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. Continue reading
Category Archives: Web Development
Why we should all be forward thinking
Having attended the “For a beautiful 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. Continue reading
TradingEye show search query string in URL
![I [heart] Trading Eye](http://www.kamikazemusic.com/wp-content/uploads/blog_tradingeye.jpg "I [heart] Trading Eye")
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. Continue reading
The 10 Basics of HTML Email Newsletters
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. Continue reading
5 key metrics you should know from Google Analytics
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. Continue reading