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Posted at 2:55 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in css

2 comments - Latest by:
  • richard
    Which is insane!
  • MacBros
    Now if you search "school signage lincolnshire" on Google, THIS page comes up in the first two placings. LOL
 

Jan 23
2012

Posted by richard

I use Google for searching, mostly because I find their results accurate and (most of the time) spam-free.

Lately however I’ve been experimenting more with Bing and Yahoo. They seem to be the same. So much so that they have the same results for the search terms I’m using, in the same positions. Makes me wonder…

Anyway, on to my point. Bing, your search results are awful. I select ‘Results only from the UK’ and here’s a slice of what I get, for the search term ‘school signage‘:

  • Position 10: they can’t even spell the word ‘signage’ properly (they spelt it ‘sinage’), yet you have them at position 10? They’re also position 21, apparently duplicating content, you allow that do you?
  • Position 42: is a PDF file leading to an article. Surely when searching the web, I’m looking for websites?
  • Position 63: Nothing to do with school signage.
  • Position 72: Nothing to do with school signage.
  • Position 82: Nothing to do with school signage. The title even says so!
  • Position 95: Nothing to do with school signage.

Ok so this is the first 100 results out of 19,000. Admittedly no-one looks past the first three pages (if that!).

So my reasoning for this was because I was looking for the company I work for, , for their results under the same search term. Limiting this a little to ‘school signage lincolnshire‘, again on Bing, here goes:

  • Position 12: Finally! We’re on there, but oddly not the GRS category for school signs, why is that Bing?
  • Position 13: Lincolnshire tree services? Are you serious Bing? And again at position 20?
  • Position 25, 26, 30: Council web pages?
  • Position 29: A school?

Ok so why is this happening? Surely a simple search term like ‘school signage‘ should net me only those websites and webpages that deal with ‘school signage‘? Out of the 16,400 results above, the first 30 have at least 5 bogus (maybe bogus isn’t a good word, let’s say ‘inaccurate’) results…

I read that Bing (and Yahoo) both set their store by how many incoming links a website has, to grade and position them in results. How is that useful? That’s easily manipulatable by scammers, and companies as large as yours should know that. How easy would it be to create an innocent page on say, breakfast cereal, get hundreds if not thousands of incoming links, let it sit for a month or two, then swap the content out for mobile telephone offers, or worse, porn?

My family’s business chooses not to have outgoing and incoming links to competitors, or related businesses, because we want to stand alone on the product we produce. There is nothing wrong with that. Google seems to agree, our links are fairly high on their searches, but not on yours (and Yahoo’s).

Can someone please clarify a little? How can I structure the website to better gain rank on their search listings? It is well written HTML/CSS/PHP/JQuery, I try to follow all the rules, but because we don’t want to clutter our business pages with incoming links, we’re penalised?

Posted at 3:30 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in news

6 comments - Latest by:
 

Mar 6
2011

Posted by richard

Finally, after many years, I’m getting this theme (Dog Blog) updated!

Talk about bringing it from the stone age, this was one of my first wordpress themes, so it’s a little old. It was for a site called The Snood Factory but now the blog section appears to have been removed. Not sure if Jan kept up with it or not.

Now updated for WP 3.0 it’s looking much better thankfully. Just finishing it up right now and it will get updated for a new download. You can see it by looking for the theme switcher near the bottom of the post and clicking on ‘Dog Blog’ – it sets the theme for 10 minutes (currently no way to override it except by changing the theme back to GlassFlare).

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Posted at 2:10 pm • Trackback Trackback

Posted in themes

1 comment - Latest by:
  • mel
    That's very pretty. Looks like you put a lot of work into it.
 

May 9
2010

Posted by richard

I wanted to just jot a quick note down that I’ve finally got round to releasing the wordpress theme I’ve been working on for a year. It’s a three-, four-, five-, or six-column wordpress theme, lots of options to set, colours, layouts, graphics, and so on.

You can find all the screenshots on my business site: .

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Posted at 9:55 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in drupal

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Oct 10
2009

Posted by richard

Had a good mini presentation on my OpenAir Drupal theme just now.

This was basically a quick talk on the work I did porting the OpenAir WordPress theme to Drupal. Although this was my first theme with Drupal I think that I will be doing others, it’s a good system, easy to work with, and lots of resources (with ever-more coming online).

Thanks to Yuetsu for asking me, much appreciated.

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Posted at 10:37 pm • Trackback Trackback

Posted in css

1 comment - Latest by:
  • MrCorey
    Good on you, Richard! I've still been dragging my heels on learning how the Drupal theming works. I've been considering ...
 

Oct 8
2009

Posted by richard

Several months ago I was approached to port one of my WordPress themes () to Drupal. Bear in mind I’d never played with Drupal whatsoever, but I said yes just to get some experience. It worked well, although there are some things that can’t be done, with my level of knowledge at this point, at least. I imagine I’ll learn more soon and catch up.

So this weekend, I was asked to give a chat on Skype on how I ported the WP theme to Drupal, so it will be this Saturday afternoon sometime. The Drupal camp is in Portland Oregon I believe. Should be interesting.

Getting in the spirit of things, I’m going to be porting another one of my WP themes to Drupal tomorrow to get ready for this, going over some of the things I’ve done so I know what I’m talking about. I’m thinking a fairly easy theme, like , or .

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Posted at 11:22 pm • Trackback Trackback

Posted in themes

1 comment - Latest by:
 

Aug 27
2009

Posted by richard

I’ve had the week off, so I have had the time to finish up some work that I’ve really been meaning to get to.

I expanded the News Print v2 WordPress Theme, adding a second sidebar in to it, and fixing up some issues that had been bugging me for a while. The featured post now works as it should, and I added a lot of extras to the theme options in the backend.

I released the Victoriana WordPress Theme yesterday, a two column theme with theme options in the backend, such as colours, sidebar position and so on (that link has screenshots). I’ve actually had this going for months but never really got my teeth into it. Yesterday was the day and it’s now released.

I’ve done some work in the Expression series too, currently there’s Blue and Red, but today I’m released Yellow and Green. These are simple themes, but quite easy on the eyes, good for a newbie starting out.

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Posted at 3:25 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in javascript

2 comments - Latest by:
  • richard
    Yeah there's two sides though.
  • macbros
    I might be wrong, but isn't 10+1+1=12? Unless you're subtracting the 10,1, and 1 from something. I really don't see ...
 

Aug 25
2009

Posted by richard

I was porting the Expression Blue WordPress Theme over to the Thesis framework (released on Thesis Themes here) and started work on the #multimedia_box which controls pieces of multimedia content above the sidebars.

I noticed that if you changed the size of the #multimedia_box itself, the image still came through as large as it wanted. Bit of an issue that though, especially if you style the #multimedia_box and subsequent #custom_box, #image_box, #video_box inside it (and subsequently content further inside that, such as an image). So in my case the image was sticking out the side rightways because I had added margin to #multimedia_box and padding to #image_box.

The solution to this is a bit of jquery inside the header, which of course you have to put in the custom_functions.php and use a hook to access the wp_head(), like so:

<script src=”http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery-1.3.2.min.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
<!–
$(document).ready(function() {
  $(“div#multimedia_box”).ready(function() {
    var imageBoxWidth = $(“div#multimedia_box > div”).width();
    $(“div#multimedia_box > div”).css(‘padding’,’10px’);
    $(“div#multimedia_box > div img”).width(imageBoxWidth – 24);
  });
});
//–>
</script>

In my case I had added 10px padding, then there’s 1px padding and 1px border on the image itself giving you the 24 that you see in the code snippet above.

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Posted at 3:16 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in life

2 comments - Latest by:
  • MrCorey
    Come and join the cool kids at http://identi.ca
  • macbros
    It's been iffy lately. I think it might have something to do with the massive amount of spam from spammers ...
 

Aug 25
2009

Posted by richard

I’ve noticed that Twitter is being a little odd today. On my main business site I have my Twitter feed posting my last tweet on there, but the file_get_contents() php call times out on it. Not too lovely on the front page of course, and I hope that it’s just a temporary network slowdown, but I wondered if anyone else had noticed this?

Of course, this would happen on the one day that I launch a new site (http://www.thesis-themes.com/) and tweet about the new Thesis themes I’m offering on it. Great. Nevermind, I expect it’s just an anomaly.

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Posted at 1:36 pm • Trackback Trackback

Posted in testing

3 comments - Latest by:
  • macbros
    I doubt I'll be on there. I have very little time and what time I do get is me resting ...
  • richard
    Thanks! Nice compliment there, and yes, I do love messing around with WordPress. Of course, it drives me nuts sometimes ...
 

Aug 17
2009

Posted by richard

So I’ve been burning the midnight oil for the past week or so on lots of work, but last night and tonight it’s been on a new Thesis child theme that I’ve been concentrating on. It’s a port of my OpenAir WordPress Theme to the Thesis framework. I mean, I’ve moved it over to Drupal, so why not to Thesis? You can see it in action on my test site for my Thesis themes.

Just one or two little things that are driving me up the wall, but if I do 30 minutes here, an hour there, I’ll get it ready. It should be up and running in the next day or two! I’ll post when it’s done.

In the meantime though, I’m already starting to think about the next one that will be ported over. Perhaps a Paypal Thesis theme? :)

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Posted at 7:08 am • Trackback Trackback

Posted in themes

4 comments - Latest by:
  • mel
    I'm diggin' it. I see where you're going. I'm pickin up what you're puttin down. I'm smellin what you're steppin in.
  • macbros
    Can't wait to see what you did. :P
 

Aug 6
2009

Posted by richard

I’ve been working on a new theme over at The English Guy Web Design, primarily aimed at letting people see and download my themes more easily. This will be something of a large project as I aim to greatly increase this and make it much easier to see all of my themes.

That being said, I need to update a lot of these themes because I just haven’t had the time over the past year or two to update them all. Look out for more soon though!

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