TalkTalk Business Websites – A Brief Encounter

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I’ll keep this purposely short. I’m just in the process of attempting to transfer a basic 3 page static “Talktalk business website”, with a contact form from TalkTalk Business to my own hosting provider. This should be an easy task and a task I can do blindfolded for a tiny static website consisting of 3 pages.

My client asked TalkTalk for a copy of the site’s files (which will consist of a couple of html files and a single server side script to process the contact form). Nothing ground breaking by any means.

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Opencart 1.5.5 – Product Filters

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Opencart have implemented product filters as of 1.5.5. In my opinion, category level product filters are a much needed feature and something Opencart has been lacking for a while. However, in true Opencart style, to date their documentation/announcement is completely lacking, simply citing “Product Filters” as a new feature – even their demo store still uses Opencart 1.5.4, meaning you won’t even be able to see the amazing new Opencart product filters in action!

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Counter Cache

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Counter Cache (or Counter Cache Columns) is the term coined when adding a column to data tables in order to keeps track of aggregate data in an application. The term “cache” is used because the application has no need to perform costly count queries. It can simply read the value of the “count column”. This practice is less costly when compared to performing separate database queries. The worst case scenario, where the application has database queries within a loop is avoided too.

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Bodyforms’ Perfect Response to Facebook Rant

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Nowadays, companies and brands are wide open to criticism and comments from anyone with an Internet connection. With the dramatic rise of social media, there is no place to hide. Brands and companies needs to deal with such negative criticism and comments in an open, yet transparent way. The worse thing any brand or company can do is to not respond to such comments or try to cover them up with deceptive tactics such as fake replies, negative SEO, paid reviews etc.

Granted, some comments are always going to malicious and spam, but others are genuine and will go viral. This happened to Bodyform when a Facebook commenter, Richard Neill made a humorous rant that questioned the advertising myths in relation to periods:

Hi , as a man I must ask why you have lied to us for all these years . As a child I watched your advertisements with interest as to how at this wonderful time of the month that the female gets to enjoy so many things ,I felt a little jealous. I mean bike riding , rollercoasters, dancing, parachuting, why couldn’t I get to enjoy this time of joy and ‘blue water’ and wings !! Dam my penis!! Then I got a girlfriend, was so happy and couldn’t wait for this joyous adventurous time of the month to happen …..you lied !! There was no joy , no extreme sports , no blue water spilling over wings and no rocking soundtrack oh no no no. Instead I had to fight against every male urge I had to resist screaming wooaaahhhhh bodddyyyyyyfooorrrmmm bodyformed for youuuuuuu as my lady changed from the loving , gentle, normal skin coloured lady to the little girl from the exorcist with added venom and extra 360 degree head spin. Thanks for setting me up for a fall bodyform , you crafty bugger

Richard’s rant went viral and attracted thousands like of likes and comments with days. Although it was said light heatedly, the comment is clearly something that doesn’t reflect too well on the Bodyform brand. The PR people at Bodyform quickly came up, which what I think is a near perfect response, bordering on genius.

To respond to Richard, Bodyform posted tongue in cheek, humerous video repsonse. It opened with the CEO of Bodyform (played by an actress) addressing Richard directly:

Hello Richard. We read your Facebook post with interest, but also a sense of foreboding – and I think it’s time we came clean. We lied to you, Richard. And I want to say sorry.

I’d advise anyone watch the full video, which has notched up thousands of views already. The response exposed the human side of the business and only improved their brand image going forward. Huge kudos to Bodyform for firstly replying – which is arguably the most important part – respond! The response clearly demonstrates that Bodyform understand their audience and how interacting by social media is now essential. As a company, if you’re not doing it then you should start!

If you need an example of how to respond to negative criticism online use Bodyform’s video response to Richard as a model.

Website Transfer Guide – Common Pitfalls & Solutions

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A Different take on the normal “Website Transfer Guide” …

Taking over, or inheriting responsibility for an existing website happens to any web designer or developer at some point. In theory, website transfers sound extremely minor and insignificant – take a backup of the site, re host and away you go. As a result, if you Google something generic like “transfer web site” you’ll get lots of guides that are technically correct but rarely work in theory, as external factors have a big part to play. For instance, look at the website transfer guide of 123-reg.It appears transferring a site is a case of following a couple of basic points. It really isn’t! In reality, taking responsibility for a website is an absolute minefield and deceptively complex. A website transfer guide should reflect these complexities. What follows are some points to consider, from the view of a web developer when doing just that.

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Opencart Theme Development – My Opinion

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Opencart theme development, in it’s current state is flawed in my opinion. Opencart is a great platform for any type of ecommerce store, having a plethora of features for users and a low entry point for developers. As a result, Opencart has plenty of themes available for download, just take a look on Themeforest. Occassionally, to test out various things out I’ll install such themes locally. More often than not the theme will break the store completely, or render parts of the site completely broken.

9 times out of 10 the issue will be down to the theme developer not sticking to basic Opencart theming guides – they’re very basic to say the least. The main point to note is that Opencart, like other ecommerce platforms, uses a fallback technique on the “default” theme. So, for example, if Opencart doesn’t find a template for a category listing page, it will fallback to the template from the default theme. If the latter is not adhered to, and it isn’t – look at some of the so called “premium” themes out there, it makes upgrading very, very painful. There are theme developers out there that are copying over a files for the sake of it, when no changes are made. If your theme literally only has changed the color/layout of the footer, apart from the default stylesheet folder, image folder and header template you only need the footer.tpl in your theme folder.

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Just Search SEO Review

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If you were looking for an honest Just Search SEO Review …

.. apologies. If you were looking for an honest and impartial Just Search SEO review, this post has now been disabled due to pressure from Just Search, they clearly don’t want honest and truthful seo reviews. Just Search deemed my experience with them as something they don’t want on the Internet – which would be pretty boring place if everyone agreed and no one had an opinion. All the facts contained within the original post were verifiable and based upon upon actual events of my personal experience with Just Search and the SEO they performed (or are still performing) on a small website inherited by myself, for which I perform additional web development. The findings are also all backed up via industry standard tools such as Seomoz’s Opensite explorer and Google Analytics.

As a result of the review, Just Search decided to email (and Tweet me!) and instructed me to remove my post. After 2 over weeks of me replying to their email, Just Search have not replied to explain exactly why they think the post was inappropriate. Also, Just Search, copying in mutliple people really doesn’t make your email appear anymore “official” or serious. Personally, I’d just like to know out of interest what was specifically wrong with the original post. Some of the reviews posted on your Review Center page are much worse, highly impartial and don;t provide a balanced view at all.

In the past, I’ve blogged about encounters with larger companies, like Just Search SEO. As a result, I have decided that it’s not worth the time or stress to keep the original post alive. It’s a shame that a genuine and honest post is now no longer here, but I’ve experienced first hand how much pressure a large company will put on you to remove content they disagree with – I’m not saying Just Search would ever become as bad as before (that frankly, was bordering on harassment …), but bigger companies seem to work in a very particular manner when dealing with reviews. If you were looking for a Just Search SEO review, I’d advise you do your own research, use Google to search for the company extensively and ask around for honest reviews – which is what was previously here. The Review Centre is an excellent resource for reviews on potential SEO companies, so I’d advise you start there see www.reviewcentre.com.

Unfortunately, nowadays it seems having an opinion about a company on the Internet isn’t allowed if that view isn’t fully commending the said company.

EDIT 06/11/2012: I’ve received several emails over the last few days (interestingly from anonymous Google mail accounts …) asking me to send them the original post. Due to reasons outlined above, I’m not sending copies out to anyone. In all honesty, I don’t have the time or inclination to deal with emails and pressure from Just Search – I’ve seen this type of effect in the past and don’t want to get involved in it again. End of story. Fin

EDIT 14/11/2012: After I replied to Just Search’s email (on the day they emailed myself) they haven’t emailed me back at all – that’s over 2 weeks ago, with no response – pretty disappointing. Nothing to even acknowledge the fact I replied to their email. This goes hand in hand with what lots of people seem to cite on Review Centre about Just Search (use your common sense in deciding which reviews are genuine and fake …). Also, the the pleb who keeps using variations of bill_seo_uk_8544@ gmail accounts – I won’t be releasing the original Just Search SEO Review, it’s not worth the hassle from them. Simply changing the end four digits and emailing me from a different gmail account won’t suddenly make me changing my mind! Nice try though :) Also, to clarify – I am not any of the following: an annoyed Just Search employee, a competitor or from any other seo company – I’m a web developer.

EDIT 26/11/2012: not sure if Just Search have decided to pull their Review Center account at http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews173642.html, but that have isn’t working for me at all – the rest of the review center site works fine. Very, very fishy Just Search, although not entirely unexpected.

EDIT 28/11/2012: It seems the review center page of Just Search SEO is now back online after a couple of days downtime, with lots of new comments approved. According to commentors (see below) Just Search have registered a new domain name too, not sure what the purpose of that is though. I’ve also noticed at justsearchseoreviews dot co dot uk is now listed in Google. This is a site with no content at all and is simply there for SEO purposes to influence Google. Yuck.

Also, the Review Center have also contacted me via Twitter as they want to speak to me “about seo reviews” – which is extremely odd to say the least, as this blog post is the only SEO review I’ve ever written and I’m not sure how my opinion, concerns them. But still, I’m quite intrigued as to what they could possibly want to talk about. Must be important as they sent me a direct mention on Twitter, and a later, a few follow up messages, urging me to get in touch. All cloak and dagger stuff.

EDIT 30/11/2012: I’ve spoken to the review center about their message yesterday. It concerns a comment made by someone on this article, see here. It turns out the Review Center suspect Just Search of paying their customers for positive reviews and would like me to provide the contact details of “Stephens Plumb” to them. It doesn’t feel right to simply pass on commentor details to a third party, without consent from that commentor. I’ve decided to email the commentor (“Stephens Plumb”) directly so he can make his own mind up. I don’t feel it’s my decision to make and know I;d be pretty annoyed if it was the other way around. However, kudos to the Review Center for noticing things like this and working to keep their site clean – kinda refreshing in this day and age. So, “Stephens Plumb”, the Review Center would like to have a chat if you wish to follow this up, as I’m going to assume you wouldn;t want me to pass on your private email address.

For whatever reason, there are an increased number of comments on this post. I have zero objections to comments that contain a valid email address or link to the website in question. However, comments that are simply slating a company for no good reason, with no mention of your site or nothing specific to verify your point will not be approved – I’ve just deleted 17 comments for this reason alone! Such comments amount to nothing more than spam and are helping no one. You’re welcome to comment, but please keep things clean and base them upon actual, live websites.

Validate Data within A Model using CodeIgniter and MY_Model

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CodeIgniter’s validation library is amazing out of the box and will save any developer an absolute ton of time. However, as CodeIgniter is an MVC framework it’s validation library does encourage data validation directly in controllers – which of course for the “MVC Nazis” out there is against strict MVC principals. So, data validation should strictly happen at the model layer, not in the controller. Moving data validation to the model has a few benefits  – it allows your application to follow to coveted “Fat Model, Skinny Controller” pattern and allows you to validate other data types (not just posted data). Again, you can technically keep things neat by saving your validation rules to a config file and keeping validation in the controller, but that still breaks the MVC principals.

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Why Codeigniter Base Models Rock

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codeigniter base crud modelsThere are a plethora of reasons to use a good base model (also called CRUD Model, MY-Model) for all your CRUD operations in a CodeIgniter (or any) application. Amongst many, a base model will boostrap all models it extends, keep your application as “DRY” as possible and speed up general development. Codeigniter has a pretty neat active record implementation, but you do tend to repeat a lot of the boring database stuff when writing models. In my opinion, you’d be insane not to use a good base model. There are many out there, but I use the amazing base model from Jamie Rumblelow (it deserves and SEO Link before you ask!).

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Yell Websites and Template Recycling – A Review

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yell web design reviewIt’s been fairly common news for a while now that the age old Yell.com offer web design services, or “Yellsites” as some have coined it. There’s been a lot written about this fact, with some people citing lots of reasons why Yell websites are evil. There also a fairly in depth post that goes on to actually explain why the author dislikes yell.com websites over here. Additionally, there is also a big pool of annoyed people over at the infamous reviewcentre.

Personally, I think their sites will never set the world on fire, but at the end of the day Yell are tapping into a certain and very specific niche where the majority of their clients are very small businesses. It’s truly a case of you get what you pay for (even if a Yell.com website will cost you more overtime, which is what I assume is key Yell’s business model). For me, it’s great really, as seem to have lots of clients who currently have a Yell site, realise their site isn’t performing for them and want to move on – in I (or any other web person) step. Yell are clearly going down the bulk route with their sites being mass produced and based upon templates – at the end of the day they aren’t charging bespoke prices (in the short term anyway). I say fair play to them if they want to go down that route. This post isn’t in any way intended to knock Yell.com websites in the least. Although I’m not a fan of their apparent sales patter I keep hearing about where Yellsites say they have a special partnership with Google” or the “Did you know Yell.com is the most searched UK website” – for the record, both of those statements are frankly lies and total rubbish.

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