Why Use A Professional Website Developer?

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Alex Wells

Many of us feel that employing a website developer is a waste of money. I mean, come on. With the free use of countless templates, such as WordPress, widely available today you’d be crazy to pay for exactly the same thing. Many companies have created free and easy-to-use platforms to start building your own website, all with just a few clicks of the mouse. You can even tweak your website to suit you and your business needs. Heck, with another click of a button you can even get SEO to rank your website. It seems that all you need to invest is your time. Piece of cake? Or is it?!

I bet for a moment there you thought I had just answered all your worries about starting your own website. I’m sorry to pop your bubble but without the right skills and expertise, you’ll only be digging yourself a deeper hole and sitting in a world of pain attempting to save money.

If you truly care about your business, then do right by it and yourself, use a professional web developer. The cost of the professional website won’t mean anything once profits start rolling in from your website. A web developer will have in-depth knowledge about the industry, best practises and true SEO techniques to make an effective and popular website which can push your company and its products out to the World Wide Web efficiently. Yes, it’s a jungle out there and it takes the best of the rangers to help you survive. There are 644 million active websites (and rising) on the Internet and it takes a lot of work to make yours standout.

Feeling like a fool yet? Going for the DIY route wasn’t such a great idea after all. If it still hasn’t sunk in yet, let me rub it into you some more. Noticed I said ‘true’ SEO techniques. We’re not talking one click and you’re ready to go. I regret to be the one to break it to you that it doesn’t work that way. It involves things like keywords research and implementing them effectively throughout your website. Only a professional web developer can understand the importance of a website that search engines, like Google love to crawl.

That’s just some of the practical side of things. Not even the legal aspects yet. I feel a headache coming just mentioning the word ‘legal’.

You need to have a website with visual appeal, full of relevant content and most importantly functionality, all of which need to suit the purpose of your website and complement your business needs. Not just a colourful website with pictures here and there. A 6 year old can do that for you for free!

The importance of a professional web developer cannot be underestimated. If you want to survive in the jungle then seek the assistance from someone who know what they are doing.

Building your own website is not so easy now is it?

Blog post by Alex Wells
Working as a Website developer I love nothing more then working waist deep in code, I have specific interests in PHP and WordPress development but mostly working with local businesses to provide them with a website that meets their needs. Contact me if you have a project in mind and would like to get an input from an experienced website developer.

Social Media and Its Role in the Business World

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Alex Wells

There’s a good chance that you, your partner or someone in your family is already a member of a popular social networking website. I’m talking about the giants like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Apart from using them to socialise with friends and family, more and more businesses are identifying social media as a profitable platform to promote themselves.

The goal of business owners is to make money. Otherwise they’re in business for the wrong reason. The way a business makes money is by selling goods or services. In order to sell the goods or services, the public needs to be aware that it exists in the first place. This is where creating product or brand awareness through advertising plays an important role.

Advertising is not a step that many business owners like to commit to, mainly because it is costly and does not always guarantee sales. Not all advertising takes money. If you think so then you are sadly mistaken. There are effective ways to advertising your product or service without forking out too much of your dollar.

Curious yet? The title of this article would’ve already given you the biggest clue to what this method is. There are billions of Internet users out there and at least a million belong to a social network website. Many small online businesses are already taking advantage of this fact. With a massive number of users, there has never been a better way to maximise your exposure, and get your message seen by a massive customer base.

Facebook is definitely worth a mention as it has a user base of over 901 million users. The best thing about advertising with Facebook is the flexibility to choose your target audience based on specific groups and information contained within their profile, such as gender, location and personal preference. You can guarantee to generate interest in your business, including the products or services you sell. Once you’ve created awareness and interest, the sales bit gets a little easier. As an online business owner, you should already know that without traffic your website is pretty much a dud.

Exploiting social media marketing is just plain smart especially if you’re a small business on a tight budget. What better way is there to reach millions of prospects all over the world and from one place? With the growth of the Internet and social media in the last decade, small businesses have been given the golden key to low cost marketing like never before. Facebook, Twitter and blogging are great economical ways to market yourself without the huge price tag normally associated with advertising.

If you haven’t yet embraced this method of advertising then you’re missing out big time. It is an excellent way to keep in touch with your customers and create awareness about your brand, product or service.

The only downside to social media marketing is that you have to be a bit savvier than just registering for every social media network website out there. If you’re not the Internet savvy kind, it’s best to employ one who does so you can jump on the wagon and get your business rolling.

check if input is a valid email – PHP code

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Alex Wells

This code snipit checks to see if the input is a valid email or not, it will even check to see if the domain name is in use so ‘fake’ email domains will be rejected, this will help keep your database clean!

<pre><code>function isValidEmail($email) { //Perform a basic syntax-Check //If this check fails, there's no need to continue if(!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) { return false; } //extract host list($user, $host) = explode("@", $email); //check, if host is accessible if (!checkdnsrr($host, "MX") && !checkdnsrr($host, "A")) { return false; } return true; }</code>

source: http://css-tricks.com/forums/discussion/17370/make-sure-email-field-is-valids/p1

Sanitize Database Inputs with PHP

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Alex Wells

Insuring that data entered into forms and via the URL of a website (POST & GET) is ‘safe’ to use is vital to preventing hackers from getting into your website

this snipit of PHP code will let you do just that, make sure you run it before saving information to a database and before showing content in putted by a form or from a database to the user.

1) Function for stripping out malicious bits

<code><?php function cleanInput($input) { $search = array( '@<script[^>]*?>.*?</script>@si', // Strip out javascript '@<[\/\!]*?[^<>]*?>@si', // Strip out HTML tags '@<style[^>]*?>.*?</style>@siU', // Strip style tags properly '@<![\s\S]*?--[ \t\n\r]*>@' // Strip multi-line comments ); $output = preg_replace($search, '', $input); return $output; } ?></code>

2) Sanitization function

Uses the function above, as well as adds slashes as to not screw up database functions.

<code><?php function sanitize($input) { if (is_array($input)) { foreach($input as $var=>$val) { $output[$var] = sanitize($val); } } else { if (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) { $input = stripslashes($input); } $input = cleanInput($input); $output = mysql_real_escape_string($input); } return $output; } ?></code>

Usage

<code><?php $bad_string = "Hi! <script src='http://www.evilsite.com/bad_script.js'></script> It's a good day!"; $good_string = sanitize($bad_string); // $good_string returns "Hi! It\'s a good day!" // Also use for getting POST/GET variables $_POST = sanitize($_POST); $_GET = sanitize($_GET); ?></code>

Source:http://css-tricks.com/snippets/php/sanitize-database-inputs/

Google Analytics – what can I do about not provided search terms?

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Alex Wells

In April 2011 Google started to block the users search queries in their own website tracking software, this meant that website owners and developers like me can no longer look up the search terms people are using to find and visit my website. This restriction is only in place for users who are logged into their Google account but with Google pushing accounts and encouraging us to stay signed in this is only going to become more of an issue. Google estimated that 10% of the keyword searches would be affected and come up with the (not provided) in the results, but looking at the results for this website over the last month 55% of the keywords are (not provided) the Simpsons Creative website faired better with 20%.

Both of these websites are IT related (this one more so) and a possible result of this is more of the people visiting the site (and searching for relevant terms) are IT literate and are more likely to make use of Google full range of services so are more likely to stay signed into their Google account while searching with Google. I know I do as I use Gmail and Google reader regularly as well as my Analytics account so it makes scene for me to stay signed in.

This is somewhat supported by the results of some of the other websites Simpsons Creative look after, a cloths retailer scores 15% a kitchen supplier scores 11% and a commercial property websites score 14% , 7%, 12% and 5% (Simpsons Creative specialises in commercial property marketing visit the property marking website for more information)

With more and more people staying singed into their Google accounts the percentage of the searches that don’t provide the search terms is only going to go up, faster in some industries then others but it is only a matter of time.

So why is this a problem? This information is very useful for website developers because it lets us tell what information the users are looking for when they visit our websites and in turn lets us focus our content creation efforts on the topics people want to read. This means we can make better use of our time creating content that we know people are interested in reading, it also benefits the users of the website as we will be producing content they they are interested in and with a better focus on the topics being covered the quality of the content would be better.

All of the data collected by the analytics service is anonymous which meant that even if the data was provided even for those signed into their Google accounts website developers would have no way of identifying the individuals from their search data.

Is there anything website owners can do to get back some of this ‘missing’ information? in summary no, there is no way of getting back the detail that we used to get but there is a way of filtering the results so that we can see what page the users are landing on, this will let us make some assumptions about what they were actually searching for – not as good as the full data as we are still guessing what they searched for but it will give us some idea on the type of content users are after.

To do this log into your analytics account and access the organic search data by going Traffic Sources -> Sources -> Search -> Organic

This screen will then display the search terms people have made to find your website in the search, what we will be doing is adding a ‘secondary dimension’ to the results – in other words adding a second filter, this will then let us view the keyword results organised by landing page.

With this in place we are now able to view the landing page that people came into our site for results when the keyword was not provided.

From this data for this website I can see that the most popular page on my site when the keyword was not provided is the Jquery mobile splash screen page with 20 of the not provided visitors landing on that page.

some more of the results for this website in the last 30 days:

Click on the image to view it full size

Source: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/how-to-analyze-google-analytics-not-provided-data

Blog post by Alex Wells
Working as a Website developer I love nothing more then working waist deep in code, I have specific interests in PHP and WordPress development but mostly working with local businesses to provide them with a website that meets their needs. Contact me if you have a project in mind and would like to get an input from an experienced website developer.

Add copy write notice when people copy text from your website

Posted on June 12, 2012 by Alex Wells

This handy bit of code will add a copy write notice to your text when people copy it from your website, this code is for wordpress but could be adapted to fit other platforms, to add this code to your wordpress website add the following code into your themes functions.php file.

function add_copyright_text() { ?>

<script type='text/javascript'>
function addLink() {
var body_element = document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0];
var selection;
selection = window.getSelection();
var pagelink = "<br /><br /> Read more at Alex-wells.co.uk: <?php if(is_single()){ the_title();}?> <a href='"+document.location.href+"'>"+document.location.href+"</a>"; //Change this if you like
var copy_text = selection + pagelink;
var new_div = document.createElement('div');
new_div.style.left='-99999px';
new_div.style.position='absolute';

body_element.appendChild(new_div );
new_div.innerHTML = copy_text ;
selection.selectAllChildren(new_div );
window.setTimeout(function() {
body_element.removeChild(new_div );
},0);
}

document.oncopy = addLink;
</script>

<?php
}

add_action( 'wp_head', 'add_copyright_text');

Example of the outcome when pasted into a word document:

Copy Write added to content copied from a word press blog

Need help installing this script on your website? contact me for any website development queries

I have installed the code on this website, but am not sure if i will keep it. The code is handy for adding a copy write notice but it is not always suitable – on this site i post allot of website development code (the above for example) and the script will add a copy write notice to this as well which could cause problems if people do not remove the code.

All in all its a handy bit of code that even if i dont use on this website i can see its application on others so thought I would share.

source: http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-add-a-read-more-link-to-copied-text-in-wordpress/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wpbeginner+%28WordPress+for+Beginners%29

How to find industry news to blog about

Posted on June 11, 2012 by Alex Wells

One of the hardest things to do when you run a blog or website is to think of new content to keep your website fresh and up to date, this blog post will look at ways of keeping updated with industry news to help find topics that you can blog about. The first step in this process is to find out what topics are popular, you can do this by keeping an eye on the popular news and blog websites for your industry.

Checking each of these websites one by one can be time consuming and you will quickly end up either checking less websites or not at all, one way of reducing the amount of time involved in checking websites for updates is to subscribe to their updates through either their social media links or RSS feeds.

Using social media to keep up to date

We will look at social media first, to use this method you will need to decide which social media platform you want to use to follow the industry news, the most popular are Facebook and Twitter. When you have chosen which service you wish to use and created an account you will need to locate the websites social media account, many websites provide links to them on the websites – popular locations are in the header, footer and sidebars.

When you have located the websites social media account you will then need to ‘follow’ or ‘like’ the account this will then mean you receive updates through the service each time the website makes a new message – for example each time I post a new update to my website i post a link to the content onto Twitter and my Facebook timeline to let people know about the new content. Not all websites have social media accounts but more and more websites are starting to identify the importance of social media so this method is only going to increase in popularity.

Using RSS feeds to keep up to date

The next method we will look at is RSS feeds, this is my preferred method of keeping updated with industry news but because i am interested in website development the websites that i want to keep updated by are more likely to have an RSS feed as the website owners will know how to add it to the website and identify the importance of a feed.

Using RSS feeds to keep updated on industry news

An example of the RSS feed icon

RSS feeds can normally be found in the same places as the links to the social media profiles with popular locations being the header, footer or sidebar. You can find the RSS feed by looking for an orange icon with lines looking like waves coming from it.

You will need to use a online service or bit of software to keep track of your RSS feeds, there are several available and if you wanted you can even add the RSS feed as a bookmark in popular browsers such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.

I have found Google Reader to be the best solution for my needs, it lets you add RSS feeds using the web interface and check them from any computer. This means that if you use more then one computer you will still be able to use the same service to monitor the feeds. There are also a large number of mobile applications that sync with your Google reader account which means that you can read the RSS feeds on your mobile – perfect for keeping up to date with content on the go – for example on the way to and from work.

Now you know how to keep updated with industry news the next step is to add / follow several industry leaders and blogs that you have found contain good information, with all of these added to your service of choice you will be able to keep up to date with popular subjects which will give you an idea on the types of subjects the industry is talking about and finding interesting. This will help you focus your content on subjects that will attract visitors and also help give you ideas on what to write about.

It is worth noting however do not simply copy and paste content from other websites as Google and other search engines will be able to tell and you will not gain any SEO benefit from it – if anything if you regulatory copy content it will harm your ranking results.

Search engines love popular, well written unique content.

Website Design Projects – What to Expect

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Alex Wells

As a business owner who is about to get a website, you would want the best features with high visibility and recognition. A professional web design and development company can help you build this quickly. Bear in mind though, that creating and designing a website is more than just a couple of web pages put together. There are coding and layouts involved, amongst various other elements essential in achieving an engaging and profitable website.

When it comes to building a website, it helps to have a process to follow, especially if you are new to it. Following good guidelines help you work better and get things running along more smoothly. Web designers may not all necessarily follow one methodology throughout, but the basics remain the same.

A typical web design project goes through a standard six step process: learn, plan, design, code, launch and maintain.

Learning is the most fundamental step of web design process. Done more so on the designer’s part, it is as important for you as the business owner to learn what to expect from the designers, as well as to take in all their expert advice. The more they know what you want and need to accomplish, the better your chances of ending up with a successful website. Don’t be intimidated by the million and one questions the experts throw at you. In fact, you should be relieved and give them your utmost confidence. They are merely proactively finding out what you want.

Once, they’ve learned what needs to be built, they then need to plan how to make it happen – and it all begins with establishing a design strategy. A lot of serious research, brainstorming, sketching and mock-ups are done in this step of the website design process. This is also where ideas take on more of a tangible state.

When the legwork of learning and planning are done, it makes the next step, design, much easier. The design phase itself is pretty straightforward. It’s practically bringing the mock-ups to life and really sweating the details. At this stage, the experts will be seeking a lot of feedback from you. It is absolutely critical that you are completely satisfied with the outcome, as once the coding is put in, it’s ten times more difficult to make what would be a simple change here.

Once you’re happy with everything, all the coding is implemented and your website becomes real and live. All the validating and testing are also done at this stage to avoid any hiccups once launched.

The final step of the process is maintenance. This optional step may be carried by the experts or by yourself. If you choose the latter, the web designers will brief you on how to properly maintain the site.

The most important thing throughout the whole process is for you to continuously give the web designers feedback and for them to constantly seek feedback from you. A lot of time and effort, not to mention headaches, can be saved by doing this.

Getting your last tweet and displaying it on your website

Posted on June 7, 2012 by Alex Wells

This bit of code will look up your last tweet and display it on your website, it will save the tweet to a file called tweet.html so it avoids triggering twitters request limit (150 requests per hour) it works by looking at the time the file was last modified and if its under an hour it will query twitter for the latest tweet update the tweet.html file and display the tweet

the time between updates can be changed by modifying this line:

1	if ($timeDiff < 216000)

The time is in seconds so 108000 = 30 mins and 216000 = 60 mins

make sure you update this line as well for your own twitter account:

1	$username = "alex_simpsons";

Full code listing:

<?php
// get file time
$tweetTime = filemtime('tweet.html');
$timeNow = time();
$timeDiff = $timeNow - $tweetTime;

if ($timeDiff < 216000) //108000 = 30 mins 216000 = 60 mins
{
}
else
{
updateTweet();
}
include('tweet.html');

// This function will update the tweet in a file called tweet.html
function updateTweet ()
{

$tweetout ='';
$username = "alex_simpsons";
$limit = 1;
$feed = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name='.$username.'&count='.$limit;

$tweets = file_get_contents($feed);

$tweets = str_replace("&", "&", $tweets);
$tweets = str_replace("<", "<", $tweets);
$tweets = str_replace(">", ">", $tweets);
$tweet = explode("<item>", $tweets);
$tcount = count($tweet) - 1;

for ($i = 1; $i <= $tcount; $i++) {
$endtweet = explode("</item>", $tweet[$i]);
$title = explode("<title>", $endtweet[0]);
$content = explode("</title>", $title[1]);
$content[0] = str_replace("–", "—", $content[0]);

$content[0] = preg_replace("/(http:\/\/|(www\.))(([^\s<]{4,68})[^\s<]*)/", '<a href="http://$2$3" target="_blank">$1$2$4</a>', $content[0]);
$content[0] = str_replace("$username: ", "", $content[0]);
$content[0] = preg_replace("/@(\w+)/", "<a href=\"http://www.twitter.com/\\1\" target=\"_blank\">@\\1</a>", $content[0]);
$content[0] = preg_replace("/#(\w+)/", "<a href=\"http://search.twitter.com/search?q=\\1\" target=\"_blank\">#\\1</a>", $content[0]);
$mytweets[] = $content[0];
}

while (list(, $v) = each($mytweets)) {
$tweetout .= "$v\n";
}
$html ='<div id="latesttweet"><span>Latest tweet:</span>'.$tweetout.'</div>';
file_put_contents('tweet.html', $html);

}

?>

Download the code

link to see how many requests your IP address has left with twitter (note this is your IP address of your internet connection and not your web server – useful for when developing scripts)

Finder crashes with a background image

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Alex Wells

after playing with the folder display options in Lion i set a background image for my images folder, the outcome of this was that finder would then use 6GB of RAM before crashing each time i tried to open the images folder, because it crashed when i tried to open it i was unable to tell it to stop using a background image

the solution was to use automator to set the background back to being white

source: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1293637