IDH Solutions - Website Design & Development

Don’t Start Without a RoadMap

admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:45:56 +0000

So you have decided to start a web project. If you are a web developer, you probably have friends, family and clients pitching you ideas everyday with a new great idea for a website. And you being the code monkey that you are start imagining models, controllers and crazy interface elements that will take their idea and make it completely awesome. However, if you are anything like a few of us guys here - you end up with a hard drive with many, many unfinished projects (not client projects - the crazy idea projects). So how do you overcome that?

Draw Up a Roadmap

Mozilla are great at this and definitely have the process down pat that all developers need to follow. You spend an afternoon scoping out the idea and the main role (functionality) of the web app. The who, what, when and hows on how to do that properly is for another post for another time. Let’s just assume you have got that down.

Your next port of call should be finding out your resources (people, technologies and time) and see if you realistically have the time to turn the idea around in a reasonable rate of time. Now I know I am completely breezing through this, but we feel these are basic steps that everyone should know already.

But now comes the fun part!

Get yourself and your team together to figure out the order that needs to be done. So there various methods of software development are available (Prototyping, Waterfall, RAD, etc) and one has to be decided on. Once again, there are plenty of more experienced people out there that can outline the pros and cons of both.

But setting out the map and giving people direction is the greatest way to succeed in the endeavour. This is because by breaking the features down as landmaps on a road map, you can attach tasks to them to make sure they are completed. If those tasks are not completed, the landmark cannot be reached and the journey will never be realised.

There are some great pieces of software out there that can help you assign tasks to people:

BaseCamp - Probably one of the best ones around from a SME or purely business point of view. The small fee to setup is completely worth it and the integration with the other solutions in the suite is as close to perfect as possible. The learning curve however might through some non-tech people off
Project Bubble - this is a new web app that was built by one of the bloggers I regularly follow: Stu Green. He has built a fun little app that is actually packed with quite a bit of functionality. We are using it at IDH at the moment to interact with friends on smaller projects. Setting tasks for content and images, approval for certain design elements, and even the ability to log the time spent and even generate invoices (for those parts of the project you have no choice but to charge for ;) ) makes it perfect for the 1-3 man jobs.

Why we recommend this approach even for small projects

There are a few reasons and the main one being it sets really good habits. If you are training your team and your clients (whether friends, family or paying ones) it creates an audit trail and everyone has a clear sense of what they are working towards. This training is invaluable when you are working on a twenty person job and people are committing code and supplying content at various times of the day.

Secondly, the project has a much higher success rate. By forcing people to stick to deadlines and play by the rules, they are automatically accountable for the success or failure of the project. We have clear evidence of this - all projects (no matter the size) that we have setup properly from day one have a vastly improved success rate.

Lastly, it tests how committed they are to the project. What started as a few ideas over a beer on the weekend has now become an investment of sorts and requires actual effort. You would be surprised the amount of blogs I have started for family and friends and others which have never taken off and still remain stale in the depths of the unfound Internet.

Planning will work… You just have to do it

What Should Count as a Conversion on Your Blog

admin — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:28:07 +0000

After looking after my blog for a while now, and taking it more serious than any of my other projects in a long time, I have decided to sit down and really nut out a strategy as to what is really important as regards to the blog’s KPIs and how they relate to my overall strategy and purpose of this website.

So rather than provide some general advice that tries to blanket every blog out there, I think a better why to go about it is to explain exactly my strategy and hopefully it can inspire other blogmasters to think about theirs as well, maybe even in a new light

Do People Read My Blog Posts

To me this seems a given, but in reality I see very little talk on problogging blogs and forums (disclaimer: I don’t really read too many religiously) talk about this that is clear and to the point.

My blog has the snippet inserted in the posts so only the first section of the post is on the homepage. Also on the homepage, you can access that post by clicking on the headline.

So with analytics, tagging both links with the same URL parameter for all links that point to a particular post page, shows me how many people land on the homepage and then are excited enough to read the post. Obiviously I cannot say for certain how many would actually read, but I think its a fair assumption to make that if someone clicks the link, they want to read the article.

Someone Leaves a Comment on a Post

As my blogging improves, I really hope that people enjoy the posts and the information I present enough that they are motivated to leave a comment, whether good or bad. Blogging is web 2.0’s version of a forum in my opinion, and we all know that a forum is only as good as its members. A blog therefore, is only as good as its comments.

How do I track the comment leaving? Once again with analytics, how many people read the article, then clicked the submit button. Also the next level is to say how many people landed on the homepage, clicked through to an article and left a comment in one session. And I know these one night stand style conversions are very, very rare - but I still feel its a nice goal to work toward.

Are People Sharing on Social Networks

If leaving a comment is good, then sharing on the social networks is great. However, in order for a natural/organic spread of the article (meaning you don’t leverage self promotion and let your regular visitors/subscribers take care of it by themselves), is a true indication that your blog is effective, informative and useful to the community that you are targeting.

Once again with analytics, tagging the social buttons with links is another great way, and doing some online rep monitoring to track the spread and also with your incoming link checkers, can give you all the data that you require.

Attaining Regular Return Visits and RSS Subscribers

All the aspects I talked about before relate to brand new people mainly. However, what would make me most proud as a blogger is to see my return visits and subscriber numbers continue to increase overtime.

Everyone in the business world and even in your personal life recognise that long term relationships is the key for success, in both your reputation and the growth of your blog.

And at the end of the day, I think that is the most important, creating a community around your passion. That is the true measure of success for your blog.

iThumb - Im a Sufferer

admin — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 10:14:45 +0000

EDIT:: this is what happens when you dont research a topic before blogging about it: Urban Dictionary - iThumb

I’ve had my iPhone for a decent amount of time, meaning that I’m past the honeymoon stage of having the phone and now just grown accustomed to its features and lack of (the no cut and paste option is still killing me, I’m not going to lie).

But I can spend up to 20min or so in a session of purely doing nothing but check my RSS feeds, twitter, emails, and so forth - without ever having to boot up the lappy. Another great feature.

Unfortunately for me however is the fact that I have probably larger than normal sized hands and hence regularly moosh multiple GUI elements and accidentally over-flick (is that what its called?) when browsing on the phone.

Below is an image of how my hand stacks up against the phone itself.

My iThumb

Now after repeated flicks and pinches, lately I have found that my thumb itself has started to get an RSI type sensation, like what I have after marathon sessions on the mouse photoshopping, blogging, etc.

Since my current status is that my iThumb is playing up. Give it about 5min or so after a session on my phone and it goes back to normal. By the way, using the phone less isn’t really an option. As it turns out I am not the first and only sufferer of this serious affliction. Is there a support group yet?

Maybe I’m just a big girl having a whinge, but it wouldn’t suprise me if others had this same issue.

If you suffered any other iPhone related injuries, please leave a comment below. Please do not let me be the only one.

Using PHP for Reading Writing Files to a Web Server

admin — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 11:26:50 +0000

Spent most of the week doing plugin development, and you wouldn’t believe the issues I was having with writing PHP code that enables to read/write/open/close files onto the server. There is plenty of information about the functions and how to implement them, not so much information on tips and tricks on real world implementations. Below I will highlight a few points I learnt along the way.

Make sure what you write to the file is encoded correctly: When you write a string to a text file or so forth, you cannot just write it without properly encoding the data. Especially if you plan on running the data through Excel or some other program for further indepth analysis.

In PHP, and for most standard types of processing, utf8_encode(string) is the best and easiest way to properly encode your data. By running your string through this function before anything else is done, such as writing to the file, is your first step toward having it easy to read and extract data from later on.
Make sure you use correct end of line characters: In PHP, for a particular string that you are compiling, it is best to use double quotes “” rather than singles ‘ ‘ because this enables you to correctly end the line and start a new one in both Windows and Mac environments. I took this lesson from university as well, when I was working with a sample text file that used \n and was constantly erroring because it wasn’t encoded properly to be read on linux and OS X. The solution, at the end of your string, append \r\n to cover both your bases and you will not have to worry about these little issues further down the track.
Write to the absolute path, not the URL: This is probably the most important one of all the points I took away from this project. I had to write a file to a particular sub-directory with the url: http://www.example.com/dev/logs. Now I built the URL with a function, I had created the directory on the server and set up the permissions, but it failed to write and spat out error after error.

After a few Google searches here and there, it turns out the secret is that you do not write to the URL but to the path of the sub-directory on the server. In this case being root-path/~test/public_html/dev/logs. Once that was setup up, and making sure the path was complete, everything worked like a dream. To make it easy for myself, I used $_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"]; to grab the path to the root, and modded my URL builder function to take care of the rest.

Now I know most of the information presented here is at a fairly basic level, but as someone that has not done much file handling with PHP or many other web languages (I’m too used to just dumping everything in a database) it was a nice little learning curve to brush up on my skills. Now I know some of this isn’t that secure, so if anyone has some security recommendations about how to protect yourself correctly when writing to the server, leave a note in the comments and I will adjust the post.

Don’t Just Rely on Google Webmaster Tools

admin — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 01:52:36 +0000

It happens over and over again. You create a website for a client, you get it moved from the dev environment to the live. Everyone is thoroughly happy with the work done. You celebrate. And then they ask you to monitor and maintain the website.

Not a problem you say, Google has their Webmaster Tools, I’ll submit your website to that, and it can allow me to check the sitemap is getting picked up, monitor 404s and so forth. Google will tell me everything about what I need to know about the websites performance.

However, did you know that both Yahoo and MSN have a webmaster central as well? Did you know that they offer different tools to what is offered by Google - and in some cases *gasp* better than the ones offered by the big G?

So I thought in this post what I would do I would outline the different webmaster tools on offer and highlight some different aspects of the tools and how it can give you a better indication of how the website is going via the search engines.

Google Webmaster Tools

Link: Google Webmaster Tools

I’m not going to dwell too much on this one, because my guess is that it is the one that is used most often by webmasters. Login via your Google account and verfication of the website is done via uploading of a html file (I have NEVER had success with the meta tag option. NEVER EVER.).

My favourite part of Googles services is the sitemap options, and analysis of how the crawls went, along with the areas of duplicate title and meta tags, cleaning up your SEO.

Also, there are some really nice greasemonkey scripts to analyse back links, such as the one that shows you anchor text and PR of the linking webpage.

All in all, its a good tool to analyse how your website is going against the largest search engine.

Yahoo SiteExplorer

Link: SiteExplorer

Yahoo throw you off the scent straight away by not calling it webmaster tools, but siteExplorer. Thats ok, points for being semi-original.

SiteExplorer is probably most well known in the seo industry for backlink analysis. This is not the time or the post to get mixed up in all of that, but I bet many of the people that use it for backlinks did not know it also doubles as your Yahoo analysis of your website.

What I do like is the easy submission of feeds of all types (rss, atom, xml sitemaps, etc) and procedures to put in place to help with dynamic urls. Unfortunately, it seems the skinnest in terms of features out of all the 3 major ones.

Live Search Webmaster Central

Link: Live Search Webmaster Central

Microsoft only just recentely overhauled their own webmaster tools platform, and also setup a fantastic blog that they are updating regularly. It is really great to see that Live Search are starting to take the Internet Development community seriously and providing useful tools and information. The other reason you should seriously consider taking Live Search more seriously as that according to some statistics, it is now locking in its position as the second most used search engine.

Verification is done via an XML file that you upload to your website, once again, I always steer clear of meta tag validation - but do recogonise that sometimes it is the only option.

One part of Live’s webmaster tools is the checking of HTTP compression and seeing if it was enabled. To be honest, I did not know much about it before reading about it on MSN, but now that I have, its amazing at the difference that it makes. That is something Google never has told me (or at least never made it easy to notice).

I like the way they format their crawl issues, and allow you to break it down to subdirectories, rather than just dump them all out in one massive CSV or coresponding format.

The keywords tool to check your performance for pages that suposedly perform well for a particular keyword I think needs to be tidied up a little bit, it just seems a little bit too generous for my liking with the green box system.

Conclusion

In conclusion, each service has its own pluses and minuses, but for a holistic approach to how your website is viewed by the engines, it only takes about 3min per engine to submit, and in my books, definitely worth the time - I was resubmitting and 1st time submissions whilst writing this post.

In order of usefulness, I would still say Google is out in front, closely followed by Microsoft, and then Yahoo - in my opinion anyway.

If you know of any other tools you should be submitting your website too, please leave a message in the comments on this post. I will probably then combine all the tools into one webmaster tools style post.