What have I been up to?
Friday, September 21, 2007 10:20:01 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
It's been rather quiet on my blog recently, if you're wondering why (and don't chat to me on/off-line) I thought I would share with you what we've been working on recently.
For the past month or so The Site Doctor has been developing a new web site (www.wineandhampergifts.co.uk) for Porter and Woodman Gifts Ltd - a local company that produces personalised corporate hampers and gifts. It's been quite a challenge as they have a rather unusual ordering system that allows multiple recipients/addresses multiple items. Looking at it now, it's not so complicated but the delivery charge calculations and initial specs took a while to fully grasp. It's been really enjoyable.
I'll probably cover aspects of the site over the forthcoming months but there are a few really nice features to the Wine and Hamper Gifts site (or at least I think so), some of which the end user will never know about such as the use of generics to calculate the address/recipient/gift variations) and those that they may -for instance the use of the JavaScript1 Zoom function on the product details page (courtesy of LuckyZoom), also the design created by our excellent designer Gareth Brown all adds up to what has to be one of the best sites I've developed to date.
1 Yes, I did just say I've integrated some JavaScript into the site ;)
I doubt most of my readers are interested on the in's and out's of the project itself but from an SEO perspective, I for one am expecting pretty decent results. We opted to use the URL Rewriting ISAPI from Helicon this time round over our usual IISMods URL Rewriting ISAPI as for some reason the IISMods site has been offline for a while (and checking now has been converted into a very weird site).
Another aspect that some people may be unaware of is that the majority of the Wine and Hamper Gifts site operates the same without JavaScript as it does with JavaScript, this is important not only for screen readers but also search engines. There is only one area of the Wine and Hamper Gifts site that I'm aware of that doesn't operate without JavaScript and that is the "Personalise this gift" link on the cart page that allows the user to either edit the existing message or add one that doesn't already exist, that's because it uses a LinkButton, but I may find a way around that later.
Other features that I really like are little things like the way the drop down lists on the left hand menu are created -they're not actually drop down lists but unordered lists that are then manipulated using JavaScript, I think the JavaScript could do with a little tweaking but the result is superb. The Wine and Hamper Gifts site also creates a PDF receipt for the user which is emailed to them, this is something I've been meaning to look into for some time but haven't had the chance, luckily while I was developing the site, Sean Ronan posted to the MsWebDev list about an ASP.Net PDF library iTextSharp (a port from a Java library) which, despite a few oddities from the POV of the Java port does exactly what I wanted. The library is pretty easy to use once you get your head around it and certainly produces some nice results.
There's still more work that's needed to finalise the content and various aspects of the Wine and Hamper Gifts website but if you have a chance, check out the new Porter and Woodman Gifts Ltd Wine and Hamper Gifts website and leave a comment here letting me know what you think :D
Oh, and they've given us a pretty high target to get before Christmas so if you're thinking about treating your customers to a personalised corporate hamper or gift give a little thought to using www.wineandhampergifts.co.uk
Give your site a pulse
Tuesday, March 13, 2007 10:45:25 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Get your finger on the pulse of your site with this great new (free) RSS statistics service “PulseRSS”. I met the developers of PulseRSS the other day at my first Multipack meet (West Midlands based new media meet) which, if you’re nearby you should check out in the future as they’re a lovely bunch of guys (and girls apparently but they were no-where to be seen on Saturday).
Back to PulseRSS! As already mentioned, PulseRSS is a statistics service via an RSS/XML feed that works in a very similar way to Google Analytics but unlike Google Analytics, they’ve followed the principle of KISS which I think works really well, the interface is simple and easy to use and have I already mentioned it was free?
So if you’re looking for a simple free statistics package then check out PulseRSS –I’ve got it running on my blog already so it’ll be interesting to see how the stats compare to Google Analytics...
Custom 404 Error Pages
Friday, June 16, 2006 8:48:54 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
I made an interesting discovery this morning. A few weeks ago I was doing a little SEO on The Wargame Company (Devon) and thought I would look into utilising Google SiteMaps. After creating the XML file with the correct format it's just a matter of having Google approve it. They do this by accessing a random page i.e. www.domain.com/GooglesWonderfulPageddmmyyyyhhmmssmmm (which clearly should return a 404) and check the response code -I guess to ensure that you're not trying to spoof the pages in some way.
"What's the problem? I've got custom 404 pages" I hear you cry! Well, if like us you've written some fancy page to handle the error and email you/log it to a database, it turns out that you're not returning a 404 error at all!
What I discovered was that if you configure IIS to handle 404 error pages with a URL you're actually returning a response code of 200. After a little thinking, the only conclusion we could come to was that when setting it as a URL in IIS you're actually redirecting the request which is either a 301 or perhaps a 307 (see http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec6.html for more information on response codes) and then the final page the user hit's returns a 200 (Response Status "OK") rather than the desired 404 -clearly not what we want!
After a little more investigation we also found that the same thing happened when using ASP.Net's built in handlers and the same thing happens, the only time it doesn't is when you handle the 404 with a File in IIS rather than a URL.
"What can I do about it?" Well that's simple, if you're going to use a URL to handle your 404 errors, make sure you change the Response Status Codes to the correct code, i.e. 404, this is pretty simple to do:
ASP.Net 2.0: Page.Response.StatusCode = 404;
ASP.Net 1.1 (I think): Response.StatusCode = 404;
ASP: Response.Status = "404 You are Unauthorized"
I hope that helps someone out there!
Tim
Update: I've just run fiddler on The Wargame Company (Devon) and and can confirm you get a Response Status Code of 301 before the 200.
New TSD Design
Friday, June 09, 2006 4:08:07 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Ok, The Site Doctor has moved on a fair amount since I started it up, we started off with a somewhat techy design (Version 1) which at the time I loved but as time went on felt it was somewhat cheesy so it was replaced with Version 2 in September 2004 and this has remained the face of The Site Doctor ever since. It’s a nice site but as far as the code quality is concerned it’s terrible, not to mention to SEO issues (to say the least!)
Site Design 1
Site Design 2
Site Design 3?
In the past both designs were tabular based and didn’t care too much for accessibility standards which are now at the fore-front of our minds so we felt it was once again time for a change, but what to do? Although I dabble and with enough time I can come up with some snazzy designs, this time I felt it was necessary to have someone “in the know” to put something together for us.
Mike from Butterfly Media stepped up to the mark with some great concepts, the current design he’s finalising for us is based on the following concepts (click the image to see the next example image): The New TSD design
Watch this space for an update in the next few weeks. I hope to have the final TSD design live shortly after I return from holiday along with a few other, well, niceties 
I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on the new design