A survey carried out on nearly 500 small businesses, found that 66% are spending more time on social media this year than last. In fact, more than half of small business owners and managers spend more than an hour a week on social media, and a shocking 43% spend more than six hours every week blogging, sharing, and tweeting about their business. Research carried out on small business owners revealed that many were not willing to look at Facebook and Twitter for even 15 minutes as of only two years ago.

Small businesses have been found to be virtually ignoring LinkedIn Google+, and Pinterest, with participation at just 4% for LinkedIn, 3% for Google+ and 1% for Pinterest.

The number of small businesses that have increased their social media budgets is four times higher than those that have decreased their budgets, so clearly something is working.

If you need any help with developing a successful social media strategy, contact us at Network Intellect for more information.

The post Small Businesses Prefer Facebook and Twitter appeared first on Network Intellect.

I have the philosophy of always building with the larger scale in mind as you never know when a project may take on a whole new scope, and its better to be prepared than left pulling your hair out. So how to we build for scalability and maintainability?

Below we have some of the best things to remember when creating websites with scalability in mind.

Create maintainable code

Creating simple CSS classes for things such as buttons, links, sidebars, headers etc. that can be used throughout your sites will save you a mountain of time in the long run. Instead of creating images for every buttons for example, using a simple button CSS class that can be built upon where needed saves a lot of pain in future when developers need to add new buttons.

In addition thinking about your menus, if your menu fits perfectly on the screen as it is, what will you do if suddenly your company wants to add 3 new items to the end of this. Either leaving a lot of space for growing into or using a vertical menu may serve you better here.

Think to the future and be organised

In the future you may need to suddenly add a new arm or section to your business, which means you need to be very organised. Before you do anything think about your folder and naming structures.

Try to keep seperate folders for each of your seperate site parts, a folder for scripts, another for stylesheets, another for images etc. this can go as deep as you like with subfolders or seperate areas for admin and front end files but make sure you have a good structure that will be easily readable in 6 months time when you come back to it.

Naming files with useful names is one of the most useful things you can do, imagine coming back after 6 months and seeing an image folder with 1000 images in simply called ’0001.png’, ’0002.png’, ’0003.png’. Maybe using prefixes will really help for example putting ‘footer_’ before every footer image or ‘menu_’ before every menu image. This helps you find them when listed alphabetically. In addition give descriptive names to your files after your prefixes.

The same applies for commenting and naming your code here. Naming your css, php and javascript classes and files can really help to understand what you are doing in the future.

Another great tip is to get your browser compatibility working early on and constantly checking as you add new functionality and styles etc. Waiting until you’ve finished a project can make it almost impossible to go back through everything and apply patch after patch to get it to work in IE6/7.

With these few tips you will make your life much more bareable in future when creating web projects.

If you want help tidying up and getting your websites future proof then why not get in contact with us here at Network Intellect.

The post Designing & Maintaining Large Website Projects appeared first on Network Intellect.

Google has recently released the documentation for their Mirror API, meaning that developers now have a new place to start creating apps. Glass is the first mainstream and viable way to bring constant computing to our world. We moved from the home with desktop PCs, to the street with mobiles and now we will be constantly connected with Google Glass.

Google Glass will be comfortable, unobtrusive and will be instantly available due to the fact that it will be worn at all times. In fact this is likely to be the biggest shift in computer integration since the iPhone.

A very welcome addition to Google Glass is the fact that developers won’t be permitted to provide advertisement or charge for applications within Google Glass. This in itself is a massive change from Google itself and iOS and Android models.

You can be the first!

We are at a massive advantage here with the opportunity to be able to create some of the first apps to run on Google Glass and really establish ourselves in the market. With a marketplace that is not saturated with apps from the sublime to the ridiculous our apps will stand out.

Sign up for the Google Glass newsletters and blogs and keep up to date on the latest developments.

If you would like any help with getting started with Google Glass then why not get in contact with us here at Network Intellect.

The post Developing for Google Glass appeared first on Network Intellect.

Even using the newest spec of HTML (currently version 5) is not possible in pre IE9 due to its inability to parse HTML5 elements.

You don’t want to not be able to use the latest web technologies in your clients projects, but how do you use them but still keep your site backwards compatible to still work near enough as expected in older versions of Internet Explorer I hear you ask?

In comes Modernizr.

What is Modernizr?

From their site:

Modernizr is a JavaScript library that detects HTML5 and CSS3 features in the user’s browser

Using conditional JavaScript and CSS you can handle situations where older browsers still stay behind, regardless of if the users browser supports a specific feature or not. Modernizr currently supports the following browsers: IE6+, Firefox 3.5+, Opera 9.6+, Safari 2+, Chrome,  iOS’s mobile Safari, Android’s WebKit browser, Opera Mobile, Firefox Mobile and Blackberry 6+.

Installing Modernizr

Modernizr lets you select which features you need in ordered to keep the size of the code at its smallest, if however you don’t currently know what features you will require, you can always use the development, uncompressed version which has all features enabled.

You can select your options with the download link here, and the options page will look similar to below:

Once you have downloaded your specific version, you should then link to your script inside the <head> tags after your stylesheets.

For more information on using Modernizr, why not get in contact with us here at Network Intellect.

The post Working With Modernizr appeared first on Network Intellect.

Now we have our environment set up its time for the fun stuff, lets begin to code!

First of all open up your text editor and save your file “index.html” on your desktop. The .html extension at the end of the file tells the web browser that the file contains html code and to treat it as such, compiling it into a html page with content areas, text etc.

In 99% of web server environments the home page of your website will always need to be named “index.html” as this is the page that the server looks for first when a person types in your web address in the browser. If you were to type in http://www.google.com into the browser the server would actually look for http://www.google.com/index.html behind the scenes.

Our First Code

A HTML document requires only a few elements for it to be classed as a valid HTML document and these are doctype, html, head and body.

Copy and paste the following into your index.html file, save it and then open it in your browser by simply double clicking the file on your desktop.

<!DOCTYPE html>

<html>

<head>

<title>My First Web Page</title>

</head>

<body>

Hello World

</body>

</html>

Now you will see the words Hello World in your browser, congratulations you’ve written your first ever website!

HTML5 Elements

Now we are almost seasoned pros at HTML web development, let’s go through each of the elements above to briefly explain what each one does.

The 3 main elements of a website are the the <html>, <head> and <body> elements all of which must be closed with their corresponding </html>, </head> and </body> tags.

The doctype declaration at the beginning of the file <!DOCTYPE html> is a little piece of code that tells the web browser which standard of HTML to compile the page with.

If you need any more help creating websites in HTML5 then why not get in contact with us here at Network Intellect.

The post Working With HTML5 appeared first on Network Intellect.

Don’t fear! If you take baby steps you will soon learn to run with it and start making all sorts of content and you never know, you may move on to use other dynamic languages that you once thought impossible!

What do I need to write webcode?

A text editor

Yes, thats it! All you need is the standard text editor that comes with your computer.

What is HTML?

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and is the basic code that every website in the entire world is written in, including this one. If you want to get a quick look at what HTML looks like then simply right click your mouse here and select the option that says “View Source” or “View Code” or similar.

HTML is used to build a webpage’s text, content and structure among other things.

Every webpage has the ability to add text, images, videos etc. and each of these is inserted into a page using standard HTML syntax, which can then be interpreted by computer systems. In addition to structuring the page, HTML can also be used to describe what each section contains (navigation, footer, header, content areas etc.)

What HTML doesn’t do however is “style” the site, in terms of font sizes, colours, borders, backgrounds etc. these are handled by another relatively simple language called Cascading Style Sheets or CSS, but we will get to that later. You may also have heard of other languages such as JavaScript and PHP but we don’t need to worry ourselves with these for now but they are good to know about for future development.

The current version of HTML as we speak is HTML 5 and the biggest advantages of HTML5 over previous versions is the usage of new features such as LocalStorage, Video and new interactive form elements.

Tools

Before you start building your sites you will need to set up your development area, while not strictly necessary it is best to download as many web browsers and text editors you can to get an idea of how web browsers affect differently the code you write. Try to get Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Intenet Explorer and Opera as a starting base.

A word of warning, the further in to your development you go the more and more angry will you get with previous versions of Internet Explorer (pre version 9), as it does some strange things and doesn’t support HTML5 at all.

In terms of text editors, there are thousands of them out there but as a great general purpose free one (and the one I personally use) get Notepad++

Now that we have our system set up it’s time to actually start coding some HTML5, we will cover this in our next post which can be found from out blog.

If you would like any help coding up your HTML5 pages then why not get in contact with us here at Network Intellect.

The post Beginning With HTML5 appeared first on Network Intellect.

What is jQuery Mobile?

Good question to start with!

The jQuery mobile framework allows you to design a single highly-branded web site or application that will work on all popular smartphone, tablet, and desktop platforms

So Why jQuery Mobile?

jQuery Mobile is a mobile-first framework and no a mobile only framework which means that you can develop responsive web designs on top of the jQuery Mobile plugins, below are 2 of my favourite features in the new jQuery Mobile versions.

Panel Widget

We all know that side sliding Facebook menu, and now we have access to our very own thanks to jQuery Mobiles new panel widget. You can see how these work exactly in the jQuery Mobile documentation here.

Table Reflow

One of my biggest problems when creating Responsive Web Sites is how to deal with tables, but thanks to jQuery Mobile tables can be switched to be stacked rather than inline on small screens, something which jQuery Mobile calls table reflow. You can see this in action below:

How Do I Include jQuery Mobile?

jQuery Mobile is really starting to take off in Web Development Circles and it’s current Latest Stable Version as we speak is 1.3.1 which you can insert directly into your websites using the following:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.3.1/jquery.mobile-1.3.1.min.css" />

<script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.9.1.min.js"></script>

<script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.3.1/jquery.mobile-1.3.1.min.js">
</script>

The code above simply includes the css required for jquery mobile to work, the latest version of jquery (1.9.1) minified and then the minified version of jquery mobile (1.3.1) itself.

With all of this included in the head of our sites we are now ready to proceed with actually using jQuery Mobile itself.

Although the above is a very short introduction to jQuery Mobile it should whet your appetite enough to get you thinking about how you can use it across your sites.

If you need any help developing your websites then why not get in contact with us here at Network Intellect.

The post Why jQuery Mobile? appeared first on Network Intellect.

Facebook Home is a custom Android user interface and achieved the 500,000 download mark in 9 days which is some achievement however it is worth noting that this is only 0.05% of their actual user base.

Again, this could be offset by the fact that Facebook Home is currently only available on Android devices.

With all of this aside, Facebook Home has had 11,600 reviews with a massive 6,059 of these giving it a 1 star review with an average review score of 2.2 out of 5.

Below is one users review:

I tried it, and to be honest, it just was too much. I would like it better if it was just the lock screen, but it gets annoying

while another added

There are some really neat features, but I feel like it’s too in your face

In addition, users have continuously complained that Facebook home drains their batteries too fast.

If you would like any help with setting up your own apps or developing your applications then why not get in contact with us here.

The post 500,000 Facebook Home Downloads appeared first on Network Intellect.

According to the latest online data 182.5 million Americans watched 39.9 billion videos online in March 2013 with video advertisement views reaching its highest figure ever at 13.2 billion in the same month.

In February, 178 million Americans watched 33 billion videos with advertisement views reaching 9.9 billion.

It is worth taking in to account the fact that there are 31 days in March compared to 28 in February so its an unfair comparison, however March is still the highest on record.

The post Video Advertisement Reaches 13,000,000,000 appeared first on Network Intellect.

If you don’t know what Summly is then let me explain. It is a summarisation tool created 3 years ago by a teenager named Nick D’Aloisio which uses a natural language algorithm with machine learning. The new app takes news articles and condenses them down into 400 characters ready for mobile devices.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said:

We’re thrilled to introduce this game-changing technology in our first mobile application, and, with the immersive imagery of our virtually endless newsfeed, the new Yahoo app has both great technology and beautiful design front and center.

The app lets users search for news topics they are interested in and then displays the summarised versions of the articles and is currently only available for iPhone.

The post Yahoo iPhone App Upgrade appeared first on Network Intellect.