Evolved CMS Auto Upgrades itself…
This is a huge one for everyone here at Evolved Websites, finally our Evolved CMS can auto-update itself to the latest version, with just 1 click.
We made a little video to celebrate:
From v9.6 upwards.
Blog Category: Tips & Resources
Video manuals for eNewsletters
Our eNewsletters area of the online manual for Evolved CMS has had an overhaul, we’ve added 5 new video tutorials on Creating, Editing, Sending and Reports for eNewsletters, view here (or click on the image below):
Testing your website in all major browsers
We believe in testing all our clients websites in the major browsers in use today, as of Jan 2012 our list includes:
- Windows: Internet Explorer 7 to 9, Firefox 4 to 9, Safari 4 & 5, Chrome 17+
- Mac: Safari 4 & 5, Firefox 4 to 9, Chrome 17+
- Mobile: iPhone, iPad (iOS 3+)
To speed up testing and development, we use a number of online browser testing services we thought we’d share, in order of brilliance.
Litmus
These guys do an awesome job of email and website previews (even if they are limited to static images of each website so you can’t scroll around or test Javascript like slideshows etc).
We have been using this UK based outfit for years and heartily recommend them:
You can also share any results with clients, such as this sample of a new Home page and slideshow for Brookfarm:
https://evolvedwebsites.litmus.com/pub/e38bf7e
View their full offerings at http://litmus.com
Browserstack
We’ve only just discovered this service which lets you browse any website using actual browsers, not emulators, so far so good, and we’ll likely signup for their professional account at $19 per month (unlimited testing).
IE Netrenderer
An older service which lets you take a screenshot using just one IE browser at a time, since using Litmus I have to admit we don’t use this anymore. It can be quite slow, but is free and still useful if you can’t afford to pay for a one-off testing session:
New App: View website as Spiderbot
We’ve just released a little online app for viewing any website as a Googlebot:
- Useful for seeing how your website will appear to Google’s Spider, the famous Googlebot
- Also works for other search engine bots
- View how optimised are your keywords are without any CSS styling or Images
You can try it out right now at http://www.evolvedwebsites.com.au/spiderbot/
UPDATE: 31 May 2011 – we’ve just added keyword highlighting in v2, see our Release Notes
Use any font on your website
For years websites were stuck with the same basic ‘web-safe fonts’ like Arial, Verdana and Times New Roman.
No longer!
We’ve been using www.typekit.com to render some fancy fonts (such as Brevia) without any trouble, brilliant and well worth the $99 per year.
This opens up a whole world of possibilities for designers and web developers.
This font service comparison chart(thanks to Sylvia Egger) is a great place to start, esp. if you need advanced features such as SSL or:
Markup.io – draw and share on any website
Markup.io is a new online tool that is blowing my mind, I used to have to take a screenshot, draw on it using Preview, save it, attach to email. No longer!
View the demo markup used for the screenshot above:
http://markup.io/v/2j7g5msym11q
How DO these people keep coming up with these things?
It really shows how everything is going web-based though, so many apps and tool are now available online.
Some interesting links I’ve come across this week
Just thought I would share the most interesting websites I found this week:
- Book: ‘Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination’ from Amazon
- App: Shave Video for Mac, a simple video editor
- Blog: Google moves into the web-safe fonts area and the website http://www.google.com/webfonts
- CSS: ‘CSS drop-shadows without images’
- WordPress Plugin: ‘SEO Rank Reporter’ track your Google rankings every 3 days
Tracking website visitors mouse movements and clicks
We’ve been trialling some new software which allows us to record and watch customers moving their mouse around the website to see exactly what they are doing wrong, its helped our clients to identify issues on their shopping cart and increase sales.
Examples of improvements we’ve made to clients websites based on these recordings:
- we noticed that customers accidentally add the wrong size clothes to their cart, as the sizes keep reverting to ‘XXL’, which frustrates them as they need to go back, add the right size and delete the wrong size from their cart. We now save their chosen size on all similar products.
- find customers who have abandoned the cart, those that added items but never checked out, and watch to see why they left (e.g. to find out the freight price was a common reason)
- added a ‘continue shopping’ button for customers who added 1 product to cart but acted lost after this. A simple call to action with the ‘continue shopping’ button made the shopping process much smoother.
- converted a size chart image to a table that can be clicked to choose your size, after we noticed confusion among shoppers how the size chart worked.
You can see a short video of someone filling out the Evolved Websites contact form, see as they type and also move around with their mouse:
…and another video on Visitor Tracking – Filling out Forms:
How we work: a few great Coda Plugins we use
Coda, Panic’s all-in-one-editing software for Mac, has some great plugins available to make coding easier, here is our pick of the bunch:
Tabbed Indenting
Allows you to indent multiple lines of PHP code using the tab key (instead of ‘Command + [‘ keys), a nice time-saver.
http://menumachine.com/blog/2009/01/tab-key-indenting-for-coda/
White Out
For the perfectionist programmers that we are: “It trims all that annoying, unnecessary white space from the end of each line of code. With one simple keystroke, you can wash away that pesky white space once and for all!”
http://erikhinterbichler.com/software/white-out/
Pixelmator (an affordable Photoshop replacement for Mac) 1.6 finally gets Layers
If you love Adobe Photoshop but hate the price (and thousands of features you don’t use, or know how to use), then Pixelmator is for you!
A Mac based image editing software, Pixelmator ($59 USD) mimics many of Photoshops most-used features in a very intuitive, Mac-based style.
Here at Evolved Websites we’ve been using Pixelmator for several years, the last big issue that kept us from using it full-time was that it did not offer Layers. Until now.
Pixelmator 1.6 now has Layers, which tops off the Slices, Export for Web and much smaller file sizes that Photoshop. We have now dumped Photoshop permanently, its been 6 months and we haven’t looked back. Thanks Pixelmator!
Check Pixelmator out on their (great) website www.pixelmator.com