On Web Design

A few weeks ago, I decided to rebuild this site using a minimalist template in order to see if it would affect the search engine rankings. So far, there's been no discernible impact, in case you're wondering.

However, I've been wondering if the stripped-down theme might have other benefits. Perhaps in terms of calls to action at the end of the post. I know that since changing the design, I've experienced more comment responses to the site, which I'm very grateful for.

But let's look at calls to action. For the uninitiated, we think of something a reader might want to do after reading an article. Other options might include:

• Subscribing to receive updates
• Following me on Twitter (very popular these days)
• Social media buttons (I'm not sold on the benefit of these)
• Advertising

Before I go on, I'm only keen to implement one call to action. I want to keep this simple, I don't want to baffle readers with tons of options. This has to be a focussed call to action with a measurable set of results.

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Pellentesque et quam.

Donec sodales purus vel lectus. Pellentesque id lacus. Nullam purus ipsum, fringilla vitae, rhoncus in, porta at, felis. Donec non eros. Nullam vehicula ipsum sit amet sapien. Etiam fermentum euismod magna. Sed sed massa.

Mauris dapibus, libero at mollis pulvinar, enim quam lacinia magna, non hendrerit tellus tortor at enim.

Morbi in arcu.

Nunc placerat nisi at leo. Quisque malesuada. Mauris ipsum odio, tempor auctor, varius semper, rutrum ut, lacus.

I've read a few interesting blog posts recently about minimalist blog designs. Specifically this Tutorial9 post showcasing streamlined designs, and more recently this Devlounge article by Dustin Boston.

I love the idea of thoroughly streamlined designs, where the content is virtually the only thing on the page.

In a web where sites are drowning in navigation, widgets and advertising, cutting out the visual nonsense seems appealing. One of my favourite sites at the moment is Brainz, a website where the article takes precedence. Apart from the logo at the top and some minor links at the bottom, the content (in huge letters) is the only thing on the page. No sidebars, no distractions, no noise.

Now, I would never consider a design like this without thinking about the impact on SEO.

Here's a quickie Firefox hack - there may be quicker ways of doing this, but this is pretty nifty all the same.

Let me explain why I needed to search across all subdomains: on Unreality TV, we have a handful of subdomains, each containing its own installation of WordPress. Now, when I'm writing about a topic for the music blog, I might want to see what else we've written with regard to that person or band or celebrity.

Now, I could simply do a Google search and include "Unreality" as a keyword, which works fairly well. Lately though, I've taken to using an advanced search feature - the site: operator.

Typing "search query" site:*.unrealitytv.co.uk quickly retrieves posts from across the site that meet my query.

Adding the search to Firefox

So where does Firefox come in? Well, Firefox is my primary browser, and I use the search box extensively, I decided to see how easy it would be to add the domain search to the list of search engines. Here's what I did:

I use the wp-shortstat plugin across all my WordPress blogs to track visitors and show me where my visitors are coming from.

However, Shortstat has its problems – it logs everything, resulting in a massive database size on your server. The more popular your site, the more this lumbering beast of a database slows things down. In fact, in one instance, the database grew so large that Shortstat couldn’t display the stats anymore.

I’m throwing in the towel with Dreamhost. The downtime problems that started in the summer and seem to be intermittently reappearing have caused me to completely lose hope in DreamHost.

I signed up for a Media Temple Grid Server (affiliate link) account a few weeks back and have been gradually porting my blogs across one-by-one. With other people following suit, I thought I’d share my notes for moving a WordPress install over to Media Temple.

Any SEO worth his (or her) salt, knows that Google Sitemaps are a great way to tell Google about the pages that are available on your site. Using a sitemap, you can basically pass Google an inventory of your content and let wee Googlebot crawl your pages without having to rely on your shaky navigational system!

I’ve been working on a couple of projects recently where I’ve had to retain legacy databases and integrate them into new websites.

In order to do this without damaging the original tables, I find it useful to make a copy of the original database table and use that for the development work. Since I do all of my bespoke CMS development on hosted Microsoft SQL Server databases, I had to hunt down a quick method to copy an existing database table into a new one.

Because I develop sites using both ASP.NET and PHP, I’m tied to a Windows setup for the foreseeable future. However, I’ve been doing more and more work recently with LAMP-type applications which normally require a working Linux server installation.

Although I currently dual-boot with Kubuntu (because KDE’s pretty), I don’t have the Linux know-how to set up and run Apache/MySQL/PHP. XAMPP is a fantastic alternative, because it runs a fully configured LAMP setup on a Windows machine.

In deciding between various Linux distributions, a friend recently recommended that I look at CentOS. I duly tested it out for a bit on an old machine then decided to have a play on one of my regular PCs, setting it up to dual-boot with Windows XP.

Things were going fine until I needed to access my Windows XP partitions which were formatted with NTFS. Apparently due to concerns over licensing and the legally of tapping into the NTFS format, the CentOS developers (or more likely Red Hat) have decided not to build NTFS support in by default.

As with everything Linux, there is a way to work around this. And here it is.