Web Design Company, Hampshire UK

I have now been writing this blog since June and have been toying with the best way to publicise it. I am aware of the positive effect that social networking can have on SEO but also that notifying networks can be a time consuming activity.

This has meant that SEO has taken a back seat to the more important task of learning to be a web designer. Well my work as a web designer does pay the bills but surely advertising is an important part of business? So whilst working; I have been keeping my eyes open for a way of advertising my business, without the mind alteringley boring routine of notifying social networks of changes to my blog and business pages.

During this process, I stumbled upon a WordPress plugin called Links Alpha. This software lets you link all of your social networks to your WordPress blog so that you can auto notify them of changes. LA seems to have a few bugs and this leads me to the major drawback. You have to pay for Links Alpha. It is cheap and the service it provides is potentially very helpful but I do not like paying for something that I could potentially get for free.

So I kept searching and yesterday I found a plugin that I am hoping will make my life easier.

Ping.FM is a website that performs a similar service to Links Alpha but with one important difference, it is free. First you have to open an account. Then starts the laborious task of creating and adding social networks. Here is the list of networks I have successfully added.

TwitterTwitter
# Posting
FacebookFacebook
# Posting
Facebook PagesFacebook Pages
# Posting
Google BuzzGoogle Buzz
# Posting
TumblrTumblr
# Posting
Identi.caIdenti.ca
# Posting
FriendFeedFriendFeed
# Posting
PlurkPlurk
# Posting
JaikuJaiku
# Posting
BloggerBlogger
# Posting
Plaxo PulsePlaxo Pulse
# Posting
YouAreYouAre
# Posting
MultiplyMultiply
# Posting
YammerYammer
# Posting
FlickrFlickr
# Posting
StreetMavensStreetMavens
# Posting
PosterousPosterous

Sorry for the formatting but I have been at it all day. I will sort this at a later date.

Then you have to add the wping plugin to your WordPress installation and the API key from Ping.FM. This is the point I have reached. After finishing this post, I am going to auto publish to 17 networks! There are other networks available from Ping.FM but I made sure that the networks are relevant, as I was advise that this was important for SEO reasons.

It is also important to note here that the word social network is used loosely in this post. It is worth familiarising yourself with the links on offer as picking the wrong links may end up hurting your rankings.

Hopefully this process is going to work successfully. I will post the results accordingly.

The first version of Magento I used was 1.3. Instantly I was surprised and shocked at the way in which Magento performed.. There are so many useful features that come as standard but more often than is acceptable, you will be greeted by errors and extensions simply not working.

It is after these sort of things happen a number of times that you realise that Magento is rather fragile. You have to make sure that extensions are suitable for your version. Even if you do everything right you will at some point find a bug. Another couple I found were when moving categories via the backend and also when importing and exporting products.

An issue I am having at present with an installation of Magento 1.4 is that the indexing system has seized up. Luckily the site still works but it is this sort of fragility that means that everytime you press the refresh button, you cross your fingers!

So you can imagine how happy I am to have found that Magento 1.5 has entered the testing phase. Ok, so they are about 9% through this process but I think I am allowed to get a little excited. Anything that makes my life easier is ok with me.

Here are a few things which caught my attention:

Fixed Onepage checkout – Shipping address issues
– added resetting property to save billing address in address book
– added saving of new shipping address
– simplified condition in order preparation routine

Improved Import/Export

Fixed Displaying Out of Stock Products on the front-end

I have had problems with all of the above fixes. Hopefully this will save loads of time in the future.

On one site that I recently finished, the one page checkout was simply not completing. I could add products and proceed to the cart but when it came to selecting the shipping method, the cart would reset. I had to search long and hard to find the fix for this.

You can read more about the new version of Magento 1.5 here.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/magento-preview-version-ce-1500-alpha1-now-available/

I missed writing last week as I was lucky enough to be in Madeira, literally one of the most beautiful places I have visited in my life. I took my fiance, turned off my phone, my laptop and left the UK. Now having returned, I can say for sure that Madeira (nestled on a volcano in the Atlantic Ocean) is a special place and one which I will be looking forward to visiting again in the future.

Here are a couple of pictures.

This is an image of the view over Faial from Portela

An example of a strain of flowers which can be seen across the island.

The Monte Toboggan

Funchal

One of the clients we are working with at the moment has asked us to help them improve their search engine rankings. To achieve this we have to utilise a variety of SEO techniques, one of which being the creation of a blog.
We currently use wordpress for this task as it provides an excellent blogging platform, due to the thousands of extensions, easy to use interface and the supportive community surrounding it.
As a web designer, the question you have to ask yourself on every project is, what is the most effective option for comleting the task in terms of time and quality constraints? This usually means using a pre-created template and re-skinning it. This solution means that the complex benefits of modern themes are already in place, rather than having to learn to create them from scratch.
So I had to build a blog quickly and to mirror the design of the client’s current site. This was so the blog could be bolted on.
Here follows a quick rundown of the steps I took to re-skin the blog.

Step1:
Look at the design of the site you are trying to mirror. So this means looking at the width, height and makeup of the divs. A good way to do this is to take a screen shot and paste it into Photoshop, you can then measure the parts. Then compare this to how the template you are going to be altering has it’s divs arranged.

Step2:

Start to test out how you can alter your template to the desired design using firebug http://getfirebug.com/. Once you are happy, copy and paste the css into the correct files within your theme editor.

Step3:
So you now have a page which structually mirrors the design but probably looks nothing like it. Go back to your screen shot and find out the colours that make up the site. Add these and all the required imagery.

Step4:
Now it is time for the navigation and footer. This can be made far easier by just copying the markup and code from the original site.
Navigate to the site and view source. Now find the html for the menu and copy the entire div. Open your header.php file and paste in the code. Refresh and you will see a version of the menu. Now go back to the original and using firebug, copy the css of all of the divs included within the menu. Copy this into your css files. And there we have it.

Repeat this for the footer.

And there we have it.