Baltic Blog Design create unique custom themes for WordPress blogs

Coastline is a great “chippy” on the coast of Blyth in the north east of England. Blyth’s coast has recently been redeveloped and it is looking great – the beaches are clean, the promenade is new, and there is always people windsurfing and jet skiing out at sea – so Coastline  adds to a nice day out at the beach with some quality fish and chips!

Because of this, we were very happy to build their website, and spent a sunny day taking photographs to use and get creative with the theme. We also did some custom coding as we feel this site could really develop into a community hub, and can benefit from adding local events and weather along with the expected content.

We really believe more small businesses should know about wordpress:

The great thing about using WordPress to get companies on the web, is that many of the usual five page static websites can’t be updated without more work from the web design company, costing extra money – some even charge a monthly fee.

Using a content management system (CMS) you log into for security, it’s not only easy to update the site, but it’s easy to link with social media such as Facebook and Twitter – these are great ways to connect a business website to its customers.

With WordPress, it is easy for a small business to update themselves without wading into HTML. Adding a post to WordPress is no harder than writing an email:

Coastline can update customers with business news, local events and any changes required to the menu are easily done.

WordPress has also has many “plug in” features that can add even greater functionality to your site:

We custom coded a widget that displays the local weather over Blyth, getting the data dynamically updated from Yahoo Weather. Customers can check the weather and the menu on the website before driving to the coast for fish and chips!

Finally WordPress is great for SEO, the way it is structured means your site is friendly to Google and other search engines. WP sites are indexed faster than many other sites and will start bringing you traffic to your business in no time at all:

We also linked Coastline’s website with Google maps so people searching for fish and chips in the area will be directed to the website, and people on the website can find out how to get there. Fantastic!

Search Kingdom is a great resource for SEO knowledge which is definitely worth reading for anyone who wants to get more traffic to their site. The blog instantly clears away many of the myths surrounding SEO and keeps strictly to the facts we know about the top search engine algorithms and various practical tips to ensure your site is optimised.

We were asked to do a Medieval theme and this was the design that  our customer loved. The landscape contracts and expands to fit different browser sizes and is cross compatible in numerous browsers despite using .png files and z-index to create the layered effect.

Etoys.co.uk was originally a simple ShopWindow site that required a revamp to bring it up to date and achieve better SEO.

ShopWindow is a great affiliate software client that uses its API to query the Affiliate Window product database of over 4 million products. An affiliate can literally upload the client to his web space and have an “instant” online retail site selling a massive range of products that updates in real time.

The caveat to this is that the basic layout and templates are hugely generic, and relatively basic in design. The initial shop feed is far too diverse to be good for SEO, and I’m also sure by now that search engines would probably not take much notice of the generic version. Affiliate Window is also aware of this and has quite rigorous criteria an affiliate needs to pass before they can use the software to it’s full extent.

If you want to achieve success with the software, the trick is (as always) to make sure you provide relevant and fresh content, and what better way than to integrate it with a WordPress blog?

Etoys.co.uk limits its product feed to toys, and that already provides an SEO advantage. As our client feels the domain name and the ShopWindow client are already doing a good job of achieving a low bounce rate, we decided to keep the ShopWindow client on the front page and pull through the latest two posts from the WordPress blog. This gives the site better SEO and provides users with a more informative and interesting shopping experience, while still allowing quick access to the huge range of toys available. The full blog is then available on its own page and has been seamlessly integrated with the shop window client.

For the design we kept to original bright playful colours, updating the logo and site layout and adding a few jquery widgets. The integration of WordPress also allowed us to create all necessary social media to further increase SEO.

WordPress is often still regarded as blogging software, however with an easily modified open source structure and massive user base; it’s certainly no longer limited to creating blogs.

With the huge variety of open source modifications and plugins available, WordPress is rapidly becoming a flexible content management system that offers functionality to rival most other CMS, and we’ve noticed many people switch to wordpress because of its ease of use, especially when it comes to integrating it with social media apps like Twitter and Facebook.

Gadgetspy.co.uk is a very successful gadget blog. Originally built in Drupal, we were asked to transfer the blog from Drupal to the WordPress platform. Unlike many other blogging platforms/CMS available, it is not a simple matter of running a script to transfer posts and all data across to WordPress.

There are some mySQL scripts available which will do a very basic job, but simply running a script will often end in categories being mismatched with posts, “tags” and “categories” being merged together, and any Drupal modules have the potential to create havoc, as they will store pictures/links or any other content separately and basic scripts will miss them out. This means you really need to tailor the mySQL commands used to suite the specific blog you are moving.

We’ll go into this further in an upcoming tutorial.

After transferring the site we did a full redesign of the Gadgetspy site, it’s always nice to redesign an existing blog, as you have a full and “finished” looking website from the start. On that note, it’s always nice to see new blogs grow too!

Playboyz is a blog reviewing gifts for men such as Jewellery, Grooming, Gadgets and Experiences. The Playboyz team had purchased a Revolution Template which has some pretty nifty features – but nothing we cannot recreate ourselves – and wanted a cosmetic overhaul to give their site a style unique to them. We gave their logo a quick revamp too.

www.playboyz.co.uk