Design Communication Blog

Blog comments are a hot topic at the moment and something we're constantly reviewing. Since Matt Cutts, at SMX Advanced, announced the 'nofollow tag' no longer passes pagerank, the blogging and more importantly the SEO community has been discussing the merits of page rank sculpting.

Barry Welford's post, Blog Comments and Google, gives a great run down of the situation and the merits of allowing comments on your blog.

We, at Makak Media, are interested in how a blog aids your SEO efforts and attracts visitors to the site but at the same time we're also mindful that this blog is primarily there for the reader. It's not all about getting visitors and gaining page ranking if your content isn't of quality and your readers can't interact.

Read Only Comments

Securing your ecommerce website is a top priority to give customers confidence in purchasing from your store.

You may have payment options such as offsite or onsite payments. If you're using an offsite payment method, such as PayPal, customers are sent to an external site to complete checkout and so security issues are handled by PayPal themselves.

What about if you're using onsite payment methods, what do you need to do to secure the payment page?

The first thing you'll need to do is check your hosting package came with an SSL Certificate. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypts critical data, such as credit card details, providing security and data integrity for communications over networks such as the Internet.

If you're serious about Drupal and developing your site further you should be looking at using the CCK and Views modules. These two modules are the basis for most sites we build and provide great functionality that can take your site up a level.

Luckily for you, the great people at Lullabot have released two Free Drupal CCK & Views Video Chapters from the Lullabot Learning Series, to give you a flavour of the modules and their approach to teaching.

The Content Construction Kit (CCK) module allows you to add custom fields to nodes using a web browser. A great way to expand your content types beyond the standard page and story supplied in core.

The Views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists and tables of content (nodes in Views 1, almost anything in Views 2) are presented.

What a stunning piece of work to create a fantastic video for Moray McLaren’s We Got Time. It’s pure creative genius, no camera trickery, everything was recorded as you see it!

I first saw the video on brainpickings but felt I had to share it with all my readers it was so good.

If this doesn't inspire you then I don't know what will!

David Wilson is the genius behind it, go check him out.

Everyone the world over is aware of the poor state of the economy at the moment and the restrictions this places on your income and subsequently your marketing budget.

Those in marketing will tell you that now is the time to actually make a concerted effort to further promote your business ahead of the competition. Getting the message across to businesses suffering from a dramatic slow down in trade is a difficult proposition though.

Bearing this in mind how can a business promote themselves on a limited budget or nothing at all?

I recently visited a company in Bromley to talk about a CMS website project and naturally got talking about their current Content Management System. Safe to say I was surprised by the relative complexity of their CMS.

When it comes to editing content, you want the end user to feel in control and at ease with the process. This particular firm felt completely the opposite and were a bit disillusioned at the thought of finding a new CMS that would make life easier for them.

This is when we discussed the open source Content Management System Drupal and how my clients have been happy with its' day-to-day operation.

CMS Simplicity

When it comes to managing a website you need a system that is not only intuitive but inspires confidence. Many of my clients are by no means technically minded so the CMS needs to provide them with the tools to create and edit content within a few clicks.

The advent of spring got me in the mood for some spring inspired web designs. The sun is out... was out and now gone back in again but at least the temperature has improved, just!

The blue skies and blossom led me to putting together this little list of stunning web designs that caught my eye.

The list contains Boompa and Getting Crazy, my favourites for their use of water colour paintings which really make them stand out form the crowd.

Hopefully it will give you some inspiration for future designs.

I got tagged the other day by Patricia over at Wellwrittenwords and thought I'd join in the fun!

The Rules for This Particular Meme

* Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (see above)
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below)
* Let them know they’ve been tagged. (you’ll just have to trust trackbacks and such)

Without further ado here are 7 things you probably didn’t know about me:

Every now and again our mind goes into melt down, either we have too much going or on not enough, causing a creative block!

At this point I like to get away from the run of the mill websites or magazines and find something completely different.

FFFFound is just one place this monkey visits to find random imagery to give me some inspiration or spark to get my mind working.

The best way I've found lately to browse a number of sites is by using the great iPhone app iView which brings up imagery from your chosen website such as FFFFound.

I use it on a regular basis to clear that creative block and get the juices flowing again.

When building your website you need to take into consideration at some point in the future someone will mistype a url or find an old link that doesn't have a redirect assigned to it.

At this point the user will be directed to your 404 Page not found. This is a standard page that is set up by your internet service provider (ISP) or comes with your CMS eg Drupal.

This is where most sites let down their visitors as the standard 404 page is a bit of a let down. No real content for you find out where you should have been directed and sometimes not even any navigation!