Bristol restaurants coming up trumps!

We're always mentioning the latest places we've eaten in Bristol to friends and family outside the city - and increasingly these little gems are getting the recognition they deserve! After achieving Bristol's first Michelin Star, Casamia in Westbury-on-Trym have just been crowned Britain's best restaurant by Gordon Ramsey! Brothers Jonray…

Day and Night design feature on LoveGloucesterRoad.org.uk

This is really quite simple compared to the rest of the coding we do here at 18a Towers, but it's still fun! If you visit LoveGloucesterRoad.org.uk - a website we've made for free to help promote our local area - then, depending on whether you visit it in the day…

How to use the TinyMCE Filemanager Plugin

TinyMCE is my favourite WYSIWYG editor (and I've used quite a few editors over the years). It's far from perfect - some of the code it produces can be a little non-standards compliant and we  often get clients who copy and paste directly from Word, which causes all sorts of…

The Web Design Process

Making a website doesn’t have to be complicated, this is how it works. 1. We have a chat with you about your requirements and what you hope to achieve from your website. It’s important at this stage to fully consider your audience. We can help you ensure that your website…

WP e-commerce plugin User Guide

Below are instructions for how to update WP e-commerce, a very good online shop plugin for Wordpress websites. Adding products: The main thing you need to know how to do, is to add products. Here's a screenshot of (what looks like the very long...) products page. You access it by…

UK Number 3 in Top Startup Hotspots

Everyone knows Silicon Valley is the 'home of the startup', but here in the UK, we're not doing too badly in terms of levels of innovation. There are clearly some motivated people around the UK, trying to dream up new ideas and push new online startups. So why then have…

Halloween campaign for AQuarterOf.co.uk

Case Study: marketing with the seasons. We do the affiliate management for AQuarterOf.co.uk - the UK's favourite online retro sweet shop - and as you can imagine, Halloween is a busy time! The Halloween banners were rolled out a month ago, and we've been working with various affiliates on content…

Shop Software Review: OpenCart

I was recently asked to quote for making a few improvements to an OpenCart shop. OpenCart wasn't a package I'd customised before, but as I always like to keep abreast of the latest software packages for use on clients sites, I thought I'd spend a little time having a play…

Setting up public key authentication over SSH

This post is a little on the techy side, but for those sys admins out there who have ever needed to setup SSH keys between 2 servers so they can authenticate without prompting for a password, you know what a hassle it can be. I've done it enough times over…

Nasty spam email offering tax rebate

Just a quick note to watch out for emails like this one I received supposedly from HMRC this morning. Hovering over the links in the email shows me it's actually trying to send me to recivetaxrefund .xf .cz - quite different to hmrc.gov.uk!  It also doesn't have a "to" address -…

Think you’ve cleared your cookies? Think again!

There's nothing new about Cookies, most people are aware of their existence and accept that they're just a fact of life. They're fairly easy to delete after all, you can just go into your browser settings and 'clear history' or something similar and all traces of your browsing habits are…

Going that extra mile with WordPress – great feedback for Growing Vision Gardens

A fine example of a bespoke Wordpress customisation, Growing Vision Gardens is now live! This site is a case study of how going the extra mile can make all the difference. Rather than stop at the initial completion of getting content on the pages, we worked with Growing Vision Gardens…