Latest Posts

10 Things To Do When Launching A Site

It always seems to be a hectic and rushed time when launching a new site. So having a checklist of things to tick off before launching can help save your sanity and avoid you launching a site that’s missing something important. Find out the 10 most important things to check for.

Using PHP to connect to SFTP

When programming in a business enviroment you often have to send and recieve files of data (data feeds) from other organisations or departments within your company. To handle this quickly and securely you can use the existing FTP protocol and its secure sibling sFTP. Today we will learn how easy it is to send/recieve files over sFTP automatically, allowing your scripts to run completly autonomously.

Asynchronous Virtual Pageviews with Google Analytics

If you have moved over to the new Asynchronous Google Analytics (GA) tracking code you may have trouble finding how to create virtual pageviews as the manual seems to push you more towards using Events instead.

5 Advanced Text Editing Keyboard Shortcuts

Learn 5 advanced text editing keyboard shortcuts to increase your efficiency and speed in text editors and word processors.

Get the headers of a HTTP request with PHP

Need to check that a URL is valid? Or get the last-modified date, or the charset, or the ETag of a page? Here is a simple bit of code to help you do just that by returning the headers of a HTTP request for you.

How-to: Create PDF preview images in PHP – Part 2

A follow up to creating thumbnail previews of PDF documents quickly and easy with this basic walk-through from setup to code samples.

How-to: Create PDF preview images in PHP

Create thumbnail previews of PDF documents quickly and easy with this basic walk-through from setup to code samples.

Quick Code: Get the domain name in JS

When your developing a site or online application that uses a lot of XML HTTP Requests (XHR) it’s generally a good idea to use a full URL when creating a request. If you then try to re-use your code across multiple sites and domains, you will find you get errors due to posting to a different domain than the current site.

Things to think about when designing a logo

Here is a quick post which takes a look at some of the things I take into consideration when designing a logo, I’d say also looks at some of the considerations for print as well, plus it also contains what i think makes a good logo.

Javascript Array Functions

Without using a Javascript library such as JQuery, there are very few functions built into Javascript to deal with arrays. Here are a few of my own that often come in handy when working on projects.

Integrating FCKEditor to save current content with AJAX using PHP

A short guide to getting FCKEditor to autosave the current content.

Pad A Javascript Number

To keep design and content consistent I often pad numbers with zeros to ensure they are all the same width. There is no built in function to do this, so I wrote my own.

Why use heading tags as opposed to font tags for displaying text in HTML?

Learn the how and why of using header tags in your markup.

Creating One Time Download Links

Creating single use or timed download links can allow websites to offer downloadable content that expires after a single download or after a set period of time. Many e-commerce sites are using these techniques to sell documents and files online.

Why Javascript in Forms is Bad

A look at how some Javascript in forms is bad and how when it’s bad it can destroy customer confidence and lose you valuable sales.

5 Things To Remember When Designing Accessible Web Pages

A look at what to remember and actions to take when designing accessible web pages.

Sizing Images Correctly – Part Two

This post follows on from what we looked at from Sizing Images Correctly – Part One and looks at another issue as to why correct image sizing is important.

Graphical CSS Rollover Menu

Learn how to create an accessible CSS only menu with image rollovers.

How-To: Create A Simple Text Reflection

Ever wondered how to create a simple text reflection within Photoshop? This post will take you through a simple tutorial on how to do it.

Using WordPress Tags as Keywords

Tags in Wordpress allow you to organise your content with quick and easy Folksonomy. This can then be used to view or show other related data or fancy, but not very usable, tag clouds. Today we will see if we can’t make more use out of this information by adding it to our meta keywords for better SEO.

Use the Canonical

Over the past few weeks all the major search engines have announced support for a new link element to help clean the web of duplicate URL’s. This new element allows site owners to specify the default URL for any page to help avoid duplication.

Sizing Images Correctly – Part One

There are many advantages as to why you should spend extra time on sizing images correctly before adding them to your web page. This post is Part 1 of 2 which looks at the difference between an image resized using HTML and an image resized in Photoshop.

CSS Image Rollovers

Many sites out there still use an old JavaScript technique to produce an image rollover for menu items or buttons. This is bad for many reasons and here we will learn how to achieve the same effect using CSS.

Welcome to Webvamp

Over the coming weeks and months we hope to use this site to help others learn how to better plan, design, produce and optimize websites. Over the past eight years we have developed 100′s of websites, and this site aims to share with others all our successes and failures. To share with you the common sense approach to developing great websites.