27-01-2012 - What happened to January?
We've been very busy here so far this year and as a result the month seems to have disappeared in a blink. It's a cold but sunny day outside the window highlighting the beauty of the colours of the sky, trees and grass - I wonder how many website designs have been inspired by that very colour scheme - sky blue header, white content section and green footer - I know I've seen at least one like that!
04-01-2012 - Happy New Year
Wishing everyone a happy and prosperous New Year! I've set myself a resolution for 2012, something I don't always do, I believe if everyone adopts a positive attitude about the economy and pays less credence to the press banging on about doom and gloom, then we can surely beat the thing and turn it around. The doom and gloom merchants in the press over exaggerate the situation to sell their news, in fact perhaps it could be said that they're in effect prolonging the whole thing 'cos it gives them a story. Any way, let's all adopt a positive attitude for 2012, after all there's a lot of good things due to happen this year to be excited about, think positive for 2012.
12-12-2011 - The great browser debate
Internet Explorer 6 is now 10 years old and never really displayed websites as they were meant to be seen because it didn't follow W3 standards, in fact the current Explorer 9 is the first Windows internet browser to be anywhere near W3 standards compliant. How does that affect you, how does it affect the website designer/developer?
For the user it means you get to see the website as it was designed to be seen, for the designer/developer it means having to spend hours writing separate code files to make the website display properly in Internet Explorer 6, 7, & 8 - especially 6.
The big question is, when do you stop writing separate files for a 10 year old technology which is currently still used by approximately 3% of the population (see the table below - 5/10/2011).
One things for sure if you do and the website doesn't display correctly for someone in that 3%, the website will cop the blame, not the ancient piece of technology.
I urge anyone out there still viewing the web through Internet Explorer 6 to update it, if you can't then get a copy of another Web Standards Compliant browser such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Opera. Ity's not like upgrading your telly or your car, they are all free and can be downloaded from the internet.
Please do yourself a favour this Christmas, upgrade now, view the internet, not Windows Internet Explorer 6's version of the internet!
18-11-2011 - Cold days and blue skies
Time seems to have slipped by very quickly since my last blog but it's been pretty full on here at Toffee HQ. We've been working on some new websites plus some "print 'n web" packages - this is where we provide a complete package of letterheads, comp slips, business cards and a website. The main advantage of this is that the whole corporate branding is completed by the same team with cost savings across the board for each item.
Meanwhile the heating has gone on and even lights coming on during the day a sure sign of the approaching winter. Stay warm!
05-10-2011 - Browser statistics
The ever present issue of browser use and what current technology works on what device occurred to me last night when reading about the release of the iPod 5. Below are the usage statistics for the wide range of web browsers, from the ancient and archaic Internet Explorer 6 to Firefox 7. Thankfully, IE6 is gradually dying out with it's users finally deciding to look at the real internet rather than IE6's rendition of it.
Having said that the majority of IE users appear to be on IE8 which is only marginally better than IE6 - IE8 is the one that suggests that the internet is broken and you may need to click a button on the browser to make it better - the button just makes the browser render the website correctly.
IE9 is finally getting somewhere near to the web standards compliancy of Chrome, Firefox & Safari, only much slower.
IE10 is on it's way and this time having finally concluded that the world has adopted W3 web standards, Microsoft are promising complete standards compliancy, something they changed their mind on with IE8 at the last hour.
| Browser | August | September | change | relative |
| IE 9.0 | 8.05% | 8.94% | +0.89% | +11/10% |
| IE 8.0 | 25.68% | 25.08% | -0.60% | -2.30% |
| IE 7.0 | 5.07% | 4.79% | -0.28% | -5.50%> |
| IE 6.0 | 3.09% | 2.85% | -0.24% | -7.80% |
| Firefox 4.0+ | 18.10% | 18.52% | +0.42% | +2.30% |
| Firefox 3.6- | 9.39% | 8.27% | -1.12% | -11.90% |
| Chrome | 23.17% | 23.65% | +0.48% | +2.10% |
| Safari | 5.18% | 5.60% | +0.42% | +8.10% |
| Opera | 1.67% | 1.70% | +0.03% | +1.80% |
| Others | 0.60% | 0.60% | +0.00% | +0.00% |
| IE (all) | 41.89% | 41.66% | -0.23% | -0.50% |
| Firefox (all) | 27.49% | 26.79% | -0.70% | -2.50% |
28-09-2011 - Sunshine and SEO
What a turn around for the weather, glorious sunshine but it's all eyes on screens here at Toffee HQ, we've got search engine optimisation (SEO) going on, a couple of new website designs to be built into their respective Content Management Systems (CMS) and some modifications to an estate agency website. My turn to make the tea so better crack on.
15-09-2011 - CMS, design and developments
It's been quite a week here, so far, setting up and developing 2 new websites, both on the ModX content management framework (CMS). ModX is very clever and quite straight forward to apply a design to, it's tag based system means we can quickly write a script, set it up as a chunk with a tag name, then simply attach the tag wherever we want to deploy that script. Applying a design doesn't require cutting the design up into sections to create a template, like WordPress, so saves time and effort in the development process. This is the kind of fun we have at Toffee HQ!
06-09-2011 - Wet day in website developments
A very wet day outside today, but the focus at Toffee HQ is very much on a couple of website projects and setting up a landing page for a new project, we try to avoid the "under construction" type of page in favour of something that will look like the finished product, containing contact details instead, that way it serves a purpose until the job is done. Stay dry everyone.