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New website completed for Devizes based bathroom designers

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Clive Sweeting

We recently been working with Aqualis Bathrooms Ltd. Based in Devizes, Wiltshire, but working all along the M4 corridor, London and beyond,  they specialise in the design and installation of luxury bathrooms, wetrooms and stone floors. Like many companies, they’ve organically grown over the years and now find that their word-of-mouth reputation for excellence has spread beyond their traditional core of home-owning customers, through to architects and property developers.

We provided copywriting, design and development services. WordPress was used as the CMS, which enabled us to quickly add media galleries, refresh content quickly and easily, plus provide the client with a platform to let them rapidly add search engine friendly content when needed.

Designers of luxury bathrooms, wetrooms and stone floors, Devizes, Wiltshire

Posted in Web Design, Web Development | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Quickly create colour themes for Products, Categories and CMS pages in Magento…

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Clive Sweeting

It doesn’t seem to matter whether we’re working as a freelance web developer for companies in Bath, Bristol, Wiltshire or Timbuktu, at some point they will give us a design that has colour variations across groups of pages. Some pages will use purple to highlight text, other will be in orange, others will use a different font, variable width columns, the list goes on. So how can you deal with this without having utterly impenetrable CSS files?

In Magento* it’s easy enough! Simple add a snippet to the Layout Update XML.

<reference name="root">
    
<action method="addBodyClass"><className>purple</className></action>
</reference>

Essentially it just calls the method Mage_Page_Block_Html::addBodyClass() and slaps the className onto the <body> tag, letting you then create css selectors like .purple .someotherselector.

If you’re feeling really clever you could probably programmatically add a class derived from the value of a Product attribute, but that will have to wait for another day…

Looking for a friendly freelance Magento developer? Need some help getting your designs turned into working websites, cost effectively? Why not give us a call on 01225 309162 – we’d be delighted to help…

*I know, I know, not often you hear “Magento” and “easy” in the same sentance.

Posted in Magento, Web Design, Web Development | Tagged | Leave a comment

Quickly find the id of all Magento categories..

Posted on December 25, 2011 by Clive Sweeting

When developing a Magento powered e-commerce, you will almost inevitably have to import product data from a spreadsheet provided by your customer. And you almost certainly will need to convert the text based Categories they’ve used in the spreadsheet into the entity_id Magento uses for categories. So first of all create all your required product categories. Then what? Yes, you can click into every category in the Magento admin and patiently write down every ID, but that’s boring right? So what to do?

Create a new .php file somewhere in the root folder and drop the following code in.

define('MAGENTO', realpath(dirname(__FILE__)));
require_once MAGENTO . '/app/Mage.php';
umask(0);
Mage::app()->setCurrentStore(Mage_Core_Model_App::ADMIN_STORE_ID);
$model = Mage::getModel('catalog/category');
$categories = $model->getCollection();
$categories->addAttributeToSelect('name');
foreach ($categories as $category) {
    print $category->getEntityId() . " " . $category->getName() . PHP_EOL;
}
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Cheap replacement for a Mac Superdrive

Posted on October 14, 2011 by Clive Sweeting

If you find that your Mac’s Superdrive has stopped working, or you’ve replaced your internal Superdrive to fit a solid-state hard drive and need a cheap way to get a working CD and DVD reader or recorder, your options are a bit limited.

However I’ve found these Samsung External USB DVD-Writers to be reliable, inexpensive and work with OS X 10.5, 10.6 and 10.7.

P.S. The only trouble you’ll have is getting it to work with Apple’s DVD Player application. However this hint worked for me beautifully.

Posted in Troubleshooting | Leave a comment

Cheap Dell P and U series monitors as good as Apple Cinema displays

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Clive Sweeting

Whilst I’d love to be able to afford one of Apple’s 27″ Cinema Displays, the truth is they’re hugely expensive in comparison to a 22, 23 or 24″ quality display from Dell or Samsung. About 6 months ago I bought a Dell P2311H 23″ monitor and am ecstatic with it. LED backlit, tilt, swivel, rotate and crucially for me a height adjustable stand, it was brilliant value.

As of this moment there are some cracking deals at Amazon. Dell have two ranges that I recommend to my customers – the Dell Professional P monitors and Dell Ultrasharp U series. The main difference is the U series use an IPS panel, which offers slightly wider viewing angles. To be honest the difference isn’t that great, but if you can get a U series display for slightly more I would spend the extra money.

P.S. If you really want to splash out the Dell U2711 Ultrasharp 27″ Monitor is just as good as the Apple display, although obviously slightly less ‘sexy.’

Posted in Apple, Bargains | Leave a comment

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