Hit Reach to build Websites & App Store for Mobile Devices

September 1, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

Mobile Devices LogoMobile Devices offer a complete line of dedicated and standardized platforms for fleet management and telematics applications.

Hit Reach have been commissioned  to provide the award winning company with 2 new websites including an app store to cater for their B2B and B2c markets.

The company has one of the largest installed basis and an international presence in more than 20 countries spanning 4 continents.

In 2007 they completed fund raising of €3,1 Million and received their first round of investment from Innovacom.

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How to Remove the Category Base From WordPress URLs

August 20, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist 1 Comment

A lot of WordPress themes automatically show a list of the tags and categories which were assigned to a page or post.

Great for the search engines and users finding groups of posts they might be interested in but with one very annoying consequence.

The addition of /category/ into your URL as below:

how to remove the category base from wordpress urls

It looks messy, cheap, longer means harder to remember and adds no value whatsoever.

This is a technique I use on most of the WordPress sites we build in order to remove the category base from the site URLs and acheive this instead:

remove the category base from wordpresss urls

Here is the solution:

1) In your wp-includes/category-template.php file search for the following line of code:

$catlink = get_option(‘home’) . user_trailingslashit($catlink, ‘category’);

Directly below that, insert the following line of code:

$catlink = str_replace(‘/category’, “”, $catlink);

2) In your wp-includes/classes.php file search for the following block of code:

if ( isset($error) )$this->query_vars['error'] = $error;

Just below that, insert the following:

if (@$this->query_vars["name"] == “page”){$tmp_ar = $this->query_vars;$this->query_vars = array();$this->query_vars["paged"] = str_replace(“/”, “”, $tmp_ar["page"]);$this->query_vars["category_name"] = $tmp_ar["category_name"];}

3) Finally, in your .htacces file, add the following to redirect your old /category/ URLs to your new ones (if your blog doesn’t reside in the root, you’ll have to tweak it):

RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
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New Offices

August 17, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

We’ve recently moved into our new offices at 37 West Port, Arbroath.

The painter still needs to do his thing inside and out but here’s some temporary pics of the outside and training area in the meantime.

Hit Reach Offices

Hit Reach Offices

Hit Reach Offices

Hit Reach Offices

Hit Reach Offices

Hit Reach Offices

Filed Under: Blog

Update Services Ping List for WordPress

August 13, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

When you create a new WordPress blog you will find that if you jump Settings > Writing and then look down to the bottom of the page there is a section called ‘Update Services’.

From the Codex:
“Update Services are tools you can use to let other people know you’ve updated your blog. WordPress automatically notifies popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Now people browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts!”

Wordpress Update Services

By default it will contain http://rpc.pingomatic.com as shown on the image above.

But there are lots more services that you can notify too. Below is a list you can copy and paste into your update services list to gain increased exposure for your new posts.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/

http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php

http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

Enjoy!

Filed Under: Blog

The Viking Laws and Business 1000 years later

July 26, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

I was at a self defence seminar last weekend and spotted a poster on the wall which showed a list of the old Viking laws.

The rules were there to illustrate how the ancient values of the 8th century ’raiders and traders’ could be translated into our modern day approach to martial arts but I realised it’s also incredible how many of their laws are still relevant 1000 years later but with regards to a successful approach to business and entrepreneurship.

Naturally some have a more conceptual relationship whilst others are in fact very literal.

Here’s the list of Viking laws:

  • Be brave and aggressive
    • Be direct
    • Grab all opportunities
    • Use varying methods of attack
    • Be versatile and agile
    • Attack one target at a time
    • Don’t plan everything in detail
    • Use top quality weapons
  • Be prepared
    • Keep weapons in good condition
    • Keep in shape
    • Find good battle comrades
    • Agree on important points
    • Choose one chief
  • Be a good merchant
    • Find out what the market needs
    • Don’t promise what you can’t keep
    • Don’t demand overpayment
    • Arrange things so that you can return
  • Keep the camp in order
    • Keep things tidy and organised
    • Arrange enjoyable activities which strengthen the group
    • Make sure everybody does useful work
    • Consult all members of the group for advice

Here’s a very brief list of relvant quotes from well known names in business which immediately sprang to mind whilst reading the list:

Be direct: “Simple and to the point is always the best way to get your point across.” – Guy Kawasaki

Use varying methods of attack: “When somebody challenges you, fight back. Be brutal, be tough.” – Donald Trump

Be versatile and agile: “If you have a problem with confidence, hide your fear. Feeling nervous and uncertain in new situations is normal. You’ll soon adapt.” – Sir Alan Sugar

What laws apply most to your business? Do you have any quotes from well known business figures that are directly relevant?

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7 Ways Business Owners Can Instantly Supercharge Profits Using The Internet…

June 29, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist 1 Comment

This is a guest post by a well known and respected leader in the internet marketing scene, James Schramko.

James left his $300k per annum salary to become his own boss and now makes even more than he did in his very successful ‘real job’.

Below he shares just some of the methods he used to acheive this. Enjoy…

The Internet is changing rapidly. One of the biggest challenges you face as a business is knowing the right things to DO so that you harness all that potential and turn it into profit. I’m going to teach you stuff I’ve done, stuff that works.

“There is nothing as useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all” – Peter Drucker

Get ready to harness the leverage.

The great thing about when you have properly set up your business for the internet is that you don’t need to be there all the time. In other words, it can work for you 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

When you compare that to the cost of a one-time newspaper advertisement you can see the compound effect of any energy you put towards enhancing your online presence.

Step 1 – Get a Support Desk Setup

Customer service is one of the resource intensive areas many businesses struggle with. As your business grows, so to will your support requirements. I recommend every business get a ‘helpdesk’ which can take the first line of defense for customer service. This is software you install (preferably on a separate domain name).

Your support system will automatically answer many frequently asked questions and allow you the ability to have outsourced help. Once you set up the help desk you are now ready to scale up traffic to your business.

Step 2 – Social Media Presence

Love it or hate it, you need a voice on the most popular social networks. Setup a Fan page on Facebook for your business. It has a viral effect when people join it. This can help you build a database of clients and at the same time the perfect platform to create sales buzz.

Twitter and LinkedIn are the two other major social media platforms to pay attention too. By linking your website to these social platforms you can automate broadcasts to your target market.

For an example see the how the $1billion dollar online shoe store Zappos deals with social media:
http://twitter.com/zappos 1,7 million followers!
http://www.facebook.com/#!/zappos?v=wall 53,200 fans!

You should also consider having a dynamic element to your website such as a blog. Blogs provide the client the ability to comment and more importantly, share your content easily with social sites.

Step 3 – Outsource Your Work

There’s hardly anything that you can’t ask someone else to do when it comes to the Internet. In the beginning it can be tempting to want to do everything yourself. The reality is we are not all gifted at design, graphics, publishing websites, etc.

Here are some examples of work you can have done by contractors:

You can have a content-writer who prepares and distributes content for you. You don’t have to do anything but come up with the idea. Once the content is prepared you can have them and submit that content to your website.

You can employ a graphics designer, a programmer, a web designer and a search engine optimization specialist for very low rates on a per unit basis.

It’s about finding people who are really good at what you need to have done, and have them do it. The rewards are far greater than what you’re going to pay them.

Step 4 – Create a Range of Digital Products

You don’t have to only deal in physical products or services if you don’t want to.
Adding information products such as high quality PDF reports, whitepapers, video and audio can enhance your profit with hardly any effort.

Your clients are craving ‘how to’ information and these form the perfect compliment to almost any business. You can even give some premium content away for free just to get your prospects into your database. Once they are there you can make them repeated sales offers mixed into great content.

Step 5 – Research

Not the sexiest topic, but it will make or break your business. Imagine if in the real world, you just bought a block of land, and you had this fantastic idea. So you built a building, and got all the staff and put the product out there and no-one buys it. So you go bankrupt.

It’s no different online. A lot of people just come in and don’t have guidelines to judge things. Doing research allows you to find out whether you’re going to win or lose before you even enter the market. If you already have a website you should do this exercise to find hidden opportunities:

Get onto Google and see what’s happening right now, who’s buying and who’s selling and for how much. The whole web is driven from keywords. Keywords are the building blocks of everything. When we go to Google, we type in a keyword. What we put in, will determine what we get out. We need to know the keywords that the buyers are using, and then we need to make sure that it’s OUR STUFF that will come out.

Step 6 – Website Tune Up

Go to your website and make sure it does not say “Welcome to our website”. That is boring and ineffective. Make sure you put a compelling and related benefit instead such as: “Termites Eradicated Fast” etc…

Make sure your page title has your keyword with a benefit in it. This is the little text at the very top of the browser. If it says “home” or “Welcome” you need to slap the web designer and then get a new one!

These small tweaks will make a HUGE difference to traffic and conversions.

Step 7 – Traffic

You can’t get too much traffic. Make sure you take advantage of thre three main types of traffic. If you miss one you are losing money.

Paid traffic is important because if you can make money with free traffic, then you can make more money with paid traffic. Most internet marketers only focus on just free traffic. People get obsessed with free, but that’s really no way to run a business, is it? Consider a Google Pay Per Click campaign with the help of a professional.

Borrowed traffic is when you know someone who already has your customers and you ask them to send them to you. You can tell them that they’ve got the customers, you’ve got the product, and tell them to send over the customers. You can cross-populate things very easily. You might have heard of what’s called a “joint venture”.

Free Traffic is where you submit premium content on your site and away from your site pointing back top your site. Search engines and humans love this and they will bring many visitors to your website.

Find out about James Schramko’s Business Internet Formula course:
CLICK HERE

James Schramko

http://www.BusinessInternetFormula.com

About James Schramko

James is a leader in the Internet Marketing scene. Much of his work is undetectable on the surface hence the term “underground marketer”.

The connections and network of serious multi-millionaire Internet entrepreneurs James has built up over the last few years is astounding. He is able to access the highest level knowledge fast.

Based in Sydney, James runs his profitable business with very few team members, zero staff. The techniques he uses are often simple yet powerful. He is sharing many of these in this course.

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At a glance: Web conferencing & remote training software from GoToMeeting

May 28, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

We have 3 main uses for web conference & remote training software:

  1. Team meetings because we are distributed across multiple locations
  2. Remote training for clients who don’t want on site training
  3. Technical Support for clients or cross department support

We’ve used a few (of the hundreds?) of web conf/meeting options and are finding GoToMeeting definately one of the better ones.

Quick glance features and things we like:

  1. Only £30 a month. Discounts for annual subscriptions
  2. Schedule meetings in advance or start them immediately
  3. Call in via your phone or using mic & speakers
  4. Displays name of the person who is talking. Handy if you don’t easily recognise other participants voices
  5. Up to 16 people can join on the basic package
  6. You can record the meeting – both video and audio
  7. Show your screen. If you use multiple screens you can choose which one(s) to show and also choose to hide your desktop icons
  8. Give control of your keyboard and mouse to others
  9. Make others presenters enabling them to share their screen
  10. Control whether attendees can use the chat window and see the attendee list and mute them all during presentations to avoid background noise

You can easily invite people because GoToMeeting populates your clipboard with the meeting details so you can just paste them into emails to fire off to participants without having to find and type out all the access codes etc.

Bigger companies will no doubt have much more specific needs but for day to day team meetings and remote training GoToMeeting is easy to use, reliable and at £30 a month it’s a no brainer.

 You can get a free 30 day trial here: http://www.gotomeeting.com

Anyone else find this a great solution compared to things like Adobe Connect which cost a fortune and don’t offer much extra?

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Best UK Web Hosting for Multiple WordPress Sites

May 26, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist 2 Comments

Having tried out quite a few web hosts I think that Heart Internet are currently the best UK web hosting company for multiple WordPress sites.

Here’s a list of the main things I like about their Reseller Hosting for hosting WP sites primarily. Everything is optional and free unless stated.

  1. Price is decent at less than £30 per month. Discounts if you pay anually
  2. Unlimited Domains, Accounts, Storage and Bandwidth (subject to fair usage – same as everyone else)
  3. Create different hosting package configurations to assign to clients
  4. Brandable control panels
  5. Integrated support ticket system for your customers
  6. Renewal reminder system for each account domain
  7. Gmail and Google Apps DNS checkboxes for auto setup on domains
  8. One click WP install – obviously :)
  9. Price Freeze – Your account never increases during the term of contract
  10. Support ticketing system (see below)
  11. You can upgrade and use custom nameservers. Costs £100 per year - but domain bling is cool!
  12. Customer database you can send out bulk emails via ie to notify of offers etc
  13. Decide what if anything customers can access in their own control panel area
  14. HostPay is a shopping cart system to let customers buy or renew services directly through their account
  15. Personalised SSL certificates are reasonable at £149 per year

I actually looked at using Heart Internet quite a few years back and the thing which put me off was the fact that they didn’t (and still don’t) offer phone support.

The fact is though that even with the other hosts we use it’s rarely something I ever want to use now as the ticketing systems are so much more efficient nowadays.

I’ve contacted Heart support about a few things, and sometimes just to test their support reliability in the middle of the night with non urgent issues, and I’ve never had a single response to a new ticket take more than 10 minutes. Normally once a ticket is open replies back to updates are practically instant as they must be monitored in real time for updates.

The only 2 annoying things are that new hosting accounts take up to 1 hour to set up. I don’t know why they take that long but it’s not something that will impact too much as it’s rare you ever NEED an account up and running in less time than that.

The other thing is that if they host a domain you can only 302 redirect it to another URL rather than choose a 301 option. To do this you have to actually set up a new account then 301 the domain using htaccess or php script. Why this is the case I have no idea but hopefully they will take my feature request into consideration shortly :)

Other than these points they are pretty solid and my only preference to Dream Host over Heart Internet is just my familiarity with the layout of the control panels.

They offer a 30 day back gurantee and even after this period you only have to give 3 days notice to cancel so you can try them out quite easily for yourself.

Let me know how you get on or what you think if you currently use them.

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The Fun Friday Roundup 21st May 2010

May 21, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist Leave a Comment

What we’ve done in work

  • Worked on various WordPress Themes, and WordPress, Drupal and .Net CMS support.
  • A hideous amount of banners in both english and spanish.
  • Flash galleries with over 300 images
  • Built 3 new WordPress based sites
  • Literally a SEA of site updates
  • Took on a WordPress developer full time
  • Bugfixing Cold Fusion applications
  • Started building our next in-house project (will post about it next week)

What we’ve done out of work

  • Sev saw renowned Spanish guitarist Juan Martin live. Consumed too much curry, beer, cookies and wine over the weekend so followed this with 5km mixed-hill runs 3 times in 4 days.
  • Alex has started early morning swimming and entered a triathalon.
  • Matt went to watch Oxford get back into the football league at Wembley, the Tate 10th Anniversary and ran in a 5k race (although not very quickly!)
  • Simon played my last gigs with Screeching Weasel and the Riverdales.
  • Chris has been ill :( But still worked and managed to find a dynamite domain :)  

Stuff we discovered this week

  • “Resx Editor” http://sourceforge.net/projects/resx/ is a great tool to give to translators who don’t understand the .NET Resource Files you want to give them when making multi-lingual .NET websites.
  • Google Web fonts!!!!
  • There is NO WAY to batch save creating unique file names in Photoshop…someone should write a script that does this. Please?
Filed Under: Blog

10 Best WordPress Plugins in 2010

May 14, 2010 By Chris Gilchrist 17 Comments

Anytime we build a WordPress site for a client we nearly always end up installing the same plugins initially as they are typically useful on every site nowadays regardless of the goals of the site.

If you are using WordPress for your site and not using any of these plugins they are well worth checking out. I’d got as far as to say these are THE 10 essential wordpress plugins right now.

Some enable clients to manage more aspects of the site for themselves, some help them manage the site by reducing the work they have to do and others work behind the scenes to improve the site’s effectiveness.

Obviously this list is accurate at the time of writing but we will revisit it and update it if needbe throughout 2010 to keep it relevant. They are listed alphabetically as we are not ranking them. Why do people do plugin ranking lists? They are only either useful or not. Anyway…

Let’s get to it. On with the 10 best wordpress plugins in 2010:

All In One SEO Pack

Set it up for the client and it will run on autopilot populating the meta data and page titles automatically for every page and post.

You can choose which elements of the post and pages it uses to produce the data and the format it gets presented in so the client doesn’t have to worry about populating the SEO settings as they go along. Every post/page also has an option to overwrite the pre-defined settings on a page by page basis for the more on-site SEO savvy clients or for times you want to help them really optimise some killer content they want to utilise to the fullest.

Cforms

Cforms is an awesome plugin. I think it’s the most advanced, flexible and documented plugin I’ve come across.

The plugin allows you to create forms for your site using a visual editor to create the fields and decide on the behaviour of the form. You can almost do anything you can think of that you could create without the limitation of a typical plugin.

Choose from pre defined styles for the forms or style your own (supports multiple styles across the site), custom error messages, make fields requires, type of input, choose the redirect page on submission, post the form data to an alternative place, receive notifications of submissions, set a from email address and populate and control autoresponders, create a chain of multi page forms that pass data along the chain, captcha and user Q&A and lots more.

And that’s for each form. And you can create as many as you like.

You can also control global settings like what mail servers it uses, the captcha and user Q&A questions, pop up date pickers and so on.

If you are willing to depart from the glossy front end and get your hands dirty in the code you can also create dynamic forms and have things like different redirect pages activated based on form choices byt the user to send them to different payment pages for example.

The other amazing new feature is the tracking facilities. Instead of the data just being emailed to a client you can just turn on tracking and all form submissions will be stored in a new table in your WP database. It even activates a nice front end in the admin system so the client can click one button to download all the form submissions they have received, which are tagged according to which form the user filled in, so they can use the data for marketing or importing into their CRM.

Adding the forms to a post or page is as simple as pasting in a small snippet of code so clients can easily do it themselves or it makes your web developer adding a new form a very simple job.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin generates an xml sitemap when once activated notifies Google and other search engines when a new page or post is created and helps them find your content by keeping them up to date with the structure of your site.

You can set the frequency that pages on your site are updated, choose which types of pages to include or not in the sitemap and which search engines you want to update either automatically as your site is updated or manually if you prefer to have more control over the process.

Awesome plugin to leave running in the background. Clients don’t have to touch it and it keeps Google updated with what they do on the site.

My Page Order

It does what it says and lets you rearrange all the pages on the site. Perfect for when clients add new pages themselves and also saves the headache of having to manually assign the order for the developer.

You order the pages using drag and drop so it’s nice and easy and supports multi level menus.

WordPress Related Posts

This plugin automatically inserts a list of related posts to the end of your posts and feeds to keep people on the site for longer and help them easily find related content.

If there are no related posts you can either display nothing, a list of random posts or posts with the most comments count.

You can manually insert where the list appears using a snippet of code or have it automatically appear at the end of posts.

Simply Exclude

This plugin lets you easily prevent pages, posts, categories and tags appearing on pages, feeds, searches and archives.

Great if you create pages that are not relevant for people finding in searches on your site or posts not worthy of being added to a popular feed.

Sociable

This plugin lets you add social sharing and bookmarking icons to the bottom of posts and/or pages.

There over 100 icons you can add and it’s done easily using check boxes to activate or disable the ones you want and drag and drop to assign the order.

You can easily decide which types of pages you want them added to, use your own icons instead of the default ones provided and integrate with bookmarking API’s.

Unlike Add This it doesn’t self promote in the sharing links (so lame Add This!).

Ultimate Noindex Nofollow Tool

Easily assign which types of pages or individual pages and posts you don’t want to be indexed Google.

This keeps the SERPs focussed on the most important pages and areas of the site and again it can be preset and run on autopilot but with the ability to add individual posts/pages if you need to.

WP-SpamFree

We choose this over Akismet every time. Powerful, robust and effective. Say goodbye to comment and form spam.

WP Super Cache

Speed up word press using Super Cache which “generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.”

With site load speed now being a factor in the Google algorithm you should definately be using this one

That’s the list!

Did you find one you didn’t know about before? Are there alternatives that you prefer using?

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