Lahive featuring on HTML5 Galleries

It’s always nice when one of my designs appears on a showcase site and I’m doubly pleased the Lahive site is featuring on www.besthtml5gallery.com and www.thewebdesigninspiration.com which showcase the best HTML5 sites on the web.

In case developments related to web design have so far escaped you, HTML5 is the latest evolution in the standard that defines HTML so it’s important to start using it and take advantage of its capabilities.

If your website isn’t HTML5 here are some reasons why you might consider upgrading:

  • It’s next generation so don’t get left behind
  • It can help with SEO
  • It can help accessibility
  • Browser support is rarely an issue

Why blog?

This is a question I was asked recently. There are many opinions and long-winded answers out there but here I think are the 3 key ones:

  • Search engines will crawl your site more often
  • You will get more traffic
  • It can humanise your business/brand

That leads to the question of the best blogging platform. I’m entirely biased on this point because I love WordPress. I love its simplicity of use – newbies no matter age/background can be using it within 30 minutes. I could go on but that’s not what this post is about. Suffice to say, I’ve only known existing bloggers change platforms to WordPress, never the other way around. And I think that speaks volumes.

WordPress Installation on One.com

I seem to be writing posts on hosting companies recently, the reason being they all seem to have little quirks when it comes to setting up WordPress.

The One.com control panel is frightening in its simplicity. The one thing missing is a spinning gif emblazoned with WE DON’T TRUST YOU. I had to call the client to find long lost emails concerning database names and passwords. But to be fair once I contacted One.com to resend them they did so promptly.

Apart from that installation is simple. It did strike me as odd how they deal with the config file. If you upload it with the rest via ftp WP has a hard time finding the database. Instead One.com prefer to create it for you prompting for names and passwords.

One last quirk, there is a CSS cache that can’t be turned off, so ensure you are happy locally before uploading.

CGF Roofing Contractors launched

CGF Roofing Contractors in Bridgend are the UK’s leading contractors in the roofing sector. Built on the WordPress platform the site has a clean layout with a very  muted color scheme. As the logo is comprised of primary colours it was important that the site be easy on the eye. First of a two part project. Roofing supplies shop to follow.

Visit the site here: www.cgfroofing.co.uk

Captain SKA site launched

Captain SKA is a producer of politically inclined tunes. The project involved a heavily customised WordPress site with a three day turn around to coincide with a national campaign. The site uses a combination of user-friendly custom fields to control the layout of content, making it simple for the band to upload text, music videos, press releases and images.

Visit the site here: www.captainska.com

WordPress Installation on 123-reg

Pretty awful. Took an age to upload via ftp as the connection kept closing then when the site went live the server was so slow no one could load the site properly. The client called 123 tech support who acknowledged there was a “known issue with WordPress” and he could get his money back, begging the question …

Romak Denture Centre launched

Romak are leading Swansea denture specialists. The project involved a WordPress site and shop complete with catalogue, shopping cart, user accounts and secure checkout payments with PayPal. Client interaction with the site was a priority so customers are automatically assigned posting privileges allowing them to write guest posts and take a more active role in the blog.

Visit the site here: www.romak.co.uk

WordPress Installation on Fasthosts

I was up against it today installing a WordPress site on Fasthosts. The site build seemed to be going smoothly until I tried uploading an image into a post. The image crunched and promptly vanished. A quick check of the media library showed the image uploaded it just wasn’t in the post.

I went through a series of checks, changed the custom theme back to twentyeleven, cleared the cache, disabled plugins. Finally I called Fasthosts support, created a user account for them to replicate the problem and minutes later they uploaded an image into a post.

Feeling a bit dumb, I tried again but no image appeared. A rather unheated exchange followed with support enquiring whether I had used their one-click-wordpress-install feature in the control panel. I said I’d used ftp and didn’t think that was the issue but something else their end. They wanted to know my browser and were audibly disappointed when I said the latest release of Firefox.

So we tried IE9 and Chrome to make sure it wasn’t a browser issue. Then I agreed to empty my cache again in case it was a cache issue. Then support suggested I contact WordPress as the fault plainly lay with them (at that point I recalled an IT Crowd episode where Jen has dealings with the elders of the internet). I said I doubted the problem lay with WordPress and could they check permissions or some other settings on the server. Nothing to change I was told.

I had been on the phone with support for half an hour by now and was wondering whether I could bill the client for the call. Fasthosts had uploaded an image so as far as they were concerned job done. I suggested trying to upload an image from a different laptop on a different connection and then getting back to them if the problem persisted. Support readily agreed glad to get me off the line.

A colleague later tried with the same result. He’d never come across the problem either. So I was back to square one.

I went back to the post Fasthosts had created and looked at the HTML view tab. The inserted image had the alternate text and caption fields completed. So I tried uploading an image, completed the same fields and bingo – the image was there.

Not having the hywl to contact Fasthosts again I deleted all wordpress files and the database and started again. This time I found the one-click-install and used it.

When the site was installed I checked images appeared in the blog. They uploaded without trouble – no captions required. I changed the theme and again no problems. I installed plugins and after the fifth one had the white wall of death. I swore a few times and then added define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’); to the config file. Bingo – I was back in the admin panel. All I had to do now was rebuild the site.

Conclusion: If you’re considering hosting a WordPress site with Fasthosts make sure you use the installer or you will age visibly.

The Cart Press – WordPress cart plugin review

I reviewed a WordPress cart plugin last January ideal for artists/photographers to easily connect a shop to Nextgen Galleries. Since then I’ve worked with the Shopp plugin which does what it says, but the website and documentation is a trial and I’ve never been totally satisfied with it.

Recently a new project needed a WordPress shop so I did a random sweep of cart reviews, concentrating more on the comment’s section than the actual post content. Somewhat depressingly ‘bug’ seemed to crop up often until I found one called The Cart Press which turned out to be a highly customisable plugin with catalogue, shopping cart, user accounts and checkout payments with paypal and authorise.net.

I set up a test site locally and spent a morning on it. In all honesty at one point I almost gave up as there seemed no conclusive guide to customising the shop pages – I pretty much ended up searching the support forums and connecting the dots. Perhaps I’m being unfair on that point – if I had taken the sensible route of going through all the documentation it might have been an easier set up. But from my point of view I needed to find out quickly if it was a fit for the project. Anyway, I’m very glad I stuck with it.

To control the content on the shop pages this is what I had to do:

  • copy loop-tcp-grid.php and taxonomy-tcp.php from the themes-templates folder in the thecartpress plugin into my theme folder
  • rename taxonomy-tcp.php to taxonomy-tcp_product_category.php, change divs to match my theme, change sidebar to sidebar2 to have different widgets in the shop and blog, add breadcrumbs
  • create archive-tcp_product.php, change sidebar, add breadcrumbs
  • create single-tcp_product.php, change sidebar, add breadcrumbs, add fblike, tweet, +1

For breadcrumbs on the shop pages I used the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin. That way I could use the breadcrumb function that comes with the excellent Yoast SEO plugin for all the blog pages.

Then I went into the backend, clicked on thecartpress ‘settings’ tab, clicked ‘theme compatability’ selected ‘use configurable TCP loops’ and decided which checkboxes to tick.

Then I clicked on ‘loop settings’ (which is directly below the ‘settings’ tab) and again decided which checkboxes to tick.

The rest of the setup is pretty self-explanatory but it’s worth exploring every tab and sub-tab to see the options available.

The one thing that is missing is a product search function but that apparently is in the works. In the meantime they recommend using the Search Everything plugin.

In conclusion, The Cart Press is a good free cart plugin that I would highly recommend. Sensei, the author, is quick to respond in the support forums and incorporates suggestions into future releases. Just one word of warning, I had a problem with IE9 and IE8 locally in the checkout stage. That problem has never been resolved but when I switched to a live server all was OK. It might just be an issue with Xampp.

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