While I built the framework and the base design, the hard work was done by Dan and Elise. After only a two hour training session with myself (and a few follow up emails) they managed to master the job.

The site is built on WordPress with some carefully selected plugins to enhance functionality and some tweaking of the theme to render a viable content management system (CMS).

Down the line I will be helping Dan and Elise roll out the ability for supporters of the foundation to make donations and to purchase goods from their shop online.

Pop by and visit. You never know – you may just see a dog or cat in need of rehoming and fall in love.

Courses range from Computers for Beginners to the more advanced Web Authoring. The Institute is registered with the Further Education and Training Awards Council (FETAC) to offer programmes leading to FETAC awards in the National Framework of Qualifications.

All of the trainers, including myself, IT professionals with years of experience. (Yes, this is a shameless plug!)  Class sizes are limited to 10 so as to provide each participant with individual attention.

There is an Open Day today, August 22, for anyone interested in finding out more. Coming from the Naas direction, the Institute is on the right just before the Chinese restaurant – a three-storey Georgian house with plenty of parking spaces. See this map.

These are the type of questions I am asked over and over again. I can never answer.

Would you ask a builder how much they’d charge to build you a house? No. You would show them the plans. You would discuss the materials and what work, such as the kitchen, you’d like them do and not do. Possibly you would state your budget. And so on.

Once the builder understands your requirements they can draw up a quotation. The same applies to web development. Until I know what you want I cannot give you a price.

Ideally the first approach should be statement-then-question: Here is what I need. What would you charge me?

However, more often than not I find people do not know themselves what they want or need. That is not a problem. We can sit down and analyse your requirements, thereby defining the “here is what I need” statement.

Then the “how much does a website cost?” can be easily answered.

An example of one very prevalent method is shown below.

The visitor, and I am guessing it was just one, used the phrase “glicit.com” to find this site.

Why?

Why if you already know the URL would you bother searching for it? If you haven’t lost your car keys you don’t go looking for them. You don’t have to!

Have people become slaves to Google, thinking that nothing exists on the Internet unless it is found via Google?

If you know the URL just type it in the address bar of your browser. Hit enter. There, you’re done. You have reached the site in one step. You are not doing a Google-search, then locating the link and then clicking.

I have asked users why they do this and the responses have varied.

However the most common is that “my boss can’t see what I’m doing if I get to a site through Google”. Eh, sorry, you’re wrong. That’s just a myth that has somehow perpetuated among office staff worldwide.

The next most frequent explanation is that “there is no other way”. Trust me, there is. Use it and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and effort.

In addition to viewing the presentation I also suggest you take a moment to browse through the accompanying speaker’s notes. (A How-To for viewing PowerPoint presentation speaker’s notes is available here).

As time was short (and I tend to rabbit on far too much when dealing with my pet topic) we didn’t get to cover as much as I would have liked. Therefore I have fleshed out the answers to some of the questions posed below. I have included a list below that of some more Irish blogs you may wish to take a look at. Feel free to contact me if you have any more. More importantly, as this is a blog after all, feel free to leave feedback in the comments area below.

Questions and Answers

Hint: Click the questions to expand the answer; click again to collapse it.

How do I go about setting up a blog?

Can I edit/delete feedback on my blog?

What if someone makes a complaint via feedback? All my customers can read it!

Could a politician be subjected to feedback on their blog from someone not in their constituency?

How do I know people are reading my blog?

Bonus (made up) question: I asked that question up there – why didn’t you name me? Why didn’t you say “as SoAndSo asked …”?

Irish Business Blogs

(More listed on the presentation itself)

Bubble Brothers (Wine merchants)

EirJobs (Recruitment portal)

John Lee (Artist)

Puddle Ducks (Rain-wear)

Ferdinand von Prondzynski (DCU President)

Tast.ie (Natural baking mixes and spice mixes)

Rabodirect (Bank)

Paddy Power (Bookie)

Piaras Kelly PR (Public relations)

I’m looking forward to meeting the group and, if the truth be known, checking out the facilities and food at the Dublin Airport Clarion Hotel.

All going according to plan I will be uploading my presentation here immediately after the event. Feel free to leave feedback below.

Update: Slides and more available here.

Of all the releases I’ve been through and the ones before my time on WordPress, 2.7 (released just days ago) has to be the most ground-breaking.

While there were many changes to the user interface in 2.5 (which caused a hue and cry in some quarters), 2.7 is totally different. Simple as that! It looks nothing like its predecessors.

The folks over at Automattic did a great job of keeping the user community in the loop during its development. They asked us which prototype designs we liked best; published screen shots; wrote user guides and created video tutorials.

A beta version was running on this site long before the official release. (I am a guinea pig). This gave me plenty of time to relearn and to discover the quirks and nuances. When the final 2.7 came out I hit the ground running. However, it did cause me one major problem:

A client’s site had just been rolled out on WordPress 2.6.5. I knew, for a number of reasons*, I would have to upgrade it to 2.7 when it became available. This was fine and the client would never even notice. All part of the service!

But his staff needed to be trained and he was pushing me to get it done. With prior releases this would not have been an issue, however the whole layout, and in some case terminology, altered with 2.7 and I would have had to retrain his people. So I had to ask him to hold off.

A week was lost on the project but it was worth it in the end. For the staff, normally limited to using email, word processors and spreadsheets only, moving to 2.7 from 2.6 would have been effectively learning a whole new system.

*Mainly as maintaining a single version is easier for myself, but also to be able to avail of the latest security patches.

As an aside, on seeing a CMS in action, a client in the haulage industry once misconstrued their typing and clicking as web development and proposed he come into business with me. I can do this. It’s easy. We could make sites for other truckers.

Luckily this was pre-Obama and I didn’t reflexively say yes we can thereby saving him a lot of pain and anguish, not to mention a doomed business.

CMS is wonderful and it is empowering.

However, if one is unable to dedicate the time, no matter how little, to managing it, it can be overpowering. For some the novelty wears off and they lose interest.

I have received calls on occasion from clients asking me to add some piece of news to their website. Why, when they can do it themselves? Because they don’t have time.

Of course I oblige. But I have to charge for my time. More importantly this defeats the purpose of a CMS.

These days I am more conscious of this and take greater care when considering recommending a client use a CMS.

I stress to the client that using a CMS requires a long term commitment.

Using the terms blog and theme has led many to believe it can be downloaded and used to dress up a blog straight from the tin. This is true – it can be if that’s all you want is the vanilla framework.

But the early adopters tend to be those who will find the bugs and try to fix them, or will want to customise by stripping out or adding in a line of code here and there.

Carrington is not like any other existing theme and attempts to tweak it as if it were will usually result in frustration or fail totally without an understanding of how it works. Alex King has been at pains to explain to those who complain it is not user-friendly that “Carrington is a theme framework; it is designed for developers”. [Source: Crowd Favourite Forums]. He must be blue in the face doing so – then he does live in Denver and it’s damn cold there.

That said, many must be happy with it. In little over a month since it was made available on WordPress.org there have been 14,000+ downloads. I am one of those happy people. In fact I’m more than happy. And I’m excited about what the next releases will bring.

Carrington takes the abstraction of WordPress tags to a new level.

Those who are familiar with WordPress conditional tags will be used to doing things such as adding code to the header.php file do make it act differently if what’s is being loaded is, for example, if it’s an archive page do something; do something else if it is a category page; and so on.

Depending on the complexity of what one is trying to be achieve (and the quality, good or bad, of the algorithm employed) this can result in a lot of code.

In Carrington this is done by creating separate archive.php, category.php and so on, files within the header directory. The process is as simple as copying the default-header.php and tweaking as needed.

Carrington automatically detects what is being loaded: If it is an archive it uses the archive.php file. If there isn’t one, it loads the default-header.php.

Novices to Carrington may think this a lot of work, that it leads to multiple files and the same amount of coding, it doesn’t and in cases where it does, it can be a good thing:

I find it leads to much less coding. Copy the default and add, delete or edit a line to do something. No need for conditional statements – Carrington takes care of that.

Usually all that is needed is to make one or two new files. It is unlikely one would want to have different actions for all page and post types.

Multiple files can help the developer modularise their work, much like OO programmers do. In addition, when an update to the framework is released from Crowd Favourite only the defaults will be overwritten at install – all the special coding the developer has done will be unaffected. Unless the default itself has been altered, which in a framework shouldn’t actually happen.

I am certain Carrington can be made do far more than Crowd Favourite say in the documentation or on their website. I’ll let you know how I get on with my experiments. (Hey, com’on – who hasn’t played with the bits in the Do not change the code above this line part?)

I predict Carrington will lead to the rollout of many more frameworks. That they become the standard system for delivering WordPress themes is likely too.

He called me recently for advice. One of those companies was now promising to get the website for his latest venture to position one, on page one, of Google for searches done for that type of business. (For a fee, of course).

What had him confused was they were talking about running two sites – the real one on the new venture’s domain (let’s call it www.newnew.ie) was up and running and another on their own domain (www.webweb.ie/NewNew) was ready to be released.

I read the mails they had sent him and took a good look at both sites.

Here is what they were doing:

• They claimed to have researched the new venture’s sector and determined a number of keywords.
• www.newnew.ie had 12 pages, with quite an amount of images and very concise text. www.webweb.ie/NewNew on the other hand was seen to have 60 pages, each having a considerably large amount of text.
• Each page on www.webweb.ie/NewNew was dedicated to one of the keywords.

This is termed keyword stuffing.

Google says “keyword stuffing” refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in Google’s search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience …

For example, a page about rubber ducks might read something like “Welcome to our rubber ducks page. We sell all types of rubber ducks. Our rubber ducks are made of rubber and resemble real ducks. While yellow rubber ducks are very popular so too are red rubber ducks …”

Google are right about the negative user experience – face it, reading this would drive anyone insane!

Yahoo! concurs:

Some of what Yahoo! considers Unwanted:
- Pages built primarily for the search engines or pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords
- Pages that seem deceptive, fraudulent, or provide a poor user experience
- Pages using methods to artificially inflate search engine ranking

• There were no links from www.webweb.ie/NewNew to www.newnew.ie. However, the contact email address provided was for www.newnew.ie

So called doorway pages are large numbers of pages with repetitious or wordy content that contain many occurrences of a particular word or phrase. The intention is to attract users searching for that phrase then drive them toward a certain area on that site or another.

While this was not the case here it was similar in that the user’s enquiry and potential business would be driven to the newnew.ie email address and Newnew, the company, respectively.

Cloaking is a system whereby different content is served to users than to search engines. This is achieved by detecting who is requesting a page is and returning a set of content accordingly. For example, a user gets a Flash page while the search engine gets text.

Again, technically this was not the case here – search engines would see both sites – but the user would likely only discover one site.

I advised the client not to proceed. Such practices do more harm than good.

• Users finding the second site would get annoyed at the repetitious content and leave.
• Google and Yahoo! could discover the keyword stuffing and remove the second site from their indices.
• A competitor could report the site to the search engines and the same would happen.
• In the worst case scenario, the search engines could also blacklist the genuine site.

My personal golden rule for SEO is “cater for the user first and foremost – the search engines come second”. It is all well and good getting visitors to your site, but only quality content will keep them there.