Some interesting articles found on their site:

Granite: A Great Material for Many Surfaces

Kitchen worktops: Granite worktops or engineered stone?

A little bit about manmade kitchen worktops

They are an established stone supply and manufacturing company based near Haslemere Surrey, providing a comprehensive service for all aspects of preparation and supply of Marble, Granite, Slate and Limestone to consumer´s direct, kitchen and bathroom retailers,builders and construction companies, including shop fitters.

Need any stone?

I cant believe how fast the last 6 months have flown by. I have simply not had the time to keep the blog up to date but I thought I would pop by and let you know of the bits and bobs I have achieved over the last few months.

In the past, we (boxChilli – Web Design Hampshire) used pass our search engine marketing work out to third parties. This went ok for some time until about 6 months down the line, when we were notified that very little progress had been made with regards to positive movements of our clients websites on the search engine rankings. It was at this point that we realised that many of the techniques that we utilised on a day to day basis were in-fact very effective SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tools. We then expanded upon this basis through researching into how SEO was changing in today’s online environment.

The next step was to find a specialist who could strengthen the Click brand. This person came in the form of an SEO specialist with over 10 years experience. He is an industry leader and has worked successfully at a couple of large online businesses.

I then created the site. To do this we decided to use a static site (html) and then use a bolted on WordPress blog. Myself and Jonathan shared in the content writing.

At this point, we were ready to launch. Here is the site:

Click Digital Marketing – SEO in Hampshire

Hope you like it!

If you or anyone you know requires advice on how to be found more on search engines then please let us know. We offer an ongoing 10% commission on referrals and are happy to build blogs, create and publish articles and many other services.

I must admit I was a little overawed by the prospect and started to try and work out how the page could be changed. The problem was that I was trying to reskin a theme which was already very complicated, or at least complicated to me at the time. I was put off. The way in which Magento is built was new to me and at that point, the interaction between html, php, xml and css was confusing.

I decided to start from the very beginning.

This is where I started:

A guide on how to create your own Magento theme.

I Went throught this tutorial and to be honest it was very useful. There are other documents attached that will help you to understand how the Magento filesystem is organised. This system can be confusing, especially for a beginner but it is actually rather clever. You are given a default theme and then told to create a new theme. You can put as much or as little as you require within your new theme, as Magento will check in your new theme folder for updates and if nothing is present, it will revert to the default (the default is created at the point of installation).

This was well and good but the theme I was left with had no styling at all (this would be ideal for some people) so I had to look for something else.

Whilst learning Magento I have browsed these three publications.

The Magento User Guide

Magento Beginner’s Guide

Definitive Guide to Magento

The first two guides are certainly worth looking at and enabled me to construct simple Magento sites using pre-made themes and a variety of product types etc. The last guide was the solution to my custom design problems.

The Definitive Guide to Magento recommmends that a designer should use the ‘Blank Theme’, a theme which is downloadable from Magento Commerce. This theme was the helpup I needed.. The theme is simpler than a full pre-made theme and is not really styled at all, giving the user a blank canvas.

I am now making impressive (in terms of my previous progress) strides and will hopefully soon be able to provide you with a link to a custom Magento site that I have designed and built myself.

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.

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/

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

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.

This week has officially been the most stressful that I have experienced since becoming a web designer. I was left to run the office in the owner’s absence, I mean I was happy to do so. Why not?

I soon realised what I had let myself in for. I had to coordinate multiple projects (About 10) as well as dealing with any issues that arose, such as websites needing updating or user errors etc. Running a web business is a very steep learning curve.

I guess that in every profession there are difficulties to overcome. When I used to work in sales, the battle was trying to understand and control candidates, a tricky skill to master, especially when considering that you may be competing against 4 or 5 other people, who are trying to do exactly the same thing. Skills that I believe you have to master in the web world with regards to clients are.

1. You have to make sure that you manage client’s expectations and that they are going to be happy with the finished product. I believe this means going into fine detail with all aspects of the site including design and functionality.

2. Working out that the work that you are going to be doing for a client is actually going to be worth it. I mean if a site sounds simple at the first look and you estimate that you can build it in 16 hours doesnt mean that it cant take 24. Once the price has been agreed you have no room to manouveure. A couple of projects where you make mistakes of this type or drop your prices to low due to competition, may result in your business folding.

3. Most people are working under deadlines and some of these people seem to think about there website last. I mean the amount of times I will be waiting for content from a client for a couple of weeks, then I will receive an email with the content attached and a message saying that it need to be finished in 48 hours. Or another scenario where the client will develop a new channel or aspect of their business and will contact you to say that they are losing money and that these upgrade will need to be completed asap.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to say that I know everything about trying to run a web business… I have only been doing this for a year and a third! I would appreciate other tips or observations that could improve my understanding of the industry.

I have been thinking recently about how to improve the home page of this website. I decided that including my latest tweets would be a nice way of getting into custom wordpress designing. Simple I know but also effective.

The next task was to consider how this could be accomplished and I think that this is where experience really counts. I knew that wordpress allows you easy access to plugins and widgets but these (as far as I know) cannot be added to pages without using php. Something that I have to improve upon before trying this. So I started to look for means of adding tweets to the body of pages without using the widget system.

I stumbled upon this:

http://www.instantshift.com/2009/05/25/10-twitter-hacks-for-your-wordpress-blog/

and this:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/04/15-useful-twitter-plugins-and-hacks-for-wordpress/

I then installed this:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exec-php/

After installing this extension, the user is able to type php more or less anywhere within wordpress but try as I might, I was unable to get any of the hacks to work. Maybe this is because of the theme that I am using or for some other reason… No Idea.

So I kept looking and through this post:

http://leebaillie.com/display-tweets-on-your-wordpress-blog-without-plugins-or-widgets/

I found these:

https://twitter.com/badges

And here is the finished product:

http://www.meonvalleywebdesign.co.uk/

So basicallly I had come full circle. Why reinvent the wheel? I am now able to style the code using css myself so that it blends in with the rest of the site. Installing the Twitter html code took about 5 minutes and has really improved the look and feel of the homepage.

My task this week was to complete the ‘Lifestyle’ and ‘Blog’ section of the site. The Lifestyle section is a mixture of recipes and tips. All in all this has meant creating about 40 pages with individual styling aspects on many of pages, an issue which results in a lot of time being spent trying to make sure that the CSS of the site didn’t conflict.

This brings me on to my tip of the week

I have used a Joomla CMS system in combination with YOO ZOOto create Anthea’s site. So many of my pages show teasers of articles.. e.g a recipe name with a short description.. You then click on the teaser and are taken to the full recipe. I had an an issue where the teaser was also displaying on the full article view and no apparent way of stopping this.

I had a chat with a colleague of mine and stumbled upon this extension which saved the day.

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/access-a-security/modules-management/10307

It allows you further control of modules, so you can see which appear on a page saving time when searching for modules with similar names. Also, I was able to use a joomla article on the teaser page which enabled me to isolate the teaser images to the specific article in question.

I wish I had know about this sooner!