articles
articles on web development, design and marketing
Articles - 2009
Your own website cartoons!
27 Nov 2009
Here's a great software facility that allows you to make your own cartoon movies using your own script. Once you've created the movie you can send it via email, or publish it on your… Read More
3 reasons to make sure you're on Bing!
15 Oct 2009
Microsoft's replaced their Live Search engine around 3½ months ago with Bing! - a completely new search engine. Is your site listed? We've noted that quite a few sites which rank highly on Google and Yahoo… Read More
Ignore social networking at your peril
08 Oct 2009
Twitter, Facebook, MySpace - the list goes on and on. Social networking is a phenomenon that looks like it's here to stay, but are people starting to tire of it all? I know quite a few… Read More
Create your own XML sitemap
01 Aug 2009
There is so much misinformation about search engines and search engine optimisation these days. A lot of people believe that a site map will increase a site's ranking. Just about the only way a site map… Read More
Website images 101
17 Jul 2009
Good photographs on a webpage can make the difference between keeping your visitor interested or losing him/her. If you have any responsibilities in updating your website, you'll have to learn the basics of image/photo editing. Why, you… Read More
Flood at Blot Towers
09 Jul 2009
Global warming or what? This week web development got put on hold after the Blot Design office was flooded! Picture the scene; it's just coming up to 5:00pm, the Blot office is still hard… Read More
Paypal - an alternative for payment processing?
28 Jun 2009
Over the last 12 months we've done quite a few e-commerce integrations with the Paypal service and found that its payment processing interface has come a long way from the old one-way 'Buy Button' type… Read More
FOWA to the Future
28 May 2009
Blot attended the Future of Web Applications (FOWA) event this month, and very interesting it was. Held at the Sun Microsystems building in Linlithgow, FOWA is an event for the web developer community that… Read More
Oracle and MySQL
28 Apr 2009
What do Google, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Nokia have in common? The answer is they all use the MySQL database for data storage. MySQL is used by all sorts of web sites,… Read More
Email - the bane of web design companies
31 Mar 2009
Email has become an essential part of most people's life, it's hard to remember what it was like before we had it. You'd think by now it would be a pretty smooth running thing, but… Read More
Don't use Helvetica on websites!
03 Mar 2009
What a beautiful font Helvetica is. It is available in so many different flavours too - the designer is spoiled for choice. However, designers, especially Mac designers, need to be aware that Helvetica looks terrible… Read More
Ajax Firefox form submit problem
05 Feb 2009
Here's a little problem we hit when writing a recent application using Ajax We have a form that calls a Javascript Ajax function on submit which updates some of the POST values in the form based… Read More
