Customer Street and UFindUs Web Design

As the start of Socail Bookmarking and Networking for Customer Street I have now set up a useful page on Delicious.

Customer Street on Delicious

The age of social book marking and networking is coming and moving forward on both design and seo  everyone needs to be paying attention to this.

The easiest way is to have a blog or other article driven section either built in to your website or on a seperate domain name to assist with your link popularity too.

Mor will be added shortly on social booking.

I have made the following additions to the Web Design and SEO Blogs. The additions will be made to the CSS Blog soon.

• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Use
• Sitemap
• Contact Form
• Additional RSS Options

The Privacy Policy and Terms of Use pages have been added for more than one reason. They offer Privacy information so you know how we handle your details aswell as letting you know the terms of use of both our blogs and directories. The other main reason is that Google likes to see websites with these statements. Afterall this is something that generally only the larger and more corporate companies take in to account. A small business may not think these are important but we advise that you add these to your website.

The Sitemap is also another important factor. Visitors to our blogs can now visit a page that links to every page on our blog. This should make navigating around easier. Also when a search engine hots the sitemap page it can gets a full list of all the pages on the site. Helping with SEO and getting as many pages indexed as possible.

Tomorrow is ‘CSS Naked Day’ but unfortunatley the Customer Street blogs are to corporate to go naked. It’s a shame because it’s for a good cause.

Why go naked ?

It’s not for money or charity, it’s simply to promote and encourage web standards. All you need to do is remove all the styles from your website to join in. This is the third year of CSS Naked Day and every year there has been a huge responce.

It has been mentioned to me that this is considered ‘Geeky’ but as Alex (Customer Street CSS) pointed out

It’s to promote web standards, and seeing as MOST of today’s business uses the web in some form, I think you’ll find that having standards is a very good idea.

Alex will be joinging with http://www.syst3m32.co.uk and it’s already looking to be a fun day.

You can find more information on CSS Naked Day, code for your website and a list of some sites going naked for the day on http://naked.dustindiaz.com/

WordPress 2.5 was finally released on March 29th 2008. It had been in development by the people of the WordPress community for about 6 months and as it’s been live on the Customer Street blogs for about a week now I thought I’d comment on it.

The Upgrade ?

The upgrade was straight forward enough. Just upload the newer version on to your server and overwrite the old one. Then when you go to log in you click the link to update the database tables.

Job done.

First Impressions

Really nice looking. I can’t complain at that. If you want to see it in action there is the WP 2.5 4 minute screen cast that you can watch.

The quick links on the Dashboard are ideal so you can get straight down to blogging, and at fist glance, not alot has moved. I was then proved wrong.

As a new feature I have introduced a new home page for the Customer Street Design blog.

I have done this for several reasons.

• To give out a set message rather than a forever changing page full of design articles
• So that the text can be more easily customized for search engine rankings
• To have a slightly different home page to the other blogs

If it works well and our targetted phrases achieve higher rankings then I will probably apply a similar concept to all the Customer Street Blogs.

I will add more updates as they arise.