Blog
A jQuery Plugin for Form File Inputs
Posted by
Tom Gordon on the 1st of June, 2011
Posted in Web Development | 3 Comments ›
While trawling through my google reader I stumbled across this post from the guys at Viget. I love their blog and some of the web development work coming out of there is inspiring and really innovative. The blog comes up with a solution to a problem I’ve always had with html forms; the way that browsers deal with file inputs so differently. This makes design difficult for designers trying to create a design that has a consistent look and feel to it. CSS is lacking in its ability to style these fields and the javascript solution that Trevor came up with is efficient and simple.
While the post from Viget deals with transforming a single file input in reality what a developer needs is a plugin, something that can allow any file input to be styled simply by giving it a class or ID. Essentially I wanted to turn the following slightly awkward solution;
$('.file-wrapper input[type=file]').bind('change focus click', VIGET.fileInputs);
into
$('input[type=file]').prettyFileInput();
IPN and PDT Paypal Responders Demystified
- Posted by
Tom Gordon on the 2nd of May, 2011
Posted in Internet Marketing, Web Development | 2 Comments ›
Building robust paypal integration into your site isn’t entirely straight forward. Here we use custom eCommerce solutions tailored specifically for our clients but sometimes the more basic solution is quicker albeit much less user-friendly. The basic integration of a paypal button is simple enough but if the client requires something heavier that can deal with writing to a database or the payment process? The IPN and PDT paypal setup can allow all of this and more through some careful tweaking of its default options and PHP scripts.
On top of the user’s feedback let’s assume that any order that has been completed needs to be added to your own personal database for record keeping and invoicing. This is where the paypal documentation gets a little bit hectic and difficult to decipher. The aim of this blog is to explain how to deal with this situation using a mix of two types of paypal auto-responder, IPN and PDT.
Alaress Wins Digital Business For Ormond College
Posted by
alaress on the 29th of April, 2011
Posted in News | No Comments ›
In a national tendering battle between Alaress and up to three other highly profiled competitive digital agencies, Alaress is the winner. Melbourne University’s Ormond College selected Alaress as their new digital partner to design and develop a new cutting edge website as a key component of their digital strategy.
The largest residential college for The University of Melbourne and founded in 1881 by the Presbyterian Church with the hallmarks of open entry and liberal education, Ormond College aspires to be a leader in residential collegiate learning in Australia.
Alaress Wins “Best In Class” at Interactive Media Awards 2011
- Posted by
alaress on the 28th of April, 2011
Posted in News | 3 Comments ›
Our Melbourne based digital agency is excited to announce that our entry for the Mentone Grammar School Website (MG) into the Interactive Media Awards (IMA) competition under the category ‘Education’, has won the IMA Best in Class Award with an overall score of 486 out of a possible 500.
The judges also recommended the website for inclusion in the ‘School’ category (in addition to ‘Education’). This recommendation was made for reasons relating to quality and relevance and has been approved by IMC.
Why images appear blurry on mobile devices
Posted by
Christopher Cohen on the 19th of April, 2011
Posted in Mobile, Web Development | 4 Comments ›
You may have noticed when browsing the web on your new smartphone or other such small screen, that despite its otherwise gorgeous screen, images on websites often appear blurry. And there is a very simple reason why, which I hope to explain, as well as discuss some possible solutions.
Our Brand & Logo
- Posted by
alaress on the 19th of March, 2011
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments ›
Just like Alaress the entity, our logo and corporate symbol is unique and captures the essence of our business. The name Alaress was discovered through sounding out the initials of the surnames of the three founding Directors of the company, James Leckie, Sean Richards and Matt Sambell — L R S
Stripping down CSS
- Posted by
Tom Gordon on the 2nd of December, 2010
Posted in Web Development | 4 Comments ›
As a front end developer one of the constant things I have to deal with is the fact that CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) can explode way out of proportion to the site they are being used on. If a site goes beyond a simple blog or set of static pages and morphs into a web app CSS becomes cumbersome and bloated.
This is largely due to the fact that classes like “float”, “color” and “background” are applied in nearly every individual div that is used to present a site. The common way around this is to combine classes into a single line like this: Continue reading this post ›
Schoolbox Launched
- Posted by
alaress on the 30th of November, 2010
Posted in News | 1 Comment ›
Monday 29th November, was an exciting day for Alaress as we launched Schoolbox, an online collaboration and eLearning system for School communities.
Schoolbox was initially developed as a pilot in 2000 and branded OurSchool. It was developed as a self-managed solution that incorporated a learning management system, intranet and portal. It was produced by the founder James Leckie whose vision is to develop a system that is simple, time saving, minimises administrative tasks for teachers, and improves the effectiveness of classroom time to maximise learning opportunities.
2010 Australian Web Awards Finalist
- Posted by
alaress on the 13th of October, 2010
Posted in News | 1 Comment ›
Alaress are pleased to announce that our digital agency is a finalist in the biggest national web award in the country, the 2010 Australian Web Awards.
After submitting the Mentone Grammar School website in July 2010, we were informed today that our submission was selected in the top three websites in the education category for the east coast.
You can view our award winning website and the other finalists for the 2010 Australian Web Awards at http://www.webawards.com.au/finalists/.
Using Google Analytics to Improve Your Website
Posted by
Sean Richards on the 30th of September, 2010
Posted in Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, Website Conversions | No Comments ›
Google Analytics is possibly the best web tracking and analytics software packages on the market. Recent studies have shown that as calculated by Alexia ranking, over 56% of the top 100,000 websites have installed Google Analytics. This suggests that majority of the best websites on the web are using Analytics to track their websites performance. Don’t be fooled that just because Google Analytics is free that it is uncompetitive with other analytics platforms as it is quite the opposite. In many cases it is better than other costly solutions. This tool contains so many valuable features that it would take many more than this article to cover the entirety, however from the wealth of data and reports that this tool can provide I am going to show you four key features that your as a website owner you can’t live without.