Firetop Ltd » Design & Usability

New Gift/Hint Email Tool Launched

Matt Peskett — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:30:30 +0000

With Christmas approaching the folks at RacingPost.com asked Firetop to design and build an interactive gift suggestion tool. The single page tool at http://gifts.racingpost.com lets people identify their preferred RacingPost.com product and compose a personalised HTML email message to a friend or relative highlighting their Christmas gift selection. The page contains a dynamic data capture form which populates an HTML email with a relevant image and text… and can also be previewed live as it is composed by the user!

This new email marketing tool is Open Source (as usual) built using PHP and MYSQL. We have employed some fairly simple yet effective Ajax and Javascript functionality to generate the informational overlay pop-ups and generate the dynamic email builder preview. Now we just hope that it helps all those RacingPost.com customers get the gift they want for Christmas… instead of one they don’t!

Web Design Basics – Firetop’s Trainee

Matt Peskett — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:21:05 +0000

With modern technology evolving as fast as it is, it’s always useful to get the opinion of the younger generation on what’s up and coming in the digital environment. Our young apprentice web designer (aged a little under two and a half) is getting to grips with web usability and layout, today she came to work (late grr!) for two minutes to lay out a basic website design – a 2 columned content area, left menu and horizontal banner… take a look at her handy work, we were fairly impressed:

Magazine Website Template Goes Live

Matt Peskett — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:31:12 +0000

This month the Firetop designers have been hard at work in creating a new optimised website design for William Reed Business Media and the Federation of Wholesale Distributors (FWD). Their rebranded magazine Wholesale News (formerly ProWholesaler) now has a shiny new website design at www.wholesalenews.co.uk (right) incorporating their content and news headlines from thegrocer.co.uk.

The site sits on a PHP/MYSQL based Content Management System (CMS) powered by Hungarian web development company Pressflex. The folks at Pressflex have been super efficient and managed to tweak our HTML to fit their needs for all browsers (including the dreaded IE6). We like their CMS, it works very nicely indeed for publishers and enables traditional print-based publishers to upload XML files for each printed issue whilst also editing and tagging the content themselves.

IE6 browser testing (because it won’t die!)

Matt Peskett — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 09:31:36 +0000

At Firetop we’re really very disappointed by the lead story on the BBC Technology website ‘Microsoft backs long life for IE6’; Microsoft have announced five more years support for their ancient and flawed Internet Explorer 6 browser… taking it to 2014! Website developers hate IE6 because it doesn’t display website code in the same way as IE7 or IE8, Firefox, Safari or Google Chrome

A professional developer has to test multiple browser platforms with each new Website build and create CSS work-arounds to fit the whole gamut of versions, this ensures that a consistent screen display occurs for the majority of people. For the website funder / customer this means more time spent and consequently a more costly development. One could argue that the BBC headline may as well be ‘Microsoft to make Web development more expensive until 2014’.

Given the recent Twitter hashtag popularity on ‘IE6 Must Die’ we would have hoped that Microsoft might have paid attention to the Web developer community! However, as they appear to have done quite the opposite we shall continue to test multiple browser versions via a single PC on an IE6 simulator. This isn’t particularly straight-forward until you look into it and discover Microsoft’s free Virtual PC 2004 download and associated ‘VPC images’:

1. Download Virtual PC 2004

2. Download a suitable Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Image
Here there are many VPC images for IE6, 7 and 8 on XP SP3 and they provide the only really stable and well supported browser testing environment that we can find. The VPC images currently expire on 31st August 2009 so here’s hoping that with the new IE6 support announcement new VPC Images will be loaded in the next few weeks! September update: new VPC images expire January 1, 2010 – PHEW!