Dare to Think | Web Design, Blog Development, Hosting and Print and Print made Simple

BETA Launch of Interview Hub

alan — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 15:06:46 +0000

Today (actually last week, but I’ve only just got around to writing about it) saw the BETA launch of INTERVIEWHUB.The site provides a unique marketplace enabling journalists, with celebrity contacts, to publicise their pitches both online and via their email newsletter (also created by Dare to Think). The site will be seen by thousands of editors looking for content to fill their publications. It really is a unique and fabulous site that I have absolutely no doubt will succeed. If you’re a journalist, with contacts, or an editor looking for content then check out interviewhub.co.uk right now.

Hug Your Dog and Hug Your Cat Relaunch

alan — Wed, 26 May 2010 13:43:43 +0000

Dare to Think with our current client, brand strategists t7F London, to redesign and develop their clients’ campaign sites. Hug Your Pet was a simple landing page that went through to either Hug Your Dog or Hug Your Cat. Both of the main sites were developed using Wordpress as the backend and used PodsCMS for content areas. The client then has the added ability to maintain and update key sections of the page with minimum fuss.

Useful Wordpress Snippets

alan — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 11:40:33 +0000

There’s lots and lots of things to remember when using Wordpress and you can’t remember everything. Here’s a list of useful little snippets that I’ll keep on adding to over time. To be honest it’s more for my record as it’s stuff that I use regularly but thought I’d add for all to share.

Wordpress Cheat sheets

Not so much cheating as great reference guides. There are lots and lots of useful Wordpress tags that you can add to pages and templates. Here are a couple of great Wordpress Cheat Sheets:

WordPress Visual Cheat Sheet

Free Complete Wordpress Cheat Sheet

Body Class

Replace the tag with

This will allow you to change elements on the page on a page-by-page basis simply by referencing the body in your CSS. For example you may see this, when you view the source code of your live page:

which would then allow you to target elements on that specific page in your CSS.

For more information visit the Official Wordpress page.

Custom field in Wordpress template

Adds a field within your template that will show custom bits of text, images etc that you add from within the post/page admin. Add the code to your template e.g.

ID, 'custom-field-name', true); ?>

Then add a new custom field to your page/post and add the name e.g. custom-field-name.

Custom field in Wordpress template with if else statement

There are situations where you need to see whether the custom field has content of a certain criteria and then display something else.

In this example the “custom-field-name” is the name of the custom field you are calling. If the content of that custom field contains “London” then the outputted text will show as “capital of England”. If “Edinburgh” then the content will be “capital of Scotland”. If no content exists in that custom field then the text “No capitals” will be displayed.

If Else Wordpress

The following code will add tags to the post, if there are any, if there’s not then it will add a bit of text. This function can be used in lots of different ways and is incredibly useful.


'); ?>

Sorry, no tags here!

Another example is that if you want to continually add elseif statements:

Wrap your Custom Field in DIV tags

It’s straight forward to show your custom field using the code mentioned above but what it would like to wrap that custom field in DIV tags or Paragraph tags or whatever else you fancy. Here’s a few options:

Display and wrap the custom field named “custom-field-name” in the div class “my-class”. If there’s no Custom Field by that name or nothing is entered in that field then display the text “No Custom Field here”.

ID, 'custom-field-name', true);
if ($customfield) {
?>
'.$customfield.''; ?>

No Custom Field here

The following will only show the Custom field if it exists. It will also be wrapped in list tags. If not then nothing will be shown:

ID, 'custom-field-name', true);
if ($customfield) {
?>
'.$customfield.'';
}?>

Conditional tags

Useful tags for use in your Wordpress templates: http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags

Control the amount of posts per page/category/search or archive

Open the Wordpress template file and locate the following:

and add the following code directly above:

The -1 indicates an infinite amount of posts – you can change this to whatever amount you’d like to appear. Bear in mind the page load time and file size if using an infinite amount.

Get all Sticky Posts

Insert this code into your template file to display all of your Sticky Posts

get_option('sticky_posts'))); ?>

Execute shortcode inside custom field

Allows shortcode to be used inside a custom field

ID, 'custom-field-name', true)); ?>

Launch of Adaxial Website

alan — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:57:52 +0000

Today saw the launch of the www.adaxial.co.uk. We were recommended to Adaxial’s Denzil Lee by one of our current clients. I know I always say it but it really is great to get a call from a potential client that have heard of Dare to Think through websites that we’ve developed. It just goes to show that if your work is good, your prices are right and you have a good working relationship with your clients that they will be more than happy to refer you.

Adaxial specialises in improving the operational and financial performance of client companies.

The Knowledge Antenatal Website

alan — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 09:00:37 +0000

So pleased was Sarah, co-creator of The Birth Team, with their new site we’d developed that we were then asked to replicate the style of that site for The Knowledge Antenatal website that was in a tired state and need of some love and attention. Another happy customer and one that we continue to work with on maintaining their sites as well as a monthly Google Adwords campaign.

Launch of t7F London Website

alan — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 15:00:08 +0000

t7F London had seen the work we were involved in developing and keeping up to date the interestment.co.uk website. They required a website, with blog built-in, to showcase their work and have a place where they communicate with the world through their blog.

The site is very creative minded and features a full screen homepage scroller that incorporate their main case studies. Although the blog is a part of the main site they wanted this to look different but still with keeping with the feel of the site. Take a look at the site now.

The Birth Team Website

alan — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:09:31 +0000

We were recommended to The Birth Team by a previous work colleague. Sarah, co-creator of The Birth Team, was a little disillusioned with web designers after a few bad experiences. Dare to Think were there to reassure her that we’re always here to help and will listen and explain in non-techy words exactly what’s to be done with the site. The Birth Team required a website that was simple, clear, informative, enticing and easy to maintain with an added News section. The result is something we’re all proud of and more importantly is proving to be an ongoing success for their business.

Root Path and Configuration of your Website using php

alan — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 17:43:17 +0000

There’s times when you need to know the root path of a website as well as all of the configuration details of that server. This is actually very simple, we’ll explain how…

Root path of your site

Open a plain text editor and enter the following:

Then save this with a .php extension i.e. root-path.php and upload to the root of your site via FTP. Then type in the url to that file and you’ll see the root path of your home directory.

Configuration details of your site

Find out if your server runs php and all of the configuration details of the server by opening a plain text editor and type the following

Save the file with a .php extension i.e. config-details.php and upload to the root of your site. Type in the url in your web browser and all of the server config details are there to see.

If you’ve found this useful please leave a comment below.

Show and hide text in a form field using onclick and onblur

alan — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:17:44 +0000

A great way to reduce the need for a field heading/title is to include the informative text within the text field. This is most commonly used in search fields, where there’s often no further available room to include a heading alongside or above.So from having a black search field like this:

You can have one with some explanatory text contained. This will disappear as the user clicks in the box and should they not enter any text will reappear again when they click elsewhere on the page.

To recreate this version use the following code:

You can then style your form field by using background images, removing the field border, adding an image instead of the standard submit button and make your very own lovely search field.

Should you remove the border on clicked links

alan — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 19:33:35 +0000

Firstly, dotted borders on clicked links are there for a reason – For accessibility and usability. They may not look pretty on your newly designed website but some folk rely on them to get around the web. Therefore only remove if strictly necessary.

Here what they look like:

The selector and declaration you need to insert in your stylesheet is:

*:focus {

outline: 0;

}

*:focus {outline: 0;}

A better way to do is to only use this on certain elements. For example Safari adds an ugly blue box on form text field elements to highlight that you’re in a certain field.

Great on the majority of forms and you should probably think about keeping them but for fields such as your search box then you can add text to this, which will highlight when tabbed on.

So you can remove it from this. To do this include the following in your text field style.:

outline: 0;

Have a go for yourself – first, tab your way around your website and notice how easy it is to know what link you’re currently on. Now, add the focus selector to your stylesheet and try to navigate around your site now… Almost impossible, right? As with anything, web-wise, you have to know when you can and can’t do something and when it will affect your site users.