Waterford Web Design

incorrect-captcha-sol recaptcha

admin — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 16:13:22 +0000

I was pulling my hair out regarding this one for ages with the php version of recaptcha

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:




is_valid)
    {
        echo "Thank you ";
    }
    else
    {
        echo "Invalid recaptcha response: " . $resp->error;            
    }
?>

    
        
        
                    
        
Name:

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.

instead of:

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

Hope this helps someone out there!

Add Spam Protection to a Web Form

admin — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:59:50 +0000

Often when submitting to websites you will see that nasty little thing that you have to type two words into to get the form to submit. These nasty little things may save you receiving a lot of junk requests.

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:

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

Here is a simple example:




is_valid)
{
    echo "Success";
}
else
{
    echo "Failure";
}
?>

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

Facebook Statistics Ireland – November 2011 Stats

admin — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 10:06:22 +0000

A client of mine just asked me to research current Facebook stats in Ireland and so I utilised the facebook page advertising tool to collect some basic information.

At the time of writing (30/11/2011), there are 2,060,740 facebook users.

53% of facebook users in Ireland are Female.

46% of the entire population (4,484,300 according to CSO) are on Facebook

I’ve also created a summary chart with Facebook’s age distribution spread in Ireland for anyone that wants to download, share or use these statistics in presentations

13-17	275,620
18-24	491,880
25-34	628,220
35-44	370,880
45-54	172,780
55-64	73,200
64+	48,160

What is drop box and how does it work?

admin — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:23:05 +0000

We’re currently working with a client in France on a very image heavy website. To share images traditionally would mean the client would need to package up images in a zip file or send them over multiple emails.

Another way the client might have sent them traditionally would be on a CD or usb drive to send over lots of images.

Drop box changes all that and it is so simple and intuitive to use that anybody can use it once it’s installed.

Drop box allows you to share a folder (and the files within) on your computer with anybody in the world.

Basically you sign up to drop box and download the drop box application to your computer. Once it’s installed, it creates a drop box folder under your user folder. It integrates with windows explorer so you can share folders with other through bringing up the context menu on a right click.

To share a folder is simple, right click it, go to drop box menu item and click share this folder. This will bring you straight to the drop box website where you can share the folder by entering the email address of the person you wish to share it with. Simples.

I’ve used it so far to share files with my accountant, clients, co-workers, family and friends.

Dropbox is here to stay and the best part is, it’s free (well it’s free up to a folder size of 2GB and you get 250mb more for each additional person you recommend to the system, dropbox’s viral marketing mechanism).

FREE SEO Test For Your Website

admin — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 15:32:55 +0000

If you want to evaluate whether a webpage on your site is optimised for the main keywords customers are using to search for your products or service, we created a handy little tool for you to try here: Free SEO Analysis Tool

Basically what it does is searches for the keywords you specify within the areas of your page that Googles evaluates content too such as title, headings, images, meta description and so on. It then generates an indicative score based on this evaluation.

Embedding the keywords people are searching for is critical to the success of your site. By not having the keywords people are searching for on your site means that Google has little or no way of matching your site with a search phrase.

It is worth noting here that there are other factors too in SEO terms that can affect your site’s position on the results page including:

Competition
Back links to your site
Trust
Social networking likes
Age of your site
Overall quality of your site content
Your site’s link structure

This tool is intended as an initial evaluation tool for a single page on your site and is no substitution for a full in-depth SEO analysis.

Top Website Design Considerations

admin — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 22:25:17 +0000

When designing / developing a site, too often the technical details are given all the focus instead of stepping back and telling the wood from the trees.

Here are some top design considerations when building a website:

Every page is a landing page, so it should be branded and formatted consistently
Make sure the brand targets the intended audience (e.g. don’t use shocking pink for corporate site)
Images such as jpegs etc. should be crisp, nothing gives off a sense of amateurism more than poor image quality
Avoid Animation / Flash, not only is it distracting, it does not work on iphones, if you have to animate maybe you could try jquery image transitions. If you absolutely need flash, limit it to specific sections of the site.
Readable Font / Width / Contrast: it’s important that your pages are readable, your fon therefore should be legible, paragraph widths should not be too wide and the contrast should be good (black on white)
Make use of Whitespace – don’t be afraid of space, whitespace gives a sense of order, try align elements together to an invisible grid where possible
Easy to navigate (nothing should be more than 2-3 clicks away)
Good content organisation – content should tell story, beginning middle and end and put your key message at the top for speed readers.
Put contact details on every page – a basic oversight, users can enter your site from a any page, make sure contact details are there, you might only have 1 shot for the business.
Highlight your call to action (use colour such as red for apply buttons etc.)
Use a subtle background (backgrounds can make a site but keep them subtle)
Make sure the site works on various screen sizes, try on large and small screens, avoid horizontal scrolling at all costs
Make sure your site works on ALL major browsers, make sure that your site works on the important browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome)

This is just a snapshot of the kind of things that should be considered when designing a website. Best of luck.

What is Twitter?

admin — Thu, 12 May 2011 14:57:00 +0000

Twitter is a social network. On twitter people post short <140 character messages called tweets. The difference between twitter and facebook is that tweets are generally available for everyone to search on so it’s not as egocentric as facebook.

Even though tweets are public, most people follow others on twitter (people who follow are called tweeps). This means they get a quick view in their timeline of what tweeters they’re following are saying.

Features

Timeline – shows what tweeters you are following are saying
@mentions – see who mentioned you
Retweets – see what others in your network have retweeted
Favourite – save your favourite tweets
Save searches – Keep an eye on your favourite topics
Twitter Lists – Group users together to watch them
Trends – Shows what’s currently popular

What are the #tags on Twitter?

On Twitter people can search and tweet based on the concept of #tags, where words that are commonly searched are simply preceded with a #. It is an unofficial symbol, i.e. not invented by twitter but it has become very very useful. As all tweets are public (on public accounts), #tags are used to give a topic an id e.g. #eurovision. Anytime anyone posts with this word included it can be seen in real-time by people who search for it. This is very useful for media / news companies. For example, in Ireland TV stations such as TV3 use the #tv3 tag, so if anyone posts a message containing this tag, their researchers can find it instantly during a live program.

The genius of twitter is its simplicity.

Prestashop – No Search Results

admin — Tue, 03 May 2011 10:13:31 +0000

So you’ve built your amazing prestashop and you’ve imported hundreds of products into the system but alas, when you peform a search, nothing is returned even though you know you’ve entered text present in one of your products.

This one had me stumped for a bit as I assumed that the data would be stored within the system or that prestashop would do some dynamic search on the database records. It turns out prestashop is a little more sophisticated than that and actually indexes all the products in the site to make search results quicker.

To ensure all of your products are indexed go to your backend, click on preferences and then search.

Once in there you will see how many products have been indexed. If you had the same problem as me you will see that 0 products have been indexed. This is because I imported products from a CSV. Manually inserted products are automatically indexed.

Once you are in backoffice->preferences->search you will see something like

Indexed products: 44 / 44.
-> Add missing products to index.
-> Re-build entire index.

You can click either option to re-index your products. Once you don’t have thousands of entries it should take < 1 min to do. You can also set up a cron job to perform this indexing regularly for you.

Other options on this screen inclued

Ajax search: To automatically fill in your search box, like google
Minimum word length
Blacklisted words

There are also options here to weight your search results using various factors such as weight, tags etc.

WordPress White Screen of Death (wp-admin blank screen problem)

admin — Mon, 02 May 2011 23:29:17 +0000

If anyone out there is experiencing the WordPress white screen of death i.e. when you go to your wordpress wp-admin folder all you see is a blank screen, you may have been hacked.

I had a nasty little hack where link code was being injected into the footer of every rendered page. It was difficult to find as the links that were being injected were injected by an encoded script that had infected several files (especially in my themes folder). I went through each file and deleted the script from them. In this case, if you’re not experienced with code you would be safer to do a full re-install of your blog.

The result of the clean up was that several files had spaces injected into them at the top and bottom of the page. I did a full re-install to restore all the important files in the system and I still was experiencing the blank screen. Obviously wp-config.php wasn’t part of the update and so I cleaned out a blank line on the top of this module and I could finally log back in again.

Hope this helps someone out there.

Note: If you have been hacked, change all of your passwords, database, ftp, wordpress etc. and make sure that all file permissions on your server are set up correctly, be pessimistic.

Tips when Picking an SEO Consultant or Firm

admin — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:27:08 +0000

If you haven’t built a site yet, then make sure you talk to SEO experts before building your site! SEO should not be an afterthought!

Lately, I’ve been asked to assist companies more and more with their Search Engine Optimisation. The first thing I ask is why they are not consulting with the firm that built their website? In most cases it comes down to price but also they want to independently verify the work that was done by their web development firm.

The first thing I tell clients is that they shouldn’t expect their website firm to have done much SEO work if they didn’t explicity ask/pay for it. Invariably it is the case that the minimum will be done and sometimes they just don’t have expertise in the area. Most firms put some basic effort into SEO but beyond that, nothing is done. However, if companies charge for it, I’d expect a little bit more and a report of what has been done.

If you are not happy with your site’s SEO and you are seeking an SEO consultancy firm then I suggest you follow these tips:

Understand the basics of SEO yourself, read books, go online, do some research before meeting a consultant
Ask your business networks do they know SEO consultants that have made a difference for them
Ask SEO consultancy firms for the best examples of their work
Be careful that the SEO firm doesn’t have other clients in your niche area, would there be a conflict of interest?
Make sure the service they are providing is clear and what they will need from you
Make sure and get clear reports based on your analytics data
Make sure the price is not ridiculous. In Ireland I’ve heard of some companies charging 1500 per day! That kind of spend would get you a lot of clicks through PPC advertising

In my professional opinion an SEO consultant should be able to assist you with the following:

Keyword Analysis
Competitor Analysis
Website Audit
Suggest or make changes to your site (sometimes they might not be willing to update the site)
Link Building or Link Suggestions (sometimes best to do link building in house)
Social Media Marketing
Advertising Advice
Deciphering Analytics and Monitor Improvements

Most of these tasks can be done in house at a fraction of the rates an SEO consultant will charge you, so in my opinion, do what you can yourself based on your SEO consultants advice, however if you do require expertise to fulfil a specific task outsource that aspect of it (e.g. link building, site re-build etc.)