At Web Design Taxi we work hard to make sure that deadlines are meet and customers remain satisfied. This is why we are expanding our programming team due to an incease in custom application development work.

Our programming experience includes but is not limited to:

WF, ADO.NET, LINQ, COM, COM+, XML, XSL, XSLT, JavaScript, JSON, AJAX, HTML, CSS, VSS, MSMQ, MQSeries, Crystal Reports, ORM, MS SQL Server 2000, 2005 Reporting service, Oracle 9, and Oracle 10 on Windows and Unix environments, PHP, ASP.Net, Visual Studio 2005-2008, Visual Basic 6, and more!

To request a free quote on your programming project click here. There is no obligation.

We come across a good number of web re-design clients who have sites that automatically play music. Some of them are basic and do not even include a way of turning it off or pausing the music.

Depending on the website, it may or may not be a good idea to have music on it. But you should always include a way to turn it off. And if possible, do not automatically have it start. Keep in mind that some people may be visiting your website at night when others in the house are sleeping. They visit your website and hear a sudden loud blast of music that wakes everyone up. Not to mention, it may give someone a heart attack.

Put these things in mind when you are creating your website. Careful planning is needed to make sure you do not turn off any of your potential customers.

In addition to the above you will want to put serious thought into the music playing in the background. You will not want punk rock playing on a business themed website. It is always best to go with mellow, low toned music that is universal. Universal being that it is music heard by a majority of the population on a daily basis when they go on an elevator, or are on hold on the phone. Choosing the wrong music might offend someone and they will remember that you are the place wih the bad music.

When you are working on your seo strategy you will come across the issue of whether or not to purchase multiple domain names then point them all to one website. Well, it is not recommended.

It is not a huge problem. You will notice some big websites that use the 301 redirects like that, but they do not go and buy tons of domains with keywords in them and setup redirects. That can easily be looked at as black hat seo, and attempting to manipulate search engine results.

You will see websites like www.download.com using the redirect. Try going to www.downloads.com and notice it has an s in the second domain. It redirects to the domain without the s. This is completely ok as it is a branding issue, and they are protecting their domain. You will notice the same thing with .net and other extensions.

But when it comes to buying domains just for the keywords, you are wasting your time. You can end up being banned or penalized for your efforts.

When you think backup, especially for a large website, you think hours of work. Databases can take awhile to download, but then there are the files. I have personally dealt with many websites that have over 3 gigs worth of files alone. Databases with 70 megs or more to start. On a cable internet line it can take 6 to 8 hours or ftp transfer.

The problem is that sometimes you come across a lazy webmaster. These are the types that look at those 8 hours and say “Forget it. What’s the worst that can happen?”. Well, you live and learn I guess. Back when I just started out I dealt with that situation myself on a site I owned. Because I was lazy I lost key files to my website and they had to be redeveloped.

It is better to always be safe. I have had days where I had back to back backups of 3+ gig websites. The backups would be placed on multiple discs, hard drives, or other medium to prepare for the worst case scenerio. Other than the possibility of losing a file, you risk being sued by a client of you do not use common sense.

My advice. ALWAYS BACKUP. Even if it is one single file you are working on. Some developers work on a file in notepad through an ftp client. Occasionally the ftp client might freeze and error out. What happens is the ftp client borrowed the file from the host, and that file was lost or corrupted during the program crash. When working with only a few files you should always create a BAK folder on your local machine for that project. Transfer the file then edit it through ftp. This way if something happens all you have to do is upload the backup and everything is ok once again.

A template tag is code that instructs WordPress to “do” or “get” something. There are various tags that make a template work, or display data to your visitors.

For example: <?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> will display the name of your blog. This tag is used mostly in the header, which is where you see on top of the page.

Template tags are extensive and not all of them must be used when you are creating a custom theme. You can find all of the tags at http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags

When creating your custom wordpress theme just remember that the tags you include decide the fate of your end-user so include them wisely. Wouldn’t it suck if you accidentally forgot to include the categories tag? Nobody will be able to find your posts!

Customizing wordpress themes at first is a hard task in your mind. You see all of this code and you need to figure out what makes the cms work and what is filler design.

When you are starting with a custom design that you created with photoshop and constructed with notepad or dreamweaver you can start with a blank wordpress theme then you will be happy knowing that the code involved is minimal. You just have to copy and paste the php code into your template within the right areas.

You also have many resources to work with including the theme docs, also known as template tags, on wordpress.org itself. These are just small bits of php code that tells wordpress what to display on your design template.

In addition to the standard tags you will want to make sure you widgetize your theme so you can easily add functionality to your blog site using the administration rather than chopping through code in the future. Be sure to style your widgets accordingly or it will look different from your design. You can find the styling for the widgets in the wp-includes/widgets.php file. You will notice an area where it says before widget and after widget. This is where your widget calls the style from via classes in your style.css file.

If all else fails and you get confused, we currently develop custom wordpress themes for a mere $350.00 so don’t be afraid to ask (if you are reading this at a much later date then this price may have moved up).

If you do not own or rent your own dedicated server then you may come across an issue when you try to include a url. The issue comes when your hosting company has it disbaled in the php.ini file.

There are alot of hosting companies that have the global setting disabled but allow you to have a local php.ini file. If this is the case then you can change the setting by adding a php.ini to your main directory such as public_html. In this case you would add the allow_url_fopen = 1 to the php.ini file.

You can also setup your SAFE_MODE options this way. Sometimes hosting companies limit the local changes you can make so some of the options may not work with a local php.ini.

We have been working with a client who has been using an ecommerce website that was originally using an Open Source script. That script was modified by their previous developer and the script is unrecognizable due to the functionality not being added according to how the script views modules and other additions.

We took on this client and are currently working with them to create a better site from it. The problem is that their website is a bigger maze than we originally though. Because of this we have had to adjust the deadline time and the launch date for the new website.

Keeping this situation in mind, any future issues of this sort would be handled differently. When you are dealing with a customized Open Source script you have no way of telling what work will need to be done. It is better to start from scratch, import the old database after making it compatible, and integrating the new design into it that way. By doing this you are working with an Open Source script that your developers know pretty well and do not have to “learn” new functions from foreign code. It would reduce the timeline for completion and the price of the project as well.