Website Design Peterborough, Jigowatt - Magento Web Design, UK » Blog

Jigowatt are recruiting, again!

Jay — Thu, 20 May 2010 12:50:49 +0000

Due to an overwhelming amount of work being undertaken and more coming in, Jigowatt are on the lookout for a kickass design ninja and web developer to join our team on a freelance basis.

Instead of filling in all the job details here, I will direct you to the job listings over at alldevjobs.

Local applicants are preferred but all candidates will be considered.

Introducing Magentosphere

Jay — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:47:41 +0000

Today we soft launched our latest project, Magentosphere.

After our successful foray into the digital product marketplace through the envato marketplaces (ThemeForest & CodeCanyon), we decided to set up our own store selling Magento related products, namely Premium Themes and Extensions.

As of launch Magentosphere is offering two Premium Magento Themes and we plan to add our first extension (a Google maps based dealer/store locator) within a week.

Our themes will differ from those you have probably seen elsewhere by being designed to suit a range of different online Magento stores. We’ll not only be creating themes for superstores with thousands of products, but also smaller boutiques who may only have a handful of products, similar to the recently launched StickaStyle web site (designed by Jigowatt our selves).

Co-inciding with our recent induction as a recognised Magento Solutions Partner we feel that this will help secure our position as one of the UK’s leading Magento design and development companies.

So go ahead and check out Magentosphere right now!

Add Magento Category Links to your Footer Template

Chris — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:56:24 +0000

A useful bit of code for those who want to start optimising their website towards visitors and importantly Google for great SEO.

In your footer template file add the following code snippet where you want to display a list of your Magento categories.

app/design/frontend/default/your_theme/template/page/html/footer.phtml

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$helper = $this->helper('catalog/category') ?>
foreach ($helper->getStoreCategories() as $_category): ?>

echo Mage::getModel('catalog/category')->setData($_category->getData())->getUrl(); ?>" title=" echo $_category->getName() ?>"> echo $_category->getName() ?>

endforeach ?>

This modification is Magento 1.4 compatible.

AJAX Contact Form; Add / Validate Checkboxes

Chris — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:12:08 +0000

For all our AJAX Contact Form customers on CodeCanyon, here’s a quick tutorial on how to add / validate checkboxes.

As some have found, the standard Javascript .val() request does not work with checkboxes, for this reason we’ll need to add a quick function to our Javascript handling file, here’s one we made earlier… add this at line 14 of jquery.jigowatt.js

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function getCheckedValue(field) {

field = $('#' + field)
txt = ""
for (i = 0; i < field.length; i++) {
if (field[i].checked) { txt = field[i].value }
}

if (txt == "") { return "0" } else { return "1" }

}

Using this function will return a ‘1′ value if the checkbox is ticked and a ‘0′ if it isn’t, this will make it very easy for you to validate in the contact.php file.

Note: If for any reason you need the checkbox’s value returned for validation you need to replace

1	if (txt == "") { return "0" } else { return "1" }

with..

1	if (txt == "") { return "0" } else { return txt + " " }

Now you just need to add the value to the post as normal.. aprox line 30 with the above function inserted

1	checkbox: getCheckedValue('checkbox'),

For your reference, our HTML for the Checkbox looks like this..

1 2	<br /> <input type="checkbox" name="checkbox" id="checkbox" value="Milk"> Milk<br />

And that’s it on our part, now with some validation you’ll be well on your way to passing checkbox variables.

AJAX Contact Form; Add or Remove Custom Fields

Chris — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:21:56 +0000

In a burst of Wordpress fever we decided to write another blog post to help all of our ThemeForest / CodeCanyon customers.

Alongside our ThemeForest and CodeCanyon success comes Customer Support. We get a lot of questions from users needing a point in the right direction so we thought we’d make it easier for us both and explain how to add custom fields to our ever popular AJAX Contact Form.

Add a Custom Field Tutorial

In this example we’re going to add a new simple text field (Your Height) which we want all users to fill in (a required, validated field).

Step One

Firstly, backup backup and backup again, once you’ve done that we need to edit our HTML to include our new field, we’re going to add this one under the ‘Your Name’ field.

In the included index.html file find the following lines..

1	<input name="name" type="text" id="name" size="30" value="" />

Below it we’re going to insert our new text field..

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<br />
<label for=height accesskey=H><span class="required">*</span> Your Height (cm)</label>
<input name="height" type="text" id="height" size="30" value="" />

Now save and close index.html, that’s the first step out of the way.

Step Two

This is an often overlooked though most important step of this tutorial.

We’re going to edit the Javascript handler (the AJAX part) of the contact form.

In the js/jquery.jigowatt.js file find the following line..

1	name: $('#name').val(),

For this example add the following code immediately below.. (please note the comma , after the line – this is important)

1	height: $('#height').val(),

Once done the section of the code should look like this..

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name: $('#name').val(),
height: $('#height').val(),
email: $('#email').val(),

Save and close jquery.jigowatt.js, that’s the second step done!

Step Three

The third and final step! We’re going to add our new field to the PHP form handler. This will validate it’s contents and put it into the e-mail.

In contact.php find the following line (aprox line 5)

1	$name = $_POST['name'];

Add the following code immediately below..

1	$height = $_POST['height'];

In contact.php find the following lines (aprox line 13)

1 2	echo ' Attention! You must enter your name. '; exit();

Add the following code immediately below..

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} else if(trim($height) == '') {
echo '

Attention! Please enter a your height.

';
exit();
} else if(!is_numeric($height)) {
echo '

Attention! Your height can only contain digits.

';
exit();

This piece of code checks that the user has firstly entered a value, and the further checks that they have only entered a numeric value. The only variables within this are $height and the error message you want to display if it finds a discrepancy.

And finally, place our validated variable into the e-mail.

Find the following (aprox line 70)

1	You have been contacted by $name with regards to $subject

Replace this with the following (notice the sentence change to include our new $height variable)

1	You have been contacted by $name who is $height cm tall with regards to $subject

And that’s it, you’ve just added a new field to your AJAX Contact Form! Upload the changed files and give it a test. Any questions, feedback or suggestions please use our comments box below.

Introducing our Acronis / RAID Web Server

Chris — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:38:50 +0000

Despite being busier than ever at Jigowatt HQ we thought we’d sneak in some time to introduce our new Acronis / RAID server setup (we don’t expect that to mean anything until you’ve read a little more).

We’ve added yet another dedicated server to our already gluttenous collection; what better time to let you all know the workings, secrets and latest new features of our server range.

Acronis

Acronis is a comprehensive backup solution which also minimises downtime to meet our strict Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs).

But what does it do you may ask..?

It allows us to operate automated incremental nightly backups of new/modified files and data across all of our hosted websites. With each and every-one of our dedicated servers running Acronis we can now offer a further outstanding hosting service to all our clients, giving peace of mind and hands-free operation to all.

With that said, we thought we’d go that one step further, we’ve customised Acronis to run a weekly server-wide backups too! This means we not only have previous days workings and changes, we have entire week backups which are securely stored off-site.

How does this benefit the client?

Ever lost a picture, removed an order accidentally or even deleted a page? In the past this may have caused headaches and disruption, with Acronis incremental backups you need not worry, individual files through to entire databases can be recovered and restored quickly and easily.

RAID

RAID is a technology that allows computer users to achieve high levels of storage reliability via the technique of arranging the devices into arrays for redundancy.

In a slightly less tech-savvy explanation, having a RAID configured server means that hardware reliability is no longer an area of worry, as with everything, computer parts have a life expectancy, if you’ve ever had a Hard Drive fail you’ll already know this can be detrimental to every-day business and can sometimes lead to permanent data loss.

For example, RAID arranges files in such a way that if 1 out of 2 Hard Drives fails, data stored on the working Hard Drive can be used to restore the other quickly and easily vice-versa. This simply means, no data is ever at the mercy of hardware failure.

All of our dedicated servers are configured with RAID as standard.

Introducing Nanowatt

WordPress – List subpages including their post tumbnails

Jay — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:15:02 +0000

We’re building a WordPress web site for a local hairdressers which is obviously quite gallery intensive. To tackle this issue using WordPress we’ve used the Cleaner Gallery plugin which is great, but our issue was on the galleries parent page where we had some brief description text followed by a simple text list of the galleries (sub pages).

Displaying sub pages is easy enough but we wanted to incorporate WordPress 2.9’s post thumbnail function to display the sub page title, and next to it the post thumbnail.

The first step is to make the theme “post thumbnail compatible” by adding the following to the themes functions.php file:

1	add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );

With post thumbnail support enabled we added a thumbnail to each of the gallery pages. Then, on the parent page template we used to following code to achieve the desired effect:

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This outputs all of the child pages in an unordered list, including the post thumbnail (if one is present) and the page title, all as a link to the actual page itself. Enjoy!

Shopp tutorial; only display top level categories

Jay — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 11:42:23 +0000

We love WordPress, and use it as a platform for many of our clients web sites. There are even eCommerce plugins available which we utilise for customers whose budget wont stretch to a full-blown Magento build. Our WordPress eCommerce plugin of choice is the fantastic Shopp.

We’re currently using Shopp on several sites successfully, however on one we’re currently building we needed the ability to display top-level categories, ignoring their children. The category display function displays all categories, regardless of arguments and while there seemed to be a function to display only top-level categories it didn’t work!

On further exploration it seemed that the function didn’t even exist so, we wrote our own. This does involve modifying a shopp core file but unfortunately there was no alternative in this instance. To add this function, add the following code to your core/model/Category.php file on line 664;

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case "is-subcategory":
case "issubcategory":
if ($this->parent == 0):
return false;
endif;
break;

Then to display your top level categories on the front-end of your shop use the following code:

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if(shopp('catalog','has-categories')): ?>
while(shopp('catalog','categories')): ?>
if(shopp('category','is-subcategory')) continue; ?>

shopp('category','slug'); ?>">
shopp('category','name'); ?>

endwhile; ?>
endif;?>

This will format the top-level categories in an un-ordered list. Tested and used in Shopp 1.0.6. Enjoy!

FREE – Credit Card icons for your Magento store

Jay — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 12:50:00 +0000

Download the Jigowatt Credit Card icon set (337)

An essential part of every online shop is clarity in which payment types/credit cards are accepted at the shop. There’s nothing more infuriating than picking a product, choosing your size and colour only to find out, when you want to hand your cash over, that you cant! So we always like to display some icons on Magento shops we build to inform customers straight away whether they will be able to pay at the store or not.

In the past we’ve created and used several different card icons after searching and not really finding what we wanted on the world wide web. There, for some reason, seems to be a shortage of good credit card icons. That’s why we’re sharing the set that we made.

At present there are icons for; Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, PayPal and Google Checkout which are the standard payment options here in the UK. If there are requests for more, we will happily add them.

You can also find several more credit card icons over at Smashing Magazine.

Dont forget to check out the other Digital Products we offer via ThemeForest, let us know what you think of the icons in the comments section below.

Enjoy!

No related posts.

Display WordPress blog posts in a Magento page

Jay — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:08:39 +0000

Due to Magentos lack of a solid news system and WordPress’ general awesomeness we often find ourselves integrating the two which is a fairly painless process. Once integrated, one of the first and most important things we want to do is display some posts from the WordPress side of the web site, be it news, blog posts or articles inside a Magento page. The easiest way to do this is to utilise the feed functionality built in to WordPress. We use the following code to do so:

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$channel = new Zend_Feed_Rss('http://www.jigowatt.co.uk/feed'); // Your RSS Feed Address
$limit_result = 3; // The amount of latest items to output.
$i = 0;
foreach ($channel as $item):
if ($i < $limit_result) {
echo '

';
echo '. $item->link . '">' . $item->title . '
';
echo $item->description . '

';
echo '

';
$i++;
}
endforeach; ?>

Paste the above code into any page you want to display WordPress posts on.

The only lines you really need to pay attention to are 3 and 4. In line 3 you simply replace “http://www.jigowatt.co.uk/feed” with your own feed URL and on line 4 you can set the amount of posts to be displayed.

This code will actually work with any feed, be it WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or any other CMS.

Enjoy!

5% later, a ThemeForest product update

Jay — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:25:13 +0000

It’s been a while since our previous ThemeForest update and the truth is that we’ve been so busy with other projects that we haven’t actually had time to add anything new to ThemeForest over the last couple of months (except for dozens of support comments of course).

However this has given us the perfect opportunity to test the business model and see how earnings pan out without being as active as we would like to be in the community. Here is a lowdown of our earnings and how they correlate with our activity:

We uploaded and began selling our first products on the 20th of June and in the next 10 days amassed 91 sales and earned $191 at the standard commission rate of 40%.

Throughout July we added several additional products and it turned out to be our most active month. This resulted in our most profitable period too earning $1500, again at 40%. This catapulted us to 2nd place in the “ThemeForest Popular Author” leaderboard with a total of 580 sales.

As I mentioned previously, from this point onwards our activity, besides support, has been minimal and our earnings have reflected this. We have experienced a dip in profit but it is not a steady decline, in fact our earnings seem to have leveled out at around $1000 per month whilst overall sales figures are steady. Aided by the fact that our commission rate is now 45% as our products have earned a total of >$11,800 we’re more than happy with how our ThemeForest adventure is progressing. Especially if we look back to those first 10 days in June and compare them to the first 10 days of November so far and compare them:

Month	Sales	Profit
June (10 days)	91	$191
November (10 days)	136	$358

This is encouraging reading and illustrates how fantastic the ThemeForest model is. Since our first product upload we’ve seen a rapid increase in interest in our own site and sales on ThemeForest, this has contributed to us being regularly featured as a monthly popular author and even generated new clients for projects outside of ThemeForest. After 2 or 3 months of not uploading anything new we’re still making good money which seems to be increasing. It will be interested to see how things develop when we find time to create and upload some new products.

Some other interesting information: Our most popular files have been, by far, our PHP scripts which continue to sell daily whilst the HTML templates seem to fall off the radar and not sell as often once they leave the ThemeForest homepage. This is perhaps due to the template market being totally saturated whilst the PHP section of ThemeForest is still in its infancy.

Our most popular product has been our AJAX Contact Form which has sold 720 times earning $1303.
Our most profitable product has been our PHP Login and User Management script which has earned us $1374
Our least popular/profitable product has been our PHP Users Online script which has sold just 32 times and earned us $42.
At a 40% commission rate we earned $4.80 for every $12 product sold, we now earn $5.40. An increase of 8%.

And finally, I leave you with our favorite testimonial to date:

Thanks, your scripts are quite addictive

Here’s to the next few months on ThemeForest!

PS We’re always looking out for good ideas for new scripts so feel free to leave a comment with any ideas, or even message us directly via Twitter.

Blueprint Theme – A naked WordPress theme based BluePrint CSS

Jay — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:39:38 +0000

View a live preview of WP_BluePrint

Download a copy of WP_BluePrint (141)

When we create a new WordPress theme we base the CSS on the popular BluePrint CSS Framework of which the benefits are obvious and numerous! However, it can take a surprising amount of time to simply set up that blank theme and upload and insert the correct BluePrint files. This is where WP_BluePrint comes in…

WP_BluePrint is a simple combination of the BluePrint CSS framework and a “naked” WordPress theme. WP_BluePrint was created to reduce the time it takes to set up a new wordpress theme based on the BluePrint framework. Simply upload the theme and instantly have all of the BluePrint stylesheets preloaded for you to begin using immediately. The basic features and files are based on the default WordPress theme by Kubrick.

It should be obvious that no styling has been applied to this theme, it is designed to be used merely as a template for you to build your new theme upon. Enjoy!

An atypical Saturday night…

Sandra — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 11:06:10 +0000

Jigowatt (minus Jay – slacker!) donned their dickie bows and frocks on Saturday the 24th of Oct as special guests and official sponsors at the African Joy Autumn Charity Ball. We were overwhelmed when almost 200 people gave us a warm round of applause at the sumptuous event which raised close to £7000 from sponsorship packages, a superb auction on the night and a raffle. However, late in the evening the crowd were convinced that Donny and Chris on the dance floor were part of the entertainment and were on the verge on donating more for their performance!

African Joy raises money for disadvantaged children in Africa and is currently supporting an orphanage in Liberia and a local charity called WAKE UP Uganda – which helps to provide housing and education.
Their Jigowatt designed website www.africanjoy.co.uk goes live soon. Keep your eyes peeled for a case study.

No related posts.

Introducing Nanowatt

Jay — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:43:46 +0000

Jigowatt are happy to introduce a brand new service; Nanowatt. As the name suggests, Nanowatt is Jigowatt’s little brother and is a service aimed at giving new and small businesses powerful web site solutions with zero compromise.

The idea came to fruition when recently a new client came to Jigowatt for a quote on a new, small business web site citing a service he had found elsewhere on the web offering static 4 page web sites for extremely low cost. To be frank we were disappointed by the level of quality exhibited in these templated sites and particularly dismayed at the lack of control given to the client. We found many similar services all of which charged monthly costs from £25 to £50 (plus the initial setup cost) which allowed 2 to 5 simple text changes. Adding pages was a whole other issue.

Happily we were able to persuade the client to hire Jigowatt and while it cost a little extra initially we were able to provide him with a gorgeous web site, powered by WordPress which he could easily update and expand by himself at a competitive price. As we expected, within a week of the clients new site going live, he has already added several pages, made multiple text changes and most importantly created a blog and started adding new posts which has done wonders for his SEO. This alone would have cost him hundreds of pounds if he’d opted to go with one of the aforementioned services, if it would have been possible at all.

We’ve decided to brand this package as Nanowatt, Jigowatts little brother. For a fixed low price we offer a package with unrivaled features and flexibility, all built on WordPress and geared towards putting our clients in control of their content. The front end of these sites are provided by a plethora of high quality WordPress themes, of which we’ve built a database and are comfortably assured that we’ve a theme for any type of web site, be it business, personal or misc!

You can read all about Nanowatt and it’s features on the Nanowatt page.

Nanowatt will eventually be a fully blown web site which stands independently of Jigowatt.co.uk, where we intend to allow new customers to sign up automatically through web forms. But for now if you’re interested in a Nanowatt package of your own please contact us via the form on the Nanowatt page.

Change the first day on our PHP Event Calendar Script

Jay — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:40:53 +0000

Just a quick post for any of our ThemeForest customers who’ve purchased our PHP Event Calendar Script and would like to change the first day of the week to Sunday.

If you want Sunday to be the first day enter this code

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$firstday = date("w",mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, 1, $year));
if ($firstday != 0){
for($y=$firstday; $y> 0; $y--) {
echo "

";
}
}

before this line

1	for($i=1; $i<= $day_count; $i++) { // Start of for $i

in the function list_events in the functions.php file.

Thanks to swamp_under on ThemeForest for posting this fix!

Great news from Jigowatt HQ

Jay — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:39:53 +0000

Experienced print designer and fellow Back to the Future disciple Leo Gehlcken is set to join the team. Leo will utilise his extensive design skills and manage many of our customers’ advertising and print design campaigns. He has extensive knowledge of the automotive market and has already created designs for many current Jigowatt customers in his previous role at Bauer Media, so he certainly knows how to produce the best on page or paper design solution quickly and accurately and will be an asset to our growing business.

Welcome Leo!

Website Design Peterborough, Jigowatt - Magento Web Design, UK » Blog

Jigowatt are recruiting, again!

Introducing Magentosphere

Add Magento Category Links to your Footer Template

AJAX Contact Form; Add / Validate Checkboxes

AJAX Contact Form; Add or Remove Custom Fields

Add a Custom Field Tutorial

Introducing our Acronis / RAID Web Server

Acronis

RAID

WordPress – List subpages including their post tumbnails

the_title(); ?>

Shopp tutorial; only display top level categories

FREE – Credit Card icons for your Magento store

Display WordPress blog posts in a Magento page

5% later, a ThemeForest product update

Blueprint Theme – A naked WordPress theme based BluePrint CSS

An atypical Saturday night…

Introducing Nanowatt

Change the first day on our PHP Event Calendar Script

Great news from Jigowatt HQ