If you approach a company (or one approaches you) regarding the development of a website, the chances are it is going to be involving a content management system. Practically nobody uses static web files anymore when building a website, due to the bad scalability and flexibiility, which is why the CMS became an ideal solution – but here are a couple of points to consider before saying ‘yes’ to a web company.

Maintenance

Having a website is great, and it’s even better if it’s your first one. Once the site is launched you may presume nothing else will need to be changed as you discussed the requirements fully with your developer – but that’s (almost) never true. Using a bespoke CMS means you are usually locked in with the web company should anything need to be changed, even for little things such as updating a home page image, so it is important to think ahead before proceeding with a project.

The value of an open-source content management system means that you can usually complete the changes yourself, and if not, there are hundreds of support forums and people available to help you along your way.

Scalability

As mentioned with static websites, the biggest problem is often when you wish to improve the functionality or add additional components to an existing page or website, and this can often be a difficult aspect with bespoke systems.

As an example, you may decide that you wish to have a contact form on your website, that allows visiting users to send you an enquiry without having to email directly. With an open-source CMS, such as WordPress, the process of this is very fast, as it can be done efficiently and securely through the use of plugins. However, with a custom CMS you will often have to go back to the original web agency, who will then quote for the work, and come back to you with a date and price for completion – both of which you should want to avoid.

Contracts

From experience, most web companies that develop using custom content management systems often try to get you involved in ongoing maintenance contracts, or simply don’t provide the client with the neccasary details to pass on to another company to use (such as FTP and CMS login details). This is bad for two reasons, firstly; you are tied to the original company for any changes to be made (as above), or worst still, you may lose contact with the company who developed the website and won’t be able to get any changes made at all in the future.

A large aspect of running a succesful business is being efficent with money, so you shouldn’t want to be paying ongoing contracts or one-off charges where they are simply not neccasary. If the worst comes to worst and you can’t count on the original company to make changes (or you don’t want to go back to them), this is potentially going to cost you a lot more money as the simplest solution for a new company would be to rebuild the website entirely (using an open-source content management system, I would hope).

Not all custom CMS are bad – as they may be needed in some cases where an open-source solution doesn’t do the job in hand. But for 5 or 10 page websites for a standard business, or websites without the need for bespoke solutions, there is simply no need to restrict somebody or cause potential issues in the future.

PushON develop search engine friendly websites with WordPress, Drupal and Magento – all of which are open-source content management systems with a whole heap of support online. We obviously would like our clients to come back to us should they need any further developments or help with their systems, but the option is there for them to control their website – as after all, it is their website.

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General WordPress Plugins:

• Akismet – a comment spam filter that successfully reduces the number of spam comments on your blog.
• Lightbox Plus – automatically sets all images in your blog posts to open in a light box, by default WordPress opens images in the same window and some users find it hard to return to the original post.
• NoFollow Free – removes the nofollow tag from your comment links, we’ve debated this one for a while but as long as you have Akismet enabled and moderate your comments then extra relevant comments can only help your blog.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade – allows you to upgrade your blog quickly and securely.
• WordPress Database Backup – backs up your database on demand or through a scheduler.
• WP Security Scan – ensures that you have taken every step to secure your blog.
• cformsII – allows you to create advanced contact forms for WordPress pages quickly and easily.
• Google Analytics for WordPress – adds your google tracking code to your blog so you can see how many users you’ve had, where they’ve come from, what they’re viewing and lots of other bits of information!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) WordPress Plugins:

• All In One SEO Pack – allows you to set your own meta details including title, keyword and description amongst other things.
• Google XML Sitemaps – generates a standards compliant XML sitemap for your WordPress blog.

Social Media WordPress Plugins:

• ShareThis – allows users to share your blog posts on social bookmarking website including Digg, Facebook and MySpace.
• Twitter Tools – publishes links to your blog posts as tweets.
• SphinnIt – adds a Sphinn button to all blog posts.
• Flickr Photo Album – allows you to pull in Flickr photosets and display them on your blog

Don’t agree or think we’ve missed something please leave a comment below, we’re always eager to learn!

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At first we were slightly skeptical as we wanted to make use of stylish drop down menus and insert customisable video’s. Luckily we found some excellent plugins for such things. This is where WordPress really comes into its own. We used the Multi-Level Navigation plugin and also the Smart Youtube plugin. We found these gave us excellent results.

The other thing we were slightly concerned about was accessibility. We are strong believers in accessibility and wanted to ensure we could continue to deliver accessible sites. Fortunately WordPress doesn’t incorporate a lot of useless code in to a site. Although we have used WordPress as a full CMS before we found the updates in the new version to be extremely useful. The content restore feature especially. We are very pleased with the new design and if you ever need home or industrial insulation services give Sprayseal a try.

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Over the past week we have noticed that WordPress blogs (including this one) have not been indexed by Google. After investigation we decided to deactivate all of our plugins, upgrade the blog and ensure that it was being pinged out to all of the search engines and it seems to have worked!

The steps we took were:

• Backup the blog files
• Backup the database using WordPress Database Backup
• Disable all plugins through the admin
• Follow the instructions to upgrade WordPress
• Ensure that the blog is secure using WP Security Scan
• Enable only essential plugins

The only problem now is that we’re not using Feedburner and several of our other plugins are still disabled. Several people have commented that it may be Feedburner that is causing the blog not to be indexed so we have now installed Joost de Valk’s RSS Footer plugin which links back to the blog and have re-enabled Feedburner.

If you have any more suggestions or have had similar problems then please let us know by leaving a comment.

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The extremely useful Google Webmaster Tools indicates nothing we should be concerned of,

So what have we done to try and fix it?

We’ve checked our robots.txt file and sitemaps and they all seem fine. We’ve updated to the latest version of WordPress to ensure there are no issues with duplicate content due to canonicalization. We double checked our feeds via Feedburner are active and working correctly and they are.

So what has changed?

Well, we’re left suspecting that the method we are using to display our RSS feed on our new website has had some detrimental effect on our blog. The other point of note is that 2 weeks ago we experienced 2 Sundays in a row where our web server was down for lengthy periods. Could it be that Google has decided due to the lack of availability during those periods we are no longer a reliable source? If this is the case it’s really does highlight the importance of reliable hosting solutions.

If anyone has any other thoughts as to what might have happened then please let us know.

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