Blog

Here you’ll find articles about website development, WordPress, and other topics that I’m interested in. I hope you enjoy them and find them useful. Comments and feedback are always welcome!

Using jQuery Selectors to Locate Page Elements

8 March 2010 / 4 Comments

As explained in Getting Started with jQuery, typically you use jQuery selectors to locate elements within the page to work on, then call jQuery methods to manipulate those elements.

jQuery selectors are based on CSS selectors, so if you’re familiar with CSS then you already understand the basic idea of selecting elements in the page.

In this tutorial you’ll look at pretty much all of the selectors supported by jQuery. Many of these are the same as CSS selectors, while some are specific to jQuery. For each selector you’ll see an example showing how to use the selector to find page elements.

How to Transfer a Domain Name Between Registrars

1 March 2010 / 6 Comments

When you first register your domain name, you purchase the registration through a domain name registrar. Often the registrar is affiliated with your hosting company or ISP, or it may even be the same company.

Many people stick with the same registrar for the lifetime of their domain(s). However, sometimes you want or need to transfer your domain registration to a different registrar. For example:

You want to save money. Most registrars offer essentially the same service for wildly differing prices, ranging from a few dollars per year up to $50/year or more. By moving registrars you can save a lot of money in the long run, particularly if you own several domains.
You’re not happy with your current registrar. Maybe your registrar’s customer service doesn’t meet your needs, or there has been some problem with your registration, and you want to move to a more reliable registrar.
Your current registrar is going out of business. This does happen! If your registrar is going bankrupt then obviously you’ll need to move your domain to a different registrar.

There are hundreds of registrars in operation today. If you haven’t yet selected a new registrar, find out how to choose one in the “Registering a domain name” section of How to Set Up Your Own Domain Name.

If you’ve chosen a new registrar and you’re ready to transfer your domain, this step-by-step tutorial walks you through the process. Read on!

Create Nice-Looking PDFs with PHP and FPDF

26 February 2010 / 33 Comments

The PDF format can be a handy way to distribute documents to your visitors. A PDF document is self-contained, looks the same on any PDF reader, and is easy to print. PDFs are often used for reports, brochures, manuals, invoices, product data sheets, and lots more.

Often it’s useful to be able to create PDF documents dynamically from within a PHP script. For example, you can produce a custom PDF report based on a user’s preferences and include up-to-the-minute data.

In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the process of creating a nice-looking, 2-page PDF document using PHP. You’ll use the freely-available FPDF library to handle the nitty-gritty of PDF creation.

Article Marketing 101

18 February 2010 / Leave a Comment

Article marketing can be a great way to attract targeted traffic to your website, increase your sales and grow your online business. Although article marketing can be hard work, it can have a big effect on your traffic if you do it well.

In this tutorial you’ll discover how to get started with article marketing. You’ll find out exactly what article marketing is and why it works, and you’ll learn some useful tips for writing effective articles and getting them published.

Getting Started with jQuery

16 February 2010 / 14 Comments

In What Is jQuery?, you learned that jQuery is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to create feature-rich, JavaScript-enabled Web pages.

Now you’re ready to try out jQuery. In this tutorial you’ll learn how to download and install the jQuery library, you’ll explore jQuery objects and the jQuery() function, and you’ll create a simple example jQuery script that brings all the concepts together.

Let’s get going!

Measuring Your Online Store’s Success with Google Analytics

9 February 2010 / Leave a Comment

Google Analytics is a great way to examine how well your online store is working. Once you’ve integrated Analytics with your store pages, you can access a huge range of useful reports. Many of these reports can give you a good indication of the success (or otherwise) of your store, and can help you to improve your store and increase sales.

In this article you learn why it’s important to measure your store’s performance, and how to install Google Analytics on your store and start collecting useful data. You then explore some vital metrics for measuring your store’s success, including conversion rate, bounce rate, goal funnels, and more.

What Is jQuery?

4 February 2010 / 2 Comments

In this series of tutorials I’m going to explore jQuery — “The Write Less, Do More JavaScript Library”. If you code using JavaScript then you’ve probably already heard of jQuery — it’s by far the most popular JavaScript library in use today. For example, Microsoft, Twitter and ESPN all use jQuery on their sites.

To kick off the series, this article explains what jQuery is, and the kinds of things you can use it for.

[Read more…] about What Is jQuery?

Formatting Numbers with PHP’s number_format() Function

29 January 2010 / Leave a Comment

When displaying a number in a Web page, it’s nice to format the number in an easy-to-read way. For example, 123,456.78 is nicer to read than 123456.784321.

PHP’s number_format() function gives you an easy way to format numbers for displaying to the user. You can separate thousands with commas or other separators, choose the decimal point character, and choose the number of decimal places to display (or display no decimals at all).

Book Review: Getting StartED with CSS

28 January 2010 / Leave a Comment

Getting StartED with CSS by David Powers is published by “friends of ED” / Apress. It was first published in late 2009. As the title implies, this is a book for CSS newbies or casual CSS coders who want to deepen their knowledge.

The timing of this book is spot on. Microsoft has finally produced a reasonably CSS-capable browser in the form of IE8, and IE6’s usage is starting to dwindle. Now is a great time to learn CSS 2.1 in depth, and discover what it can really do.

This book thoroughly explains pretty much all the features of CSS 2.1, and also touches on some of the features of the upcoming CSS 3.

Here’s my full review of the book.

How to Reduce Your Website’s Bounce Rate

22 January 2010 / 7 Comments

In How to Measure Your Website’s Bounce Rate, I showed how you can use Google Analytics to measure various important bounce rates on your site, such as the overall site bounce rate, landing page bounce rates, and search keyword bounce rates.

Armed with this information, you have a good idea which areas of your site are performing well, and which parts could benefit from a lower bounce rate.

In this article you’ll discover many useful tips and ideas for reducing your bounce rates.

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