As I designer I'm all for changing websites; maybe the design got a bit stuffy, maybe there's a new layout you'd like to try, maybe you've got a better idea than before, or even your focus has changed.

Change is good. But yesterday I noticed some websites that once had very important links to my clients' websites had changed. The layout changed and so had the content. The links were missing.

I wish changes to old websites would include keeping the old content. Whilst there may be more work to do in the short-term there's ultimately less playing of "catchup" and you've already got a raft of content that may be indexed in the SERPs, even ranking quite well and picking up some traffic.

Please people, think about a site upate as a full, holistic upgrade including keeping your old content.

Labels: design, development, search, seo

As a designer I'm quite often working on text files here & there and sometimes cutting & pasting data from various sources into MS Word means that the formatting is all wrong (tip: paste into notepad first to strip formatting then paste that output into Word) or there's no formatting at all.

For instance - I want to find out how many items there were in this small business news page.

Rather than count line-by-line there's a labour-saving technique to be had with Find & Replace in Word. So I copied the main page content into Word and had a one-line output. Seeing that every item began with either '2007' or '2008' I simply executed find '2007' and replace all with '^p 2007' and find '2008' and replace all with '^p 2008'

^p 6p is basically a line break.

So I replaced all the year dates with linebreaks and ended up with 79 lines/articles

Life saver :)

Labels: copy writing, design, development, office, tips

We're currently working with a client by the name of Oceanwide Properties who sell property in Turkey.

As well as consulting for their web design & web development projects we're project managing their SEO strategy and slowly but surely raising their profile in the search engines.

The site will be undergoing a redevelopment & redesign to help their SERPs and we'll be adding features to make the site more useable.

Watch this space.

Labels: consultancy, development, news, search, seo

A developer friend put me on to the Firebug extension for Firefox a few months back and yesterday it proved invaluable in identifying some troublesome code on a live web page. I specifically used Firebug to track down which classes and IDs in a blogger page template were causing my layout problems and it worked an absolute treat.

Folks, if you haven't already plugged in the Firebug extension/add-on for your Firefox browser then I recommend you give it a go.

Labels: browsers, development, tools

I've been busy using a huge array of free web tools over the last few weeks and the OctaGate SiteTimer has proved to be very handy.

Whilst optimising the HTML and PHP code in a number webpages I used the SiteTimer, checking to see if there were any noticeable speed gains, and the OctaGate SiteTimer not only showed the speed of the page but of the individual files that the page pulled in.

By that it showed me the speed and loading times of:

• The page as a whole
• Favicons
• Cascading Style Sheets
  
• External JavaScripts
• Image files

What the SiteTimer highlighted was that one of the pages I was pulling in had 3 favicons being called when there was only a need for the 1. So I dived into the CMS I was using, hacked the templates and saved 2x file calls and a good couple of seconds of server time.

In addition SiteTimer highlighted that there were a couple of redundant images I was calling in to my pages and not using... now time to hunt down the code for those images and kill them off too...

Labels: design, development, tools

New Life in IT is a premier web design company specialising in the provision of Open Source Software solutions.

With a firm footing in the Joomla! CMS arena, New Life in IT provide a depth of experience from Business Analysis & Consulting through Professional Training to some pretty funky enterprise level web development solutions... we know because we've had the pleaseure to work with them.

Andrew Eddie, Director of New Life in IT, is well known as one of the original developers of Mambo CMS and the recent Joomla! CMS so they're headed not only by a sharp programmer & consumate professional but all-round nice bloke too.

Be sure to check out New Life in IT.

Labels: CMS, consultancy, design, development, news, open source

In the early days, back in '98, I found IE4 to be a better browser than NS Navigator. Personally I found the NSN buttons and tool bars to bloated and gimmicky and the cleaner lines of IE4 allowed just that little bit more screen to show.

But here, 9 years later, I have found that my browsing habits changed and they did so a few years ago. I tried Opera because it was new, it was different. I tried Firefox and fell in love with it. And I know that sometimes Firefox has memory leaks, I know it locks my system up occasionally, but that's because I can often run 20+ tabs at a time and regularly do that in two windows... a work window and a leisure window...

But I'd rather have that Fox logo on my shirt than just a plain old E.

I design clean code and I like my browser to respect that.

Labels: browsers, design, development