Music, even down to the shortest of riffs and phrases, has enormous capacity to reach your emotions. Filmmakers and advertisers use recognisable sounds to set scenes and convey a mood more quickly and effectively than they ever could with words. We all know the familiar tropes: The Jaws music means someone is in danger; a single violin means you need to reach for the tissues. But we hear hugely effective jingles every day without even realising it. Continue reading »

In a previous tutorial, I showed some inventive uses of the PHP rand and switch functions. You can do all this (and more) with JavaScript. So, for the sake of balance, here is how you make a Magic 8 Ball in JavaScript. Continue reading »

Consistency of vision and clarity of purpose are essential when blogging, but that does not mean you always need to stick to the same format. Blogging is an inherently creative activity. Today is a good day to shake things up a little. To express yourself in a way you haven’t tried before. Here a just a few ideas of new formats you could try on your blog, some of which I will be using over the next week or so. Continue reading »

The best way to learn good practice in making and maintaining websites is to learn from others. No website is perfect and simply copying something which you like the look of will land you a lawsuit for intellectual copyright infringement – but you would be mad not to take inspiration and learn from others’ mistakes. Casting a critical eye over other websites trains you to design better and produce better content. There are at least three good reasons to review the next website you visit. Continue reading »

Websites love to greet their users when they log in. A personal welcome like ‘Hello, Betty’ or ‘Hi, Donald’ makes a user feel at home, but most websites don’t need user registration. There is an extremely simple way to add a touch of sparkle to your welcomes, though, by turning your ‘hello’ into a ‘good morning’, ‘good afternoon’ or ‘good evening’. Continue reading »

Mission statements are one-line declarations of intent which define an organisation’s aim or purpose. They guide policy and give direction to the organisation’s activities. And your blog will be lost without one. Continue reading »

If you have any kind of responsibility for a website, you owe it to yourself to read Steve Krug’s Don’t Make me Think. Since it was first published, Don’t Make me Think has been the book on web usability. It defines the guiding principles and sells a convincing philosophy of intuitive web design. By way of a review, here are three biggest lessons I learned from the book, which themselves are more than worth the price of the book several times over. Continue reading »

I was recently reading David Thorne’s frankly hilarious antics with a Magic 8 Ball. He spent a day responding to every question with a randomly-generated phrase using the famous fortune-telling toy. But why buy a Magic 8 Ball when you can make it at home for free with a little bit of PHP code? People will be flocking to your website for this kind of advice.The Magic 8 Ball offers 20 possible answers; ten are positive, five are ambivalent and the rest are negative. In this tutorial we will use the original (and best) answers. Continue reading »