Constituency Support Services wanted a very limited web presence. Simply somewhere prospective clients could go to read about and get contact details. We designed this minimalistic modern site that gives the company a professionally presence on the web.

If you have seen our ‘News’ page you will notice that when the title of an article is clicked the contents of that article expand while all the other contract, this all done quite simply with jQuery.

Firstly, you need to create a news page.

Open the file and add this at the very top:

<?php
/*
Template Name: News Page
*/
?>

This simply tells WordPress it is a custom template file and what it is called.

Underneath that add the following JavaScript:

<script type="text/javascript >
$(document).ready(function(){
  $(".toggle:not(:first)").hide();
        $("h3 a").click(function(){
             $('.toggle:visible').slideUp();
             $(this).parent("h3.entry-title").next().slideToggle("400");

              return false;
          });
});

</script>

Running through this quickly, (document).ready means as soon as the document is ready, .toggle:not, hide every div with a class of .toggle attached to it except the first one. .click (function()) is selecting every link wrapped in an h3 title tag to act as the selector. .slideUp is telling it that as soon as an h3 link is clicked, hide any open classes with a ‘SlideUp’ effect. (this).parent is telling it to slide down the associated news article we just clicked the title of.

Now login to your WordPress back end, navigate to Pages then Add New. Call it ‘News’ and in the right sidebar, under Templates select News from the drop down list.

CONTENT

This cannot be stressed enough. Good content is always going to get you rated higher in Google or any other search engine than underhand tricks or altering the meta tags. It should be relevant to the subject, contain about an 8% – 10% keyword density and ideally should be dynamic or updated regularly.

However, be warned that a page stuffed purely with keywords WILL be penalized by Google. Good content should flow naturally and be readable to humans.

URL

Fairly important, but often over looked, is the URL of your website or webpage. Any website domain name that contains searched for words or phrases is automatically given an edge in results. Obviously, this isn’t a magic bullet, it won’t guarantee you the top spot, but in the world of SEO every little helps.

Say you target keywords are ‘Norfolk Golf Club’, somehow you want to incorporate this phrase into your URL. Obviously it isn’t practical to rename your whole company, and the domain name is probably taken, so the next best thing is to change your page URL to your targeted keywords and put some well constructed and relevant content on it. If our domain name is www.golfXYZ.co.uk we can create an inner page at www.golfXYZ.co.uk/Norfolk-Golf-Club and use it as an about us page. The extra words in the URL will help give your website that extra edge.

Backlinks / Linkbuilding

Possibly the most important part of SEO after content, link building with other websites. Google rates Web Pages by the quality and number of incoming links, so the more you can get other sites to link to your site the higher up in search results you’ll come. Bear in mind though, that the quality of the source is also considered by Google, so for example web directories have hardly any weight behind them.

So how do I link build? Firstly, get involved with social media, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc can help provide you with good quality links. Be involved in an online community, post in someone else’s blog or be active on a forum. Start you own blog, write good quality articles and people will link to them. Lastly, the old favourite, simply ask. Approach websites and you think would be interested in link sharing with you and simply ask them.

Meta Tages

No where near as important as they used to be, in the 90′s Meta tags where the only way to get your site on top. When the internet was still in its infancy, all the major search engines used to rank website solely on meta tags. Unfortunately, keyword stuffing became common; to many shady websites repeating the same words over and over in a bid for the top spot. Fortunately, Google came along with their new way of ranking websites by its backlinks and severely curbed the importance of meta tags. Some say that Google doesn’t even bother to look at meta tags these days and others don’t even include them on their website. However, Google isn’t the be all and end all of the internet and other search engines defiantly do still rank meta tags, so what’s the harm.

To be done properly meta tags should be 10 – 12 carefully chosen key words that are common on your websites. Ideally, don’t bother to include you domain name. Google still uses the Meta Description as a brief synopsis of your website in the search results, so write it carefully, in the third person and keep it short!.

Alt Attribute

A rather simple on this, and something both professional and armature web developers regularly over look. When including an image on a website you have the option of adding an alt=”" attribute. This attribute is suppose to be a small line of text describing what the picture represents allowing screen readers and text based browsers to interpret the image.

So not only does it help keep your website accessible, it is also used by Google’s image search and helps with SE, no reason not to include it. Keep descriptions short, accurate and if possible include keywords.

Title & Heading tags

When writing content for your website or blog, ensure the correct use of title tags. h1 tags should contain your main site heading or slogan. h2 tags the main phrases or headings that stand out on your site and are important, h3 the lesser headings such as mid-article headings etc etc. Importantly, make sure they are nested correctly and in order. Don’t have an h3 outside a Div that contains an h2 tag, this will just confuse the search engine spiders.

Website Title

Think carefully about the Title for your site, do not just put your company name if it isn’t terribly descriptive of what you do. Returning to our fictional Norfolk golf club, which of these titles would be better for SEO?

• Royal Oaks Parkway
• Royal Oaks Parkway | Norfolk Golf Club

When titling each page, use the same practise, History | Norfolk Golf Club is much better than simply History.

File names

There is some debate about whether it is worth optimising filenames or not, but as I’ve previously stated, in the world of SEO every little bit helps. If you have files available for download from your site they will have much more chance of appearing in results if you name them something relevant like Royal Oaks Parkway – Calendar 2010 rather than simply Calendar. Also it helps the end user remember what the file it is they’ve downloaded.

Sitemap

Fairly simple one, but still important. Search engine robots have the ability to get horribly lost in a site, especially large complicated sites no matter how well it is coded. Submitting a simple sitemap to all the search engines ensures the robots have a complete overview of your site, all your pages will be index and they won’t get lost..

East Anglian property developers wanted their website updating to look sleek, modern and to better represent the company. Featuring several picture galleries of past developments as well as a PDF page for their newsletters all encompassed in very modern design.

So, in no particular order, here are our Top Ten Joomla Extensions

JTweet

JTweet – Joomla Extentions

A rather simple little extension that will allow you to easily display your Twitter feed on your website. When a client first requested this ability we tried 5 or 6 different extensions before settling on this one. Its simple design, easily customisable CSS, speed and the fact it worked meant it quickly became our favourite.

BCA RSS Syndicator

BCA RSS Syndicator – Joomla Extentions

One of the few extension actually linked to a charity this after market RSS feed is superior to the built in one in almost every way. Can display feeds in RSS 1, RSS 2.0, ATOM, HTML and may others as well as being able to create your own buttons and separate feeds for each page.

!JoomlaComment

!JoomlaComment – Joomla Extentions

A rather neat component extension that will allow you to add comment abilities to selected section / categorise. With more and more people wanting blogs on their sites the ability for readers to provide comments is paramount, infact we think that this extension should be integrated into the core Joomla package. A very customisable module, with several different styles built in as well as an HTML / CSS editing window allowing you to easily change the appearance and style of your comment boxes while it is live on your site. Comes with a whole host of features from read more links to catchpa to filter lists.

JCE

JCE – Joomla Extentions

The standard editor that comes with Joomla is bad, oh so very bad. The HTML it puts out is terrible, it’s unreliable, difficult to use and confusing. So the first thing to do when installing a new site is install a new editor, and we recommend JCE. TinyMCE is pretty close behind, and infact has a better picture uploader, but by overall experience JCE clinches it. Of course it is fully customisable, skins, buttons etc so it’ll fit in with your website with out a hitch.

Jumi

Jumi – Joomla Extentions

Possibly one of the most useful extensions listed here, it allows you to execute custom Javscript or PHP inside articles. We’ve used it for everything from a quick Javascript menu to a more complicated PHP iplogger and it has always worked without a hitch. Very easy to use as well.

xmap

xmap – Joomla Extentions

xmap is essentially a site map plugin for your Joomla site. It will generate a XML file of all your menus, (obviously you can choose which menus), which you can then submit to Google and other search engines. You can also point a menu link at it so it will display a site map for your visitors as well. Very useful for your SEO.

Community Builder

Community Builder – Joomla Extentions

A rather hefty extension this, but by no means overweight. This will turn your Joomla site into a full fledged Facebook / MySpace/ Bebo clone. Allowing users to easily register, update their profile, make friends, status updates, talk to each other etc etc. Pretty much everything which comes as standard on a social networking site. A very powerful addition to Joomla.

JoomlaPack

JoomlaPack – Joomla Extentions

Another ‘behind the scenes’ extension, JoomlaPack provides a very easy to use backup control of your site. Allowing you to easily migrate to other hosting as well as provide secure backup and restoration if anything should go wrong. Simply a must for safeguarding your Joomla site.

The Ultimate Social Bookmarking Plugin

The Ultimate Social Bookmarking Plugin – Joomla Extentions

Can you guess what it does? Of course you can, and it does it very well. It displays social links at the bottom of selected sections / categories so if people like your article they can Digg / tweet / any of the other dozen social links it includes. Comes with several different icons for each one as well as JavaScript versions. See it in use at the bottom of this article. Don’t forget to Digg us!!

ccNewsLetter

ccNewsletter – Joomla Extentions

Almost everyone wants a way to keep in touch with the their visitors, whether to advertise at them or simply to inform them about new content, and ccNewsletter is the perfect way. Will display a very simple subscription module form on your site, allowing users to enter their Email and name, and it will add them to a list subscribers in your backend. However, it’s far more advanced than that. It has built in features for creating your own HTML news letter as well as easy options for managing subscribers, an you can send your newsletters directly from the backend. A very worthwhile module.

After a lot of ho-humming about whether to design it as a module or plugin we just decided to do both. The beta version of the module is currently available and hopefully the plugin will be here in a few days.

At the moment it really is quite simple. We grab the page URL, send it off to the external site, they shorten it, we receive the URL back and display it on the page. Very simple, very little to go wrong. You can see it in use on the column to the right.

At the moment you can select 1 of 3 different services to use is.gd, TinyURL, u.nu.

It comes with no CSS styling but everything is wrapped in div called “short_url” so is easy to style.

Here it is if you want to play.

Indigo Elf Joomla 1.5 URL Shortener

Halifax PPC Linda Riordan needed a campaign website where she could keep in touch with local Halifax residents throughout the election. YouTube, RSS Feed, Picture Gallery, two News Feeds, Twitter Feed and a simple Administrative back end.

As a Political & Business Website Design & Development Company we try and keep our fingers on the latest ideas coming from the net, be it CSS3, JQuery update, WordPress 3.0, a Joomla Pligun or simply some HTML code we like. This enables us to keep up to date with current ideas, trends and coding principles, allowing us to pass on our expertise to our customers.

We are always always coming across new and interesting problems, original ideas and little snippets of code we just think are neat. In our new Blog we aim to address the more technical side of things, we’ll be posting on anything we find interesting or we think may help some one. Over the coming weeks we have several Top Ten lists including WordPress & JQuery, a small Joomla Module we created, some PHP and some advice on SEO.

We hope to keep this blog updated and to keep writing for it over the coming weeks and months, and as long as one person finds it useful or informative we’ll judge it worthwhile.

Bury St Edmunds PPC David Ruffley wanted a website he could post information on and contact residents through during the campaign. Google Maps integration, YouTube, RSS Feed, Picture Gallery, News Feed, Administrative Back end & a Scrolling News Ticker.

A Bedfordshire Councillor, Richard Stay already had a popular and active blog cllrstay.blogspot.com/. However, he wanted a separate website dedicated purely to his local residents and local matters.