In an industrial environment, a pest control contract is a must. Hampshire and Surrey Pest Control can tailor make a package to suit your needs, starting from a 4 visit per year basic package, up to a full once a month inspection package that includes all pests and unlimited call outs.

View Hampshire & Surrey Pest Control website »

Unfortunately it is that time of year where we all feel obliged to make unrealistic promises to ourselves under the tradition that is “New Year’s Resolutions”. Just like most people, I have got the stand resolutions that roll from year to year which include loosing a little bit of weight and doing more regular exercise.

However this year, I wanted to set myself some new personal challenges and with some dedication, hopefully I will succeed.

Practise what you preach

We are always encourage our customers to utilise social media (such as Facebook and Twitter) and keep their website up to date with fresh new content.

Social media provides you with increased opportunities to gain new customers while reinforcing your branding. Social media has become very popular over the last few years and its influence is becoming stronger. Regular updates to your website lets your users know that your are invested to communicating latest business developments or offers. Far too often I see websites with a “Latest News” section which has not been updated in the last 6 months, this can often provide a negative impression on the business. Most importantly, activities such as these can help with search engine visibility and search engine rankings. More often than not however I am guilty of not dedicating enough time to these activities.

As part of my News Years Resolutions I intend to build upon our social media communities aswell as blogging about company developments, offers or just general banter.

Giving back to the open source community

I am a big fan of the open source community and think its influence on how the internet is involving is often understated. Without open source I would not be the developer I am today nor would we be able to publish new websites to such a high standard while maintaining low costs. A lot of our customer’s website are being powered by the open source Worpress software which is rapidily becoming the most popular content management system in the world.

As part of my New Year’s Resolution, I hope to build and publish a project into the open source community.

Personal development

As a web developer, I am always looking for ways to improve upon my skill set. As part of this goal, last year I started to attend PHP London on a regular basis. Overall, I have found these meetings to be enjoyable and informative and will continue to attend throughout 2012. To further my personal development, I am very excited to be attending “PHP Conference 2012″ for the first time. This is a 2 day event in February which will cover a wide range of topics while providing an excellent opportunity to network with other developers.

I am also setting myself the goal of becoming a “Zend Certified Engineer”. This certification is designed to test a candidates knowledge of PHP. This New Year’s Resolutions is perhaps the one I am most excited about, however may involve the most amount of work and dedication.

2012 New Years Resolutions

In summary;

1. Build upon Bigstylee’s social media communities and provide the website with regular updates
2. Develop and publish a project into the open source community
3. Continue with personal development and become a Zend Certified Engineer

2012 hopefully promises to be a good year, both for Bigstylee and on a personal level. I am looking forward my new challenges and promise to keep you all updated on my progress!

Intega IT also wanted the ability to update the website with their latest job vacancies. Prospective candidates would then have the ability to apply for these roles by filling out their contact details and submitting their CV.

We have provided Intega IT with a modern and cutting edge website which allows them to easily post and manage their current vacancies.

View Intega IT Recruitment website »

Dee was disappointed with how her old site looked and how it failed to communicate with her audience her key attributes. Dee is now extremely pleased with her new website and is now looking forward to sharing some of best fitness tips.

View Dee Thresher Fitness website »

Our current network infrastructure means we can now support and maintain a much larger network of customers aswell as offering a wider range of products and services. We are really pleased with the performance of our new servers, with preliminary reports indicating a 50% performance increase. We hope you too enjoy the benefits of our new infrastructure.

This work began at 20:00 on 12th of November and was completed by 02:00 on 13th of November. While we are not aware of any customer down time, we do apologies to all of our customers if they experienced any difficulty during this time. Customers are advised to contact our support department immediately if you currently experiencing any issues or have any further queries.

This months talk was about “Web Application Security” which sounded like a very promising topic. Web security is always a concern for any web development project in Fleet Hampshire. Unfortunately this was anything but the case. The speaker rattled through the talk at some speed to appoint where he finished 15 minutes early and for a scheduled 55 minute talk, this is quite significant. The talk offered little content or information.

The only useful piece of information that for me came out of the talk was a brief introduction to Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), which is a tool designed to help test web security. I however found many of the examples to be entirely trivial and any developer who knows what they are doing will already be aware of these security issues and the relevant solutions.

• Manage the whole life cycle of each customer relationship – from first contact to final delivery
• Record financial transactions and monitor performance using powerful accounting tools, including general ledger, purchase and stock controls
• Deliver outstanding customer service by tracking ongoing projects, managing service contracts and dealing with help requests

LimeDB approached us as they wanted to give their current website a face lift. The purpose of the website is to communicate their product information and features to new and existing customers. With the new version of their website we wanted to produce something that was innovative and clearly communicated the core aspects of their product.

View LimeDB website »

This months talk at PHP London was about PHP extensions.  A PHP extension provides the ability to override or extend the default functionality of PHP. One can do this for several reasons including performance, change the default functionality or provide functionality that was not previously available. This talk provided a good insight into how we can fine our web design and web development projects in Fleet to provide our customer more functionality or an improved user experience.

A great resource for finding PHP extension can be found at PECL.  Some of the more popular PHP extensions include;

1. APC and memcache – both provide functionality for caching and improving performance (if used correctly)
2. oci8 – allows you to access Oracle databases
3. imagick – for image manipulation

For more PHP extension check out PECL.

The Varnish we are talking about is a software solution which sits on top of your web server, designed to increase performance for content heavy dynamic websites.

The BBC website is obviously a website with very high volumes of traffic, be it the iPlayer, news, weather and so on.  Building a website to serve such a high volume of users, performance must be a key factor.

While most websites will not require this additional layer of performance, it was very interesting to get an insight into the architecture of the BBC website and how to implement some very simple techniques to dramatically increase the performance of a high volume website. Some of these ideas and concepts will certainly be implemented into our web design Fleet projects.

As a web developer, I am always looking to improve upon my understanding of new and existing technologies related to web development in Fleet Hampshire.  PHP London offers exactly that aswell as a great opportunity to network with other people within the industry.

This was my first visit to PHP London and the topic of discussion was “Saving the World using Regular Expressions”.  Although this might sound like quite a dramatic title, this was anything but the case.  In a nut shell, a regular expressions is a powerful technique to evaluate a value in order to determine if it matches a predefined pattern.  A real life implementation of this could include checking the format of an email address or a date to ensure valid user input.

Although I already had a fairly solid foundation of knowledge surrounding the use and implementation of regular expressions, I found the presentation to be both interesting and valuable. The experience was very enjoyable and certainly intend to visit PHP London again.

I will continue to use regular expressions in our web design and web development projects in Fleet Hampshire.