Developing Mobile Web Sites

Wednesday 27th May 2009

"We recently developed a mobile web site for A-Z-Animals.com enabling users to search the A-Z Animals encyclopedia for animal facts and information directly from their mobile phone. As part of the development process we gathered a good collection of resources which we hope will be useful for you when developing a mobile [...]"

Service Recovery

Wednesday 6th May 2009

"In my previous article I touched briefly on the fact that it's human nature to tell the world if you've received bad service from someone, yet to only tell a few if you've received exemplary service. It's not uncommon for entire websites and newsgroups to be setup for people to complain if something has gone wrong (though [...]"

Building relationships with your customers

Thursday 19th March 2009

"Last article I spoke about standing out from the crowd and making sure you are talked about.   Your most successful relationships are likely to be built by word-of-mouth referrals. While search engines, advertising and press will bring traffic to your site, there is often nothing better than having a customer sing [...]"

Doing the unexpected

Monday 9th March 2009

"With many businesses feeling the effects of the global credit slowdown, there is no better time to be focusing on your customers and working to build and maintain your relationships with them.   'Word of Mouth' referrals have been proven time and again to bring the best customers to your business. There is no higher [...]"

PHP/JavaScript World Map with Continent and Ocean Selection

Tuesday 3rd February 2009

"A world map image which enables the user to select continents and oceans to indicate location.   The world map function was developed for our favourite project, A-Z Animals and is used to enable contributors to select the locations an animal lives in or visits. The user may select by continent or ocean, or of course [...]"

We've Moved!

Tuesday 13th January 2009

"We are very pleased to announce we have moved to a new office 450 miles across the UK in Lands End, Cornwall, UK.   Our new office is considerably larger than the previous which will enable us to expand our business further. We will be employing several new staff over the course of 2009 so the new office will provide [...]"

Customer Showcase: A-Z-Animals.com

Monday 10th November 2008

"We've not discussed a customer project on our blog before, but never before have we had such direct involvement with a project, or so much fun developing it!   A-Z Animals is an online encyclopedia of animal information, facts, pictures and videos which is intended for children. The entire site is based [...]"

Optimising your secure content for Google

Wednesday 22nd October 2008

"An important consideration when securing your content is how this will affect your search engine optimisation and pagerank. After all, you work on great content so you want people to be able to find it - they may have to pay to view it but you still want them to be able to find it. If Googlebot (the tool Google uses to [...]"

Membership business models

Monday 6th October 2008

"This weeks article takes a look at membership business models and the different approaches that can be taken when charging users for membership and to access your online content. Recurring Fees Firstly we have the obvious model, where users are charged a set fee for membership to access a product, for example on [...]"

AJAX Calendar with PHP and mySQL

Saturday 20th September 2008

"A PHP calendar with AJAX 'day status' selection using a mySQL database, simply click on a day to mark it as 'busy'.   This calendar function enables you to display calendars including month navigation and AJAX day status selection. Multiple calendars can be displayed at once, each with individual owner IDs enabling [...]"

PHP Function for Reciprocal Linkback Checking

Tuesday 19th August 2008

"A PHP function for reciprocal linkback checking, the function will check the supplied URL for a link back and can also validate whether or not the link has a nofollow tag which will prevent search engines from indexing the link or playing relevance to the linkback.   The function is especially useful if you run a [...]"

AJAX Tree Menu with PHP - Revisited

Sunday 3rd August 2008

"The AJAX tree menu has received some minor updates so we have decided to re-release the project. The tree menu now offers a option 'swapping' feature when only one top-level option can be expanded, when a second top-level option is selected any others are collapsed.   The tree menu offers a convenient method for [...]"

What is membership software?

Wednesday 23rd July 2008

"A discussion with Neil Skirrow, the original developer of Locked Area and OpenCrypt and Managing Director of ionix Limited covering the basics of what user management and membership software is and how it can be beneficial to your project. What is user management and membership software? 'User management' and 'membership [...]"

Login form designs and inspiration

Saturday 19th July 2008

"Designing a stylish yet functional login form can be difficult, that's ignoring actually getting functionality behind the system in the first place. We already provide you with the tools to create a login system so we decided we should give you some ideas and inspiration for how to style it too. Here is a collection of [...]"

PHP subscriber counter with Addicted to Feedburner class and Feedburner Awareness API

Sunday 29th June 2008

"A FeedBurner subscriber counter with change indication using the Addicted to FeedBurner API PHP class and FeedBurner Awareness API.   This function enables you to display your FeedBurner subscriber count in your own style/design without using the FeedBurner subscriber counter image. The function enables you to optionally [...]"

AJAX Tree Menu with PHP

Monday 9th June 2008

"We have recently developed an AJAX tree menu function as part of OpenCrypt version 2.0 which we hoped you might find useful when developing your PHP applications.   Article UpdatedView Latest Version   The tree menu offers a convenient method for organising data, whether links or other information which can [...]"

AJAX data listings engine with PHP and mySQL (BETA)

Saturday 17th May 2008

"We have recently been developing an AJAX data listings engine as part of OpenCrypt version 2.0 and thought it may be of use to our visitors... The system is written in PHP and can be used to list data in any mySQL table, all you do is specify the mySQL database details and the engine will automatically generate a data [...]"

Join the ionix Team!

Tuesday 6th May 2008

"ionix Limited is seeking a creative and enthusiastic individual with a keen interest in computing and the Internet to assist with the maintenance and development of our various online products and services. Roles include assisting with customer enquiries, including both sales and support, web site design and management, [...]"

Press Release: OpenCrypt 2.0 in Development!

Wednesday 30th April 2008

"OpenCrypt was only released two years ago, but in that short time the software has evolved significantly. Whilst the current system is unmatched for features by its competitors, we're still not satisfied. The addition of add-ons such as the picture gallery and helpdesk, and advancement of features such as the multi-domain [...]"

PHP: Basic functions for quickstart PHP framework

Wednesday 30th April 2008

"Below are a number of PHP functions which we hope you will find useful when developing your applications, all are very simple functions but each takes a minute to write, and hopefully we can save you that minute!   1. Numeric Validation Check the variable $number is a number/integer.   function validate_numb [...]"

Welcome to the OpenCrypt Blog!

Wednesday 30th April 2008

"Hello and welcome to the OpenCrypt Blog!   The intention of this blog is firstly to provide a collection of programming and web-design resources to be used for quick/reliable software development, and secondly to discuss software development ideas and principles with an aim to provide development and inspirational [...]"