White Hat Web Design

Facebook Connect Integration

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:18:43 +0000

Having recently had to integrate facebook connect into a websites registration and login process I realised there seems to be a lot of confusing articles on the web. Hopefully this article will provide developers with the basic steps on setting up Facebook Connect

Main Steps

1. Register API key
2. Download SDK
3. Include Javascript libraries
4. Modify your database
5. Modify your registration and login code

Register API key

First you need to register for an API key, this can be done by visiting the developers centre at http://developers.facebook.com/app

Download SDK

You will need to download the Facebook PHP SDK from the Github repository at https://github.com/facebook/php-sdk. For the purpose of this tutorial we will place the files from the src folder into a subfolder on our site called fbsdk

Include Javascript Libraries

Place the following directly above your closing body tag:

Create a new file in the root of your site called xd_receiver.htm and copy and paste the following into it

Modify Your Database

You will need to add a field in your user table to store facebook id’s

Modify Your Registration and Login Code

Here’s some sample code for dealing with the logging in and registering. This file is saved in the root as fb.php


include_once('fbsdk/facebook.php');
$fb = new Facebook(array('appId'=>'YOUR_APP_ID', 'secret'=>'YOUR_SECRET_KEY'));
// $fb_user will contain the facebook id of the visitor if they are signed in and have already authorised your app
$fb_user = $fb->getUser();
if($fb_user) {
	$user_profile = $fb->api('/me');
	$logoutUrl = $fb->getLogoutUrl(array(
		'redirect_uri'	=> "http://YOUR_DOMAIN.com/fb.php",
	));
	/*
	Check if the user's facebook id exists in your user table. The variable $fb_user contains the users facebook id
	*/
	if( $exists == true) {  // if facebook user id is in database
		// Insert your code for logging a user in, e.g saving the user in session
		header("Location:/home.php");// redirect to your logged in users homepage
		exit();		
	} else {
		$user_info	= $fb->api('/'.$fb_user);
		/*
		Insert your code for creating a new user in your user table and saving the required information
		You can access the facebook users details from the $user_info array for example $user_info['first_name'] will return the facebook users first name. 
		Also insert your code for logging a user in, e.g saving the user in session
		*/
		header("Location:/home.php"); // redirect to your logged in users homepage
		exit();	
	}
} else { // if the user is now signed into Facebook or have not authorised your app then show the sign in button
	$loginUrl = $fb->getLoginUrl(array(
		'scope'		=> 'email',
		'redirect_uri'	=> "http://YOUR_DOMAIN.com/fb.php",
	));
	echo 'Click to log with your facebook account.
.$loginUrl.'\';">';
}
?>

Cybertill Website Integration

admin — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 21:48:02 +0000

If your business is using Cybertill EPOS systems and you are looking for a website to integrate with this then White Hat can help. We have experience in building bespoke e-commerce websites that fully connect to Cybertill to synchronise products, customers, orders and stock levels using their SOAP API service. Contact Us to discuss your requirements.

ParcelForce expressLink API Integration

admin — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 18:50:41 +0000

Having recently worked on integrating ParcelForce’s expressLink web service for a client there appeared to be very little online about how to work with this service using PHP. The following code shows how we set this up using the NuSOAP library. Note the below uses the expresslink test server.

If you need a development team for a project involving ParcelForce’s API then please Contact Us for a quotation.

Creating a shipment


$client = new nusoap_client('http://expresslink-test.parcelforce.net/ws/?wsdl', true);
$params = array(	
	"Authentication" => array(
		"UserName"=>"xxxxx",
		"Password"=>"xxxxx"
	),
	"RequestedShipment" => array(
		"ShipmentType"=>"DELIVERY",
		"ContractNumber"=>"xxxxx",
		"ServiceCode"=>"SUP",
		"RecipientContact"=>array(
			"BusinessName"=>"xxxxx"
		),
		"RecipientAddress"=>array(
			"AddressLine1"=>"xxxxx",
			"Town"=>"xxxxx",
			"Postcode"=>"xxxxx",
			"Country"=>"xxxxx"
		),
		"ShippingDate"=>"xxxx-xx-xx",
		"TotalNumberOfParcels"=>"x",
	)
);
$response = $client->call('createShipment', array('CreateShipmentRequest' => $params));
?>

The parameters in the $params array are all of the essential parameters that are required to be passed, on top of these there are numerous other optional ones. Replace the ‘x’ values with the relevant information. Username and password should have been supplied to you when signing up to expressLink. ServiceCode’s are available in the expressLink documentation, SUP in this case refers to their express 48 hour service. If successful the $response array variable should contain a key with the shipment number created called:

$response['CompletedShipmentInfo']['CompletedShipments']['CompletedShipment']['ShipmentNumber']

Creating a printable label


$client = new nusoap_client('http://expresslink-test.parcelforce.net/ws/?wsdl', true);
$params = array(
	"Authentication" => array(
		"UserName"=>"xxxxx",
		"Password"=>"xxxxx"
	),
	"ShipmentNumber"=>"xxxxx"
);
$response = $client->call('printLabel', array('PrintLabelRequest' => $params));
$pdf = base64_decode($response['Label']['Data']);
?>

The variable $pdf can then be saved to a PDF file or output to a browser

Note that the above code is for illustration purposes only and doesn’t contain any validation or checking for error response codes.

WHM Plugin: AllAwstats

admin — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:38:31 +0000

Need to view the Awstats unique visitor numbers across all your sites?

SSH into your server and run the following to install:

wget http://www.white-hat-web-design.co.uk/scripts/addon_allawstats.txt
mv addon_allawstats.txt /usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi/addon_allawstats.cgi
chmod +x /usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi/addon_allawstats.cgi

WHM Plugin: WordPress Versions

admin — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 12:09:35 +0000

Ever wanted to check the versions of all WordPress sites running on your server? We’ve built a handy plugin to do just that. The plugin simply scans through all the home directories on your server looking for WordPress installations and reports them all to you notifying you whether they’re running the latest version or need updating.

SSH into your server and run the following to install:

wget http://www.white-hat-web-design.co.uk/scripts/addon_wordpressversions.txt
mv addon_wordpressversions.txt /usr/local/cpanel/whostmgr/docroot/cgi/addon_wordpressversions.cgi
chmod +x addon_wordpressversions.cgi

Then login to your WHM control panel and you will see a new link under the Plugins section in the left hand menu

Basic Top 10 SEO Checklist Rules

admin — Tue, 03 May 2011 14:45:29 +0000

Below is a keyword checklist to ensure that you follow the basic top tips to optimise your pages correctly including existing, main pages and secondary ones so to present them to the search engines in a acceptable manner, generally accepted search engine algorithm rules.

URL: Get your primary keyword as close to the beginning of the URL as possible.

Title Tag: The title should be between 10 and 50 characters and include one or more keywords while still being descriptive.

Description Meta Tag: The description meta tag should be insightful and useful but it should also contain one or two of your more important keywords.

Keyword Meta Tag: It makes sense that you should include all of your keywords in the keyword meta tag. Do not include any words that don’t appear in the body of your text.

Keyword Density: Your content should be made up of all of your keywords and other text. A total keyword density (all keywords) of around 12% is the maximum you should aim for if you exceed this you could fall foul of Google’s acceptance and cross the line and commit the sin of ‘spamming’ and key word stuffing. Anything less than 2% is unlikely to yield good results. Density for a single keyword should be between 1% and 7%. 1% seems too low and 7% a little too high. Wherever possible aim for approx 5% with the primary keyword and 3% with secondary and subsequent keywords. This is balance which requires very careful consideration and calculation. SEO experts are more skilled at this fine balance and you should seek advice on this subject.

Header Tags (e.g. H1 and H2 tags): More weight is given to keywords that appear within H1 tags, then H2 tags and so on.

Text Formatting Fonts (e.g. strong, bold and underline): This may not offer much weight in algorithms, but generally if you bold the first instance of your keywords and the last instance of your primary keyword you should see some positive results.

Beginning of Text: The closer you can get your keywords to the beginning of your page content the better. Try to include your primary keyword within the first sentence or two and also within the last paragraph.

Key-Phrases as Whole Phrases: If you are targeting Internet Marketing as a key phrase then do not split the words up if possible. Some effect is noticed if the words are split, but much more benefit is received by including the phrase as a whole.

Images Alt Text: Include your keyword at least once in the Alt tag of any images. Ensure that the text is relevant to the image and gives some information.

Primary Keyword Layout

admin — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:10:57 +0000

Ensure that your primary keywords are going to be seen and spidered first.
When the Search Engine Bots/Spiders visit your site the first read the source
code just as we read a books title from the top downwards.

It is known that Bots/Spiders place more relevance to keywords
and phrases which are at the top of the page so it is logical to place as much
as possible of your primary page keywords and pages at the top of the page
and remove any potential obstacles, such as graphics and code.

If you take this illustration and imagine this glass of beer is your webpage
and keep your primary keywords and phrases at the top of the glass then your
first thing you taste is the head and if you place your primary keywords at
the top of your page then you are letting the Bots/spiders the opportunity to
taste/read your pages and you will be optimising your pages to make then more
search engine friendly.

If you have tables and graphics place these below your primary
keywords and phrases and ensure all JavaScript and lengthy lines of code are
hidden. Adjust all your page layouts in this way and you are giving the Bots/Spiders
an easier task to read what your pages are about.

Want to Climb the Google ladder?

admin — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 14:46:34 +0000

If you want your website to climb the Google
ladder then you need to develop your website ethically
within the guide lines and be prepared to be patient
and never take Unnecessary risks with short term
tactics with potentially ‘Black Hat’ practices.

If you want climb the Google Ladder and improve your organic rankings then you need a well constructed site that is fully assessable containing a growing volume of new content and has plenty of quality in bound links. This is the best recipe to follow and your site will eventually climb the Google ladder.

Positive changes you make to your website will be automatically picked up by the Google bots who regularly spiders pages of websites as long as they are accessible and will index pages to their database and take note of those changes. Every web owner wants to see their website rise the Google rankings and we all want to please Google, so if you want to improve your rankings you should try to understand how to satisfy Google’s alogryhtm. To find out more about the Google guidelines http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

Unlike other search engines such as Yahoo and MSN, Google don’t really pay that much attention to ‘Keywords’ and whilst they are important In the overall design and construction of your website they are of lesser importance to Google.

The two main areas of interest that Google are looking at

Growth in your unique content this makes your site of interest and up to date as a resource of good information to their readers.

Quality and volume of inbound links to your site both incoming only [directories] and reciprocal links with relevant sites which have high link popularity.

Both of these areas need your urgent attention if you are going to please Google’s measure of importance and climb the Google ladder

Let’s look at these topics in more detail

Content

It is widely known and accepted that well researched uniquely written content that is grammatically correct is of great value to your website’s well being. Like taking vitamins for good health the content for your site is the pill of good health you need to add to your site on a continual basis. They used to say ‘An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor at Bay’ well a page of content per day will do wonders for your website’s ranking. The more content you add to your site the more the site grows and builds a resource of information that Google can index and potentially display to their searchers.
To find out more about content go to http://www.white-hat-web-design.co.uk/content-writing.php

Liks

So much has been written about links that could fill the shelves of municipal libraries many times over so we intend to keep this very simple and straightforward as we can.

What is a Link?

A link to your website is a piece of code when displayed on another website page that creates an ‘active live’ link to your website when you click on it. For example when you search on Google you will see results of websites and a short description of that page and the blue text is an active link when clicked will take you to that page. That is classed as Inbound link as you don’t have to link back.

Each link you have to your web pages can be counted as a vote in favour of your content and the more links you have then the more votes you have in your favour.

However, not every link will be a high vote and some may be potentially damaging to your websites ranking so it is important to check the quality of those links to your site. The most important thing to remember about links is to go for Quality and above all Relevancy. The sites that link to your web pages should be relevant sites to your topic or subject matter. If you are selling clothes to children then a link from a Casino website bears no relevance and should not be accepted.

You will receive constant link requests from websites and web marketing people asking for a reciprocal link to your website every day, the problem with these is that 90% of them will be of no use to you and potentially from companies that are not as transparent as they seem to be. The unfortunate fact with link requests is that the vast majority of link requests are from sites that are not that honourable and are looking to deceive you. The term ‘Cheaters’ is used in the link building business to label such sites and we do not have the time to go in detail here to explain what cheating practices they get up to. Needless to say there are many ways in which these ‘Cheater’s can deceive the innocent web owner here are some of the more commonly used tactics.

Removing your link back after agreeing to place it a month or so later.
By leaving the link in place but placing a ‘no follow’ scripting block to prevent the spiders from seeing your link, so that all appears to be in order but of no value to you whatsoever but great value to them.
By isolating the links pages so that spiders can not follow the path to value and credit your link

These are just some of the more obvious ways that cheaters use to devalue your link and gain credit from the link you have placed on your site to theirs. There are others which experienced webmasters are aware of and that WHDesign check and monitor.

In short a link to your website is a vote in favour of your web pages if you give a link back then you are effectively cancelling out the vote by giving away a vote to the other website. The more links you can have to your website without having to give back a link the more votes you are building. To obtain ‘one way inbound’ links is difficult for example if a leading and informative website such as www.bbc.co.uk were prepared to place a link on their news pages to your website this would be priceless in terms of votes as the BBC is a international institution and highly respected website.

The only other way to obtain one way inbound links is to make
your site extremely popular or to add your site to the thousands of directories that catalogue websites as they seldom ask for a
return link you are building more inbound links as opposed to
giving more links away.

To find these Directories is a full time job and requires a sustained effort to research, catalogue and classify suitable directories. You then have to take the time to submit your site online, and provide a variety of descriptions as requested, and reply to confirmation emails from the directories editors who review your submission and in some cases you have to pay to apply.

Creating a website is like having a baby

admin — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 15:32:24 +0000

Crazy as that statement may sound at first there are some parallels to be drawn from it.

Like a baby, a website needs care and a great deal of attention and feeding
all the time.

Like a Baby, a website needs training and teaching to be strong and self supporting
and to be educated

Like a Baby, a website needs its parents [owners] to give correct guidance
and to know what they would like their baby to develop into

Once child hood is past then the young website needs new skills and new fresh
content all the time to change with time and to reflect the latest information
and thinking

Eventually, the young website will develop into a living entity which breaths
life and constantly seeks out more data and new imagery like clothing.

In time your young well fed website will develop into a mature creation that
is well liked by the search engines and visitors alike and will live on provided
you are prepared to keep supporting it.

Like teenagers they never really move away, they may leave home but they still
need help and support for many years to come

Your website is your new child and unless you are prepared to make a true
investment in time and energy into its creation and development then maybe
think again. If you think that creating a website ends after the initial
design and submission then you are going to be very disappointed with the
results and returns the website will give you. However, if you are prepared
for a great deal of effort and prepared to devote some energies and resources
into your new website then you will be rewarded and pleased with the eventual
returns.

A website is for life and we understand that principal as we have created
and managed websites for commercial reasons for almost 10 years now.

Our commitment to you and your website is to help feed and develop your website
and to deliver only what we can promise and nothing more and nothing less.

Web Design Dictionary

admin — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 15:13:31 +0000

Affiliate – A marketing program which enables webmaster
to place banner ads on the website and received a referal fee or commisson
when customers click on the link to visit the merchants website.

AJAX – Asynchronous Javascript And XML is an approach
to using a combination of technologies (such as Javascript, DOM, XML, XMLHttpRequest)
to allow changes to a webpage to be made without reloading the whole page.

Anchor Text – The clickable text part of a hyperlink.
It usually gives visitors or search engines important information on what
the page being linked to is about.

Apache – The most popular web server software in the
world since 1996. As of October 2005 almost 70% of the worlds web servers
run on Apache.

API – Application Programming Interface is a set of definitions
of ways computer software can communicate with each other.

ASP – Active Server Pages is a Microsoft technology for
generating dynamic webpages. Most ASP pages are written in VBScript but many
other scripting languages can be used such as JScript.

Bandwidth – Bandwidth is the amount of data that can
be transmitted in a given period of time. Web hosting companies often limit
website bandwidth, for example a 10Gb/month limit which would mean you cannot
transfer more than the set 10gb in 1 month.

Bot – See Spider

CGI – Common Gateway Interface is a web technology that
enables clients to request data from a program executed on a web server.
When a request is made to a cgi script the server will call the program to
be executed and its output is sent to the user to be displayed in their web
browser.

CMS – A Content Management System allows someone to easily
add or edit the contents of a webpage often without them needing any technical
knowledge.

Cookies – A small text file stored on a visitors computer
usually used to identify that user to a particular website.

CSS – Cascading Style Sheets is a feature which gives
web designers more control over the design of a webpage. It allows content
and design to be kept seperate allowing small changes to the design to be
made without having to make large changes to every page.

DBS – DataBase System of storing data in a structured
format which can accept feeds from website forms and applications to store
clients records securely.

DHTML – Dynamic HyperText Markup Language is a combination
of technologies used to produce more interactive webpages. It makes use of
DOM.

DOM – Document Object Model is the specification for
how objects are represented in a web page. The DOM defines attributes that
belong to an object and how they can be manipulated.

Domain – The address of an internet site. For example
the domain of this site is white-hat-web-design.co.uk.

Flash – A technology developed by Macromedia which allows
web pages to have moving animations and video.

FTP – File Transfer Protocol is a protocol for transfering
files over the web. FTP is mostly used for downloading files and uploading
sites to a web server.

GIF – Graphics Interchange Format is an image format
which uses upto 256 colours. GIF is great for animations, buttons and diagrams
that have a limited number of colours while JPEG is used for photographs.

Hosting – The files for a website have to be stored on
a web server, this is refered to as hosting. Your host is the server on which
the website is stored.

HTML – HyperText Markup Language is the language used
to create webpages. HTML is used to structure information inside tags for
exampe

Heading

denoted the text inside the h1 is a heading.

HTTP – HyperText Transfer Protocol is the protocol used
to connect to a web server and transfer files across the inertnet.

IIS – Internet Information Services is a web server created
by Microsoft which runs on Windows. Roughly 20% of the worlds web servers
run on IIS, second only to Apache.

Java – A high level object-oriented programming language
developed by Sun Microsystems. Small applications written in Java, called
applets can be embeded into web pages. Note: Not to be confused with
Javascript.

Javascript – A client-side scripting language developed
by Netscape to help developers create interactive sites. Some
of its features are similar to Java but they were developed independently.

JPG / JPEG – The most popular image compression format
on the web. The name itself stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group.
JPEG is at its best on photographic images while line drawings and iconic
graphics are best saved as GIFs.

Meta Tags – A HTML tag that provides information about
the web page. Meta tags may contain information about what the page is about
(keywords and description), who wrote the page, when they wrote it and much
more. Many search engines use this information when indexing pages.

MySQL – MySQL is the most popular open source database
in the world and is most commonly used for web applications. It has become
so popular due to its speed, reliability and ease of use.

Page Rank – One of Google’s methods to measure the importance
of a web page according to its popularity and links to other websites.

Perl – Practical Extraction and Report Language is a
programming language first developed for processing text but now often used
in web development.

PHP – PHP Hypertext Preprocessor is a server-side scripting
language allowing websites to contain dynamic content. Over 20 million domains
use PHP making it one of the most popular scripting languages on the web.

PNG – A lossless image format originally designed to
improve upon and replace the gif format. PNG is the 3rd most common image
format on the web, beaten only by JPEG and GIF.

PPC – Pay Per Click is a marketing program where you
can list a series of search phrases and determine your bid price for each
phrase in competition with other web sites. The more you bid the higher your
placement on the search engine results for that phrase in the list of sponsored
listings either at the top or to the right or under the free listings.

Reciprocal Link – An agreement between two websites to
provide links to each others sites. It can provide visitors with links to
other sites of a similar topic. Search engines take the amount of incoming
links into consideration when ranking your site.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimising
a site to improve the chances of it being ranked higher by a search engine,
therefore increasing the amount of visitors to your site.

SERP – A Search Engine Results Page is the page returned
by a search engine containing the results of your search.

Spider – A program which fetches webpages to allow them
to be indexed by search engines. They crawl through the inernet by following
links on a webpage.

SSI – Server Side Includes is a simple server side scripting
language, its primary purpose is simply include the content of other files
within a webpage. For example creating a file for the website header and
then including it with every page, if the header needs changing only that
one header file would need editing and not all the pages on the site.

SSL – Secure Socket Layer is a protocol for transmitting
private information across the internet by encrypting the data sent. URL’s
which use SSL usually start in https://

URL – Uniform Resource Locator is the complete address
of a resource or files on the world wide web. It includes the protocol, the
domain and the name of the file.

W3C – The World Wide Web Consortium is an organisation
whose purpose is to develop standards for the web. The W3C’s mission is "To
lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing protocols and
guidelines that ensure long-term growth for the Web".

XHTML – eXtensible HyperText Markup Language is a markup
language which builds upon HTML but is a lot stricter and requires code to
be syntactically correct. XHTML can be thought of as a mixture of HTML and
XML.

XML – eXtensible Markup Language provides a text-based
means to describe and apply a tree-based structure to information,
allowing data to be easily shared across networks and the internet.