Edmonds Commerce are currently recruiting for a highly talented and creative web design professional to join our team.

You will be working with our core clients on a variety of design tasks including mailshots, banners and other related tasks. You will also be involved in creating brand new designs for clients looking to rebrand their existing sites or set up a whole new site.

We are based in Shipley which is very easy to get to from both Leeds and Bradford areas. It is also easy enough to get to from surrounding areas such as Huddersfield, Wakefield and Keighley thanks to having a well connected train station and easy road links. You can read more about our location here.

If you would like to join the team as a web designer please fill out the contact form below.

Mobile internet usage is perhaps one of the defining revolutions of this decade.

People love how quick and easy it is to quickly look up something on their mobile that they carry around 24/7.

Signs of mobile usage are now all around us. People scroll through websites on tablets, smartphones, notebooks and other web-enabled mobile devices to pass their time.

According to the BBC, almost 50% of people have used the internet whilst away from their computer in a survey last year. In fact that article was published in 2011 so the reality now is probably much higher.

Have a look at these statistics which clearly show how mobile use is climbing year on year and now well over 10% of total usage:

So if you are wanting to increase access to your site this is definitely something to consider!

Developing World

Mobile use is truly becoming a global phenomenon. Whilst China and India have the majority of mobile connections, the use of mobile phones by developing nations is also under a period of rapid growth.

Many people in the developing world are unable to buy or charge a computer but they can afford to use internet on their phone; they often lack a wired internet infrastructure, however the mobile technology is much easier to implement.

Mcommerce

As people have more access to sites on their phones, it is not surprising that they want to buy the things that they see on their phones.

According to a report by SAS and Verdict Consulting survey m-Commerce “is growing fast and will become an integral part of shopping for all ages –
retailers need mobile capability to engage with shoppers as well as sell to them.”

App

Building Apps is quite a bespoke task which means you can modify your app to your specific modifications.

However designing the app means that you need to create it individually for each type of device, so this can become expensive as you will need at the least both an iOS (iPhone etc) app and also an Android app. You might also want a Windows Phone app giving you a total of three separate apps that need to be coded.

The popularity of mobile Apps has not gone unnoticed by Magento themselves as they have launched their own Magento mobile integration.

If you would like to find out more about Magento mobile app capability here is the link to their website.

Mobile Version of your Website

Rather than opting for an app, we always recommend that instead you focus on having a mobile friendly web site.

There are two ways to optimise your site for mobile devices: these are responsive themes and mobile versions. They have positive points and drawbacks and it really depends on what you are looking for.

We offer both types of mobile optimisation so whatever option you decide, we are happy to implement it.

Just in case you are not sure about what the differences between responsive themes and mobile versions is, I shall give some more detail on this below.

Responsive Theme

Responsive themes are basically your current website but with the capability to scale itself to the size of a mobile device. The idea is rather than having one web page you can shape,size and place the elements of your site to fit any size browser.

According to google responsive themes are great for SEOs and for ease of updating the site. This may be because they minimise bounce rate which means it minimises problems of when a visitor presses the back button when the site is unresponsive. This in turn will improve your site ranking. Another SEO benefit is that it directs the user to one URL. It is also easier to update than a mobile version of your site.

Mobile Version

A mobile version is literally a completely different website. This means that you can edit your site to be completely how you want it rather than tweak an existing site. The disadvantages of this is that it can time consuming and expensive.

A mobile version is served up as a completely alternative version of your website if a mobile user agent is detected. For Magento there are some modules that do a nice job of offering a fairly bog standard mobile version which is optimised for slow connections etc. These days with large screen powerful smartphones running on 3G networks, the issues that prompted the mobile version are less of an issue so we tend to lean more towards the responsive strategy these days.

Summary

To summarise it is a great idea to optimise your site with mobile capability so that your customers can properly view your site. Responsive themes are best if you want to have a mobile version of your site that is easier, quicker and cheaper to update, while mobile versions are better if your aims are to have a bespoke mobile version of your site that you would not need to update regularly.

Edmonds Commerce employs a team of specialist PHP web developers who are all Zend Certified Engineers. This is a highly respected PHP qualification that ensures the highest standards of PHP development expertise. By achieving this certification we ensure that our developers have the kind of well rounded and deep understanding of the PHP language that can be utilised to achieve the highest quality production.

All of the e-commerce platforms, such as Magento and OpenCart are written in PHP and so the first thing to be sure of when you have a developer working on your projects is that they are very skilled in PHP itself as well as having an expert knowledge of the platform.

You can read all about the ZCE exam here.

In a nutshell the exam is designed to test knowledge and skill that a professional PHP developer would need to tackle the kind of day to day issues they are likely to face. The exam covers a broad range of topics and really tests the in depth and broad knowledge of PHP that is required to really get the most out of the language and deliver the highest quality PHP development.

If you have a page that keeps getting longer because new items appear on it at the bottom and what’s at the bottom of the page is most important it can be a paint to have to keep scrolling done to see it.

You can make it auto scroll continuously with JQuery but that’s potentially really awkward if at any point you need to scroll up (it basically means you can’t).

The best solution is to make the page auto scroll in a sticky fashion. So when the page is already scrolled all the way to the bottom it auto scrolls, when it’s not at the bottom it does not scroll.

This can be achieved quite easily with the following code:

var num = (lastDocumentHeight - $(window).height()) - $(document).scrollTop();
if(num == 0) {
	$("html, body").animate({ scrollTop: $(document).height() }, "slow");
}
lastDocumentHeight = $(document).height();

In this example lastDocumentHeight is a global. It works by determining if the current position is the same as it was previously and this position equates to being at the bottom of the page then scroll. This needs to run after your page length has increased.

When you’re uploading multiple files (HTML5 feature – remember IE as yet STILL does not support this), it may not be the fact you’re uploading multiple files that’s actually causing the problem.

The problem often is actually caused by the various php memory limits in play, one way to avoid getting caught by this is using the following snippet in the form’s php to remind you which restrictions are in play (note the min_by_key() function is from the php.net comments) :-

<?php
function min_by_key($arr, $key){
    $min = array();
    foreach ($arr as $val) {
        if (!isset($val[$key]) and is_array($val)) {
            $min2 = min_by_key($val, $key);
            $min[$min2] = 1;
        } elseif (!isset($val[$key]) and !is_array($val)) {
            return false;
        } elseif (isset($val[$key])) {
            $min[$val[$key]] = 1;
        }
    }
    return min( array_keys($min) );
}

$arrayMaxes = array(
    'upload_max_filesize'=>intval(ini_get('upload_max_filesize')),
    'post_max_size'=>intval(ini_get('post_max_size')),
    'memory_limit'=>intval(ini_get('memory_limit'))
);
$maxUploadSize = min($arrayMaxes);
foreach ($arrayMaxes as $key=>$value) {
    if ($value == min($arrayMaxes)) {
        $minimumOfThree = $key;
    }
}?>
<p>Max filesize <?php echo $maxUploadSize; ?>M Maximum filesize due to server setting <?php echo $minimumOfThree; ?> in php.ini</p>

In a move that will hurt a lot of small businesses and especially startups, Google have withdrawn their free Google Apps for Domains which has been slowly reducing in number of users from 50, to 10 to now 0 (almost).

They are keeping the existing accounts open so if you have Google Apps already, don’t panic yet, your data is still there.

For one-man-band startups apparently there is the option of creating a single-user apps account still apparently, according to Greg D’Alesandre of Google.

If you pull down a Magento site to a local machine, and change the database core_config table to point to the local machine, and it appears to work fine until you try to login to the site admin, there can be many issues.

One of the most common ones though is not having a period (dot) in the host name – e.g. localhost/admin or martyn-desktop/admin – if you don’t have the period, the cookies don’t work properly and you end up in a login loop.

To fix it, make sure your machine is accessible via a domain with a period – e.g. martyn-desktop.local – by either editing your hosts file (/etc/hosts) or check your router – it possibly already adds a domain name like .config and set your path in core_config to the same.

Concrete5 is a CMS system based on Zend Framework that uses Jquery for it’s Javascript layer. Both of these are very popular and powerful frameworks that are really great to work with.

The thing that users really love though is the ability to edit Concrete5 pages on the fly making it very easy to use by non techies.

You can see the real ethos of the platform (from our techie point of view) here.

If you are looking for some expert PHP developers to help you get your Concrete5 site off the ground then get in touch with Edmonds Commerce today.

If you are at all involved or exposed to the world of web design and web development then you have no doubt heard of the phrase “responsive” web design. If you browse the popular theme sites for themes for platforms like WordPress and Magento then you can see responsive themes becoming more popular.

So what does it mean and how does it work?

What does Responsive Web Design Mean?

Responsive designs change the layout and visible content on a page depending on the width, height and other factors of the device or window rendering the page. You can generally test out responsive designs by simply unmaximising a browser window and then resizing it down to smaller sizes such as 320 pixels wide. On a normal design you would be quite lucky if the site still rendered in a readable way at that width. More than likely you will only be able to see a fraction of the page and would have to sideways scroll to see the rest of it.

On a responsively designed site, the layout would change as the screen width gets smaller. It might hide certain elements such as side columns and may make things rearrange in a more vertical way to allow them to be displayed without the need for side scrolling.

In a nutshell, this is what responsive web design means.

How Does Responsive Web Design Work?

Responsive web design works by using a CSS3 technique called Media Queries.

CSS has had the concept of media specific style sheets for quite some time. Traditionally though this was limited to print and screen, allowing for example to remove background images from a page when printing and perhaps adjust font family and size for better printing results.

The media queries functionality extends this concept significantly, allowing custom style rules to be applied based upon a range of differnt media options. The most commonly used of these for responsive web design are width and height.

The full list of properties that can be utilised with media queries include:

width
height
device-width
device-height
orientation
aspect-ratio
device-aspect-ratio
color
color-index
monochrome
resolution
scan
grid

Get Your Web Site Working Responsively

If you want to upgrade your web site to use responsive design techniques to better support the wide range of internet devices in use today then get in touch with Edmonds Commerce today to discuss how we can help you.

Some Useful and Interesting Links

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-mediaqueries/
http://johnpolacek.github.com/scrolldeck.js/decks/responsive/
http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/mediaqueries
http://mediaqueri.es/
http://mac-blog.org.ua/css-3-media-queries-cheat-sheet/

All of the PHP developers from Edmonds Commerce made our annual pilgramage over the Pennines to Manchester this weekend to visit arguably one of the best PHP conferences around – PHP North West, PHPNW for short.

This is a three track conference with a diverse range of expert PHP developers giving presentations on some really interesting topics. The team split up and chose their own route through the choice of talks meaning that between us all we got a real flavour of the entire conference.

They Keynote by Ade Oshineye was all to do with API development and DevX – developer experience as opposed to the more usual and in vogue UX – user experience. The point being that users are often getting a lot of thought put into their experiences but developers are often given sparsely documented and unwieldy APIs to work with. The metaphor of a door with an ambiguous push/pull requirement was really apt.

Particular highlights for me included the ReactPHP talk by Igor Wiedler which was both entertaining and really informative. The ØMQ (zero MQ) layer looks really interesting among other things. The guys that went to the Data structures talk by Patrick Allaert were really impressed with that.

Take homes from the conference in terms of projects and technologies to keep an eye on include the following:

Composer

Silex Framework

React PHP

ØMQ

Amazon Web Services Command Line Tools