This was to address a few knows security issues in some of the older versions of WordPress.

In the beginning

When we 1st launched, I was using a brilliant tool called Rapidweaver (RW) , by realmacsoftware to design and develop our sites. RW was a great tool to start out with as I had just bought my 1st MacBook, I wanted to do everything on my mac.
RW produces (predominatly) static HTML sites with powerful graphics and a very professional look and feel. (have a look at our Portfolio, Armadillo Security Shutters was done in RW).

Phase 2

After about 9 months of using RW for our clients, we needed to take the next evolutionary step towards a Content Management System (CMS) based platform. At this stage, Joomla was being used by everyone as it offered an all round CMS platform to suit all the requirements of my client (have a look at our Portfolio, Richmond Hockey Club was designed using Joomla). Joomla was great at the time as I was only starting to learn about CMS platforms and their capabilities.

Partway through the development of the RHC website, a very good friend of mine (Justin Harrison) suggested that I take a look at WordPress as a CMS engine. I had already completed 80% of the RHC site and didn’t want to change platforms… so I put Justin’s suggestion on the back burner until I had completed the RHC site. This was about 2 years ago and WordPress was mainly seen as a Blogging tool and not a true CMS engine.

Next Step

After the RHC go live, I started to have a look at WordPress (WP) and straight away I LOVED the interface. At 1st it was very Blog orientated, but it was evolving and with WP 3.0 they hit the nail on the head and it was now a true CMS platform.

Over the past year and a bit, I’ve used nothing but WP for my sites (check out our Portfolio). We’ve done a few migrations from static HTML (dreamweaver based) to WP (including our own website RW – WP) and I can’t see us moving away from this rapidly evolving CMS platform.

Alignment

My fundamental issue with all these technology was that they  didn’t have a decent Backup and Restore utility. RW , Joomla or WP don’t have any native backup tools to handle database and file system requirements that you could schedule and send the data off-site.

That is until I came across BACKUPBUDDY!! This is a phenomenal WP plugin which allows you to schedule backups, easily move the data and within a few simple clicks, restore your site to the same or another location. With integration to off site your database or full (database and files) backup via Amazon S3, RockSpace Cloud, FTP, Email and most recently DropBox, so there is NO excuse now to have a valid off site backup of you website.

There are 100′s of Premium theme providers out there offering WP themes. But out of all of them (and we’ve tried a LOT) only 2 really stand out head and shoulders above the rest.

• Woo Themes and Elegant Themes.

These 2 theme designers have by far the most professional and beautifully designed theme sets on the market. All of our WP sites are designed around these 2 theme providers. They both offer different functionality with an outstanding and powerful graphical experience for the visitors.

Summary

We’re in the process of migrating all our existing sites over to WP and with that every migration or new site, we’ll implementing BackupBuddy as a standard and will more than likely be based on a WooThemes or ElegantThemes template, which we modify depending on the clients needs.

You should hopefully be able to see how BDD has organically grown over the years, to accomodate our clients needs and the technical needs of our systems. We’ve also aligned ourselves with market leaders within the WP ecosystem.

So, there I was sifting through my daily catchup of last nights tweets and I came across this totally awesome SEO tool:

What Search Page am I on?.com

Quit simply, it does what it says on the tin.
This site takes your search query and your web address and then checks to see if it’s on the 1st 10 pages of Google and then reports back.

This is a great tool to track and see how and where you rank on Google in a quick and efficient way.

Let me know your thoughts and views on it.

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.

We’re REALLY sorry, but there seems to be an issue with our web hosting guys at the moment and the WebMail server is currently off-line

They’ll hopefully get it up and running again ASAP!

Thanks and SORRY!!

As part of our effort to keep all our clients website and data safe, we will be applying this latest patch to all our WordPress based websites hosted with us.

As part of our testing, this site (BDD) and a number of our personal project sites (www.paulbav.co.uk & www.paulsphotos.co.uk) have already been updated.

We will be applying the 3.0.4 patch to all our client sites tomorrow (30th December 2010) during the course of the day.

Regards,
BDD Support Team