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PM Surf Shop South Wales

November 3, 2011
By gk-b in GK Design Blog

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PM Surf Shop South Wales : www.porthcawlmarine.co.uk

PM Surf Shop South Wales

So with most of the work now finished on PM Surf Shop‘s ecommerce store, I thought I’d blog it out to get some link juice a flowin’, and to let you all know its there.

For this job, the latest version of OscMax has been used to host the catalogue of wonder surf stuff PM Surf have on offer. My first outing with OscMax as my weapon of choice and, and a fine choice to make it was too. Like OSCommerce but, on steriods, OscMax has so many built in functions and features there is almost no need to further develop the functionality of the standard product. Thas said, if you should need to develop or add any functionality it seems as though its as easy as OSCommerce – download the plugin, upload to server, turn on in OscMax Admin.

Design for this ecommerce solution is nice and easy too, taking away most of the issues that came with  OSCommerce, you can do it all from the admin panel, making it a breeze to open specific page templates to add or subtract <div> tags, and control the entire look of the site with some sweet, and easy on the eye css. 

With fingers in both pots of Twitter sand Facebook the guys at PM Surf Shop South Wales really wanted to be able to integrate their social networking in to thier new webiste. We added both the twitter conversation and a Facebook post badge to the front page of the surf shop. along with a Surf Report for Porthcawl from magicseaweed.com and also some other surf links to help the everyday surfer work out where’s best for a surf.

The combination of the social networking and the live surf reports enable a conversation spanning both twitter and facebook, with up-to-date info about surf spots in and around the locale of Porthcawl.

With regards to Search Engine Optimisation, Peter & Nathan @ PM Surf Shop wanted to do well for the search terms ‘south wales surf shop‘ and ‘surf shop south wales‘ when people searched on google. Quite some competition for these terms considering the surf heritage preserved in South Wales, but with a little tweaking around for a couple of weeks we’ve managed #4 in google for both those terms…and I’m aiming for #1.

Check ‘em out! Nice guys, great surf shop and good prices. – www.porthcawlmarine.co.uk

 

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Useful SEO tips

September 23, 2011
By gk-b in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

1 Comment

Below are some very basic and useful SEO tips and tricks to help you start to optimize your website, hope they help.

Content is King, Remember!– You must create relevant, unique content and avoid duplicating content from other posts or websites.

Keywords – Don’t stuff your keywords in to your text – use them as and when they naturally need to be used, and use them in bold type. Below are some free keyword tools for you to use:

Word tracker Keyword Research Tool 

Google Keyword Research Tool

Title Tag - add keywords to your title tags so search engine spiders will know what your page is about. The title tag should be no longer than 70 characters. Use a unique title tag for each page remembering to naturally use  your keywords as and when.

Meta-tags  - although most major search engines don’t use meta-tags so much anymore some of the smaller ones do so its good practice to ‘cover all bases’ when optimizing your website.  Below is a meta-tage generator to help you get your meta-tags in to your site.

Meta Tag Generator

H1 Tag – use H1 tag for headlines only with use of primary keywords in the headline, and use H2/H3 for sub-headings.

Alt tag – use alt tags to describe any images to search engine spiders using relevant and descriptive keywords as  they don’t index images.

Anchor Text – use keywords as anchor text in your content linking internally and externally to relevant pages.

W3C Validation – always validate your CSS and HTML using an online program such as to make sure your code is free from errors. Search engines have trouble indexing pages when code is wrong or broken.

W3C Validation Tool

Sitemap.xml – Create an XML sitemap and submit it to google, yahoo, bing.com and ASK.com

Free Online Google Sitemap Generator

Search Engine submission – wi all of th above done submit your website pages to google, bing yahoo and ask – as these are the four main search engines that most of the others run from too. The links are provided below for you:

http://www.google.com/addurl.html

http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/in/free/request

Directory Submission – submit your site to as many relevant and  reputable web directories, open directories and yellow pages as you can. Directory submission is a great  way of getting quality one-way incoming back-links.

List of Internet Directories

Link building – is the continuous process of obtaining inbound links to your site. Try to get links from high PR websites as search engines consider links such as these like votes for your site.

Backlink Checker Tool

Web Analytics – You will need to monitor the bahviour  and movements of people on your website. There are a plethora of free and paid web analytics software and services available, but google analytics is free and a good place to begin:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

Webmaster Links – sign up on all the below sites to monitor and measure your websites performance, page ranking and and SEO tweaks  yo migth make.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites

http://www.bing.com/webmaster

Just a little something to help in the daily grind.

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SEO for beginners

September 19, 2011
By gk-b in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

5 Comments

“…I’m having a website built and my designer is bangin’ on about SEO….or something, and TBH – I haven’t a clue what he’s talking about.”

Yeah, we get that alot. No problem – your journey starts here.

First of all – What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization is a process used by web designers intended to make your site look as important as possible to search engines such as google, yahoo and bing, so when people search for the specific keywords your site has been optimized for, it is displayed high in the list that  the search engines return, therefore producing more hits on your website.

How do you do SEO?
You won’t get a straight answer out of many designers because it is such a minefield of variables, and experts in SEO tend to keep their secrets close to their chest. Suffice to say that it is a rapidly growing and constantly evolving web science that takes a lot of time and effort to get right. What we can tell you is that there are a few basic things you should know about good SEO – it starts at home by optimizing your website for specific keywords or phrases and writing good, relevant content to back it all up. This is the Key to good SEO – Content is King – repeat, and repeat again until it sinks in – Content is King.

Once you have clear concise optimized content, you must monitor the progress of your website with a  tracking or analytics program that will provide specific information about the number of visitors to your website and the  information they are searching for, and looking at. This enables you to tweak your website to provide the content people are looking for and therefore retaining  more visitors.

Search engines are getting better and better at pin-pointing and punishing websites that use less than savory techniques to attract visitors, which is why its so important for your web site to be well written and based around relevant topics and content.

So now you know what it is – ill give you some useful SEO tips for optimizing your website in the next exciting installment of …da! da! da!  ’SEO stuff for people who don’t know much about it, like’.

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Best Open Source E-Commerce Platforms

September 9, 2011
By gk-b in E-commerce

3 Comments

We’ve done a few different online stores over the years but decided recently to take a look at 5 of the top 10 most used open source e-commerce shopping carts  and let you guys know about the.

You know…for a more informed decision.

So here they, are our fave 5 open source e-commerce platforms to work with :

1. OS Commerce - www.oscommerce.com

OS Commerce Logo

OS Commerce has been our weapon of choice for a while now, due to its massive expansion and initegration capabilities. Written in PHP & MySql oscommerce privides a stable and feature rich ecommerce store. Great for a developer/designer to get stuck-in toif they have a little knowledge about php/css etc, however maybe not so easy for the more… ahem, drag and drop based individual.
It is absolutely free under the GNU General Public License and caters very well to most people’s needs. Unsurprisingly, as its so easy to set up, it’s amazingly popular among open source ecommerce store owners, powering over 230,000 online stores. One downside of the ‘out-of-the-box version is the look of the store with no design templates available to the layman, the shop looks the same as every other oscommerce store out there. If you want something different you’re going to need to get a web designer who knows what he’s doing.

2. Magneto - www.magnetocommerce.com
Magneto LogoOne look at Magento’s client list makes you realise what a cracking bit of open source e-commerce software it is. It is used by corporate entities such as Stussy, The North Face & Samsung  to power their online stores. It’s also used by 35,000 other sellers worldwide and is currently the world’s fastest growing open source ecommerce solution.  The Community Edition of Magneto which is meant for developers only, is free to download and use, but you have to pay for the Enterprise Edition, which is fully laden with all the useful features you could possible need to run your online store.

3. osC Max - www.oscmax.com
osC MaxosC Max could be described as as sort of ‘osCommerce’ on steroids. It is based on the original cart that started them all – osCommerce – but at some point  broke a way to become a version of oscommerce with all the features you’d want and plugins you’d ordinarily need to plug-in, already there, working and ready to use. Great store for people who just want to worry about design and not functionality throughout your set up an install.

4. CubeCart - www.cubeCart.com
Cubecart Logo

CubeCart  integrates well into all kinds of websites and from the customers point of view looks exceptionally professional. CubeCart 3 is free and CubeCart 4, which is the premium platform, costs £110. There are significant differences between the two CubeCart versions : CubeCart 3 has 3 skins, CubeCart 4 has 5; CubeCart 3 has 4 payment steps, CubeCart 4 has 2; customer registration is mandatory in CubeCart 3, but optional in CubeCart 4 etc etc etc.
You should have a go with CubeCart3 first to see if you like it store as it is, then if you do, we’d recommend investing in the premium CubeCart 4 if you’re settling on this as you platform of choice

5. Open Cart - www.opencart.com

Open CartNot only does OpenCart look great, it’s extremely scalable. You can create an unlimited number of categories, sell an unlimited number of products, accept multiple currencies, use multiple languages, and choose from over 20 payment and 8 shipping methods. It’s user-friendly and search-engine-friendly too, so will help your prominence in Google. Customers can even review and rate the items you sell. It’s not as popular as osCommerce, so help and guidance is not so freely available, but it’s a darn sight better looking.

 

 

 

 

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Open Source E-Commerce Software

September 9, 2011
By gk-b in E-commerce

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So you want to sell products online, eh?

Quite right too! The whole world is doing it, and if  you have a product to sell on the internet and you’re not, well you missing out on a world of revenue and sales you could be cashing in on.

Some businesses may look at  the cost and hassle of setting up an e-commerce website and having no experience in the IT field, give up on it quickly to concentrate on other more important things.

Well, today it couldn’t be more important to be selling online, and there is a solution to the hassle and cost of setting up such a store –  Open Source E-Commerce Shopping Carts.

Whilst the cost of developing a totally custom build shopping cart based specifically on your needs alone is indeed a mammoth, time-consuming  and costly task, the alternative is…well, not. Open source e-commerce platforms cut the development time to zero by providing a totally free, full featured shopping cart platform to simply upload to your server and use ‘out-of-the-box’ ( in most cases you can, but you wouldn’t want to due to lack of design).

‘OK’ you say ‘…but i still don’t know how the inter-webs work so what am I gonna do with this bunch of files i don’t understand’.

This is where the cost is saved – instead of forking out for weeks of development time and coding with a software development company, you can get in touch with your friendly neighbourhood webmonkey and ask him to set up your open source e-commerce store for you – the beauty of which is you will only pay for time designing and installing the site, which makes having your own online store that much more affordable to smaller businesses looking to venture out on to the web with their products for the first time.

The next thing is to decide which piece of open source software to use, as you will find there are many to choose from. Some perform better than others in certain aspects, but all have a good variety of features and plugins that can be used to great effect. Do some research about the best open source e-commerce platforms, with your web designer so yo know you’ll get the shop features you want.

Of course just having a site on the internet is not the end of it, especially if you want to do well. You can just leave it and hope it makes a sale every now and again, but for it to do well, it must be attended to and maintained.

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is an ongoing battle all e-commerce store owners undergo, and with many businesses now using social networking platforms to gain more business and attract new customers, the online marketplace has never been a more competitive place to be.

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GK Design is born!

September 8, 2011
By gk-b in GK Design Blog

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After many week s spent postulating about the outcome of such an event – GK Design is finally born!

GK Design provide website design and hosting, design for print, 3d graphics & animation and audio visual services such as audio production & recording and digital video editing.

So if you’re in need of a web designer in cardiff, who can handle your business on the web from  start to finish, from website design and coding, through servers and hosting, then site promotion and social networking, then drop us a line a see what we can do for you.

If we actually had doors that wouldn’t break if we flung them open -  we’d film us doing it and use it as a metaphor, just to display that our doors are well and truly open for business.

Drop us a line to see if we can help you – www.growingkenneth.co.uk

Cheers,
B – GK Design

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