Archive for December, 2009

Collection of Handy Wordpress Tips

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009

When developing Wordpress driven websites for Surrey and South London based businesses, more often than not, I find myself referring to a handy list of Wordpress tips. Commonly, it’s the SQL commands for transferring the local site to the remote host.

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How do Search Engines Rank a Website?

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

Search engine knowledge base specialist, SEOmoz,  provides an excellent round up of the factors that impact a website’s search engine ranking. An international host of industry experts are polled, which results in some intersting findings.

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Estate Agent for Holiday Homes

Sunday, December 27th, 2009

I received a request from a Surrey based web designer to convert a number of Photoshop designs to a functioning dynamic website. The designs were for an estate agency website specialising in holiday homes.

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Grabbing PHP Form variables with the Extract() Function

Monday, December 21st, 2009

The extract() function is a quick and convenient way of grabbing form variables. Rather than going through the entire $_POST array assigning variables to each element, simply do the following:

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Converting a Design to a Wordpress Website

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

There doesn’t appear to be too many psd to HTML tutorials on the net, so I thought I’d write one. Given the popularity of the Wordpress blogging software, I’ll code the design up for Wordpress rather than a static HTML site.  To reiterate, this is about taking a design (in whatever format), slicing it up in Photoshop, or similar (Gimp), then applying the CSS to the HTML. Wordpress features intuitive markup, so I’ll base the HTML around theirs.

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Web and SEO Services for Surbiton, Surrey based Electrical Firm

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

drc-portfolio

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Fixing Internet Explorer CSS Problems with Conditional Comments

Thursday, December 17th, 2009

You’ve developed a site using W3C best practices; it validates, the markup’s semantic or as clean as possible, and looks great in Firefox. The problem is, Internet Explorer doesn’t quite see it as the designer intended. The CSS is out and in need of a few hacks; but there’s a better, more effecient and tidier solution – conditional comments.

<!--[if lte IE 7]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/ie.css" media="screen" />
<![endif]-->

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Simple jQuery Drop Down Menu

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

Jquery’s a phenomenal JavaScript library that greatly reduces the amount of JavaScript required for front-end user interface interactions and utility tasks. As a quick introduction to the wonders of jQuery, I’ll demonstrate how simple it is to build a dropdown menu. First off, the HTML:

<div id="page">
<div id="content">
<ul id="menu">
<li><a href="#">About Us</a></li>
<li><a href="#" id="show">Services</a></li>
</ul>
<ul id="service-options">
<li><a href="blinds.html">Products</a></li>
<li><a href="curtains.html">Testimonials</a></li>
<li><a href="interior-designs.html">Contact Us</a></li>
</ul>
<ul id="menu">
<li><a href="#">Products</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Testimonials</a></li>
<li><a href="#">Contact Us</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div><!--page ends-->

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Web design and SEO services for Surrey based MMA Business

Wednesday, December 16th, 2009

nova-portfolioNova Forca are a successful BJJ (Brazilian Jiu Jitsu) and MMA house based in Surrey and with operations in London. Their existing site was treated to a redesign and a content management system (CMS) to allow staff members to performs updates, blog posts, and upload galleries. The CMS has put them in charge of their content and encouraged them to post more articles, which among other good points, benefits search engine optimization (SEO).

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Using the Flickr API to Import Images to your Website

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

With a vast number of Wordpress plugins available, it’s easy to download one, then plug and play while not having to get involved with any code. Although convenient, sometimes it’s intersting to know what’s going on under the bonnet. Here, I’ll be looking at the Flickr API thanks in large part to an interesting chapter from Sitepoint’s ‘The Art and Science of Javascript’. Where they mashed up Flickr with Google maps, I’ll merely download a Flickr gallery to a site, integrating it with the famous ‘lightbox’ image viewer so users can view an enlarged images without having to go to Flickr.

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