Sites that Sizzle & Blogs that Boggle! - Make the web, make more of it!
Guvnr.com Goes Live
Sites I like to surf are really uncluttered, with everything barely more than a click, or a mouse movement, away.
That's how I hope this site is. A really usable web design.
The website requirement
The kind of site I needed had to showcase my work and, because there are always new websites and other web projects to add, it had to allow for new content. It would need a content management system. I thought about using a great system, called MODx. I'd build the site in Dreamweaver, then set it out in MODx which, when updated with various plugins, would give me everthing I wanted. But I've used modx on a couple of other sites recently, such as ollythebuilder.com. And I've been working with WordPress a lot this year, for a bunch of my clients' blogs. I was real curious to put it through its paces, as an engine on which to strap this site...
...because wordpress has some amazing expandability. There is a raft of plugins to help you improve both the front web design and the backend administration of your website.
So, that's what I did.
The website solution
Now I have the best of both worlds, with this site. A web design that looks and feels like a website, with the functionality of a professional blog. And an online utility for clients to view their project privately, with planning and chat facilities. And which also has powerful tools to administer every aspect the the site, content and it's marketing.
What you see, my interface, or what WordPress call a 'theme', I have coded using xhtml and php, css and javascript. The data is stored in a MySQL database.
Powering the page effects and rounded corners, the javascript I'm using is jQuery, and I'm looking forward to blogging a lot about this brilliant new language. For the ajax search dropdown I've styled the Addicted To Live Search plugin from http://addictedtonew.com/archives/145/wordpress-live-search-plugin/. For backup, I have BackUpWordPress, from http://wordpress.designpraxis.at/, set to run automatically. For page ranking, I'm using the All in One SEO Pack from http://semperfiwebdesign.com/portfolio/wordpress/wordpress-plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/, but I know better than to rely only on this to market this web design.
Web Design Spain
"Why is Web Design Spain so prominent with this web design?" you may ask. It says Web Design Spain at the top of the web browser, it's the name of the page, it is shown at the top of the window to the right of the logo, it is the heading for this post and is to be found also at the bottom of the page, to the right of the copyright strap. Hover over the first image of this post and again you will see "Web Design Spain." Plus, now, Web Design Spain is plastered all over this paragraph!
It's all about marketing, and targeting an audience. In other words, SEO, or search engine optimization. An objective for this web design is to attract online enquiries and, for that, one must encourage a decent search engine 'page ranking'. To do this, we use keywords. At it's most concentrated, this website is about web design, and I live in Spain and so will likely receive more prospects from within Spain. As I am a native English speaker, it is likely that my prospects will also be English-speakers. Hence my keywords. So, when someone, probably English but living in Spain, types the keywords "Web Design Spain" into a search engine, because this site has effectively placed these keywords at strategic points within this web page, properly not illegally, it is likely that, given a little time, the page ranking of this site will be high for that phrase and that the site will appear in the top few results of Google. This precise keywording exercise should be done on each and every page of a website, depending on the content therein. Luckily for me this website has a great excuse to explain it, and so to get out a few more instances of the phrase, er, Web Design Spain, for the search bots to index. Shameless!
Then, adding offpage optimization strategies to these onpage optimization strategies will allow Guvnr.com to compete for the top ranking on Google, when someone types, you guessed it, "Web Design Spain."
SEO; while time-consuming, it's very easy to do, but it's remarkable how many webmasters do it poorly, yet often charging a small fortune for this key service. I'll be blogging about this quite a lot more...
Most of the other wordpress plugins I use are to help improve admin. Two of my favorites are Simple Tags, which allows me to do things like tag content on mass, and Search Docs, which gives me a simple research facility for everything wordpress, pulling details of links to plugins and the codex, right there in my content management admin area.
Developing Guvnr
There are so many cracking plugins that can be used with WordPress and I intend to keep testing some of the most useful or just plain coolest ones with guvnr.com, and will keep you posted about that.
The truth is, this site has got quite a lot more functionality than I'd dreamt of originally and, you know, it's just so darned exciting! There's some great stuff we can do these days, developing sites and blogs, so I'll be writing posts about some of that. My tutorial posts are by way of a thank you, too, for everything I have learnt online. In so many topics, everything I know, I learnt online.
I hope there's something useful for you here. Enjoy, and drop me a comment sometime to say Hi.
Olly Connelly
... the guv!
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Piet January 13th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
The backup plugins out there all are not that easy to deal with, but still I would like to recommend a different plugin for backup as yours seems not to work properly (outdated and no support). This one is called wp db backup and you can find it at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/ Cheers
the_guv January 16th, 2009 at 8:14 am
@Piet tx for that, will take a look but am using a non-wp solution for now, which for backup I don't think is a bad idea. as you can see I've changed the site a lot since this post, and meantime wp 2.7 came out too, obsoleting a bunch of plugins for a while.
hey, saw your site...are you a sailor? saw a piece about the volvo race.
the_guv January 16th, 2009 at 11:43 am
@Piet tx again. handy tip. just plugged in db-backup, and it works a treat. far quicker config than was backupwp too