I am today delighted to announce the launch of brownnosefriday.com, the first web application to recognise and reward Twitter’s top brown nosers.

[Read more →]

At the end of last year Microsoft announced details of improvements to IE8’s compatibility view. It’s an announcement that went largely unnoticed until last week when a few rumblings could be heard coming from the web standards community.

To get to the bottom of this we need to understand the history.

[Read more →]

Are you having trouble with your excerpts? Is WordPress misbehaving and making your theme look downright shoddy when all you want to do is use it’s native excerpt function? You’re not alone so read on.

[Read more →]

How does your site fare in the search engines? Have you ever thought of hiring a search engine ‘expert’ to improve your site’s search engine positioning?

Friend of mine, web designer-developer, SEO consultant and all-round good guy, Eggman John (who from now we’ll just call John) recently posted an article outlining seven reasons why you don’t need SEO. John’s article caused a bit of a stir amongst the SEO community, but there is a lot of sense in what he says.

[Read more →]

When using jQuery (or any other JavaScript library for that matter), have you ever wondered how to test whether an element exists using a selector? Well, maybe you haven’t, but I have – lots of times – so I thought I’d share how it’s done here because it’s not as simple as it seems.

[Read more →]

I’ve been using Mint, a self-hosted and extensible web analytics program for a few months now. Whilst Mint has been around for a few years and has slowly been building a strong reputation, I actually only came across it earlier this year when I was looking for an additional stats tool to run alongside Google Analytics.

I have come to use Mint extensively for monitoring the traffic on this site, so here is an honest and unpaid review of the product.

[Read more →]

I have just published a new addition to my portfolio. Pinstripe Trader is a virtual stock market trading game Facebook application. Users are given £50,000 of virtual cash to invest in stocks and shares.

The game uses real data from the London Stock Exchange so as your investments change value in real life, that price is reflected in the game too. Each month the most successful trader wins a free iPod touch, and there are other goodies up for grabs too.

[Read more →]

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is something of a dark art practised only by highly trained ninja web gurus. We call them SEO consultants. Due to the highly secretive nature of their work, ordinary mortals often don’t know where to start when it comes to SEO.

A good SEO consultant can turn an obscure website buried in Google’s supplemental index into a money making enterprise. At a cost. However, there are many easy hits that web designers like you and I can and should be doing to their websites to improve search engine positioning.

[Read more →]

Forums are a great place to get inspired and learn from others about all aspects of web design. Forums can help with sharing creative ideas, asking for help with a specific problem or to networking with potential clients and colleagues.

However, there is no shortage of choice when it comes to finding your online home. To get you started here are five web design forums I find myself using from time to time.

[Read more →]