Manchester web designer Phil Thompson
These past few weeks, I’ve been doing some work for a new client. Prior to getting the gig, I did the all the usual things: sent my prospective email, went to meet the client, etc. However, this client, a big web agency, did something I’ve not experienced before - they gave me a programming test.
Since announcing the launch of Cart45 last week, I’ve had quite a few people asking how I’ve managed to create an ecommerce app and another web app (Bean Counter) simultaneously. So here goes…
Last week, saw the completion of the first round of beta testing for Bean Counter. Was the beta testing a success? No, not really.
Current and former colleagues of mine, will attest to my intense hatred of poorly written code and by poorly written code I mean code that is hard to follow. In a bid to make my PHP code even more readable I’m dumping the curly brackets traditionally used with control structures (e.g. ifs, fors, switches) in favour of the colons and semi-colons of PHP’s alternative alternative syntax for control structures.
It is beyond silly to repeatedly copy and paste the same HTML into the top and bottom of every HTML file that you create. That’s why god invented include() but, the humble header/footer HTML include file needs to be extended slightly - that is, unless you want all your pages to have the same title/meta description/CSS files etc.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about wasting my time trying to integrate Google Checkout into our top secret web app. You may be glad to hear that my time is no longer being wasted and I seem to have finally solved my Google Checkout conundrum as of this week.
This week, my work for our top secret web app, has mainly revolved around caching. This is work I really enjoy. I can sense the user experience of future customers improving each time I create a useful cache of information that speeds up a page’s load time.
Yesterday, I wasted an entire day trying to integrate Google Checkout into an exciting new web app for my employer, Soapy Co.
WordPress 2.5 is coming very soon. ‘So what.’ I hear you cry, ‘WordPress release new versions every other day!’. Well 2.5 is different, it’s actually good.
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.
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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A mini-update of recent work.
See my portfolio for more work