This is an important explanation of email changes for all existing clients.

Over this last weekend I have been spending every hour dealing with what seems a simple issue, but in fact is far from it. The hosting company I use, and which many of my clients use announced something very simple – they were switching off phpMail. This is a core tool used by millions of web contact forms, and used by default in many content management systems such as WordPress.

Until a few days ago there was simply no need to question using this tool. WordPress is reported to have been installed over 190 million times and they are happy to ship using phpMail. But there is a problem. Rather than get bogged down in heavy technical details I’ll try to explain in simplified terms.

phpMail is an open relay email tool for sending emails from forms etc. It does not need a password to send an email. It exists behind your site is a protected place. To use it you have some code between your form and phpMail which gathers up all the information in the form and sends it off to your email inbox. Read the rest of this entry »

London calling. This is London calling.

What is it with search engines these days – especially the most famous? They have become so good at knowing where you are and finding results for everything from car tyres to pink taxis in your area that you are increasingly being shut out from the rest of the country! Now this is great for many many searches, and great if your business is completely local, but for businesses like mine, and no doubt many of your clients, this is becoming a real problem.

Though I have many fine customers locally, that’s increasingly all I’m likely to get enquiries from, local businesses. It quite easy in some areas of business to exhaust your local potential client base. I know this acutely from living in New Zealand for 10 years. When I lived in Auckland I got to know all the key players, or at least who the key players were, in several industries. For example I knew all the record labels. Once you had exhausted opportunities with them you were finished. In a city of just over one million people things could feel very small very quickly. The rest of New Zealand was even smaller. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a question I struggle with daily!

I started using Flash with version 4 back in about 1999. The first commerical websites I produced were entirely built with Flash which was quite an achievement as back then designers charged significantly more for Flash skills. It was later I spent time learning HTML, which wasn’t much fun before full-CSS enabled browsers circa 2005.

Because I was reasonably good with Flash I was able to produce hundreds of products for the music industry, in particular many product sites for EMI, Universal, and Virgin Classics. They were fun times where fonts, audio, images and video all came together perfectly. It was probably the closest you’ll get to realising print design online and it was no coincidence that a lot of Flash creators had a print background. HTML was very much second best. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m often asked ‘how long does a website last?’ The technical answer is possibly decades – one built in 1993 would still theoretically be viewable now as old code still works. There is code that we no longer use, but even the most up to date browsers can display the original HTML tags, or at least all of the key ones.

Of course the question is really ‘how long should I keep my website before changing it?’ I usually suggest three to five years is a sensible life-cycle. In the last five years the underlying code has completely changed as browsers have caught up with CSS specifications that have been around a long time. Right now there is wonderful and exciting potential with something called HTML5 – this represents big changes for the better, but still we wait for browsers to be able to use it fully. Read the rest of this entry »