Web Development by Alistair Robinson

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Archive for May, 2010…

E-commerce for Small Business in The UK: A Starting Point For Web Developers


May 22nd, 2010 8 Comments

NOTE: see the comments for updates about how this went in the end.
I think I’ve unearthed a conspiracy. In the wonderful world of the world-wide web (that’s WWWWW for short), with so much information available, and so many companies selling online, surely there must be a collection of standard procedures for implementing an online shop, and reliable sources of information covering them? Apparently not. How else to explain this except an evil conspiracy? In particular, an evil conspiracy against web designers and developers.
This post is drawn from an e-mail that I sent to a tech savvy client, a small business owner. The email summarized their options for e-commerce, in the specific context of the UK, and it was the result … read on »

CSS Abstracted


May 1st, 2010 2 Comments

Half way through the development of my last site I decided to use PHP files for CSS. I had a few stylesheets, and I found I was constantly going from one to the other to copy and paste hex colour codes. And then later, if I wanted to change a colour, I’d have to change it in all those different places. That really is no way to work.
The answer to this, of course, is variables (or constants), so that you can define your colours in one place. Trouble is, CSS don’t got none. In fact, CSS is lacking in several important ways. What it boils down to is that we struggle to get around the fact that CSS doesn’t work … read on »


©2010 Alistair Robinson