News and views on new and emerging technologies and how they affect businesses today.
Email contact forms on websites are notoriously bad at just … working! They work one day and just suddenly stop working the next. Usually the first you know about it is when you notice that you haven’t had any email enquiries from your website for a while.
Here are some tips on why email contact forms stop working and what to do about it! This is a non-technical article, so you won’t need to be a geek to make use of it.
To remove the “Not Secure” warning from your website, and replace it with the trusted “green padlock”, you need to install an SSL certificate.
Your website will be flagged as “Not Secure” in a web browser if it does not provide any encryption of the data which passes between the website user and the site.
This data could include things like usernames and passwords, data captured in online forms, comments, credit card details, or any other kind of data, including simply requesting web pages from the site. Read more
Today the BBC has announced that after several weeks of A/B testing it will move all users to it’s new responsive website design.
Responsive design means the same site present itself differently according to the kind of device that it’s being viewed on.
Usually this means having more horizontal content on desktops and on mobiles using bigger text, and fewer or just one column of content, with content stacking up vertically instead of horizontally. This means less pinching and zooming on mobiles, links that are easier to click, and forms that are easier to fill in, while at the same time delivering the rich user experience that desktop users demand.
We’ve been using the responsive design for a few weeks and we like it. It focusses the user on the content not on the presentation, which is Rule #1 of great web design. We didn’t much enjoy being directed to a separate website when viewing the site on mobile, but now we’ll stay on the main bbc.co.uk/news URL.
The BBC news team have said that up to 65% of their traffic is now via mobiles and the old desktop site was built four years ago when the conventional wisdom was to build different sites for different devices. They also have a great mobile app which is specifically designed for mobile and there are no signs that will be withdrawn.
As many developers know there have been issues for a long time integrating Google eCommerce or Google Analytics tracking with WorldPay hosted payment solutions.
The problem arises because both of these tracking systems use JavaScript to read the shopper’s cookies, tracking customers from clicking on an ad in AdWords all the way through payment. This JavaScript must be placed on the merchant’s site in order to read the tracking cookies that Google has placed there.
Unlike other payment providers, (SagePay, PayPal etc), WorldPay do not provide a way to return a customer to the merchant site complete with their payment information. Of course WorldPay supports callbacks, but these callbacks are called from WorldPay, not the customer, and therefore the customer cookies are not available to pass to WorldPay as part of the callback. Instead, WorldPay provide a way for merchants to show custom pages on payment completion via their own servers – but these custom pages are called up from WorldPay and sucked into a WorldPay-delivered page.
These custom pages cannot currently contain JavaScript due to the risk of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. It’s a reasonable security precaution but it stimies the use of Google Tracking codes.
Over the years various solutions have been proposed, including showing an iFrame within your response page. These solutions work for a while but WorldPay always seem to shut them down after some time.
As of the time of writing Google eCommerce tracking is not supported via WorldPay and although they say that new payment pages will be available in Q1 2015 which may support such functionality, we are not holding our breaths! Solution: switch to SagePay!
We completed another interesting project using technologies that we don’t normally use – creating PDFs from ASP.NET.
Our client supplies materials around the world to research institutions. For decades, every year they produced a paper-based catalogue – an impressive heavyweight document – which they send to all their clients and anybody else who wanted one anywhere in the world.
This was a successful marketing strategy and great customer service, but extremely expensive and very time-consuming.
They approached us to find out if we could automate the production of their product catalogue and make it downloadable from their web site. We said “Of course!” Then we had find out how to do that.
Since their web site technology stack includes ASP.NET, C# code, and Microsoft SQL Server, it made sense to source a software library that would easily fit in. We looked at several PDF libraries for ASP.NET and found the most popular to be iText – but when we received a license quotation from them we realised it would not be financially viable to use this software. In the end we plumped for PDFSharp and MigraDoc.
Once installed, these libraries allow programmers to create PDF documents, add pages, images, paragraphs, tables of data, tables of contents, headers, footers, page numbers – exactly what we wanted.
First we created software classed that would extract the relevant data from the database, using the specified currency – our clients sell in GBP, Euros, US dollars, Japanese Yen and Swiss Francs.
Then we created classes using PDFSharp that would inject the product data in the right format and right currency into the document.
Once that was done, we focussed on building a table of contents.
Seemingly simple, the table of contents turned out to be one of the most challenging parts of the project. The client wanted two nested levels of contents – the main material and within that, the form of the material (sheet, rod, wire etc). All these had to linked to the relevant pages in the document, but of course it’s impossible to know which pages those products might appear on. Fortunately PDFSharp provides a way of setting up a bookmark and taking care of the page numbers itself – a very handy feature which makes internal linking easy.
Finally we added a full-page cover image with the company’s logo, a terms and conditions page and introduction pages. We added headers and footers to the product pages with the company’s logo as a watermark to add polish and panache to the finished product.
The last piece of the project was to get the catalogue to be generated daily in each of the five currencies. To do this we set up a .net page which generates the catalogues and saves to the server’s filesystem, making them available to be linked to for download. We set up a scheduled task to allow this to happen daily at 5am. Finally, we added links to the catalogues from all the relevant points of the web site.
This automatic system now does away with the heavy, expensive and out-of-date catalogue. Now our client can point their customers to a brand new downloadable catalogue that is produced every day so has the most up-to-date prices. They will save considerable amounts by not having to send the paper-based catalogue around the world. And customers can now download the catalogue in their preferred currency at any time from anywhere in the world.
Our client has a thriving e-commerce site which we built a few years ago. They sell all over the world and accept payments in a number of different currencies. The challenge with this project was to ensure that customers outside the UK were presented with prices displayed in their home currency.
For this we implemented a geolocation lookup using the reliable ip2location service. This takes the user’s IP address and performs a lookup against ip2location’s database, returning the country the customer is in with extremely high levels of accuracy. The service is fast enough to be done on-the-fly without any noticeable slow-down in accessing the site.
The process of identifying the geographical location of a person or device by means of digital information processed via the Internet
Performance in any web application is key, so instead of performing the lookup every time a visitor arrives at the site, we cache the lookups in the database. We first perform a check against the database to find out if we have already done a lookup on the IP address within the last few days. If so, we don’t need to call ip2location for the country, and we retrieve it from the database. This makes things even faster.
One of the challenges of web development is finding out what your site/pages look like in countries outside the UK. To do this we employed several techniques. We tested using many web proxy services, and also utilised a great service called GeoPeeker to get a view from the USA, Brazil, Singapore, Ireland and several other locations.
Now the service has been launched, so customers around the world are presented with their “home” currency. This is great customer service and is a handy time-saver for customers who no longer have to change their currency from UK pounds to their home currency.
Have you ever wondered what all the fuss is about “responsive” web design?
Responsive design aims to present a site that’s tailored to the device on which you are viewing it. For example, on the web, screens are generally wider than they are tall (landscape format). But on mobile, screens are usually taller than they are wide (portrait format). So a site that looks great on the web probably won’t look so good on mobile.
On the other hand, if you turn your mobile sideways, you’re back to landscape format again!
Responsive design aims to solve all these problems by delivering a different layout according to your device. The general aim is avoid the user having to scroll in more than
Mobile web traffic now accounts for about 28% of all web traffic 1 – so if your site is not mobile-friendly or responsive then you risk alienating an entire quarter of your audience. No business can afford that.direction (up and down scrolling is fine) and to avoid pinching and zooming.
The task of the web designer is to ensure that sites can detect the device (known as browser sniffing) and deliver a user-friendly format in response.What’s more, mobiles have much smaller screens, meaning web-size fonts are going to be difficult to read without pinching and zooming.
If your site is looking nasty on mobiles, then get in touch with UKcentric – we can redevelop your site in a responsive way to ensure it is fit for purpose no matter what devices your users prefer.
Mobile traffic now 28% of total report
UKcentric’s ever-growing collection of test phones
We’re delighted to announce we have added a great new service to our repertoire. WordPress is a fantastic blogging platform that is powering thousands of sites all around the world. Now you can have a WordPress-based web site on your domain for just a few pounds a month. Read more
