The website project is in three stages – to make public the results from the solar panels in real time, which we have now achieved. This is to be followed by displaying data from test installations using new photovoltaic materials, to allow comparison in real performance under a range of conditions. This is important because photovoltaic panels are rated at 1000 W/m² solar power input – wheras the UK more commonly only manages a few hundred W/m² sunlight. Unfortunately photovoltaic panel response is not linnear, so less sunlight input can mean a lot less electrical power output, as a consequence the array you’ve planned may not provide the power you are expecting! In the third stage people from around the UK will be invited to submit their own photovoltaic data, so providing a real measure of how panels perform ‘in the wild’ e.g. after being outside for a few years… This is the kind of data that many householders will need before making a commitment to the expense of an installation themeselves.

The site (Sheffield Solar Farm) has a small graphic display showing what solar power is currently available, and what the electrical power output from the panels is on every page. The display is in Flash, but driven by an XML datafile generated on demand from the database. The alternative for people who do not have Flash is a static bar chart graphic that reflects the situation at the time the page was loaded.

In addition, there are graphs of solar power available and electrical power output, which currently display data for the last 24hrs. We evaluated two graphical packages for the project:

Flot is a nice Javascript based plotting system, that takes data in a list and spits out a pretty graph to order. It is not able to offer x and y axis labels, however…

jpGraph is a fully featured graphical package running in PHP. It takes a while to get it as pretty as Flot, but it is very flexible, and includes x and y axis labels. The ability to label axes neatly and correctly was a deciding factor in this instance, as the site is being developed by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, they wanted their graphs to be as clear as possible!

As general notes for the two packages, jpGraph places considerably more load on the server than Flot, as the graph is prepared as a graphic file for insertion into the page. This also means that the actual data is hidden from the visitor’s web-client.

The website is built in WordPress, where we adapted the latest Twenty_Ten templates to create our first production HTML5 website. We are still evaluating the new standard (which will not be fully released for many years – so we are not a long way behind the times!), and I think it fair to say that its reception is mixed. In many ways it is a regression, permitting the sloppy code that XHTML was intended to eradicate. At present the new graphical capabilities are not reliably realised in user’s browsers, however, so the trumpeted advantages of the new standard (which seem to centre around ‘Flash bashing’) are yet to emerge.

The Sheffield Solar Farm will be visited by Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister, on the 20th August 2010.

Sheffield Solar Farm

At the end of last year, however, it became clear that the market was becoming more competitive. In response to the downturn in the economy, just about every garage in the UK was looking at wheelchair accessible vehicles as a higher margin product, and there are now a lot of cheap websites pushing metal. As a consequence, we felt that we needed to look at developing the website to put some clear water between the competition and ourselves.

Site optimisation helps ensure your site is close to the top of the search list on Google, which is vital to ensure people find your website. Having already placed the site close to the top of the search rankings, however, we now had the opportunity to look hard at how our site could improve customer service. What we wanted was a simple-to-use site that would help our customers find the vehicle they were looking for.

Improved customer experience

Increased choice of vehicles on the home page: Mobility Nationwide has one of the largest stocks of wheelchair accessible vehicles in the UK – and we need to be able to demonstrate this to visitors on our home page. Given that that space on a home page is limited, we used a Flash animation that runs through the entire stock in groups of four vehicles. Flash gives us a lot of control over how quickly the page displays, as it can load images in the background, but not all devices can show Flash, so we also have a static view for visitors using these devices.

Improved vehicle display: The new vehicle display offers more information about each vehicle – including power and fuel consumption (important in cost-cutting times). In addition, we can now show more, and larger, photographs of each wheelchair accessible vehicle. We used the excellent Lightbox JavaScript application for photo libraries to place more pictures into the page. The application is fairly intuitive to use, and offers redundancy if JavaScript is not available on the visitor’s browser.

Online sales assistant: We have always offered a competent search engine (a feature which distinguishes us from simple out-of-the-box websites), but many visitors will not use search engines. Our online sales assistant is there to help in these cases. By looking at the current choice of vehicle, the assistant can suggest a range of similar vehicles that might also be of interest.

Back-history retention: This shows on each page the last few vehicles the customer looked at. It is a really simple concept, commonly used on larger sales sites, and allows the customer to quickly compare vehicles they might be interested in (without having to set up those dreadful comparison tables!), and keep these vehicles in sight while they look at the help, finance or contact page if they want to enquire further.

Improved search: The search allows visitors to find vehicles based on price, fuel, mileage, transmission, size and access options. Refinements include intelligent prices – if there are no vehicles available for £3000, the site doesn’t offer prices less than £3000 as a search option; so reducing time wasted searching for things that do not exist! As with the back-history, the search parameters are now retained, so the visitor can easily browse vehicles, and adjust search parameters in-flight.

Back-end improvements

If the front end sells to customers, it is the back end that assists your sales force, and helps the company itself be more focussed and efficient. What this reports to you can help you understand what your customer wants! In many ways this is at least as important as the glossy sales pages…

Popular vehicles: What are people looking at? – Now! This simple feature just keeps a tag on how often each vehicle has been viewed – so you can quickly and easily spot a problem with your stock.

Improved data entry: With more data carried on each vehicle it was important to speed up data entry, so we have a fast model look-up which allows all of the basic information about the vehicle to be entered from a single selection.

Easier photo upload: Introducing a web-based photo-upload to replace the old FTP system. This automatically re-sizes and optimises images for the site, so no more mis-sized images! It also suggests standard image captions – so the site is well optimised for the search engine!

Online archive: A facility continuously monitoring your sales history to see how well (or badly) different vehicles have sold in the past. Are red cars more popular this year? – You should know – you sell them!

Technical specifications

We have worked hard to build a device independent site to current HTML standards. We don’t know what is around the corner (will the iPad with its under-powered browser wipe out the laptop?), but we’ve future proofed as well as we can. As long as our visitors use a browser that understands current standards, they can use our site!

There is room for improvement, there always is, but hopefully the new site will offer solid performance for Mobility Nationwide, both the business and its customers!

Visit the Mobility Nationwide website if you need a wheelchair accessible vehicle – or if you would just like to check out our latest commercial site!

Successful websites are organic creations – your audience is going to change, and you are going to want to change with them. The last thing you need is to have your website integrated with a server technology that is no longer supported. Can’t happen? – Think again (again).

On April 15th 2010 Microsoft pulled Live support from its original X-boxes – not a very old piece of kit. If you’ve got one, it is now obsolete (at least for online multi-player stuff).

Your problem with any piece of proprietary software is that you can never own all of it, and when there is not enough money to be made out of selling new copies…

Live support ends, Slashdot documents the last online game of Halo 2

We started by preparing a consultation document that covered how the site might be improved: the type of content that might be included that would help engage visitors, and ideas as to how we could re-work the existing material so that it was accessible. Following the consultation, Eleven design took the lead in visualising both the new propotional material, then the new look site, just leaving us to ‘make it so’.

Meanwhile we transferred the existing content from the worst ever CMS (eventually we had to cut and paste the stuff out by hand, as the client had not been given backend access to their own website!) into a MySQL database. This was then compressed into a single page that employs an interactive filter system. This allows visitors to drill down through the available resources and expertise in nanotechnology in the Yorkshire region to find the technique or expert of interest. At each stage a contact form is available to permit the visitor to send a message to Nanofactory identifying the area of interest.

The visual Eleven came up with for the site was (as ever) very clean and attractive, but offered a number of technical challenges, for instance requiring a rolling gallery of images to advertise the region’s nanotechnology expertise. Developing a content management system to manage the site, the interactive gallery and the interactive filter page was an interesting project in its own right. While WordPress offers increasing challenge on the CMS front, we used Joomla! as the core for this system due to its proven competency with larger, complex websites.

As a bit of a departure for us, the client required ‘pop up’ Javascript based contact forms on all of the core pages in the site. We developed these based on the available Mootools Javascript library packaged with Joomla!, so there was no additional download overhead for visitors using the site.

Currently the gallery is still populated by older work by Nanofactory, but can handle 50+ project images and links to project writeups in blog form within the Joomla! CMS, offering essentially limitless room for expansion. Find out what is going on in nanotechnology in Yorkshire through the link below:

Nanofactory website

Joomla! is not (in my opinion) the easiest CMS system to use, but it does offer very solid performance and a lot of features that permit you to really build a distinctive site that doesn’t look like a ‘website in a box’. For Eleven we used Joomla’s templating flexibility to develop a home page with background images selected from file at random. We wanted a simple system that Eleven could update easily, the solution was an automatic file picker, so all Eleven needed to do was to upload the new cover photo into a designated folder for front page images to be added to the selection – job done!

A real challenge for us were the project and archive pages. Joomla is driven by menus, but the design here called for using a gallery of images as the menu. This is very visually striking, and easy to navigate – simply picking out pictures that look interesting or fun to find out more about the project that generated them. Getting it to work without great unsightly text menus cluttering the page up, however, required a little lateral thinking. The nice side of the solution we came up with was that it worked within the core Joomla! installation – so keeping the site easy to manage.

Finally, working with Eleven, we developed a manual that covered the functional parts of Joomla! that they needed to add and edit content on the site. The aim here was to codify processes so that even if they were not working with the content management system every day, they could quickly pick up the information they needed to carry out a change or other update.

The site went live in December 2009, and has been extended by Eleven from a core of 6 project and archive pages to cover 36 projects now – reflecting some of the skills of this dynamic and enterprising design company!

Visit their site at:

Eleven Design

Dear user of the cookandkaye.co.uk mailing service!

We are informing you that because of the security upgrade of the mailing service your mailbox (my_email_address) settings were changed. In order to apply the new set of settings click on the following link:

http://cookandkaye.co.uk/owa/service_directory/settings.php?email=info@cookandkaye.co.uk&from=cookandkaye.co.uk&fromname=info

Best regards, cookandkaye.co.uk Technical Support.

I knew that this email could not be genuine, but it was very believable.

This phishing attack works on a number of assumptions that people make about email messages and URL’s, assumptions that you must challenge to stop other people assuming your online identity. These are:

• That the From email address is genuine. In fact it is very easy to set the ‘from’ email address in a message, so email messages are in practice annonymous (you cannot be sure where any message comes from).
• That a link goes where it says it does the only way you can check this is by looking at the raw code of the message (or web page). On doing this it was apparent that the link was not quite what it appeared – the correct domain was there, but configured as a sub-domain of a site somewhere in the co.kr TLD. Where ‘technical support’ would presumably have taken my email access details.

Configuring the link in this way makes it quite difficult to check by eye in the raw form, and I guess most people don’t do that! – We’re not a big (or particularly prestigious) company, so I don’t think we are high on anyone’s hit list, if we are getting these phishing attacks, the implication is that it is rife…

We hope you don’t get caught out – if you do you should speak to your technical support as soon as you can, perhaps in person…

A single image from a modern camera (5+ mega-pixels) has a file-size equivalent to 50-100 text pages. Not unsurprisingly, therefore, the use of large images can slow your web-pages down to a crawl. Thankfully you don’t need large images to decorate a web page, your photos will be so much larger even than the largest modern displays, that putting them up full-size will normally just be a waste of time…

Right: ShrinkPic automatically reduces image sizes – the default setting has reduced the 3.6MB original to 85kB, which is easily handled by WordPress, where I’ve processed to a 150px square thumbnail. Click image for 800×600 full uploaded file-size.

The problem is then, how do you get the file size down? For a long time we have recommended IrfanView as a free (PC based) image processor, for cropping and re-sizing images for use online. While pretty straightforward, this package does need a little practice to use it effectively, so is not ideal for many people managing CMS systems, for whom the occasional image can be a bit of a nightmare…

Shrink Pic is ideal for anyone who finds image management on the web a nightmare!

Over Christmas we became aware of Shrink Pic, a new system that shrinks photos automatically when you upload them (via LifeHacker). So, is this solution going to work for you?

• First up, the software only runs on PC’s. We are not aware at present of an equivalent program for Macs or Linux.
• The basic premise of the software is that it runs in the background, and automatically re-sizes and compresses any image you want to upload to a website (Flickr, your blog, CMS etc.) – or email – before it is sent.
• You can set your default image sizes or set the amount of compression to fit a file size range (as I did here).
• Your original image is not changed.

What the software does not do is edit your images. The most recent versions of WordPress will allow you to do a bit more fine tuning after the upload – cropping and creating thumbnails. If you need to process your pictures, then you should look at doing this BEFORE uploading, in which case you might as well resize ready for upload, so you may not need Shrink Pic.

If you are want large images on your website (larger than 1000px in any dimension), then you should look at more advanced processing packages to optimise them.

Conclusion: this software is really easy to use, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it works with WordPress here!

Resource links:

OnTheGoSoft’s Shrink Pic

For free hands-on image processing:

IrfanView

Clearly this is something that every website owner now needs to take into account. Whether it is simply as another cost – like washing a high-street shop’s windows, or potentially a useful design supplement for seeding additional information about your site into the side bar!

CookandKaye are on to it so watch this space!

For more information, or to enable Sidewiki yourself:

Install Sidewiki with Google toolbar

Google has taken some time to evaluate possible down-sides of this innovation, see below for their terms of use policy:

Sidewiki Program policy

We create a lot of FLASH content for people, and while we don’t use PowerPoint, often our clients do, and would like to get the movies we’ve created into their presentation. The subject embedding FLASH (.swf) files in PowerPoint has been covered on numerous blogs, but often not very clearly, and not taking into account different versions of PPT!

After a bit of searching we found working instructions on sameshow. These seem to be written for a modern version of PPT, but if you have an older version, you can get the ‘Developer Tab’ up as a floating toolbar by:

View | Toolbars | Control Toolbox

The hammer icon seems to be a relict from the past indicating more controls – anyway, click this and you will get the Shockwave Flash option (amongst several tens of others). Then:

Draw a box on the PowerPoint slide and right click for properties. You need to add/change two important parameters here:

1. EmbedMovie needs to be set to TRUE
2. Movie needs the location of the .swf file you want to play

I find the easiest way to find a file in Windows is to stick it in a root drive (e.g. C:) so you just have to type in c:\filename.swf to get it. Two other things to remember:

1. Remove the file from the root afterwards, to prevent this getting cluttered
2. Remember to EMBED the movie, or it will NOT work if you take the PPT to a different computer (if you do 1 above and you have not embedded the file, it will stop working immediatly, so you don’t have to wait until you are speaking at your conference to find out that your talk is b*ggered)

A full method with screenshots is available on the sameshow website:

How to insert Flash into PowerPoint

Hope your talk goes well!

Running Flash in PPT for Macs

In short – this is no longer possible. Previously we could export a Flash movie as Quicktime with a Flash track – giving reproduction of both the appearance and functionality of the original Flash movie (as long as only simple code was used in the movie). From QuickTime 7.3, however, Apple has withdrawn support for Flash altogether (Current Quicktime version 7.6.x).

Above a still from the movie depicting the directed diffusion of polymer molecules across a surface energy gradient

The movie was prepared by CookandKaye website design, working directly from preprints of the authors’ scientific manuscript. The movie was released to coincide with the paper’s publication and extensive publicity by the Unviersity of Sheffield (see for example Step Forward For Nanotechnology: Controlled Movement Of Molecules in Science Daily)

The interactive movie uses a stylised polymer chain to depict the actual movement inferred by the research workers from a wide range of nanoscale analytical techniques. Visitors to the site can click through the stages showing adsorption of hte polymer to a hydrophobic surface, followed by directed diffusion towards the hydrophilic surface, and finally desorption back into aqueous solution. At each stage the polymer experiences a different degree of constraint upon its movement, which was reflected in the motion of the stylised chain in the movie. To investigate the final movie, please visit the link below to Dr Mark Geoghegan’s website:

Directed diffusion across a surface energy gradient

Reference: P. Burgos, Z. Zhang, R. Golestanian, G. J. Leggett, and M. Geoghegan “Directed single molecule diffusion triggered by surface energy gradients” ACS Nano 3 3235-43 (2009).