Product Photographs

May
03

We were off at a product photoshoot today. A site we’re working on required high resolution images of an artists canvas artwork. The new site will be a catalog of her past paintings and future exhibitions. We had great fun collaborating with Markku Karvonen from Makamedia to get the best possible quality images. Who photographs the photographers?… We do.

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Security, spam and WordPress

Jan
17

Well it’s finally happened. The spam bots have found this site and are being thoroughly repelled and I thought I’d take a moment to discuss security, spam robots and WordPress.

Akismet

One of the best methods of catching comment spam is through the plugin Akismet. Akismet is installed with every WordPress installation and simply requires a key (which is free) to activate. You can get an Akismet API key here. Akismet checks each comment made against it’s own database. Its database gets smarter every day as users all over the world let it know what is spam (rare) and what isn’t. Spam comments rarely get through and since it started being bundled with WordPress I can’t recall a single instance when I’ve seen a spam comment get through, it’s that effective.

Contact Form 7

The nicest form plugin I’ve found is Contact Form 7 (available via your dashboard). It has a few extra add-ons such as The Campaign Monitor Addon which makes managing email campaign lists and collecting subscribers a breeze. Once the bots find your site it’s time to tighten up your form security. Contact Form 7 provides two different fields to stop bots. One is a CAPTCHA field, the other is a quiz field. Both of these work in different ways.

CAPTCHA

You’ve probably seen these around the web and have been frustrated at their complexity. They drive almost everyone to distraction and there are many articles documenting the hardest to read CAPTCHAs around the world. Luckily Contact Form 7s CAPTCHA isn’t nearly as difficult as those but it can still frustrate your users as well as exclude visually impaired people.

Quiz

This field asks a simple question. You can set the questions yourself and they display randomly on the form so that bots find it difficult to get the form submitted. This is my personal favourite and I use it here on the quote form as well as the contact form.

Updating

One of the best things you can do to beat back the robots is to keep your WordPress and plugins up-to-date. Robots can exploit software holes, luckily the WordPress community is quick to find the holes and patch them up. You get no benefit if your version is out of date and may become a target for the latest bug exploitation. Crafty Coding Blog Packages come with a Maintenance Package for a year which means you won’t have to worry about updating your software and you can concentrate on your own work.

In Conclusion

There are many other methods of combating spam, these are just a few tried and tested simple methods that stop the vast majority of spammers from taking advantage of your site. Crafty Coding customers automatically have these methods installed and are able to blog/ignore their site without worrying.

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How to improve your 404 error page

Jan
12

The 404 page

A 404 error page is a page that’s displayed when a web server can’t find the page you’re looking for. Usually this error page appears because content has been moved but links to the content stay the same. According to Google, 404 errors are the 5th most common error page displayed however it’s also the easiest one to predict and develop a damage-control system for.

Doing it wrong

A view of the default 404 page in Internet ExplorerWithout a custom 404 error page, your users see something similar to the screenshot on the right. The default page doesn’t help the user (a.k.a your customer) at all. According to some surveys done, 79% of visitors will not make any effort to find a missing page once they’ve hit a 404 error page. That’s a lot of lost visitors.

Default 404 problems:

  • It’s ugly and doesn’t match the rest of your site which is unprofessional as well as disturbing to users.
  • It looks like a system error page and users may feel that they have caused the error themselves.
  • It’s uninformative and doesn’t tell your user why they’ve arrived at this page.
  • It doesn’t help your customer find what they were looking for in the first place.

Continue reading →

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Social media and related posts

Dec
15

upPrev and Share Rail in action.WordPress Extend currently has 17,387 plugins available which makes choosing the best plugin for your blog difficult to say the least. I was browsing around today and came across two plugins that I particularly like and after installing them I thought I’d promote them while I’m at it since they’re awesome. I should also note that these are included automatically with all of our Blog Packages. So without further ado…

upPrev

You know how sometimes you find a plugin that does a good job at something without tooting it’s own horn? upPrev is just like that. Basically when a user is on a page or post and is almost finished reading or scrolls down to comment it’ll slyly swoosh in a popup at the bottom of the screen suggesting something else they might like to read. It can also integrate with Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. You can try out the plugin by clicking here and scrolling to the bottom of the screen. The official website’s in Polish so not much help there unless you understand Polish. As I started using this plugin around Crafty Coding I noticed one feature that I needed that the plugin didn’t offer, I wanted to be able to exclude certain posts/pages and categories from the popup. I did a quick and dirty hack for that, you can find it here.

Share Rail

This plugin makes it easy for users to like and share your content. It adds a bar to the left of your site showing how many tweets/Facebook likes and Google+ shares each page has. It’s quite easy to install and has an easy to use CSS creator so you can customise appearance. You can see it in action on the official plugin page.

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Live chat and Crafty Complete

Apr
22

Things are getting really exciting around here. We have a huge new product on the way and in the meantime we’ve also added a new package Crafty Complete. The aim of Crafty Complete is to make it as simple as possible for companies to get online and have everything they need in one place. We’ve also launched live chat as a support method which makes it much easier to ask quick questions and get support without having to fire up an email client (we can be lazy too). Another speedy method of support is visiting our newly designed Facebook page. Be sure to like us to receive 10% discount on our products and keep your eyes peeled for our latest project.

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Interlinks 3

Jan
08

We’re proud to present the third version of our Interlinks plugin for WordPress. This version improves upon the basic functionality of the previous plugin by allowing you to hide or use certain features such as whether the red links will be shown to guests on your site, whether the red link will send logged in users to the write post page and also whether you’d like to allow Interlinks in comments. For more information on this time saving plugin please visit the plugin page and we’ll be happy to hear your comments/suggestions.

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Expansion

Dec
15

The original Crafty Coding theme was set at a maximum 800 pixels. We’ve had to increase this to 1000 pixels as there just wasn’t enough room to fit in all the products we’d like to offer. We are currently in the process of updating and clearing out all of the plugins from harleyquine.com and with a lot of elbow grease this process should be complete in the next few weeks. We’ve had some fantastic ideas sent in for improvements to the plugins as well as coming up with a few tricks of our own, we hope our existing users will be happy with the end result.

Mailing services are going to be an important part of the machinery here at Crafty Coding. We plan to make it as easy as possible to contact your customers. We’re currently developing a range of completely unique email templates for the fantastic Campaign Monitor software as well as plugins utilising the Campaign Monitor API (more about that in the next few weeks).

As always we hope you take a look at our products and feel free to get in touch should you have any questions.

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Crafty Coding founded

Nov
01

After much soul-searching and plotting, Crafty Coding is now a reality. Today was our first day of official operations and we’re excited to get started on building a company based on honesty, trust and a love for all things nerdy. I hope the years to come will be fruitful, not only for us, but for the customers we work for. Check out our current product list and feel free to get in touch should you require more information. We look forward to working with you!

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