Are you in technical debt?

Even though I wasn't previously familiar with the term, "Technical Debt" is something I consider for clients every day. I've just read a very interesting article on SitePoint about technical debt, putting it in comparison to personal debt and credit cards. Technical Debt, a phrase coined by Ward Cunningham in…

Managing orders in Open Cart

Once your Open Cart shop is all set up, and the orders start flooding/trickling in you'll need to be able to manage them.On your Admin dashboard when you first log in you'll see a list of recent orders, with an option to View next to each one. Clicking this View…

Has link building changed?

I was just reading an article on how to get more out of your website and one line in particular jumped out at me. The article said: "A word of caution – link building isn't what it used to be. Only do it with reputable sites." By this I assume…

Creating a basic table in WordPress using Easy Table

As the name might suggest, creating a table in Wordpress using Easy Table is very easy.Creating a tableOnce the plugin is installed you simply go to the text editor within wordpress and enter:[table][/table]Populating your tableTo give your table some data you simply type in the text you want to appear…

A Comprehensive(ish) List of Things to Consider when Building a Website in 2013

I wanted to put this list together as a checklist of things to remember when creating a new site, and more specifically when creating and developing our new site at 18aproductions.co.uk (coming soon...). This is all written in very much a 'note' form as there's just so much to cover.…

Server migration issues

Some of our hosting clients may be experiencing problems with their hosting and email but we are working to get this resolved as soon as possible.Yesterday evening our server alerts made us aware of a problem with the hosting of some of our clients' sites. We immediately investigated everything we…

How to Work Locally

To develop locally there are a number of steps you need to take to get setup. I'm working on a Windows 7 PC. 1. Download Wamp or Xampp Whichever takes your fancy. Personally I work with Wamp, but I've heard good things about Xampp too. 2. Download all the files…

Git based development -> staging -> live workflow

I've been trying to get my head around a simple git based workflow for deploying from development to staging to live server environments. I found this post extremely useful in achieving a basic development -> live workflow, but adding in a staging step is very useful if you want to…

Changes to OpenCart payment’s controller inline with WorldPay updates

If you use WorldPay to process your payments on your OpenCart shop you may have recently received emails from them about updates to their system.For a client running OpenCart v. 1.5.1.3.1 I've just made the following changes to their WorldPay controller, so as to call to a different WorldPay URL.…

WordPress security alert!!

WordPress have been hit recently by attackers targeting the "admin" user account.The incredibly popular website software is used by millions of websites around the world and it's important to keep your installation of WordPress up to date.The people attacking WordPress currently seem to be aiming their attack at both stand…

How to get around Duplicate Content issues with Cloudfront CDN

Cloudfront is Amazon's Content Delivery Network (CDN) offering and provides web developers with an easy to use and cost effective way of letting people access content from a variety of regions around the world with the aim of speeding up website delivery. This isn't a guide to using Cloudfront -…

How to add special offers, discounts and vouchers in OpenCart

There are various ways you can offer discounts to your customers with OpenCart - you can do it via "Specials", "Discounts" or "Coupons" (voucher codes).Specials:Specials let you mark an item as being reduced in price - depending on your theme, this might show the old price with a line through…