Bytewire Ltd was formed towards the latter end of 2008 and to this day we have never had a logo we were fully satisfied with. We have had a range of different styles, colours and design but none of which we really fell in love with and which we were proud to say was our  logo.

Therefore we decided it was time to put this right and get a logo which we could be identified by. After all corporate identity is important with any company and even more so with one which bases a large part of its presence online.

We had several attempts to create the logo ourselves however after a long debate we decided we were too close and too involved with the company that it would be best suited to a specialist logo design company. Having drafted in the logo design company we set about explaining our criteria of what we wanted it to look like and what we felt the logo should achieve.

Design Phase 1

The design phase began with an agreement of 6 initial designs being created in which we would then voice our opinions over and then develop a particular logo from the choice.

Having analysed the 6 designs we received we felt that none of them really suited our genre of company. We were looking for a more gaming/techy feel to the design and felt all of these logos lacked that cutting edge…..back to the drawing board!

Design Phase 2

After more discussions between ourselves and the logo design company they set about designing more logos in attempt to get the look and feel of the design more accurate of that of a web gaming company.

Again the designs we received, although very nice, did not match the logo we could visualise a company such as ours having. The designs above would have fitted on a Garden Centre or similar but for a website and gaming company it just did not look right….back to the drawing board!

Design Phase 3

Determined to get a logo which we felt would mirror the image of our company we proceeded with more discussions to try and bring both ours and the designers thoughts closer together. They then went away and created the following.

Having finally received a couple of designs which we felt had potential we were pleased. The next step was to develop the two designs we liked, right hand side on the top row, and turn them into our company logo.

Development Phase 1

With a good base in place to develop the logo we wanted to refine these ideas and turn them into something more eye catching. One of the most important aspects of a logo for us was the ability to be identified by just the Logo Symbol for example a Nike tick. The next stage of the development aimed to work on this philosophy.

After receiving these logos from the design company we really felt we were getting somewhere with our logo but we had another problem, we now liked more than one of the logos designs, how do we choose?

Development Phase 2

In an attempt to make or break our decision about the logo designs we asked for one last attempt at developing the logos above. We felt we could go on and on with tweaks and adjustments but there had to come a time when enough was enough.

Although we liked these designs we were slowing warming towards one particular design which we felt represented our company well.

Decision Time

After our rollercoaster ride to find a logo which we liked and felt represented our company it was now decision time. As the logos progressed we were generally swaying towards one design more than others. However to give a chance to all logos we kept our options open and continued to ask for both of the original design ideas to be developed. The logo we chose to be our company logo is shown below.

We chose the logo above because we felt it suited our criteria the best. It can be used as a logo with or without the surrounding text, it fits our genre and it looks good. No doubt there will be further developments to the logo as time goes on but for now it works well.

Its been a while since our last post on Bytewire so we thought it was time for an update on what we have been up to, what we have been planning and an insight into the future for us at Bytewire.

Recent news

We have focused our efforts over the past few months largely on our online game, Street Crime. Street Crime has evolved into a popular gangster text based game with now over 15,000 registered users and over 600 users playing on a daily basis. We have been working on improving and implementing new and old features to enhance overall gameplay.

Below is a short overview of recent additions to Street Crime :

• Turf Damage – Gangsters turfs now come under threat from a series of random events which cause damage to the buildings which costs money to restore. If a building reaches 100% damage it will no longer produce an income to the gangster. This feature is a replacement for the previous maintenance feature which was too static.
• Trade – Provides a secure feature for gangsters to trade various items such as casinos, cars, credits and crews with each other. Each player adds their side of the trade in and then locks in their items. Only when both players have locked in their items and finalised the deal will the items switch hands.
• Weapons – Street Crime now boasts a weapons locker of more than 30 different weapons which can be unlocked through earning Prestige throughout the game. There are 6 categories of weapons all of which serve a different role in the game. Weapons needs to be trained up in order to fulfill their potential when using them in an attack.
• Achievements – An additional 40+ achievements have been added to Street Crime to give gangsters additional tasks to achieve whilst playing the game. The achievements range from easy tasks such as crushing 350 cars to stealing 50 cars in succession without getting one confiscated by the police.

Coming soon to Street Crime

With the recent additions of Heavies, Turf Damage, Weapons and more we are now getting close to an announcement for Attack so stayed tuned for more information. We have been working on attack and all its interlinking features for sometime now as we hope to produce the most unique attack systems of any online game of this genre.

Look what our designers have been up too

Our designers have been busy building us some new graphics for Street Crime characters to replace our old system with a cool new fresh look. We’re naturally really excited about these new funky characters and will be looking to get the system into the game as soon as possible. Check out some of the characters we made below.

Our Plans

At Bytewire we believe its good to plan ahead and have therefore already discussed various key areas and key development projects we will be pursuing and developing in the near future. We are devoted to continuing to work in the online games sector as we continue to work on Street Crime and aim to create one of the largest gangster games on the internet. In addition to Street Crime we also have further game ideas which we have developed over time that we would like to see come to fruition, when the time is right and the development time is available from our already jam packed schedule.

We also plan to broaden our horizons by working on a Facebook game which we hope will open our games to a wider variety of users. In addition to this we hope to make mobile versions, including an iPhone application, of our current game Street Crime to ensure users can keep their accounts up to date even if they are not able to access a computer.

There are also plans to develop our core websites such as games top sites and a game advertising network as we feel these would accompany our core competences as a business well. More details on all of our upcoming projects will follow in the future.

As web developers we all use a range of different programs and tools to help us go about our day to day work. As time goes on new programs are released which take away that really annoying problem which you wish wasn’t there. However as soon as that problem is eradicated we tend to forget what it was like before.

So if you didn’t have the use of the programs, tools and knowledge which you have gained over the years how would this have effected your development of becoming a web developer that you are today? Below I will be looking at 5 different programs or tools which I use on a daily basis to make my life that little bit easier.

Coda

Coda is a superb text editor for Mac OS X, its so easy to use, allowing you to manage multiple sites and format your code in a way in which suits you. Coda also allows you to preview your site, write beautiful CSS and even includes a built in terminal. Without Coda coding websites would take us alot longer and require alot more tools, don’t hesitate to try it! Download Coda >>

Tiny Grab

Tiny Grab automatically uploads screenshots you take and copies them to your clipboard so that you can easily send them to a friend for quick viewing. This is an excellent tool if you work with other web developers on the internet as it allows you to quickly show examples of something you have seen to help explain/describe/show the matter being discussed. Download TinyGrab >>

Subversion

Subversion is a revision control system which allows you to work on a new revision of a website whilst still showing your current users a previous revision. Once you have finished making the necessary changes you can commit your latest revision and the changes made will go live. This excellent tool therefore allows you to make changes to a website without effecting your users until its complete. If at any point you make a mistake you simply role back to a previous version!

Dropbox

Dropbox is another tool which is very useful for web developers who outsource work, for example to graphic designers. Dropbox allows you to share files between users avoiding the hassle of sending large files through email. If a file is added or modified a notification is displayed. Although limited to 2GB simply invite some friends to use Dropbox and this gets increased. Download Dropbox >>

Mozilla Firebug

Mozilla Firebug allows you to inspect elements of a website within the browser, this is excellent tool for diagnosing display problems as you can inspect the element of section which is incorrect and view the css etc of that element in order to solve the problem. This can save large amounts of time when developing a new website, its a must have for any web developer. Download Mozilla Firebug >>

If anyone has any other programs or tools they want to share, or think they have a program/tool which does a better job than the ones listed here be sure to leave a comment with your recommendations it would be great to hear some different opinions.

At Bytewire we are often faced with long projects which are developed over many months, sometimes even years in the case of our biggest project Street Crime and it can often be demoralising to continue to work on the same project over such a long period of time. There can be times when you feel the project is not moving along as well as you would like or you are stuck in a bit of a rut.

Below are a few hints and tips in ways in which we stay focused on our goal when working on a large project, hopefully some of you will find the ideas useful and perhaps even implement them into your projects.

Brainstorming

Yes, we still use old fashioned brainstorming, its a superb way to drum up some new ideas and start a roller coaster of improvements and changes which will make the overall project a better one. Sometimes on web development projects its not always possible to get everyone together in the same room, fear not, there are plenty of excellent tools which allow you to brainstorm without being together.

The main one we use here at Bytewire is Etherpad. Etherpad is a totally free real time text editor owned by Google. Its allows several people to simultaneously edit a document at the same time therefore allowing people to develop ideas started by someone else.

Time out

Believe it or not a large proportion of ideas are thought of away from your working environment, when your slaving away to meet deadlines and your heads in the game your unlikely to come up with inspiration for new ideas. Take some time out and take a step back from the project and take a look at it from the outside in.

Take some time away from the project to relax as a group of developers, you may well just come up with that idea which makes or breaks the project, it may not seem like “work” but as long as its not done too often it always helps motivation.

Progress

If your struggling to get over the line for that final big push spend a couple of hours looking at the progress you have made so far, as you progress the inspiration for what you have done so far will spur you on to finish the project.

Ask a friend

Friends are always there to help you, call on a friend who has no connection to the project. Either ask them for their thoughts on the project without going into too much detail to feed off any ideas they may have or chill out and relax to re charge yourself for another push at coming up with the best result possible for the project.

We use a combination of these techniques at Bytewire as we are often zoned in on a large project which can take a long time to develop. Street Crime has been in constant development for more than 2 years now and we are striving to make it the best we possibly can.

If anyone else has any techniques they use to stay motivated throughout a long project perhaps you can comment and share your ideas so that other people can benefit from what you have found works for you.

As the use of Wordpress continues to grow with bloggers and web designers the number of plugins created is also increasing. Some plugins are superb and can really make a difference between a sub standard Wordpress blog and an excellent one, however this is not the case for all the plugins.

I will be outlining 5 must see plugins which all Wordpress websites should be using. Some of the plugins I will be mentioning are solely there to make life easier whereas others assist you in generating the traffic your blog deserves.

1. All in One SEO Pack

Although a large amount of search engine rankings is done on your content alone there is no harm in giving yourself every chance to get your blog posts to the top of google, yahoo or other search engines. If your blog post ranks well in search engines you will generate a large amount of traffic to your site.

The All in One SEO Pack is an excellent, simple way to add title, descriptions and keywords to your posts and pages therefore giving you the best possible chance of getting yourself near the top of the search engine rankings.

Download the All in One SEO Pack plugin here >>

2. Google XML Sitemaps

Sitemaps are important to search engine spiders as it provides a list of links that your website has. Each link that is picked up by a search engine means another page you have listed in search engines for users to find therefore increasing the traffic to your website.

This excellent tool takes all the effort away from generating sitemaps by automatically generating a new sitemap each time a change is made on your blog. This means that if you blog about the latest news your post is instantly submitted to the search engines and users can begin to find your blog straight away!

Download Google XML Sitemap plugin here >>

3. Search Everything

It has often been noted that Wordpress’ search feature is one which often lets them down due to its inaccuracy. This is no longer a problem thanks to an excellent plugin which increases the ability of the default Wordpress search facility.

Included features in the plugin are: highlighting, search every post, page, comment, tag, category and more! Don’t prevent your users from finding the information they are looking for on your blog, install this plugin straight away.

Download Search Everything plugin here >>

4. TweetMeme Retweet Button

Traffic is a major key to a websites success. You can write the best blog posts and have the flashiest website but this does not drive traffic to your website. Twitter has become a phenomenon every since ‘A’ list celebrities began telling us their life stories and this can be used to your advantage by jumping on the bandwagon.

Simply add ‘Retweet’ buttons to your blog posts using this excellent plugin and any users who use Twitter can easily ‘Retweet’ your blog post to all their followers therefore expanding your potential target audience.

Download TweetMeme Retweet plugin here >>

5. WP Super Cache

There is nothing more frustrating than when your viewing a slow website. If the pages take an age to load you get fed up and often leave in order to find an alternative website to find the information you were looking for. Don’t let this be a problem on your blog by installing this superb cache plugin which increases the speed at which your pages load.

Not only that it also decreases the required CPU processing to load the page as it stores static versions of your site for faster viewing!

Download WP Super Cache plugin here >>

Plugins, Plugins and Plugins

This is just a small number of Wordpress plugins which are freely available on the internet to increase the performance of your blog. This is just a start and as time goes on many more will be made available however make sure you install the 5 mentioned above to give you a head start in generating a fast, effective and traffic driven Wordpress blog.

Wordpress is becoming a more widely used tool by web developers to create websites. Originally Wordpress was seen solely as a tool for blogging, they were easy to setup and you can choose from a selection of free templates to make your blog stand out from the crowd. As developers have learnt more about the capabilities of Wordpress it has become apparent that creating your entire website in Wordpress is advantageous as it makes for an excellent CMS.

How do I get started?

As with any normal website you need the basics before you can start creating your Wordpress website. The basics include purchasing domain name and hosting package. Once you have this setup you can download the latest version of Wordpress here.

Next you need to upload the files you downloaded to your server, the best way to do this is using an FTP program such as FileZilla which you can download here for free, the details you need to connect to your website will be provided by your host.

Once you have uploaded all the files simply go to the domain where you want to set this up to for example: http://www.bytewire.co.uk. You will be taken through the steps to install Wordpress on to your server.

How do I stop Wordpress looking like a blog?

In order to setup Wordpress to function like a “normal” website and not just a blog you need to make some changes to your Wordpress settings. First you need to give your pages a template name, this is so that Wordpress can link a Page created to a file, this will all begin to make sense further down.

Setting up template names:

• Navigate to the files of the theme you are using for example yourdomain.com/wp-content/themes/yourtheme/
• Create a new file called homepage.php
• Add the following code to the top of the page: <?php /* Template Name: Home */  ?>

Linking template names to Wordpress Pages:

• Login to the dashboard and navigate to the Pages tab
• Create a new page called Home
• On the right hand side change the template from “Default template” to “Home”
• Create another new page called Blog and leave the template as the “Default template”

Set Wordpress to show the Homepage not the Blog

• Within the dashboard you need to navigate to “Reading” which is in the Settings tab
• Set it so that the “Front Page” shows “a Static page”
• Select Home from the Front page drop down box
• Select Blog from the Posts page drop down box

Turn on Permalinks

• By default Wordpress does not use enable Permalinks, permalinks allows URL’s to be more friendly for example news/20/11/2010/setting-up-wordpress
• To enable permalinks go to “Premalinks” in the Settings menu
• Select “Day and name” option as this gives you the best URL’s.
• Press Save Changes
• Wordpress will now attempt to create a .htaccess file to make the changes to your Wordpress settings, if your files have strict permissions set on them Wordpress will not be able to do this, follow the on screen instructions to complete this manually.

Common Problems

Sometimes when you set a static homepage this page is also shown on your posts page. If this happens to your blog, you need to rename the homepage file on your server to something different. Wordpress uses a template hierarchy in which index.php and home.php are at the top. Your posts page will be named index.php therefore you posts page should not be called home.php to avoid confusion.

Your Wordpress website

You now have a Wordpress website which now has a static homepage whilst still making use of the superb blogging system provided by Wordpress. From here you can add other pages just like the homepage was setup to create your whole website in Wordpress.

Bytewire unveils www.myblogbytes.com a website based on users posting articles on absolutely everything more or less. Users can create and manage there own knowledge bytes on the site. Dont know the purpose of Blog Bytes? Well let us explain…….here at My Blog Bytes you can read thousands and thousands of Bytes about anything and everything you want. You can also share and create new Bytes as and when you please, all completely free! You can post and make articles for other byters to see and pass your judgement on a fellow byters bytes with a Bytement.

Go to the site – http://www.myblogbytes.com

We are very pleased and proud to announce our partnership with Fubra Ltd a media over ip company based in Aldershot, United Kingdom. Fubra Ltd are a very interesting company primarily run by Brendan Mcloughlin and Paul Maunders they own many large websites including OurProperty.co.uk and MyJobSearch.com.

Fubra expressed interest in our Online Game’s and we have since agreed to work together to produce more.
We hope in the future we can make some awesome new games and boost the profile of both our companies through doing so.

Established in 2000 they started out very much like we started out, two enthusiastic computer and web users who thought they could provide a service. Much like myself and Elliot they specialize in web-design. Eight years later they are now a very successful and ever growing company with some envious assets.

Fubra have been a very successful company in the recent years and have some valuable experience and knowledge in the field. In the past week or so we have already learnt alot from them and are very grateful. We are really looking forward to how our relationship will develop in the future and how our two companies can work together.

The first order on the menu is to build Street Crime into a massive pillar for online gaming. More will be announced on this in the coming weeks, so make sure you watch this space!

We have released our latest online game, Street Crime which is a thrilling gangster game mmorpg, emerse yourself in the world of a gangster.

What is Street Crime?
Street Crime is an massive multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG). Street Crime is based on a gangster theme whereby you create a character and aim to reach the top and become a Godfather. Along the way you will come across various hurdles.
What can I do on Street Crime
Street Crime offers a wide variety of features including Organised Crime, Property, Street Racing, Poker and more.
Who is Street Crime aimed at?
Street Crime is aimed at everyone and at any ages. Street Crime has a variety of players from different nationalities, everyone is welcome.
How can I play Street Crime?
To sign up to Street Crime visit: www.streetcrime.cc

Ever wanted to translate your website so that it appeals to a wider audience?

If you have then continue reading as ill take you through the steps in which to set this up. There is an excellent function in PHP called gettext. In simple terms instead of just writing “Hello World” in your document you would write <?=gettext(“Hello World”);?> or shorthand <?=_(“Hello World”);?> then PHP looks up the equivalent of that text in your desired language and displays it on the screen.

To me, the best way to get this working is to work locally then upload to the server afterwards, so thats what I am going to do. So to start with create a new folder on your desktop called “Translation”.

Inside the Translation folder create a file called test.php. Insert the following code into the page:

[sourcecode language='php']echo gettext(“Hello World!”); [/sourcecode]

Next you need to download a program called poEdit – this makes your life much easier when translating to different languages. Once you have downloaded and installed poEdit you need to setup the directories for the files to go into.

Inside the Translation folder create a new folder called: locale.

Inside this folder you create the folder for your desired language, for this example we are going to use german so we create a folder called: de_DE.

Inside this folder you create another folder called: LC_MESSAGES.

If you are getting confused at this point, don’t worry, we are just setting up the necessary directories ready for the translation steps.

With the directories now setup we now need to setup poEdit so that it creates the necessary language files. Open poEdit then go to File -> New catalog.

Insert anything in the Name of the project.

Language:  German

Country: Germany

Charset: iso-8859-1

Source code charset: iso-88591

Then go along to the paths tab at the top of the window. Enter the base path to the folder you created on your desktop for example “/Users/Bytewire/Desktop/Translation”. Then in the paths list below click the dotted square and type the path as “.”. Having set this up, press Ok. When asked saved the file as messages.po inside the LC_MESSAGES folder.

poEdit should now have the string “Hello World” displayed in the top half of the screen. Click on the string and it will display the text in the 2nd box down. The 3rd box down will be empty, here is where you enter your translation, so for german enter “Hallo Welt!”. Once you have done this, save the file, which will automatically create a file called messages.po.

The next step is to set the language of the page to german and then view the page again. So create a new page in the same location as test.php and name it “localisation.php”. Inside this file enter the following code:

[sourcecode language='php']
$locale = “de_DE”;
if(isSet($_GET["locale"])) $locale = $_GET["locale"];
putenv(“LC_ALL=$locale”);
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);
bindtextdomain(“messages”, “./locale”);
textdomain(“messages”);[/sourcecode]

The above code basically sets your language to german, so that when you view the page it will display the german equivalent of the text if available. Finally you need to open up test.php and include the localisation file so at the top of the file add the following code: require_once(“localisation.php”);

Now if you view test.php, you may need to upload all the files you just created to your server if you dont have a local server, you should see the text “Hallo Welt!”.

Although fairly time consuming to setup, gettext is a very good method of translating your website and is very commonly used. Having set this up you should be able to further this and translate in many different languages.

I hope this helps some people translate their websites.