you will see, all that glitters is definitely not gold! Less is definitely still more - and has always been. However with the web, it took a a number of years for the IT based self-educated ‘web designer’ to concede this role to someone with more relevant experience and training.
Is it down the maturing raft of designers that have ‘digital’ specific knowledge, which is more focused on the end result of conversion and usability? You can make your own mind up. However, what you can’t deny is that this progression in design is far more sensitive to enable search and internal navigation by the search engines.
Old Adobe
New Adobe
Old Amazon
New Amazon
Old Apple
New Apple
Old Expedia
New Expedia
Old Old Navy!
New Old Navy!
Ian 
PS. Thanks to the source: http://www.jakeo.com/words/tabs.php
The challenge was to increase Outline Skincare’s online presence to increase web traffic, generate sales and increase ROI, while actually driving down overall marketing spend.
Miromedia were recommended to Outline as specialists in search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, email broadcasting, link building, online PR, and social media
The solution was an online marketing strategy which included removing programming issues, managing and adding keyword strategies, content creation and restructure of page layout.
Benefits Since working with Outline when compared to the same previous year period, we have achieved:
And most importantly this was all achieved during a recession!
To download the Outline Case Study please click here.
The vi command in Linux provides the most basic of text editing capabilities from the command line. It is both useful and at the same time extremely clunky without the proper command knowledge. Most of my searching on the web has resulted in many pages assuming that if you know the vi command then you must also know how to use it… I Linux therefore I am, or some such.
However to someone that generally doesn’t need to use the editor that often it can be frustrating trying to make a single character change in a file only accessible via SSH without having to copy the file to a desktop machine, change and copy back. Luckily I have found the following command cheatsheet for the editor:
ctrl-F :Page down
ctrl-B :Page up
$ :Move cursor to end of line
^ :Move cursor to beginning of line
:1 :Move to first line of file
:$ :Move to last line of file
/ :Search for a character string
? :Reverse search for a character string
x :Delete the character at the cursor
dd :Delete the current line
p :Paste data that was cut with x or dd commands
u :Undo
a :Add text after cursor
i :Insert text before cursor
R :Replace text starting at the cursor
o :Insert a new line after the current
esc :Switch from Input mode to Command mode
:w :save without exiting
ZZ :Save and exit
:q! :Exit without saving
So far this small but concise list has proved extremely helpful, all of a sudden the linux vi editor has become a very handy tool to have.
Never forget that a disabled form field value will not be passed in PHP when posted. Consider the following:
<form action=’ ‘ method=’post’>
<input type=’text’ name=’enabledField’ value=’value_1′ />
<input type=’text’ name=’disabledField’ value=’value_2′ disabled />
</form>
When this form is posted retrieving the two fields will return as follows:
<?php echo $_POST[enabledField]?> returns value_1
<?php echo $_POST[disabledField]?> returns nothing
This is always worth remembering to save you time trying to work out why your post values are not being passed. Of course they are ways around this e.g. duplicating the field with a hidden text field, or simply not disabling the field in the first place.
