Only Network » web development

Focus on your store front

Owen — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 21:55:44 +0000

The design of your online site should be paramount in your mind when you’re building a new presence online. It’s easy to know where to focus on when you have a bricks and mortar store; the floors need to be clean, the point of purchase displays tidy and the staff well groomed. But when a potential customer hits your website, the design is the first thing that’s they’re going to notice.

It’s worth getting a professional designer in on your design and make sure that the user interface being designed is the best that it can be. There are a number of factors you need to keep in mind when designing a site and these professionals will have the right training and experience to make sure your site hangs together.

Don’t underestimate the strength of a decent design.

From 1 WordPress blog to as many as you like!

Owen — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:56:32 +0000

Have you ever used WordPress MU? It’s the multi user version of WordPress that lets you create a blog for every user who registers with the site. It’s a big favourite, especially for people who want to offer the ability to others to create their own blogs, as it doesn’t cost anything extra to have another blog on the site (no incremental cost).

Well, with WordPress 3.0, WordPress and WordPress MU are being merged together. You’ll have a feature so that any standard blog can be turned into what’s called a Multisite configuration. So it doesn’t matter if your blog is about hosting or about diet pills that work, you can now convert your site into one that supports multiple blogs with a pretty simple process.

Are you up for Facebook Like?

Owen — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:20:38 +0000

: Image via CrunchBase

Facebook has just launched a new service that allows webmasters to add a “Like” button to any page on their website. This allows visitors to click on the Like button and let people in their network know that they Like this page. Not only this, but when people on their network visit their page, they’ll see a link to the original person on the widget, helping to increase confidence in the page.

It’s a great tool for webmasters and one that’s bound to increase Facebook’s dominance on the Web. The button will work on any site, regardless of whether it’s a static site or a PHP based site, regardless of whether the page is about donkeys or about Acneticin. So, what are you waiting for: Here’s how to add a Facebook Like button to you site.

jQuery FTW

Owen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:04:50 +0000

Spent a few hours this afternoon coding away and every time I do some AJAX work with jQuery I’m stunned at how efficient and effective it is. It’s almost like the team who designed it have had to deal with real life problems and designed the language to cope with this. I’m sure other languages are also designed in this way, but jQuery jut keeps surprising me in just how good it is. It’s like looking at promo keychains which work without even trying. Much better than soething that doesn’t work.

What’s your target market?

Owen — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:59:15 +0000

When building a new website, always keep in mind who your target market is. Why? you may ask? Well, different segments find different things attractive and compelling and getting the formula wrong can spell disaster for your website. For example, if you’re building a website about fitness equipment, then your audience is probably going to be young, dynamic and vital. Choosing a dull colour scheme is going to be detrimental to the site; you want something bright and vibrant.

Have you seen a site recently that brought this principle to mind?

Working on new version of WP AuctionsW

Owen — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:51:33 +0000

We’re currently working on the next iteration of the most awesome WP Auctions plugin. If you’re not familiar with it; it’s a WordPress plugin that lets you auction items right off your blog. You can auction anything from stink bombs to patio furniture.

The new version has a couple of great features, including the ability to restrict bids to users who are registered to your blog and the ability to auction items out of posts and pages (rather than just having an AJAXy popup that does the work) It’s all about providing options for users so that they can choose their own delivery mechanisms. Anyway, hoping to get the release out soon.

How to decode encrypted WordPress footers

Owen — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 14:16:17 +0000

Do you ever find a WordPress theme with encrypted footers? Now I don’t have a problem with people putting their signatures in a footer, but encrypting it is going to have a detrimental effect on a server, especially as the footer needs to be decoded over and over again so people can read the page. Well, before you get your self defense products out and hide in a hole, here’s one thing you can do.

It’s a blog post called How to decode ugly eval(gzinflate(base64_decode and provides a very useful script that will loop through the multiple encodings on a file to produce an unencrypted version. There’s also an online version of the script here.

Good hosting need not cost the earth

Owen — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:36:02 +0000

I just wanted to draw your attention to some of the services that The Only Network offer. We’re particularly proud of our cheap web hosting that comes complete with our caretaker service. This service means we take care of backups for you and even ensure that your site’s content is always fresh. And the great thing is that it’s really really cheap. Even if you only have a limited budget, we’ll make sure that the debt collection agencies don’t come knocking at your door.

So don’t delay, contact us for more information today.

New theme

Owen — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 09:58:01 +0000

I’m trying out a new theme on this blog, so let me know if you spot any issues or have a any problems. I’m not 100% certain I’ll be keeping this, but I wanted to experiment with child themes and see what benefits they have.

Personally, I’m not convinced yet, but I still have some more playing to do. I’ll write more on WordPress Guru once I have made my mind up.

Having a play with WordPress 2.6

Owen — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:04:16 +0000

I’ve installed Beta 3 of WordPress 2.6 down at WordPressGuru. It seems to be running very well and I love the new features like the integrated word count and the ability to preview themes. There are also lots of behind-the-scene changes where you’d need to make sure you have clean eyeglasses on, things like comments in the code and performance improvements, but most users will see the end result of those rather than the changes themselves.

The one gripe I have is that with every release there are changes that older themes don’t support. For example image alignment and captioning work great with the default theme, but don’t see to work at all on any other theme I tried. This means that new WordPress themes have an advantage over older ones, but it’s going to be lots of work for theme designers to make sure everything works.