Resources on Web, Mobile, SEO, Outsourcing and more.

Like any other year for a web development company, 2010 went with lot of learning. Not even a single day left without the impact of technology advancements and new techniques to learn. At Macronimous, we always try to let our clients know what we learnt: jQuery/HTML 5 instead of Flash, Ajax driven forms, Mobile and Tablet interfaces for websites, Security for WordPress blogs & sites and social networking integration are some of the key considerations for improving the deliverables. Few things were challenging and few attempts didn’t turned up well. At the end of the year, it’s a summary of things will help any business to focus or rethink to make 2011 better for us and most importantly for our clients.

1. Social Marketing: Facebook and twitter will rule next year (or next few years too). Every SEO company which helps their client to succeed online, should help them by letting them to consider these technology giants, which might take them to next level. Social media optimization will not replace Search Engine Optimization, but social media optimization should go in parallel with SEO.

2. Cloud applications and hosting: We started using invoice applications first (Freshbooks) and it ended up with cloud hosting. We moved our sites to cloud. Also helped clients to taste the flour of clouds. Web hosting with Amazon web services was a very different service we offered to our clients. Setting up their sites and web applications with EC2 were initially needed some learning with Amazon, but it became an expert service at the year end. In 2011 we will be providing setting up applications in cloud as a key service.

3. Social Media integration: We learnt FBML, Facebook SDK with PHP and started offering business pages and applications with Facebook , which will continue next year. Marketing those pages is another fruit to reap. Similarly Facebook Like button integration and Twitter API integrations are two important promotional services clients will require in 2011.

4. Blogging: Is blogging dead? No, it has come out in different format. Twits and Facebook status updates are micro blogging and People who do not want to write much, or those who like to share instantly use them. But, still business blogging isn’t dead. Macronimous helped serveral clients to start blogging. WordPress helped us much. We provide SEO friendly WordPress blogs by adding SEO plugins and basic SEO readiness setup as a mandatory feature along with every blogs.

5. Search Engine friendly coding: SEO readiness is no more a value addition. Every site we develop should be ready to for Search Engines. It begins with light weight coding and ends with Keyword setup. Making dynamic sites such as CMS driven content, ECommerce sites and Flash sites with PHP and .NET are offered by us as an expert SEO service.

6. HTML5 for Flash: We started offering HTML5 based presentations and sites. Flash was replaced by jQuery for many clients and they were happy too. By 2011, HTML 5 should be the standard, and Flash will move for interactive applications. The test results made at RWW in March 2010 was an eye opener. With full fledged CSS3 and HTML5, easy to create interactive web applications without Flash should be feasible.

7. Rich Internet Application – Flex was used much in few projects this year. We look forward to work on RIA based frameworks, such as Sencha.

8. PHP Frameworks: We used Codeigniter very much. But MVC is still not very popular, and framework based applications are relatively lower then non MVC based solutions like WordPress etc.

9. Smartphone and Tablet applications: We did much with iPhones this year (including 2011 World Cup Cricket app), moving to iPads. Android development for Smartphones and tablets will be our important strategy for 2011. By the end of this year, we see more Tablets, and thanks to iPad, which regenerated the new platform of business. Building portable applications for the mobile and tablet browsers is another channel. By providing mobile friendly websites we help clients become accessible everywhere. Sencha Touch nd dhtmlx’s JavaScript mobile UI APIs will be a part of the development in 2011.

10. Security for Opensource applications: Many of us believe that Opensource application based development cost is almost nil. This is a lie. The initial cost of a WordPress or Joomla based application/site development might be relatively lower than a closed, custom application development. But the real cost of ownership is affected by the security issues that comes with the Open standards, mainly when they are affected by Security attacks. We will work hardly on providing secure web applications when we develop them with open source in 2011. Even at this year end we have an important announcement with a  major security fix from WordPress.

11. Remote project management: Managing projects across the globe was a real challenge a decade ago. Using standards and web based project management tools we provide hassle free project management. Tools like Basecamp, dotproject and Eventum helped us much, and we are working with few cloud based PM and collaboration tools, github etc. Apart from this our agile based PM methods have had some customization. Part of that is a project closure questionnaire.

Overall, many easy and hard ways of learning helped our team to build the next year strategy very much. Leave your comments if you had such learnings to share with others. Looking forward to another technologically challenging year which helps us to help our clients.

Dilbert stripe: © Dilbert.com

Last weekend, we have upgraded this Blog system to WordPress 3. It went well without any troubles, as expected. Our team shares few simple steps to do it yourself.

1. Download WordPress 3.0 from the URL wordpress.org/download. And before you install make sure you have access to the FTP client and mysql database

2. Create a subfolder in your domain root folder and upload unzipped wordpress 3.0 files to the subfolder. Create a database for new WordPress version on your web server. Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php. Open wp-config.php in a text editor and fill in your database details and upload to the desired folder. Run the WordPress installation script by accessing yourdomain.com/subfolder/wp-admin/install.php.

3. Now you should have done with the installation. Next step is to copy your theme files and paste it to the wp-content folder were you could see the default theme.

4. From now on you need to be very careful, copy you DB tables scripts from your existing blog database and paste it to a notepad. Here you see the links with the original URL yourdomain.com and you need to replace with demo URL yourdomain.com/subfolder/ since you are installing a demo test version in a subfolder. Now you can copy the DB table’s script and execute in your new database that has been created for demo version.

5. Now you are 50% done with wordpress 3.0. All the remaining is plugins and you need to note that all plugins are not compactable for new wordpress 3.0 so do not place all plugin in the wp-content plugin folder if happens then there would be problem in access wp-admin. Through your FTP client you need to create a folder can be named “backup” and place all your existing plugins in the “backup” folder. Then move on your desired plugin one by one to check compatibility by logging into wp-admin. There would be less or more plugins you would have located that are not compactable.

6.  Now you are done with your wordpress 3.0 in your demo version. You should be able to access your demo blog with all the post and as well you would be able to access blog wp-admin.

7. At this instant, you can move your live blog files to a different folder or can move to your local machine just for a support. Through FTP client go to your subfolder were you have wordpress 3.0 file and upload all the files in your root folder were you had the files of your previous word press version. Now download your wp-config.php and open in a text editor and fill in your live database details.

8. Now you need to access your mysql demo database and copy the table’s scripts to a notepad and change the URL from yourdomain.com/subfolder/ to yourdomain.com/ and execute it to your live database.

That’s it, now you can enjoy using wordpress 3.0 for your live blog.

When we launched our business/technical blog system under this domain/url, it was done with WordPress version 2.7 and later we upgraded it to 2.9 (Carmen McRae release) last year. Now WordPress announced its version 3, with major revisions.  WordPress community announced that 1217 bugs were fixed (which means our present blog system has 1217 bugs) which is not a small number. It has 4 digits.

WordPress 3

Next week, we will be upgrading to the new WP 3.0 and we when have started planning now few things come to my mind.

• The first thing would be Database backup.
• The only major task involved in WP upgrades is theme and plug-in compatibility checking. We may need to change our present theme and sacrifice some plug-is if they do not work with the new version. The directory of plug-ins for 3.0 is yet to be displayed, we are waiting for that.
• We are preparing a list of plug-ins, I have asked team to give up some of the plug-ins like ‘Listen Now’, i do not see any use in it. We will also remove the video comment plug-in even if it is compatible with 3.0.
• WordPress has detailed guide for version upgrades, simply following up http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress helped us before.
• Finally we will check the site for validations, in a previous blog we discussed this too. 4 site design validations you should do before you deliver

Now why would we want to upgrade while the present 2.9 is working fine. Not just for the terrible figure 1217, But I like the following list of features which I see in WP3.

1. Create multiple blogs/sites with single control panel. This would be a boon for company like us, who run more than 4 business sites and blogs. But we need to find how easy it would be.
2. Contextual help in the same page. You get what is what within that section. I am sure this will help our customers who use WordPress or any blogging/CMS for the first time.
3. Custom Menu management: We so far used third party plug-ins for Menu based navigations. Some plug-ins works well with some WordPress versions, and some are not. This is the graceful feature which I welcome.
4. Support for short URLs: We need to check is the short URLs are automatically created or we need to use a service like bit.ly

Before we recommend the upgrade to our customers, we want to try and practice it in our system first. Can’t wait!

WordPress control panel has Auto upgrade at : http://blog.macronimous.com/wp-admin/update-core.php , we will try it and post it soon.

What is Keyword cloud?

Keyword cloud represents most used keywords in a site visually, by showing it in different font sizes and it is known to be a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) term. It differs from larger to smaller in font sizes. Keyword that has been used more around the site and blog, which we call as keyword density, are shown in larger fonts. According to the keyword density the font size varies from larger to smaller. On looking at the keyword cloud size variation, users can see the importance of the keywords that relates to web site or a blog.

Benefits of keyword cloud

Keyword cloud is benefited to find relevant and useful web pages for user who looks for certain information. 

By using the keyword cloud, popular words (density rich words) are shown and it is as well clickable for users. When users find a keyword listed in keyword cloud useful then he will be going for a click on the particular keyword and he will be taken to the category search results page were all pages or blog posts will be listed related to the tagged keyword.

Make sure the keywords in the cloud section are not overlapped and ugly. Have it in a place were users could find it easily. The better option is to have it in the side bar of a site or blog. 

Keyword cloud generators

Here is a site that helps to generate a keyword cloud by mentioning your web link.

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-cloud/

WordPress Keyword Cloud generator plugin

The below WordPress plugin helps you to install keyword cloud to your blog or site

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/resize-tag-cloud/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/keywords-cloud-for-wordpress/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-tagging-plugin/screenshots/

How Keyword cloud will look like?

If you find any other interesting information about Keyword cloud, you may share through comments.

1. Ajax powered WordPress Themes:

Alisha provides a list of Ajax powered WordPress themes. You may want to try one or more.Some of them are good, Some are limted with one or two features like search. Some not found. But worth a look if you plan to use Ajax in your templates.

http://www.softtechreviews.com/web-design/ajax-enabled-wordpress-themes/

2. Ajaxed WordPress

This is a WordPress plugin which adds power, usability and the beauty of AJAX to WordPress based blogs and WordPress based websites. The plugin improves the user experience, the administration capabilities and the design potential or the blog/site.

http://ajaxedwp.com/#awp::

3. Ajax for WordPress plugin developers

So how about writing your own WordPress plugins with Ajax? WordPress codex helps you to begin: http://codex.wordpress.org/AJAX_in_Plugins

4. Four Ajax WordPress plugins

Finally, here are four plugins discussed. http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9574 This should help you to get more ideas to start.

Organizing of content is done better way using drop down menus. But coding them could be a heck of a task. Thanks to some of the finest plug-ins that cater to the drop down menus needs for WordPress, we can use them in our websites or blogs for easy drop down navigation. These plug-in can also be customized manually for better presentation.
 
Discussed below are four drop down plug-ins, for sites enabled with WordPress.
 
1. Suckerfish WordPress Plug-in: It can be downloaded from here. Suckerfish has already existing drop down design, but the same can also be customized using the CSS generator, which very well suits this plug-in. The site clearly explains the procedure to install the plug-in onto your website.
 
2. Zack Designs: A three level drop down menu has been developed by Zack Designs, for WordPress. This looks to be really promising and efficient as well. You can download it from here. But one thing is that this would be a strict no-no for people who are not well conversant with CSS, especially if you are attempting to make changes to the existing design that the plug-in provides.
 
3. Gouden Douche plug-in: Depending upon the page list, the drop down menu is created in your website, by this plug-in. It has about 3 versions of the plug-in and is still in the beta version. All the 3 versions have specific requirements, with the latest one still having few bugs in it; still it is definitely worth a look and a try, in case you are able to fix the glitches. With the beta version that has come out, it sure looks to be a promising WordPress drop down plug-in.
 
4. TransMenu: A very swift and animated drop down menu, TransMenu is easy to install at the same time makes drop downs more attractive as well. With options to include pages and sub pages inside, the drop down is definitely a very good idea for starters. The site also gives detailed information about how to go about installing the plug-in.
 
It would be good to try them out first in any blog if the features are compatible with your requirements and try applying them in your WordPress enabled sites.