March 6th, 2010 by Andrew Male
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
January 20th, 2010 by Andrew Male
(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.
January 15th, 2010 by Andrew Male
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.
November 20th, 2009 by Andrew Male
…it’s about where your link goes.
On page links are important not only for your sites usability and how you guide prospective customers around your site but also important to its SEO performance within the search engines. Having good internal linking can help boost our sites ranking. With bad links or at worse links that take users to the dreaded 404 Page not Found will do potential harm to your ranking.
Read the rest of this entry »
November 6th, 2009 by Andrew Male
Another week comes to an end and we get ever closer to Christmas, which in my book isn’t a bad thing. The build up to Xmas is always the best bit; buying in the food, putting the tree up, eating nuts, chocolates and sweet meats, watching the festive films and yuletide offerings on the goggle box.
So, during this past week I have stored some interesting posts and blogs articles which I’d like to offer to you now, a (very) early present:
Only a few I know but with presents it’s not only about the size is it…?
July 13th, 2009 by Andrew Male
It’s not often that the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Kierkegaard spring to mind in the non-philsophical PHP coding world. However whilst working on the latest set of feature updates for our content management system, Miromanager2.0, I found the need to be looking to see if smoothing exists before attempting to use it.
Part of Miromedia’s next release version of the new CMS will be the ability to easily (for the developers at least) create client-specific customisations that sit outside the core code. Such things include modules and HTML output relating to a certain industry sector that would not necessarily apply to other customers.
In order for use to achieve this we needed a customisation model that would site alongide the base code but would not be affected by future release of the base code. So, a new directory strucutre and mirroring of customised objects has been adopted making use of: is_dir(), is_file() and function_exists(). These being used to determine if customisations exist for a particular PHP object and if function overrides exist. In this way the base code will only execute customisations where they have been created.
…the question now remains if I can call a similar function call passing myself to find out if I truly exist. As yet I have been unable to find such a method either in the existing PHP manual or future upgrades however if I do find one and call it and the call comes back false will I explode in a puff of existential logic?
July 13th, 2009 by miromedia
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:
- 46% increase in turnover when compared to this time last year
- 60% decrease in marketing spend
And most importantly this was all achieved during a recession!
To download the Outline Case Study please click here.
June 24th, 2009 by miromedia
Permanent or semi permanent make up, as it is sometimes called, is an exciting, revolutionary treatment to enhance facial features. It is a highly skilled, state of the art form of cosmetic tattooing also known as Micro-pigmentation or intradermal cosmetics. Annalou is one of the UK’s leading clinics and with a quickly expanding client base they called upon Miromedia to design and build a new site complete with easy to use CMS and a powerful SEO redesign.
Utilising the new Miromanager 2 Content Management System for the new Annalou site, Miromedia where able to create a faultless and intuitive backdoor solution for Annalou. It is a CMS that will serve Annalou for the foreseeable future, allowing for effortless updates and image changes. Along with the search engine optimisation redesign, which is due to begin this week, Miromedia have also added a Facebook portal to keep fans of Annalou up to date with company and industry developments and gossip.
June 4th, 2009 by Andrew Male
Miromedia’s latest and greatest version of its Content Management System, Miromanager2.0, was officially presented to its very first customer earlier this week. An overview training session had been arranged to demonstrate the various new capabilities and user interface. This brand new version of our Miromanager builds on the solid foundations created in earlier versions of the software and incorporates many changes that have been requested from existing clients who either use our CMS or have experience of other systems.
The training session demostrated the various new aspects and enhancements added to Miromanager2.0, including:
- On page inline editing
- Robust navigational drag/drop manipulation
- XAJAX data updating
- Brand new User Interface
- CSS based page content template
As with all software demos the developer always their fingers (or more likely, toes) crossed, hoping that they will not stumble across any issues that were not previously fixed during test passes. In this case though their proved to be no hidden gotchas, testament to out internal QA process so a big thank you to our testers.
After the session I was very pleased to hear that the client was impressed with the functionality and usability; it would give them much more control over their site than the previous CMS they used. This was one of our main aims when designing Miromanager2.0; to make the process of editing web site content as intuitive as possible thus giving the client ownership of their site and content. They are free to spend more time updating content and less time battling with a confusing or cumbersome content management system.
Miromanager2.0 has arrived…
…i shall put my R&D trumpet away now and get back to the code face.
May 7th, 2009 by Andrew Male
In life there are generally 2 groups of people: tidy ones and untidy ones. Those who fill the dishwasher, pop in a tablet, turn it on and those that leave dirty cookery stacked high in the sink to go mouldy and turn the kitchen into a festering hole. As a web developer you must be the former. You must be clean, both hygienically speaking and in terms of the markup and coding you produce.
Creating websites with clean and concise code which conforms to the latest web standards is paramount to producing high quality, fast and SEO efficient sites. A site that is created and can be validtaed using W3C’s validation tools will aid future proofing and accessibility. A badly created HTML page may work in the current crop of browsers but that does not mean that future version will be so forgiving.
Always write XHTML making sure it is as stripped down and lightweight as possible, use no unnecessary tags or attributes, after all a Formula 1 car has no radio or cup holders (it doesn’t need them). All styling for a page should be contained within style sheets using validated CSSand applied to the page using either class names or by tag Id. Not only will this help any future development that you may make to a site it also means that any other competent developer can look at the code and easily understand how it work.
Spending more time to produce the best output you can will not only benefit your clients but will also benefit your own team of developers, easing any future updates and giving SEO potential a head start.
