Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category
January 5th, 2010
Well I started this post knowing full well there’d be plenty of resolution posts around as we enter this new year, and having not got this finished quickly, there are plenty around. You can’t really make anyone follow a resolution and you should all take up your own but here’s five suggestions from me, if you have room in your life for 12 then head over to Six Revisions and have a read of A Designer’s List of New Year’s Resolutions.
Read more »
Tags: book, new year, programming, resolution
Posted in General Stuff, KamikazeMusic.com, Random thoughts and musings, Web Design, Web Development |
3 Comments »
December 18th, 2009

We always seem to leave browser testing till the end, open up Internet Explorer and within about 10 seconds of page load there’s a variety of swear words and we go off to hack our CSS or put in IE only style sheets. God help you if you go crazy and open up IE6, you’re sure to find some form of mess awaiting you.
Recently though my work habits have changed and I’ve decided to stop leaving it until the end, this has been prompted by a few things such as approaching the end of a project having not checked in IE7 and sending a colleague off to show the site to a client who, you guessed it uses IE7. (Sorry Andrew!)
Coupled with that I’ve started to develop sites in Google Chrome. I was impressed with Google Chrome when it first came out and apart from a few too many crashes with flash content it was pretty slick. However the lack of developer tools left me developing in Firefox and using two different browsers seemed a bit impractical.
Read more »
Tags: browser testing, cross browser, CSS, CSS3, HTML, HTML5, IE6
Posted in General Stuff, Random thoughts and musings, Web Design, Web Development |
9 Comments »
December 14th, 2009

My second post on Six Revisions and as we approach 2010 I take a look at what is behind the emerging web trends.
So head on over to Six Revisions and have a read of the article.
It must be worth a read as it’s made the front page of digg and been tweeted around a bit!
Tags: future, guest post, six revisions, technology
Posted in General Stuff, Web Design, Web Development |
No Comments »
December 7th, 2009
*Now updated with jquery 1.4.2 and removed supersleight as usage of IE6 only stylesheet removes most of the need for it*
Merry Christmas Twitters and RSS subscribers and all those who have found their way here via some other route.
Having started to get into using HTML5 and CSS3 in quite a big way recently I’ve put together a base package that I’ve been using to start projects off. (I’ll hopefully have some of them finished for you to see in the new year).
I was thinking to myself what better way to encourage people to start using all this new stuff than sharing the package with everyone. Now it’s not up to much but it will give you a basis to customize and start from for HTML5 and CSS3.
There’s a good chance my coding may not even be to your liking but that doesn’t matter, I’m making this available so you can download it and change it into your own starting point.
You can download it right here.
HTML 5 / CSS3 starter package [size : 718.25 KB]
Read more »
Tags: CSS3, HTML5, template
Posted in General Stuff, Quick Tips, Web Design, Web Development |
13 Comments »
November 17th, 2009
Well I’ve been doing this web design blogging for a month now. Sure I’ve been working in web design and development for years and I’ve blogged before occasionally keeping fifthandlast.com updated but this is my first time blogging about web related topics. So what have a learnt? A few things actually but here’s 5, mostly learnt from buggering something up.
Read more »
Tags: blogging, design, development
Posted in General Stuff, KamikazeMusic.com, Quick Tips, Random thoughts and musings, Web Design, Web Development |
2 Comments »
November 2nd, 2009
Having attended the “For a beautilful web” workshop in Newcastle I was very impressed with Andy Clarke and as such there’ll probably be a few more posts on here related to the stuff I picked up from the day and I would highly recommend anyone who can to attend a workshop or see Andy speaking if they get chance.
For those who don’t know, the workshop was all about using new technologies such as CSS3 and central to everything was the fact that websites don’t have to look the same in every browser. (Check out http://dowebsitesneedtobeexperiencedexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/)
I was convinced, the arguments for progressing and using this new stuff are great but I left and my first thought was “well it’s all right for Andy he gets good clients, but I couldn’t start doing that with our clients”. Which I’m sure is what a lot of other people think straight off, and then I did a bit more thinking and realised that was the stupidest thing I’ve possibly ever thought to myself.
Read more »
Tags: CSS3, HTML5
Posted in General Stuff, Web Design, Web Development |
7 Comments »
October 26th, 2009
![I [heart] Trading Eye I [heart] Trading Eye](http://www.kamikazemusic.com/wp-content/uploads/blog_tradingeye.jpg)
Another Trading Eye hack for today. Very nicely the guys at DPI Vision have spent plenty of time making the URL’s search engine friendly. They’ve also done it with the site search however and if you want to track your search in Google Analytics (and you should do!) then you need to reverse that change.
But fear not it’s pretty straightforward! – Read on.
Read more »
Tags: ecommerce, google analytics, htacces, search, tradingeye
Posted in Trading Eye, Web Development |
No Comments »
October 25th, 2009

They’re becoming ever more popular as a form of cheap, affordable and effective marketing but HTML emails can still be a pain in the arse mainly due to the dated rendering by most email clients. They’re something I’ve found myself doing ever more frequently recently (even getting an inclusion on the Beautiful Email Newsletters Gallery) so here’s my 10 basic tips for putting together your own HTML email newsletters.
Read more »
Tags: design, development, HTML email
Posted in General Stuff, Quick Tips, Web Design, Web Development |
19 Comments »
October 21st, 2009

Well a nice little jolly down to London for the eCommerce Expo at Earls Court today. Generally I was surprised that I didn’t learn much new, except maybe that UK Fast have a recruitment policy that involves women who look good in hot pants http://twitpic.com/m8t5w (the girls in the picture are actually UK Fast employees and not hired in like I thought).
Not learning much can I guess be a good thing as it generally means we’re doing everything right in work. Still I attended a Google University session on analytics and I would certainly recommend Google University sessions if you get the chance to attend one. Amongst the things I took away were what the speaker said were his 5 key metrics that you should know for any eCommerce site and they’re equally applicable to normal sites.
Read more »
Tags: analytics, conversion, ecommerce, google
Posted in General Stuff, Quick Tips, Web Design, Web Development |
8 Comments »
October 18th, 2009
![I [heart] Trading Eye I [heart] Trading Eye](http://www.kamikazemusic.com/wp-content/uploads/blog_tradingeye.jpg)
Firstly before I start I’d just like to say I think Trading Eye is a great piece of software and I think the guys at Dpivision have done a great job with it. Still there are some shortcomings and one of my major issues is with the search which I believe would be fixed with version 6 but from first look hasn’t.
Firstly if you search with an apostrophe there’s a good chance of breaking the search e.g. searching for (dave’s book). Secondly if you want a red book and searched with the phrase “red book” you wouldn’t get a match unless the exact phrase “red book” in that order was somewhere in the product title or description, even if the phrase “book red” was there that wouldn’t show up either.
So here’s my fix which currently works for version 5 and in the near future after I’ve had a poke around version 6 I hope to give you some adjustments for that.
Read more »
Posted in Quick Tips, Trading Eye, Web Development |
No Comments »