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.

CRE Loaded Catalog Images

Posted on August 7, 2007
Filed Under Design, Portfolio, Products, Real Estate News, Template Design Kit | 1 Comment

CRE Loaded Thumbnail Generator

Nothing is more annoying than seeing or hearing about the frustration end users and site owners have with their site after spending a lofty chunk on its development. Although some things are certain to surface almost routinely, many things can be avoided by taking the time to draft well written and clear documentation.

In CRE Loaded projects I almost always provide site owners with a style guide if I have the slightest idea that he / she intend on using the content page features in the cart. Now, all though CRE Loaded comes with a WYSIWYG editor for product listings, it does not come with a logical explanation on how to use it effectively and therein lies the problem I face quite frequently with end users.

CRE Loaded unlike osCommerce provides a way for store owners to add content in a more rich and controlled format, thats the good part. But Its been my long held suggestion to end users to do their publishing of content offline in a professional html editor (commercial or not) primarily because online editors fill your drafts with countless inline elements that can break a layout. In every single one of my commercial sites, I draft the content in MS Word so I can port a version of my article to a PDF and MS Reader for downloads and then I copy that article into Dreamweaver, clean up the messy MS Word markup, validating the structure, then pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor in HTML format. As you can guess my blog is NOT one of those places I do this at. Nothing here validates. (proof positive on another experiment I’ll tell you about later)

Pictures and Content Break My Layout!

So, in CRE Loaded projects and templates I’ve always provided the client with a simple one page sheet on the correct image sizes and a small collection of examples among other things for the editor. In the last month alone I’ve seen only 1 person use a CRE Loaded design I’ve built correctly. Thumbnail images are consistent in size, the popup images are all the same size and product images are all the same size. Its when people try to upload these gigantic images in hopes that they will be sized correctly that problems begin.

Because of this I’ve had the php guy build me three little CRE Loaded generators that I’m publishing free of charge for your use. The main one is a simple image generator that takes the product photo and produces three output sizes based on user variables for either width or height. It will add a nice little user defined prefix to the image and provide some other features that will help CRE store owners to quickly generate consistent photo sizes without the lengthy process of producing them in photoshop.

I’ll write more on this generator and the content validation generators later in the week. Until then, blog like a mad man.

Private Label Applications

Posted on June 18, 2007
Filed Under Template Design Kit | Leave a Comment

CSS Navigation Generator – Color Manager

Today after working with Mark Panovia (Computer Science Instructor) and Justin Green (Desktop Publishing Instructor), we hashed out a few final edits to the Rapid Template Design Series. The printers as mentioned before will begin production sometime in August for the Fall Semester and the course will first be published in Washington State colleges then nationally if everything works well.

I wrote this post http://www.jaredritchey.com/rapid-template-design-series.html regarding the series a few weeks ago and as far as features goes nothing there has changed.

We did manage to convince a few freeware application developers to private label their applications and include some of our features and characteristics to better accommodate the course. Naturally since these are freeware and or shareware applications, they will be available for FREE download on http://www.templatedesignkit.com in compliance with the developers free distribution licenses.

Designer Tools of The Trade

So with the CSS Navigation Generator, the pending code snippet tool, the color wheel manager and hopefully a font manager among others, the course will deliver a lofty arsenal of tools to the student designer.

Since the focus of the course is for the student, ease of learning is critical and the right tools can make that experience easier. For years professionals in the design business have attempted to standardize many things including the tools of the trade. Starting in the early days with Adobe Page Maker or Quark Express for example, the first forms of instruction were not easy and rarely included layout guides and templates. Books and manuals produced by experts familiar with the applications, a dilemma surfaces, as documentation is written in technical terms by technical experts that quite literally require you to be very technical to understand it. For a student this catch 22 has long since been identified as problematic when course material makes broad assumptions of understanding.

The Rapid Template Design Series really shouldn’t have the name “Template” in it but templates are in fact foundation to nearly all design. Print, web, application interfaces, among other things follows a set of guides for optimal results. Because of this, those like us who have worked in the print media industry tend understand the use of complex grids and layout guides used to achieve consistency in our work. The same is also true of web design, and now that the term “Template” is synonymous with design layout, Rapid Template Design seems relevant because its familiar.

So only a few tiny little things, aside from desperate need more ca$h for the budget and a few holdouts on private labeling, we are close to making this a reality.

FYI the original budget that the college provided was a grant in the amount of ONLY $2,500 which was eaten up quickly for the plugins and code elements we had to purchase distribution licenses for. Thankfully many contributors and code providers to this course traded link and advertising space for their form of compensation. I’m fully grateful to the people at Utteraccess.com, Joomla, Mambo, OpenRealty, vBulletin, php.net, WordPress, and countless others that authorized use of their contribution and assisted to bring about this course. Special thanks to Adobe for the donation of 8 licenses of Adobe Photoshop CS, Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe InDesign Tools like these are instrumental to modern design processes.

Learn to Be A Design Professional

I’ve not really expanded on the target audience of this course so a brief mention would be beneficial. This course as mentioned on the college blog was created for entry level to intermediate level design students who seek mastery of the foundational or should I say fundamentals of design. This course is NOT for professional designers as much of it covers very mundane theories on color, layout and navigation in great depth. A lofty inventory of core elements is also provided including template layout masters, css contributions and code, working files, and private label software most professionals have already accumulated in knowledge and inventory alike. So this course is for students of design.

Template Design Kit Update!

Posted on April 12, 2007
Filed Under Template Design Kit | 2 Comments

Delays nearly over, I’ve had to change perspective on a few areas to accommodate priorities in the features of the kit. I’ve expanded a few fundamental features and went back to basics on the design procedure. However, I’m still unable to get the kit onto a single DVD comfortably I’ll be removing some non essential elements and posting them for download on the new site.

Some of the elements will include things that are specific to various applications like osCommerce or vBulletin for example. Since these applications tend to change with frequency it may actually be better to put all application specific design elements where we can modify them to follow version changes.

Joomla Template Design Kit
I really hope that I can get this published and ready for use by months end. The Joomla Template Design Kit Elements as well as the Mambo Template Design Kit Elements will also be featured in the registered member area for download. Many additions have already been laid out for this section of the template design kit largely because of the popularity of Joomla and Mambo. Its been a real serious challenge finding the best overall method for teaching students ways to understand some of the more complex template structures as well as integrated structures like the one that osCommerce uses.

Again, without letting to much out of the bag at this point, when it comes to osCommerce related template design elements Mark opted to teach about only one template engine called BTS “Basic Template Structure” and not the STS system.

Feel free to contact me in advance for individual parts, branding, and reselling of the Template Design Kit for Mambo, Joomla, osCommerce, OpenRealty, vBulletin, and osCMax.
UPDATE! April 13th, 2007: I’m including osCommerce Template components and osCommerce Dreamweaver template components as well.

How to Expire Template Demos

Posted on April 2, 2007
Filed Under Design, Template Design Kit | 2 Comments


Expiring template demonstrations and protecting your work.

If you’ve ever wanted to allow a potential customer the ability to demo your template or themes while still protecting your rights then this little snippet may be the answer.

The idea behind the code is to simply provide a potential buyer or client a theme they can test run on their domain and expire the template after a period of time. Having worked for large template houses in the past, I’ve seen all too frequently where people have ripped off designs by simply looking at the web page source code and figuring out the rest from there. The temptation is to use tactics many times lengthy to protect your work often resulting in a slow loading site.

Now I use to publish live demos on my domains much like the template houses do and one of my favorite techniques that works great is to simply encrypt the template with a tool called HTML Guardian which works beautifully for such things. You can post a live working example of the theme or template and the code is completely hidden from prying eyes until they purchase the design.

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New Template Design Kit!

Posted on February 15, 2007
Filed Under Template Design Kit | 1 Comment

What is the template design kit?

Some of you may recall my Template Design Kit v1.0 that I released free about two years ago on my old site. For those who didn’t see it, the Template Design Kit is a design tool for newbie Photoshop users breaking into the web design business and provided a sort of quick start guide. The kit basically included flash video tutorials built using Macromedia Captivate® and a few hundred support files, actions and other Photoshop elements wrapped into a nice download package of about 50 meg. It was intermediate, quickly assembled, and far from truly complete and would have likely been abandoned had it not been for two important reasons I demonstrate below.

I hate when things disappear

We’ve all bookmarked something we intended on visiting again and again only to discover that the site is gone, the resource has been removed or the account has been suspended. I kick myself many times for not just CTRL + S and saving the page in a folder. Well jaredritesigns.com has fallen to similar fate now that I accepted an offer to stop using my former site from a large jeweler of the same name we turn a lemon into lemonaide and move on. So that was my first reason or motive to keep the Template Design Kit available. Tossing jaredritesigns.com I can live with even though it had a high PR rank but the one thing I knew I’d regret if I tossed was the Template Design Kit. So, two of my associates and I decided to rework the original concept and build the kit into something all together new or should I say newer yet. With an estimated final release being VERY LARGE in size, my major concern was how to distribute such a large inventory of thousands of files and videos effectively, or should I say CO$T effectively.

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