It seems there is battle happening inside my iMac between Adobe Fireworks and Snow Leopard OS! Initially I presumed it was probably my lack of re-booting/updating that was causing the problem so I carried out the necessary updates (480mb!) for my CS4 design package, re-booted the iMac and hoped for the best.
I though as I had dismissed 480mb worth of updates for a while that was the most likely thing to be at the root of this problem. Wrong! Fireworks still hangs when I try to start it, and displays the not so helpful message “an internal error has occurred”. So off I go to the Adobe support site where I stumbled on a blog by one of their own developers that works for Adobe Systems on the Fireworks Engineering team.
The 1st post in this thread was back in September 09 the most recent is from less than a week ago with around 90 comments on the post! Adobe need to address this issue. I will be checking this error at home this evening as im in the office right now (but do have a new 27″ iMac at home).
Pretty poor support from a company of this size in my opinion!
Backups are essential for anything to do with computers and having a WordPress website is no different at all. You learn the hard way with backups, and I learnt the hard way about 4 years ago, when due to the lack of having a backup I lost my entire recipe collection. So here is a quick video tutorial on how to backup your WordPress website.
There are two main things that should be backed up when backing up a WordPress powered website. The first and perhaps most important is the database. This stores all your sites posts, pages, categories, tag, custom fields and in fact almost everything. The second is the sites Theme folders and any plugins that you site is using.
However what I tend to do when backing up a site is backup the entire files on the server (the public_html folder in CPanel) and then backup the database. I would recommend that you carry out this at regular intervals. If you have a heavy use site where you are writing posts and pages all the time, everyday then I would back up your site weekly, if not once a month should be fine.
Social media is all around us at the moment with literally millions of users using sites such as Facebook and Twitter everyday it is becoming more and more essential that your website can integrate with your Twitter and Facebook accounts. This article will explain how this can be done, to help drive traffic to your website.
Facebook has around 300 million users. Twitter use is growing at over 1000%. It seems pretty clear that in order to drive traffic to your site it is important that your site utilises social media. I mention Facebook and Twitter because it is clear that these tend to be the main players. Ask almost anyone (under the age of around 50) do you have a Facebook account and the answer tends to be yes.
When integrating the two into your website we need to look at your website as the hub for all your goings on, on the web. This is where you want people to be. When they are looking at your website it means that they are viewing your products and services that you are offering and therefore there is a chance of a sale and the possibility of making more money. So what you need to do is use these social media sites in order to help drive traffic to your website, the hub and purpose of your online presence.
Another key point to mention here is the word consistency. By that I mean consistency in brand look and naming across the social media sites as well of course on your own site. It is more and more important that you try and get your companies name on social networking sites, rather than something else. Your companies name is what people will look for and what you want people to associate you with. The good things is that there are several tools that can help you secure your ‘username’ on a wealth of social networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook. Here are two that I have found and used:
Know Em Username Check – a site that discovers whether your username, brand or company name is available of social websites across the internet. There is a even a paid service that lets them sign up for all the sites leaving you time to get on with your every day tasks.
Namechk – allows you to check your username availability across many different social networking sites. It is a little simpler than Know Em but equally as effective, however there is no paid service for signing up for you. The site tells where your name is available and you have to do the leg work.
I would recommend that you reserve your name for all the major sites, even the ones that you do not intend to use. Importantly it will stop anyone else using the name and posting content using your companies identify.
So once you have your usernames signed up for it is a matter of getting them into one place, so that it is easy to update all your websites. The way that I do this is to use a Facebook application called ‘Selective Twitter‘. This means that any Twitter updates that you post that you end with ‘#fb’ will be posted as your status on Facebook. Therefore you never really need to visit Facebook again in order to update your Facebook profile.
When it comes to updating your Twitter status, I tend to opt for TweetDeck. This allows you to use a desktop application in order to update your statuses and it can also handle multiple accounts if you have a personal Twitter account as well. However there are several tools which you can use in order to update your status for your WordPress Dashboard. A search for ‘Twitter’ or ‘Social Media’ in the WordPress plugins repository will provide several plugins that will do the job, depending on the complexity of your needs.
Once you have everything working I would then recommend branding your Twitter page. Once you have logged into Twitter from their homepage you can click on settings and design and then choose some suitable colours and perhaps even a background image that will match your website. This will enable visitors to easily identify the brand, product or company to which the Twitter page is referring to. A simple but important step in my point of view.
So there you have it, a quick guide to integrating social media to your website and outlining some of the benefits that it can bring to your business and your own website.
After a while on a reseller account that has served us well, we have decided to make the move to a Virtual Private Server rather than a shared server. This should help customers in making a more reliable, robust and customisable experience.
So what is a VPS? As I have mentioned a VPS is a ‘Virtual Private Server’. The difference between this and a shared hosting solution is that we can make custom changes to each of the servers that we have in order to optimise their performance for certain tasks. In the past these changes would have been reflected on the rest of the domains on that server, including those hosted by other individuals and clients.
So what does it mean for Equal Design customers and potential customers? First of all if you domain name and hosting are managed by Equal Design you will not have to do anything for the change to take place. Everything should be changed for you, but as a fronted user to your website and email you will notice little difference. For those that manage their own domain names a change in name-servers will allow your site to continue working and you will already have been contacted.
The VPS should allow Equal Design to develop into the future and provide a better service for both Equal Design’s needs and our customers.
For a long time we have used WordPress for creating a number of websites, many of which can be seen in our portfolio. However WordPress comes in 2 flavours (at the moment anyway). WordPress MU is a multiuser version of WordPress that allows for any number of ‘blogs’ or sites to be created with one install. Therefore we thought that it was time to take a look at WordPress MU and find out the benefits.
Firstly the install. It is almost as easy as WordPress itself apart from the fact that you have to choose between whether you want your additional blogs created as sub domains (example.domain.com) or as sub folders or directories (domain.com/example). We decided sub domains was the best way to go and therefore we had to add a wildcard DNS entry in order to allow any subdomain to be added. Our friendly hosting partners obliged to our request on this one! Once that was done the install was easy.
So we started to look at the benefits of using WPMU over WordPress for our home site. Firstly we tend to create quite a lot of sites. For many of the clients that we create websites for, we tend to install a test version of their site on our servers so that we can tweak around with things before they are live. It is handy to give clients access to this so that they can see the changes that are taking place on their site and make comments and suggestions that we can then act on. In the past we have had to install a separate copy of WordPress for each site. Using WPMU makes this much easier as we just add a blog and make them a user on that blog. It also means that we can just use one admin side of things to look after all the users of the sites.
Another advantage is that all of the files for the websites that we have created are in one place. This makes it easier to manage locally when making changes and uploading to the server. As we use Dreamweaver to make changes and upload we can just create one local site and then use this for all the websites on the install.
Upgrading is also no longer as much of an issue. In the past all the sites would need upgrading separately which was a painstaking task in itself. This was made easier with WordPress v2.7 (I think it was 2.7!) when they introduced the automatic upgrade but it still took a while to login to all the sites and upgrade them all. Now this is all done from the one install of WPMU and all the site can be updated there and then with the click of a button.
I have come across two small disadvantages whilst using the software. Firstly the ability to add a gallery to a page or post seems to have gone and files are not being stored as ‘post attachments’ anymore. Secondly you don’t seem to be able to change the category slugs, only the names. However it is early days and maybe I am doing something wrong, but I am sure we will learn this as we go along.
Still first impression suggest that WordPress MU is an excellent addition to using WordPress for multiple sites and so far it seems as though it was the right decision.
As web designers we love creating websites (of course!) and we create a wide variety of sites for a wide variety of clients. This is what we love about web design, meeting different people from different walks of life doing different things. The web really does bring people together in that way. However it is always nice to get some recognition for the work you do.
Over the last year we are proud to have had 2 of the websites that we have produced for clients showcased on the web and recognised as good practice. There are many sites that showcase good design, good CSS and good code. The two sites that we have gained recognition on are cssmania.com and the WordPress Showcase.
We love using WordPress as a web publishing platform and therefore we were particularly delighted to gain recognition, when we created a WordPress theme for Education by creating a website for Carrigaline School in Ireland. They had found WordPress and understood that it could be a fantastic, low cost opportunity to create an economical, yet quality website for their new school. However they wanted someone to create a professional theme for them to use for their site. One that would appeal to their pupils as well as look good for parents and the local community.
Equal Design produced a theme for Carrigaline school that met all these criteria and more, and the finished site was showcased on the WordPress Showcase back in November 2008.
The other site on which we have gained recognition is a blog. Cliff Bashforth, an Image Consultant in the North West of England, and a member of the Colour Me Beautiful group already had a successful shop and online store, however felt there was an opportunity in to blog about the travels and things that he did in life in order to get in touch with clients a little more. As well as advice, Cliff asked Equal Design to produce a blog design that would fit in with the work that he does.
Cliff’s work revolved around colour and therefore we wanted to create a site that would reflect this. With the design that we finally used we felt that we had managed to mix a variety of colours in a way that worked without over powering the visitor. So much so that cliffbashforth.co.uk was recognised in cssmania.com as a good blog design. We are delighted to be showcased on such an important site in the web design community.
We strive to design the best sites on every site, however it is not always going to please everyone in the designs that we choose and of course what our clients want comes first. It is, however nice to gain some recognition from other members of the web design and development community and we look forward to achieving more success such as these 2 sites.
After nearly 12 months of our latest site we decided that it was time to have a change. The problem was, is that we have received some good feedback on our site design and people seem to like it. Therefore instead of a completely new look, we decided to create a revised design based around the ideas of the original site design.
We have tried to freshen up the site whilst at the same time keeping it simple, fresh and clean. I suppose that one of the big differences that we have made is that the site is now running WordPress MU rather than standard WordPress and apart from a few custom queries here and there it is a fairly standard theme using WordPress as a content management system.
We hope that you like the site and would love to hear your feedback on it.
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Finally Fireworks is now playing happy with Snow Leopard! 2010/03/10
Another advantage is that all of the files for the websites that we have created are in one place. This makes it easier to manage locally when making changes and uploading to the server. As we use Dreamweaver to make changes and upload we can just create one local site and then use this for all the websites on the install.
