Venuecom, our partner web design company, will be redesigning the website for A Place to Bead, a Wilmington, NC bead store.  The site was recently scheduled for redesign, but the project was never completed and it was not what the owner of the store had in mind anyway.

The new website for A Place to Bead will be given a fun, more colorful design.  The owner also wanted to be able to easily handle minor updates herself in order to add dates for jewelry classes or post new pictures, which will easily be handled via the content management system that is included in all sites built by Venuecom and Impulse Web Solutions.  The site will also feature a blog and e-commerce, giving the store the ability to sell its wares online as well as take payments for class registrations.  She will also be switching her email newsletters from manually sending them via her personal email account to using Venuecom’s EMT (email marketing tools) system, which will allow people to sign up for the store’s newsletter online and gives better creative control to the newsletters that are sent.

This website redesign is made more affordable by taking advantage of Venuecom’s website leasing program.  Contact us for details on leasing a website.

Venuecom, a Wilmington, NC web design company and partner of Impulse Web Solutions, has just been given the green light to  redesign attydc.com.  The website has been in existence for roughly a decade and has seen no major design overhaul in that time, so Venuecom’s web design team will work on bringing the site up to date with fresh, new graphics and a bolder appearance.

The site already has terrific search engine placement for its main key term, Wilmington NC Lawyer:

Google: 1
Yahoo: 1
Bing: 2

However, the client wishes to have the site rank high for other areas around Wilmington as well as for specific areas of law.  To that end, the newly designed website will include many new pages of relevant content and feature a blog for the discussion of legal advice, law news and other legal matters.

It has been a busy week for Impulse Web Solutions and Venue Communications, partner Wilmington, NC web design firms.  Between the two companies we have sent out or are working on sending out proposals for the following web design jobs.

• Redesign and increase search engine optimization scope of an existing client’s website.  The site is at the top of search engines for its main key phrase, but the client would like to rank high for more search terms.  A secondary goal is to ensure a higher conversion rate by updating the design of the website, which was probably built close to a decade ago.
• Revamp a website that focuses on providing information about the Myrtle Beach area.  It was originally intended to be a one-page website with some basic information about the company, but they are now ready to flesh it out to make better use of their resources.
• Redesign a partially-completed website for a local Wilmington, NC shopkeeper.  A site was started for her, but it was never completed, did not accomplish what she wanted to accomplish and is not easy for her to update.  To top all of that off, the client is no longer able to get in contact with her former web designer.  (And that’s why it’s better to use an established web design company instead of the friend of a friend who happens to do  websites.)
• Copy an existing client’s website, update the code using CSS and make some minor modifications to help them better track leads generated from mass mailing campaigns.

In addition to these web design jobs, we have a few minor to major maintenance jobs lined up for some new and existing clients.  While we’ve been very busy since at least November, this is quite a bit to come all at once.  That fact makes me really glad that we recently expanded our team.  And who knows, maybe all this work is a sign that the economy is turning around.

I’ve worn many hats in this job, the most recent ones being sales, support and design.  Being pulled in so many directions kept us steady, but dividing time up between three distinct jobs meant less focus was given to one or another at any given time.  We decided that if we want the company to grow, the team would have to grow too.

We determined that the best place to expand was in the design department.  We were looking for someone skilled in creating fresh, contemporary designs who was also comfortable talking to clients.  After all, it’s more efficient in web design to have a designer who can also sell, otherwise you’re playing the telephone game and details might get lost or you waste time going back and forth (designer to sales to client then client to sales to designer and so on).  We’ve been around long enough to know that the less interference there is between the designer and the client, the better the whole process flows.

So after a weeks-long search, we would like to welcome Travis Ray to the team.  Travis has an impressive design background and the ability to listen to what a client needs then take it a step further to improve upon their ideas.  He will be taking over the majority of the design duties as well as following up with new and existing clients.  We look forward to showcasing his skills, and I, in particular, look forward to wearing fewer hats.

This week a friend contacted me to take a look at a template that was purchased for building a photographer web site. He had purchased was a site template built in Flash. Not an HTML site with a Flash plugin, but a 100% Flash design. He wanted to know if I could advise him on how to make some changes to it.

My response was he would need the original .fla file that should be with the template that was purchased. Then he would need Adobe Flash in at minimum the version of Flash the template was built in to edit it. His site, as it is now, has very little chance of showing up in Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines for anything other than a search for the domain name, and perhaps the company name if he can get that in the Title tag. After years of trying, Google (and others) still cannot index Flash sites so they have no idea what is in the site.

Most of my clients have a need to rank high in search engines, therefor I have very little experience with Flash. Instead, I use HTML5 and AJAX to create the same stunning visual effects you can achieve with Flash. See examples listed at the bottom of this post.

My advice to my friend was if he wants to show up in searches he should build it in HTML5. If he doesn’t care about his ranking then he’s fine with Flash as long as he can afford to get it edited by a Flash developer. CMS for Flash – haven’t seen it!

One more slam on Flash and I’m done. His site is a big black blank on 2,000,000 iPads and over 50,000,000 iPhones/iPods Touches. Blackberry and Android typically only support lightweight Flash plugins. The proper way to build a pure Flash site is to provide an alternative version for mobile devices and other systems that do not support Flash.

The bottom line is the future for web design is HTML5, Flash is dying fast. Do a few Google searches on that subject.

I recommend the following book on getting started with Ajax:

Ajax in 10 Minutes
Sams Teach Yourself
Phil Ballard

http://www.amazon.com/Sams-Teach-Yourself-AJAX-Minutes/dp/0672328682

My only complaint is that the first half of the book does a brief overview of Javascript, HTML, CSS and PHP. I already know all of that stuff so I didn’t really need the refresher chapters but overall the sections on Ajax were very thorough. It had some good explanations and easy to follow examples that I coded for myself just to make it sink into my brain.

I recently setup a simple PHP script that allows the site admin to copy and paste embded code from YouTube into a MySQL database.

The code is pasted into a simple HTML textarea field and the user hits an ‘Upload’ button. The code is then inserted into the database using a simple MySQL UPDATE query.

Once the query runs, a simple return message is displayed saying ‘Upload Successful!’.

Check it out: http://www.aussieisland.com/

I am going to start a new series on PHP programming 101. Check back often for new tutorials, ideas, facts and featured functions. If you have any suggestions or questions about anything PHP related don’t hesitate to leave a comment.

The concept of a variable is used to store information that can be used later on. PHP variables are very easy to setup and define; here is the syntax:

$nameOfVariable = Value;

where Value can be any string.

Examples:

$var = ‘Hello World’;
$data = ‘12345’;
$myString = ‘xyz’;

To print a variable out to the webpage, just use the ‘echo’ statement:

echo $var;

According to www.tizag.com, here are some important tips on variable naming conventions:

There are a few rules that you need to follow when choosing a name for your PHP variables.

PHP variables must start with a letter or underscore “_”.
PHP variables may only be comprised of alpha-numeric characters and underscores. a-z, A-Z, 0-9, or _ .
Variables with more than one word should be separated with underscores. $my_variable
Variables with more than one word can also be distinguished with capitalization. $myVariable

If you have something easy you need done in a jiffy – send me an email. I knock out contact forms, registration forms, data entry forms, etc. pretty quickly. My prices are competitive and reasonable.

Go their website and read the instructions – http://wordpress.com/

However, if you cannot figure it out or you just don’t have the time to mess with it, give me a call and I can help you out. I have installed it plenty of times for other sites I have worked on.

Call now! 1.910.538.6731 use the Contact page contact form to send me an email.

On a side note, I saw this job post on Craigslist today:

We need the following today:

– Someone to setup WordPress on our host
– Take our custom/ branded CSS and create a WordPress template
– Install the new custom template to the WordPress blog

Send hourly/ project rate and examples of your work. This should not take you more than 2 hours.

I find it amusing how someone who does NOT know how to install WordPress, much less create a custom WordPress template, know that this type of project should only take 2 hours. Without seeing the complexity of the design, it would be impossible to quote an accurate estimate on the time needed.