Many store owners using Magento as their e-commerce platform are frustrated by the lack of flexibility and control in terms of how their products are displayed on the frontend.

Ideally, we would like a screen where you can view your products, then simply drag them up and down to change the order in which they appear when in list view.

Unfortunately, when it comes to user-friendliness, Magento is way behind other CMSs like WordPress.

Still, there is a fairly straightforward way to re-arrange the default product listing order in Magento – if you know where to click.

All web designers who undertakes a lot of monthly maintenance for their clients must implement a checklist system for keeping track of the tasks performed for each client.

Having a separate task list for each client can complicate things. As a very visual person, I prefer to give myself a general picture of each month's maintenance work, so that I get a real sense of the amount of work left at the end of each day: I can then allocate time more effectively – and it just feels more structured.

We are releasing another free template, this time the theme is mobile disco and DJ. Dark background and contrasting bright colours, a top navigation menu and a left sidebar for more internal links.

The theme comes as a .zip file containing an index.html page, an image folder (all images are copyright-free) and a CSS stylesheet.

As always, this free web template validates as XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS 2.1.

You can preview the template here.

The default installation of Magento has two lines of footer links, one that you can edit from the CMS tab of your admin (under Static Blocks – Footer Links) so you can add links to your own content and one that is dynamically generated by Magento via a set of XML and PHTML files. It's a bit of a maze but for help on editing individual links on this second block follow
this tutorial.

We have just introduced a new service called website healthcheck. This came about because lately I have found myself offering advice to many businesses that already had a web presence but were concerned about its performance.

It’s a very common scenario: they had someone design their website – often a friend or relative who told them “Yeah, I can do websites, don’t waste your money hiring a professional” – the finished product looks good, it’s getting some traffic from Pay-per-click advertisement and direct links, but for some misterious reason it’s getting nowhere with Google’s natural search.

Nodewords is an absolutely essential Drupal module. In fact, I am not sure why its features are not implemented in Drupal out-of-the-box. I was quite shocked to discover that Drupal doesn’t include support for meta tags, so basically there is no way to add keyword and description meta tags to your pages (or “nodes” as they are called in Drupal – why? no idea) unless you install and configure Nodewords.

So you do.

And then… it doesn’t work. Blast! But you went through all the required steps… Let’s check them all again. You installed the module, enabled it, configured the “http://www.yoursite.com/admin/content/nodewords” page, set permissions and created those nice meta tags on your pages… You look at the HTML: no tags! What the…

So, here it is: our brand new website.

What’s different? Quite a lot actually. If you remember the old look website, the first thing that will strike you is the much more minimalistic approach. Gone are the retro graphics and Flash animation.

WebRightNow is about “fresh” and contemporary web design, so we wanted to reflect that in the new look.

Also, we now offer a whole range of new services, like SEM, CRM and web hosting. There are some great web design packages that we believe offer amazing value for money: these can be purchased online via Paypal.

Update: the Toque Tambor website has recently been redesigned by a different developer, so the links below no longer work.

I have recently been working on an update for a previous client, Toque Tambor. Their “web person” (every band or community has one) was keen to integrate Youtube and Flickr into their website. I had previously installed both a video and a photo gallery on their site www.toquetambor.com but he was finding it hard to update and couldn’t afford to pay for my services every time one of their gigs was filmed or photographed.

As a web developer, you will want to be able to test your pages on different versions of the major browsers, especially the troublesome IE. The problem of course is the fact that ever helpful Microsoft have made it almost impossible to install multiple versions of their browser on a single machine. I said “almost” because of course, where there’s a will there’s usually a clever way. Which is this: the Maddalone/Staudinger workaround, which basically works by removing certain DLL files and making some changes to the registry.

The hardest part of the transition from laying out pages with tables to using CSS and nested DIVs, was for me the tedious process of testing the layouts on different browsers and finding that the code was being interpreted in wildly different (sometimes completely illogical) manners, yet not being able to visualize exactly what each browser was “seeing”.

I came up with the simple solution of assigning each troublesome DIV a different colour border, which would give an immediate picture of the layout when viewed in a browser. High contrast colours work best, and you can also choose between solid or dotted lines.