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.

• Site Map Generator Plugin by Dagon Design
• Google XML Site Map Generator by arnebrachhold.de
• Permalink Redirect by FuCoder
• SEO Title Tag by NetConcepts
• Sociable by Push Technology
• Ultimate Tag Warrior by Neato.co.nz

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The only major setback in using a tool like HTML Guardian is that search engines will not index a page that uses it because the search engines cant see the code and code they cant see they don’t index regardless of what people tell you about content surfing and all the other alleged search engine techniques. The plain fact is that search engines will not index your site if they cant see the code.

So, using a $50 program I purchased about two years ago called CodeLock I’ve been encrypting only a small portion of my designs or in some instances several portions to protect my work and still allow search engines to work their magic. If your templates are worth anything they are certainly worth the trivial $55 to purchase CodeLock to protect your investment.

Step One

First we need to get the current server time to create time lock period and to do that you simply add the following code to a file called "gettime.php" as I’ve done IN THIS EXAMPLE.

<?php
echo time();
?>

Step Two

Next we need to calculate the expire time to add to the script in Step Three. To do this we use a formula to calculate the time we simply multiply days X hours X minutes X seconds so it would be 7x24x60x60=604800 for a 7 day trial. Try this calculator below, I’ve set up two fields for you, one is if you want to expire by number of days and the other is if you are seeking to expire by a specified number of weeks. Just enter the number and press the tab key, it should automatically give you the time.

	Enter Period		$end_trial
Expire in Days
Expire in Weeks

Step Three

Next we need to add the server time from the “gettime.php” to the script below and also add the $end_trial time as well. To do so add the server time to $start_trial and the end period (7 days in our example) to $end_trial = $start_trial + 604800

<?php

$start_trial = 1157044256; //this is the time from gettime.php
$end_trial = $start_trial + 604800; //this is the expire time from the calculator above
$current_time = time();
$remaining_trial = $end_trial – $current_time;
if ($current_time > $end_trial) {
//modify the text below to give the message you want upon expiration.
die(‘Your trial has expired. Please contact jared – at – thebrokersedge.com for unlock procedure <a href="http://www.thebrokersedge.com" target="_blank">Contact The Brokers Edge</a> to purchase a license for the UltimateIDX for only $299.95 to continue‘);
}
?>

Step Four

Now simply paste the above code from Step Three with your time edits into the header of your HTML or PHP document or any dependent file prior to encryption. I’ve placed this file in many things from dynamic JPG files to the core class files in php. If your server can parse a file with the PHP engine then you can put this code just about anywhere you wish to activate the expiration code. Upon doing so you simply visit http://www.jaredritchey.com/codelock/ and encrypt your code.

Using the encrypter is quite simple as you will notice once you select the third button on the left titled “Segment” and then make your code selection for either HTML or PHP. Paste in your code including the time lock snippet you created above into the encrypter window and select “Encrypt”. Thats it! Your done!

By example if you had created template for vBulletin or Joomla for instance you could simply take all of the header code, paste in your time lock, and then encrypt that code to be used in your demo. Once you paste in the encrypted code back into your original document (saving an original backup of course) your template is now time locked. Naturally you can encrypt larger portions of your code that do not want prying eyes to see but by doing so you end up with a page that search engines may not like. The key is to be clever in what you encrypt so the removal of the encrypted time lock would be difficult, otherwise a clever thief could simply jack your design and replace the encrypted sections with the logical replacements necessary. I’m a big fan of CSS layouts for this very reason because I can encrypt phpincludes that deal with layout and structure and NOT content so search engines done beat me up.

Because search engines frown on encryption in general, using a PHP Include or Require Once method to include your encrypted time lock code in the header of your template is one of the easier solutions. This of course does not always protect your code from view and anyone clever enough to figure out what you have done could simply remove the lines of code that include the time lock.

Final Notes

THE BIGGEST REASON IS GETTING PAID!

I’m extremely thorough in my design work as I follow a lengthy checklist of final requirements in all my work and many times people simply will not respect or appreciate that enough to pay you for the work you put in. Its always been my policy to never compete against discount or offshore designers from India or Pakistan (no pun intended). Many do not operate the Walmart of web design and protecting your work is essential. You may find yourself in a similar situation where people expect a Ferrari but are only willing to pay for a KIA and one way to insure you get paid is to deliver the template with a time lock with the ENTIRE key code source encrypted until you receive final payment. I rarely have the gut feeling to do this but when I feel someone is likely to burn me, in doing so I’ve saved myself a ton of headaches after delivering a final product to someone who feels you work for $1.50 an hour and finds no reason to pay you the balance.

Protecting code on a per domain basis without damaging your chance at search engine indexing will be the subject of a subsequent tutorial on how to lock your scripts on a per domain basis and then encrypt the lock snippet from alteration. Naturally we will also include dependencies to prevent people from removing your time locks and domain specific requirements which will send you an email upon modification attempts. I love that part because if someone trys to install your product or design on a non licensed domain you will receive an email of the offending domains location.

This is one of my favorite techniques in using remote code based on time lock or time settings wherein the timed out page would simply display a page I build to be displayed inside an iFrame. Upon expiration or invalid domain installation of your design an alternative to the time expiration message would display a page on the offending domain with links and credits back to your site. I’ve done this in tests but never live thus far largely because uncertainty on legalities of the practice.

So this pending tutorial is a lofty one and I’m pressed for time today but I will write on this in the very near future. Until then……

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.

What I’ve done is ask Mark Panovia, my friend from Washington State University, agree to help me build the new Template Design Kit into a more complete and intuitive resource for entry level to intermediate level designers. The rework now occupies my weekends and evenings with no definitive release date.

NEW Template Design Kit Released!

So why announce a release with no pending date? Well, I’m using this as motive to get it completed and out the door by spring. I have this nasty habit of getting side tracked on projects leaving my own things unfinished. A common pain really when you consider that most web designers often have crappy or no web sites at all for themselves. We’re all busy working for someone else, right? Since the Template Design Kit is essentially Photoshop related resource, I’ve temporarily scrapped the plans for free photoshop tutorials on Open Source University and purchased 7 new domains to accommodate marketing the new Template Design Kit as a commercial product. Commercial but not expensive! This new release will be available only through the mail because of its large size and other features I wish not to disclose at this time.

Thus we arrive at the second reason or motive which is the LARGE volume of downloads of the first kit from my site in a 9+ month period of time. This to me was really the strongest motivator for publishing a new release. If people find it useful enough to download thousands of times then its got some utility value. Enough value in fact to make it worth while to students and entry level designers to get a jump on the design business. Even the 20 or so free templates I had published didn’t out perform the downloads of video tutorials which I published on many applications. From my perspective, people love tutorials, and as a motivation for re-creating the Template Design Kit, that is a realtiy as to the point and blunt as it gets.

A little sub note, Open Source University will be online eventually, or I could just simply donate it to someone who wishes to have it and babysit it. "Hosting Included". But until then, this kit is the direction I’m heading with my video tutorials for Photoshop in between client design jobs. I’m so far behind now on posting up a design gallery, my old tutorials and resources and some personal projects that I’m working round the clock to make it a realtiy.

UPDATE! I have fully canceled the plans I had for Open Source University and have subsequently migrated all materials to our new domain which I’ll announce later.