Apologies for the hiatus: at least my first post of the new year is pre-February!

Why so busy? Site rebuilds. I’m working on a range of site rebuilds at the moment. January is a classic time for this: just like we do in our private life, businesses tend to look at the their new year’s budget and make a few resolutions.

I’m working with a range of business types, sizes, and budgets. With this mix comes a cloud of CMS systems. Sadly, one of those is Websphere, but on the plus side one is Drupal :-). I also have a feeling that there will be a first of a kind blend of Websphere and Wordpress on one project!

It’s incredible when you think about it that a business would spend thousands of pounds on IBM’s famously inflexible CMS tool, then host a free, open source blogging CMS alongside so that content can be easily and quickly hosted.

But then, web design’s always throwing up these paradoxes.

Building a great website: foundations

What do you do first on a site rebuild?

This is my favourite stage of a web build project. I love getting to the core of a web accessible, seo focused, user friendly site. For me, this starts when you’ve got a whiteboard in front of you, a clutch of marker pens, and the key site stakeholders all in the same room to make decisions. The speed with which you can make decisions and plough forwards through the key broad strokes steps is always astonishing.

Getting a feel for the finished product while in these stages is important, and to make the best decisions you need experienced people in the room. It’s a huge win for a site’s SEO to have an understanding of how the code will need to be laid out to achieve a certain structure - and what impact that will have. A savvy designer will know their code and be able to ensure you degrade gracefully for your mobile audience (you haven’t thought of your mobile audience? Start thinking).

There’s challenges, of course, but getting the right decision in place the first time pays off throughout the course of a build. Some of my current projects won’t complete until cSeptember - and I’d add on the obligatory 15% overrun time to that deadline too ;-), but they are all looking in good shape and I plan to give some more detailed updates relating to build tips and tricks, common problems, quick wins, and insider know-how.

Assuming I can get everything off the whiteboards and into the mock-ups that is…

I’ve been waiting for the tide of comment following Google’s launch of the gOS - the Google Operating System - early last month (again). But it just seems to not have happened. Tie that in with the almost entirely unheralded launch of a syncing tool for OpenOffice and Google Docs and I can only assume that thanksgiving’s caused a lot of the high volume bloggers state side to rest on their laurels for the festive season.

Personally, I love OpenOffice - it strips out the unnecessary elements of Microsoft Office. In fact it forces me to think about the content I’m producing, and not how it’s formatted. However, I’m a multiple machine kind of guy. I need to get documents synched. Google Docs then, right? Well yes and no. I like the look of Google Docs, but the feel is way too laggy for me. If I’m entering data into a spreadsheet, I want that data going in and updating other cells instantly. When I save a doc, I want that to be done straight away.

Also: I bet I’m not the only one here who finds Google Spreadsheets to be frustratingly simplistic. I’m not talking about pivot tables, but at least a little flexibility in basic editing functions and some support for decent formulas is desperately needed.

So I just don’t get the speed I need from Google Docs and sometimes the product is a little limited. syncing up OpenOffice is a great step forwards. In fact it’s surely the greatest app for the gOS?

Google Operating System Vs Plain Vanilla Ubuntu

I was a big fan of Fiesty, and Gibbon is another great leap forwards, but still the pickup for Linux via it’s friendliest flavour is low. Google’s talent for making the mainstream love the geeky could be just the injection of glamour open source desktop environments need.

I’m watching old episodes of Cranky Geeks (Dvorak is pretending to be Nick Nolte for Halloween) while I work on Thunderbird filters and I think the above.

This is my disclosure moment which will be referenced in future posts (Hello people from the future! Are you sitting comfortably?). I’m a technically minded chap from well known SEO company bigmouthmedia. However everything published on this blog is of course entirely my own opinion and shouldn’t even be taken seriously, let alone considered professional advice.

But is that the real you?

This is what I look like as an SEO professional and as a scruffy geek with little spare time. That’s all there is. Apart from some blog of course.

Hopefully now you’ll be feeling even more relaxed about my stance on anything controversial, potentially libelous, genuinely thought provoking, or simply au courant.

* Of course you are!

Often underrated in the push for best practice is password admin and general housekeeping in the back-end.I’ll worry all day long about Id v’s Class usage for site design style sheets, but having just spent 3-4 hours clearing up my admin, role permissions, passwords and user profile options I’ve come to realise that CSS standards are simply so much fluff in the face of core site maintenance.

Can you bulk change all your ftp passwords? I hope so, I’m going to start digging and I’ll share what I find.

CMS systems vary wildly in their friendliness, but hardly anyone seems to talk about mass tweaking. They should. It’s crucial. If you head up a development team then multiply that last statement’s sonorous tone by 100.

Password Protocols

I hope you have some. But I hope they aren’t logical. Think like a machine and you’ll likely get hacked. Remember: SSH is your friend: never go online without it (I’d feel naked, I think).