Blog•
on April 26th, 2010•
These results are ranked in order of full-time staff devoted to Web Design or Development and were published by the Atlanta Business Chronicle. I didn’t make the list this year – ha! Number in parentheses are full time staff devoted to design & development:
- Moxie Interactive Inc. – (108)
- Web.com – (100)
- Definition 6 LLC – (75)
- Engauge – (75)
- Northridge Systems Inc. – (75)
- Razorfish LLC – (73)
- LBI Atlanta LLC – (69)
- THINK Interactive Inc. – (47)
- MaxMedia Inc. – (43)
- IQ Interactive – (40)
Blog•
on April 25th, 2010•
I spent hours trying to figure this out and thought I would write about the solution. When turning on Search Engine Friendly URL’s in Joomla, they begin adding an extra index.php within the URL’s so that it looks something like this – http://www.yoursite.com/index.php/category/article.
I want the URL to be http://www.yoursite.com/category/article.
It’s cleaner and better for the search engines.
So, here are the steps I took to remove the unnecessary index.php:
- Go to the Global Configuration area within your Joomla admin.
- Under SEO Settings, click YES for the following two items:
- Search Engine Friendly URLs
- Use Apache mod_rewrite
- Now, go to your htaccess.txt file at the root of your site and rename the file .htaccess.
- Use some sort of text editor (I use text wrangler) to remove the ‘#’ before the words ‘RewriteBase /
- For me, this was around line 53 of the .htaccess file.
- Now, try to navigate around your Joomla website. The index.php should be gone.
Blog•
on April 21st, 2010•
Here is a list of my 12 favorite WordPress plugins that I use on nearly every website:
- All in One SEO Pack – the best Meta Tag plugin I’ve used
- Dynamic to Top – sweet little arrow key that shows up when someone scrolls down your page so they return to the top
- Google Analytics for WordPress – Easy Google Analytics implementation
- Google XML Sitemaps – I use this on all my sites and combine it with my Google Webmaster account to make sure Google receives updated sitemaps every time a new page or post is generated
- Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu – Love this one – creates a horizontal menu within the WordPress admin area for better screen use
- SexyBookmarks – Plugin that makes it easy for blog readers to share your posts on pretty much anything
- WordPress Database Backup – See my previous blog posting
- WPtouch iPhone Theme – puts your blog posts in a cool format for those looking on their iPhones
- CForms – Easy to use Contact forms. I usually connect a PayPal feature with this so my clients can take payment after someone fills in a form
- PixoPoint Menu Plugin – Great drop down menu for use on your site – easy to change around, add, remove pages. Also places a nice search bar in your menu bar
- Reveal IDs for WP Admin – a must have for excluding pages in the menu – this plugin lets you know the id of pages, categories, posts, etc. within the admin area
- Content and Excerpt Word Limit – a plugin that allows you to limit the length of a blog post on a page to a certain amount of words or characters. Great for placing more blog posts in a small area
Please comment on this post with your favorite plugins and how you use them.
Blog•
on April 21st, 2010•
If you’ve been running a blog or CMS website on WordPress for any amount of time, you’re probably due for a backup of the database. If that scares you, fear not. There are a number of plugins that can assist you in regularly backing up your database.
One that I just came across and have begun utilizing on my sites is the WP-DB-Backup plugin. This plugin allows you to backup your database within the Admin area of your site. Once you have installed this plugin, go to the menu area under Tools and click ‘Backup.’ Here, you will be given the option to save a backup to your FTP area, to your own computer, or have a backup sent to you by email. You can also set the backup to occur daily, weekly, monthly, etc.
This is a great tool to protect yourself should something happen on the back end of your website. At least you will have a backup of all your site content.
Blog•
on April 21st, 2010•
These numbers were just released showing the percentage of overall traffic per social media site:
- Facebook – 41%
- MySpace – 24%
- Gmail – 15%
- Twitter – 8%
My guess is that Facebook, Gmail, & Twitter’s share is rising while MySpace’s share is falling.
Another interesting trend is that Facebook is used as an email client. I was talking to my wife about Facebook the other day and she does most of her emailing with friends through Facebook. Think about it, you choose who can send you messages, so you automatically cut down on a lot of unwanted emails and wasted time by using Facebook as an email client.
Keep this in mind as you consider marketing initiatives for your company. The trend may be moving away from email and towards email clients where the user can control who can & can’t email you. They must trust you.
Portfolio•
on April 14th, 2010•
Company:
Clairmont Cosmetic & Family Dentistry
Website Link:
http://www.clairmontsmiles.com/
Date Launched:
April 2010
Design / Development Notes:
HTML, CSS, PHP, WordPress
Notes:
Created a number of forms for this client so new & current patients can submit their information before ever stepping in the office.
Blog•
on April 13th, 2010•
What is a 301 redirect?
A 301 redirect is like a party that has moved. You arrive at the party and there is a sign on the door telling you to go to the next building because the party has been moved.
In a similar fashion, a 301 redirect is code that tells your browser that your website has moved from one location to another on the back end and automatically sends your user there on the front end. There are some handy reasons to set up a 301 redirect. A few of those reasons are to:
- Redirect users from http://yoursite.com to http://www.yoursite.com. This is beneficial so that Google knows you just have one of those sites going.
- If you have changed company names, and thus URLs, your website can automatically send the user to your new website if they type in your old domain name.
- Say your business has a difficult name, you could redirect common misspellings of the URL to the real URL.
- The URL shortener sites use this technique to have a short URL point to a long URL.
So, how do you set up a 301 redirect? First off, create a 1.htaccess file on your computer’s text editor. Type in the text below, and then upload this file to the root of your website folder. The most basic redirect is:
redirect 301 “/old/index.html” http://www.newsite.com/
A second redirect is from http://yoursite.com to http://www.yoursite.com. Here is the code for that 301 redirect:
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^dragonboatatlanta.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.dragonboatatlanta.com/$1 [L,R=301]
This should be a common step in setting up your website to make sure that the search engines know that you just have one site, and not two containing the same content.
And best of all, 301 redirects are SEO friendly.
Uncategorized•
on April 9th, 2010•
Company:
Global Sales Growth
Website Link:
http://www.globalsalesgrowth.com/
Date Launched:
April 2010
Design / Development Notes:
HTML, CSS, PHP, WordPress
Notes:
I designed this template and integrated it with WordPress so that my client could update content and update her blog.
In the last few years, websites have gone under an important shift from static to dynamic purveyors of information. Static means that the information is placed online, much like an advertisement, and it is there for people to come and see. Dynamic content means that a web page exists, but it’s content is continually updated by outside content relevant to the page, whether through Twitter updates, RSS Feeds, or Blog Entries.
Dynamic sites, as the word signifies, are exciting. They are always changing, and they give website users a reason to return to your site. If your website content is the same as it was 5 years ago, you are probably not attracting many repeat viewers to your site. You are losing out on business. You wouldn’t put up a billboard and leave it the same for 5 years, so why have you done that with your website?
The Atlanta Business Chronicle just had an interesting article about small businesses & their use of websites. According to the article, most small businesses still have a static website and they do not have E-Commerce capabilities built into their site. So they are not giving their viewers fresh content and they are not offering their users a chance to buy into their idea or product.
The Internet is changing so rapidly that you must keep your website and your content fresh. For real estate, location is the key (location, location, location!) With websites, content is king. You must have good, unique, and fresh content on your site to be noticed among the millions of new web pages being added to the Internet each day.
Portfolio•
on April 5th, 2010•
Company:
Stephologie
Website Link:
http://www.stephologie.com/
Date Launched:
April 2010
Design / Development Notes:
HTML, CSS, PHP, WordPress
Notes:
This is a website for my wife, a professional musician. This is a site for her to express herself through blogs, videos, music, etc.
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