This will ultimately apply to all websites in the EU that use Google anyaltics, Social media and Advertising on the sites, As well as other means of cookie data collecting.
Below are some useful resources & download to comply with this new regulation for further reading.

http://blog.silktide.com/2011/05/cookie-law-makes-most-uk-websites-illegal-what-you-need-to-know/

A universal solution for cookie law compliance. http://civicuk.com/cookie-law/index
A free, open source solution to the EU cookie law. http://silktide.com/cookieconsent

With search engines making changes to how they index web content constantly, and competition getting greater, it is important to be fanatical about technology changes, and be honest with your content.

How does it work?

Microdata are defined pieces of information using a key value pair inside your HTML markup. They are matched with specific 3rd party libraries which are widely accepted by search engines. Each key value pair is called a Schema. There are a choice of libraries, but I am going to be focusing on schema.org for it’s easily accessible website and good compatibility reputation.

Here is an example of how you would change an HTML block to contain Microdata. Consider this blog post.

<div>
<span> <!– START BLOG POST –>
<h1>My Blog Post</h1>
<span>Joe Buckle</span>
<article>Hello World!</article>
<a href=”/my-blog-post.html”>My Blog Post</a>
</span> <!– END BLOG POST –>
</div>

Now we are going to add our microdata. Notice that I have wrapped the block in an itemtype itemscope key value pair. This helps categories this area as an Article, and will match sub metadata or Article with everything it relates to. This helps narrow down the possibilities of what your content could mean.

<div itemtype itemscope=”http://schema.org/Article”>
<span itemprop=”blogPosting”> <!– START BLOG POST –>
<h1 itemprop=”headline”>My Blog Post</h1>
<span itemprop=”author”>Joe Buckle</span>
<article>Hello World!</article>
<a itemprop=”url” href=”/my-blog-post.html”>My Blog Post url</a>
</span> <!– END BLOG POST –>
</div>

By making a few small changes to this block, we are able to give indexing services an indication that this is an article, which is a blog post. We have defined where the headline is, who the author is, and what the permalink is.

Will this help websites get better search engine results?

Whilst using Microdata formats is widely accepted by search engines, it is unlikely to have any short term effects. My belief is that as more advanced search engine algorithms are rolled out that it will become increasingly important to explain your content in much greater depth, and we do this predominantly by using Semantic Markup.

It is possible that years of SEO work on a website has ensured it’s position for the short term, but the long term solution is constant work and fanatical professionals. In my opinion, the very least we can do is ensure that the search engines know what the content on our website means, and can index it the best way it can based on the way we’ve described it.

Additional Resources

schema.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdata_(HTML)” target=”_blank”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdata_(HTML)

We were assigned to build a new seo friendly website that was user friendly, clean & professional to help Fiona gain new customers and find her site after visiting a jewellery exhibition.

This is our first responsive design so we thought that we would take the opportunity to experiment and make the site render in different devices using the less framework.

With thousands of new web designers cropping up everywhere everyone claims to be one, just like cowboy builders, there are many cowboy web designers out there. Many will use themes and charge hundreds/thousands of pounds and don’t do much work or even care about the clients needs.

Today a Web designer is a very broad term. We would recommend that you make sure the freelancer/company you choose has all the skills and knowledge that will make your website successful. There are also many points to consider when choosing your agency or freelancer to make sure you make the right decision.

It’s true you get what you pay for – putting a price on what your business is worth.

It’s very true on the saying ‘ you get what you pay for ‘ Be very careful on cheap designers and developers unless you know them personally or through a friend. This isn’t all-ways the case as they may be building a portfolio or keen to learn ( we know, we have been there ) however as long as you know this and are willing to be patient you should be looked after. Otherwise if you can only afford £300 for example it’s likely you will get a pre-set theme or something very simple without content management.

How much is your business worth? careful planning and investment will ensure you long term results.

Communication is the key to success

Monitor your enquiries and the freelancers/agencies response time when you first contact them.

How long do they take to respond? Communication is vital to building a relationship, If they are slow or take days to reply this is the first sign that your project will take a long time or showing the first signs of communication breakdown.

Commitment

Commitment to the project is equally important as quality of work. Are they egar to work with you long term rather than a quick turnaround to make quick money? Yes they need to get paid, but are they showing wiliness and a genuine interest in your business. Make sure you are on the same wavelength.

Things to look for:

• Do you see evidence of repeat business in their portfolio from existing clients?

• Reviews – see if they have any reviews that sound genuine. You can generally get a good feel for the company by reading client testimonials to see how they interact with the clients.

• Is the portfolio showcasing a range of skills and layouts? Do all their websites look the same? Check they aren’t using the same template over and over again. If so, make sure your aware and know the work involved.

• Check terms and conditions. Also whether or not you will have access to FTP details, PSD’s and any other assets to your project in-case you need them or the company/freelance disappears.

Do you need a designer or a developer?

Most people who claim that they are both must be Einstein and charge £100 an hour. This is very rare, a general rule of thumb is that a designer may know HTML & CSS and general front end skills in web design to get the site working, but they wont know too much on the technical side of things if you need functionality and coding and vise versa. With a coder, they generally have no design skills and want to concentrate on the functionality rather than look and feel.

Plan your project with a informative brief. This will include your requirements for the new site and business plan, where do you see your site in 5 years time? and want you want to gain from the site with functionality and results. This will help you determine whether you need a developer & designer or just a developer / designer.

If dealing with a company/agency will you be allowed to communicate directly with the developer?

Sometimes working with a project manager or sales team doesn’t always mean your ideas will be conveyed correctly to the designers and developers. If managed correctly this can work, however it can go drastically wrong if not managed thoroughly. However saying this, they are the workers so need to spend quality time on the project to get it done efficiently to meet any deadlines. Any comprehensive discussions can lead to delays.

There are many more points to consider, but we could be here for a while. The above outlines the most important things and may help you with your decision.

Here at white fire web design we have both the skills for a well designed, functional site that’s seo friendly. You can find out more about us here, or contact us to have a chat about your project.

First, you will need to enable the WordPress multisite functionality. This is easy.

Navigate to wp-config.php in your WordPress root, and change the following line

define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, false); to define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);

The next step would be to create a network.

Log into your WordPress control panel and navigate to Tools > Network Setup You will need to specify some options. Server Address would be your primary domain name, or the IP of your server. Network Title and Admin Email Address is the reference and email of the primary administrator of the network. In this example, we are going to be using sub directories for our sites – but you can choose to use sub domains if you wish. Once you have chosen these they may be hard to reconfigure later.

Here is an image example, taken from the WordPress knowledge base (I hope they don’t mind).

Now that you have enabled WordPress Multisite and created a network, your WordPress admin panel will change. You can now create as many websites as you like on demand.

Navigate to My Sites > Network Admin > Sites and create a new site. Specify the subdomain of your automatically generated primary domain.
For example http://www.domain.com/second-site/

At this point, you have told WordPress to set up the database tables for a second WordPress site that is located in http://www.domain.com/second-site. But since you haven’t got a website there yet, you must upload it.

Upload your second WordPress site to subdirectory /second-site

At this point you should be able to log into your WordPress control panel and manage your new website(s)

Navigate to My Sites > [website name] > dashboard and this will bring you to the familiar WordPress control panel so that you can manage your 2nd site.

At the moment, all of your created sites will be accessibly by specifying the sub-directory url.
http://www.domain.com/second-site
But what we want is to map primary level domain names to these sub directories to separate them from the domain name it exists. We do this by installing the WordPress MU Domain Mapping Plugin which you can download from here

Note: You MUST ensure that your domain names are pointing to your server IP address

You should be able to install the plugin as normal, but you will also need to take some extra steps

Once the plugin is installed, Navigate to wp-config.php in your WordPress root, and add the following line

define( ‘SUNRISE’, ‘on’ );.

According to the developer, the best place to add this is on the line above the last “require_once”. Inside the plugin directory, you will need to move sunrise.php to /wp-content. If you haven’t done this, it will prompt you to do so before continuing.

Now your Multisite Domain Mapper is installed and you can now redirect your domain names to subdirectory level sites you create in your WordPress Network panel.

Navigate to My Sites > Network Admin > Settings > Domain Mapping and make sure you specify your server IP, and select all options you wish to apply.
Before this next stage, take a note of your Site/Blog ID number. You can do this by navigating to Sites, hovering over the site and reading the number from the URL that’s usually printed in the bottom right hand corner of the screen (in firefox). An example of this url is as follows
http://www.domain.com/wp-admin/network/site-info.php?id=9 – The id number indicates the site/blog ID.
Navigate to My Sites > Network Admin > Settings > Domains. Specify the Site ID collected from our method above. Specify the Domain Name you want to map to the Site ID and save.

If you now point the domain name in your browser, it should resolve to the sub directory site from your primary level domain.

What about Nginx Directives or Apache Mod Rewrite for Multisite?

In order to rewrite permalinks for WordPress Multisite, you may need to add some additional directives or expressions in your configuration. Here are the examples that work for me based on this guide.

Nginx Directives

if (!-e $request_filename) {
rewrite ^/[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+(/wp-.*) $1 last;
rewrite ^/[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+.*(/wp-admin/.*\.php)$ $1 last;
rewrite ^/[_0-9a-zA-Z-]+(/.*\.php)$ $1 last;
}

For more information on Nginx Directives for WordPress click here.

Apache .htaccess

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+) wp-includes/ms-files.php?file=$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?wp-admin$ $1wp-admin/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
RewriteRule ^ – [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(wp-(content|admin|includes).*) $2 [L]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?(.*\.php)$ $2 [L]
RewriteRule . index.php [L]

For more information on Apache rewrites for WordPress click here.

Additional Resources

Creating a WordPress Network
WordPress MU Domain Mapping

I also wanted to stand out from shared hosting services, so I started making bold decisions on what software to use, one of which was replacing tradition Apache web server software with Nginx, a newer and of course, less known web server.

So, what were my reasons for choosing Nginx? Well, the 3 main reasons are as follows…

1. Event Driven Architecture: Any good developer would know that reserving memory pockets to perform tasks will be much much faster than processing a task on request. I like to call this asynchronous memory partitioning. Nginx tries to predict how much memory each task will use and keep this immediately available. Apache and some other popular web server suffer from the C10K problem, which is an age old issue where the web server can only process a request, then has to wait until that process is complete before accepting the next request. One of the greatest explanation of Event Driven Architecture is The Doctor’s Office Reception Line Analogy with regards to Node.js, which is also an event driven web server using only Javascript.

2. Speed: Because of this Event Driven Architecture, Nginx stores web sites in the RAM once a connection has been made, making a very fast experience for users browsing websites hosted here. Since the web server is only processing the request once, it no longer needs to do it again, unlike process driven web servers. This means Nginx can do other things rather than repeating the same tasks over and over.

3. Resource Management: Nginx manages the server resources much better. Coupled with a good Linux OS, Nginx has a low memory footprint. It will remove any dormant information in the RAM blocks to replace it with new information. Although this creates a delay with websites that haven’t been requested for a while, once it has been requested – the ram blocks are restored and the delay is still minimal.

Although this is brilliant, it’s not been without it’s faults in my experience. However, the issues that I faced were easily overcome with a few small configuration tweaks.

1. The PHP-FPM FastCGI Wrapper Nginx, unlike Apache, doesn’t come with a PHP-Mod by default. Instead it needs a wrapper to parse PHP scripts. If you are running a server with multiple sites on it, I recommend you use PHP-FPM sockets to limit the resources each site uses. When I first started using this, I wasn’t doing that I was allowing all available resources for each site. The servers memory was getting compromised which caused crashing. Using all memory for each site will cause a serious memory leak. Use a socket, specify the resources. Here is a generic example I have been using for each site which seems to work well. Make sure these are included in your PHP-FPM per site conf
pm.max_children = 4
pm.start_servers = 2
pm.min_spare_servers = 1
pm.max_spare_servers = 3

2. Permalink Rewriting Nginx has a different way of rewriting URL permalinks. If you are used to Apache, you would use the lovable Mod-Rewrite and write regular expressions in .htaccess to specify arguments for URL rewriting. Unfortunately, Nginx does everything you need that Apache does, but has a different method. Instead, Nginx uses Location Directives specified in the .conf file. After a little while of getting frustrated on how to use them, eventually they become easy. This is a small price to pay for a highly optimised web server.

Here is an Nginx Directive example for WordPress that will rewrite your URLs like Apache Mod Rewrite.

if (!-e $request_filename)
rewrite ^(.+)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;
}

In conclusion, I have decided to use Nginx in both my live and development environments as it’s default web server. It performs excellently and is easy to maintain. It is scaleable and lightweight. It is fast and memory efficient.

This hits all the right buttons for me and I hope that Nginx developers and contributors keep up this fantastic work.

The client needed a logo designed and full branding to launch the new business model, We have provided a bespoke wordpress design which includes a custom portfolio using the blogging functionality.

The client needed a complete refresh of their online appearance with a new, professional and welcoming site. The old site never had any enquiries so our task was to improve this. The revamp defiantly has a warm friendly feel.