Having being working on designing and building websites for over 8 years now, I have seen the web change at a very fast pace. Now, it seems to be gaining more and more momentum as more and more people get online. It’s an exciting career to be in. As things are changing so rapidly, it has definitely been a huge benefit being a part of a larger web team. At the time of writing this, there are six web developers/designers at Strawberry; Jamie Wright, Stu Greenham, Matt Woods, Adam Gilleard and James Greenwood. Although not necessarily a competition, it is always good to try strive to be the best you can be. And with the rest of the team picking up new skills, it’s always encouraging to try and keep up with the pace. If you fall asleep in the web industry for even a month, you’ll fall behind.

Working as a Part of a Team

The biggest change I found when moving to Strawberry was the diverse skill set. Rather than having one or two people who are really good at everything, it’s a case of having many people who are good at a lot of things, and really awesome in certain specialised areas. Of the various times I’ve been unable to do something to the best it could be, I know there’s someone else there who can do a kick-ass job.

I’ve always been more of an all-rounder when it comes to my skillset. Over the last couple of years however, my skills in CSS, HTML, jQuery and PHP have grown at a fairly decent pace. Since being interested in web design since the age of 15, I stepped in to the developing stage straight off the bat. Although I don’t think that a web designer should be able to do everything, I disagree that someone can call themselves a web designer if they can’t write CSS and HTML. It can play a vital role when designing your site in Photoshop.

As I mentioned above, my jQuery skills have grown at a decent pace. When I joined Strawberry, Adam was pretty much the jQuery wizard. As I had only been writing jQuery goodness for a few months I was often pestering him for help. He then went back to university for a year, so it was the perfect time to just dive right in. As much as I like to use tried and tested plugins, I’ve never been a fan of the copy and paste method of ‘coding’. I like to learn, experiment and create. I’m now at a stage where I’ve begun writing my own jQuery plugins and slideshow functions. Sometimes, if time permits, it’s better to write your own code. You get a better understanding of how everything works. Plus, if you want to add features, you know your code so you know what everything does (hopefully).

ExpressionEngine

I’ve been a huge fan of WordPress since it first came out. It still powers this site and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. When I started working in Hull, I met the giant that is ExpressionEngine (EE). Learning a whole new Content Management System (CMS), which wasn’t small by any means, led to a fairly steep learning curve. For certain commercial projects, it’s definitely a contender for top-dog CMS. Over the past year, my skills in EE have developed nicely. I’m now at a stage where I’m easily coming up with solutions to complex problems, and really pushing the boundaries of what the CMS can do; from e-commerce-like set-ups to multi-language websites. I wouldn’t have even considered anything like that possible about a year ago. As with jQuery, I’m now at a stage where I’ve written a few plugins. The latest one being a Twitter plugin that uses the OAuth authentication method to pull in Tweets (hopefully the blog post will be available on the Strawberry website very soon).

All in all, my skills as a web designer have drastically improved over the past year. Even a year ago I thought I was good at what I did. I’ve always liked looking back at my old work and having the thoughts of, “what was I thinking?” If you can look back at your work from a year ago and can’t do better now, there is a problem. Can’t wait to see what the future holds in the beautiful web.

When people receive brochures, read articles in magazines or view other printed marketing material they may typically see a URL they are supposed to type out. This URL should typically be as short and as meaningful as possible; nobody wants to type out www.willans.net/amazing-website-strategy-guidelines. They are more likely to go to the website if the URL was shown as www.willans.net/web-strategy.

So what if you already have a page URL of ‘amazing-website-strategy-guidelines’? Renaming the file/path isn’t an option because it will mess about with SEO rankings, and anyone who has this page bookmarked would no longer be able to find it if it were to be changed. The solution is page redirects (or technically speaking, 301 permanent redirects).

You could either change amazing-website-strategy-guidelines to web-strategy and have web-strategy redirect to amazing-website-strategy-guidelines or vice-versa. But, if you use any analytical tool (such as Google Analytics) to track what pages the user has been on, it won’t track 301 redirects (because these tools rely on the page actually being loaded). To get around this, you can simply append a query string to the end of the URL. For example, www.willans.net/web-strategy would redirect to www.willans.net/amazing-website-strategy-guidelines/?campaign=my_facebook_campaign, which would show up in Google Analytics.

So how easy is setting up a 301 redirect? For a webmaster with access to Apache (or the Windows Server equivalent) it is relatively straightforward. But what if you want an even more hassle-free way (even if you are a webmaster)?

If you use WordPress then you’re in luck. John Godley created a plugin for WordPress that allows you to easily manage your 301 redirects (it also handles 404 error pages too). With no server knowledge required, you can easily redirect one page to another, and append query strings to URLs. It gets even better than that too – it also has it’s own built in stat counters so you can view the results even quicker.

This is the most efficient way I found of setting up campaign tracking. There may be better solutions, but this worked for me.

The default template will have all the usual details. Username, gravatar and comment etc. The issue isn’t the content (unless you care about the format of the date to match the rest of your website) – the issue is the layout.

By adding some code to the functions.php file in your WordPress theme folder, you can have more control over what is going on. The following is the template used on Castle Made.

<?php
function cust_comment($comment, $args, $depth) {
$GLOBALS['comment'] = $comment; ?>
<li <?php comment_class(); ?> id="li-comment-<?php comment_ID() ?>">
<div id="comment-<?php comment_ID(); ?>" class="aComment">
	<div class="commenter">
		<div class="gravatar">
			<?php echo get_avatar($comment,$size='140'); ?>
		</div>
		<?php printf(__('<h4><cite class="author">%s</cite></h4>'), get_comment_author_link()) ?>
		<div class="comment-meta commentmetadata"><?php printf(__('%1$s'), get_comment_date(), get_comment_time()) ?></div>
	</div>
	<div class="theComment">
	<?php comment_text() ?>
	<?php if ($comment->comment_approved == '0') : ?>
	<p><em><?php _e('Your comment is awaiting moderation.') ?></em></p>
	<?php endif; ?>
	</div>
</div>
<?php } ?>

The important part is to now trigger the template change. Open up your theme’s comments.php file, and go to line 29 (default theme) and look for the following code:

<?php wp_list_comments(); ?>

And change it to the following:

<?php wp_list_comments('callback=cust_comment'); ?>

The value of ‘callback’ must match the name of your comments function.