The RHC website was my 1st stab at a Content Management System (CMS) based website over 3 years ago now, and at the time Joolma was well established in the market as one of the main CMS contenders. WordPress at this point in time was still viewed as a “Blogging” platform… oh, how times have changed.

Anyway, I digress …. At about the same time that Nick and Andrew decided to contact me about the existing site, I was keen to migrate the RHC site from Joolma over to WordPress (my platform of preference). This was great, because it allowed us to start on a clean slate and really get our heads around what would be best for the club.
We had been running Google Analytics (a std on all Blue Doodle hosted website) on the original site since it went live, so we had a LOT of good information to help guide us in the right direction with regards to what the club members used and (more importantly) didn’t use on the site.

Nick was the mastermind behind analysing the Google Analytics (we may use him in the future new & existing clients – he just doesn’t know this yet) and came up with a brilliant heat map of the site so we knew what the members liked and wanted.

3 months later we have an AWESOME members based website with a great look and feel (thanks to WooThemes‘ canvas theme), some great looking and very dynamic online forms (thanks to Gravity Forms) and and handful of great WordPress Plugins to extend the functionality.

Go have a look (www.richmondhockeyclub.com) and let us know your thoughts!!

With our new mail packages (Blue Mail & Gmail) you are able to pick the perfect email solution based on your requirements.

We’ve flatterend the Web Hosting options from £60 and £100, respectively, to a single £75 covers everything option.

Please have a look and give us some feedback (comments box below) … we’d love to know if we’re doing this right or if we’re getting it wrong, and only you (our clients or perspective clients) can tell us that.

Redfoot Solutions Ltd are the CRM experts, with hundreds of implementations to our name, specialising inMicrosoft Dynamics CRM and ACT by Sage solutions.

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What should I write about?

Become your audience: What I mean by this is simple. Determine who your customer is, give him or her a name, and deliver them the content they are wanting to read. If you typical customer is female, age 28-42, married with 1.2 kids, watches the Food Network and reality TV, and is generally interested in family activities then write about topics that interest that person. Remember, not everything you write has to be directly tied to your product or service. Simply becoming a resource for your audience, developing trust, and keeping them coming back to your site is a benefit, both long term and short.

How do I get more comments?

• Ask questions
• Be Controversial
• Leave part of the topic untouched

How can I get more people to find my blog?

• Use the Google Keywords search tool to determine what keywords/phrases are most searched for your area of expertise.
• Use those keywords in your page title, page URL, headers & body, and the description of the blog. This will help your SEO.
• Use email marketing, both to your list and relevant rented lists. Offer these people something for joining such as a white-paper, eBook, free trial of a product, discounts, etc.
• Publish your blogs on third party sites within your industry. This will expose your company, blog, products & services to a much larger audience. This also helps you establish authoritative back-links to your site which greatly enhances your SEO.

This was taken from an article published by socialmediatoday.com

Here are just a few of the new features which can be found in full here:

• redesigned link workflow within the post editor.

• a new admin bar, which can been seen at the top of the public site when you’re logged in as an admin user for quick reference to some of the backend features.

• a streamlined writing interface that hides many of the seldom-used panels by default to create a simpler and less intimidating writing experience for new bloggers.

There’s a bucket of candy for developers as well, including our new Post Formats support which makes it easy for themes to create portable tumblelogs with different styling for different types of posts, new CMS capabilities like archive pages for custom content types, a new Network Admin, an overhaul of the import and export system, and the ability to perform advanced taxonomy and custom fields queries.

So, without further adue, we’ll be upgrading all our clients WordPress based sites to version 3.1 once the go ahead has been giving by the theme suppliers we use (WooThemes & Elegant Themes).

WooThemes have already done all of their testing and have given the go-ahead for the 3.1 upgrade on sites using their themes.

The guys over at Elegant Themes are never very far behind and we should have a release update statement from them shortly.

When you are ready to start your domain name search you can use the built-in tools that 123-reg provides or you can use fun tools such as Domjax which makes searching for a domain name kinda fun.

The five most important things to consider when picking a domain name:

#5. Keep the domain name 5 words or less

Big companies who use traditional marketing will want to keep their domain names to no more than one or two words, but us little guys who are shooting for SEO traffic can pick domain names that are much longer. There is nothing wrong with a domain name that has 3, 4, or even 5 words in it. Remember, we aren’t going to be creating TV ads or print ads so we don’t really care (within reason) how long our domain name is. Longer domain names are of course much more likely to be available.

#4. Don’t use a trademarked brand names in your domain name

If you include ipod, iphone, zune, ebay, toyota, or any other brand name in your domain you will most likely be asked by a lawyer to cease and desist, and all the work you would have put into your site will be a complete waste of time. No matter how good the domain name sounds, and no matter how compelled you are to buy chevypartsforsalecheap.com DON’T DO IT!!! Trust me on this one. Find other names that get across the same idea that don’t infringe on copyrights.

#3. Don’t listen to those that say avoid hyphens

Many SEO experts will tell you to avoid hyphens in your domain name such as electric-socks.com, and if we were branding our website through traditional means such as television commercials or print advertising I would agree with those experts. But our goal as the “little guy” is to get organic traffic via the search engines and therefore hyphens are not such a bad thing. I have created several websites that do great in the search engines and they have hyphens in their domain name. That being said, if I have the option to pick an unhyphenated domain name I would pick that over the hyphenated name. Said in short… unhyphenated domain names are the best but hyphenated domain names are not a “deal killer”.

#2. Pick a “dot com” domain name

Avoid the .info’s, .tv’s, .us’s, .me’s, and all the other wacky types of domain names. Yes it’s true you might be able to grab that perfect .bz domain name but typically these types of domain names do not perform very good from an SEO perspective. The only possible exception is .net which isn’t a deal killer but I would still stick with the .com’s if at all possible.

#1. Use your targeted keyword phrase in your domain name

This of course is the most important factor of them all to consider. If you are shooting for the keyword phrase “electric socks” make sure that the words “electric socks” are in your domain name. If electricsocks.com is available buy it! If not, buy electric-socks.com or electricsocksforsale.com. Plural domain names are a good choice because you cover two keyword phrases with one shot, for instance electricsocks.com covers the search electric sock as well as the search phrase electric socks, whereas the domain electricsock.com might not be as effective for both searches. If your domain name does not contain your targeted keyword phrase it will be much more difficult to get a page one listing in Google.

Other helpful things to consider when picking a domain name

I recommend buying your domain name for at least 5 years. My research indicates that Google rewards domain names that will be around for awhile. From Google’s perspective they probably figure that domain names that are only purchased for a year might be less valuable because the owner is just “testing the waters”. The longer your domain name has been registered to you the better it will do in search results, so it only stands to reason that if you buy it for a longer term contract from the “get go” the search engines may reward you with better results sooner.

Be very careful when buying existing domain names from other people. You have NO IDEA what that domain name has been through prior to you acquiring it. I have had colleagues get kicked out of affiliate programs or been blackballed by search engines because of the shenanigans that the former domain name owner was involved in. If you don’t know for certain that the domain name is squeaky clean avoid it! Even though mature domain names perform better it’s much safer to buy a new domain name.

Picking the right domain name for your website is the cornerstone to your overall SEO strategy. Don’t rush it, take your time, do your research, and pick a domain name that will help you acquire the organic traffic that in turn will help you make money online!

This article was originally seen on internetpoop.com and has been modified for the UK market.

Please don’t get the wrong idea, all of our sites are backed-up on a daily basis by our hosting partner, but these are once a day and require a call to be logged for a restore, which might take a short while to perform.

So enters a great WordPress plug-in called Backup Buddy.

Backup Buddy allows up to take add-hock or scheduled backups of the site content and database. This allows us to take a quick snap shot of your website before we apply any updates or patches.

Backup Buddy has now become a std plug-in for all our WordPress based sites and we’ll be implementing a  weekly “full site” backup as well as a daily “database” backup for all of our WordPress based sites. The Full Site backup captures all the files (images, pdf’s etc) as well as the database as where the database backup only captures the database which holds you site content (text and settings)

These backups will be automatically sent to an off-site (not on the same servers as our websites) service where we’ll be able to retrieve them and restore your (or our own site) within a few minutes as and when needed.

We know this makes us feel a lot more secure and hopefully it does the same for you.

We’re in the process of updating all our WordPress based sites to version 3.0.5.

This is a security update that was released by WordPress to plug some know issues.

We should have all our WP sites updated by the end of play today.

Thanks,
BDD Team

You might have also noticed that we’re now on Twitter and Facebook. So please feel free to join our little revolution . We also have a new RSS feed if you’d like to keep tabs on us that way.

More news and funky stuff coming up, so please join our mailing list (bottom right column) and you’ll be the 1st to hear what happens.

Just in case you were wondering… we haven’t gone anywhere.

We had a systems crash and with the corruption of our database (which could have been restored if we felt like it) we decided to have a total site redesign…

Please bare with us and get ready for an AWESOMELY cool new website….

Thanks,
BDD Team