Common sense (and Google) suggests our web pages should be accessible on all devices, from smartphones upwards. As the proprietor of a desktop-centric website, I decided to look for the quickest way to become 'multi-platform'.
After many false starts - I won't bore you with them - I found the quickest was to adapt a free template of a site that already worked. You need to feel comfortable about tweaking HTML (it's only text editing) but you don't have to be an expert by any means.
I also found it best to plan for mobile rather than start with a desktop system. This led me to a single-page main site with a menu bar that jumped (mainly) to internal parts of the same page. (Okay, I added my YouTube channel to the menu as well, but this really wasn't difficult.)
The free one-page template I chose, called Urbanic, came from template.mo Download at http://www.templatemo.com/download/templatemo_395_urbanic
I could have just used a text editor to twiddle around with the code but I actually used Microsoft's free Expression Web 4. Download at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36179 This lets you look at and tweak any of the files in your downloaded template folder.
Open the index.html file and (I would recommend) save it as something personal to you. I called mine newtebbo.com. This will save you heartache later on when you try it out on your live site. Instead of overwriting your existing root page - index.html - you can test it to death under its pseudonym. Only when you're completely happy do you need to rename it to index.html. (I would strongly recommend that you first rename your existing index page to oldindex or similar. That way you can always revert if need be.)
Apart from three early lines at the top of the <head> section (title, keywords and description) your changes will all be in the <body> section of the web page. The source code is laid out neatly in divisions which start and end with <div> and </div> these are followed and preceded by a note of the section you're in. Just chop out any entire sections that aren't relevant to your design.
Replace your chosen template's text with your own. Add images you want to use to the images folder and edit the references. (You will need to add all the template's folder contents to your existing folder contents. If a template folder doesn't exist in your existing site, simply copy the template one across. I suggest doing it this way so it's easy to revert to your old site if you need to.)
You're probably best off changing only things you're confident of. Leave the CSS and other folders well alone - unless you take deep exception to some of the colour schemes or section layouts. (My recommendation would be to stick with your template's design for a while, it might grow on you.)
If you want to see what I did to the Urbanic template (assuming you downloaded it) - just right click and View Page Source of www.tebbo.com/index.html
[You probably don't need this but I use Firefox's right click/inspect element useful when fiddling around with the more techie aspects - you roll your mouse over the left panel and it highlights the part of the page you're on and gives you all sorts of information about the CSS elements that support the section you've chosen.]
Best to just 'have a go' and keep it simple to start.
Good luck. It took me less than a day.
September 28, 2015
November 13, 2014
November 05, 2014
July 29, 2014
May 22, 2014
A quickie on Python
Call me mad, but I've been learning the Python programming language.I needed a quick way to modernise masses of old HTML documents.
In the end, I decided it was quicker to use TextPad's powerful facilities to do that job, rather than learn a new language to do it. However, by then I had seen that Python would be a great way to write a pilot of a new program.
Thinking that I should get the newest and shiniest version, I installed 3.4 and, with the help of the online Python Tutorial and Michael Dawson's Python Programming book, started to crank out some useful little programs.
All very well, but then I realised that I could shortcut a lot of tedious work by using some cloud-based information but discovered from programmers and the cloud host's technical info' that they still prefer Python version 2. Grrrr.
Moral: do a bit more digging before taking the plunge. Version 3 may be the future, but version 2 is definitely the present as far as integration is concerned.
I'm now mugging up on the differences between 3 and 2. Oh well.
April 29, 2014
April 22, 2014
April 18, 2013
Need to search for content in non-standard files?
Thanks to Dick Pountain for reminding me that the bleedin' obvious isn't always.
I was groping around for a desktop search program that could look into any file, not just some standard list of extensions such as those handled by Microsoft's search. I looked at loads of programs and even downloaded a few but none did what I really wanted: to index a bunch of largely text files with the .brn suffix. In fact I didn't even need them indexed as long as I could search inside them reasonably quickly.
As a web developer and occasional programmer of many years' standing, I'd been using TextPad as my editor of choice. And, when I wanted to do global edits, I'd use its 'find in files' function. It just never occurred to me to use it to look inside other files. Until Dick suggested it.
Now, I set the file type to *.brn, the root of the search to 'desktop', tell it to look in sub-folders and the search to whatever I'm looking for. With regular expressions if I'm feeling flashy. Bingo.
As a paid-up user, why didn't I think of it before? So simple, so quick. Thanks Dick.
January 31, 2013
January 01, 2012
Online Marketing 101
If you need a crash course in online marketing, you could do worse than browse my recent collection of articles and blog posts by experts on the matter.
I had started off, a month ago, intending to investigate what's out there on the subject of 'web-based business to business collaboration' but, as I collected the links on Scoop.it, I found that 'marketing' was the theme that bound most of my discoveries together. Hence the title of this blog post.
When I was a journalist, I didn't really like having to interview marketing folk because they were too sanitised, too in control of their messages and hard to get real stories out of. (Good stories to a journalist are those which carry at least a hint of disclosure.)
However my Scoop.it investigations gave me a new respect for marketing, it really does seem to belong at the centre of B2B collaboration activities.
Here's a snap of part of my Scoop.it collection (click on the image to see it full size):
It was 'curated' by looking at hundreds of suggestions from Scoop.it, reducing them to fifty or so, then throwing out the four or five that didn't live up to the promise of the extract.
The result is a neat little package of pieces, admittedly of variable quality, but all of which helped to round out my existing perceptions of how to approach online B2B collaboration.
Since so much work went into the curation, I thought it would be silly to keep it to myself.
See what you think. It's at http://www.scoop.it/t/b2bcollaboration
David Tebbutt
David is a writer, editor and trainer. He's closed this blog.
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