Slow dogs, a Just Because Moment

Design Credo’s content in realtime?

PubSubHubbub allows Design Credo to send realtime notifications when new content is published.

Ever wondered how FriendFeed and GoogleBuzz get updates from your blog so fast and how Netvibes or Google …

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Rich Text -The value of keywords in Google SEO

I have a number of domains and have recently started using Twitter. In addition I have a Facebook presence and network through Linkedin. With Linkedin I am part of a group as part of my membership of the Chartered Society of Designers. All of this would of course totally fail the Grandpa Test, to be honest my son thinks it is a load of tosh. However I have recently been Skyped by my father so he may be more receptive. The simple truth is that many people think it is all twaddle and quite simply don’t get it at all.

Last Friday I sat trying to explain Twitter to a customer who’s website we are currently developing and to be fair it is a hard thing to explain. The irony is that it was she who had first suggested Twitter for her website and I only joined the community to learn more.

Yesterday I Googled my name (I Google therefore I am?), my Twitter details came up third in the rankings. I am a convert.

Further searches brought my Linkedin status, references to my Twitter activity and this blog in the top six. I have only recently re-visted Linkedin and this self-hosted blog has been up for less than a month. Not bad, not bad at all.

About six months ago I couldn’t find myself through a reverse search on Google at all, I just didn’t appear either through my own name or as Design Credo. Of course there was a simple reason to this, my Design Credo website was set up quite some time ago and things change. Around the time we developed the site I took a break from design and moved into education, the site wasn’t attended to although it has remained hosted throughout. When we set the site up we didn’t really attend to making the site search engine friendly and anyway conditions were very different then.

So, any ideas what started here in 1998?

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Serendipity -SEO improving Search Engine Rankings in Devon

Serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally stumbles upon something fortunate, especially while looking for something entirely unrelated.

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4. Man Still Willing to Look after Aston Martin (SEO in Exeter Devon) Just in case this seems like a load of tosh, as predicted from my last post “youtube cigar smoking football...
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Man Still Willing to Look after Aston Martin (SEO in Exeter Devon)

Just in case this seems like a load of tosh, as predicted from my last post “youtube cigar smoking football players” now occupies position two in the Google rankings (using …

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Exeter SEO the answer to all of your needs?( Beyoncé to help in light household duties )

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO brings Beyoncé to Exeter? Yep if you’ve been following so far, “Beyoncé to help in light household duties” now seems to rank in the top three of a Googlé search.

Update – “Beyoncé Exeter” now position 2
Update – Now position 1

Further to this I am eagerly expecting people to fulfil my desires for a Leica M9 and a Colnago Mexico due to similarly high rankings for search strings.

So what’s this all about?

It started as a bit of a joke, I noticed that cigar smoking football players seemed to rank highly as search strings for The Design Credo WordPress blog (this is not a group that I have previously had an interest in). So checking it out, this was in fact true (by accident) as explained in my earlier post.

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Who’s Been Looking At My Site Then?

I’ve said before, I’m a bit of a stats watcher: sad but true. So last month this blog had it’s highest readership ever, thankfully this just continues the trend …

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Tumblr is Down: Don’t call me shortly

According to The Next Web and CenterNetworks, Tumblr has been down for two hours now, causing a lot of derision among folks on Twitter.

Tumblr has taken to Twitter to inform followers of what’s afoot: “We’re working quickly to recover from a major issue in one of our database clusters. We’re incredibly sorry for the inconvenience.”

As those who regularly use the platform know, Tumblr going down is no unique occurrence. Still, two hours is a rather lengthy stretch of time — especially for a company that’s been rapidly growing and garnering funding of late.
source
My car has just gone in to have a repair, there is a problem with the part, an oil line, it is incredibly inconvenient. My personal transport of choice is a motorbike but I tend to get a bit ‘wussy’ when the outdoor temperature is being defined in negative terms. We rely on this technology and by and large it works, the effect of it not working can be damaging if not planned for, eggs and baskets?

Tumblr is down and it has been for quite a while, now. I woke up to a Tweet from Mashable (below) which was already ‘old’. The world won’t come to an end, planes won’t fall out of the sky but… “we’ll be back shortly” isn’t really cutting it.

This is in anyone’s terms a big downtime but please don’t call me shortly. Database Cluster? Sounds like the new chocolate that will be left in the selection box for that last desperate act of post Christmas binging.

This one Read More

SEO Exeter: Oodles of Googles

OK, it’s the end of a year, a time to take stock and a time to look forward. Design Credo design websites and perform SEO for companies in Exeter, Devon and the UK. We also specialise in creating WordPress websites but whatever the platform we believe that the sites need to be found easily by Google, so here are some of our top searches from 2010.

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Web Hosting from Exeter’s Design Credo

Exeter based Design Credo have once again brought web-hosting in-house.

WordPress website design specialists DesignCredo have made this move in order to ensure high quality stable web-hosting and security for their sites.

Website technology continues to move forward and with it the hosting needs develop. As with any website, WordPress sites work best if kept lean and trim. But, by their very nature, they frequently offer a huge amount of functionality and on occasions this does require slightly more complex hosting needs to ensure all of the plugins and add-ons work appropriately.

Protect Your Assets
It is easy to get caught unprepared; In the last year we have helped customers out who have lost their websites due to their existing suppliers ‘going to the wall’. As matter of course we regularly back-up sites for our customers and on more than one occasion this practice enabled upload a replacement site to temporary space when the existing hosting had vanished. We have also helped people out who have lost their domains through the years.

Whoever is hosting your site we would urge you to ensure you regularly back up your website and any databases that the site may rely on.

The problem to any interruption of service is that there may be a knock-on effect with search engines such as Google. These search engines regularly visit sites to see if they have changed, if so the sites are re-indexed (it’s a bit like a massive stock check.) The problem is that if Google visits your site and your hosting has failed the search engine will probably assume that the site has disappeared, as such it will no longer be listed in search engines. If this happens the lead time to getting a site re-listed can be weeks, running into months. Of course Design Credo have a few tricks up their sleeves to expedite this process but it is one situation where even we would be loathed to offer a firm guarantee.

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London’s Perfume River new Look Website

London’s Perfume River have launched their new look website featuring the logo designed by Exeter’s Design Credo.

The …

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New Mini-Site For Park5 by Design Credo of Exeter

Exeter website design company Design Credo …

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The Obsession’s in the Chasing and not the Apprehending

There is little point to creating a website that people aren’t going to read and people need to find the site is there?

I remember quite some time ago (more than a decade), a slightly geeky friend (even slightly is overly) tried to explain how exciting HTML was and also kept on about how great Alta Vista was; Yahoo too. It all sounded bollocks to me, total and utter. I do remember thinking that Alta Vista seemed a strange brand, I couldn’t really hook into it, the imagery the name, it sounded like some sort of 40′s film studio that made westerns and I never really liked westerns apart from those odd ones where the likes of Bardot, Loren or Lollobrigida appeared. Anyway I now see the friend as often as I use Alta Vista. However I have just spent a few minutes using Google to see if I could find an image of Bardot, Loren and Lollobrigida to liven up this ramble. As Tom Waits said;

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Man willing to look after Aston Martin

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Start as You Mean To Go On Manage Information with Start Pages

I am a sinner, I am not tidy by nature. If I could capture the special ability of my desk detritus to replicate and transfer this to farming I could …

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Hey Bright Spark Twitter can add value to your business

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Virtual Revolution: The Great Levelling

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Building 43 (Google it)

But just as Google isn’t ready to rest …

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Twitter Hacked

When a respected Business Link adviser informed me that,

hi, i’m 24/female/horny… i have to get off here but message me on my windows live messenger name Paris545love@hotmail.com

I knew deep down …

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Plasma cutting company: great Search Engine results

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Exeter search engine optimisation company masscommunication gets new logo

[kml_flashembed movie="http://designcredo.co.uk/sites/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/masscomm_1.swf" height="230 width="400" wmode="transparent" /]

Exeter SEO company masscommunication company say;

Search engine optimisation will make your website work for you by improving your Google search page position and …

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Share This but don’t Share ess eee ohh

Share this is great but could anyone answer this?

In this WordPress blog I use the …

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Important diagrams #2: Twitter

The original product name or …

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Exeter SEO helps men from t’North

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Techserv, the plasma cutting machine company from West Yorkshire continue to get good Google …

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Web Design Helpers

A few little design helpers here, the links will appear in my blogroll in the sidebar. These are fun but useful tools to make web design easier.

Color Scheme Designer
[caption id=”attachment_1252″ …

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Firefox Advert

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Getting Your WordPress Blog Seen by Google

This is a development of the reply that I made the other day about getting a good Google response to your blog.

Search Engine Marketing is a must if you are to going to get people to view any website. Nowadays everyone seems to be an SEO specialist, at least they do in Exeter and Devon, I imagine it is the same throughout he UK.

I am more aware of the abilities of WordPress than other blogging platforms so this is what I will use as my reference point. I have to say that I am totally enamoured with WordPress, I think it is great, but first a bit of general knowledge.

WordPress comes in two distinct flavours

.com Most people start with a free WordPress blog which you can start straight away and I would recommend you to go and sign up. If you blog a for a while and chose to migrate to self-hosted this can be easily done.

.org If you have access to hosting then self-hosted blogs open up a world of possibilities. You will need hosting with a database which is necessary to store all of the posts, images, comments and information about the site. My hosting supplier now throws one in with even the starter hosting package. You don’t really need to understand about databases (MySQL) but it can be quite interesting looking around, seeing how all of the data and information is organised.

WordPress can be thought of as a modular entity.

Core
The site itself, everything that is needed to make it work. This includes a user friendly interface that will allow you to update the site without knowing about web deign.

Themes
There are a huge number of available themes that make the basic WP blog look different (1 column, 2 column, colours styling etc.)

Plugins
These add to the functionality of the blog, they make it do more things, (display images in galleries, add contact forms, etc. )

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What is PubSubHubbub?

Geeks Get Funny
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Words are The Key

OK so I have spent a lot of time talking about search engine marketing and its various aspects. However this is all of limited use unless we understand the value and importance of text, particularly keywords.

Let me make it clear from the start when I say keywords, I am referring to text that appears in the

Page Titles (Meta Tag)

H1 tags

Body text (in particular text toward the page top)

Meta Tag Keywords

Meta Tag Descriptions

At Design Credo we have a number of hats available to wear, graphic design, photography, website design and of increasingly greater prominence SEO or search engine optimisation particularly for companies in Exeter, Devon and the South West. So, when we write for our own websites we need to mention these creative skills.

In essence we are trying to pre-judge what our potential clients might type on when using a search engine, particularly Google, when looking to access the services that we provide. Google still has the strongest market share but this doesn’t mean that we are oblivious to the likes of Bing and Yahoo though.

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100 Top Twitter Tips

OK so he’s got a geeky American accent but there are some good suggestions here, listen and absorb.

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Hi, anything I can help with?

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iPad in Exeter, Cool not Flash?

Well I’ve just been to the Apple shop in Exeter, you know, the place with the impromptu Post Office style queuing area outside? All the more incongruous for it’s lack of waiting people other than the gaggle of previously imprinted pensioners with their paperwork at the ready.

A sudden moment of awkwardness as I attempt to enter the shop, is it invitation only? Oh god, the public shame of not being invited again. From the door, in spite of the “T-shirted One’s” interjection, I could see my quarry, the iPad. There was one free, it was mine to iNvestigate.

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Welcome to The Ever Expanding Pit of Possibilities

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I Need a Website but I Don’t Know Why

Communication is the word, yes communication. It all goes horribly wrong sometimes.

I am a slow speaker, I know I am but once many years ago this was really brought into focus when I was trying to teach a friend how to ride a drop handlebar bicycle. She fell off at the point that I had said “take your hands off the lower part of the handlebars” and never got to hear me say “slowly, one at a time and move them to the top of the bars”. She survived (we didn’t). The point was that the communication clearly failed.

Why Mining
Frequently I hear people say things like “I need a website” or “I need an A4 brochure”. Rather foolishly some might say, I usually engage in a bit of Why-Mining by asking “why?”

To aid communication the emphasis is on the why not the mining. Why-mining is an effective although slightly annoying tool. Quite simply people frequently tend to already hold many of the answers that they seek, they just need someone to stand in front of them and ask them “why?”

“I need a four page A4 brochure”
“Why?”
“Because my competitor has one”
“Why does it need to be A4?”
“Because thats what they always are?
“Why do you need four pages?”
“Dunno”

Eventually you will get to bedrock and even if this bedrock is “I don’t know”, that will be a good place to start.

The bottom line is that what we at DesignCredo are trying to find out is what is the customer’s story, the unique thing that they are trying to communicate to others.

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Protect Your Brand, Look After Your Domain Name

Domain Types
Domain names come in different flavours. Most people know think of .com as the web domain. This “top level domain” is available for everyone and is a valid choice for a commercial organisation. Clearly within the UK a .co.uk is a valid alternative and generally a little cheaper. This country code top-level domain is one that will locate your business to your country. Sometimes it is worth considering whether your trade will be primarily UK based or international before purchasing domains. Whatever it will be worth ring-fencing the alternatives.

In the past business names were frequently arrived at by an accountant purchasing an ‘off the shelf’ company. Thankfully this practice is now much less prevalent. Ideally the company name should say something about the company and there should be a ‘fit’ between what the company does and what it is called. Death Star Skin Treatment Remedies is hardly going to work is it? A bit like naming a sports car company after someone who’s called Trevor? What, they did…?

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Now to the ‘but’.

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How To Create a Post for WordPress Blogs

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In a Way This Blog is Defined by Its Eclecticism.

OK, so this blog has been going properly for about 6 months now and it is interesting (at least to me anyway) to see what people have been searching for. As I write I have just noted “fully clothed swim” was a search string that worked for someone yesterday, not to be confused with “failed fully clothed swim” or drowning. ‘Don’t know what that was about.

In some ways I can be accused of taking the eclectic and making it niche with this blog. An ex colleague Mal Dickson once described it as,
“the eclectic ramblings of Andrew Butler”
Anyway I like to think that here is a continuous thread somewhere in here binding together a rich tapestry. From readers there is clearly a strong interest in Citroen’s (dS3), SAAB 900s, and clearly a number of people willing to help locate “Missy the Cat”.

A lot of people looking for Teo Jakob in Bern, who am I to argue? If you get a chance go, please say hello to Marion for me.

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How to Ensure That Your Blog Grows, (Give a Little)

Blogs are great, I love them. WordPress is a fabulous tool for a business, no question about it in my mind. I have previously written about how to set your blog up to improve its performance. So what more do I need to give?
You Need Energy

Energy, in a word, energy. The difference between a blog and a static site is that the blog will generally develop and grow, but this won’t happen without some form of input. (my Mac grammar checker told me off for using that term the other day, told me it was jargon).

So what for does this energy take, what do we do to aid the ongoing development?

Blog. The first thing to is to actually write some posts, ideally fairly regularly. It’s not rocket science, why would someone visit your site if there is nothing new to read?

Keep a Focus. Yes this is a bit ‘do as I say, not as I do’. I have previously commented the eclectic nature of this blog, but… Keep a focus, yes of course embellish, express your human qualities, but make it clear what the boundaries are.

Hold on there, you haven’t done yet, back to the keyboard.

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Categories and Tags in WordPress

Some time ago I needed an X-ray. I went to the hospital reception and was told to follow the blue line on the floor. Great idea, however I needed several X-rays by the time I arrived, I had walked into so many trolleys whilst looking at the ground.

When I first started creating websites it would take several months to get sites listed on search engines. One would write a site, generally half a dozen pages or so, add a few keywords and a description to the code and wait for it to all happen. It was infuriatingly slow, there were debates as to whether one should submit sites to the UK and/or the US versions of the search engines and whether submitting to both would cancel each other out.

My recent record for site submission is about 40 seconds. That is from the time that I made a blog post live to being able to find it on Google. 40 seconds.

Nowadays sites are much larger entities, this one already runs into hundreds of pages, it’s a blog and although the posts all sit in a single page, that page is effectively a placeholder for as many posts as I write. Click on the title of the posts and you will see that they open up into their own page.

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New WordPress Website for Topsham’s pdm Architecture

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Make one that looks like our existing site but works.

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The Best Things in Life Are Free

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Don’t Gamble With Your Image (Part 1)

It may not always seem so but things really do change, look in the mirror if you don’t believe me.

1990 no internet, 1991 internet starts. Digital cameras? Texas Instruments patented a film-less electronic camera in 1972, August 1981 the Sony Mavica was giving single image capture and back to 1991 where Kodak introduced a Nikon F3 based digital ‘pro’ camera.

This is recent history for me, for the young it is a lifetime though. When I first started in design getting images ready for print, or for that matter screen was a tedious and expensive process.

Shoot Image
Process Film
Scan Negative or Transparency
Watch Money Leave Bank Account

Yes the last aspect was hideously expensive. One had to take an original to an expert in a white coat in a dust free environment in a repro house and get the wallet well and truly drained to digitise an image, £50-£150 per shot. Further to this it was far from quick, days running into weeks could pass.

It is worth reflecting on this for those occasions where the technology isn’t quite doing what you want. If it isn’t now it may well be doing so soon but the bottom line is that now, if you want you can photograph something, get it posted on the internet and for that matter get it listed on Google in less than a quarter of an hour. Things really do change.

So in this DIY era a bit of knowledge may help, because in the moments when we are doing it ourselves creating our WordPress blogs, from our offices in Topsham or Exeter and things aren’t going quit right I suspect a reminder about the above won’t necessarily help.

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Improving Your Image (Part 2)

Can’t see the linked video on anIPAD?

Who says Twitter doesn’t do anything useful? I put a Tweet out the other day and within a couple of minutes the following suggestion had been made,
“Anyone out there able to recommend an online image resizing tool, not that my image needs resizing you know?”

mediocre_mum @designcredo “picnik.com???”

“excellent work @mediocre_mum, award yourself a mid-afternoon drink”
So why am I looking for online editing, as a pro photographer surely I use fancy software ‘n’ stuff?

In short my customers need a way to manipulate images and somehow I have to bridge the gap between what I know and do and what they could really do to know and do. Putting it simply I am trying to erect some scaffolding for those learning WordPress
My Workflow
I now work entirely digitally having sold my trusted Mamiya RB67s some time ago. I generally use Nikon equipment. What customers don’t always get is that the taking of the photo is a relatively small part of the process. Nowadays quite a bit of time will be spent at the computer but compared to the costs incurred pre the full digital era this is a worthwhile investment and a step forward.

Typically then I will

Shoot the image
Transfer the image to computer and open up in Photoshop
Adjust levels, curves, colour balance, verticals, crop
Save a PSD and a High Res JPEG (retaining the original file)
Let the customer proof the JPEG
Backup computer before deleting originals on camera card

So the first problem here is that Photoshop is a hugely powerful program that isn’t the easiest to learn. The second problem is that the program alone costs several times more than most reasonable compact cameras.

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Have The Balls To Tell It Like It Is

I have said it before but, down my way (Topsham, near Exeter, in Devon) everyone seems to be an SEO expert, everyone. Great, farming’s not what it was and they closed all the Devon coal mines and heavens when did you last see a working steel mill in the South West? So I guess it’s good to have a new sustainable industry…er.

In recent weeks I am pleased to say that I have saved a number of my customers money in various ways though not related directly to design or photography. One customer was paying for Broadband but didn’t have a modern router (still using an ancient USB device). They now have an improved contract and up to date technology, meaning to that they will be able to work better and communicate more easily. I have other customers who were getting invoiced for hosting packages they didn’t need.

Finally some are looking to improve their position on Google by, each month, throwing Google’s way the equivalent of an,

Interesting old motorbike

Well sourced Omega Seamaster (SH)

Pleasant weekend away for two

Well that’s my perspective on it, yours may be different but you get the idea I’m sure.

The problem with this last customer is that they are actually already page one numero uno on a Google search of their primary keywords anyway. That’s what we try to do when we create a website.

Now, here is the rub, the awkward truth. Most of my work comes from direct word of mouth referral. I have in the past paid thousands of pounds to advertise in online and printed directories but saw little effect other than worried mothers phoning me looking for work placements for young Jade or Dean.

It seems to me that it is almost naive to believe that everyone can be a winner in the SEO game and, unless your services are ‘niche’ in the extreme, you will risk an overly expensive bidding war that won’t actually bring the dinner home. That’s not to say there isn’t a job to be done but please be realistic.

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Beyond SEO: 10 Essential Questions

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The Limited Company behind Design …

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How Organic SEO Works: an Infographic

Sam Aspden came to us recently with a bit of a problem. She had bought a DIY ‘website in a box’ for her starter business in wedding stationery design but unfortunately the site was doing very little. In fact even if she spelt her own name out in Google she still struggled to find herself.

Now, two weeks on,
Yeah it is on Google page 1!!! You’re like the Superman, Yoda & Optimus Prime of the SEO world, all wrapped into one.What did you want for xmas?
Sam Aspden Designs
So what did we do to get this huge turnaround?

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WordPress Support: I Can’t Get Out of Maintenance Mode

WordPress Support Pages
Design Credo of Exeter have been offering WordPress training and support for some time now and plan to develop this as we move into 2011. Existing support items can be found in the WordPress design page here: this list will be regularly updated.

Can’t Get Out of Maintenance Mode
WordPress is great but occasionally even great things go wrong and usually things going wrong cause un-necessary panic and anxiety. I suspect I won’t be alone in feeling worried when my lovely blog was replaced by a white screen and simple text saying.

Maintenance Mode – SITE is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. Please try back in…

So what causes this and how do we clear the block?

WordPress is constantly being updated, both the core platform and the add-on plugins. This is sometimes annoying but overall it is a good thing, it is all part of a dynamic and organic entity constantly evolving. Generally updates are done via the ‘dashboard’ (the WordPress user interface) although in most cases updates can be performed manually using FTP.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a way of sending files from one computer to another, in this instance, from your computer to the server where your WordPress blog is hosted. If you don’t have an FTP program there are many available, we have previously highlighted how Firefox can be added to, allowing it to perform full FTP activities.

Whichever way you choose to upgrade, WordPress disables the site whilst files are being upgraded, and puts itself into Maintenance Mode. This avoids a viewer trying to access a file on the site that is in the process of being replaced, potentially causing a ‘crash’. If the process stalls whilst in Maintenance Mode your blog will continue to be inaccessible. However this is really easy to rectify.

Access your WordPress blog root directory using an FTP client and simply delete the ‘.maintenance’ file (this is an ‘invisible’ file so you will need your FTP client to be set to ‘show invisible files’.) As soon as the file has been removed the blog will once again appear. However you will probably find that the upgrade hasn’t completed so you will need to try again.