Matt Doyle | Elated Communications
Web and WordPress Development
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!
Occasionally your PHP script will need to break up a long line of text into several shorter lines while preserving whole words. This can happen if you’re formatting some text for printing or emailing, or you want to display preformatted text in a Web page using the pre element.
PHP gives you a handy function, wordwrap(), to do this job for you. This tutorial shows you how wordwrap() works.
[Read more…] about Wrapping Text with PHP’s wordwrap() Function
In What is Bounce Rate?, you learned about the concept of bounce rates and saw how they can be a useful indicator of your website’s success. Now you need to measure the bounce rate for your own site.
In this tutorial you’ll learn how to use Google Analytics to measure various bounce rates on your site, including:
[Read more…] about How to Measure Your Website’s Bounce Rate
mod_rewrite is a marvellous feature of the Apache Web server. It’s very flexible and can do all sorts of useful things.
mod_rewrite can be quite tricky for beginners to pick up due to its somewhat complicated syntax and processing mechanism. However, once you understand a few basic concepts then you can use mod_rewrite to do some pretty clever things with your site.
In this tutorial you’ll find out what mod_rewrite is, and the kind of things you can use it for. You’ll learn how to create a few basic mod_rewrite rules, and you’ll explore some useful real-world examples that you can use on your own website.
[Read more…] about mod_rewrite Tutorial for Absolute Beginners
A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor is a JavaScript-driven Web form field that lets users enter formatted text, much like using a word processor. The editor then converts this formatted text into HTML when the form is sent to the Web server. Here’s what a WYSIWYG HTML editor looks like:
Most WYSIWYG editors let you do at least the following:
Many editors take things further, allowing you to upload images, Flash movies and other files to the Web server, and browse files on the server.
[Read more…] about Adding a WYSIWYG HTML Editor to Your Site
Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics can give you a lot of insight into how your website is performing.
A key metric that’s useful for any type of website is bounce rate. This figure can tell you whether your visitors are finding what they want when they arrive at your site, and whether they’re interested enough in your content to explore your site further.
Bounce rate is particularly useful for e-commerce sites, since it measures how well your visitors are engaging with your site, and hence how likely they are to buy your products.
In this article you find out what bounce rate is and how it’s measured. You also look at why bounce rates are important to your site, and how to tell if your bounce rate is too high.
Site maps have been around for almost as long as the Web itself. They’re a great way to improve your website’s navigation and usability.
Although site maps aren’t used that often by visitors — around 7% of the time, according to Jakob Nielsen — a site map can really save a visitor if they can’t find what they’re looking for using your site’s regular navigation menu.
In this article you’ll explore the concept of site maps, look at some examples, and learn how to design and create a site map for your own website.
In Trimming PHP Strings you learned how to remove unwanted whitespace characters from around a string. The opposite of trimming is padding — adding extra characters to either end (or both ends) of a string to make the string a certain length.
Padding is handy for lining up strings vertically for display, for adding leading zeroes to numbers, or for any situation where you need a string to be of a certain fixed length.
In this article you’ll explore PHP’s str_pad() function for padding strings.
In programming-speak, trimming a string means removing unwanted characters — typically whitespace characters — from either end (or both ends) of the string. This is useful in a number of scenarios, such as:
In this article you explore 3 useful PHP functions that you can use to trim strings:
trim() for trimming both ends of a stringltrim() for trimming the beginning of a string, andrtrim() for trimming the end of a string.
A regular email newsletter is a good way to keep in touch with your site visitors and encourage them to return to your site. If you run an online business then it’s also perfect for telling existing and potential customers about your products or services.
With an email newsletter, visitors add their email addresses to your mailing list (usually via a form on your website), then you regularly send an email message to all the subscribers on the list.
There are many ways that you can set up and run a newsletter mailing list. In this article you’ll explore 3 broad approaches:
Your online store’s checkout is a critical point in the sales process. The design of your checkout can make a big difference to the success of your store.
It’s very common for shoppers to happily browse an online store and add products to their cart, then abandon their purchase when they reach the checkout page. Often, between 50% and 75% of shoppers give up during the checkout process.
So how can you reduce your checkout abandon rate? Fortunately there are lots of things you can do to improve your checkout process and increase sales. Here are 10 helpful suggestions.