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The Art Of White labeling
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Loading ...One of the most common misconceptions in the world of webdevelopment is that white labeling is time consuming and a big waste of times. If you build a website the last thing you think about is whitelabeling.
But as soon as you start getting partners interested then you will need to offer them your information or services. For example if you run a website about games, and offer games for sale or webgames you may get partners that are interested in offering your games on their site.
Why white label
Lets first start of why, at least preparing for, whitelabeling is important. These partners will want their users to watch the content in the style they set out for the website. They are not interested in your views on how their website should look. I mean would you be!
Being able to offer the content in their style will make it easier to get them as a client.
How to white label
Well there are a few the things to keep in mind when creating your base white label. I’ll try and list them below, but don’t think it’s complete.
- Use CSS everywhere to define the style and layout of your default white label ’skin’. This will help making custom styles and layouts for each partner easy!
- Avoid using tables for layout purposes. It’s very difficult to change the layout of a website if it is fixed by tables, not impossible but far from easy.
- Separate your HTML part of the website from the logic. Might not seem important but it’s a bitch to build all of your code over and over rather then just the HTML parts.
One of the easiest why to white label a bit is simply changing the stylesheet. By doing so you can modify the entire style of the website. Will look like magic to your clients, trust me!
If they are a bit more demanding you may have to create an entire new set of front-end webpages. But since you separated logic from webpages it will not require you to do a lot of work. All you need is some logic that decides which webpages to use for which partner. Which is not rocket science.
So why don’t you all give it a try, and if you fail at first. Well just don’t give up. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask them.
Light posting for the time to come
You might be wondering why there haven’t been many entries over the past few weeks. Well its been a busy time for me. Really, I’m not just making ecuses ;). So lets shed some light on what’s been going on.
At the work floor it’s rather busy because were in the middle of a migration from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005. Which is taking up so much time that I don’t really have time to write articles. But I will make some about how to migrate soon. I promise :).
Another thing that has been keeping me busy is the search for a place to live. Not that I’m on the streets right now or anything. It’s just time to get a new place. As I’ve been visiting many houses over the past weeks it leaves little time to write even short articles.
Now that all this BS is out of the why some news flashes:
I finally got Netbeans 6.0 working with web projects, a problem which I reported earlier in ‘Netbeans 6, a quick folow up’. It seems I downloaded the wrong version that was lacking the support. Dough…
Finally had some time to continue on my pet project MovServDex, made some bug fixes as can be read in ‘Internet Explorer Error’. I also started to work on some search capabilities, which at this time works kinda neet. Hopefully I’l post something about this soon.
And last but not least I’m thinking about dumping my corporate website Jong-Soft.com. Why, simple I haven’t updated it in ages. Nor do I really have the time to. It’s hard to write a blog, build my pet project, have a full time job and maintain a corporate website. (Not to mention all the other things I’m working on ;).
Internet Explorer Error -1072896658
I found a strange bug lately. I’m currently working on a website that I’m building Ajax in. Just to do some fancy shit, nothing special. But to my amazement I started getting a scripting error with the funny content ‘System error: -1072896658′.
Thank you Microsoft, for giving me that much information on what the f*ck is going on. Parden my french.
The strange thing is that the code used to work. So I new the JavaScript itself wasn’t broken. So what was???
Took me a little of searching on the web to figure out that sometimes IE is trying to be smart. It will try to decode the character set of incomming data. Which means that if it can’t it will crash.
In my case this happened when calling the .responseText of the Ajax call. Appearantly my webserver didn’t include the charset by default. (Which is my fault as I configured it) But that shouldn’t be a problem. Except for IE that is!
Solving it is a lot easier though. Just set the charset in the response header. With PHP you can do this as follows:
header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8");
That little line caused me hours of work! All thanks to the very vague messages of Microsoft.
Netbeans 6, short follow up
I recently wrote sort of a review on Netbeans 6. In this I was sorta positive about the cool new features :). Well I have to correct something’s.
I recently installed Preview (M9) of Netbeans 6. And I don’t like it. It’s a lot more stable and a lot faster then the version I reviewed, but for some reason it won’t recognize project folders.
Strange thing is that it will recognize and load some but it won’t do the same for others. I’ve so far been unable to figure out why. It simply doesn’t recognize the folders as Netbenas projects.
Just to make sure the folders are correct I tried it in Netbeans 5.5 and sure thing the projects were recognized and loaded correctly.
Don’t know what is wrong, and really don’t care. I’m moving back to the beta builds of Netbeans 6, these may have been slow but they worked!
Friday Afternoon Dip
Today is a bad day. I’m not kidding. Really…..
Most times the beginning of the weekend (which is how I prefer to see a friday) is a quite day. Mostly by my choosing, as you slowly burn all of your energy during the rest of the week.
This friday started out the same. I planned lightly to avoid a lot of work :). That way I usually get enough to fill my hours twice. Once through planning and once through all the rush jobs. But this time I got far more rush jobs then normal.
- Disable this part of the online system (granted it didn’t work, but still :))
- Build a new feature to make it easier to activate the games soled. (fun but unplanned :()
- Run some test
- And the last and most hated. Fill out your epraisal of half a year ago, I hate epraisals.
All of this caused me to be cranky. And I hate being cranky!
Lets hope the weekend is better.
