Neith Studio » Programming

Successful web development at affordable rates

admin — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:28:55 +0000

When you need to have a site developed it is very important to get the most professional designers, developers and copywriters to do the job for you. There are millions of sites on the internet today. In order to stand out from the crowd good joomla customization is necessary. Great style and functionality will always be in fashion and professionalism never hurt anyone either. It is very important for your site to be fast loading with easy transparent navigation and simple structure that won’t slow down customers who are always in a hurry to view pages without the unnecessary hassle. People hate when designers have lots of pop-up windows, fancy welcoming pages or clashing backgrounds on their sites. This is not about showing off cms development but about making it most comfortable for the users.

Nowadays websites are becoming more affordable and are built much faster than in the past. It doesn’t mean they are worse, in many cases they look just as professional as old-school websites built from scratch without website development modules. With joomla module development it is possible to build very professional websites fast without losing on creativity and individuality. It is important to maintain a chosen style throughout the website and make sure that when users turn to different parts of the site they can still distinguish where they are. Easy navigation is a prerequisite for a successful website. If a user can get to where he wants from every page of the site, then the layout is really great. Sites that load fast, don’t have built-in audio and video files are welcomed by the public, look good on all screens and in all browsers. These are the basics, a good site will have much more at work to make visitors stay satisfied, let alone bookmark it.

Curtail project completion time

admin — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:27:50 +0000

With many projects never reaching their target objectives it is daunting to start a new one, always difficult and challenging. But project management software can make the initiation, planning and production of projects much easier, besides, some software offers testing and control features which save the energy of managers and testers. With the right application of project management programs it is possible to do a day’s work in a couple of hours and without any problems. Absolutely all members of the team can be assisted in the simplest tasks, freeing their time to do more important things, such as internet marketing, for example. Isn’t it the main task that technology should perform these days?

Any project in application programming and web application development will go into stages where circumstances will change and the initial planning will fly out the window. People run out of money, valuable employees become unavailable, the economical climate changes. With software it is easier to change the whole plan of the project as everything is done automatically. Tasks will be rescheduled and relocated into different portions of work. As long as the major goals of the project have been stated clearly and accurately it is possible to get out of any situation with the help of latest software to help project management.

It is also very helpful to have web conferencing software these days. You can reach your employees all over the world and explain whatever you need to them. This software can also be used for communicating with customers about different issues.

We have discussed various types of software that might help you to curtail project completion time. You can use one of the things discussed or all of them together. It will not only save your time but will definitely make the atmosphere in the project team much more relaxed.

Making things faster and easier

admin — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 17:26:09 +0000

With project tracking software the task of controlling and carrying a project to completion has been somewhat eased up for project mangers worldwide. With dashboards and control panels everything happening within the scope of a given project is easily monitored and controlled. Scheduled tasks can be viewed and time spent on them easily checked, so that the manager knows exactly what everyone is up to. You would say that Google Docs perfectly fits to fulfill all these functions but I would say that this is a completely wrong understanding of the project management process at all. For sure, Google Docs allow you to edit the documents and allows collaboration and file sharing but even the basic documents sharing opportunities are limited. That is why if you want to achieve success and what is more to reach the point of a convenient workflow you should turn your attention to special project management shareware. One of the best features of project management software is its adaptability and flexibility with timetables and schedules easily reschedule if the parameters change. It is easy to manage the day with the interface that includes the presentation of tasks for the day, messages coming in, meetings scheduled, important calls to make, issues to address and risks to look out for. Everything is fully customizable and you can have an email marketing solution tailored exactly needs of your particular business. Collaboration is take to another level and communication on a daily basis, as well as file sharing and video conferencing is no longer a problem. No wonder more and more people use this software every day. It really makes the life of everyone easier and helps the project team focus on delivering the best service possible to their clients. And ultimately this is what every CEO has always been dreaming of!

Problem/Solution with HTML Character Encoding

admin — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 08:16:02 +0000

This is second time I come to strange problem. In html code, inside header tag, I setup page encoding to ISO-8859-1:

meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"

When I opened page in browser, it showing me some strange characters(ttis was page about some french products), and the problem is because browser render page using utf-8 encoding. Because I have no control over content, and converting content into ut8-8 encoding would not be easy, because content is coming from external sources.

After digging a bit, I found that the problem is because apache default encoding was utf-8, and it overwrite encoding setup in html header.

Fortunately, solution was easy, and only thing I have to do is to change apache default encoding. This can be done in main apache config file(httpd.conf) for all sites on that web server, in VirtualHosts section of same file, or in .htaccess file.
Because my site is on shared hosting and I don’t have access to httpd.conf, I simple change default apache encoding in .htaccess. I added next line:

AddDefaultCharset iso-8859-1

And it worked perfect!

Google Map API for PHP

admin — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 10:03:04 +0000

I had request from one client to create Google Map on one website, with database of almost 200 000 locations. Depending on filter criteria, it should be possible to show up to 800 locations on the map(this limitation is due to Google API). Locations haven’t contained geo codes(coordinates).
It would be possible to use Google API using address, but their geo coding service is so fast, and imagine how that would work for 800 locations. So, we decided first to convert addresses into geo codes. This can be easily done by google geocoding service, which was done as batch process. We had to run this service few days, because large number of locations and Google request limitation.

Once this is done, next step was to show those locations on map. For this we used Google Map API for PHP developed by Monte Ohrt (Google Map API for PHP). Their library contain one file-class, with very good examples/documentation, so we were able to integrate into our website very fast. It was also easy to integrate with smarty templates we used.

So, the reason why we avoided direct coding in javascript, is mainly because smarty code would become unreadable with few loops, few condition checking, which look much more natural if done in PHP.

TcPdf PHP Library

admin — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 07:54:51 +0000

I worked on one project with many different reports that had to be created. And in addition to html reports, client wanted to have pdf options, so his customers could download pdf version of report.
PHP build-in libraries for PDF creation, haven’t satisfy our needs, because we had much tabular data, and many different tables, so it would take too much time to setup all these width/heights with block elements that those libraries offer.
I checked some additional libraries too, and even some popular libraries like fpdf haven’t had support for tables.

Then I found one excellent library called tcpdf, which have great support for tables, different fonts. You can use html tags to create layouts, tables, blocks, define fonts, add images, so if you need really good tool, I greatly recommend this library. It is free library, and you can find many examples on their website.

However, I had to use fpdf library in same project, because we need to create Avery labels in pdf file, so user can print on sticker paper for example. This, of course could be done with TcPdf off course, but because it would take maybe whole day, so setup layout, we decided to use fpdf. It is not good idea to use two different libraries for same thing, but this was client request.