Latest news from The website-lab http://www.website-lab.co.uk en-gb Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:32:09 +0000 tom@website-lab.co.uk Thu, 27 May 2010 16:23:20 +0100 http://www.website-lab.co.uk/news/page/nhs-bright-ideas-for-health-awards/17 Last night The website-lab attended the Bright Ideas for Health awards at the Hilton Hotel in Gateshead. The ceremony is an annual event that recognizes and awards newly emerging ideas in Healthcare across a range of different categories. We are very pleased to announce that First Contact Clinical won an award for their idea SCIPit in the category of Software and IT innovation. SCIP It (Share, Compare, Ideas, Plan) is an online motivational tool to help people bring about healthy changes in their lives. The idea was first bought to us in January by Dr. David Julien. From the initial idea, development and final deployment, we have worked very closely with First Contact Clinical in helping to design and develop the SCIPit website and we are very proud that it has won an award. The site has already received very positive feedback and we are looking forward to the continuing development of the application. To find out more information about SCIPit and to try it out for yourself, please visit http://www.scipit.co.uk Sat, 01 May 2010 11:04:54 +0100 http://www.website-lab.co.uk/news/page/the-website-lab-at-dibi-web-conference-2010/16 Just recently The website-lab attended the first DIBI web conference (that’s “Design It, Build it”) held at the famous Sage building about a 10 minute walk from our offices in NewcastleGateshead. The conference brought together some of the UK’s top web design and development talent who were there to talk about their area of expertise. On arrival, the atmosphere was pretty relaxed, with most dressed fairly casually and enjoying the sweets and treats that had been left for delegates to enjoy throughout the day. Upon registering we were giving a neat little booklet attached to a coloured lanyard, blue for designers and orange for developers, I thought this was a really good idea, it was a great platform to strike up a conversation with and made networking easier. The conference ran two track, one set of talks for developers and the other for designers. My first port of call was with Elliot Kember and “Pimp your app using jQuery”. Although I didn’t take anything new away with me, it was nice to hear jQuery been discussed with such energy and humour. The website-lab use jQuery fairly heavily in almost all sites we develop because it’s fast, robust and fun to use and so it was nice to see that the majority of delegates at the conference agreed. Last.fm vs the Xbox wasn’t quite what I expected it to be. It was an excellent introduction into how enterprise size web applications are managed and the points that need to be considered when they expand. This was of particular interest and revelavance to us as The website-lab is currently working on some web applications that are expected to have a high turn over of traffic, hearing about the process involved with scaling large sites and how some of the tools used to manage this left me feel confident, even if we aren’t dealing with some of the scary numbers that Last.fm were! I spoke with David Singleton briefly after his talk, the geek in me really wanted to ask him if he’d been named after the software design pattern but I thought I’d make better use of the time and he recommended learning more about “Squid” as an excellent web cache deamon. My favourite talk of all was by Michael Bruton-spall, who works for “the guardian” and is basically responsible for keeping the site up and running. The guardian’s website is of course a very high traffic news hub that has thousands of articles, comments and rich media to manage. It was refreshing to see that Michael was still very much enthusiastic and excited about what he does and this came across in his passionate discussion of what it actually takes to keep a site as big as the guardian serving pages even when millions of people are demanding it at the same time. Although The website-lab uses one of the best web hosting companies in the country, this talk has inspired me to dig deeper and learn more about server administration. The day was a lot of fun and we everyone was well taken care of (even those web developers who needed their caffeine). The tone of the conference said to me “Come and learn but remember to have fun!” The after party gave everyone a chance to relax and reflect on the day, the fun money casino was a great place to meet others and the free bar and top notch food meant everyone was in high spirits. I even managed to catch a moment with a developer who had worked on the ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter which left me feeling a little bit star struck, as they are both two frameworks I am very impressed by and use a lot. Over pizza and drinks we met a small group of students who were studying web design at Newcastle College and had attended the conference hoping to learn a bit more about the industry and network. It was a lot of fun hearing about what they were learning and the particular areas that interested them. I have only managed to highlight a small part of DIBI but I’m pleased to hear they’re planning to do the same thing again next year, as The website-lab’s fist major web industry conference I can confidently say it was a big success and many other delegates shared this sentiment. If you’d like to learn more about the conference you can visit www.dibi.co.uk. Tue, 13 Apr 2010 10:22:53 +0100 http://www.website-lab.co.uk/news/page/subscription-to-.net-magazine/15 Last Saturday, I was in the Metro Centre and was having a wander around WHSmith. An interesting front cover of a magazine grabbed my eyes and so I thought I’d investigate. It read “The hackers guide to site security”, now as a security freak I immediately had to pick it up and have a quick read. I had always dismissed .net magazine as a magazine for .net developers, always seemed to me like a bit of niche publication but didn’t give it a second thought. Pleased I did manage to pick up .net though, it’s just the magazine I’ve always been looking for. The website-lab used to receive Web Designer magazine every month but didn’t have very much in it of interest to me, except for the odd jQuery tutorial it was very much design oriented (more Tom’s stuff). So, we’ve decided to get ourselves a year subscription to .net. Looking forward to having something to read while I’m eating my egg mayo sandwich! Wed, 07 Apr 2010 11:02:03 +0100 http://www.website-lab.co.uk/news/page/recycling-at-the-website-lab/14 Here at The website-lab we think it is very important to reuse and recycle. Just as I reuse code to keep my applications clean and bug free, we also try and reuse and recycle everything we use in the office. We have our own little green policy to help keep our business carbon foot print down, we always cycle to work come rain or shine (or even bad snow), we always take public transport when meeting clients who are outside the Newcastle area and we recycle all paper, metal and plastics! Whenever we pick our lunch up from Morrison’s we always take our own bags! The picture to the right shows a little of what we got up to this morning. As a web developer, I work on a diet of energy drinks but because I drink so many, we don’t just chuck them out, we put them in a recycle bin and when there’s enough, we crush them all (very noisy business but quite therapeutic) and take them downstairs, where our building has been kind enough to provide a large bin for recyclables! Thu, 01 Apr 2010 14:43:38 +0100 http://www.website-lab.co.uk/news/page/web-development-my-story/13 Back in my novice days, when I first started developing for the web, all my PHP sites were written in quick and easy procedural code. This was great I thought; I could knock together a website in no time, as long as I knew exactly what I was developing. The problems always came when a client would come back a month or two later and ask to have something changed. I would revisit a previous project only to be greeted by a spaghetti meal of html, php, javascript, sql and css, all tangled together on the same plate. God forbid if the client asked for some changed or new functionality, because my application made no use of classes or objects, a lot of the code I wrote would be copied and pasted where it was necessary *cringe*. I knew something had to be done about this and it was around this time I began to see how object oriented programming was a god send. By creating classes and using objects I was able to create (what I like to call) mini-applications within a big application. This meant I could reuse the same code easily when performing tasks which were often repeated (form validation, file uploading, database administration). I continued to create great applications like this for a long time and even used some great classes that people had developed and generously shared with the rest of the development community. It was around this time I began to wonder, has anyone created a massive library off all of these classes which share similar naming conventions, class structure and would separate the different areas of programming into more manageable and sensible sections? I put my thinking cap on and did some research, and I came across the Zend Framework and CodeIgniter. Wow, this was my first introduction to MVC programming and I have never look back since. After comparing the two excellent PHP frameworks, I decided to use CodeIgniter as the Zend Framework seemed very verbose and was more suited to enterprise projects in my opinion. CodeIgniter was easy to get to grips with, still had the “wild west” feel I loved about PHP and was super fast with great documentation! With an MVC framework I have managed to develop applications extremely fast and the best part is, when a client asks for changes or new functionality, it’s so easy to do so. Keeping costs down and the quality of our service top notch! If you’re fairly new to PHP, or software development in general, I would still always suggest you spend some time working with procedural code, it can give you an appreciation and understanding of what is happening behind the scenes, using an MVC framework has often left me forgetting just how much time and effort I’m actually saving! Remember though, web development is an art of sorts. We will always have great new tools, frameworks and guides to make our jobs easier but we all must take responsibility when it comes to adhering to best practices, commenting and documenting code and above all ALWAYS plan for extensibility and changes within your applications (everyone loves to change things). Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:26:44 +0000 http://www.website-lab.co.uk/news/page/web-design-workshop-with-codeworks/12 On Friday last week, the website lab visited a workshop run by Codeworks that demonstrated the exciting news features of CSS3 and HTML5. We also got some got told some good techniques and tips for proper project management and dealing with clients in a proffesional and efficient manner! Towards the end of the day, we were asked to create any type of digital media using the word "Freedom" to inspire us. We took sometime to come up with something a little creative and exciting, we came up with the idea of taking the word Freedom, splitting the letters up and allowing the user to bounce them around the page "freely". Whenever the user dropped a letter on the page, a new tweet would appear from Twitter that contained the word freedom. The little project made us of jQuery, CSS, xHTML and the Twitter API. To take a look at our submission that took little under 2 hours to make! Click here Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:01:32 +0000 http://www.website-lab.co.uk/news/page/hard-at-work-in-the-lab/10 It has been a very busy couple of weeks. We are pitching for some really exciting contracts at the moment and we're looking forward to sharing more information about them when we can! We've just gone live this week with two more websites as well. We're working on writing them up for the portfolio section of this site, but if you just can't wait to see them, head to these links: firstcontactclinical.co.uk, finehardwoodboxes.co.uk. The First Contact Clinical site is going to serve as their 'home site', or a base of operations if you will. First contact offer a wide range of services, and we're continuing to work with them to develop their online presence. The site for Peter Lloyd was a replacement for a long outdated site. The idea for this was to create something that was very easy for him to update whilst maintaining a similar design Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:12:12 +0000 http://www.website-lab.co.uk/news/page/design-it-build-it-conference/9 The website-lab will be attending the DIBI conference at the Sage, Gateshead in April. Looks like it'll be a great day out for us both. Check out their website for more information: www.dibiconference.com Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:32:09 +0000 http://www.website-lab.co.uk/news/page/revisiting-mysql/7 I've used MySQL in almost all the web applications I have written here at the website lab. My first experience with it was creating a database driven repair site, I then went on to develop a shopping cart and then a blog. The more time you spend with MySQL, the more you learn about relational databases, normalisation and indexes. I feel that up until now I haven't really taken advantage of the raw power of MySQL. After been asked to create some seriously thorough statistical informtion for a recent client, I knew the most efficient way of doing this would be with MySQL. If you delve a little deeper than just your simple SELECT queries, you'll find MySQL has a whole host of very powerful and useful functions and is great for handling conditionals. Doing all your filtering and sorting with MySQL helps remove another layer of complication from your application and means nine times out of ten, you'll only get the data you need, ready to be display neatly in your view!