The Venture Skills Blog

The first round of beta’s for Drupal 6 is out and its better the ever, you can grab the code from Drupal main site at drupal.org and read all the new features from the release notice.

After eight months of development, we are proud to let you know that the first beta version of the Drupal 6.x family is released. This beta includes a tremendous number of new features and new programming APIs for both users and developers.
http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0-beta1

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Their are plenty of guides out there dedicated to the subject of creating sites for niches and complete case studies on SEO for a niche site, my favourite series by far is by Matt Coddington at Net Business Blog and his current series a case study of a niche is a fantastic read, you could also try Self made minds Blog by Scott and Al or Ashs’ very quick guide. So what can I possibly add to the subject, well this series will combine several passions of the blog Drupal and SEO/SEM as we look at how to develop a niche based Drupal site, monetize it and promote it. What’s more we will be following a real site and you will be able to see if it works or not.
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One of the most important things about Search engine optimisation and any sort of on-line marketing is being able to measure our success. Enter Google Analytics a free service from Google which

generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that a webmaster can optimize their AdWords advertisement and marketing campaigns through the use of GA’s analysis of where the visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website, and their geographical position.

- Wikipedia

It first appeared in 2005 after Google bought its parent company who’s software was called Urchin (indeed the script is still referred to as Urchin as we will see later) and is now used on literally thousands of blogs and sites across the world. Unlike many tracking software that your web host may provide you Google Analytics uses Javascript as its mean of tracking by placing a cookie on your visitors system. The pro’s of this includes the ability to find out far more about visitors, but also leads to privacy issues, and because javascript can be turned off and cookies disabled visitors can “avoid” tracking. Even with these limitations its still a great system and one we use on all our sites where possible.

Getting it up and running is simple so lets get started!
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Its time to do a more in depth write up on Drupal and SEO there have been several floating around recently and hopefully this will help tie down the various ideas that have been floating around. But lets start with some of the simple bits like…

Getting past the deadly sins

I wrote a short article on the Deadly sins of SEO websites these sins were on the whole received well by readers though one blogger did I feel miss the point of the article (Though his follow up post is a remarkable piece of work and well worth a read! I love his idea of me on an ego trip), but to summarize these are the major sins I feel are committed by some companies and we all have done them in the past to which in my mind there are no excuses partly as some of them are legality and partly because they are common sense. Here they are:

• No Alt attribute in image tags
• Use of tables for design
• Not using heading tags
• Images instead of text
• Failure to declare a doctype
• failure to declare a language
• Not using robot.txt or htaccess files to control spiders (and people)

Now people added several others including sitemaps, keywords in titles etc, but I initially want to concentrate on the Deadly sins. Luckily there is almost nothing that we need to do as Drupal has done most of the work for us, our template is CSS tableless design, we use alt tags as part of the standard practices built into Drupal (Though with the logo extra data was hard coded to give it a more accurate title) The doctype is declared correctly and it automatically picks up a language (Again we overrode this by declaring the language in the template though this is not needed it just happens we did this time) So the only real issue is when dealing with robot.txt and Htaccess files.

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So Drupal 5 has been out for a couple of months now but is it time to start your migration process?
Its ironic but in the last couple of months I have worked far more with Drupal 4.7 then 5, up until the launch of Drupal 5 I spent hours working with beta and RC builds checking compatibility and working on migration schemes to get our current sites, and our client sites over to the new Drupal as soon as possible, however as of today only venture-skills.co.uk and my own blog timnash.me.uk have been converted to the new version. Why you may ask well here are a couple of reasons.

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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.

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Drupal 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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Drupal 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.

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del.icio.us | digg it

So the big thing for CMS are to be SEO search engine optimisation friendly at the moment and so I thought it would be worth highlighting a few of Drupal features and modules to aid in optimisation and content management. This is not the definitive list just a few ideas and bits that have been banded in my head.

This article is based around Drupal 5 which means far less work, those on 4.7 reading this may also want to check out articles about sending correct 404s and robot.txt file

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Its been a short break but here is the third part in our Create a site like Digg with no programming series, the first two have been two of our most popular posts so hopefully this third one will be well received.

In part 1 we set up a basic site that mimics Digg, allowing users to submit stories and people to vote up an down the story, part 2 saw us expand this with a range of modules, taking the site in different directions. For part 3 we are going to discuss how to categories the site and develop a taxonomy system.
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