My client is developing a business to supply print and media design services to, principally, the Education market. Typically, their clients will be schools, colleges and universities that want to produce high quality promotional material such as magazines and prospectus. The initial requirement was just for a straightforward website, for which the client provided the design work, that delivered a web presence that could be modified via a content management system.

Our Solution

We have delivered the content management system via the WordPress framework. Whilst the development was straightforward, due to most of the design work and content being provided by the client, there were several difficulties.

Firstly, the company with whom my client had registered the domain name made it very difficult for him to point the domain at a different name server. The original intention was for the website to be hosted on a DMJ server, and the site was developed with this in mind.

Secondly, as we had developed the site in WordPress to provide a good CMS for the client, there was a requirement to add MySql (as WordPress needs MySql to function) to the services provided by the domain hosting company. This would have had an additional cost impact on my client and so we needed to find a way around the problem.

Whilst the client has several pages on the website which are still under construction but which will not be ready for some time, he does not envisage many short-term changes to the site.

Our solution was to continue running a ‘development-mode’ version of the site on our server, allowing WordPress to function normally and for changes to be made to the site in the short term. Static html files for each page of the site were then created from the wordpress-generated html which were then moved to his hosting area. This means that the site can run on the existing limited server without MySql whilst ensuring that when the client moves his site from his current to the DMJ web server all of the components should be in place for the site to continue running sweetly.

Why not take a look at the finished website?

What does the client think?

Other clients are pleased with us too…

Take a look at what our other clients say about our Website design and building, and about our web marketing services. we use the vouchforthis.com service so that you can be sure that these are real testimonials written by real people about the services we have actually delivered.

Whilst these books are functionally and practically really no better than a well-designed website image gallery, and take a little putting together to make look really effective, they can be really impressive and offer website visitors something a little more interesting than the normal content. For example, they could be used to make your holiday rental property guestbook available online so that your web visitors get to see the real words written by your guests in their own handwriting (see our example on the right). Whilst this can be fiddly to put together, and time consuming to keep scanning and uploading more pages as they change, it can be an effective tool in persuading your visitors that they are real testimonials.

Have a play with the example on the right – you need to click the image then, once the book pops up, you can page through it by clicking the bottom corners of each page, or by using the navigation, or by double-clicking on the page to turn it.

We like it and can see a number of possibilities to use this to make some of our own content more appealing, as well as for our clients (e.g. brochures, newsletters etc. and anything where you want to give your customers the opportunity of saving the planet by providing an online version of your printed materials – if your website doesn’t already do this!).

We did come across a few glitches when installing, configuring and using the flippingbook plugin, the most confusing of which was having to change the file attributes of some of the images in the gallery to at least ’644′ before the book would display its contents.

What do you use it for? Can you see a use for it on your website? Get in touch and ask us to help.

Then comes the cold slap of reality, that cold kipper round the face (see example on right).

These aren’t comments from people that have something real and insightful to say about your post. It’s SPAM – verbal diarrhea, garbage, provided by those whose only interest is in writing a completely irrelevant comment in the hope that it generates traffic and link juice for their own web page. This is usually a pointless exercise anyway – as nobody will read the comment and think “ah, that sounds interesting, I’ll just click through and find out more” and there will generally be no link juice to be gained because the page will either not be valuable enough to have any in the first place, or the site owner would have instructed search engines not to pay attention to these links (see earlier post on using nofollow on your web pages).

But – these comments can still be rather disruptive to your blog, as they will devalue your content if left in place and can be time consuming for the blog owner to keep removing manually. Akismet is a plugin that all WordPress site owners can use (free for non-commercial use) to trap spam comments and bin them before they spoil your blog. You can review the comments it traps before deleting them for good, and you can set it so that all trapped comments are automatically deleted after a month.

So if spam is still spoiling your blog, take a look at Akismet and make it a problem of the past.

My client has 3 properties in the Manche department of Normandy in France. The brief was to create a single website to effectively advertise each of the properties, whilst providing a good backend content management solution to enable further changes to be made by the client.

Our Solution

We have developed a WordPress website using a premium theme that allows a slider control on the home page to showcase each of the properties.

The site uses the PIMS Holiday Rental Management system for availability calendar and pricing tables, and we have incorporated the booking form option to allow better integration for the owner and potential renters. All of this means that our client can use an external system to manage their holiday bookings whilst ensuring that theavailability calendar is automatically updated on the site.

Integrating the holiday rental management system inside a WordPress site requires some additional coding to allow url parameters to be sent by PIMS and picked up by the website. Contact us for details if you are a holiday property website owner and are having problems.

Why not take a look at the finished website?

What does the client think?

Other clients are pleased with us too…

Take a look at what our other clients say about our Website design and building, and about our web marketing services. we use the vouchforthis.com service so that you can be sure that these are real testimonials written by real people about the services we have actually delivered.

The reason for this is that WordPress automatically strips out parameters it doesn’t recognise before it builds your pages. The solution is to trick WordPress into accepting your parameters as though they were integral to the framework. I couldn’t find an ‘official’ wordpress plugin to allow me to do this, but came across this neat solution….

http://www.webopius.com/content/137/using-custom-url-parameters-in-wordpress

You will need to edit the template file which loads the page you want to receive the parameter, and you will need to upload some code as a plugin to name the variable(s) that you want to use, but it seems to work well.

Here is the plugin code, which needs to get uploaded to your plugins folder and activated….

<?php
/* Plugin Name: Parameter
Plugin URI: http://webopius.com/
Description: A plugin to allow parameters to be passed in the URL and recognized by WordPress
Author: Adam Boyse
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://www.webopius.com/
*/
add_filter('query_vars', 'parameter_queryvars' );
function parameter_queryvars( $qvars )
{
$qvars[] = 'yourvarname';
return $qvars;
}
?>

…and here is an example of how to use it in your template page….

global $wp_query;
if (isset($wp_query->query_vars['yourvarname']))
{
print $wp_query->query_vars['yourvarname'];
}

You need to change yourvarname to the name of the variable your page expects to receive.

The complication with this website was that a couple of the pages in the existing site had some considerable PHP scripting code which also needed to be incorporated into the new WordPress site. There are plenty of widgets around to allow you insert blocks of PHP into WordPress pages, but none of these seemed to work for the code on the site we were converting, giving various parsing errors, problems picking up included files, and also problems passing data from a form inside the included php file. For completeness, the widgets we tried were Executable PHP Widget and Inline PHP.

After many hours struggling to get it working we eventually just stuck the php file inside an HTML iframe tag, set the width to 100% and the height big enough to cope with the entire page, and it worked like a dream first time. We have accepted that iframe isn’t universally supported by all users, but it is a good, time-effective solution to the problem.

Here’s the code you need….



<iframe src="yourphpfilename.php" width="100%" height="1500" scrolling="no" frameborder="0">
<p>Your browser does not support iframes.</p>
</iframe>

If you have managed to overcome this problem without iframe, please let us know