Monday 28 November 2011

Customer Focus (Joinery Contractors, North West)

J C Joinery (NW) Ltd are joinery and building contractors who offer a wealth of services including:

In fact, everything from replacement hinges for a garden gate to a complete Property Refurbishment.

A Professional Approach

Their work is finished to a high standard, but for a reasonable cost whilst using good quality, long lasting materials.

As they're well established and get 90% of their existing work from referrals (with the website acting as a bonus), they must be doing something right.

Location

Based in Thornton Cleveleys on the Fylde Coast in Lancashire, they are well placed to serve local homes and businesses in Blackpool, Preston, Lancaster and surrounding areas, including: Fleetwood, Lytham, Kirkham, Garstang, Chorley, Leyland, Blackburn, Burnley, Morecambe, Poulton-le-Fylde, Thornton and Over Wyre.

For commercial work and larger domestic work, they also operate thoughout the North West, including: Manchester, Bolton, Wigan, Liverpool, Chester, Widnes, Warrington, Southport, Skelmersdale, Bury, Stockport, St Helens, Accrington, Oldham, Bacup, Oswaldtwistle and Macclesfield.

Possibly the best ISP in the United Kingdom?

Okay, before we go any further, we ought to state that the contents of this blog are the opinions of EasierThan Website Design and are based on our own experiences.

Readers are advised therefore to refer to our Disclaimer for a full clarification of our position.

The Best?

As web developers with over 15 years experience of working with different ISPs, we've experienced everything from an acceptable level of service to over 20 emails required to resolve a single issue.

For the first time ever though we have encountered an ISP that we would actually be happy to recommend to a friend. Our current ISP, PipeTen, provide the fastest, friendliest and clearest level of support that we have ever encountered.

And for a website design business, support is the most important factor to consider.

Support?

Some are cheaper than others, but these days ISPs are all fairly standard in the services they provide and the level of uptime they offer. The real test comes when you want to do something a little bit more unusual than a straight HTML website or something goes wrong at their end.

We eluded to it above, but one of our previous ISPs (who shall remain nameless, except to say that they are a leading UK hosting supplier currently advertising on TV) regularly required in excess of 10 emails to resolve even the simplest of problems.

Their record was the unresolved issue that caused us to ditch them, which required over 20 emails from ourselves and went on for more than three weeks!

In contrast, from our experience, support calls with PipeTen are typically resolved satisfactorily in 1-2 emails and under 30 minutes.

Credit Where Due

We all know how easy it is to complain when we get bad service and how rare it is that we reward good service. We'd love to give you a list of the lemons we've dealt with over time, but as this is an official site, we're not sure it is the right place.

Instead, we'll say many thanks to Jamie, Gavin, Carl, Matthew, Grenville and the rest of the PipeTen team. Keep up the good work guys!

Thursday 3 November 2011

Customer Focus (Accounting Services, Lancashire)

The Accounts Office offer reasonably priced accounting services, including:
For those looking to develop their business further, they also offer Financial Budgets and Forecasting, along with supporting Management Accounts.

The Associates

Their associates have over 75 years combined accounting experience, working with all sizes of business from individuals, sole traders, partnerships and SMEs to larger corporations.

They can assist in the preparation and production of trading accounts, taxation calculations and online tax return submissions to HM Revenue & Customs, as well as corporation tax and statutory accounts services for limited companies.

If you have employees, they also offer reasonably priced Payroll Services.

Location

With associates based in Preston in Lancashire and Warrington in Cheshire, The Accounts Office have customers throughout the North West including Blackpool, Preston, Lancaster, Warrington, Crewe and Wigan.

Tuesday 1 November 2011

Code Tip #1 - More than one translation with Google Translate and no frame (translate whole website dynamically)

Please note, Google have made changes to their translation service and the following solution is no longer working. We hope to investigate it soon and post amendments.

If you find a solution in the meantime, please feel free to post it in the comments.

After trawling through the internet for years (like most web developers do) to find coding solutions and thus saving hours of our own time, we thought it was about time we returned the favour.

Here's one that many people seem to be struggling with for which we've developed a simple solution. There's already lots of tips out there to remove the Google Translate frame when dynamically translating your website, but as most of them point out, it only works once. Try to translate to a subsequent language and Google falls over.

The solution? Read on...

Remove Google Frame

Just to recap, the first thing we need to do is make sure the Google Translate frame is removed when it appears. This is done by placing the following code just below the <body> tag of the page you wish Google to translate first (the home page is probably best):

     <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
          if (window.top !== window.self) {
               window.top.location = window.self.location;
          }
     </script>

Set-up a Translate Page

Next, set up a blank page called Translate.[Ext] which should be placed in the root folder of your website. Ext can be ASP, PHP or whatever coding you use. Or it can be just Translate.htm as the only thing it will have in it is HTML and Javascript:

     <html>
          <head>
               <title>Translate</title>
          </head>
          <body>
               <p>Translating...</p>
          </body>
     </html>

Link to Translate Page

Somewhere on your site you'll need to create your links for calling the Translate.[Ext] page as follows:

     <ul>
          <li><a href="/Translate.[Ext]?Lng=es">Spanish</a></li>
          <li><a href="/Translate.[Ext]?Lng=fr">French</a></li>
          <li><a href="/Translate.[Ext]?Lng=de">German</a></li>
          <li><a href="/Translate.[Ext]?Lng=it">Italian</a></li>
          <li><a href="/Translate.[Ext]?Lng=pt">Portugese</a></li>
          <li><a href="/Translate.[Ext]?Lng=en">English</a></li> 
     </ul>

They don't need to appear in a list obviously and if you prefer, you can display your links as flags. A quick search on Google Images for 'Translate Flags' or similar will reveal hundreds of free ones.

You can add extra links using Lng=[Code], where Code is the language you want to translate to. See Google for a full list of translatable languages.

Translate Page Code

Finally, insert the following Javascript code below the <body> tag of your new Translate.[Ext] page. This code will ensure that every time the Translate page is called, the user is freshly redirected to a translated version of your home page (or another page of your choosing):

     <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
          var sURL = window.self.location.href.replace('%3D','=')
          var iPos = sURL.indexOf('Lng') + 4;
          var sLng = sURL.substr(iPos, 2);

          if (sLng == 'en') {
               window.self.location.href = 'http://www.[URL]';
          }
          else {
               window.self.location.href = 'http://www.google.com/translate_c?hl=en&ie=UTF8&langpair=en|' + sLng + '&u=[URL]';
          }
     </script>

The URL is the domain of your site including www (if relevant) e.g. www.easierthan.co.uk. If you want to point to something other than your home page, include the full path and make sure that the Remove Google Frame code above is placed on that page.

In the above example, English (en) is the normal language of the site. This can easily be swapped to your own native language by changing sLng == 'en' to your country's code. All it does is redirect the user without calling Google Translate, thus setting their view back to normal.

No Javascript

For anyone who does not have Javascript enabled you may also want to add the following to your Translate.[Ext] page:

     <noscript> 
          <p>Sorry, the automatic translation of this site using <a href="http://www.google.co.uk/translate">Google Translate</a> services requires Javascript to be enabled on your browser.</p> 
     </noscript>

Questions

The code is fairly simple so we haven't included a walkthrough for now, but we might add one at a later date if there is a demand.

If you have any questions, submit them below, but please make sure you've read the whole post before asking for assistance.

Possible Errors

When copying the examples, make sure each piece of Javascript is on its own line. Wherever it is clearly wrapped above, you need to ensure that it isn't still on more than one line when pasted into your code.

Items in square brackets should be replaced with your own value as explained. Do NOT include either the [ or ] characters.

Copyright Free

The above is all offered without copyright so feel free to use and adapt it as you wish.

If you have the opportunity though, spread the word and perhaps add a link somewhere back to this page.

Enjoy...