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 saw yesterday that WordPress 3.0 was out of beta and available via WordPress’s terrific automatic update feature.  I figured if they had it available through that, they must have worked out any auto install bugs, right?

Well, not quite.

I did the auto install on my personal blog and was told that it failed, then when I tried to go back and change some things in my admin, I got this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function set_current_screen() in /xxxxx/wordpress/wp-admin/admin.php  on line 129

I did a little digging around and discovered that I wasn’t the only one.  The suggestions were to disable all your plugins (if you don’t have admin access you can do this by simply renaming the plugins directory via FTP) and see if that works, which would mean one of your existing plugins was causing the issue, or do a manual upgrade.

Renaming my plugins directory didn’t fix it for me, so I decided to do the manual upgrade, and that did the trick.  My WordPress 3.0 blog is working peachy keen now.

There’s a lot going on in WordPress 3.0 and I was eager to play with it, but it was pretty late at that point so I messed with the new default WordPress theme, Twenty Ten, a little bit and called it a night.

While the manual install isn’t particularly difficult, I’m not going to suggest our clients upgrade to it yet unless they want to give it a go themselves.  I’m going to wait until whatever bugs there are in automatically upgrading from WordPress 2.9.2 to WordPress 3.0 are fixed before we go forward with that.

In case you want to know how to manually upgrade from WordPress 2.9.2 to WordPress 3.0, here are the steps:

• Download WordPress 3.0 and unzip the files into the WordPress folder on your computer.
• Back up your database.  This is optional, but it’s a good idea.
• Disable your plugins.  Sometimes a plugin will conflict with something in a newer version of WordPress.  You can reactivate them one at a time to make sure there’s no conflict.  I usually skip this step, personally, but I do remember once or twice where it caused me a problem.
• Delete the wp-admin and wp-includes directories on the server.
• Upload all the WordPress 3.0 files to your server except the wp-contents folder.  That folder contains your themes and plugins.
• Upload the wp-content/themes/twentyten folder.  This will give you the WordPress 3.0 default theme, Twenty Ten, which lets you use all of WordPress 3.0’s new features.  Uploading this folder separately from the rest will ensure that any other themes or plugins you have are not overwritten.
• You’ll be prompted to update your database, which takes under a minute, then you’re done and ready to explore the new features of WordPress 3.0!

You’ve got a Facebook page for your company, but now you want to put a link to your Facebook page on your company website.

Not sure how to do it? Give me a call – it’s simple and inexpensive to add.

Contact Me Today!

Facebook now allows you to embed several different types of widgets onto your blog or website:

1. Profile Badge

2. Photo Badge

3. Fan Box

4. Live Stream Box

5. Page badge

Link: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/

If you need help setting these up on your blog or website, please let me know.

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/

Impulse is now offering a new service in reference to social media networking. You’ve heard of them – Faceook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. We can coach you on how to set up your own account and create a personal profile. We can also provide tips and clues on how to optimize these accounts to increase your presence on the web.

Link: http://www.impulsewebdesigns.com/social+networking+media.php

To be successful in today’s business and advertise your services and products, a website is number 1. Print ads are struggling because the web has become the number one source for consumers to search for the information they need.

Establish your web presence today! We have website solutions for tight budgets. Call or email today for more information.

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.

Google has come up with a nice little PDF with a ton of SEO information. It is basically a starter guide for anyone interested in optimizing their site. Optimizing a site is not rocket science, but it does require a ton of work which is one of the services I provide.

Link: Google Blog Topic about the SEO Starter Guide

Link: My SEO Services – for info or prices please call 1.910.538.6731