Category Archives: News

Improved branding for intraspin.com

intraspin.com has a new logo.  It’s been a long time coming, the previous logo was designed 6 years ago and lacked simplicity and a strong metaphor.

The new logo employs all caps and a bold typeface to present a strong presence to support a somewhat awkward name.  A complete re-brand was considered but decided against at this time.  The target symbol in place of the ‘dot’ in ‘dot com’ represents the marketing-driven approach taken by intraspin.com to web design.  Every detail in Iain’s designwork is customer-focused and can be justified in terms of ROI.

intraspin.com moves to new offices

intraspin.com has recently moved into new offices, shared with the designers of o street and BERG.  Previously a launderette and a general store before that, the new space has been completely renovated to high standard with a contemporary “designer” feel that is already having a massively positive impact on Iain’s creativity and productivity.

SQL required to move a WordPress Site to a new domain

To move a wordpress site from one domain to another, you need to execute the following SQL scripts on the database:
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'http://www.old-domain.com', 'http://www.new-domain.com') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://www.old-domain.com','http://www.new-domain.com');

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://www.old-domain.com', 'http://www.new-domain.com');

This works as of WordPress 2.8.

Web Marketing – A Brief Glossary

There are increasingly a range of acronyms being thrown around in web marketing that sometimes slip out when interacting with clients. Here’s a brief overview of some of the more common e-marketing acronyms to ease the conversation.

  • SEM
    Search Engine Marketing

    SEM is a broad term covering the range of activities you might engage in to improve the extent to which you generate revenue via search engines

UK Google Market Share 2008

Following our post last year on Google UK’s market share in 2007, here are some figures providing an indication of Google’s Market share in the UK in 2008. Hitwise are providing the numbers again, and in a relatively short sampling period during March 2008, they found Google to be holding a market share 87.5%, 10 percentage points greater than the same figures for 2007. They found 73.7% to be using google.co.uk, and 13.8% google.com. Clearly Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask among others have therefore lost ground to their primary competitor.

UK Google Market Share 2008

MooTools’ Garbage Collection and IE’s ‘Stop this script running?’ error

I wrote a post before the weekend about some performance issues with MooTools, DHTML and AJAX, but having found the solution to a related problem this morning, I wanted to post a followup.

I’ve been working with a large, dynamically generated and AJAX populated table that features sorting, filtering and row highlighting, and was finding that my table took a long time to render, and was also very slow to close – that is, when I tried to close the window or refresh the page, there would be a delay when the browser would first hang for a few seconds. IE often (but not always) popped up the error/prompt Stop this script running?, and Firefox less often threw it’s Unresponsive Script warning.

MooTools, AJAX, DHTML and Performance

I first delved into javascript frameworks with Prototype, but I quickly realised that the Prototype+Script.aculo.us combination, even in Protocoluous or Protopackt form, was never going to work – it was just too slow.

I moved to MooTools, and for a while was pretty happy – load times were quicker, effects smoother.

But having recently tried to build sorting and filtering functionality into an HTML table of 200+ rows, I’ve been forced to take a closer look at how different browsers execute javascript, and at where the bottlenecks are. Here I’m going to promote a few best practices, largely via Julien LeComte at Yahoo.

How to choose an eCommerce Solution for engagement and conversion

There are a real plethora of eCommerce solutions out there now, making it difficult to isolate which solution is best for you. Some solutions are free and open-source, some licensed or bought off the shelf, and others custom-built – each has it’s advantages and disadvantages. This post is an outline of what your decision-making process with your IT consultant should look like.

  1. Will you be marketing your products to the search engines? If so, you need, at a minimum, a solution with 301 Redirect Management, keyword-rich URLs, and management facilities for title and meta-tags. This will rule out a sleuth of options.
  2. What is your estimated annual turnover, average transaction value, and average unit price? Payment gateways (i.e. PayPal, Google Checkout, Protx, ChronoPay, etc.) differ in their charges, and you should choose to minimise your costs.

Troubleshooting your FORMSOF & INFLECTIONAL searches not working, SQL Server 2005

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t get different results, using SQL Server 2005, for a simple Full-Text Search query and a Full-Text Search query using the FORMSOF and INFLECTIONAL keywords.

What I stumbled across eventually was that when creating and configuring my SQL Full-Text Indexes, I had left the language parameter as the default selection. When I changed this to English, voila!, my FORMSOF (INFLECTIONAL, @query) queries started to produces fantastic search results!

Also, an example query showing how to parameterize the the search term, and how to rank your results:

SQL Server 2005 Express Full-Text Search Setup Tutorial

I recently had to setup a search facility on a website driven by SQL Server 2005 Express. My natural choice was SQL Server’s Full-Text Search feature, but setup was not entirely intuitive, and the web was full of misinformation. I’ve put together a tutorial to save you time.

If you’re not sure if your have Full-Text installed, read my post on installing SQL Server 2005 Express Full-Text Search.

Once, Full-Text is installed, you need to create your index:

CREATE FULLTEXT CATALOG MyFullTextCatalog

Managing your index is then actually very simple:

  • Browse to the tables of your database, right click and select ‘Design’

"His work is constantly client focused"

Kevin McDonagh
Software Developer JP Morgan Chase

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