While the website may perform the basic stuff you want it to, it will not be the best it can be, for many reasons.

Things like SEO optimisation, considerations for the best user experience, call to action button theory and a multitude of other crucial things that web design and development companies (like us) are likely to simply not be there, if you do the website yourself or if you hire a cheap bedroom coder. The things I just mentioned come with years of experience and are absolutely critical to building a successful website.

The cost argument might come up if you are just starting your business and want to reduce your spending, however you have to consider that a website that doesn’t sell you in the right light or makes you look cheap will not help you attract new business and win over clients.

If you don’t have a web presence, you don’t exist. If your web presence is not positive, you will be ignored. Playing a game of roulette is fun in a casino, but doing so with your business may not be the best idea.

I hope this article will nudge you in the right direction. ByTheScruff is only a quick phone call ( 0207 033 4269 ), brief email ( getit@bythescruff.com ) or  contact form away.

Some don’t understand this idea or don’t care about it enough and build exclusively for the desktop environments and the larger screens. iPads and iPhones have built up a market share too large to be ignored.

There are various ways and various approaches to building cross-platform web applications. One site and one html can be supplied to mobile and dektop environments, but may look completely different when looked at in the different browsers.

In this series I will review different websites and approaches to making your website work on different devices.

Example one: The bbc responsive news prototype site.

• Technology: a mixture of CSS and JavaScript that makes the website adapt to the new resolution instantly on load and on screen size adjustment.
• Hazards of this method: unless extreme care is taken when writing JavaScript functions, large and JavaScript-intensive websites will chew through RAM faster than the developer would like to admit. The reason behind this is the fact that the DOM tree has to be rewritten on every resize. Another thing to consider is the fact that not all parts of the website and not all JavaScript behaviours will be required on every resolution. The functions that are reused throughout are subject to heavy variable changes. Meaning that the user-side cache is likely to be flooded with temporary stuff, resulting in reduced performance in browsers where localStorage is not available.
• Benefits of this method: Most popular resolutions can be easily targeted using only one line of code and a completely different set of styles may be served to that resolution. A seamless experience, the user visits one site and it is rendered appropriately to their device, no need to configure any settings or to use separate addresses for the mobile site, the old bbc mobile news site is a great example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/index.html
• BTS Responsive Test score: 8/10 (on 22/11/11, we fully understand that the website is still in development and will review again when it goes live)

Here’s a video recording of the website adapting to resolution changes:

The new website benefits from a completyely new design and is developed on the WordPress system.

The London Wildlife Trust is using the blog to promote their work in the area and to encourage people to take a more active role in local conservation and to appreciate the diverse wildlife. They have many different activities planned that will be promoted on the Barking Riverside website through this year and 2012.

Users can find new image galleries with pictures of the new building taking place including the recently completed Rivergate Centre. The website will be updated more regularly as new property is built and becomes available for sale.

Developed under the management of the Homes & Communities Agency this new site has been in the making since 2007 when we were first commissioned to design and build the website. Its been a long time coming and many changes have happened in that period. We hope the site can see the development through this next phase of building.

For further information go to barkingriverside.co.uk

Previously that meant having a huge number of email accounts, desktop applications and a selection of devices, and spending a lot of time. Not anymore! Thanks to Litmus we can test our emails across a wide range of email clients with a few clicks. Litmus allows you to preview what your email will look like in all the major (and minor) browsers, websites and devices.

Litmus makes testing emails easy

Each email client renders HTML emails differently, so with Litmus we can quickly see any differences and adjust the code accordingly. Therefore we can assure our clients that their email will display correctly across all the major email clients and a wide range of devices.

BrowserStack is the most refined in-browser testing software that I’ve seen on the market. It’s free to try for an hour and the paid subscription is not gonna break any budgets, but the value it brings is absolutely irreplaceable.

You are able to test your website in all the browsers that you wish, using a virtual environment. Here’s an example of me doing exactly that.

Quality control is a top priority here at ByTheScruff and we appreciate great tools that enable us to test our web sites more efficiently. If you think your testing suite is better or have some project that you would like us to help you with, please get in touch with us.

Read ahead for the race report:

Smarts4youracing which owns and runs the 4Two Cup, a race series for the little town car, entered the larger forfour model owned by the smart club into the prestigious Britcar 24hr race at Silverstone. It was the first time in the world that a Smart car had been entered into such a gruelling race and was up against some very fast cars from marques including Porsche, Ferrari, and Aston Martin.

The drivers consisted of four very experienced racers: 4Two Cup founders and former Britcar winners, Paul Bates and James Palmer, local racer Tom Mills and 16 year old David Moore, the current 4Two Cup series leader. Nigel Moore from Tockwith motorsport help build and run the car as our chief engineer. Nigel is the youngest British driver to race at Le Mans for a works team, So plenty of experience there.

Paul Bates said: ‘We had a very good team running the car and some great sponsors, including CFT Financials and drum and bass label, Ram Records.  The team set out with one goal and that was to finish the race.’

Things didn’t start off too well during Thursday practice as the car had a misfire, which took until the early hours of Friday to rectify.  This meant that the car went into qualifying without any testing on the tyres that would be used in the race.

Qualifying took place and due to their practice problem this left the team on the starting grid in 54^th place out of 57 cars.

The race got underway at 4.30pm on Saturday afternoon and first to take to the wheel was Paul Bates.  James Palmer was followed by Tom Mills and finally 16 year old David ‘Nipper’ Moore.  At this point the Smart car was up to 27^th overall.

Near disaster was about to strike as darkness approached when David radioed through to the team with a fuel surge problem.

James Palmer added: ‘ He came into the pits for a check and the team found that the fuel tank had split.  So 6hrs in to the race a decision was made to take the fuel tank out of a road car, fit all the special fitting and put this on the race car. 1hr and 5mins later the car was back on track, but had dropped back to 36^th place.’

The car pounded on into the night gaining places and was back up to 33^rd, when a wheel bearing broke causing the brakes to fail.

As Paul Bates said: ‘What a scary moment,  I was approaching Brooklands at 125mph with no brakes.’

Once again the car pitted for a new wheel hub and brakes and less than an hour later the car emerged from the pits in 37^th place.  On it went for the next 11 hours with only the scheduled stops for fuel, new tyres and driver changes. As the race went on the team climbed back up the leader board.

By 4pm on Sunday the car was not surprisingly looking worse for wear.  Half its wing was missing, it had no side skirts, a very badly cracked windscreen and a suspension issue.

But despite all that on it went to take the chequered flag on a late Sunday afternoon in 28^th place overall.

The car had completed a total of 456 laps of Silverstone race circuit, a total of 1,672 miles.

740 Litres of fuel had been used and 6 sets of slick tyres.

We would like to say a massive thank you to all of our sponsors and team. Without them this would have not been possible.

Roll on next year.

For more information about Smarts4YouRacing go to smarts4youracing.com

The website already offers tips and advice on the latest style and trends from the world of interiors and this new online service will allow customers to contact Pippa directly and draw on her 15 years as an Interior Stylist.

Customers from anywhere can submit their questions to Pippa and her team, who will answer them at an introductory rate of £38. This online-only service can be bought directly from the website, and Pippa aims to answer all questions within 5 working days. Her answers will provide advice and guidance, and aim to help customers make an informed decision to make their homes beautiful and stylish.

To use the service simply go to www.pippajamesoninteriors.co.uk and click ‘Ask The Experts’. Users can buy this service through Paypal and then submit their question to Pippa who guarantees a personal response. We are confident that customers will like what we say, but if for any reason they are not entirely satisfied then we will refund their money.

Pippa says, “We realised that there was a gap in the market for people looking for quick solutions to their dilemmas that are too small to warrant employing a full-time Interior Designer but still need the expertise of an industry professional. We see this as an affordable and accessible service that can benefit anyone that is looking for answers to their interior style questions.”

The ability to add hierarchical pages as well as a very user friendly menu manager turned the development focus from a purely blogging platform into something much more flexible.

However a good CMS needs more. A good CMS absolutely must enable the user to create various content bits that can be used in various areas around the website, custom fields have been in WordPress for a very long time now, but they were never user  friendly. They were never easy to use for casual bloggers or the people who only update their websites once a month.

Developing custom interfaces to wrap these custom fields was a long and tedious task, so in the interest of saving costs companies would usually resort to using half baked plugins, which tried to do just that. The choice was pretty limited and the plugins never quite did everything you need. There was always a but. Until now.

ByTheScruff recently started deploying a plugin that we have had our eyes on for quite a while now and it has yet to give us one good reason not to use it in production. The plugin is “Advanced Custom Fields“, it provides a beautifully designed interface that makes creating really simple and good looking custom field panels an absolute breeze. There is support for every imaginable field type and it even allows the creation of data streams via its “Repeater” field functionality.

Below are 2 screenshots for a text quote carousel that we are using on one of the sites that we have built using Advanced Custom Fields, the image on the left is how we create the actual field set and the one on the right is how our clients will edit and update them, it doesn’t get easier than this:

So if you are interested in setting up or overhauling a website for your business, a well-developed WordPress site might be just what you need. Give us a shout on 0207 033 4269 or drop us a line on getit@bythescruff.com and we’ll be glad to help you.

The website, developed in WordPress, designed by By the Scruff, is primarily a blog and is updated regularly by the team at The Corner.

About The Corner: Edited by the team at the Spanish magazine Consejeros (“board members and directors”) and the stock market news website consensodemercado.com (“market consensus”), thecorner.eu brings together a group of professionals who have been working in economics and communication for over 25 years.

Visit The Corner for the latest news from the finacial markets in Erope and around the world.

Awareness spreading like wildfire, meetups and conferences, we have seen this before with other emerging languages and frameworks, but few have become the standard. Does node have what it takes?

Pros

• It’s JavaScript – a decent language which is relatively easy to pick up and already is one of the standard languages which should be learned by all web developers.
• It’s versatile and flexible – setting up virtual servers is only a few lines away. Virtual servers can easily be assigned different ports and can be configured to do pretty much anything any other server can.
• It’s fast. Very fast. From the moment you press go. – I’m a big fan of php, but the amount of effort that is required to get apache to execute it efficiently and to handle the same number of concurrent requests as node.js can straight out of the box is simply ridiculous.
• The community – the avalanche of plugins and addons reminds us of what happened with RoR, however what sets node apart is the support and the attitude of the node community. If you need help, you’ll find it. Forums, irc channels(and servers), wikis and all kinds of resources are available, are free and are very noob-friendly.
• npm – the simplest and most powerful package manager I’ve ever used.

Cons

• It’s JavaScript – while the majority of the web development community supports it, there are a good amount of opponents who like to point out the downsides of the language. One of them being math and the fact that JavaScript by default uses floating point numbers and thus can be a bit inaccurate in the most unexpected moments. (I’d like to point out that there are workarounds for this.)
• It’s young – the docs are not what some developers might be used to and some bugs may pop up from time to time.

So will it succeed? It definitely has everything necessary for success, but only time will tell if it has what it takes to convince the “set in their ways” sysadmins and to overtake apache.

Meanwhile here at ByTheScruff we are toying with node and are creating little javascript experiments that we think you should be interested in, so stay tuned!