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Party Invitation and Guest List
My brother and Sister were throwing a joint birthday party and needed a way to manage a guest for the party. We looked at facebook but had issues with different groups and people not on facebook (mainly family members) and adding guest names. It was decided in the end that it was easier to have an open guest list added onto this site with invitations sent out with the URL on. So I designed the invite... More >>
Speed up your website with these tips
Most of us have broadband nowadays but with sites becoming more complex with the use of Ajax and JavaScript Libraries the average web page has tripled in just five years. Developers seem to be getting lazy and building fat websites that are becoming too large for most of our average broadband connections. When at work our broadband line isn't fantastic and I often end up feeling like I'm using dial-up again!
A whopping 55% of users felt speed is the most important factor in a site.
Source: Study: Web Users Prefer Speed Over Customization (A very interesting read)... More >>
Church website redesign and build
Wallingford Baptist Church's design brief was:
- Being welcoming to all
- Dispelling negative images of Christians as boring, judgmental or killjoys
- Showing how the church is a community and family
- Vibe: Friendly, warm, welcoming and vibrant
- Fit in with the CMS they had already signed up too
The design was based around the words warm and welcoming and straight away I went into colour brain storming trying out different colour groups I settled on the yellow and browns you see in the final design... More >>
Updating conditional comments for IE8
CSS breaking in IE8? - have you checked your conditional comments?
If you don't know what conditional comments are Jump to the explanaition. If you do and you use them in your site and your CSS is getting messed up in IE8 you might want to check any you have. When I opened redwood.com in IE8 the top navigation was very broken and this was down to me controlling where the end "</a>" was being positioned for ie using conditional comments... More >>
Use Google Maps API to mark a location or address
This basic tutorial will take you through the steps you need to embed Goggle maps API on your site and use a marker to point out your location and then show an info window with your address and a link to get directions with your location already filled out, helping out your users as much as you can. View the working example of what you can have on your site to see how this will look and work at the end of the tutorial... More >>
Creating an XML RSS feed with PHP.
Using this PHP class you can create an RSS feed of your dynamic content very easily.
I have built the class for this site so it is focused on blog style content. I have built in XSLT support into the class. The class will print out the XML header the content and then the XML footer. I have put all the files you need into a folder: rss.zip... More >>
Styling RSS News Feeds with XSLT
I have been using Chrome for my general browsing in the last few months and have noticed they have no support or predefined styling for RSS feeds, IE6 also doesn't support RSS and instead both print out the raw code. Most people presume IE6 users aren't interested in RSS but we should not presume anything and not rely on browsers to style your RSS for you. After giving myself a slap on the wrist I jumped onto Google and searched for the best way to structure and style my RSS feed... More >>
Building a custom PHP search tool
How to search several columns of a MySQL table with keywords and multiple parameters
The Project - Resource Center
I want to centralise all of Redwood Resources on the site into one manageable place. To accomplish this I will need to put all our resources details into a MySQL table and give users the capability to search that table and display the results... More >>
Custom PHP common functions
Useful standalone php functions
I am listing a collection of PHP functions I have used over the years to organise and speed up my coding. I am now looking at re-writting these using PHP 5 and using PEAR for some standard functions. So thought this would be a good time to document them and hopefully they may help somebody with there work in the future.
Some people would argue that small standalone functions like these are no longer needed due to function libraries (like PEAR) But if you are just building a small site with limited functions I don't feel a large library is always needed... More >>
Salesforce form integration (web-to-lead) with PHP and cURL
Salesforce has an out of the box solution for generating leads from online forms called web-to-lead, this solution is very basic and in my opinion very insecure. A small amount of Redwood's forms require a submission of data to a database as well as sending the data to Salesforce, the basic web-to-lead forms can't handle this... More >>
Building a Marketing Administration System from scratch
Project Requirements
To build a system where staff can build and edit landing pages for webinars and events where customers could register for them plus request documents. Staff also require the ability to view and edit registration details online. I also wanted to add the feature of downloading the data as .CSV files.
This project was one part of a much bigger project of rebuilding the Redwood Software site... More >>
Writing content for a website
Have you ever read magazine story online? It's not easy. This is due to the fact that articles meant for print don't translate well to the web. The rules for writing for print are different from those for the Internet.
How is the web different?
Dpi
The average computer monitor has a resolution of 96dpi (dots per inch). If you compare that to a print out from a laser printer which will have a resolution of 600dpi, or that article you wished you had read from the magazine page? They are printed at upwards of 2400dpi! So it's not hard to work out why text is hard to read on the screen and can put a lot of strain on your eyes... More >>
Why you should have a print style sheet
The reason you would want to do this is so that you can have the HTML page 'change' it's appearance automatically when someone visits your page with a particular type of device. These types of devices can include a typical desktop computer, a PDA (Windows CE device, Palm Pilot etc) and a printer among other devices!
I'm going to only be using 'print' and 'screen'.
Here's a sample pair of CSS links that point to different style sheets (from this site!), one for the printer to use and the other for a normal PC monitor to use:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="growth.css" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="growthprintpage.css" />
The code in the link that chooses which style sheet to use is this text:
media="print"
media="screen"
The first ('media="print"') points to the style sheet that has been set up for printing while the other (media="screen") is set up for normal PC monitors... More >>