You may notice a new template for the Web Design UK Blog. We have now migrated to BlogEngine.NET and when we get chance will customise the template. At the moment there are some very pressing projects though, so a blog design will have to wait I'm afraid! It will also allow us to customise blogs for clients, as well as work out the SEO impact of using BlogEngine.NET as opposed to Wordpress, which when configured correctly is rather good for SEO. The technical issues with Wordpress however far outweighed good SEO on a fairly infant blog. I'm signing out now, but see you for the next post, which will hopefully be an eye opener about my favourite ASP.NET control!

In my last post about our complete move to .NET I mentioned that we would trial BlogEngine.NET. After a fairly short trial we are going to attempt a Wordpress to BlogEngine.NET migration! This, in essence, seems a fairly straight forward transition to make but we will have to see how the URLs turn out. Obviously they will be different to the Wordpress ones, and should still retain the keyword richness, but only time will tell. I will post part 2 when the migration is complete and we can edit Wordpress posts in BlogEngine.NET as well as reference any code we have borrowed. As well as being written in C# (our favourite language), BlogEngine.NET is also remarkably easy to theme, in contrast to Wordpress where you need to change several files and know PHP. With BlogEngine.NET there are 3 code files plus the CSS and you don't even need to know any ASP.NET, though HTML would be advantageous.

As you may well know, our knowledge is based largely around Microsoft based products and languages, however there is still one area where we are struggling a little bit. That is this very blog! Yes, it’s built on Wordpress, which is a great product, and one of the best things to happen to PHP. However, following a server upgrade some of the wheels have come off Wordpress a little and things aren’t quite as they should be in Blogville! We currently rely on plugins for this, and also for client blogs which seem to be causing no end of instability following the move to the new server. As such, and with the desire to be able to extend our blogging client, as well as provide a lot greater customisation options for clients, we are trialling Blogengine.NET, an open source blogging engine written in C#. Should it tick a few boxes, particularly in respect to search engine optimisation, then it will be our blog of choice moving forward for clients, allowing us to support them more fully rather than a plugin causing a problem and not knowing where to start because it’s written in PHP (which has it’s own set of issues with regard to configuration etc). We find that things tend to just work with ASP.NET whereas our limited experience of PHP has meant we have to fiddle and tweak rather too much, especially on someone else’s code! I will post in future with regard to the success of Blogengine.NET and you never know it may just be a Blogengine.NET post by then!

As a slight diversion from the straightforward web design posts that I normally write - I am going to hit a technical one here! I have posted tweets on the Mediasmith UK Twitter page about a small virtualisation project with VMWare's ESXi 4.0, but for the technically minded (aka geeks!) here's the lowdown.

We have been running 2 servers for development for some time now. The original one, a HP ML350 Dual P3 1GHz with 2.1Gb RAM and 3 x 36.4Gb 10k hard drives has been suffering a little bit of late with some fairly hefty site rebuilding duties, resulting in a reboot each time the scripts have run, and so it was time to take some pressure off and put it all onto the new server. The new server incidentally is a HP ML150 G5 with a Xeon Quad-core 2GHz processor, 6Gb RAM and 3 x 146Gb 15k hard drives. For some reason it did ship with a low end RAID controller though which could only handle RAID 0 or RAID 1; meaning that for the past months it has only been running with 146Gb capacity and with a hot spare drive.

The first thing to do was fix this situation and I found a new HP Smart Array P800 RAID controller on eBay at a very reasonable price. After performing 2 backups (one online and one offline - you can never be too careful) of the data on the ML 150, I installed the new RAID beast. Beast being the operative word! I have never seen a RAID card come online so fast. Oh and one press of a button and it set up the RAID array in the correct manner. We now had 298Gb in a RAID 5 array, on a much more powerful controller - awesome.

Having been a little bit skeptical of this whole virtualisation malarky I had previously run a quick test on a HP ML115 which coped OK, and it seemed easy enough to set up using ESXi 4. I proceeded to setup ESXi on the ML150 and sure enough a few minutes later it was ready to install the virtual machines. One of the beauties of ESXi is that it allows you to set the number of cores available (if you have a multicore processor), the amount of RAM and disk space for each VM (Virtual Machine). This is in a free and easy to use package. My one gripe is the VMWare Go is still a bit hit and miss as to whether it will work correctly, and downloading vSphere from the ESXi server is a much more robust option to set the VMs up.

Firstly came the domain controller / file server. It doesn't require much power, but plenty of disk space. ESXi allows you to set this up. 1 core @ 2GHz, 2Gb RAM and 150Gb of disk space to be precise. Try buying a server with that oddball spec! The DC was up in no time with File server role added, and running way faster than the resources I had allowed it suggested it might. Then came the application server which is running ASP.NET, SQL Server 2008 and the 3CX phone system with the 3 cores, 4Gb RAM and 85Gb disk space. The application server is also a Certificate Server as one of our requirements for the virtualisation was to have an externally accessible server and a non-accessible one, with SSL connection to the accessible one. ESXi allowed us to do this. Both VMs are running exceptionally well, in fact better than might be expected of 2 physical machines of their specs. Moving forward we can now say that virtualisation will definitely be an option for some clients, depending on their current hardware, to support our web applications. And after looking at Hyper-V, I have to admit, although we love Microsoft, it's the VMWare product that holds the big cards. Quicker to install, a smaller footprint, a doddle to manage and still free - it is a fantastic product.

As an ASP.NET developer you tend to come across all kinds of weird and wonderful anomalies; file or application permissions and incorrectly structured web.config files seem to be some of the most popular ones. However you see them once or twice and intuitively know how to fix them next time even if you have had to Google the problem originally. The chances are someone else has come across the problem before and fixed it but there are sometimes several fixes for the same problem and you sometimes see some that are a mile from what anyone else has found and wonder if they can really work. My experience shows that often the more out there ideas are the ones that you try last in desperation, more hoping than applying any belief that the solution will work.

One such case of 1000 answers to 1 error is my first attempt at an ASP.NET application in Windows 7. Sure the Microsoft site tells you all the wonderful things that you can do with Windows 7, SQL Server 2008 Express and ASP.NET running on IIS7. What it seems to fail to tell you is that Microsoft have chosen some rather strange  configuration for the IIS7 default setup in Windows 7. I discovered this when I tried to run an ASP.NET application to test a client machine capability. The 1st error I encountered was a 500.19 error stating that my web.config file was incorrectly structured, but it could also be an application permisson error with the <handlers> tag highlighted in red. Incidentally the error code was 0x80070021. I found this post from Anil Ruia on the IIS forums site. It proved very useful. At first I simply followed his instructions but found I didn't have permission, so followed these steps:

1. Ran Command Prompt as Administrator - go to Start, type in cmd in the search and right click cmd.exe that appears. Click Run as Administrator


2. Navigated to the %windir%\\System32\\inetsrv folder - type cd %windir%/System32/inetsrv and press enter


3. Ran the following command in command prompt - type appcmd unlock config -section:system.webServer/handlers and press enter. You should receive a message to say that the section is unlocked.


4. Ran appconfig unlock config -section:system.webServer/modules - after solving the handlers problem I found that modules was locked too.


5. I still faced a problem though in that IIS wasn't handling ASP.NET pages. I discovered that the default options when installing IIS (through Turn Windows Features On or Off in Control Panel --> Programs) didn't allow it to handle ASP.NET! Bizarre. I enabled this option and now everything works.

Here is a screenshot of the options that need to be selected. Now that I know this, the sensible option is to select this when installing IIS:

I can now go back to the client and run this on his machine to test the application performance. What a relief!

 

Testimonial

I would like to thank Mediasmith Web Design for the great work and support that's been achieved over the last 6 month. Since moving to our office in the Burnley Business centre we have built a great relationship with Mediasmith Web Design . We have now been working with Mediasmith Web Design on a number of important web design projects. Monkeyfish Marketing are very pleased with the results and design work done with the Mediasmith Web Design team. Monkeyfish Marketing decided on moving back to Burnley in the Dylan Harvey centre, a luxury office complex in the Rosegrove area of Burnley. When we invited Mediasmith Web Design to the Dylan Harvey office in December we had a couple of meetings about web design and thanked then for all their hard work. Monkeyfish Marketing are looking forward to the year 2010 and expanding our operations to other Dylan Harvey offices around the north-west. We hope Mediasmith Web Design are happy working with Monkeyfish Marketing and enjoy a very busy year.

If you're looking for web design in Burnley then why not give Mediasmith Web Design a call.

If you're interested in Luxury offices in the north-west then contact Toby Whittaker at the Dylan Harvey B1.co.uk centre in Burnley. View other office locations to rent. The Dylan Harvey Blackburn office to rent, Dylan Harvey Preston office to rent, Dylan Harvey Blackpool office to rent.

Using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool I found a good search term and that a relevant domain name was available, but prior to searching for the keywords I had to fill in the obligatory CAPTCHA word, which showed me that it seems Christmas may have come slightly early in the Googleplex. Yes, this is 100% genuine. The only way it has seen Photoshop is for me to crop the image and save it for web!

 

Enjoy this Christmas treat from Google!

 

Outsourcing is a buzz word at the moment in web development and search engine optimisation (SEO). With the plethora of companies available to outsource web work to in Asia, there is a temptation for many companies to do this. I have touched on it in my 2nd good web design post.

It may be no surprise that outsourcing can be risky, and it seems that a major player is taking these risks. We have seen 1st hand one of the risks involved in a job that we have had to quote for. The client had been promised an SEO friendly website by their web design company, who claim that all their sites come with basic SEO. Attached to this site is a content management system which uses some rather basic, and unorthodox methods. Certain aspects of the content management system (CMS) will write data to a database, and front end pages retrieve it. That is fine. The problem has arisen though, when some of the other web pages don't have their data saved in the database, but to static HTML pages instead. This then prevents the database being used as the source of meta data for the pages. To compound this problem, the site uses a Master Page to derive its design from, which in turn contains the page title, keywords and description. The end result is that each page of the site has exactly the same meta data which is pretty useless!

With the combination of these 2 issues, the solution will never be the tidiest or slickest as the client has already had to pay out for the website, and as a new business it is another cost they could really do without!

There is a simple moral to this story. When you buy your website with a content management system, ask if you can have unique meta tags for each page. They are building blocks of SEO and to have to add the functionality for this at a later date will cost more in the long run.

A question which has been burning in web design for some time is which is better to use when building a website, tables or divs. It largely depends on the site, but most purists will always say divs due to the accuracy with which you can place items on a page, and the ease of which you can then change the layout in CSS. Back when we started, there wasn't the argument as CSS and browsers weren't so advanced as to have the option of choosing between the two.

Tables as their name suggests, are designed to display data, therefore if you are listing, for example a library of books in a simple fashion, a table will do nicely. Equally when dynamically loading data from a database, a tabular structure has traditionally been used.

Pros of Tables

Tables have some advantages:

• Older browsers will support them


• Can be much quicker to develop for simple sites


• Data intensive websites that need to have a certain degree of compatibility with spreadsheets can easily be created so that users can copy and paste the data

Pros of Divs

Divs also have their advantages, and generally speaking a pro for one is a con for the other.

• Smaller page sizes mean the site can load faster


• You can accurately design layout elements to ensure cross-browser compatibility


• The design should be easier to update by using CSS


• Some say divs are more search engine friendly. This comes from the smaller pages sizes, and less tags so that the spiders don't have to crawl through excess tags to get to the content. The increased load speed could also have an effect on search engine friendliness

Overall we tend to use divs as the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The extra time spent on tweaking the page layouts mean that visitors can have the same experience whichever web browser they choose. On this note, I would like to point out a great article on div layouts, to achieve one of the most popular results (and tempting usages of tables); to create a 3 column website. Yes we have used Sheriar Designs' Holy Grail for inspiration on a current project! The difference being that we are using a 3 column header and 3 column content section, and slightly more divs!

A while ago we wrote an introduction to good web design. In this second post we are going to go through some more tips on how to improve the look, feel and experience for your users. We have been scouring the internet and found some real howlers which inspire the topics involved in this web design blog post. We will look at some of the more general topics of web design, and choosing a web designer, rather than the tecnical aspects of web design.

Choosing a Web Designer

Choosing the right web designer or web design company is vitally important. In an unregulated industry, with massive variations in price and quality of websites being produced, there are many web design companies who fail to produce good web design, or at a realistic price.

Outsourcing abroad is a very popular option for web design, to the likes of India and the Phillipines, due to potential cost savings and a high skill level. Indeed, any web development forums and help sites will contain a lot of good quality ideas and code from these locations. However, as with all things in life, there are pitfalls. Some of which may cost your business valuable traffic and sales.

One example is a former client, who asked if we'd mind if he passed the new websites to someone else and we would still deal with server hardware and software development. This was fine as there are a couple of small sites, which we won't really be specialising in. This has been passed to his friend who has outsourced to India. There are a couple of mistakes been made in the re-development of the website. Firstly, there are a couple of examples of bad English & mis-spelling. Typos happen on most sites nowadays, so that is reasonably minor. They have also published an IP phone number which at the moment isn't a commonly understood technology, so why will people phone a number where they don't know how much the call will cost?? Secondly, there are sections of repeated text, in French! This would indicate that the site is under development, however, in that case it is very bad practice to put a development site onto a production domain name. The biggest one of all is that the client is a UK company with a site hosted in India. Here's a TOP TIP from the Web Design UK Blog - Host your website in the country of your target market! Search engines can tell where your site is hosted and they generally prioritise listings from the country. Therefore a site hosted in the USA will rank higher for US users than UK users.

Bad Use of Website Validation Tests

There are many websites out there that seemingly put the validation logos from the W3C without seeming to understand what they mean. Why do we think that they don't understand? Well if you click on one and you get 14 errors and maybe the odd warning, it is a clue that the web designer didn't really understand the concept of standards and validation. Although we haven't quantified them exactly, there is a huge number!

Website validation is important as Google, and the major search engines, place some weighting on a website that meets the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. It is just one more little thing that will help go towards your overall search engine optimisation effort.

Blatant Lies on Websites

We understand that web design has a lot of opinion in it, as with any design discipline. However, when a web designer claims "You need a clear and concise message" in black text, over a dark grey background so that it is barely readable, you do need to question the validity of their claims! As we find more lies we will save them all for a post! It should be a very entertaining read!