CSS Design Magic – A Site Above – Make MONEY NOW!

Posted on October 19, 2007
Filed Under Design | 3 Comments

Established, Aged, SE Indexed, PR Rranking, Business Site Opportunities

Cleaning house and getting rid of several domains I’m putting up three for sale, two of which are immediate. These two domains were originally going to be created as a CSS gallery and a CSS repository for code and open source templates specifically developed to benefit its members by providing one way links. Time and energy are better spent elsewhere at this time and I’d hate to see good site names like this die. Each is aged better than 4 years and each has some kind of PR and does index in the SE’s. Markets can be slow and more people invest in other businesses to build residual incomes between September and December than other times of the year. If you are looking for a place to invest, then invest in your own site. These sites have great earning potential and as I mentioned are ALL AGED SITES which lends a great deal to their SEO prowess and potential. Please read more about these sites and contact me for further details.

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Updates! Dreamweaver Template Extensions

Posted on October 19, 2007
Filed Under Design | 2 Comments

Templates, Extensions, Products and Plugin Updates

People have asked what the delay was for all the plugins, templates and other products and its simply this. I’ve been gone for long period of time handling a personal matter. I haven’t fully returned to full time work here or at the school so I’ve let a few things slide.

Those who were curious about other aspects of the template design extensions for Adobe Dreamweaver should note that each of these are actually production ready and when I updated my WordPress to version 2.3 it somehow broke my shopping cart which I’ve simply not had a spare moment to fix. I’m going to install a file manager this weekend where you can simply register and download the files without using the shopping cart for all the items that are FREE. This will include all of the templates and some code snippets.

Code Snippets, Tutorials, Updates, Support Docs, Guides, Articles!

Since my absence I’ve managed to take a few hundred brainstorming notes while on the plane between California and Washington each trip and I’ve come up with a new method for publishing support materials and articles for code snippets and such.

My idea is to continue to use WordPress as my primary CMS for this site and then use Joomla 1.0.12 (my version which is modified to accommodate SEF better) as the primary article publishing medium. I’ll publish blurbs or introductions I’ll call the short version in my blog solely for WordPress impressive search engine friendly presence and then direct people to the full documented version of the articles in my new Joomla install. I’ll test this but if I’m correct, it should improve Search Engine rank in regards to getting pages out of “supplemental” status which Google now hides from people.

The new Joomla install location for articles will feature some cool stuff as well like the iJoomla Magazine component and my all time favorite DocMan for document and file management. I can’t count how many Realtors I’ve installed DocMan for that come very dependent on its features. Its a great product. Since I no longer use the Joomla PDF generator for articles, I drafted a new standardized look for all documents that I publish to this site. I simply draft all articles in MS Word, test them for keyword density among other SEO things with my tester, print it to PDF, create an HTML version and finally create a visually impaired version for the compliance people. All articles can be downloaded in DOC, RTF, PDF, MSReader, and HTML formats once complete.

Last the Articles Section will be here: http://www.jaredritchey.com/articles/ (Please ignore that template I was just messing around)

Photoshop Web Templates

Posted on October 3, 2007
Filed Under Design | 2 Comments

Interesting and hefty week of teaching at the college presented a desperate need to alter the semesters syllabus after realizing that the cutting edge is in the minds of the designers not the educators. Its been said that assumption is the mother of all screw ups and the reality of that statement rings true when you actually experience it first hand.

As an instructor for Photoshop for Web Design, its easy to fall into the assumption or should I say presumption that as an instructor I should know more and have more experience than the students I teach. As this modern world’s youth are raised in front of computers, It’s easy to realize the paradigm that the very nature, perspective and interaction between people and the expression of their knowledge is a reflection of how they were raised. Second nature to almost every student this semester, the computer and nearly every facet of it including the use of very advanced software took me by surprise more so then ever before.

Students, especially those that are emerging college students, have nearly a lifetime of exposure to computers and or software. In previous times such knowledge had been the realm of those considered geeky “professional” whom of which would have invested his or her entire life to become proficient. Today its second nature for many students.

Tactics change and so does the syllabus for Photoshop Template Building. More than just a trivial post, I’m forced to rethink my approach in the Rapid Template Design Kit tutorials which I’ll address yet again.

Until then, happy posting.

WordPress Maintenance Update

Posted on September 28, 2007
Filed Under Design, Real Estate News | Leave a Comment

WordPress 2.3 Released – Tags and Tag Clouds SEO Feature

WordPress has released the much anticipated version 2.3 which features one of the latest trends in search engine optimization known simply as tags and tag clouds.

Having used the Ultimate Tag Warrior which in my opinion is by far, the best solution to date for tagging, the new WordPress features the ability to import from about a half dozen popular tagging plugins. Albeit the UTW is rather sophisticated and can be difficult to install, configure and implement the UTW has been fundamental in many sites success when it comes to getting yourself out of supplemental status in google for your pages. Now that google has removed or “made secret” which pages in your blog are in supplemental, the release of the new WordPress 2.3 seems to arrive with a new tagging feature right when we need one.

WordPress 2.3 Themes and Templates with Tagging Options

Cross developing themes to include the options for the new feature for tagging is a breeze and now that WordPress steps further toward the CMS class of applications in this latest release it stands to reason that it will fast become a websites single cms solution. Joomla and others similar in this genera can be overkill for some types of websites that require less than full blown portal or corporate level sites which is where Joomla shines. Now that WordPress 2.3 is released, it stands as one of the best overall instant website solutions on the market pound for pound. With WordPress the ease in which an instant, seo friendly, intuitive, easy to manage website solution can be implemented in well under a day in most instances.

With growing popularity WordPress has become the second fastest growing application on the web second only to Joomla and with the implementation of the new tools and codex could surpass Joomla as the application of choice for websites not requiring such robust and lofty features. Joomla is certainly an excellent application, but in situations where you need something a bit less lofty, WordPress fits the bill for many site requirements we encounter today.

Some additional features of the new WordPress 2.3 include Update Notification, better post and draft management and certainly the long overdue but greatly appreciated updates to the blogroll, wysiwyg editor and url management. Each of the latter three most of the time required some finesse and patience in getting them to behave properly. Well almost, the blogroll has just been annoying so I tossed that in as one of the long overdue feature changes. You can read about the latest updates to version WordPress 2.3 on the WordPress Site Here.

“Now we put it in practice what we eagerly preach”

WordPress Experiments for Design – Site going offline for a day

Now that I’ve managed to update dozens of clients blogs with the new WordPress 2.3 and their themes to accommodate the new features, I’ll be doing the same here shortly. This site has actually been redesigned and my new template is an integrated one unlike any other I’ve built or designed. I’ve created it to function with some features I’ve never applied to anyones site before. Things like the Real Estate Listings Plugin which will be used in this very site as a template gallery to demonstrate its flexibility in hopes that we can release it FREE here very shortly. And I’m a super fan of of jQuery tools over MooTools so I’ll certainly have a nice collection of cool features in this site that use the codex (js library) from jQuery.

Its very strange but many times I set out to work on my own stuff and get my own plugins, addons, extensions ready for publication, a project comes out of no where that just challenges me in a way that I can’t say no. Well I’ve put off way to many very necessary projects too long so I’m taking this site offline to wrap up the design either this weekend or the next and completing other outstanding product developments in addition to finalizing several pending small projects.

Template design by and large is not at all complex and in fact is quite easy if fundamental steps are followed. But steps and procedures can stymie or hinder creativity which had been a major concern in my pet project the “rapid template design series”. With WordPress 2.3 now available, its clear that the approach to design following the fundamentals can help us quickly produce some readily available themes for free download that I’ve procrastinated on releasing. I’ve had hundreds of concepts that I’ve abandoned where only a small percentage became a working example on some clients site that I’ve been itching to dig out, complete, and release for free as many as I can.

I’ll keep you posted as things go on the WordPress 2.3 integration feature as well. Sitting in my WordPress drafts is the post about all of the plugins I most animately suggest to clients for SEO which I’ll publish shortly. I’ve revised my list in recent days as the release of version 2.3 changes the approach but never the goal. My list has grown to become the top 10 suggested instead of the top 5 suggested as many plugins are simply not avoidable if SEO is your objective.

Until then, happy blogging.

Index Faster in Google with Word Press

Posted on September 22, 2007
Filed Under Design, Template Design Kit | Leave a Comment

Many times I’ll install WordPress where each instance requires several common plug-ins for effective blogging, like the site-map tool, SEO Title Tags, permalinks, custom htaccess for dealing with canonical url’s, sef and other things like image caching and the list goes on. So, depending on the projects focus or industry, I keep several pre-modded and pre-configured versions of WordPress in inventory to do what would normally be a two to three hour process and reduce it to about 45 minutes. WordPress realistically only takes about 5 minutes to install but as any WordPress professional knows, the configuration and setup of other elements of design can take many hours if good results are expected. Since my #1 SEO suggestion to site owners is a blog, It makes sense for me to keep and maintain up to date versions of the tools I work with. What is truly rewarding is not only the frequency in which I’m hired to do these things but the testimonials I receive after very short periods of time where clients index almost overnight.

Testimonials are important but I rarely publish them even though I get some impressive examples sent to me by email. Recently after installing a WordPress blog for a client who had previously been using the Joomla blog feature, he discovered to his surprise that his site went from almost no rank or position to being in the top 20 in just a few days. Many would argue that there are some factors that were already in place to achieve such results and although I rarely reveal what I know regarding SEO, that argument is almost moot.

Many times what I’ve experienced playing a large role is the configuration of the blog and the way the little things for SEO are addressed among some proprietary features I install for all clients. Of these proprietary features, most of them have to do with SEO optimization and a few for load speed which may include AJAX on a very small scale. But I would never say I have SEO fully figured out and I’m not bold enough to declare someone else’s methods ineffective as SE’s like Google are the teacher, not a student, and many times we get schooled and humbled.

Effective indexing with Google or other SE’s with WordPress is really not as “luck of the draw” as some would tend to think. Having all the cards in hand doesn’t necessarily mean anything if the rules change and as most of us know who have been doing this long enough SE’s change the rules without notice. But what can you do to help your blog along?

Top or Best Word Press (WordPress) Plug-ins for Search Engine Optimization

As I’ve mentioned in my other blogs and design articles, I maintain about 5 different variants of WordPress in my inventory all pre-modded and pre-configured for rapid development of blogs. In each and every variant I keep in inventory I include 6 fundamental plugins and characteristics of the installers to start as a foundation for good SEO practices in blog development. Here is my list.

Now a few others didn’t make my standard install list only because I find I need to alter or change things with frequency but are none the less ideal for SEO. Of those other plug-ins, I usually include one of the assortment of Meta Tag plug-ins like the one from Brandon Buttars or the g-loaded version which I maintain a modified version for my own use. There are also benefits in using other feed link tools like feedburner among as well as using RSS tools which I usually customize on a per site basis.

Of all the sites I’ve built that use a blog only a small handful fail to index quickly. Coupled with a half dozen proprietary modifications to WordPress I perform, WordPress comes out of box ready to assist any site in ranking quickly for search engine results.

In the resource section of my site I’ll be adding the tutorials on this very subject and I’ll include a few of our proprietary modifications for your use. I’ll also walk you through the permalinks techniques we use to keep things nice and clean.

Dreamweaver extensions for template design

Posted on September 22, 2007
Filed Under Design, Products, Template Design Kit | 1 Comment

How to eat an elephant! Tackle giant projects one bite at a time.

Its been a while since I wrote in my blog, taking on the challenges of getting the balance of the features completed for rapid theme and template development proved way more daunting than I had estimated. For years I’ve followed the same routine in design, MLS integration, and development of sites that hover around the open source cms solutions so popular today. Early on as I had mentioned in previous posts, the RTDS was designed to optimize a routine that makes mundane and redundant tasks almost instant. The idea naturally is to take things that are common to nearly all projects and group them into drop in solutions. When you get handed the task of eating an elephant, the notion you can do it in one or even a few bites would prove itself futile.

The way you eat an elephant is piece by piece in manageable sizes. Maybe this isn’t the best way to articulate a point, but as you read it may become a bit more clear because in our business each project can be as large as an elephant and just as intimidating. By creating the collection of Adobe Dreamweaver Extensions for template design (many to release GNU / GPL) I approach an elephant with a different mindset unlike other extensions I’ve evaluated. I spent a spank of time, energy and even money to evaluate the logic behind the approach of dozens of extensions. After many weeks of evaluation, I came to realized that NONE of the extension I evaluated followed standard design processes and even more interesting I found that most were basically a collection of code snippets designed for one click inclusion. It seemed to me that it was un-necessary for an extension to be built this way as most design professionals I have ever worked with maintain a Microsoft Access Database with their code snippets or they invest in tools like CodeWarehouse or SnippetBox to store their code. Dreamweaver is beautiful when it comes to storing snippets and managing common features but experience has demonstrated its not always the ideal.

If you take by example that I do no fewer than 25 – 45 WordPress, Joomla, or OpenRealty installs and configurations on a monthly basis it would be easy to conclude that I had little time for anything else. Each of these products requires an investment in time and certainly a lofty inventory in resources that can only be acquired with experience and time. What I’ve encountered more often than not is that each installation is pretty much the same as far as my plug-in inclusions and general setup configuration, so it becomes easy to spot the first hurdle in effectively maximizing time and project management. Individually, with modifications most of which are common, along with the install and configuration of SEF and SEO features, many times people ask how I can do so much for so little as my average price is just $25 per install. The answer to that is simple. I break things down into logical steps and maintain an accurate and up to date inventory of drop in solutions. This technique is not to different from the one I teach about in the RTDS for project design management. As a design professional, working any other way given the volume of projects we turn would prove extremely difficult if not impossible to maintain while still trying earn enough to pay programmers, hosting and other bills to stay in business.

I have no desire to work for $1 an hour and competing with foreign coders and designers, many professionals in the US, UK, Canada, Western Europe, and Australia struggle to stay in business as many times pricing is so cheap one has to wonder how its possible to avoid that very $1 an hour situation. For this reason among many others I created these Adobe Dreamweaver extensions and built a Code Freelance Open Bidding System for professionals who require a bit more CA$H. I’m not presumptuous or arrogant enough to attempt to limit the use of these solutions to only the west. I’m no bigot and for this reason, these Adobe Dreamweaver Extensions are freely available for ALL professionals regardless of nation. These Adobe Dreamweaver Extensions for template design are effective in reducing the mundane and tedious steps for effective layouts hopefully increasing your income as you can achieve more with less. As I mentioned above, most extensions I’ve evaluated were basically one click snippet inclusions which can certainly be time savers, but did not follow any particular design process. These extensions follow a design process as old as the print design process which includes the use of a grid system.

Now that my coder has gotten things wrapped up in the extensions I’ll update a section of my site so you can download, evaluate, bug test and freely use. Currently available are OpenRealty, Joomla 1.0.12+, WordPress and CRE Loaded with osCommerce, vBulletin and Joomla 1.5 soon to follow among others. Free is free and its my intention to keep them free.

Note: These extensions require a minimum of DreamweaverMX to work properly. Tested in versions MX, 8 and 9.

Turnkey SEO Content Writing – Keyword Density

Posted on September 5, 2007
Filed Under Design, Real Estate News | 2 Comments

Search Engine Optimized Content Writing

It never fails, every time I build a website, certain requests from clients seem to be as consistently mentioned as the color scheme; Content.

In the years I’ve been building sites one thing that has crept up more and more is the ever present importance of good quality, keyword dense, relevant and original content for websites. Over these same years I’ve found only a handful that can pull it off willing to work for hire and one of them I’m soon to be married to. But time is a valuable commodity and the quality of content is directly influenced by a conscious timely approach to writing with voice and deliberate attention to the target audience.

I’ve seen the price for content writers fall from the average of $25 per 450 – 550 word pages all the way down to an average price of $5 – $7 for the same expected results. Is it because technology makes the job easier? Or maybe its because content writing isn’t really that hard! Possibly, but an important trend I’ve noticed is the consistent letdowns I hear about from clients because they chased after the $2.50 per article writers that do little more than cleverly and masterfully operate a system of plagiarism that allows them to use technology like script builders and content generators that gets pimped off as original materials. Its tragic to see industry in general fall prey to those that first drive down prices by flooding the legitimate business world with reams of junk, then abruptly leave everyone else holding the bag.

True professionals are not just good writers as the internet, like every other form of written media seeks to achieve purpose in the messages they write by keeping audience and idea in mind as the “voice” the written word. Internet writing is substantially more dynamic than the printed word and with technologies that can vary the content according to user preferences, a single article can quite deliberately mean different things to different people. Keywords and keyword density are paramount as is structure, titles, sub titles and all the underlying code that makes up a well formed page worthy of indexing by search engines.

Professional Content Writers Starting at $5 per article

I’ve watched Jamie as she writes researched content for large companies that don’t even flinch at the $250 – $500 minimum she requests for researched documents and its interesting to note how effective and well thought out her content is. Not many people can afford spending so much money on content writing even though a website without it is dead in the water. An affordable solution is needed and affordable must not be confused with cheap.

Inundated with nearly a dozen emails this weekend from those seeking content writers, I decided that I’d take the time to email the professionals I know and add a new aspect to my business model to accommodate this growing need for good content. Calling in the troops, most of them college students I know, required only a quick decision to be made into a reality since each of these writers I solicited can write with all of the earmark characteristics of a good web content writer. I’d simply offer them an opportunity earn some extra money doing what they do for those A+ grades they brandish so happily. Writing essays, term papers and technical analysis papers differs in web writing only in a few key areas particularly in the area of relevance and keyword density. Once grasped, then fully understood, the birth of a new service was born.

Professional content writers who understand the importance keeping their audience involved in the writing with a clear voice and well articulated words cleverly drafted with keyword density in mind. Three of them, one of them clever, another a relentless researcher, and one too smart for his own good, deliver more unique ability to the prospect of writing internet content than anyone I know. So I’ve added the service to my business model where prices for entry level researched content can be drafted for your website at a price that is easy to justify. $5 with a minimum of 20 articles delivered in a formatted cut-n-paste ready to use solution that can make all the difference in the world regarding the success of your site.

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Moving to Missouri – The Brokers Edge

Posted on September 4, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News | 3 Comments

Joomla / OpenRealty / WordPress Websites are all ranking high

I’m excited about some of my the discoveries I have so passionately invested energies into. Its one thing for a person to draw conclusion and theories about search engine optimization having little or no experience as I so often see today being played out in forums on the subject. But its an entirely different thing to test, harbor, covet and experiment with techniques first hand that lends so much to a collection of winning formulas giving someone the ability to say that what they do isn’t just half wit theory, but something that actually works.

For nearly a year now I’ve planned on moving to Missouri where the offices of The Brokers Edge are located and have held off mainly because the UltimateIDX was in its third beta nearly ready for production release. Well with a renewed teaching contract and the UltimateIDX in production status, a brick and mortar office with a desk with my name on it calls to me.

Being an instructor, writer and freelance designer, my office gets to follow me around most the time as I pack my laptop to and from the college as well as meetings related to what I do. Teaching Photoshop or writing course ware is a fond passion as is design in general but The Brokers Edge presents an opportunity for me to do all three and never skip a beat. But this really fits in when I considered much of the information myself and Mark has been tabulating so it makes logical sense.

Today after confirming that better than 80% of my serious clients (those that take the internet serious) all rank in the top 10 for their search terms, I built a portfolio I had in standby ready to present these gems. Sometimes I wonder if It’s by luck or the grace of god that I’ve never had two clients in the same market for the same industry. I am just not sure how I would represent two competing sites with search engine optimization effectively. Thankfully The Brokers Edge has a formula that apparently works doing just that. Looking down my list I found that client websites I’ve built and or migrated from Advanced Access or Agent Image for example now rank #1 – #10 consistently and the tools we used were Joomla, OpenRealty, and WordPress. Granted severe hacks to OpenRealty were required to achieve this but they none the less work.

So why do I say “serious clients” other than the obvious? In the time I’ve been doing this business it still surprises me that a person would either not take the internet serious for Real Estate or when they do, they simply pay so much money to have me develop a site only to sit on it and let it do nothing but age. Aging a site is a good thing, sitting on it untouched is a bad thing. Serious Realtors, those that know, understand that according to the national averages, nearly ALL (80% – 90%) home purchases begin with searches online. Why then let a site sit stagnant?

Last Thursday I got a phone call from such a client that owns a site in Utah that I developed with the triplicate solution (Joomla – WordPress – OpenRealty) more than 18 months ago. Today I still see that the site has never received a PR and never indexed for a single term because the 9 agent blogs I built were simply NEVER used and the content is as old, cut-n-paste stagnant as can be. Tragic really because the energy that went into the site to provide the Turn Page Flash Real Estate Gallery, Real Estate Document Management, Online RTF document generator (custom mind you), an Integrated Innova Studio WYSIWYG editor with a half dozen content layout templates that should have made publishing a snap. Features is what the site was all about yet inactivity again demonstrates what we have long known. More on that later.

So, moving, I think that The Brokers Edge will give a nice central place to display the technologies in real world demos that articulate the finer points of good seo readied sites. Guided navigation, Title Tags, URL’s, relevant content, and the list goes on. When a Realtor considers that the cost of developing a triplicate solution like I so frequently write about using all these tools for well below a $1,000; it makes it a real hard argument to justify proprietary solutions that so many often jump right into. Had it not been for the up sell on established length and name recognition, more people, not just Realtors, would jump on this because it works and it GIVES YOU CONTROL. Besides, when you couple this with The UltimateIDX which was designed and developed to work with ANY real estate site on a LAMP server and provide CRM (client resource management) features along with Multiple Listing Service data directly into the Realtors site, this IS a total solution. It WORKS with Joomla – Open Realty – Word Press and nearly a dozen other open source CMS solutions and sites. I’ll keep you posted.

How To Expire Template Demos with PHP – Revisited

Posted on September 1, 2007
Filed Under Design | 1 Comment

Time lock code for template demonstrations using PHP

Periodically I’ll have someone ask if they can demo one of the designs on their server to verify that some of the more complex examples of my designs will work on their hosting account. Its not really an unusual request given the complexity of some of the code and requirements involved so I usually accommodate such requests. My favorite method in doing so is to simply employ a few code snippets to expire the demo at a set period of time or to lock the element for a specific domain.

For the most part, simply posting a template or live demo at http://www.livedemosite.com would be sufficient but when I add code to templates for specific needs, it can be required to customize the HTACCESS file or even server side includes to have some of the more advanced features work properly. This is certainly true in one version of my PagePeel effect. So it should be evident that a time locked demo is certainly the most efficient way to help my customers evaluate my products.

Time locking with PHP isn’t anything new per se` and fundamentals rarely if ever die so using the technique is efficient and effective in keeping that fundamental objective in the realm of the possible. Since my objective is pretty clear, to demo a complex template in hopes of a purchase, using this php snippet achieves my objective easily and cleanly. Naturally expiry code can insure you get paid as well.

Your initial thought might be that such a technique could be easily defeated rendering the whole idea moot. Its certainly true that almost any attempt to protect code can be cracked or usurped with enough tenacious effort. So by adding a few additional safe guards and steps you reduce the risk of losing your work to a would be dishonest person.
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CRE Loaded Design – e-Commerce

Posted on August 24, 2007
Filed Under Design | 2 Comments

I love it when a plan comes together. I managed to go through late last night and salvage exactly 12 nice designs 4 of which I’ll give away on this site.

Working with the Dreamweaver Extension for CRE Loaded / osCommerce I discovered several little bugs that would make life difficult if the designs were built using it. It seems that CRE Loaded Pro and CRE Loaded Standard have a yet to be discovered difference in the rendering of boxes that I’m still not able to locate.

I’ll have it by weeks end figured out and then I’ll convert all my osCommerce designs to CRE Loaded so I can offer up a wider selection of free resources.

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