Invisible Window » WordPress

Maintain search indexes when re-developing a site.

webhank — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 05:34:51 +0000

Often times when sites are being re-developed URL’s change. A page that previously read as www.sitename.com/about.html on the new site may be www.sitename.com/about-us/. For a human user interacting with the site, this is seldom an issue (aside from the occasional bookmark that needs to be updated) but for a search engine, this can be problematic. Frequently, lack of budget, or lack of the knowledge that these issues need to be addressed leads to a site’s page rank and search related traffic dropping upon being re-designed. These problems will usually rectify themselves over time, pages get re-indexed, etc., but why wait, when a few easy steps can guarantee that traffic is re-directed instead of lost.

There are a plethora of great tools available to web developers that provide statistics on how a site is indexed and what kinds of traffic a site is getting. Google Analytics has become the standard for tracking how users interact with a site. If this tool is running on the original site, you’re golden. If not, I would highly suggest installing it on the “old” site as a first step of developing the new site. The data gathered from Google Analytics during the development period will ultimately drive which urls from the original site will be redirected to the new site.

We develop 99% of our sites with WordPress as the CMS. The concepts we’re about to cover will work regardless of how you develop your site but this article assumes you’re using WordPress. You’ll want a plugin to make this a bit easier. Go download and install Redirection now, I’ll wait. No really, I’ll wait, go ahead, do it now.

You’re back, good.

Now let’s jump ahead and assume that you’re ready to launch your newly re-designed site. Log in to Google Analytics and go down to the Content Overview section of your dashboard (lower right).

Click on View Report – you’ll be taken to an overview page – at the bottom of that page, you’ll find a link that says view full report – click on that link to view the details.

From this content overview page, you can export the most popular links on your site to a file (.csv, .xls, .txt, etc.). This file will be the raw data we’ll use to set up the redirects for the newly designed site. Sort the file and identify all of the links that you wish to re-direct to your new site. Log into your WordPress admin and click on the Tools sidebar then click on redirection.

This screen will allow you to enter in the original url (from the old site) and the destination url (what page you want to redirect to on the new site). And the option to make it a 301, 307, or 307 redirect. Additionally you can use regular expressions to avoid having to create every single redirection manually (check out the redirection site for more details).

The redirection site has many tutorials on how to use the plugin, how to write regular expressions and how to use it with other modules – it is definitely worth checking out if this article’s peaked your interest.

These simple steps will keep a newly launched site from dipping in rank after a re-design.

How To Do Basic ‘Things’ in WordPress

webhank — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 05:31:59 +0000

WordPress recently launched WordPress TV a collection of “How To” videos dealing with many aspects of WordPress. The following are some of the videos that our clients will find useful when maintaining their site/blog:

Wordcamp Denver

webhank — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 05:30:53 +0000

Today I had the privilege of attending Wordcamp Denver today at the Denver Art Museum, a conference put on by Automatic “…created for enthusiasts, users, developers, designers, and fans of WordPress in the Denver/Boulder area.” It would be a mild understatement to say that the amount of knowledge dissipated today was colossal. I can not wait to put some of the things that I learned into practice on new projects.

Invisible Window has been committed to developing on WordPress for a few years now, but today opened up a whole new world of possibilities. The most noteworthy sessions were:

Matt Mullenweg (Automattic) – founding developer of WordPress.
Matt spoke on the future of WordPress, presented some amazing themes and plugins, and spoke of some new projects on the horizon that the WordPress community can look forward to (bbpress, wordpress.tv, Buddy Press, etc)
Ben Huh (Pet Holdings) – Ben Huh is the CEO of the company that runs FAIL Blog, I Can Has Cheezburger?, GraphJam and other Interweb time sinks.
Ben spoke on how to scale a company using WordPress and other ‘pluggable’ vendors/providers to grow a business (he was quite entertaining to listen to, and coined a great acronym – MPH – Mr. Potato Head – essentially you can put something in, it may look ugly but it works – you can pull something out – it may be ugly but it works)
Alex King (Crowd Favorite) – WordPress as a CMS using the Carrington Theme FrameworkAlex presented an amazing CMS framework theme for developers called Carrington. Carrington offers a very high degree of customization via a sophisticated file structure (Invisible Window will definitely be using this heavily in the future)
Jake Spurlock (Petomundo!) – Developing with BuddyPress
Jake spoke on Buddy Press (a social network which runs on a WordPressMU installation). I think we will be using this to re-deploy The Chain Ring.

This was a totally amazing experience (especially if you’re a geek like me ) and I am really looking forward to putting this knowledge out there on projects. Contact us and we’ll get going on your next great idea.

Denver Wordcamp 2009

webhank — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:29:45 +0000

We’ve were fortunate to catch the WordPress wave right as it took off and have been using this amazing blog and CMS software to develop client sites (and this site too) for a few years now. We’re really excited to be attending Wordcamp 2009 at the Denver Art Museum at the end of the month. We’re really looking forward to learning even more about WordPress and being able to use this new found knowledge to “take it to the next level” for our clents.

WordPress 2.7

webhank — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:29:11 +0000

Wordpress 2.7 is set to release soon. We’ve installed the beta version on some test blogs and we’re blown away by the new interface and features. Here are some screengrabs to check out.

Cool Climate Jobs

webhank — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 05:24:35 +0000

www.coolclimatejobs.com launches!

Cool Climate Jobs is an exciting new online job resource for the climate and renewable energy communities. Featuring jobs in the climate, renewable energy, and green collar research, policy, and practice fields from around the world, Cool Climate Jobs is free to browse as well as an affordable platform to promote your employment opportunities. It’s just $125 ($100 for non-profit organizations) for a 4 week posting – internship postings are always free. There are also sponsorship and advertizing opportunities to showcase your event or organization directly to thousands of skilled members of the climate and renewable energy industries.

For more information visit: www.coolclimatejobs.com (then check it out on your iPhone!).

Invisible Window launches Michael Waddell’s Web site

webhank — Tue, 13 May 2008 05:23:29 +0000

We are proud to launch Michael Waddell’s new web site. Michael is one of outdoor television’s top personalities and this site will be a great place for fans and Michael to interact. Invisible Window built this site on a very customized WordPress installation. Go check it out and let us (and Mr. Waddell) know what you think. michaelwaddell.com

WordPress 2.5

webhank — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 05:22:22 +0000

Originally slated for a release date of March 10, 2008, WordPress 2.5 made its debut yesterday. Most notable in the long list of improvements is a major upgrade to the admin area. Writing posts, pages, and especially managing assets (images, videos, mp3 files, etc.) received a total re-vamp and a slick new user interface to boot.

Invisible Window has been developing sites using WordPress as a CMS for some time now, and it’s is a great system. WordPress sites allow the site owner to easily make updates to content and imagery, and WordPress has many features that allow better organic search engine results – these new features in this release make this great system even better.

If you have a site running a previous version of WordPress (unless you’ve already contacted us for an upgrade, you do), shoot us an email (hello at invisible window dot com) and we can set up a time to upgrade your site so you too can be blown away by these new features.

In Praise of WordPress

webhank — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 05:21:12 +0000

The gang here at Invisible Window has developed multiple sites and written many articles about using WordPress as a content management system (CMS). We believe it excels at this task and, more importantly, puts the site owner in charge of their own content. And who, after all, knows more about their company than anyone else ever could? There are many other advantages to using WordPress, as you will learn in this video interview of Matt Curtis, one of the head developers at Google.

Check it out

Google Maps WordPress Plugin

webhank — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 05:20:29 +0000

For over a year now our Invisible Window team has built some very cool web sites using WordPress as the content management system. We’re pleased to announce our first publicly released WordPress plugin, Google Mapper. Installing this plugin allows a site admin to add locations, stores, dealers, etc. to the database and for these locations to be plotted using Google Maps on the front end. Custom icons and markers can be used, and a default zoom level can also be entered.

You will need to signup for a Google Maps API Key to use this plugin on your site.

== Current Version ==
Google Mapper 1.0 – 2007-12-04
Download Zip: Google Mapper Plugin v 1.0

== Installation ==

Upload `google-mapper` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
Enter your Google Maps API key and any optional default values
Place < ?php if(function_exists('gm_show_map')) gm_show_map(); ?> in your templates

== To Do ==

Finalize Upgrade Script
Allow setting streets, topo, hybrid view
Allow setting for default map display size

== Donate ==
PayPal: Like this plugin? Want to see it developed further? donate here.