B3Labs
Following on from an earlier post about Zend Framework Structure, I wanted a more modular approach for a set of tools I’m working on for some internal work. It is a collection of applications, and I wanted each application to be split into a seperate folder, with it’s own controllers, models, layouts, forms and views.
Following on from Doug’s post about Double Meta Refresh; we found it is quite handy to be able to visually test what the referrer is when visiting a link.
Again, I call on my favourite language – F# – for doing quick scripts and utilities!
Plugins to sort and filter elements using jQuery aren’t exactly few and far between. However, when it came to implementing a filter on our client list page, there weren’t any that looked as smooth and complete as the Quicksand jQuery plugin. Not only does it work very well, but it’s incredibly easy to execute and manipulate.
The core of your website; a content management system (CMS) needs to be stable, secure, and flexible. The main objective of any company is to have a website that not only looks amazing, but is also easily manageable too.
Making it simple to update company and product information and articles; content management systems are a necessary component of any efficient business’s web presence, but with so many CMS options available, where do you begin?
Two of our very own talented web designers received a well-deserved pat on the back when they came into the Branded3 office this morning; as Max Shearer and Andrew Machin made it through to the final three teams chosen to rebrand Leeds Digital Festival this year.
I’m of the opinion that you should use the right tool for the job. In the case of making simple XML files from data in another source, the XML literals feature in Visual Basic works very well and tends to be my first choice.
Check out how simple creating XML documents can be:
We all know the impact of social media has been huge; not only on our lives, but on businesses too. There are now agencies which focus solely on advertising on Facebook; and there are social media consultants which are being outsourced to look after company social media accounts.
There’s no denying what the likes of Facebook and Twitter can do for your company; the business leads it creates and the unfiltered connection to your customers is unrivalled; but my question is, are these ‘specialists’ which have emerged from a growing trend, really necessary for an effective company?
We produce a fair few HTML emails here as part of our production process and our DigitalMill volume service, so it’s fair to say we know a thing or two about making them work in as many email clients as possible. Some are much more difficult than others, and we’ve found that the worst culprit is Lotus notes 6.5/7. It has very little support for CSS and tends to ignore a lot of HTML attributes such as heights or widths.
Second up is Outlook, which even with the latest version still uses Word as its HTML rendering engine; hindering design and quality, and producing a number of inconveniences for us. Those two clients aside; here’s a run-down of our top things to remember when designing and building:
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I was watching the MIX11 Keynote last night when I heard Joe Belfiore talk about the changes in the upcoming release of Windows Phone – which is currently code-named “Mango”. Amazingly, he promised solutions for all the top problems I have when developing for the fledgling platform.
Resulting from an interesting Twitter conversation I was following last week, we got talking in the office about sending traffic to a website and not sending across any record of what site it came from.
When you follow a link from one website to another, the second website can ‘see’ who sent the traffic to it. This is used in packages like Google Analytics to show you your traffic sources and, this is obviously very useful information. If you’re promoting products on your site and have many links through various mediums (Google Adsense, Facebook etc), you can see which sources are leading to traffic, and even through to conversions.