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Archive for the ‘Web Development’ Category

Celebrating 10 Years

Filed under: E-Commerce,Email,Hosting,Performance,Security,This & That,Web Development — Art Zemon on November 1, 2011

Ten years ago, on November 1, 2001, Hen’s Teeth Network was born. The past decade has seen tremendous technological change and let me work with truly amazing people and companies. Take a trip down memory lane with me.

When I started Hen’s Teeth Network, I never imagined the broad range of clients with whom I would work. Fascinating clients: from jewelry to medical marijuana, from children’s books to adult products, from swaddling blankets to grief counseling, from wedding invitations to anger management, from spiritual to religious to political and back again, from stylin’ shoes to hiking trails to bicycling, from podcasts to public libraries, from airplanes to trains to cars, from women’s fashion to medical uniforms, from art galleries to theatrical stages, from rubber stamps to air conditioners, from coffee to lobster to health supplements, from fishing tackle to board games, from financial forecasting to transportation planning, from dating help to parenting help, from home schooling to college course materials, from natural birth classes to Halloween costumes, from one-person start-ups to multi-national corporations to governments. It never ceases to amaze me how complex and interesting every business is, when you take the time to look at it carefully and understand how one business person is differentiating him or herself from his or her competition.

Among HTN’s clients, computers and the web are tools, simply a means to an end. Our mission, from the very beginning, has been: We help our clients improve their businesses by turning the internet and the web into useful tools.

2001

Launching a business less than two months after 9/11 might not be considered stellar timing but it was the right thing at that point in my life. I offered my time way below a living wage but it is better to earn something than nothing and, in those days, full fare work was darned hard to come by. Our web hosting was done on machines in my basement and reliability depended on my constant, personal availability. (more…)

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October 2011 – Celebrating Our Tenth Birthday

Filed under: Newsletters,This & That,Web Development — Candy Zemon on October 28, 2011

[HTN News] Ten Years Old

 

Hen’s Teeth Network is 10 years old! Read all about it.

 

 

Customer Site News

Script for PDG Commerce Users
We have created a script to “clean” special characters that shouldn’t be there from text fields in PDG Commerce. Because the inadvertant appearance of unwanted special characters is such a common issue for folks, we have released this script to the community of PDG Commerce users free of charge. It is released licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You can find the script along with instructions in our Knowledgebase.  Feel free to use it.

Presidential Election, looking forward to the upcoming US presidential election next year, upgraded their site with a new design and new features, such as the scrolling online product gallery. This site is an amazing resource of non-partisan information about elections.

Coffee Icon asked us to add a shipping line to the mini-basket that displays on every page of their PDG Commerce installation for their US store. Be sure you are shopping the US store (select the tab with US flag in the upper right) and shop. You will see a shipping line in your mini-basket. If you pass the threshold for free shipping, you will see that change to Free shipping on the mini-cart shipping line. This is a nice feedback for the customer. The soft add-to-cart behavior lets the customer stay in the shopping process until they are really ready to view that cart in full.

Clipa offers handbag-hanging accessories that can be customized like jewelry. We built the gem-selecting widget for their Custom Crystal Clipa. A user can design the look of their clipa by selecting one or more gems and deciding in which position each gem should go. When the order is placed, the positions and gems are passed as options through the order process to be used as easy error-free manufacture instructions.

Other News

 

Browser Version Support

Google recently announced that, as of August 1, 2011, it will no longer support the following browser versions: IE7, Firefox 3.5, and Safari 3. HTN follows the general consensus of “current” browsers in its testing. We have also stopped routinely testing these three versions. We suggest that folks consider putting a browser version courtesy message on their sites so that folks visiting with older unsupported browsers are alerted to the fact that the site is not optimized for their version and are given a pointer on where to get updates. If this sounds like a good idea, but you don’t want to do it yourself, ask us to put up such a browser version courtesy message for you.

HTN Affiliate Program

HTN is pleased to announce the HTN Affiliate Program. This is an opportunity for our customers to earn some cash – and help other folks enjoy great HTN Cloud Hosting services and products. There is no cost to sign up. There is no minimum required. The only requirement is that you yourself be an HTN customer.

Payments to you continue for as long as the referred account is with HTN. It is not a one-time or limited-time situation.

Who might be interested in this? If you are a web developer with customers who need hosting referrals, you are a natural candidate. If you are a corporate body with related subsidiary companies who have hosting needs, you might refer those subsidiaries to HTN hosting. If you simply have lots of business acquaintances who have websites, you might mention HTN services at appropriate times. Do your friends a favor (and earn cash while you’re at it) by signing up as an HTN affiliate.

 


Hen’s Teeth Network provides expert web development, e-commerce, and hosting to small-to-medium size businesses and not-for-profits world-wide and has been doing so for more than 9 years.
Our mission: We help our clients improve their businesses by turning the Internet and the web into useful tools.
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New Web Sites Mean New Ideas

Filed under: Web Development — Art Zemon on April 25, 2011

Congratulations to the St. Peters Chamber of Commerce on launching its new web site. In particular, welcome to the blogosphere! I am pleased to see the Chamber branching out into additional media beyond email blasts.

Browsing any new web site gives you a golden opportunity to look for new ideas to implement in your own site. In what ways does the Chamber serve it’s community and readership through this site? What visual elements do you like? With which aspects are you less than thrilled? Now take those thoughts and turn to the web sites of your business, your congregation, and the other organizations of which you are a member. How can those sites be enhanced to work better?

The web empowers us to make incremental changes, unlike almost all other media. When you print a brochure or put up a billboard, the results are static — never to be revised — but when you publish a web site, you can continue to refine it ad infinitum. Each change can be as big or little as your imagination and budget allow. You can even try several things at the same time, and run A-B tests to determine which works best.

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Google SEO: Focus on Content

Filed under: SEO,Web Development — Art Zemon on October 6, 2009

For years, webmasters have focused (often myopically) on the keywords and description meta tags on their web sites. These are bits of information which are “in” a web page but are not visible to the humans who read the page. They look something like this:

<meta name=”description” content=”Tips, hints, and musings on web design, e-commerce, and the internet by the staff of Hen’s Teeth Network.” />

<meta name=”keywords” content=”web design, e-commerce, technology, web hosting, Hen’s Teeth Network” />

Ostensibly, these tags give accurate information about the page, hence the name “meta,” but they are more often abused than used. It has turned into a virtual arms race, with site owners frantically visiting competitors’ web sites and copying the “good” keywords and “best” descriptive phrases into the meta tags on their own sites. Some webmasters go so far as to place their competitors’ company names in their own keywords fields, in hopes of capturing search traffic and diverting it to their own e-commerce stores.

We have always advised clients to do search engine optimization (SEO) primarily by focusing on the human readable content on the page. We do help clients get reasonable stuff into the description and keywords meta tags but keep steering them back to the real content; that is where the effort needs to be placed. If people can quickly find useful information on a page, Google will, too.

Google recently published Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking on the Google Webmaster Central blog, completing supporting our position.

Q: Does Google ever use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no….

Q: Does this mean that Google ignores all meta tags?
A: No… we do sometimes use the “description” meta tag as the text for our search results snippets [but] we still don’t use the description meta tag in our ranking.

If you are trying to get your web site to show up well in search engines, toss something reasonable into the meta keywords and meta description tags but do not obsess about them. Put your real time and effort into improving the real content that real people read.

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Tools of the Trade III: PHP and MySQL

Filed under: Web Development — Tags: , — Scott Youmans on April 16, 2009

Welcome back to part three of our series, Tools of the Trade. Whether you’ve had a web page for years or are just now considering hanging your online shingle, the tools of the trade — and their acronyms — can be confusing. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, PHP and MySQL are some of the technologies we use every day to build successful websites for our clients. Last time, we talked about how JavaScript and AJAX allow for interactivity on otherwise static web pages. Today, we’ll learn what PHP and MySQL have to offer.
(more…)

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Tools of the Trade II: JavaScript and AJAX

Filed under: Web Development — Tags: , — Scott Youmans on February 28, 2009

Welcome back to part-two of our series, Tools of the Trade. Whether you’ve had a web page for years or are just now considering hanging your online shingle, the tools of the trade — and their acronyms — can be confusing. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, PHP and MySQL are some of the technologies we use every day to build successful websites for our clients. Last time, we talked about how web browsers display HTML with CSS styles. Today we’ll learn what JavaScript and AJAX bring in to the mix.

JavaScript

JavaScript, as its name might imply, is a scripting language that the web browser interprets while loading a page and afterward. Just like your computer runs a program called FireFox or Internet Exporer, your web browser runs JavaScript programs to accomplish its tasks. Note: JavaScript is not related to the programming language Java. (more…)

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Cross Browser Testing Tool Now Includes Safari 4

Filed under: Web Development — Art Zemon on February 26, 2009

I just updated our “free” cross browser testing tool to include Safari 4 on the machine image which also includes IE8. The other two images still have Safari 3.1.

Using this tool, you can test web sites with several different web browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome.

Unlike BrowserShots.org, this tool truly lets you lay your hands on the machine and drive. You don’t have to submit a URL and wait for something in the background to load your page and post a screen snapshot.

I say “free” because, although we don’t charge anything for this, you do have to pay Amazon a whopping 12.5 cents per hour but at least there are no prepayments required, no contracts, nothing. If you use this for an hour, your credit card should get zinged for 13 cents at the end of the month.

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Tools of the Trade: HTML and CSS

Filed under: Web Development — Tags: , — Scott Youmans on February 12, 2009

Whether you’ve had a web page for years or are just now considering hanging your online shingle, the tools of the trade — and their acronyms — can be confusing. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, PHP and MySQL are  some of the technologies we use every day to build successful websites for our clients. Let’s take a brief look at what they are and why we use them. This is the first of a three-part series where I’ll introduce you to a pair of technologies in each installment. (more…)

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