Businesses need a website for a variety of reasons. The most obvious one to advertise your business. The internet is a large place and getting larger. In order for this advertising to be effective, you need to decide on a target audience. This could be geographic (Cornwall), demographic (young people) or it could be business to business. i.e. You make ball bearings that you want to sell to engineering establishments.

The targeting of your audience is an important question that needs to be answered when it comes to deciding how your site is promoted. For now let’s leave this until later.

So why have a website? If the first reason is advertising your business, the second could be to advertise your products or services or both. Next thing you might want to do is to sell your products.

Each reason is valid but the emphasis you wish to place on these needs have an impact on the content. For example:
Most sites will have as standard a home page, an about page and a contact page. However, there is much more a website can provide, tips or articles, help files, product details, information about your staff, management policies, sales policies, business availability, galleries, news and press releases and much more. You might like to provide a video for people to download or a colour chart if you’re selling paint, clothes etc.

Content can be wide and varied but the question should be answered after you decide what you want to do with your website.

Hosting
I’ll try to help answer some questions now by breaking down the jargon.
Firstly websites need two things to function; an address and a place to house the address. The address is sometimes known as the url and will often start with www.

The address is generally obtained via the company that houses your address. I will now start to call the address your website and the place to house the address your host (aka hosting)!

Hosting is done on a computer! And yes if you wanted you could run a website from your home computer - but it does take a lot of work and is not very simple - we would all be doing it if it was!!! So to host an address takes a computer that has to be managed correctly. Most hosting companies will also provide bonuses. e.g.
Multiple email addresses
Sub websites, e.g. rich.cregy.co.uk. rich is the sub address.
Databases
Applications for you to run as part of your website.

Suffice to say hosting is a very necessary part of having a website. Cregy offer hosting as part of their website design. And now we move onto the next topic.

Website Design
Some people will know what they want and some won’t have a clue. Colours, shapes, etc. one, two or three column, etc. However, creating the site is one thing, the site then has many aspects that need particular consideration. e.g. accessibility - your website has to be accessible to blind people. They will often use a screen reader to be able to ’see’ the contents of a website. Your site has to be built so that is ‘friendly’ to search engines such as Google! There are many things happening behind the scenes that you might not know about or effect the site design. If you want to know more, simply ask.

Site Promotion
This is possibly the most complicated part of website design. Why? There are so many experts and each one disagree on the most effective way to promote your site!

So why should you promote your site. Simply so people get to see it. If you visit www.google.co.uk and type in the word ‘Lostwithiel’ you will be presented with over a million options to click on. Most people will click through the first three pages and then try a different search for their answer. The key to site promotion is to get to the top three pages. However, getting there can be very hard and time consuming.

This is where the original question comes in. If you want simply to provide an online brochure that existing customers can view then why promote! You might decide that effective marketing can only be done through the yellow pages - good - then add your website address and leave the marketing to that. However, you might decide you want your site to be number one, if so then we have a long road ahead of us.

Earlier on I mentioned including articles and tips as pages. Why? Search engines love articles and tips etc. They like fresh and relevant content. A search engine works by sending out spiders (small programmes) that work there way through your site and check to see whether there is new content. If they find the site is not regularly updated they will visit your site less and less and you will find your site heading downwards in terms of where you rank. However, if they keep finding new content they will keep returning and consequently your site will rise in ranking! I wish it was this simple though! Because the content needs to be relevant and more than just adding a new product for sale! Hence why tips, articles, etc. are so important.

Two other factors are important in site promotion. Keywords and links into your site.

Keywords are words that people are using in searches. i.e. On visiting Google, there are a lot of people that are currently searching for the term ‘world cup’. (As I write this the world cup has just come to a conclusion). Armed with this knowledge if you have a world cup product we would ensure that this is well known and keywords submitted to promote this fact!

Links into your site are important but need to be relevant. Links into are those links coming from external sites. If you visit lostwithiel.org.uk and navigate to the directory you will see businesses listed with there website addresses. This is the sort of link you would want to encourage (particularly if you are a Lostwithiel business. The link is then seen as relevant as well).

Finally, there is also something called page optimisation. This means taking the content of a page and using its keywords to ensure the content of that page reflects the keywords. For example. If our keywords were world cup (I wouldn’t normally limit the keywords to two). We would start the page with the title “World Cup”. A title tag is something search engines look for in content and assume that it has an importance. In the opening paragraph we would ensure that we again mention the term world cup and then offer the service or product. Now when we come to link to this page instead of linking simply to Cregy Web Design, we would link to Cregy Web Design and the World Cup. We have now started to optimise the page effectively.

Our friendly search visits the external site and discovers a link to Cregy Web Design and the World Cup. It follows that link to our world cup page and sees that the title is - World Cup. It then notes that the article features the words world cup and that we are offering a create a world cup web page service. It concludes that the world cup is high on our agenda and adds the search term world cup cregy web design to its database.

Simple isn’t it!

Conclusion and Costs
So why have I written all the above? Simply to give you an idea of costs and to give you the information you will need to manage the costs. For example, hosting will cost £100 a year, however this can be more if you want an exceptional amount of content. A client of mine runs his family tree from his website which has over 10,000 entries and photos. This is a massive site and as such incurs additional charges.

Site promotion can cost from nothing to £2000 per annum! As part of a design package you will automatically be entered onto Google, Yahoo, MSN and Dmos. However, getting to the top three pages of these search engines takes a lot of work and hence the £2000! It really is your choice and needs to be made only when you know what you want your site to achieve for you.

Costs
Our standard web design and hosting package costs £370 per year or £30 per month. This includes hosting and site design and creation. Content will be added but updating the content will be the customers responsibility.

Our medium package allows the above to updated and includes extras such as galleries, forums, faq pages, etc. This costs £550 per year or £45 per month.

Our delux package includes online booking or an ecommerce shop and costs £950 per year or £75 per month.

All the above packages include submission to search engines but no additional promotion. Our site promotion charges are as follows:

Our starter package cost £30 per month. We will seek to update content for you monthly generally by adding articles or tips etc or content that you provide. Images can be added. We will also research link sites. The link sites researched will be free linking.

The next stage is difficult to gauge and we would recommend sitting down and talking through the options.
The options include:
Researching keywords.
Advertising through Google etc.
Link sites including sites that charge.
Optimising pages

This is where you need to head back to the original question. What do you want to use your site for? Promotion of your site is important and needs to be carefully considered. I have included the standard package so that you can start to get an understanding of what is needed. But in reality I would generally encourage you to consider spending an advertising budget and also to spend time in page optimisation.

Over to you.

OK I was using these as logos - dropped them recently in favour of the snail logo!

1.50% payable as a deposit.

2.All designs and urls are copyright Cregy until invoices have been paid. Then the designs will remain copyright Cregy but the urls become your property. All content and images if supplied by the customer will remain the property of the customer. Any images supplied by Cregy will remain copyright Cregy.

3.Site hosting is an annual charge of £100. There may be an additional annual charge depending on the site modules etc. The price of the hosting is included in the initial website development cost.

This is the first part of creating a software for small businesses.

The WP Shop originally created at the start of this year has seen a full rewrite and should be available for a re-release on 18th October. The shop plugin will be a full ecommerce product with a link to Paypal. However, development will take place to include other payment providers.

The shop features:
Runs in Wordpress 2.0.x (possibly working on it running in 1.5)
Paypal payment Gateway (with development for others planned)
Three ways to present stock
Add options (e.g. Black cap, white cap, green cap)
Link relevant products together
Create as many images as required

Future work:
Prepare plug-in for other payment gateways.
Namespace and incompatibility tests with other than the default plugins of Wordpress 2.0.4 (akismet, dbbackup and hello dolly)
Include shop urls in url-rewrite procedure.
Preparing a wordpress release of the shop as a package.
Extend the plugin to store customer details.
Extend the plugin to include the facility to send mailouts.
Extend the plugin to encompass stock control.
Extend the plugin to encompass customer/supplier billing and contact details etc.

Ok the developer has also written some instructions!

Activate plugin
configure payment
click gateway, activate paypal payment modul
click “configure”
email: shop owner email, probably the same as the blog owner
operating mode: If you haven’t set up paypal yet, test first in the internal sandbox. To use a paypal sandbox, you’ll have to set up a paypal sandbox account (which has nothing to do with your real account). Once you’re ready, use the “normal” mode
in order to get a PDT(payment data transfer) token you have to
register at paypal.com
upgrade your account to premier or business account (note the differences in charges; decide on the turnover you expect)
click on “profile”
click on “website payment preferences”
your first option is auto return. Turn it on, and add the link to your return page (find it on the paypal configuration page, or in your blog frontend, it’s titled “thank you for your purchase”)
your second option is pdt. Switch to “on”
submit the page
your pdt token will be displayed as a long string of letters and numbers.
Copy this token, and paste it into the configuration
To set up the IPN link
Copy the IPN link from the configuration page
On the paypal “profile” page, click on “Instant Payment Notification Preferences”
Click edit
Tick the checkbox
Paste the link
Submit
Logout paypal, if you want
Submit paypal configuration page on your site
Add categories
Click on categories
Click on “create new category”
The form field on the left will now be editable
For categories in the first level, just enter the name and a brief description, leave the parent select box as it is. You’ll have to do this for your first category
Click save
Add more categories, if you like. If they are subcategories, select the parent (the main category) from the dropdown list
Add products
Click on products
Select “create new”
Add all the information (this needs some more explaining…)
If you want to add a picture
Take your ftp client to the folder where you installed wordpress. You should see folders such as wp-content or wp-includes
Create a folder called wp-images (all lowercase)
Go in there, and create a folder called wpshop (no hyphen, all lowercase)
Make this folder writeable for everyone (chmod 777)
Configure your shop
Go to settings
The minimum you have to do is to open your shop
Select “options”
Change “shop open” to yes
Enter a shop title
Enter a shop email address
Select your country and currency of trade
Select a currency format
Select a date format
Alter more options, if you like
Press “save”
Set general Settings
Set “show prices” to yes
Set “show buy button” to yes
Alter more options, if you like
There are more options which you can alter by selecing them from the dropdown box
You’re ready to go!

Google Analytics for Wordpress

This is the first beta release of a WordPress plugin that can add Google Analytics to your website without you needing to code one single set of ’s.

I have it running on this site and it seems to be working just fine so far.

This site has a whole host of useful plugins. Take a look at Headzoo Products.

The plugins include aLinks, Edit N Place, Live, Flickr Spinnr, Net Bible, Post Tools, Create N Place, Digg Badge and WP Cheatsheets.

From the authors own site:

aLinks is a free WordPress plugin that takes a set of phrases you commonly use and turns them into links whenever you include them in a post, but really it’s much more than that!

Since the plugin was first released in August 2005, it’s been downloaded over 10,000 times, and many successful
bloggers are using aLinks to turn their blogs into money making machines. How? By using aLinks to effortlessly
create affiliate links within their blog posts.

Thanks Headzoo

After building WP Shop I realised that this whole venture could grow and hence the title “Small Business Software”.

Take a look at the roadmap but suffice to say that I run a small business and also build websites for small businesses so I am hoping that this plugin will help my small business and benefit others. I am also hoping that the plugin will enable developers to offer more than just websites!

Over to you. Do you have any ideas or suggestions for further implemetations? Comment and suggest please.

The Roadmap
Must haves:
- get WPShop running stable in Wordpress 2.0.x (I’m currently running 2.0.4, and have problems with the installation)
- enable Paypal payment Gateway

Nice to haves:
- WPShop running stable in Wordpress 1.5.x (not tested yet)
- debugging of existing, non-critial bugs
- Reduce number of generated pages

Demarcation criteria (do you know a better word? This is “stuff not to be done right now”)
- prepare plug-in for other payment gateways.
- namespace and incompatibility tests with other than the default plugins of

Wordpress 2.0.4 (akismet, dbbackup and hello dolly)
- include shop urls in url-rewrite procedure (we haven’t talked about this yet, but I’d be very interested to do this. Helps search rankings and makes
urls more readable)
- preparing a wordpress release of the shop as a package.
- Extend the plugin to store customer details.
- Extend the plugin to include the facility to send mailouts.
- Extend the plugin to encompass stock control.
- Extend the plugin to encompass customer/supplier billing and contact details etc.

To get a tagging simple installed and running is something I dream about. Ok that sounds a bit sad really but I odn’t actually dream about it all day long! A good tagging system is a major benefit to a website and seo work, and so is important. So happening on this plugin was good news. Does it work? Well yes it does. I installed it and got it working immediately. No problems configuring or even understanding how the plugin works. I have used both Jerome’s and UTW plugins and they are just not as polished. Install and use this plugin you will be impressed!

From the authors website comes this:

The two mostly used tagging plugins are the Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) and Jerome’s Keywords.

I think most people use UTW, however especially its performance has been criticized in the past. Also, it does not provide a auto-complete type-ahead drop-down menu when tagging posts but it always displays all tags of the entire Wordpress installation which can be quite annoying if you have really many tags.

Jerome’s Keywords is unfortunately still in beta and it seems that the project will not be continued.

With Simple Tagging Plugin, I’ve coded another tagging plugin for Wordpress which is based on Jerome’s Keywords plugin and can import all your tags from UTW or Jerome.

My thanks to Michael.