Waterford Web Design

Glanbia Estates

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:11:22 +0000

UTD Web Design has just launched Glanbia Estates new corporate website. Glanbia Estates is a branch of Glanbia focussing on the sale and development of some of their properties.

The site was kept clean and corporate looking with heavy use of pictures as we felt that the pictures would do the talking.

Click Glanbia Estates to visit the site.

Glanbia Estates Website

Putting Euro Symbol in Inner Text HTML using Javascript

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 14:58:58 +0000

Had a problem today whereby I tried to insert a euro symbol into the innertext of a div using javascript.

First I tried the actual euro symbol

e.g.

document.getElementById('theelementid').innerText ="€" + value;

This results in the user agent outputting an unrecognised symbol in place of the euro

Then I tried using the html escape code for the euro symbol:

i.e.

document.getElementById('theelementid').innerText ="€" + value;

But that resulted in the € being displayed verbatim by the browser as the DOM automatically encodes special characters such as the ampersand

Finally, I actually escaped it using the unicode value

i.e.

document.getElementById('theelementid').innerText ="\u20AC" + value;

and it worked like a treat.

http://www.thejesusalien.com/michael-jackson-is-not-dead-hes-an-ancient-egyptian-princess/

Centering a Website – Cross Browser

admin — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:02:11 +0000

Most sites these days are centred and have a fixed with be it 800, 1024 pixels wide or whatever. If any of you have used divs and css and tried using standard centering you might have, at one stage or another, scratched your head while viewing it on different browsers.

Let’s say we want a webpage with a width of a nice round 1000 pixels. To do this we might create a new div within the body tag called page:


Content goes here

In order to centre this on IE7 and less we simply set the width in the div and in the body tag set text-align to center i.e.

body
{
 text-align: center;
}

.page
{
 width: 1000px;
 text-align: center; /*don't forget to reset alignment for child elements*/

}

On IE8+, Firefox and other browsers this is not correct behaviour however and they will left align the inner div, therefore we need to centre the inner div using the margin tag by setting it to margin: 0 auto e.g.

body
{
 text-align: center;

}

.page
{
 margin: 0 auto;
 text-align: left;
 width: 1000px;
 background-color:red;

}

By specifiying margin: 0 auto and by setting the div’s width, the browser can calculate how much distance to place between the left side of the div and the left margin of the browser window.

So there you have it, simple and effective and cross browser compatible.

Flash Caching Issue on IE

admin — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 09:47:14 +0000

I had a problem with a client of a client whereby they had a flash gallery component called simpleviewer on the site. Basically depending on the page the browser viewed, the component would load up a dynamic xml file and present a different slideshow on each page.

The problem happened when users have caching turned to automatic.

I tried various things like, setting the various meta tags for browser caching in the head section of the html document

I tried setting this in the footer also because of IEs caching problem.

I then tried setting this sort of stuff on the server through php headers even setting the last modified date:

header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate"); // HTTP/1.1
header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); // Date in the past
header ("Last-Modified: " . gmdate ("D, d M Y H:i:s") . " GMT");

I then tried setting parameters on the .swf file itself hoping that it would see it as a new request for a different swf file each time (where contentid is the id of the page loading).

var fo = new SWFObject("viewer.swf?unique=",
"viewer", "640", "380", "8", "#ffffff");

In the end i figured out that the flash file itself was caching the xml document that it was loading so this had to be different for each page request (I had been using cookies to store the currently selected page).

fo.addVariable("xmlDataPath",
"gallery.php?contentid=");

And low and behold, problem solved.

Talk about beating about the bush!

Anyway, hope this helps someone else out there.

Sensible Link Building Strategy

admin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:12:43 +0000

Here is an interesting blog from the Google Webmasters Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/quality-links-to-your-site.html. Anyone interested in SEO should read the article carefully.

Here is a summary of the points made in the article:

Promote within your particular community and CONTRIBUTE to blogs and forums. This does not mean spam forums and blogs but actually share your knowledge and experience with the community. Solving problems for people is a great way of doing this.
Use of humour can be good to get lots of hits quickly but that it shouldn’t be relied on as a long term strategy.
Beware of low quality directories and link sharing with random sites, these will ultimately damage your sites reputation
Another great tip is to make linking to your site easy through social bookmarking tools

So if you have quality link backs in mind, start sharing your knowledge today.

The New Google Keyword Tool

admin — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:15:08 +0000

Last week I tried using the Google Keyword tool and it wasn’t working the way I expected it to and I thought to myself that this was the end of an era.

How could I survive without the trusted Google Keyword Tool?

Thankfully, when I logged in today it seemed to be back to normal with an improved interface.

For anyone that doesn’t know at this stage, the Google Keyword tool is an indispensable application for anyone who wishes to do keyword research on-line. The tool allows you to put in a keyword or phrase and it will show you how many people search for this word/phrase and variants of it worldwide and also locally (i.e. your target area) for the previous month. It also gives an indication of how many advertisers are paying for advertising off the back of these key words and phrases.

This information is critical to anyone who wishes to promote their site online.

From a Search Engine Optimisation point of view it facilitates decision making on what names to give pages on a website, what keywords and phrases to put on them etc. I mean there’s no point in creating a page with a certain title if nobody is ever going to search for it.

It now also asks for a website address as well as a key phrase, which can be very handy to see what your competitors are up to as regards keyword targeting.

It is an invaluable tool for anyone who takes their on-line presences seriously.

What is Google Page Rank (PR)

admin — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:41:11 +0000

Page rank is a measure of how important your website is to Google. A page can have a rank between 0 and 10 (0 being the lowest rank). In fact a page can have no page rank at all, which means it hasn’t even been picked up by the search engine bots or spiders.

Note: Page Rank is not the same as your position on the search engine results page (SERP).

Page rank is calculated based on how many other web pages link back to your website, these link backs are considered votes, however not all of these votes are of the same worth. A link back page that is already considered important and has a good page rank is worth more than a page with a low page rank. Also, a page with lots of links is worth less to you than a page with only a few links… therefore the link backs that are most sought after are from pages with a high page rank and low link count. Here is the Wikipedia entry on Page Rank.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank

Sites with good page rank generally do better on the search results page than pages with poor page rank, however, if the content on the page is not right then it won’t make a difference how much page rank your site has. Also, the links that gave you the page rank should make good use of keywords in those links to let Google know what your page is about.

You can check a page’s Page Rank by installing the Google toolbar on your browser and customise it to show Page rank, this shows a little progress bar icon on the toolbar showing the current page’s page rank. You could also use a site such as PR Checker to check a page’s page rank.

UTD Google Page Rank on The Google Toolbar

Double Home Page Problem Wordpress

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:26:14 +0000

Many of us Wordpress users will have come up with the double Home Page problem.

If you are using Wordpress to create a website often you want a static home page on the site and not have it default to the latest blog entry. To do this you must log in to the admin area, go to setttings->reading and set a static page as your homepage.

Often times you will want to create this page and title it ‘Home’ however on most themes if you do this you will end up with two home pages.

To get around this, without editing the theme, you need to create a dummy static page that is hidden from public view. Once this static page is created you must go back and edit the newly created home page and set its parent to this new dummy page.

And that should be it!

If you want to have your blogs appear on another page, simply create another static page (with no content) and again go to settings->reading and set the posts page to this page. You must do this before you make the dummy page private, however.

Windows IIS, PHP & Error 500: The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.

admin — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:52:50 +0000

I was pulling my hair out this morning when I transferred my PHP Content Management System to an Windows IIS Shared Server and started getting the message Error 500: The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.

Debugging wasn’t working, there were no syntax errors, I was stumped. So I started breaking down the code into little modules to test.

I tried printing out a variable that wasn’t initialised and low and behold the dreaded error appeared.

echo $test;

If I initialised the variable first there were no problems i.e.

$test = “Hello, World!”;
echo $test;

So, basically, the problem was that php was spitting out some debug warnings, however the shared hosting account was interpreting this as an internal error and hence the error message on the client browser.

An ideal fix would be to get rid of all warnings from the code, however, a quick workaround was to simply turn off error reporting altogether using the following line of code:

error_reporting(0);

Hope this helps someone out there!

Free Waterford Links Directory – Irish Links Directory

admin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:04:36 +0000

Just a short blog to let you know that upthedeise.com has a new links directory at the following URL

Waterford Links Directory

This directory has an impressive root Google Page Rank of 5 and so anyone with a website in Waterford (and a bit of sense) should submit their site to it as soon as they read this!!!

Another free directory, which will soon become popular is LinkLusters.com, an Irish Links Directory

They are both moderated directories and so only quality links will appear on them which means your own site can only benefit from being on it.