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Web Design – One Week Deadline

September 01, 2010

Today I have begun work on a new website design. The site is for a local business and it is a huge upgrade of their current site. I have already made some minor changes to their current design, but not a lot could be done with their current site, I did not design the current site! In case you haven’t guessed what the site is, it is a site for wedding cars and limos, as well as a taxi company.

Above is a picture of how the site currently sits, as you can see a lot of work needs to be done to it to make it more inviting and to add some life to it. Currently the site is too dark and dull and does not contain enough information for the visitors or potential clients.

My client is in a bit of a rush to have this site upgraded, so a deadline of approximately a week has been set. This is a tight deadline, considering the amount of work that needs to be done, I am used to having more time to complete a site.

So what all I am going to be doing to this site? First off it is going to be sitting on an entirely new domain name, at the moment the domain name is a bit of a mouthful at 19 characters in length! The current domain is annavillalimousines.com , it is just too long to expect someone to remember when going to look up your business and it’s not exactly snappy enough either. The new domain name however is much simpler to remember and I will keep it quiet until I have the site launched.

The next change is the biggest, it is the entire site! From concept to design to code and implementation, it has all been left to me to create something new, brighter and more inviting to potential customers. I will be designing the new site in Photoshop, and work has already begun on that, last night I made up a quick draft of the site and today I made lots of changes to it in relation to colours.

Tomorrow I will be showing my design idea to the client to see if he likes it or if there is something different that he wants done with it. Before I used to hate having to build websites from scratch, I am great when it comes to the coding side of things, but design is not my strong point at all. Now however I have learnt how to use Photoshop to get the results I like so I am a lot more comfortable with designing sites from scratch and I now find it much more interesting and fun!

Once the design gets the go ahead it will be on to making the rest of the content for the remaining pages of the site and then I will begin the stage of coding! I want to build this design using the WordPress platform, it is my native platform that I use for websites and I know it inside out by now.

I used to never know how to build a theme for WordPress, but over this last summer I looked into building WordPress themes and I realised they are really simple once you get though one.

Also by using WordPress it gives me the ability to enhance the websites presence online by adding some strong SEO to the site, thanks to the many plugins available from the WordPress community.

The final step to this site will be to create a Facebook group and promote it, it’s always great to have a client that wants there site to be a bit more modern and integrate it with social networks!

Increasing My Blogs Load Speed

June 14, 2009

: Image via Wikipedia

A problem that I have always found on my blog is the speed that it loads at. It takes far too long for my content to display fully and although in reality it only takes a few seconds, it will frustrate people because most people are used to the content displaying instantly ( maybe they never experienced dial-up before, so they cannot be grateful for the speed difference) ;).

Anyway my blog is of course powered by the open-source platform: WordPress. In my opinion the best platform for blogging. So yesterday I spent a lot of time trying to find different ways on how I could increase the performance of my blogs load speed, and it has definitely been successful.

So first off I went around a variety of different blog posts reading the different methods people used and also reading a lot of tips on how to go about improving load speed/time. So the first thing is that my blog used to take approximately 2.5 seconds to load, of course this speed varies from page to page, but on average the load time would be 2.5 seconds. It’s not too bad, however there is always room for improvement and I hate having to wait for my blog to load, so that means if it annoys me it will definitely annoy others 😀 and also if people have to wait for a page to load they will generally give up and go elsewhere and you will now have lost out on a new visitor :(.

So here are the few steps that I took to increase my blogs performance. Before you do any of this I always recommend backing up your database and export a copy of your blog posts (Just incase 😉 ). So apparently when you install plugins and then remove them and save and edit your blog posts and pages it will cause a lot of inconsistencies within your blogs database. By having all of these inconsistencies it can contribute to your database being very complex and will in turn cause the site to slow down, and that is what we do not want. So the solution I used to fix this was a simple plugin that is called: ‘Fix Database‘. It will add a page to your admin backend under the settings section called fix database, so once you click into it there is only one button in it saying fix database, once that is clicked it runs through the database fixing and optimizing your database by updating table information.

The next thing I done was to add a cache system to my site, this will save a copy of the page for a set amount of time so that when you next visit the site the page will be loaded from the cache and will cause less communication to be needed to your server so page will load quicker :D. The plugin I used for this cache in my site is called WP Super Cache, this is probably the most popular cache plugin used on wordpress. By going though the various setting in the WP Super Cache plugin you can set when and how long a page will be cached for, for example you might want the cache page to load until a new post is added and then have the cache cleared so visitors can see the new post you have added. Also you can turn on compression so that less space is used by the cache pages. Having a cache on your blog is a must and especially if your traffic is very high.

The final plugin I added is called WP-DBmanager, this is another plugin for maintaining your database and it does contain a lot of complex settings that I do not bother messing with. However there are a lot of useful things such as being able to repair and edit your database and also you can make queries into your database, I would not really make many queries into my database but it is always helpful to be able to do this. Also you can make back-ups of your database and download them or have them e-mailed to your e-mail address. Also you can set your blog to automatically send a backup daily to your site so if your blog goes down you won’t lose anything and also you can set it to automatically optimize the database on a regular bases so that your site will be in a great performance state.

So after doing all of this the new page load speed on average now is about 0.777 seconds, that is now less than a third of the original load speed (2.5 seconds) before I added all of these plugins. So I am happy at the moment on my blogs performance 😀

Also in terms of administration I have increased speed in the back-end of the site by upgrading to wordpress 2.8, it has helped a lot but the speed in the back-end never really annoyed me too much 😀

A Good Idea For A WordPress Plugin/Feature

June 03, 2009

: Image by Kate loves Bar Pt via Flickr

I was thinking that when it comes to writing a blog post, at least once i will make a spelling mistake. Usually i will save the post as a draft and then pop over to see a preview of how the post will look once i finally publish it. I would then read through the full post and look for any spelling mistakes that i may have done and not noticed.

I always find at least one. I was thinking that a great plugin/feature that could be made or implemented into wordpress would be the abilitly to edit the post live when viewing your site. So the concept of this would be that it would only work if you were logged into you site and then view the site while logged in, it would be great that if i was looking at a post that i could just click the text and edit it live without having to continuously flick to and from the post editor, it would save a lot of time and would be such a convenience.

That is just a thought i was having, as far as i know this has not been made for wordpress yet, and if it has i would love to know how i can do it 😀

If i had any idea how to go about making a wordpress plugin i reckon i would try and make one like this as i am sure a lot of people would benefit from a live text editior for wordpress.

One Year Of WordPress

April 23, 2009

: Image via CrunchBase

It is exactly a year today since i first started to use WordPress. Thats not to say this site has not been here more than a year. Before i started to use WordPress i was just using a plain old html site, it was not even a blog, since this URL ‘leateds.com’ was my first ever domain i was new to the whole scene of creating websites.

I used to make some old very shabby looking sites in basic html,that i would then host on a free hosting account that would be riddled with bloody advertisements. These sites would i suppose provide some use, first off they gave me the ability to begin to learn how to code a basic site, then the other service that it provided was for when i was in school, since the schools would block links to certain websites i used to have available on my site a proxy version of certain sites available through an iframe. My whole class started to use it to get into bebo and then a few other years began to find out about the site and that they could get into bebo that way.

So in order for the teachers in the school to not be able to get onto my site i added a password to it so that they could not block the links that i was using on my site 😀 and then i gave the password out to the class, even if they had blocked my main url i would just create a new one and use the same content. Luckily enough they were not smart enough to think of blocking the main url :P, but they did see my site popping up in the history a lot and would try to find out who’s it was, they never found out though!

ss3

Anyway, the reason i started to use wordpress was because i like how easy it is to manage all the content on the website and instead of creating pages manually i would just have to click a button and it would just create one for me :D, simple and fast. Also i was terrible at designing sites so with the vast amount of themes available to the wordpress community it was basically a no brainer to switch.

I had however never heard of WordPress until i came to college, one of my fellow college classmates showed it too me. So then i decided i would just give it a go and see if i liked it or not, and now here i am a year later still using it 😀

Also i never intended on using it as a blog, if you look at the first month of posts in the archives page you will see that the posts basically relate in no way to blogging, they were basically just me adding things i liked such as some videos.

I also never really knew what blogging was :O, i didnt really read too many either. But now i read many blogs and subscribe to loads of different rss feeds, from news to entertainment and personal blogs. Reading through other peoples blogs gave me an insight into what the main kind of trend of blogging was. So eventually i decided to give it a shot, at the beiginning i was not too successful, i struggled to gain any traffic and my site was bearly indexed in google, my posts soon began to get less and less each month.

I finally decided towards the start of this year to give it a proper go, it was now or never, so since the start of this year i have started a constant posting of posts on a regular basis, and since i have started to blog on a regular basis now people seem to return to the blog and also the stats show that the visitor count is on the rise every month!:D

By beginning to use WordPress i have broadened my knowledge of coding websites. I never had any understanding of php code at all and now by using wordpress in order to be able to modify the site i had to learn at least the basics of php code.

Nobody had ever taught me how to code sites. Back when i first started out i was using Microsoft’s Frontpage Express. Then i moved onto the likes of dreamweaver and text based editors such as textpad. When i came to college then i had a few classes which taught the basics of html which i was fairly confident about and then i was also taught css code which was all new to me.

And now since the use of WordPress i know more advanced coding techniques such as php. The next step is a new way to create a website, i know that next year in college an assignment that we will be set is to make a website using Visual Basic!

Anyway, one year so far with WordPress and i expect to have many more in the future. I have no intention of changing the platform that i am using for blogging 🙂

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Theme Preview For WordPress

August 18, 2008

Since the wordpress 2.6 upgrade came out, which allowed you to preview your themes before you applied them, i could not get this feature to work. Whenever i clicked to preview a new theme it would just show my site and the theme that was already on my site, this was annoying i wasn’t able to see how the new theme would look on my website. I wanted to be able to preview it so that if it didn’t work properly it would not effect the appearance of the site.

After a while i began searching on the internet to see if this happened to anybody else and it has happened to a few, but there was no answer on how to fix this so that the theme preview section would work.

A few days ago i was editing another site of mine when i wanted to preview loads of different theme’s so the quickest way would be to use the wordpress theme previewer however it would not work so i had to apply each theme which takes longer. So i got bored of continuously applying and reapplying the different themes so i went around the wordpress setting’s trying to find a way to fix the theme preview section.

And success i managed to find out how to fix it, if you go into the general setting’s in wordpress there is two boxes one says: WordPress address (URL) and the other says: Blog address (URL). I found that if you change the two of these website addresses to be the same then the theme previewer would work perfectly, it is strange but i dont know why it wouldn’t work if they are different, but i am just happy i now have that feature working.