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!

While a wordpress site is known to achieve good search listings, there is a lot of competition for double glazing repairs. In this case it seems to be a combination of adding the business to google maps around the same time as the website went live that has helped them reach no.1 so quickly.

doubleglazingrepairsne.co.uk is a good example of WordPress being used as a simple website with no blog, four informative pages and a contact us form – all far more easy to manage and edit than a 5 page website coded without a CMS – and easy to grow as a business requires it.

If you are a local business and your interested in getting a website that works for your business get in touch!

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!

www.playboyz.co.uk

It’s a really good idea, as many affiliates offering discount codes and offers would find this added function very useful.

A few plugins exists that will “expire” a post, but unfortunately they either delete the post, or move it to a draught version that can only be seen in Wordpres admin. This is bad for SEO. Old links expired or not, can still bring in traffic to a website and if a customer missed the offer the first time, they still know they should bookmark the site for the next time around.

SNIPPLR have written a modified version of the WordPress Loop which will remove posts after a date that can be specified in the Custom Fields section of the WP text editor. The code compares an expiry date given with the date from the host server and if the date has passed, the wordpress loop will omit that post from being shown.

The code doesn’t show the posts in the archives however and only expires posts by date when our client needed a to expire a post at a specific time. We modified SNIPPLR’s code so it would do both and also added the ability to adjust the server time, which is handy if your website is hosted in a different timezone to the one you need to use.

All you need to do when writing the post, is enter a custom field with the key “expiration” and set the value in the format: “2010/01/01 18:20:00″ – this would expire the post at 6.20pm on the 1st January 2010.

We updated Mark’s logo, designed and built this theme with a dropdown jQuery menu as a slick addition to a simple layout. One feature that was required was an ability to put an expiry date on posts and there was no plugins available to do this in a satisfactory manner.

The idea was to have individual posts that would only stay present on the homepage as long as they were in date; after this date they would disappear from the homepage, but still show in the archives, and still be accessible at their original URL for SEO purposes.

We created a bespoke code for this that we will shortly be adding to our tutorial section.

www.nrbet.com

We provided a clean uncluttered design and then added features such as an “alternate view” – which allows users to choose to view the website as a grid of images, a magazine style list of posts – or as a standard blog with the full posts scrolling down the page.

Many usefull plugins have also been integrated to give users, numerous ways to access each post. and jquery has been used to create a dynamic dropdown menu. There have also been a number of modifications to simplify the use of the site for the owner.

Hopefully if time permits we’ll be introducing a series of tutorials to show how we created some of the features on this blog.

www.greatbabythings.com

Mike from ISIOTB loved the functional and “2.0” design of UKOffer.com and so our design was created on this basis, tweaking the design to incorporate a TV based theme. First draughts went along the lines of old TV test cards, but the result was too garish so then later toned down to only a suggestion of test card colours within the navigation.

Isawitonthebox.com