Not too bad really. I build it using Dreamweaver CS3 using one of their built in CSS templates. I got all the graphics from one of my favorite free and public domain spots: the NASA image gallery. So every page was hand tuned for SEO manually where I inserted the tags myself like old school. And I had some text on every page and some links to the site… and I used it thousands of times myself during each year to purchase and maintain way over 1200 domains that I bought through the site. But there was a nagging problem. The fat zero I always got from Google for my PR.

A couple weeks ago I built a new site for it on WordPress using a great Nick Roach Theme called Chameleon and it had an optional “roundabout” slider. Really beautiful to look at. I used the all-in-one-seo plugin to configure my SEO and I only manually configured the homepage. I even added 4 or 5 affiliate links on the sidebar for my favorite themes and hosting partners. (Not that I will ever make a penny from them – lol). Just as an experiment for some laughs. The end result…

I went to Google PageRank 1 within 24 hours.

That’s service for you. That’s one of the many powers of WordPress and that’s why I switched to building WordPress sites commercially in 2008. One of my favorite things to say in the business is that “Google Loves WordPress“. Yeah, so true. One of the biggest reasons I instantly was promoted is that the interlinking on a WP site is so good. It’s got what some in the business call “linky goodness“. Plus the site looks incredibly good. This is a top professional theme right now. Take a look here:

So my point is that WordPress is better than old style HTML for dozens of reasons but this is clearly one of the best. Google rewarded a site that had been online for 7 years with PageRank just because I converted it to WP.

Thanks WordPress !!

Alter Hall
1801 Liacouras Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19122

Click the image below to go to Google Maps…

Temple University Alter Hall

I just signed up to attend and I’m looking forward to my first WordCamp since NYC in 2010. On my last WordCamp I helped Steve Bruner as an organizer. I got lots of great “GeDunk” from Jane Wells and Steve for helping out. And a lot of my friends showed up to harass Corey Eulas who was doing his first Camp speaking session.

So this time it looks like Corey is going to speak and another mutual friend “Sam I am” Sam Napolitano is speaking, and another mutual friend Brad Williams too. I hope they are all scheduled for different times.

Here is a link to the speakers page: http://2011.philly.wordcamp.org/speakers/

I’ve seen Brad Williams speak at 2 NYC WordPress Meetups and also at one of the NYC WordCamps. He’s a very engaging speaker and his knowledge of WordPress is incredible. In March I watched him describe the process for creating a WordPress Plugin. After the Meetup I went in and fixed a plugin I had been using where the original author was unresponsive.

Brad wrote 2 books that are great sources for anyone who gets under the hood building WordPress websites. I bought the first one (Professional WordPress) and last night at the meetup I won the next one (Professional WordPress Plugin development) !! I’m one of those guys who buys a copy of every book ever published about WordPress and this is the first time I ever got a great brand new book that I was going to buy anyway for free.

Don’t get me wrong, I love reading books and everything, but I don’t just read books, I sort of abuse them. Every page gets written on, I underline and write blocks around key parts, I earmark and fold pages down for super important information. Then I go over them again a couple months after I finish them to do lookups. And I throw them out after 2 or 3 years when they are dated. I’m much kinder to Lynda.com video training… lol.

Here’s a link to the WordCamp page and hope to see you there… Regards Everyone !!

Mal

WordCamp Philly 2011

A couple years ago some of the [now older] Elegant Themes and bazillions of other WP Themes from other vendors started using a game changing script called “Timthumb” (sometimes referred to as Tim Thumb) to automatically resize images. It allowed a WordPress editor to upload an image and display it in a blog post, but also to automatically resize it for the homepage thumbnail saving incredible amounts of time. Tim Thumb finally got pwnd and any security problem in the WordPress world is taken super seriously. The bottom line to all my administrator friends is search your containers for older sites that run with Tim Thumb and update everything ASAP.

Here is the letter I got from Elegant Themes tonight…

Hello,

You are receiving this email because you are an active member of ElegantThemes.com. In the past, our themes have used a popular image re-sizing script called Timthumb (http://www.binarymoon.co.uk/projects/timthumb/). The script is used by millions of sites and is quite popular in the WordPress themeing community. That being said, it was noted yesterday that a vulnerability exists within certain versions of the script (http://code.google.com/p/timthumb/issues/detail?id=212), and therefore this vulnerability may also exist in your theme (depending on when you last updated it). While that author has provided a fix, it is highly recommended that you update all of your EelgantThemes themes to their latest versions. The latest versions of our themes no longer utilize the timthumb script and therefore are not subject to this security hole.

Regardless of when you last updated your theme, I would strongly suggest that everyone update their themes to the latest version and insure that the timthumb.php file and your /cache folder has been removed. To update your theme and remove the file, simply delete your current theme via the Appearances > Themes section of the WordPress Dashboard. Then you can re-download the theme from the members area and re-upload it normally:

https://www.elegantthemes.com/members-area/documentation.html#installdashboard

The latest theme versions require that your thumbnail images be hosted on the same domain name where WordPress is installed. If you were previously using timthumb.php to allow external image source by editing the file’s $allowedSites array, then these thumbnails will no longer function.

Before updating the theme, make sure that you are using the latest version of WordPress. I would also disable all of your plugins temporarily before doing any update to insure that no compatibility issues exist. Remember to always keep WordPress, your Themes and your Plugins up-to-date to help protect yourself against any vulnerabilities.

I am sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

–
Best Regards,
Nick Roach
www.ElegantThemes.com

Their top of the line product is a WordPress framework called Genesis. When you use Genesis, you have a multitude of “child theme” options that allows WordPress and Genesis to be continuously updated without having a negative impact on your child theme. Genesis has a lot of features built in that are not native to basic WordPress installations, and the Genesis control panel add-on to the WordPress Dashboard is one of those features.

The Genesis control panel makes life easy for users that want to add their sites to Google WebMaster Tools. When you have a verified website in “Tools” you can access Google Analytics and Google Places. All this is free for now but many in the industry have suggested these excellent tools may not be free in the future. In any case I would highly recommend you use them as they provide a lot of SEO data that otherwise would cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to get with a 3rd party option.

Here is the YouTube version of the instructional video:

Click below to get the Screencast version of the instructional video:

Google Verify Process for StudioPress Genesis Users

To login to Google WebMaster Tools, I usually start by logging into Gmail.

From there, I pick the account pulldown menu and choose “account settings”. This gets me to my main Google Accounts screen.

From there I can pick “WebMaster Tools”.

WebMaster Tools will allow me to choose an option “add a site” and then I can type in the website URL.

From there Tools will offer several methods to verify:

• create an ascii HTML file and upload it to your website root folder via FTP or SFTP.
• add a meta tag
• do a DNS change and add a text field they supply
• add Google Analytics

StudioPress Genesis users will go to the “alternate methods” screen and pick “add a meta tag” which will look something like this:

<meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”2Ec_TpSNzlAj3TmVTjOqG6IbtQPW7r489pZpDYrpqTA” />

OK at this point login to your WordPress website and from the main Dashboard pick the “Genesis” option to get to the Genesis Control Panel.

On the lower right corner of the screen there will be options for “Header / Footer Scripts” and the top section there is to add tags and links to the wp_head section. That’s where we paste the verification string… the “meta tag”. Then we go to the bottom of the page and do a save.

Mac users can hold down the command key and PC users can hold the control key and you can click on the website name at the top of the WordPress Dashboard to open a new window with the website at it’s homepage. From there using FireFox, you can do a View / Page Source to get under the hood and look at the HTML code that makes up the page. From there I go back to the browser menu bar and choose Edit / Find. I look for the string meta and I keep clicking the next button until I get to the “google-site-verification” string we saw earlier.

<meta name=”google-site-verification” content=”2Ec_TpSNzlAj3TmVTjOqG6IbtQPW7r489pZpDYrpqTA” />

OK from this point we know the meta tag is in the homepage under the hood in the HTML and we can go back to WebMaster Tools and click the botton that says “verify”. Google will not give us a fancy message that tells us the verification worked, but they will let us immediately into the account to work with the data.

Web Design Workplace’s latest site: Fort Worth Texas Criminal Defense and Family Law Attorney Cody L. Cofer.

The attorney in this case wrote 25 pages of great text. Some attorneys just prefer to do their own writing. In his case, Mr. Cofer did himself a big favor because his content is outstanding and much better than the typical fodder that gets reused on site after site from the big box vendors. I think this site is going to 100 pages and that’s one of the features of a WordPress site over old style HTML… it CAN go over 100 pages. The old school $30,000 big box sites rarely hit 30 or 40 pages and the clients have to pay through the nose to get that much content out of a vendor. WordPress lets an articulate client who can write just go to town with new content. That impresses Google a lot. One of their main goals is to look for high quality relevant material to answers search queries and they LOVE unique content.

Web Design WorkPlace sites are not just built on WordPress. We use the Genesis Framework to give us a fully supported foundation for our custom design to ride on. Studio Press support is by far the best in the entire world. People from all walks of life and 100 countries use Studio Press to get an advantage over all other Themes. Great support and super functionality.

One sign of quality and attention to detail and professional work is to take a look at a website in the W3C Validator. The people that run the internet made a program that can test to see how well written a website is. So a web developer is supposed to run his web pages through this W3C Validator to check and confirm they did a good job. See the site below looks OK on the surface, but lurking below the hood is a sad story highlighting a lack of quality control and basic professional care:

Wow !! 43 ERRORS and 46 additional WARNINGS. And it’s right there for the whole world to see. That’s indicative of substandard quality. And that’s their BEST site !! So if this is their best face forward, what do you think they are going to do for you?

This is the standard that Web Design WorkPlace has set for our customers. ZERO defects under the hood. If there’s a problem we will fix it “Johnny on the Spot” Anywhere in the World Any time of night or day. Our work is as beautiful under the hood as it is to look at. Here is Mr. Cofer’s new Attorney Web Design and we are proud to have served. Regards everyone – thanks for reading.

Manhattan Bakery

Our website http://centurycafe.com ranks #2 in the Google main index behind one of the most world famous bakeries in the world – the Magnolia Bakery. Now Magnolia has been on magazine covers for many years since it was featured in a popular T.V. series “Sex in the City”. It’s got almost 1000 user reviews displayed from the busloads of tourists that are dropped off there on a daily basis. The website we promoted is a small Chinese Bakery on Bowery Street between Grand and Hester.

• there are a dozen world famous bakeries in Manhattan that all rank below the site we built for our friends
• there are 6,000 web pages that Google reports with the phrase “Manhattan Bakery” in their title
• we have never paid for a link or solicited any linking scheme ever

How did we outrank all those world famous bakeries in Manhattan?

• The design is stunning and the high resolution food and architecture photography is the best you will ever see on the internet.
• This website does 10 to 15 GIGABYTES of bandwith a month
• We pioneered the website image feature “Click it 3 times to blow it up“. That means you can click any photo you see on the site and expand the high res image to the point where a single chocolate covered strawberry can take up your entire monitor in perfect focus with exquisite detail. You literally cannot stop your mouth from watering when you “Click it 3 times to blow it up” on some of our Web Design WorkPlace food photos.
• We use WordPress so Google loves the site because of it’s internal linkiness and other technical features.
• We used On Page SEO to carefully hand tune the search engine optimization
• We built a website that has over 100 pages with over 1000 photos !
• Google Images favored the site and promotes the images in their image directory. We get a lot of people to the site from Google Images
• We have as many as 50,000 unique visitors a year

If you need a beautiful website for a restaurant or any small business and you need it to rank well on Google, Please use the Contact Form to drop us a note and we’ll be happy to discuss your unique situation and what we can do for you.

Cheers !!  Regards everyone – Mal Milligan

We arranged a time to meet when his constant stream of customers would not be an interruption and we talked for over an hour. We mostly discussed his business and things I might design into the site. We looked at Google and he was not listed anywhere except for a reference in insiderpages which Google had picked up on and used to create a Google Places listing. So we agreed on the basic things Tim wanted in his website and set a price. Since this was a job for a friend or family member… Tim did not have to sign my new NOLO Creative Contract. I was going to do a lot of work for a small fee, but the exposure to other potential clients by doing a site for a place like the Sharp Shop was well worth the low price in money I was getting. Plus I owed Tim for all the good work he had done for my family for more than 2 decades. I might mention here that Tim was one of those rare customers that are very flexible and go into a first website without preconceived notions. He might be a perfect client in that regard.

So I picked the Studio Press Executive Theme because I’m constantly impressed by the clean lines and examples I have seen in the wild. I have mostly used the Lifestyle Theme followed by the Serenity in the Genesis Framework series but I thought the Executive would be a perfect match for the Sharp Shop’s identity. They are a Master dealer for 4 of the biggest landscaping power equipment vendors and they also sell many other brands… but the big 4 would all look nice right on the homepage of the Executive. In terms of the color selection I discussed with Tim that since he sold to landscapers and resedential homeowners in Northern NJ, we might pick a style that can be converted from fall colors to winter and spring. So I setup the site with that in mind. All the .psd files are carefully setup to allow new backgrounds and colors to be added.

After I got the basic site up on a test URL, I added placeholder images that I made in Photoshop with their sizes prominantly displayed to help me size out the design. Then I made a basic header file and started playing with colors. This is the part that takes me the longest. And I also need to ask others for their opinions a lot at this stage. My kids helped for an hour as I changed colors and found a combo that worked. This particular palette combo not only worked, but it really blended beautifully and immediately, the web design started to pop. I don’t know if there is an artistic term for that but it was a point in the project that I felt we were onto a beautiful design. Along the way I used Adobe Kuler a few times for suggestions but since I’m still on CS3 I can’t use it to it’s full advantage yet. Anyway it helped.And here is the final product:

So I can change the main image quickly because it’s a “featured image” on a WordPress page. Or I can replace it with WP-Cycle and replace the image with a slider window in the future. I can also change the header colors and the nav bar and the backgrounds on the content windows quickly in the future if we want a seasonal change. I circulated the link to 3 of my WordPress builder buddies and got a thumbs up from all my professional friends. More importantly, my client Tim was impressed and grateful. Now this front page is only a fraction of the work I did. I also did this:

Items Completed with new WordPress Website from Web Design WorkPlace:

• 1. WordPress Installed on protected IP
• 2. Studio Press Executive Theme Installed
• 3. General Settings – no www
• 4. Writing – Remote Publishing OFF for security reasons
• 5. Discussion – users must be registered – commenting turned OFF for security reasons
• 6. Permalinks setup for SEO – OK
• 7. Minimum plugins installed, all from highly regarded industry leading authors
• 8. Google Analytics OK
• 9. Google Sitemap OK
• 10. dB backups set @ 12 hours
• 11. fresh posts export to XML
• 12. fresh file system backup to PC
• 13. .htaccess contents verified
• 14. robots.txt verified
• 15. favicon working OK and verified
• 16. all files rights rights checked and verified
• 17. Google WebMaster Tools verified
• 18. Yahoo SiteExplorer verified
• 19. Bing WebMaster Tools verified
• 20. snippets for meta tags for all SE in Genesis header
• 21. Google Places Local Listing Updated and Verified
• 22. Yahoo Local Listing Claimed – Updated and Pending
• 23. Bing Local Listing Entered – Used Mail Verification

So there is a huge difference in what you get when you go to different web designers. At Web Design WorkPlace we are at the very top of the pyramid in terms of getting it all done right. There is a tremendous amount of work in the background that a client never sees. Getting the site looking good for web surfers is only a small part of the work. Most of the work goes into the structure and operations aspects that drive rankings on Google, Yahoo, and MSN / Bing. A great looking site is absolutely worthless if the search engines don’t like it. So when you are looking for a great web designer make sure all the items in the background are covered too. And unless it’s a “friends and family” type job, get it all in writing and in a contract before the work is started.

Affordable web design is done professionally and artistically but above all else, with no over inflation about value. Web Design WorkPlace gives incredible VALUE to our customers and we usually do it 4 times better than the so called top company in the business, and we do it at one tenth the price. That’s what makes it affordable. It is not cheap. It is not less in any way except the cost in dollars to the customer. And it’s only available like that because I broke off as the top ranking SEO with a huge mega company making the top custom attorney web sites around, and now I’m doing it on my own with some friends. So that’s why it so affordable. Because my business is young. And actually I will never be able to lie or cheat as well as the big companies so I will never charge even half of their rip-off prices.

I have a half dozen web designer friends that all came from the mega company that I still chat with on a daily or weekly basis. One is a real artist and she sells template sites much like I do. She says over and over again that most of her customers have no idea what WordPress is. They have no idea what a template is. Even after she explains it to them, they still have no idea what a template site is. Except for about 10% that really get it. Now those 10% are usually clients that have had websites for a while. They may have had a number of different websites like plain HTML, or Flash, and they may have used WordPress or other blogs before. Those are the customers she makes the most money from and they are also the customers that ask for the most in terms of making the website work with Google ranking. They can appreciate excellent web design and they understand pricing having been there several times before.

The clients that get to my site usually type “affordable web design” on Google. I’m usually on page 2 now but I’ll push it up to page 1 when I’m good and ready probably before Christmas. Most of those surfers actually want “cheap web design” and they have no idea what the difference is nor do they care. They just want to get on the web for as cheap a price as possible. So they don’t care if their company name does not appear on Google, or Bing, or Yahoo searches. That escapes them. They want cheap. That is their focus. Not an inch further toward a goal for example. A goal like “obtain more internet exposure to get more customers and impress current clients”. They don’t get that far. They only get as far as goal: get a cheap website. And you know with websites as with many other things in life, you frequently get exactly what you pay for.

So for the record affordable does not mean cheap. Affordable is well built, good looking, fully featured, and it costs less because the company that made it is discounting the product for some reason. Affordable is sometimes mistaken for cheap. Products that are cheap are not well made, they are made to meet minimal standards but cost less. People who are looking for cheap websites should really go dumpster diving on Craigslist where they will find all kinds of the lowest form of vendor. And I am not recommending it but I tried advertising there a few times and got the worst clients and had to get rid of them all.

My recommendation to you right now in October 2010 is go to HostGator for any and all of your hosting needs. There is simply no way to beat their outstanding level of support at any price. And on top of that, there is no way to beat their price either.

After 7 years with a smaller vendor who was run by a a person I had previously described as “brilliant” and “impeccably honest”, I lost 30 WordPress sites to a cross site SQL Injection. I found out that this small vendor still had never learned to do a backup properly 7 years after loosing an entire server with no backups. They had no monthly backups, no archives. No yearlies. Only 2 weeks worth of incrementals. And when I asked for the restore a technician told me they did not have them at all. Wow. I spent the next 16 hours rebuilding the top 15 sites from scratch and then another technician told me like a clown walking in uninvited that he had “found” the backup tape… knowing well that I had just spent the last 16 hours rebuilding from the point I was told there were no backups. Nightmare. That is unfortunately typical for what you can expect at a small vendor. I have many more nightmare episodes to tell you about that vendor later but the lesson learned: Avoid small Hosting vendors like the plague.

Here is the main page for HostGator. Probably the nicest looking Hosting website anywhere and there is a ton of plan information if you look around and shop. There are regular hosting plans, reseller, VPS, and dedicated. Standard mix really. I’ve used them all with the exception of dedicated. I’ve used their chat line at least 50 times. It rocks. The technicians are super well educated. They are better educated than technicians I have worked with at any other hosting vendor ever. I’d put them in a support class like the former legendary Netware Premium Support which was 10 grand a year back in the day and only available to Enterprise users.

OK Here is a sticky caveat. I’m an SEO and I use dedicated unique class c IP addresses all the time. If you want to get an account with unique class c ip addresses from HostGator, you have to use this chinsey website called SEOHosting.com to buy a bundle of 5 IP’s minimum. OK I see how it works, but I don’t really get why the website looks so bare bones… even sexually suggestive. The website is Thumbs Down – Beneath Grade – Not Commensurate with the product offering or level of support. I do hope they get their act together on this and get a better website. I could certainly build them one Affordably!

So I just bought a SEOHosting Reseller with 5 IP’s and I setup private nameservers. I’ll let you all know how well it is working out in a month or two. Until then I can tell you the same 200 support people that pick up the chat line for HostGator also pick up the chat line for SEOHosting. It’s the same company. Different front end for the sale.

OK some standard stuff to show. This is a CPanel for the VPS3 package I bought with HostGator. The support was just over the top excellent. I’m a former Master CNE and MCSE but learning how to fly in my first Virtual Private Server was a bit daunting… the HG support made it good. The VPS turned out to be a little under powered for the number WordPress plugins I needed to run but the speed was excellent when I used fastCGI and WP-Super-Cache.

Many of their plans come with a WHM or WebHost Manager. This is the one for the VPS3 I bought. I spent 40 a month just for the VPS3 and an additional 10 a month for the Cpanel. I also has a couple extra dedicated IP addresses which were cheap, only 1 buck a month each.

Here’s a look at VZ or the Parallels® Virtuozzo container manager. There is not much to configure here but it provides a graphical interface to control the VPS under Apache on a Linux server. It’s free with most HG VPS solutions.

Here’s the proof in the pudding. I setup a test account on Pingdom which runs an http load test on the homepage every 5 minutes. I ran it from the wee hours on Sunday morning all through the wee hours of Monday AM and found ZERO defects in uptime. Outstanding. I know they ran backups during this time period. A bad hosting company will allow the websites to drop during backups and they will still call that “uptime”. That should be considered false advertising and it should be illegal really. HostGator was flawless in this particular test. I will report when they stumble to be fair of course but this is the good start I anticipated after all my favorable interactions with support during the last 3 weeks. Check them out.

Government websites have common requirements and they can be attained with old style HTML websites or the modern WordPress style. But of course there are advantages and disadvantages to every choice in the computer world. Lets look at some of the requirements and then look at how affordable we can make them by choosing old HTML or new WordPress.

Government Website Requirements:

• Security. The site must have an encrypted communications pipeline between the workstation and server. This is called “SSL” for the Secure Sockets Layer protocol. Also note that this SSL link must allow secure logins and also secure work on the administration area or dashboard. Not one or the other but both.
• Backups. There has to be a mechanism to backup the site and the data and to restore the backup quickly.
• Multi-Language Support. Many countries now require multi-language support at some level.
• Ease of use to add / change / or delete content.
• Provide alternate ways to read images for visually challenged readers.
• Add captioning for video and sound media.

Security

• HTML does not provide it naively but it can be custom built in. It’s expensive and proprietary.
• WordPress has SSL capability build in. Except for the Secure Certificate which is needed at the server level, it’s free.

Backups

• HTML and WordPress can be backed up at the server level using common server backup mechanisms.
• WordPress allows MySQL Exports and XML post exports for finer backup granularity.

Multi-Language Support

• HTML does not offer it. It can be done manually and it’s expensive.
• WordPress has numerous plugins both free and proprietary that translate posts. WordPress itself can be setup in about 50 different languages so the Dashboard is all in the native language.

Ease of Use

• HTML requires years of training and hands-on practice before modifications can be made to a page.
• WordPress allows non-technical people to add / change / or delete content. WordPress also allows non-technical users to change the entire menu system easily.

Provide Alternate Text for Images

• HTML allows this – but you have to be a computer programmer in order to write the HTML code or PHP language to actually implement it.
• WordPress allows non-technical users to add alt text to all the images from the Dashboard / Media center.

Which is a better option for Affordable Government Websites? WordPress is the winner in almost every category.