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Consulting Services
February 27, 2007 — Tim NashWe will be rolling out our new sites (the Tag It directory and re launch of Venture Skills main site) and as part of their launches we will be introducing new services for smaller sites and therefore we are testing a couple of the services and want to offer these to our blog readers
Audio consultation via Phone or Skype
We are offering hour long consultation via Skype and or by the phone (though our preference is via Skype as we can add video and screen sharing facilities) in the following subjects;
- Drupal Content Management system deployment and module choices
- Search engine optimisation site review
- On-line Reputation management introduction
If your interested in taking part and wish an hour worth of consultation then send me an email t.nash@venture-skills.co.uk with the site in question which subject you want want, and any specific questions you want answered, we will then arrange a suitable time to do the consultation.
In terms of payment we will be charging £25 ($50, €40) when it goes live however for the time being we will be suggesting that those who are participating contribute a little (think of it as a donation) but we will leave how much you want to pay up to you though I suggest around £13 ($25, €20) which makes this very good value.
Half day workshop
This really is only for those in the UK but we will also be offering a half day workshop in the same subjects as above but the difference is that it will be much more in depth and face to face at your premises or alternate location. The workshop is up to 5 people and would normally cost £125 plus travel costs. Again if your interested please email t.nash@venture-skills.co.uk with the site or sites in question a subject matter and any specific questions you would want answering.
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Google Custom Search Engine now with supplemental results but still no bulk upload!
February 22, 2007 — Tim NashGoogle CSE has been a favourite search engine, for multiple sites, check out some of our previous articles on using it within AJAX so you never leave your own site, well they have now added supplemental results for some but not all engines. To qualify you must meet one of two conditions, Be running less then 3 sites within your searches, or be using the standard Google index. Most engines are multiple sites so this perhaps is not good news, but for those who meet the require and have supplemental results within their 3 or less sites it will hopefully increase your number of searchable pages. It would have been nice if they had offered ways to switch on and off supplemental results, and a means to seperate them from the main search. For more information see the Google FAQ page here
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In defence of sitemaps
February 22, 2007 — Tim NashThere have been a couple of posts about the validity of site maps as a SEO technique the latest post from Rand at SEOmoz but why has the golden boy lost his glow?
Basically the argument goes, a search engine crawls a site in an organic way, it discovers pages through links internal and external and weighs those links accordingly. By submit a site map a web master is overriding this basic checking service, If a page couldn’t be crawled it would be noticed and could be rectified, however now any page in the site map will be crawled even if its an orphan. Is this a serious problem?
Yes and No, It is a problem if pages are orphaned and the site owner is unaware of the issue, it is not an issue if the page is a deliberate orphan (such as a landing page) but you still want it searched now most landing pages will have in bound external links after all that’s the point, but some may not for what ever reason. The second is a well designed site will have the necessary design structure to stop orphaning occurring, most modern site, uses categories or tags as means of structure and most CMS build these navigational aids in by default.
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Planning the move – Moving a blog – Part1
February 19, 2007 — Tim NashAs we begin the start of our move to our new home, I thought I would discuss some of the problem and pitfalls of moving a blog to a new domain/site and how best to deal with these minor crisis’s. but before we start we need to think through the whole process and ask ourselves why we are moving.
Why are you moving?
When people first start a blog it normally starts on one of the free services such as wordpress.com or blogger, these services provide a great no risk way to get a blog of the ground and most people are busy with there first post in a matter of minutes. However as time marches on the limitations of these services start to appear, the ability to adapt the theme to the way you want or to add that really cool widget you saw on some one site starts to build. The answer is to set up a new site but how do you manage migration of visitors? This site was kept separate from the Venture Skills site to help gain multiple positions on SERP for our own brand, but it has grown into a nice budding community and now it’s time for it to rejoin the main site, when V3 is launched in the near future. So this series will act as the demonstration for the techniques discussed.
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Odiogo arrives on the blog
February 19, 2007 — Tim NashAs part of an experiment, we have joined the Odiogo audio blogging program, for more details click here but in brief Odiogo offers
- Automatic podcast generation
- “Near-human” quality text-to-speech
- Drag-and-drop integration on your blog
- Detailed download statistics
- Make money from embedded ads
- Leverages RSS feeds of all blogging platforms such as Typepad and Blogger
Source: odiogo.com
Is your linkbait not working? try writing instead…
February 15, 2007 — Tim Nash
del.icio.us
Now we are very lucky at Venture Skills to be able to pull on a copywriter for our clients (but I’m cheap scate so you get me for the blog) most sites are not so lucky, however there are hundreds of tutorials on writing good Linkbait out there some go deep into branding and how focus your users on pages and sites, some look to women magazines for help. What ever your method this is article is about what to do when it fails…
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SEO and reputation management round up.
February 12, 2007 — Tim Nash del.icio.us | 
digg it
With all the Drupal bits on the blog recently people may be wondering if we do any reputation management at all so I thought I would provide a run down of some of our popular, and not so popular content.
- Do you have a links policy – If you don’t why not?
- Promoting yourself online feedback - Our skypecast feedback, yes we did several skypwcasts..
- Welcome to dumbest mistake in SEO – we all make mistakes even Tim
- Reputation management Podcast – Tim speaks on planning your sites call to action thrilling…
- 7 Technologies that make SEO easy – perfect Linkbait! nope almost no bites and we included IBM omnifind on there
- Why Blog - shameless, and we know it, but why do you blog?
- Are paid for links worth it – do you have morals?
- Drupal & SEO a good combination? – We couldn’t not have a Drupal post now could we!
HReview a CCK example part 1 – Contemplate
February 12, 2007 — Tim Nash
In our previous series about CCK and views we showed very simple ways to create new nodes and methods of display, we are going to take a more in depth look at using the CCK and contemplate modules. If you haven’t already read through the basic tutorials if you are unfamiliar with CCK, I’m going to presume you have both modules installed, and they are working correctly, for ease of use we will also be using the Date module which is an addon for CCK.
CCK & Views the ultimate combination – part 3
February 12, 2007 — Tim NashDrupal is a fantastic content management system but is perhaps not the most non developer friendly however 3 simple modules can help you create compelling and powerful web site. So in this 3 part mini series lets see how easy it is to develop new content types and ways to view it. To help us lets use a fictitious company called AA Design who are about to start teaching a range of courses.
Quick note this post refers to Drupal 4.7 however several of these modules are now available for Drupal 5
Themeing our CCK and Views
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