Rapid Web News

Rapid Web is happy to announce our latest client’s website launch, a brand new Kids t-shirts website!

If you want a t-shirt for your child, or maybe your young one wants to pick our a t-shirt of their choice – this brand new kids t-shirts website may be the place to look.

This websites for young t-shirt buyers, is powered by our primary e-commerce system. This e-commerce website system can be highly enhanced and modified to fit the bespoke and ever changing requirements of our clients. For example, this system integrates a custom and unique product page specifically designed for the sale of the particular products which suit a kids t-shirt website. The basket/checkout system has also been customised and simplified using AJAX technologies to provide a more user-friendly flow to the ‘product to basket’ functionality, which helps increase immediate conversions and sales.

The design of this website has also been created uniquely by Rapid Web for the kids t-shirts website. It focuses on a bright, bold and colourful design that is designed to appeal to the targeted kids and parents audience. This unique styling and design have been applying to associated WordPress installation which allows the client to post regular kids t-shirt news and announce the launch of new kids t-shirts and related products and designs.

If you’re interested in a bespoke e-commerce website and/or WordPress powered news/blog system, please feel free to contact us directly for a quote!

Several of us in the Rapid Web office are into some quite geeky hobbies, myself especially. Rapid Web is proud to announce the recent launch of Something Geeky, a brand new e-commerce website which sells geek t-shirts and other general geeky products.

This e-commerce website is based on our custom in-house e-commerce system, which allows our clients to administrate their products and site options via a secure, custom and bespoke administration suite. This e-commerce system can be customised with new functionality as desired by the client in question. For example, the Something Geeky site shows custom hover effects on product selection, an AJAX powered ‘add to basket’ functionality, heavily customised product pages and a tight integration with a custom themed WordPress installation for covering information about geeky news and new geek t-shirt product releases.

The main site and the WordPress installation are covering by a fully custom ‘Something Geeky’ theme and website design which is fully unique to the needs of the client. This design and layout is custom designed to appeal primarily to the geek/gaming audience that the products listing on the website currently target.

Something Geeky is a custom e-commerce solution, WordPress installation and full website design and theme bespoke to the needs of the client. If you’re interested in a new website that covers any of these area, feel free to contact us right here!

We’re very happy to announce to recent launch of Banky T-shirts.org, a website that sells t-shirts from the graphic artist Banksy, and donates £1 of each Banksy t-shirt to a charity of your choice!

This website uses our in-house e-commerce system to power the online e-commerce shopping experience and the WordPress blogging system to power the Banksy News section.

This Banksy t-shirt website is a great example of how our in-house e-commerce system can be heavily customised, added-on to and made bespoke for the needs of the particular system. In this case, the charity choice during the basket and checkout stages is a custom piece of functionality that has been integrated into our system. This is shown on the front-end of the system as part of the customer experience, as well as in the administration to keep record of required charity donations based on each Banksy t-shirt which is sold.

If you want, please go ahead and browse one or more of these awesome Banksy t-shirts!

So many people have smart phones now. Almost everyone in our office has one, be it an Android powered device, a Blackberry or an iPhone.

With one of the biggest features of smart phones being their near anywhere web browsing, the mobile website market is every increasing. Going to a website on a phone which has not be optimised for mobile devices can be a huge pain to navigate well and could easily turn off your visitor (and potential customers), while an optimised website can make the experience a pleasant and swift experience.

In terms of mobile websites, there are two main types.

• Optimisation of an existing website

This mainly involves ensuring the website displays well on mobile devices, and tends to revolve around changing the styling for mobile devices which not performing any major functionality changes.

• Development of a full mobile site

Such development creates a bespoke, fantastically user-friendly experience, designed specifically for smart phone users. Such developments can be specifically designed for touch interfaces and can focus on quickly getting mobile users the information they require and directing their attention to the areas of your site that will let them enquiry or purchase the product/service your company is offering.

Without a doubt a fully fledged and specifically designed mobile site is the optimal solution for you and the best experience for your customers.

If you’re increasing in optimising your website for mobile phones or indeed, creating a bespoke mobile experience for your site, please feel free to get in touch!

The PHP scope resolution operator in PHP is a useful feature when you need to access methods or variables within a static context. It can often be useful in reducing namespace conflicts. Especially when using custom code with off the shelf systems to avoid conflicting function redefinitions.

There have been a few cases where previously defined function errors have cropped up when adding a pre made system to a custom developed application. This is has been most prominent with Word press or any system which has generically named functions. It’s often unavoidable to prevent function clashes as it requires knowing any other external system definitions which of course isn’t always possible.

Keeping generic function names in a class is a possible option to reduce the problem; however this brings about the requirement of instantiating a class before being able to use the function. Another way to get around this issue is to use the scope resolution operator to statically call functions or even properties. In PHP this can be achieved using the scope resolution operator, otherwise known as the double colon operator.

Example:

class foobar {

public static function call_me() {}

}

Usage:

foobar::call_me();

The scope resolution operator should be used wisely. It is often best practice to only use static methods when they are stateless in nature, i.e. basic helper functions that do not modify any external state beyond their own contained execution.