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New Site: BayStatePowerWashing.com
BayStatePowerWashing.com
Over the past few weeks I pulled together a new site for my friend Ryan Mowry, owner of BayState Power Washing. The site is built in wordpress and uses a fairly standard template. Points to consider:
- This is a test of a new localized SEO tactic.
- The site hadn’t been indexed yet by Google yesterday, the last time I checked.
- Site is fully editable by Ryan.
- We did include a blog, where Ryan will be posting information of use to Massachusetts home owners.
- I’m not a fan of 100% width sites…
Give the site a check – especially if you’re looking for the best power washing service in Massachusetts for your home or business.
New Book, Site & Forum: LoveYourGeek.com
Last night Karl Susman opened his new site which I developed over the holidays. The site is to support his new book, “Love Your Geek”, which was released over the weekend for the Kindle and will be arriving in the full splendor of print on February 1. Many of you will know Karl from his WestsideGadgetGuy.com podcasts, and if you don’t you ought to check them out.
The site is a combination of Wordpress and BBPress Forum, designed to foster discussion around the book as well as provided news, reviews, etc. Technically, it required customization of an existing theme, and design integration with the BBPress theme.
If you’re a geek like me, you’ll love the book. If you aren’t it ought to be required reading to clue you in as to how lucky your are to have us.
They are your personal “always-on-call” computer “fixers;” your personal helper with All Things Computer. Broken Printer? Screen “not-responding”? Spill coffee on your keyboard? Computer “locked-up,” or just “not working” the way you want it to? You call your resident Geek.
You don’t pay them. You don’t ask them. You just call them – and expect the Geek to be there for you. And, of course, you accept nothing less than, “problem solved.”
In this short book, I’m going to tell you what it’s like to be Your Geek.
New vBulletin Theme – Discussnames.com
One of the first tasks I’ve tackled this week was updating both the software and the theme on Discussnames.com. A fairly simple project, but one with big rewards for the Afternic.com crew, I think.
The project was fairly simple. Take one vBulletin site that had a completely separate look and integrate it into the look and feel of the Afternic.com site. No small task, but luckily one I had some level of experience with, having worked on the http://domainersadvantage.afternic.com Wordpress project a few months ago. Still, vBulletin templates are notorious for their ability to frustrate developers and evade integration. It’s all part of that “a bazillion nested tables without a single id to be found” thing that has had designers complaining for the better part of a decade.
This is really phase two of another project, in which I had updated the out of date software and got things up to date. Now the site has a nice, clean, professional looking design, vs. the tossed together theme it had been sporting for the past 4 months.
Control Panel Issue
A couple weeks ago I was trying to get access to a site that Karl Susman had set up in his hosting account for a new website. He created a new user for me to access that specific directory on the server. Somehow we got permissions or the password messed up and he then deleted the ftp user account so that he could recreate it.
The files were also deleted…all of them.
Four hours later, when talking with the hosting company’s support crew, we were told that this is a default behavior in Control Panel, which many of us use to do minor admin tasks like adding ftp users, setting up databases, etc. via the web. They noted that they see this problem a lot, so much so that they had a procedure set up to recover files from the last nightly backup. Luckily, we didn’t need that, as the only thing in that folder had been a basic Wordpress install. Still, that behavior is just plain dumb. Before deleting files, at least warn the user!
A few Wordpress sites you might not have seen…
I’ve had a few launches recently and a few of them are worth mentioning.
The Afternic Domainer’s Advantage – this is a knowledge center for use by Domainers, which is fully integrated with the AfternicDLS.com site. For those who aren’t aware, Afternic is the world’s largest premium domain marketplace with over three million domains available for sale. The Domainer’s Advantage site is a fairly standard Wordpress installation that makes use of several fairly standard plugins. Special features:
- Integrated news feed of domain news
- Slide Share integration
- Homepage featured content block
- Single sign on integration with Afternic
- Full design integration with the parent site
- Design by Mark Hentschel – a real design rock star.
Blog.Photo.Net – photo.net is a site for serious photographers to connect with other photographers, explore photo galleries, discuss photography, share and critique photos, and learn about photography. The blog is maintained by Josh Root, the community director for the site, and is used to provide a taste of the vast content available around the site as well as to post industry news, events, etc.
- Full design integration with the photo.net site
- Standard Wordpress installation
- Twitter feed
Reel-Time.com Updated
Over the past couple months, I’ve been working nights and weekends to get Reel-time.com updated and running on Wordpress. The project, while far from complete, reached critical mass this week and I was able to go live Tuesday night.
This site has been around since 1995, and frankly, if you knew where to look, it was showing it’s age. The homepage was left justified, which is something designers haven’t been doing since around 2001.
There were a lot of challenges. First off, a lot of the content was gnarly hand-coded html of varying quality, which for the most part has had to be moved by hand. That task will no doubt continue for a while. Secondly, I didn’t have call on a designer. As such, what design work had to be done, was done by me…and if you could see how I dress, you’d understand humor in that. A few of the high points:
- Wordpress is my CMS – Yes, I’ve been running a number of sites on a version we’ve customized at Namemedia, Inc., but this is the first time I’ve gone with an out of the box installation. All customization for the site is done by plugin or theme. Absolutely no changes to Wordpress code whatsoever.
- Comments, Sharing, etc. – Reel-Time never had comments on articles before, so now it does. A small change, but actually one that will help to extend the community from the forum out into the site.
- Syndicated News Feeds – In the past, we always avoided sharing the link love. No longer – we’re running feeds of pertinent content on our landing pages which gives us more great content from around the globe and shares our link juice, being top in Saltwater Fly fishing rankings.
- Landing Pages – We’ve started doing pages by article category, so now we can present a dense, targeted page on any topic in our vast arsenal of content. Add to that feeds of content similarly tagged from our forum, and the syndicated feeds, and you’ve got tons of content on any particular subject. I only have a handful of these pages up, but rest assured, if it swims in saltwater and fishermen like to catch it, it will eventually have its own page.
- A Standard Theme – I went with a base theme from the Wordpress Theme Gallery then customized. It saved time, and honestly, without it, I doubt this project ever would have happened.
- A Classified Ad System – I’ve thought this was one of the big missing functions on the site for a long time. Now we have one. The question is, are we late to the game?
- Vimeo Videos presented in high definition – Everybody has small videos, so I went with really LARGE video presentation. It looks great, although I need to get more ads on the page.
- New Content – for the first time in a long time, we’ve got new articles coming in. I have no budget for this stuff, so I asked our community. They have responded.
- More Social – I put in links to our Facebook Group, Facebook Fan Page and to the Reel_Time twitter account. Again, there is a lot more to do here.
I still have a lot of stuff to do. If you read this blog closely, you’ll know that I had a quandry about what to do with our fishing reports section. I think I have a solution to that, which I’ll be working on next. Also on my list:
- Develop a Content Team – me working 30 hours a week won’t happen anymore. The work must be spread around the community.
- Import All the Content - about 50 stories remain to be imported. From there I have old fishing reports with valueable intro sections by some of the best writers in our sport (many started out writing for us).
- Get More Community Happening – I’ll hold this one close to the vest for new. I’m well aware that this blog is read by some that participate in my niche, so no need to tip my hat here.
Remember, one of the salient points here is that this was a nights and weekends project, only a 2 days of actual “work” time went into it. Also, the an important round of thanks to the moderators for the site, Bob Parsons, Sam Riley, Ray Avitable and Shaun Ruge who were of immense assistance in the planning and as always, in providing a firm sounding board for potential ideas. Without them, the site, I fear, would crumble to dust.
Okay, there was one other MAJOR change and no one has commented on it. Can you?
Major Site Update – Splitcoaststampers.com
Yesterday we updated the Splitcoaststampers.com site, the absolute best site on the net for Rubber Stamping and Card Making, with to the latest version of vBulletin, added a left column and did a whole bunch of system integration throughout the site. The project took approximately 4 months to complete, with tremendous work by Scott Bigelow, a great backend engineer and hardware guy, and Daven Nolta, the site manager, who kept us on track and on target for the community needs.
In addition to the standard upgrade stuff, we’ve added more Social Media functionality. Facebook Connect buttons, a Twitter Stream, a Facebook Page and a Facebook Group. There are several other big Social Media features we’ll be unveiling over the coming weeks, but thos will be subjects for another day.
The important point is that the site is no longer running on a horribly out of date vBulletin install, which I’d taken as my personal mission to resolve. If you’re using systems like vBulletin, you really need to stay current.
The upgrade wasn’t without it’s problems. We did find we had several issues with formatting when we went live. In further researching them, I find they were almost universally IE6 and almost universally using 800 x 600 screen resolution. The screen shots from users were almost comical, as some had 5 or 6 malware toolbars installed in their browsers, making the vertical space in the browser window almost non-existent.
If you are using IE6, I strongly urge you to try downloading Firefox or Google Chrome, or even the latest IE version(IE8). Your current browser is close to 10 years old. Your internet experience is lacking because of your use of outdated technology.
Also, I suggest you right click on any area of the empty desktop screen and click properties. Then click settings and increase your screen resolution. It is becoming very hard for us to support people using very low screen resolutions, when we also have to be able to handle very high resolutions as we are seeing from laptops. If I cater to you, the laptop users are going to see my site at postage stamp size. And again, you’re missing out on a lot as no one really designs for small screen resolution anymore.
Oh, one very funny thing, we began our upgrade at around 10:30 am. At 10:45 vBulletin released an update to their system, so as I was upgrading I immediately got a message about it. Timing, it’s all in the timing.
Google Social Toolbar
I’m ready to vent here. Are we, as community builders, becoming so lazy that we don’t want to take the time to build in the social media features we want for our sites, the way we want them? Do we really need to have Google package them up and provide them for us, the way they want them?
Two days ago, Google announced they were releasing the Google Social Toolbar, which is really a misnomer, as it isn’t really a toolbar at all, rather it’s a toolpack that site owners can embed in their sites. From Techcrunch:
Basically, the social bar is a small strip that webmasters can layer on top of any web page, either at the top or at the bottom. That way, website visitors are provided with a bit of information, and the bar also lets them interact with any social feature the site incorporates through drop-down gadgets. As Software Engineer Christopher Wren explains in the announcement blog post, this is a good way to save on pixel space and keep putting the actual content of the site forward first.
The Google Social Web blog explains:
- On the far left, visitors can join your site, see their identity, and edit their profiles and settings.
- Your visitors can also delve into your site’s activity stream to see what’s happening throughout your site. It includes links to recent posts made anywhere on your site, helping other visitors quickly find where the hottest conversations are taking place.
- The wall gadget can host a discussion for the whole site, a section of pages, or each individual page, letting your visitors easily read and leave comments.
- Lastly, visitors can see the other members of your site, check out their profiles to see how like-minded they really are, and even become friends.
These are for the most part functions that you should have addressed on your site by proper design (have I not told you that social media is an important tool in your toolbox?). Why would you want discussion about your site going on at another site, where the readers are seeing ads from which you do not profit? If discussion is needed on your site, add it, but for God’s sake don’t hand that traffic and it’s revenue over to Google for free.
We are looking for good value adds for our sites, such as the ability to share content ala Facebook Connect. What we don’t need is a convenient way to off load our revenue generating traffic.
If you’re going to build and manage a site, then do it. If you want Google to do it for you, then don’t come running to me when you want to “monetize it”.
Tags: google, Google Social Toolbar
13 Feb 09 | Community Building, Search, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0, Web Design | Comments (0)Boagworld: 5 Options When Website Budgets Get Slashed
If you’re a web designer or developer and you don’t know who Paul Boag is, you should. In addition to running the Boagworld website, and of course his wonderful must listen podcast, entitled “Boagworld” he is the creative director at Headscape.
In an article he’s posted today, he gives us “5 Options When Website Budgets Get Slashed“; each of which we should all commit to memory here and now, as we’ll no doubt be using them a lot over the coming year. A brief sample:
Too often we reinvent the wheel. When budgets are plentiful this can make sense. Although there is similar functionality out there, we might choose to develop it ourselves so we have more control or can customise it to our exact requirements. However as budgets begin to get squeezed these are luxuries we cannot afford.
In a world of widgets, APIs and open source it is becoming increasingly hard to argue the case for custom builds. Why build your own mapping application when there is Google Maps? Why build a forum when you could use an open source alternative like Vanilla?
Go read the whole thing now. You’ll be glad you did.
A Few Interesting Links
In celebration of ”Wordpress Thank a Plugin Developer Day” I’m posting a few interesting links.
- Colors In Corporate Branding – (thanks to Tracy Shaw for the link) – Check out the Bank of America link – I wonder if their website loads in Korean if you don’t select a language, just like their ATM machines do. ;-)
- 49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 And Internet Stats - bookmark this one, it’ll come in handy for all those Powerpoint presentations. Wow your coworkers and baffle the customers!
- Mobile social networking is driving the mobile Internet in Europe – interesting news – perhaps we should be paying more attention to mobile access for our social media sites.
- O’Reilly Presents Interactive Design Webcast on Feb.3 – here’s one you can act on. This should be interesting, I’ll plan to check it out.
About Us
I'm Mark Cahill - Online community developer and content management wonk since 1995. I'm interested in new media, communities and social networking, and love saltwater fly fishing. For a longer version, you can read my full about us page.
I am mncahill on Twitter
Email me at allthingscahill at gmail
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