Author Archives: codemonkeysteve

How to see the google cache of your site

I just came across a really neat trick for viewing whatever google has cached about your site. All you have to do is enter the following URL into your browser. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.yoursite.com/ This is especially useful because at the time of writing, Google’s cache functionality seems a little unsteady in the organic search results.

Posted in news, Technical | Tagged , | Leave a comment

How to use jQuery’s .animate to have a scrolling div element

When you have limited space on a page but require more text than the space allows, a nice trick to to have a scrolling effect for that div only. I personally don’t like having a scroll bar down the right hand side. When you’ve put in the effort to create a wonderful design, having a [...]

Posted in Design, Javascript, Technical | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

How to add a ‘chat to me’ button to a website

This is another simple tutorial on how to add a ‘Chat to xxxxx’ button to a website. You can see an example of this at the bottom right of the screen. As a prerequisite you will need a Google account. 1. Log into your google account and go to http://www.google.com/talk/start.html 2. Visit this site to obtain [...]

Posted in Design | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Why progress bars are important in checkouts

When a potential customer has taken the step to put something into a basket and proceeded to the checkout, the psychological shift changes. Before checkout we are looking to build persuasive momentum. Each click of a button, each glance up and down a screen will either build or lose persuasive momentum. That is, the customer [...]

Posted in Marketing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

What are landing pages?

A landing page is a website page specifically designed to be the entry point to your site from a specific source. For example you have a site showing off your homeopathic beauty treatments. For the next month you want people to know about a 20% offer on some nice candle treatment that you’re keen to [...]

Posted in Marketing, SEO | Tagged , | Leave a comment

I can help you understand google analytics for free

You’ve done all the right things. You’ve set up your website, added google analytics to track visitors, ran your marketing campaign and sales are trickling in. Now you’re sure you can improve the performance of your site but don’t quite understand what’s going on with your traffic because google analytics isn’t for the novice? This [...]

Posted in Advertising, Marketing, SEO | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

WAMP Review

I reinstalled my laptop at home recently. New year, new frame of mind, clean slate to work with; that kind of thing. It was time to reinstall apache, PHP, MySQL and get down down to some serious coding but this time I thought I’d install WAMP as a one stop solution. I’d created something similar [...]

Posted in Marketing, Technical | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

New look of codemonkeysteve.com

 A new year and a new relaunch of codemonkeysteve.com. I’ve now gone full time as a freelancer and feel that to showcase my talents, it would be best to design a new website and portfolio! Once the initial template was written and I saw it was good, I also created a skin for wordpress that [...]

Posted in Advertising, Marketing | Leave a comment

404 error when copying a site from a local server to live

When creating a new wordpress site, i’ll use my laptop as the development copy while I get together the theme, plugins and structure I’ll be wanting to use. Whenever I’m using permalinks, things will be absolutely fine locally but as soon as I copy the website to a live environment, all the permalinks will no [...]

Posted in Design, Wordpress | Leave a comment

Random Website Viewer

A while back I had what can only be called a ‘surfing block’. I wanted to find some new interesting design ideas and thought to browse some random sites looking for inspiration. Google at the ready and hands on the keyboard… nothing. My mind emptied and I froze and for the life of my I [...]

Posted in Advertising, Design | Leave a comment