We are currently taking orders for delivery on week commencing Monday 2nd August. As always terms and conditions apply, the main one being that you have confirmed the sizes are correct (you can do this by using our online form here) and that your payment has cleared before an order can be manufactured and delivered. Payment can be made by one of the following methods:
- Debit or credit card (please note a surcharge of up to 2.8% is applied to credit card transactions) in person or over the phone (Delivery usually around 5 working days)
- Cash in person (Delivery usually around 5 working days)
- Cheque through the post or in person (Can take 5 working days to clear so delivery is usually around 10 working days)
- Bank transfer (Can take 3 working days to clear so delivery is usually around 5 working days)
You can place an enquiry using one of the methods below:
Today I updated the directions page of our website, I removed all the out-of-date directions that I wrote a few years ago and replaced it with the new google directions gadget. The google directions gadget gives customers the ability to get customised directions from wherever they are direct to our location, to find out more about this gadget visit the google webmaster central blog.
This morning I moved eandhbaxendale.com from a windows server to a Linux server which will allow me more control over a few things including redirecting old pages, the Linux platform also has better support for php which is the direction the site is moving in now. Hopefully the downtime didn’t cause to many problem, that’s why I did it Sunday morning when visitor numbers are at their lowest.
It’s taken most of the day but I have finally finished updating (streamlining) the trussed rafter enquiry form, previously there were three separate forms, one for each roof shape. Well now there is a single (SMART) form, I have utilised the spry accordion widget to break the form up into smaller sections, with each panels content being drawn from a separate include file (easier to update individual sections that way).
The form validation is now handled by tmt.spry.widget.AccordionForm by massimocorner.com this validates each panel as you move between them and reports any errors in a div located above the accordion. So what makes it SMART, well panel one includes three building shapes, picking a shape updates the next panel with the matching roof shapes, which intern updates the next panel with the correct form fields to collect the necessary measurements for the building and roof shapes selected.
I am planning on updating the other forms on the website with similar features and layouts, maybe next week if I get chance, definitely won’t be Thursday though as I am going to Wolf Systems in Coventry to attend a Software Focus Group.
Now that the blog is up and running properly, the only change still to make is to switch the theme to a theme based upon the rest of eandhbaxendale.com, I have moved all the news articles from the existing news page into the blog and later today I will delete the news page and setup a 301 redirect to the blog.
I have also removed the latest new articles from the home page and replaced them with excerpts from the four latest blog posts, this has meant changing the home page (index.html) from an html page into a php page so it would work with the blog. This change however should not cause any problems though because all links to the home page should be addressed as http://www.eandhbaxendale.com/ which automatically displays any page named index whatever the extension.
Someone recently saw one of my previous posts about the changes I have made to the site’s navigation panels and suggested that I should write another post going into more detail, so here I go. For the navigation panels I am using a dreamweaver spry accordion, so the first step is to modify the accordion stylesheet so the panel looks how you want it to, in my case I set a width and added background images to the accordion panels.
Next you need to add an unordered list to each panel, so you will have a bullet point for each page that looks something like this
<div id=”Menu” class=”Accordion”>
<div class=”AccordionPanel”>
<div class=”AccordionPanelTab”>Company</div>
<div class=”AccordionPanelContent” >
<ul>
<li><a href=”about.html”>About Us</a></li>
<li><a href=”contactus.html”>Contact Us</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
Now you need to style that list, to remove the bullets etc.
#Menu ul {
list-style: none;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}
#Menu li {
width:180px;
height:20px;
background-image: url(../Images/back4.png);
line-height: 20px;
text-indent: 5px;
font-family:arial, verdana, sans-serif;
font-size:0.6em;
cursor:pointer;
}
#Menu li a {
display: block;
color: #000;
text-decoration: none;
}
That will give your menu the look your after but now I want the active page to be highlighted in someway or another, so this is what makes it dynamic. The first step is to add a unique id to the opening body tag of each page e.g. <body class=”twoColFixLtHdr” id=”company1″> and then you need to add unique ids to the links in your menu e.g.
<li><a href=”about.html” id=”c1″>About Us</a></li>
<li><a href=”contactus.html” id=”c2″>Contact Us</a></li>
Now you need to go back to your stylesheet and create a new style like this:
#Menu li:hover { font-weight:bold; }
body#company1 a#c1, body#company2 a#c2{
display: block;
background-image:url(../Images/openpage.png);
font-weight: bold;
}
What those two styles do are change the text to bold and the background of the link for the open page, the main advantage this has is that you can use the same code for the menu on each page without having to manually change the style for each pages own link.
eandhbaxendale.com
Well I have started working on a theme based upon the rest of the eandhbaxendale.com site, and so far it’s going well. I have got the header, sidebar and content area working somewhat, I just have to sort out the styles and the footer section, and then I will take it for a test drive to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything, which I probably have.
Looking at those two sentences it sounds so simple, but it is my first time working on a WordPress theme and my first time working with PHP, the enquiry forms on the main site are submitted using PHP but that is a script I downloaded and the only customising I did was to add the email address the forms are submitted to.
Well it’s that time of year again, I am another year older, 25 today, and the domain eandhbaxendale.com is 1, it’s hard to believe that I only set the domain up a year ago.
The website itself is more like five years old, it first started out as my second year project for my HND in Computing, before that all we had was one page with our address and phone number, baxtruss.co.uk, I think it was hosted by freeserve, then around 2002/3 I got involved and had broadband installed so the website moved to plus.net keeping the baxtruss.co.uk domain.
Then three or four years later plus.net’s service was getting terrible, we were losing the connection all the time, so over to BT Business Broadband we switched the website now hosted on their servers which aren’t the best, so over to fasthosts I went and set up eandhbaxendale.com and ever since the website has continued to improve and the number of enquiries gained through the website has also grown.
So now for the next twelve months, well with construction industry and the economy in general slowing right down business is tough, the aim of the game at the moment is to batten the hatches and survive the storm, hopefully the website can help with that by bringing in business not just from our local area but further afield as well. I am planning on improving the current online enquiry system and possibly bringing back the old truss type enquiry forms as well, so that should help. I have also been working on adding new content to the site and improving the existing content which will hopefully make it make it more appealing to the search engines which intern should make it easier to find us when using the search engines.
Talking about search engines, Google and Yahoo are great, I don’t have a problem with them, they have indexed most of the site, MSN Live search on the overhand, well that is definately not playing nice, for some reason most of the site has disappeared from the Live index and the URLs that remain are old and no longer exist. I know i changed some of the urls a few months ago but I set up 301 redirects, Google and Yahoo followed them and updated their indexes accordingly but not Live it just isn’t playing ball, I have been using Webmaster tools since I set up the domain and submitted sitemaps whenever I updated the site but No it just won’t have it, I am at a loss, I just don’t know what to do.
Welcome to WordPress. After waying up all the pros and cons I decided to install WordPress on our server and use that for blogging rather than Blogware, over the coming months I am hoping to setup a custom template that will give the blog a simialr appearance to the rest of eandhbaxendale.com
With all the changes I have made to the code over recent weeks, one thing I had forgot about was keeping the code valid, until that is Tony the managing director was having a look at the site and clicked on the valid xhtml button at the bottom of one of the pages and it failed. So after 10 minutes testing each page and making a few small changes to the code the site is once again xhtml 1.0 valid, it seems that as I was removing old code I left the odd tag behind which didn't affect the site in the latest browsers but could have caused a few problems with older browsers.
