The Waterford Health Park is brainchild of Dr. Mark Rowe, an proactive member of the community in Waterford city, a man who had a vision for the fabulous Pugin building located just outside the heart of Waterford city. The end result is a stunning clinic on a fabulous site.

Rory Moore, MPSI approached UTD Web Design to create their new website www.waterfordpharmacy.com and we were thrilled to get the opportunity.

The first thing we did was surveyed the site and took photographs of the stone work and cladding there because we felt that this could be translated to the website and would look well.  We also went inside the store to get a feel for the branding etc. in order to bring this through to the site also. The end result is a combination of both, the structure of the site is made up of the stone background and cladding and the header takes into account the blue skies and branding within the store.

Rory Moore, MPSI, was very happy with the end result.

“I contacted UTD Web Design based on a recommendation from Dr. Mark Rowe.  Once I spoke with UTD, they came up with a clear vision for our new site which matched our branding and location.  The process was straightforward, painless and quick. Once the site was live, UTD had no problem making extra tweaks to the live site. I’m very pleased with the service and  feel I  got good value for money. I would have no hesitation recommending UTD Web Design.”

Our approach in this case was to create a smaller version of the site, drawing from the same content, so essentially we separated the main menu from the content allowing the user to swap back and forth between menu and content on the mobile version, whilst on the desktop version the menu appeared on the left hand side.  To keep the site consistent, we keep the look and feel similar on both sites.

If we wanted to create a site that looked more like an app we would have used something like jquerymobile or iui, however in this case the customer wanted to keep their branding consistent across platforms.

You can visit the site at www.meadescafe.com

Here’s what Mark Lubek, proprietor, said about our service:

“I got in touch with UTD Web Design a week before I wanted my site live and they pulled out all the stops to get the site live on time for us.  In the end they actually completed it a day early!  They managed everything from hosting to social media setup to content management.  One of our most important requirements was the creation of a mobile friendly version of the site and UTD created an exceptionally user friendly version of the site for mobile users, which works seamlessly with the desktop version.”

In recent years, several competitors have come along, Firefox & Chrome in particular.  Of course Safari has always featured because of the Apple following, however the champion of the ages has always been Internet Explorer (even with all the flak it received over the years because of its interpretations of internet standards, particularly CSS). That is until now.

The game is up.  Their rule is over. The monopoly has ended.

For the first time in my professional career there is a new king of the hill, a new champion of the ages and that is Google Chrome!!!

Following are the statistics from Google Analytics for one of my websites (www.slang.ie – Irish Slang Dictionary) from this morning, the 19th of April 2012.

Internet Explorer No Longer Top Browser - Stats from Slang.ie

Slang.ie yields a good sample set because of it’s generic nature.  Most people find the site through search and come from various devices and locations (approximately 50% from Ireland).

As you can see from the Pie Chart above, Internet Explorer has fallen to second place behind Chrome which now has a significant 27% market share.

Internet Explorer is only marginally ahead of Safari (which is available on ipods, iphones, imacs, macbooks etc. etc.), by less than 1%

Firefox comes in next at almost 16%, which is 6% lower than Safari and this is followed by Android browsers significantly lower at 5.42%.

Compare this with the same period 3 years ago:

As you can see from the above Internet Explorer and Firefox are the biggest losers with IE down a whopping 50% from 48% of the total to 24% with Safari and Chrome gaining most significantly up almost 300% and 250% respectively. Based on this growth it may not be long before Safari is top dog???

I can’t really stress enough the significance of these changes, we finally have a competitive browser market with some really fantastic alternatives. From a consumer point of view this is very advantageous, because it means these companies will duke it out to provide the best features possible which will result in better security, more efficient downloading, faster browser experience, less bugs and so on.

Which browser do I use? To be honest, all of them. As a web developer I need to test clients websites on as many browsers as possible including mobile browsers.

My current favourite, probably due to habit at this point is firefox.  The reason I like this is down to a tool called firebug which allows me to analyse html and css quickly.  Similar tools are available on the other browsers and I do use them but I’m comfortable with firebug. My biggest gripe with Firefox is that it can eat up memory but again that’s probably down to me being lazy and having 50 tabs open at any given moment.

I do use Google Chrome quite a lot, it’s very clean, which is great for screenshots of websites and it also does not have separate input box for inputting search terms and urls, which makes a lot of sense.  My favourite feature is the incognito search because it allows me to perform searches without it knowing anything about my preferences so that I can get a true indication of a websites position on the search engine results page (SERP).

Obviously on apple devices I use Safari, I’d be lost without it on the iPhone.  I am not currently a macbook or imac owner so I can’t offer much comment on Safari’s features on desktop computers however.

Internet Explorer is by no means dead however, it is still used by a significant number of users and always will I guess.  Recently they have added developers options which are really great, you can view websites as they would look on previous versions of IE and the javascript and css/html analysis features are vastly improved on previous versions.

So which browser will win out in the end?

I guess Google have a nice way of promoting their browser across all devices so if they do produce chrome for all the devices out there they should continue with their trend of market dominance in this area, however don’t count out the others, it’s all to play for at this point.

About the author: Cian Foley is a web developer based in Waterford Ireland, having worked in Telecommunications research for 10 years, Cian brings highly technical knowledge to local businesses wishing to build an online presence. Cian currently runs the UTD Web Design Agency.

UTD Web Design have just launched Hartley People’s new website and we’re really delighted with the outcome.  It has been a few months in the making but we finally got it over the line during Easter week.

The previous site was built predominantly through html and it was becoming increasingly difficult to update so as a result Hartley People asked us to redevelop their site having run an successful SEO campaign on their existing site.

The new site is a bespoke content managed site building on the job search functionality of the previous site.  We’ve made job search pages more SEO friendly and we also added in an RSS feed for job seekers listing the most recent job posts.

The new design is fresh and friendly and uncongested which is what the client requested and we did a lot of tweaking to make sure they were 100% satisfied with the end product.

Fergal Hartley of Hartley People said,

“Thanks for all the work Cian, we’re very happy with the end product!”

I am building the site in PHP so here’s what I do:

//function to detect if an iphone has accessed the webpage
function isiPhone()
{
  $user_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']; //get the user agent

  if(preg_match('/iphone/i',$user_agent)) //find this string in the UA
  {
    return true; //return true if found
  }
  return false; //otherwise return false
}

If you want to make the function more specific to find user agents from other browsers e.g. preg_match(‘/android/i’,$user_agent) will find android devices.

Once you’ve detected the device you would then redirect the user to a different version of the site for mobile consumption.

Hope this helps

Since the advent of apps on smart phones such as the iphone and android phones and game consoles such as the Nintendo 3DS QR codes have found multiple new uses.  Essentially you can store any sort of data within a QR code but the most common use now is to store internet URLS.

For example this blog post’s URL is http://www.waterfordwebdesign.ie/what-are-qr-codes/

If you were reading this article on a newspaper or were reading information about the website on a flyer it would be slightly inconvenient to open your browser and type in the URL and it would be prone to human error.

QR Codes to the rescue

As well as posting the link I could also print the QR code with the article or flyer.  To get a QR Code all you have to do is go to one of the many free QR generator sites e.g. http://www.qrstuff.com/

For the link above this produced:

If you now go to your phones app store and download a QR scanner and scan the above QR Code you will be brought to this article on your iphone.

This one will bring you to UTD Web Design

The site was designed by one of our professional designers and takes into account the concept of the rising values of pensions and investments.

Here are some of the things we implemented on the site:

1. Integrated with calculators from financial institution
2. Implemented tidy testimonials section using jquery
3. Photographed Barry
4. Implemented prominent call to action and contact form
5. Installed analytics
6. Installed Facebook Open Graph Tags so that page can be liked/recommended on facebook

Here is what Barry Walsh said about our service:

“I would like to say that I am thrilled with the outcome. I think you have helped me create the BEST financial website out there, simple, snappy but the best”

On a side note, I actually changed my life assurance policy to Barry and I have to say that he really broke down the cover that my wife and I needed and we now have a much more sensible policy for the same price.

I had everything in the right place, recaptchalib.php included, public private keys set, recaptcha_get_html inside the form. It should have worked.  See code below:

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<?php
    require_once('recaptchalib.php');              
    $publickey="6LfBHssSAAAAAPxAqPSkddCIXcFIdrl2lrNxJ8da";
    $privatekey="6LfBHssSAAAAACIz-CYPmFpm6sp81S-W-RXingPz";
    $resp = recaptcha_check_answer ($privatekey,
                                    $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"],
                                    $_POST["recaptcha_challenge_field"],
                                    $_POST["recaptcha_response_field"]);
    if ($resp->is_valid)
    {
        echo "Thank you ";
    }
    else
    {
        echo "Invalid recaptcha response: " . $resp->error;            
    }
?>
<table border="0" width="400" align="center">
    <form method="POST" action="">
        <tr><td>Name: </td><td><input type="text" name="name"/></td></tr>
        <tr><td>&nbsp</td><td><?php echo recaptcha_get_html($publickey, null);?></td></tr>
        <tr><td>&nbsp</td><td><input type="submit" value="submit" name="submit"></td></tr>            
    </form>    
</table>
</body>
</html>

When I submitted the form, no matter whether the code was correct or not I kept getting back incorrect-captcha-sol in $resp->error

Turned out in the end that the problem was very simple… I had the table tags outside the form tags instead of the other way around i.e.

<table> <form> <tr><td></td></tr> </form> </table> 

instead of:

<form> <table> <tr><td></td></tr> </table> </form> 

Once I changed to the latter, it began working fine.

Hope this helps someone out there!

The industry standard as used by Facebook and Google is a technology called recaptcha which can be added to an existing form fairly easily by your web developer.

Here are the steps involved:

1. Register your website with recaptcha and get public private keys here https://www.google.com/recaptcha/admin/create
2. Download the software library (here is the php recaptcha link)
3. Within your web form include the recaptchalib.php file
4. Echo the function recaptcha_get_html(‘your public key’) within your web form
5. Put in checks to determine if the code is valid

Here is a simple example:

<html>
<head></head>
<body>
<?php
require_once('recaptchalib.php');
$publickey = "your public key";
$privatekey = "your private key";

$resp = recaptcha_check_answer ($privatekey,
                                    $_SERVER["REMOTE_ADDR"],
                                    $_POST["recaptcha_challenge_field"],
                                    $_POST["recaptcha_response_field"]);

if ($resp->is_valid)
{
    echo "Success";
}
else
{
    echo "Failure";
}
?>
    <form method="post" action="">
<?php echo recaptcha_get_html($publickey, null); ?>
    <input type="submit" value="submit" name="submit" />
    </form>
</body>
</html>

And that’s it, just be sure to call recaptcha_get_html within your form.