Take a look at our pages that summaries our new offerings for customers.

• Freelance wordpress development - Installation and theme customisation
• Freelance magento development – Installation and theme customisation

We’ve actually been working with Wordpress since 2004, and Magento since 2008, however we have been specifically asked for these products by new and existing customers.

If you would a demo of these products, or have a question how these web applications can help your business then contact us .

As you probably know by now, Google is Using site speed in web search ranking. And I couldn’t agree more: speed is important for your site, and not only for Google but mainly for the User Experience (UX) on your site. Research from Google and Microsoft shows that slower websites convert less and that the effect of a slow website is lasting.

Here are two blog posts from Magento colleagues who have found various ways of speeding up the open source ecommerce platform:

Ways to speed up Magento

Magento Site Speed tips

Also follow @magentodesigns for the latest tips and information from the Magento community.

Needing a little help with your Wordpress development?

Try this useful cheat sheet, always helpful for reference, allowing you to learn more about wordpress development at the same time.

There’s also a load more here -www.speckyboy.com/14-essential-wordpress-development-and-design-cheat-sheets/

If you are just setting up as a developer or need to know what testing suite to set up in your office before you send your client their completed web site.

Here’s the definite list for bulletproof browser testing suite:

Cloud services

• Online: Browsershots – Cost – free – all browsers current and past versions.

Local installs on a Mac

• Mac OS X: Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Camino
• Mac OS X using Parallels with installs of Linux, Win XP and Win Vista operating systems:
  • Windows XP: Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE6, IE7 and IE8 – using IE tester.
  • Windows 7: Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE6, IE7 and IE8 – using IE tester.
  • Windows Vista: (if required)
  • Linux: Seamonkey, Opera, Firefox, Chrome, Safari

As part of your quality assurance you should include which browsers and operating systems you are testing on in your client contract. Any backward compatible coding for IE6 or below should be added at extra cost if required.

With existing sites, if you look at Google analytics data, you will be able to see the share of users using each browser and make the best judgement from there, in terms of which old browsers to support.

If the results of your CSS designs are inspirational, don’t let speed slow down people seeing your work!

If you notice your style sheets are getting bloated, it may be time to stop and give it the code a good make over. With the following steps and your style sheet will be in shape in no time. Fortunately, there are some great online tools out there for cleaning and optimising  your CSS for you.

Web page analyser:

• Web page analyser – Find out how long your external CSS, JS files take to load

Find redundant CSS code:

• dustmeselectors – Dust-Me Selectors is a Firefox extension (for v1.5 or later) that finds unused CSS selectors.

Learn CSS shorthand:

• CSS shorthand cheatsheet

Optimise, clean up CSS:

• CleanCSS
• Tabifier Works for both HTML and CSS

Wordpress plugins:

• CSS compress

Learn more about CSS management at 456Berea Street.

In January 2000, odds are that you didn’t own an MP3 player, digital camera or even a cellphone.

And the iPhone might as well have been a cardboard prop off Star Trek. But today, the iPhone is not only dully common, it’s the prototype on which most modern smartphones have been built.

But as of 2007, U.S. households were more likely to be use a cell than a land line.

Time has voted the Android over iPhone for Time Gadget of the Year

Here we are about to start a new decade, and the predictions are almost a sci-fi cliché at this point, but by the end of the next decade, it’s easy to imagine a contact lens, like any other contact, that could fit on your eye to provide a heads-up display (HUD) over much of your life experience.

For computers in the next decade, the mobile OS will be indistinguishable from the desktop OS. Portable computers will be but aesthetic shells for your omnipresent connection to information and processing power in the cloud.

Read more at Popular Mechanics

Your visitors spend around 5 seconds on your web site to figure out whether it’s for them. If they visit your site, you want to make sure they are not waiting for pages to load.

Web site speed test sites are useful as they help measure the download size, as well as simulating the time users have to wait for web pages to download on various internet connections. Remember, depending on where your users are, they may not always be on broadband connections, check your web analytics to be sure before using large images or rich media like video.

How it works

The tests loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). It mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser.

Enter a URL to calculate page size, composition, and download time. The services then calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component.

The iWeb service goes one step further by offering advice on how to improve page load time. The service incorporates the current best practices from Website Optimization Secrets, web page size guidelines and trends, and web site optimization techniques into its recommendations.

Top three speedtest web sites

1. Pingdom
2. iWeb speed test
3. Web page analyser

Screenshot showing speed test report from Pingdom.com