Our thoughts about web design, cheese, and everything in between.

If you are a current or potential client, you may want to click on the Clients category
to filter our news stories that are geared towards you. We will be including a few
“how to” guides for making the most of your website’s content management system
and maximising the tools for better search engine results, as well as some general
useful information designed to make your website work for you .

There’s also a link to our Technical category, to filter results for people who speak
a million languages, none of which will order you a coke in a foreign land.

Our sidebar has all the categories listed, so you can browse by subject area,
or theme. I have a feeling the  Wonky category will be our most active .

I have often heard stories from clients about previous quotes received from other web designers, where at the outset, the price seemed very reasonable and they felt they were getting a good deal. It wasn’t until later down the line that various hidden charges surfaced, making the initial design fee too good to be true.

Here is how Gamma 5 operate:

• We will price a job for you and we agree a set fee for a set task.
• You will pay 50% up front and 50% upon completion of the project and only when you are happy with the final results.

There are NO monthly “management” fees.

There are no beefy hosting fees.

We provide sites with content management systems meaning you can update your site at any time at no cost. You are in complete control of your own site. We will show you how to use the system and trust us, it’s super simple.

We recommend a variety of third party hosting companies, the cheapest and most reliable of which will set you back approximately £10 for the first year, and £20 each year after that. You are entirely free to find your own hosting company and you are not tied in to an over inflated deal with ourselves.

Always make sure that you have a complete and clear understanding of all the costs involved with your web design project before you agree to take on designer, otherwise you may discover that the overall fee is way more than you bargained for.

Gamma 5 are fully approved web design service providers, having been vetted by Business Link North East, and included in their North East England Service Provider Register (our Registration number is SPR-7738)

This means you can be sure we provide a high standard of work, a great service to our clients, and are fully covered by professional indemnity insurance. It’s a good idea to make sure to check your potential designer is a registered member before you enter into any agreement with them.

For further information on the Business Link service, you can visit  Business Link and make an arrangement to speak to a local funding adviser, or feel free to contact us for any information regarding your web design project.

Jenny and I often work on projects together.
She handles artwork, layout, html,
css and the like. I focus on server administration,
javascript, cgi, and php.
Most of the time,
it goes quite smoothly,
we have both been guilty of making
mistakes, and have become comfortable
enough to admit them and laugh at ourselves.
Yesterday,
I had a mishap with mod_rewrite rules,
first making it so none of the pages were
visible, and then creating a vicious rewrite
loop that was supposed to point to
http://somewebsite.com/directory/
but instead came out as,
http://somewebsite.com/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/directory/

Needless to say, Jenny got a good laugh out of that.

I corrected my issues, and then this morning,
we started merging everything together for the
finished product.

We follow the methodology of applying one change
at a time, so that it we can track down any bugs that
may pop up.

After what appeared to be a seamless merge,
Jenny went to the shops to buy some chocolate
in celebration.
While she was gone, I noticed that all the dynamically
generated links from my php had disappeared.

When she returned, chocolate in hand and in mouth,
I asked,

“Did you make any changes?”

She replied,

“Only the ones I did while out buying chocolate”

I wasn’t sure if she was serious or joking.
Still reeling from my mod_rewrite mishap
from the day before, I immediately started
reviewing all my changes, and comparing them
with my previous working revision.
I could find no errors.

“Damn it Jenny, what did you change?”

“Oh for f**k’s sake, I didn’t change anything,
why is it always my fault?”

My dog jumped on the bed,
knocking my mouse over a spot that should
have been a link, I noticed my mouse had
changed from an arrow to a pointed finger,
just like it does over a link.
I clicked,
and yes, it was a link.

“Jenny, did you change the link text
to white on the style sheet?”

“Oh well, I might have done that.”

Adrian Thiele

Just what you need with a project deadline heading fast.
Yes, I really didn’t mind at all spending all that time doing uninstalls, reinstalls,
moving folders, checking event logs, and basically banging my head against a brick wall.
It appears plenty other people were having the same problem according to many a
“help me out of this ridiculously infuriating mess” forum.

Turns out, the solution, and indeed the problem, are about as ridiculous as it gets.

Dreamweaver cant handle files that are 8kb in size.
Actually, it’s files that are 8kb and any other multiple of 8.

The solution, open any file in your sites folder with another editor and
add a few comments until it is safely out the 8 zone.

As was pointed out to me by a certain technical colleague, if that was an open source piece of software, a, it would have been fixed in no time with an update, a solution or a plugin, and b, the person responsible for the error in the first place would have been laughed out of town and forever referred to as 8k Bob.  That seems a little harsh to me, but then I’m totally reasonable and forgiving of most things after a cup of tea and a biscuit.

Adobe’s statement:

This is a very rare bug that causes Dreamweaver to crash during operation, and then crash repeatedly each time you try to restart the program. It normally affects only Dreamweaver CS3 on Windows, and is caused by the presence of a file that’s exactly 8,192 bytes (8KB) or a multiple thereof.

My statement:

Bollocks.

I’ve always been a fan of the saying,
“Just because you can,
doesn’t always mean you should”

I’m sure many of you remember the
scrolling marquee

No, it’s rather annoying.

There is also the unforgettable blink tag.

Friends don’t let friends use blink tags

Flash intros often fall the same category.
Are we against flash?
Oh no, not at all.
We actually have a Flash instructor on staff,
we just believe there is a time and place for
everything and that a Flash mini epic saga
should not be your home page.

We believe that the home page of a well designed
website should provide important information in
a concise and easy to digest format as well as a
table of contents so to speak of your website.

We can put a link to the Flash epic saga
and let your customers decide if they want
to watch it, rather than forcing it on them.

Adrian Thiele

We will be having a complete re-design of the site in the coming weeks.
The site’s design has been the same for quite a while now, and as much as
I like the fresh green grass, the actual structure of the site needs an overhaul
to make space for all the features we have been working on for our clients.

On top of that, we have done a fair bit of work on our search engine rankings,
which have seen a real boost due to our efforts, so it seems to perfect time to
focus on a new front end design to coincide with all the new visitors to our site.

Search engine optimisation is a key part of any new website design project we do.
We build sites for our clients with the promise that they will achieve great search
engine results, so it makes sense that our own website is proof that our methods work.

Jenny Gibson

Yes of course Gamma5 does website design in Newcastle!
We do anything from a one page brochure site to a
full-blown E-commerce design with a database back end.

Adrian Thiele

I was looking at some code tonight,
and thought it looked a little odd.
This concerned me until I saw the
comments.

Adrian Thiele

We are on an optimization kick.
Next on the list is the dreaded
http 404 “page not found” error.
404 errors are not only unfriendly
to end users, but also to search engines.
Using the Apache ErrorDocument directive
you can point to a custom 404 page.

ErrorDocument 404 /whoops.html

Looking at the headers,
this generates a 404 response from the web server.

A 404 response is going to be detrimental
to our search engine optimization efforts.

Modifying the ErrorDocument directive
to point to a url instead of just a file like so,

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.gamma5.com/whoops.html

changes the 404 error to a 302 redirection.

A 302 beats a 404 when it comes
to search engine optimization.

Let me explain my logic behind that statement.
If I have a link to points to say thisisaneatpage.html
but for some reason that page is missing, say I accidentally
named the page hisisaneatpage.html,
I want to return a 302 redirect instead of a 404 because
a 404 means that the page is not found and a 302 means
that the page has been temporarily redirected.
A 302 redirect will be indexed by a search engine,
a 404 error will not.

The ErrorDocument directive can be changed
in Apache’s httpd.conf file or in an .htaccess
file placed in the web server document root.

Adrian Thiele