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Archive for the ‘Website Development’ Category

World of Webcraft

23 Jun

I’m back to work after an extensive battle with a World known as Warcraft. Bloody hell is that game addictive; I’m still not completely free of it but I’m weening off it slowly. I’m on a scale where at one end is a needle packed with all the +70 Spell Power and +32 Resilience you can fit ready to inject directly into your social life and at the other, gleaming and glistening and calling your name softly is the work you have neglected for the past three months. “Don’t worry!” I say, “We’ll be together soon!” and today, “soon” has finally hit. Yes, I have tipped the balance in favour of my old self – just as unsociable but much, much more productive.

Back to the point, I am finally round to start the final phase of the website, which has now been re-christened as a much more speech and search engine friendly iWishGifts.com. The rename has been one of the most motivating factors in getting me clean, it kinda feels like a fresh new project but with only that final 10% to do. With Travis singing sweet lullabyes to me in the background, I think I can do it!

 
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PayPal for Convenience

28 Jan

A colleague of mine, mentioned that I should include a PayPal option on DIVIRE because he found it a convenient and familiar option. I originally did have PayPal as my payment method and removed it after realising how restrictive their API is and how much more expensive it is to use over Google Checkout.

I spent the majority of last night adding the “alternative” functionality and it is currently live on the old but currently active version of DIVIRE. In hindsight, I think it was the right decision and I am happy that I added it. Despite the drawbacks, it’s still probably the most widely used online banking system and a lot of people have accounts set up with them and so would find the transaction to be more convenient (as I used to) if the option was there.

Another thing I want to do, though, is to add a 3% surcharge on to PayPal transactions to cover the extra cost of the service but am worried this will annoy customers and decrease my sales. It’s hard to know ahead of time how these somewhat “small” decisions will impact the company.

 
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Law and Order for the Web

26 Jan

I have begun working on some of the content for the new DIVIRE site, starting with the Affiliate Program I will be launching. It’s turning out to be quite difficult because I am not a lawyer and don’t know what I should be writing exactly.

“Then go pay a lawyer to do it!” I hear you say. Not an option Johnny, if that is indeed your name! I’m a new business and quite frankly, I cannot afford to spend where I can get a half-decent result with my amateurish skills.

Back to the point, it’s quite a difficult process because I want to make sure that I cover my ass against the dreaded ‘S’ word but at the same time, provide an EASY way for potential affiliates to see exactly what I offer and exactly what my terms are. I think, so long as I make the ground rules clear, I can’t go too wrong.

Here are some notes so far:

  • For each successfully charged sale that extends past the returns period, the affiliated party will receive exactly 10% of the generated gross profit.
  • Funds up to and including £1000 exactly will be deposited on the 1st of each calendar month into a nominated bank account.
  • Amounts larger than £1000 will be rolled over to the following month up until the time comes that the entire balance can be paid in full.
  • All rounding is done per-transaction and will be rounded to the next lowest £0.01.
  • International affiliates will have the same rules applied as above but will be paid in their local currency minus any conversion fees (typically 1-2%).

There are also some rules I wish to apply as to who can join the scheme such as preventing the scum “coupon code” sites that overwrite the affiliate cookies with their own version and therefore receiving other affiliates hard-earned commission.

Lots of work to do!

 
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A Weekend of CSS

25 Jan

I have finally finished the hours and hours of tutorials on CSS. I have to say, I am somewhat surprised at the number of, what I would regard as, “hacks” that are needed to layout a page or two with some decent margins and inlining of elements. I thought, considering the time it has taken to get a decent standard like CSS, that the designers would have clamped down on some of the side-effects that are potentially introduced with certain CSS commands in a more elegant way.

I am generally referring to the margins in the CSS box model and floating elements. I haven’t actually looked at CSS 3.0 at all so all these issues may have been presented with better solutions. I guess I will find out in due course.

On a positive note, I have used my new knowledge of CSS to produce a complete and completely standard compliant website (although it is very simple) to promote the Mikro Man and Mikro Deep models I am selling and try to funnel more customers through to my website.

 
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The Problem with Duplicate Content

23 Jan

A serious consideration that is always on the back of my mind when designing my websites recently is “How do I ensure that my data remains unique from page to page”. You may think this is an obvious question but when you begin to consider things like I mentioned below, and the many more examples out there, you soon see that it goes much deeper. In my case, with the currencies, ideally I wanted to go:

https://example.com/uk/cat/prod/item.html
https://example.com/us/cat/prod/item.html
https://example.com/eu/cat/prod/item.html

If I went with this structure, Googlebot will start to devalue my content as it will see the different ‘localised’ versions as duplicate content. While this is the case, it’s not overly helpful in allowing me to design a dynamic site.

The only way I can currently see to solve this issue is by doing a delayed re-direct from:

https://uk.example.com
https://us.example.com
https://eu.example.com

When someone visited one of these, I intend it to show a very brief paragraph explaining that they are on the site for country X and that they will be re-directed shortly to the domain with the correct currency specified. The currency selection will have to be hidden within a session variable.

I still don’t like it and I hope that I can find a better solution. Who knows, maybe it will come to me in a dream or something. I think the bottom line is:

  • Make sure all your URLs are unique to a page.
  • If there is a duplication, make sure your “robots.txt” block it so that they don’t find the duplication (especially important for RSS feeds).
  • Try to keep the data on all pages unique, not only from each other but from other places on the web.
 
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Up-to-Date Currency Info with PHP

23 Jan

So last night I started working on some plans on how to make the new DIVIRE universally accessible, and by universally accessible I mean the UK, Europe and the US and not universal at all.

What I want is to be able to have the base prices in good old GBP and then give prices using the current exchange rate plus a buffer of say 0.5% to deal with any fluctuation throughout the day. To do this I need accurate updates from a reliable website. There are two popular sites that I know of that offer this service, but both are very expensive.

Luckily for me there is a site called The Money Converter who provide a fairly accurate summary of the exchange rates according to a specified base currency, absolutely free. When I get around to it, I’ll be setting up a cron job on my server that will be responsible for retrieving and parsing the data from these feeds and uploading them into the DIVIRE exchange-rate database. If anything goes wrong, a simple e-mail to a specialised address should alert me and allow me to fix any problems that have occurred.

 
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XHTML with DTD

22 Jan

I was watching the CSS tutorial vids last night (and learning lots in the process) but about three chapters in, I realised I needed to take a step back and go study XHTML in detail first. I know it’s not a requirement but I like to know as much as possible about something I am working on, that’s just me.

So I start watching the XHTML videos and start to get a little more tired and as I do so, I fill in all those important gaps in my knowledge that really shouldn’t have been left open considering I have made many websites in the past couple of years. The major aspect being the DTD or the Document Type Definition and what that meant to me as a web developer.

I can’t count the times I have started a new page in Dreamweaver and been asked to select “XHTML 1.0 Transitional” or “XHTML 1.0 Strict” and never really knew what they were for nor did I care to find out because I thought it was unimportant. How wrong I was. These tags are there to describe how ‘new’ a document is basically and what standards it conforms to. While pages with Strict encoding might allow <font> tags and bgcolor attributes now, I expect they will cease to do this in the future rendering a lot of websites where the developer has no idea what DTD is, unreadable to some extent.

Now I have been lucky and have always used CSS anyway in its basic form, but only because Dreamweaver tells me to. I’m glad I took a step back and I will make sure my documents conform to proper standards in the future, especially with the correct DTD.

 
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Using Permalinks

21 Jan

So one of the most major aspects of good SEO seems to be getting a good Permalink set up. A Permalink is either an archived version of a webpage or a “disguised” version of a webpage in the format:

http://example.com/cat/prod/name.html

Search engines like this format presumably because it generally means that they won’t change regardless of the developer’s underlying code implementation. It also adds keywords directly into the URL which is always a big bonus.

The great thing about Permalinks is that, for the average web-developer, they are usually very easy to slot in to new and existing websites alike. All it takes is to add in a .htaccess RewriteRule and let the server take care of re-arranging the URL into a format that is compatible with your PHP/ASP script, transparently.

So in essence, our previous:

http://example.com/cat/prod/name.html

Would become (server side):

http://example.com/x.php?cat=cat&prod=prod&name=name

And the user would be none the wiser. Clever isn’t it?

 
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AdWords & P3P

21 Jan

Spent some of the morning researching the AdWords quality scoring system and have accidentally stumbled across some W3C policies I have not heard of before. It seems W3C might be a lot more important than I have previously realised and I should probably pay it more attention. Damn me and my old-skool ways.

P3P is a meta-system for allowing the browser to basically read, in basic form, your website’s privacy policy. I have a feeling AdWords will use this too and so will be making sure that I provide my policy information to the HTML meta-tag for maximum coverage.

Need to remember to look closely at the meta standards when building the new DIVIRE site. I really want this site to rock in every possible way and making my potential customers feel comfortable enough to buy from me is my current priority.

 
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SAPIAN and Creative Disorder

20 Jan

My beloved two, legacy sites have been re-animated. SAPIAN, the original company site I created back in 2002 and Creative Disorder a more recent venture into the software market (until I realised that I actually need to spend 6-months at a time creating useful software to put on the site). These have been brought back from the dead after a clash with my webhost (whom I refuse to now recommend even though I still use them) to help boost DIVIRE in the search rankings. These sites have luckily been around long enough to achieve some pretty decent rankings and I hope that by linking from them, DIVIRE will earn extra credit points.

 
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