Posted: November 2nd, 2008 | Author: Bryan | Filed under: Analytics, General, Open Source, Tutorial | 116 Comments »
If you’d like some customization done on the theme, I highly recommend going to our sister site GazelleThemes.com for an awesome and affordable Pro Package for Clean Home. Right off the bat, this has blurb customizations, new color schemes and an improved design (not to mention full customization support)! Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we cannot help users with the free-use GPL theme you’ll find on WordPress.org.
Today marks a big day for us, we’ve released the same custom theme that cloaks this very site! Well, it is a very heavily modified version of this theme, but it retains the style that we’ve got going on. I am rather partial to my minimalism themes (just check out my personal site) but this way it remains clean and sparkly.
Without further ado, I present Clean Home (v 1.2.1), our house theme. You can download it for free now right here. So what’s special about this theme? Let me list the ways:
- Lightweight - A grand total of two images, both 2×6. The rest is XHTML and CSS.
- Minimalistic - No more distracting of your users, with our theme, your content stays king.
- Attention Grabbing - With a semi-customizable (1.1.3) blurb, you can say something right away that people just have to read.
- Full Widget Support - I even took care of some all (1.1.3) of the standard widgets’ CSS for you.
- Valid XHTML and CSS - As long as you stay valid on your end…
- GPL License – New! – Do what you will with the theme!
- Multiple Widget – Now with three sidebars (1.1.4) for maximum customization: top navigation, blurb, and sidebar.
- (Pro) Fully customizable blurb - select between hidden, random phrase, image, and per-post assigned text.
- (Pro) Adsense - three separate locations for Adsense integration.
- (Pro) Color selection - Over 7 color schemes.
- (Pro) Style selection - 2 distinct styles, selectable from inside the options.
- (Pro) Feedburner integration - an email subscribe button plus automatic feed redirection.
- (Pro) Fully customizable Home Page - select different categories and how many articles to showcase!
If you’d like some common custom options, visit our sister site Gazelle Themes for cheap purchasing options for the Pro Package. Otherwise, this is just our way of giving back to the wonderful open source community that makes our business possible.
Go ahead and download it now! Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments! Enjoy!
Check out our home page for any Missouri Web Design help you may need!
Posted: October 21st, 2008 | Author: Bryan | Filed under: Hosting | No Comments »
A lot of people who are new to the whole web hosting scene figure out FTP pretty quickly because of it’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Often, this is the go-to technique for people installing WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal (among others). However, we can find a faster way to install WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal. We’ll use a combination of FTP and SSH to speed the process up.
The problem:
These software packages can take forever to upload! Not only are the files much larger because they are uncompressed, they are numerous, often hundreds if not thousands of separate files. The lag between initiating each transfer may be small but between hundreds of files…. you get the idea.
Let’s take a quick example with fresh Joomla! 1.5.7 install:
- Zipped: 1 file @ 5.75mb
- Unzipped: 3,914 files @ 12.6mb
Now imagine FTP‘ing these onto your server, which would be less hassle?
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Posted: October 14th, 2008 | Author: Bryan | Filed under: Analytics | No Comments »
Web statistics packages are now mainstream and very much accessible to the average web administrator; in the past, this wasn’t always the case. When Google bought Urchin in April of 2005, it was already an industry leading company specializing in providing an statistical package to webmasters allowing them to track pageviews, clickthroughs, sales, bounce rates and more for each individual user. Now, it is the number one analytics package available online, it is free, and it is extremely popular.
So let’s learn a little about web analytics. While it is a great tool and gives insight into your most important of commodities, your users, it has its limitations.
Basic Statistics
There are several statistics available with even the most rudimentary analytics program. These include page views, visits, pages per visit, bounce rate, average time on site, and percentage of new visitors. Let’s break these down:
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Posted: October 6th, 2008 | Author: Josh | Filed under: General | 4 Comments »
The small business world is rapidly changing as more people enter and competition gets tougher and small business owners have to be more forward thinking now than ever before just to keep up with their competition.
One of the best ways to move your business forward and increase your revenue is by getting your own small business website.A custom and functional website is not as expensive as you think and when done properly can give you more return on your investment than almost any other form of advertising and promotion you can find.
The following are the The Top 10 Reasons Your Business Needs A Website TODAY! I think you will find that some if not all of these can apply to your company!
1. A website can help you generate a professional image
A professionally designed website is one of the best ways to instill confidence in your new customers who are not familiar with your company already or even increase the confidence of your existing customer base. It gives the customer the impression that they are dealing with a firm they can trust and will generate a sense of respectability with your service and/or product.
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Posted: October 6th, 2008 | Author: Josh | Filed under: SEO | 1 Comment »
Local Search Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a pretty big topic lately ever since Google’s universal search results started to include images, locations, business listings, videos, and news. Pretty soon it will even begin to start displaying merchant services. I want to give our SEO and even design clients a short introduction on what universal search is, how important it is, and what we here at MidMoDesign can do to optimize for your local business.
Basically what has happened for about the last year, without any prompt from the searcher, Google has begun to give them more than just websites in their web search results with things like videos, news stories, local business directories, and much more. I am sure you have noticed this but not really sure exactly how it effects SEO efforts. For the purpose of this article we will concentrate mainly on how the local business directories effect your SEO strategy.
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