All - Web Development Articles

Tackling Hierarchical Menu Issues with Drupal and jQuery

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Tue, 11/29/2011 - 15:23

One of the decisions we make when creating a hierarchical menu for a website is whether to create a "landing page" for each section. In other words, does each parent menu item have its own page?

There are three options. Each parent item can:

Getting In-Page Analytics Working with Drupal Google Analytics Module

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Sun, 11/27/2011 - 12:40

It's amazing how much time we need to spend tweaking all our development tools to keep them all playing together nicely. So when I find a problem that takes me a while to fix, I like to post it here in the hope that it will save someone else some time.

Such was the case today when I switched over to the latest version of Google Analytics. In-Page Analytics, one of my favorite tools in GA, stopped working on all my Drupal sites.

Here's the error message I got:

Problem loading In-Page Analytics

Adding the Photos Tab Back to Your Facebook Page

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Fri, 04/01/2011 - 12:10

If you're like me, you probably find that Facebook changes so quickly that it's hard to keep up. Sometimes, it seems something disappears for no reason. And Facebook's user interface is often very confusing; finding the right control panel is daunting, to say the least.

Recently, I decided that I wanted to add some portfolio photos to my company's Facebook page. That's easy enough... but for some reason, the Photos link was no longer in the menu in the left sidebar.

Adding Your Blog to Your Facebook Company (Fan) Page

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Thu, 03/31/2011 - 14:31

Linking your social media platforms together can help you communicate more efficiently. One way to do this is to insert your blog feed into your Facebook business page (or "fan" page, as it used to be called).

Xdebug not working after Netbeans Update (on MAMP)

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Wed, 03/16/2011 - 15:11

If you use NetBeans IDE and Xdebug for PHP development, at some point, there's a chance you'll run into this. Today, my debugger suddenly stopped working without warning. A quick search at Stackoverflow confirms that lots of people have issues getting and keeping Netbeans and Xdebug talking. I spent several hours trying to determine what caused this.

Inserting JavaScript and jQuery into Drupal

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Thu, 03/10/2011 - 22:55

In a previous article, I showed how to track comments and contact form submissions using Google Analytics' goals. The method I described involved adding jQuery. So I thought I'd take a few minutes to show how to write custom jQuery or other JavaScript and include it on a Drupal page.

Hover menus: Boon or Bane for the User Experience?

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Sun, 03/06/2011 - 21:30

Yesterday, I read a really good article about the negative impacts of hover menus at uxmovement.com. In it, the author brings up some good points about how hover menus (also called pulldown or rollover menus) can negatively impact the user experience on your web site.

He did a great job of explaining the pitfalls of hover menus. I'd like to add a couple more and then talk about reasons why clients ask for hover menus in the first place.

Real-Time Stats in Google Analytics?

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Sun, 03/06/2011 - 18:34

I thought I'd share a useful trick in Google Analytics to show nearly real-time statistics. For anyone who has used Analytics for any length of time, this is probably very obvious. But I have to admit it's kind of hidden... I didn't notice it for quite some time.

ROI: Tracking form submissions in Google Analytics

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Tue, 02/22/2011 - 10:48

The most important role of any stats software like Google Analytics is tracking the return on investment of your web site. One way to do this is through Analytics' "goals". By setting custom goals for your site within Analytics, you can track how many times your web site fulfills its primary purpose of converting viewers into contacts or paying customers.

The Art of Linking - Don't "click here"

Submitted by Mark Kindred on Wed, 12/10/2008 - 18:19

Years ago, the W3C made recommendations regarding how to create effective links. It goes against much of what we've become accustomed to seeing on the web. The gist of it is that your links should contain text descriptive of the site or page to which you're linking. They recommend that we avoid using non-descriptive text (e.g. "Click here") or verbs (e.g. "Download").

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