Well here I am waiting for a train at London st.pancras because I was trying to be the model employee and not pay too much for my train ticket home, instead opting for a super off peak ticket that means I can only hit the tracks after 7pm! Annoying as this is, it has meant I now have the time to test out this wordpress app on my iPhone for the first time.

It’s also timely, as I feel, for about the fifth time since I started ever blogging, that I should increase the frequency of my online efforts. This time it is the course I am attending that has poked at my blogging brain to once again spark it into life.

I’ve just completed the second week of a direct and interactive marketing course which is hosted by the idm in teddington. I started with an open mind, not quite sure how I would adapt to being in the classroom again after a good ten year stint out of any form of education. But it has proved quite enjoyable and I’ve certainly learned a lot (I’ve not just put that in to please who I work for either!).

One of the best aspects of the course is the fact they have guest speakers who vary in quality admittadly, but in the main are excellent.

This week we were given the pleasure of listening to one Drayton BIrd who quite literally lit the place up with examples of his quality copy-writing and his extremely colourful language. He was most certainly an inspiring character who had been there, done that and bought the flat cap.

He is most certainly the reason why I’ve decided to have another flirt with blogging although Im sure if he read this there would be a comment on the bottom saying don’t fu*cking bother!

I would certaiy recommend the course to anyone interested in improving their marketing skills. It covers all areas and does it bloody well. But beware, it is an intensive course… Very tiring, so be prepared for some stressful times and sleepless nights.

Anyway, i’ve been at this station now for 2 hours and the train (that I can legally catch) has come into sight… So I’m off.

Oh, and blogging on this wordpress app. Yeah, pretty good!

MyHealthAndBeauty.co.uk

I have just made my latest website live – My Health and Beauty – which helps consumers find health and beauty products at the best possible prices. 

Although it’s early days (Literally only made live last week) I’m happy to say I’m seeing quite an impressive number of visits to the site.

It’s quite a while since I built a website for myself, so it was nice to have no restrictions on styles or guide lines to adhere to.  As a developer/designer, to have a free reign when designing and developing websites makes you realise why you loved the profession in the first place.

The site is in its early stages and I intend to pile in more and more product feeds as well as informative articles on health and beauty to add extra value to the site.

The developments so far include a main feed from amazon, a community forum built using phpBB, a dynamic google xml sitemap and the integration of google analytics.  Aside from that I’ve gone through the usual SEO practices of ensuring page titles are well populated, meta tags defined and h1 tags contain keywords.
There’s so much more to do though… in fact, think I better get back to it.  But I’ll keep you updated on how it goes.

Developing websites normally consists of a few elements. Design your layout, code your pages, sort out your graphics, upload your files, test, debug, upload your files, test, debug, upload your files, test, de… ok you get the idea! What takes the time more than anything is the testing, especially when it comes to developing for all those browsers.

That’s why XAMPP is a god sent! Basically XAMPP sets up a web host on your local computer meaning you no longer have to keep uploading the files, but you just need to refresh your browser and view the changes. Trust me, this saves an enormous amount of time.
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twit!

A custom 404 error page can be invaluable in retaining traffic to your site which would have otherwise been your competitors.

In some cases it may be broken links on your site that cause a 404 error, but with so many link checking programs available (many for free) this can be easily remedied.

However, a good proportion of your traffic probably comes from search engines. If you are a well indexed site and you are redesigning your website you could be in for a nightmare situation, where many of your indexed pages become defunct.

If this is the case when a user attempts to load a page under your domain and recieves the default “Page Cannot be displayed” 404 error, it is highly unlikely they are going to attempt to access your home page by editing the url. What I can virtually guarantee, is that 99% of users will click the browsers back button and search again.

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Flash

I have recently stumbled into a problem with a media section of a site I am working on where users can view video clips.  As is the norm now-days, I am using an flv that progressively downloads from my web server to the client.  The area is pretty much like a YouTube section of the site where the user picks or searches from a database of video clips, then upon choosing their clip views this on another page.

The problem reared its ugly head because unlike youtube, this site used a menu that drops down over the flash video.

This is easily curable using the wmode=transparent  parameter that allows elements to be displayed over the flash object.

<param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”> – to be added to the OBJECT tag
wmode=”transparent” – to be added to the EMBED tag

However, my issue came with also wanting the user to be able to display the video in full screen.  At first I thought it was just a case of using a skin with the full screen option.  But upon reading further I found I also needed the  “allowfullscreen” parameter set to true.
Again, not a problem, once it was set it worked like a dream… until I set both wmode and allowfullscreen.  That’s when things fell over.

This is down to the software scaling which allowfullscreen uses to take over the users monitor.

I had a few options…

• Force users to upgrade their flash player as this problem is allegedly fixed in the very latest flash player – According to our stats this would impact on a lot of users, I always like to design to accommodate the highest percentage of users.
  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/full_screen_mode.html
  http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/full_screen_mode_print.html
   

  Full Screen mode

• Change the menu – Menus should always be consistent across any website… so not an option
• Open a new kiosk style media player…

Although it wasn’t a perfect solution, opening up a new media player would allow the full screen and provide another opportunity to display more information related to the video to the user.  Therefore this is what I opted for.

The final obstacle was stopping the current video (if playing) when the user pops up the media player.
This is possible using javascript to communicate with the current flash movie and then popping up the media player in the same function.
I found http://www.permadi.com/tutorial/flashjscommand/  – very useful.

So, there we go.  For the time being that’s my solution.  Still not perfect though, so I will keep an eye on my stats to see when the majority of users have the latest flash player installed.