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Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category
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Is web development better on a Mac or a PC?
Two months ago, I bought an imac. The reasons for doing this were plentiful, and overall I’m happy with my experience so far, but I wanted to talk about why I switched, what’s better and what I miss about a PC. Hopefully this will be useful to anyone thinking about switching in the near future.
An essential checklist for launching a new website
Whenever I am about to launch a new website or relaunch an existing website, there are several steps that I always take to ensure a smooth process:
Getting to number 1 in Google: An SEO case study
To try and increase sales and awareness at the JJB Sports website, I set about optimising the site for search engines and customers. The major success story was getting the site to the number 1 spot in Google (UK) for the keyword “nike trainers“. Here’s how I did it:
My HTML/CSS templating system
When creating pages with HTML/CSS I like to make it as speedy as possible for both production and future maintenance. I make this possible with a very simple PHP template system.
Read the rest of this entry »
Bouncing back from confidence issues
This time, 3 weeks ago I was suffering from a massive crisis of confidence regarding my web development abilities, but this week the tables have turned and my confidence levels couldn’t be higher. Funny that.
I’ve always been happy to admit that while I’m not the best PHP programmer in the world, I am competent but, three weeks ago I was coming to the end of my tether whilst trying to write a small snippet of PHP code. the code was suppose to work out how accurately-matched certain pages within a CMS were to each other based upon the tags applied to them. I asked colleagues for advice which I got (but, couldn’t comprehend); I’d put the actual coding off while I thought about it for days; I’d written dozens of variants of a function for the task all of which didn’t quite work and came to a frustrating dead-end; I’d even drawn the problem out on paper in pseudo-code (numerous times) but nothing was working.
How to stop yourself from completely fucking-up your website
A junior web developer often has a capability which in other professions is often reserved for exceptionally qualified individuals: the ability to completely fuck-up an entire business.
Many businesses are run completely online these days or their online presence is at least a major factor so anything that disrupts a website can be catastrophic. The very nature of the web, and how it works, means that it’s very easy when you’re making a change to a website to break the site completely.
Creating People friendly URLs using PHP and MYSQL
Let’s face it people, URLs need to be people and search-engine friendly; People need them as navigational aids and search engines love those keyword-laden pieces of loveliness.
Textpattern as a complete CMS
As part of my uni project, I have been implementing textpattern as a complete Content Management System. Due, to the fact, that when I was doing this I couldn’t find any information about it, I have decided to document how I did it.
Information Architecture
Before installing textpattern, I worked out the IA for the website in question (meaning what categories and sub-categories were necessary), so that, when it came to mapping that to textpattern it wouldn’t be so hard (yeah right!)
.htaccess and .htpasswd
Today I’ve been struggling with .htaccess and .htpasswd in order to password-protect a directory on a site I’ve been working on.
I always find that when I Google for help I get sites that kind of help but not 100% so here’s my problem and solution. Read the rest of this entry »
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