The WordPress Content Management System is currently one of the most popular CMS around (Bloomberg Interview 2010), powering 12% of the web.  We thought it would be worth taking a look at why WordPress is a great choice for your personal or business website and why it’s become so successful.

We have used a number of different Content Management Systems (CMS) and Frameworks to design websites for organisations in and around Bristol.  Previously we favored Joomla for the simplicity of its menu systems and one page template structure; ‘old’ WordPress used to be limited by its foundation as Blogging platform.

How to add Social Media buttons into your website and track with analytics.

Off the back of reading another blog where the importance of Facebook Likes and the new Google +1 were discussed I decided it was time to implement full SEO integration on our site.  We’ve been doing it for clients for an age but with the new Google Panda Algorithm it is now ignored at your peril. Now I’m expecting that some of you are thinking – its easy, I just grabbed the code from X and stuck it in. That maybe the case but as far as my understanding extends this method adds google analytics tracking functionality.

Or, ‘Why you really need to trust your Webdesigner’

Do you know what’s written on your website? Well, of course you do. You wrote most of it and no doubt your webdesigner pestered you for copy for many weeks. But if you’ve ever tried to open a MS word file in another program, you’ll know that there is a lot more ‘stuff’ in files than just the text and pictures. And in websites, there are are many places where you can put ‘hidden’ images and text.

Some of this hidden text is completely legitimate. For instance, many webdesigners put in ‘comments’ which say what a certain bit of code is doing, where it starts and ends, and other information. This is vital for making it easy to find things, for the webdesigner him or herself, or someone subsequently who works on the site.

That said, it’s not unheard of for webdesigners to vent their feelings in code comments, though this is thankfully a rare occurrence. Since anyone can read the code which renders a website, it is worth knowing what is written in your website.

So, how would you look at what is really written on your site? It’s simple: look at the source code.

Content Management Systems (CMS) websites allow you to update your website and maintain it. This means you have control, but also means you have to know what to do when updating your site…  and what not to do.  Here are some of the things that we’ve found to be important:

We’re doing quite a few social media set ups at the moment, and one of the things that we typically do is set up a site so that when you put a blog post on to your website, it passes that blog post on to your Facebook page and Twitter account. And sometimes, we need to send stuff in the other direction.