My Journal

My last post highlighted one of the aspects of working with clients that sends a web bod to despair. Of course in these cases it’s all about educating the client but sometimes a client will say or ask something that really is difficult to believe and puts them beyond all hope.

Clients from Hell is a website that allows anyone to post their horror client stories and some of the posts really are beyond belief. Anyone involved in website should go read this site as web professionals will get a good laugh and clients should hopefully learn from the mistakes of others. You could always post your own story; I’m waiting for something to come up to have a go at posting myself.

There is one thing I would always like to say to a client but never do because you have to be a bit more diplomatic:

You are not the only client we have!

This comes up in a few situations, as a client you should avoid them at all costs:

Continue reading “Client Tip 3: Timeframes”

This evening I was informed that the ability to add a comment to my site was broken. After a quick test sure enough it was broken. You would have thought I would have figured something was amiss when with so much traffic recently I got absolutely no comments. Well I was still getting spam so I’m blaming that for throwing me off the scent. that threw me off the scent.

Anyways it appears I’ve got the system working again now, although not quite how I’d like. So it’ll be a case of having a look through it all again sometime, amazingly the comments pages were the one area I didn’t touch when redeveloping the site so I’m at a loss to know what went wrong.

If anyone did have problems commenting before I’d still love to hear from any of you via the comments or the contact form. Thanks.

The 404 page is one of the most imaginatively designed web pages in a person’s website. A page totally unrestricted by elements such as navigation and headers that are common on most websites. My own 404 page was very bland; it looked exactly like the rest of the website and had only a few links back to the main website. It was ugly and barely helpful.

Redesigning my site provided the challenge to have a go at doing something more creative.

Continue reading “What to do with a 404 page”

OK, so Smush.it isn’t actually broken but when Yahoo took over the company it’s most useful feature appeared to vanish.

When Smush.it was first released a user was able to insert the top level domain of a website and have Smush.it crawl the entire site and CSS files for images to optimise. When Yahoo took over the only ways to optimise images are to do it page by page or upload a maximum of 5 images at a time. Both these options are far from ideal.

What to do

The solution is so simple, I’m not sure why it took me so long to figure it out. If the best you can do is use the YSlow plugin to smush images displayed on a single page then all that is required is for that single page to be created to display all the images within a website.

Continue reading “Fixing Smush.it”