Category Archives: Web Development

Posts and articles about developing websites.

2013 – The year of responsive web design

With tablet sales expected to exceed 100 million this year, media companies are seeing a huge move towards mobile traffic. Responsive web design is the most popular way to accommodate this change allowing users to access the one website on various devices.

http://mashable.com/2012/12/11/responsive-web-design/

Parallax

HigherSites is always on the lookout for new trends to help set our client’s sites high above their competition. One effect that has been around for a while, but lately is becoming more used and talked about is ‘parallax scrolling’. The Parallax effect or parallax scrolling in web design is the technique that features layered images that move around the website in different speeds/perspectives creating a nice and interesting 3D illusion.

Parallax is a difference in the in the apparent position of an object viewed along different lines of sight. The term derives from the Greek word parallaxis, meaning alteration. An example that certainly makes scrolling around websites an interesting experience can be found at http://www.nikebetterworld.com/

5 ways to make your website a ‘tool’ not a brochure.

Of late (and I suspect it’s due to burgeoning financial problems) I have experienced a large number of clients coming to me for suggestions on how to improve their website and make it do ‘more’ for them. This is great because for ages I’ve been encouraging them to use it as more than just a pretty picture telling people what they do, so I’ve put together a Smashing Mag style 5 point list on what I have been advising. Continue reading →

Choosing between PHP and MySQL for quick jobs

I recently imported a database which included a selection of French postcodes. Because of a bug with the original export (received in a spreadhseet) some of the postcodes were missing the leading zeros, and some of them actually had more leading zero’s than were required.

Unfortunately the problem wasn’t raised until the data was imported, and a fresh import was going to take me hours. Fortunately all French postcodes are 5 characters long so it was possible to fix this problem programmatically. Continue reading →

The advantages of visualising design scenarios

Author: Rob Swan

Many moons ago, when I was an undergraduate, I worked as a video game functionality tester in Brighton. There was a lot of pizza and late night gaming involved, but amongst all of the fun I saw the repeated mistakes of many, many developers and it taught me a core concept:

“Learn to visualise all possible design scenarios” Continue reading →

Writing secure form to email scripts with the PHP mail() function

Spammers all around the globe are profiting on a daily basis from poorly written form to email scripts. Scripts like this can be abused by spammers, who will inject new email headers into the form fields, effectively allowing them to send whatever message they want, to whomever they want, courtesy of your mail server. Once they find a vulnerable script page, they will mercilessly hit it with their spam robots and send as much spam as they can until your server inevitably keels over and dies, possibly taking your websites with it. Cue phone calls from lots of unhappy customers and a time-consuming mail queue clean-up job.

Continue reading →