There are dozens of  WordPress plugin shopping carts available today. One of the better on site eCommerce shopping cart plugins is WP e-Commerce. The Instinct team has made a highly extensible customizable plugin that extends the fundamental functionality of WordPress as a content delivery system with streamlined checkout system that seamlessly integrates with Google Checkout, PayPal, Payment Express, and many other trusted payment processors right out of the box. WP e-Commerce also has flexible Tax and shipping rate calculations and integrates with USPS, Australia Post external shipping calculators as well as Weight Rate, Flat Rate, and Table Rate calculations.

Word of warning, shipping calculations are still a little wonky but most of these issues should be resolved in the near future. Suffice to say, if you are planning on installing this plugin, don’t get too creative with your shipping setup just yet.

WP e-Commerce is useful enough on its own, and its functionality can be further extended with additional plugins, free and pay. In example, the gold cart plugin ($40) adds the following capabilities:

• Grid view
• Multiple image upload
• Gallery View
• Live Product search option inspired by apple.com live search.

As Well As Additional Payment Gateways

• Authorize.net AIM
• DPS / Payment Express
• Paystation.co.nz
• Sagepay (previously Protx)
• Eway access (XML is also in Beta)
• Bluepay
• iDeal (ABN AMRO)

If you would like to find out if WP e-Commerce is appropriate for your online business call us today at 888-266-5449 or email me@armandgilbert.com

The Best WordPress Permalink Structure

If you’ve doing a search for the best WordPress Permalink Structure you will find that the vast majority of SEO experts recommend either of following permalink structures for the best search engine results. (If you don’t have a clue what a permalink is click here)

%postname% – This is the most common permalink structure
%category%/%postname%

And these are excellent permalink structures for usability and SEO, however, they come at a cost. They aren’t scalable. Currently WordPress holds all the rewrite_rules in a single database field in the wp_options table. If you have a few dozen pages and post, you may have a few hundred rewrite_rules in it. And this is just fine. But if you have a few hundred pages and attachments, the amount of rewrite_rules goes up exponentially. And this will slow down your site and lead to crashes.

Furthermore, starting your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields requires more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which use the text “page slug” as the URL) so again WordPress is forced to store a lot more information in it’s database.

For performance reasons, it is not a good idea to start your permalink structure with the category, tag, author, or postname fields. The reason is that these are text fields, and using them at the beginning of your permalink structure takes more time for WordPress to distinguish your Post URLs from Page URLs (which always use the text “page slug” as the URL), and to compensate, WordPress stores a lot of extra information in its database (so much that sites with lots of Pages have experienced difficulties). So, it is best to start your permalink structure with a numeric field, such as the year or post ID.

By now your probably thinking forget permalinks, I’ll just leave it alone. And this is a perfectly reasonable thing to do if you want WordPress to manage the site as efficiently as possible. But then you won’t get the nice intuitive link in the address bar and you won’t get to put those all important keywords in it either. So what to do?

In example, without permalinks this page’s address would be http://www.armandgilbert.com/?p=1001

Well if you’ve got a small site and don’t plan of ever having hundreds of pages.

Good Enough
%postname%
%category%/%postname% - Are both just fine.

If on the other hand you are planning a much larger site with hundreds of post then you may want to consider one of these two formats:
Better
/%post_id%/%postname%/
/%year%/%category%/%postname%/

What are Permalinks?

A permalink is what a visitor to your WordPress site will see in the the address bar of their browser when they go to an article and is link you would send to someone directing them to a page on your site. The term is a portmanteau of Permanent and Link hence- permalink.

Permalinks are configured in the permalinks option under the Settings Menu in the WordPress Admin Panel. Permalinks are the permanent URLs to individual WordPress posts, as well as categories and other lists of blog postings. Properly configured permalinks can have a profound effect on your site’s stability, speed, aesthetics, SEO, and usability.

Permalinks Options

%year%
The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004

%monthnum%
Month of the year, for example 05

%day%
Day of the month, for example 28

%hour%
Hour of the day, for example 15

%minute%
Minute of the hour, for example 43

%second%
Second of the minute, for example 33

%post_id%
The unique ID # of the post, for example 423

%postname%
A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI.

%category%
A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.

%author%
A sanitized version of the author name.

Why do I need a WordPress web site?
The main reasons a company would want a WordPress web site are to improve customer service, develop their corporate image, find new prospects, increase visibility, perform transactions, expand their market, meet their customers expectations, reduce their costs, and to catch up and surpass the competition. WordPress enables you the web site owner to load page content easily without having to hire an intermediary. This means you can communicate with your clients more directly.

SEO or how do people find out about my web site?
The best way for the public to find out about your web site is to add your URL to all of your advertising media and collateral. Make sure you put your web site address on your business cards, brochures, magazine ads, radio ads, newspaper ads, TV ads, press releases, and trade show publications. Internet users utilize “Search Engines” to find things on the web. We can add you to the most popular search engines so that people can find your site based on key words (meta tags) you choose. In addition, there are a number of paid solutions. We can configure your web site out so that it is Search Engine Optimized out of the box.

How do I get my own web address?
This is also known as a domain name. A company called InterNIC controls the names to make sure there are no duplicates. There is an initial fee to register your domain name and an annual fee to keep your domain name registered. You will also need a place to host your site. There are a few different options and where you host your site often depends on the type of site you have. We have a number of solutions and can help arrange this for you.

How can I post my pictures through WordPress?
Posting a digital image is remarkably simple. Just select the media button in the WordPress admin area, browse to the image you want to upload and WordPress will upload the image and resize it proportionally in thumbnail, small, medium and large sizes. To post you simply select the image from your media folder and choose the proper positioning. WordPress does the rest.

How do I “refresh” a page to see the changes?
WordPress saves (caches) pages that you are working on so that you can recover the page you are working on if you get interrupted. Furthermore, WordPress save a record of your changes over time so if you would like to roll back a page, or compare it to a an earlier version you can do that at the click of a button. If you would like to see the result of your work without committing to posting it simply click the Preview Changes button in the upper right side of the screen. If you would like to save but not publish it set the status to draft. Otherwise just hit the Update page and voila…

What if we don’t want to update content ourselves?
When the project is finished we can arrange a low cost maintenance program for simple updates and posts. You send us what ever materials you would like posted wand we do theare completely satisfied you, the client, will own everything except source files, which can be made available to you. We will make these files available for download on our extranet where you can login at any time.

We hope that you found our list of FAQ’s helpful and that we were able to answer most of your questions. Please contact us today for answers to any of your other questions.

In the ol’ days. If you wanted to implement custom fonts on a web page you had one choice. Photoshop.

As the web progressed, designers began to look for alternatives to the boring assortment of web standard fonts: Arial, Times New Roman, Tehoma, Comic Sans, etc.

This led some clever programmer/designers to create tools that could (provided you had the right plugins or were willing to work with image replacement techniques that effectively turned you text into a picture) display a custom font in a header or two.

Intrepid web designers leapt at the opportunity and braving ungainly programming techniques and obscene bandwidth requirements created web sites that at first were for the rare few higher tier users with the latest browsers and plugins.

Well the web never sleeps and over time newer and improved techniques have developed to accomplish this goal. Currently Cufón is the definitive method for implementing custom web fonts on your site. With Cufon, a website’s text, headings, pull-quotes and other elements can be styled in whatever font the designer chooses – without the user having to install it on their machine.

It has significant advantages over earlier methods as it does not require the client’s  browser to support flash as does the Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) technique and it is much more flexible than traditional image replacement techniques using CSS which rendered the text into graphical representation and not the text itself.

It was designed to meet the following four requirements

1. It doesn’t require any additional plug-ins – it only use features natively supported by the client e.g. JavaScript
2. It works on every major browser on the market
3. It is very easy to use
4. And it’s Fast – even for large amounts of text

Notice the use of the custom script font in the blog and article section on this site. The script is an open-source font called Daniel and the narrow san-serif is collaborate thin both of these were rendered using Cufon. You can highlight the text and copy it just like regular web copy. This means that the copy displayed in custom fonts is accessible to users and search engines just like regular html.

While there are 100′s of excellent quality Cufón ready font available on the web. Generating your own is not difficult. One caveat be sure that you have the rights to the font you choose. If it is a commercial font and you paid for it. Check the licensing that accompanies the font.

Once you have a font that you want to convert go to the following page http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/ to generate your custom font. If you don’t want to be bothered creating your own custom font you can choose from 100′s of Cufon ready fonts here.

Next download the Cufon Javascript. You can find it here: http://cufon.shoqolate.com/js/cufon-yui.js upload it and your font to your web site’s JavaScript folder (in this case /js/) and add the following two lines code to the header of your site.

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/YOURCUFONFONT.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/cufon-yui.js"></script>

Where js is your JavaScript folder and YOURCUFONFONT is the name of the Cufon generated custom font.
Implementing Cufon in your page is done through CSS. Typically by declaring it for header tags e.g.

<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[

Cufon.replace('h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6');

// ]]></script>

Defining a class

<div class="fancytext">Fancy Text</div>

Or with an unique identify ID (if it only shows up once on a page)

<script type="text/javascript">// <![CDATA[
      Cufon.replace('#fancytext');
// ]]></script>

As to how Cufón accomplishes this, well suffice to say it uses some very advanced JavaScript to convert font paths to VML paths, stores this information as JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) and then renders the fonts using JavaScript. Since this article is designed to explain the advantages of Cufón and demonstrate how to get started using Cufón, I’ll reserve a more technical study of the technology for later along with an appraisal of TypeKit, @font-face and the goggle supported initiative for public custom web fonts that crushed them google fonts…

Here are some links to get you started:

Website: http://www.cufonfonts.com/

Cufón Fonts: http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/10-wonderful-fonts-you-can-embed-with-cufon-and-sifr

Please note : In the spirit of inclusivity and simply for comparison purposes I have chosen to use both Cufon and Google Fonts in this site. The neatly scripted text you see in some of the twitter feed heading on the top of the page is NOT a Cufon font and is in fact an example of a Google font, a very different technology. Which is significantly very easy to implement but it was not directly integrated with the current theme of this site. You can find out more about Cufon here.

Welcome to AG Web Design

Our company combines affordable, inventive graphic design, e-commerce development, database programming, web multimedia and integrated marketing strategies to create dynamic web solutions for online businesses. We specialize in building functional and attractive sites which are results-oriented and cost-effective for our clients.

Regardless of the scale of the project involved, AG Design always strives to create attractive and functional websites which are expandable, scale well on diffferent monitor sizes and display as they should in all widely- distributed browsers.

Get started today, fill out our the following web design questionnaire or call us at 888-266-5449 for A Free Web Site Consultation!

You may have noticed that this site uses some interesting hand written fonts to draw your attention and give the site a more personal appearance.

That is a Google Font known as Architects Daughter

Google has a variety of open source fonts that you are free to use on your website.
You can choose from around 400 different font here http://www.google.com/webfonts#ChoosePlace:select

Here is a link to video on how to select and install google fonts it only requires the most basic understanding of CSS. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bhbk2mt4eEU#! (Be sure to watch this in 720p as the low resolution version is very hard to read.)

Basically, all you have to do is select the font you like. Copy the CSS link to your web page and add a very simple div class statement to your tag and an empty css description in your local style sheet. (Just watch the video it’s very easy.)

Please note : In the spirit of inclusivity and simply for comparison purposes I have chosen to use both Cufon and Google Fonts in this site. The <h1> heading on the top of the page is NOT a Google Font and is in fact an example of a Cufon font, a very different technology. Which is significantly more cumbersome to implement but it has the advantage of being locally hosted with the site. You can find out more about Cufon here.

Everlast Solar is a static site developed for a solar company in 2008, that ran into funding problems shortly after it was finished. The customers were pleased with the results and we later developed a follow up site for their next company. Since the site was not used, and they are no longer in the solar business, rather than waste the design, we are planning to adapt it to an an open source WordPress Theme during the coming year.

Converting an older technology website to a new dynamic system is not a direct process. Some of the technology used on older sites are no longer appropriate for current state of technology. In this case the Flash banners, CSS2, and a table based structure necessitated by the limitations of browsers common to 2008 have to be rebuilt. The new version will use JQuery, CSS3, HTML5. The design will not require Flash for the animation so it will work in iPads, iPhones, and will allow users to add content, logo, and graphics for the various elements in the site.

If you have a static site that you would like to convert to a modern, dynamic, content managed system that will enable you to customize and update content through an easy to manage interface please don’t hesitate to call 888-266-5449 or contact me@armandgilbert.com via email.

Rancho Tissue Technologies is a highly developed plant grower specializing in plant tissue cloning of agave, succulents, aloe and bamboo. They service the needs of the horticulture industry worldwide. And their state-of-the-art facility supplies growers with various stages of tissue cultured material as well as custom-propagated material developed to meet their individual requirements.

The website is a significant improvement from their previous site and provides them with an integrated database system for managing web content as well as a streamlined means of updating their online catalog and price lists with a streamlined data input form that allows them to update multiple items in a single step.

If your company would benefit from a simple easy use database system for maintaining a product inventory, and web site content please call 888-266-5449 or email me@armandgilbert.com

Real Innovate Realty is an 100% commission real estate company, that offers a mobile office solution with complete document processing for established real estate agents in California seeking a turnkey 100% commission agency.

The object of this project was to create a custom design that could be easily integrated with salesforce and expanded to some of their many web properties over time. We created a unique WordPress theme to create a visually engaging environment that would be visually competitive with much larger companies in the market.

The site was optimized for SEO, and our analytics program enables us to track the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns down to the penny. This way we could ensure that the company’s limited marketing budget wasn’t wasted on campaigns that yielded little results. It also helped us to develop content that directed users toward their unique goals based on their expectations. This is a critical part of the site’s success. When you have a limited budget for marketing and you are competing with much larger companies it was vital to use the web analytics effectively.

If you would like to get a marketing consultation for your company, please don’t hesitate to call 888-266-5449 or contact me@armandgilbert.com via email.

The Downtown Encinitas Mainstreet Association‘s mission is to improve and preserve the Historic Downtown Encinitas region. Encinitas is a charming beach community located in North County San Diego that has somehow managed to stay a charming beach town while growing to be a vibrant and healthy community. And over the years their site has grown from a simple who we are and what we do. To a much larger scale publishing operation focused Local DEMA events, conservation and businesses in the area area.

The site has gone through a number of iterations and  is regularly updated by a core of dedicated staff writers and contributors. This means that the Content Management System(CMS) has to be simple enough for a first time user and robust enough to manage a site with dozens of categories of content and hundreds of pages. Since the community has been growing DEMA’s mandate has grown and so too has their website. WordPress has enabled me to update their entire sites look and feel without having to reload content, saving DEMA many thousands of dollars in costs.

WordPress is the definitive Content Managed System for web sites since version 2.7 if you are considering building a web site, I recommend you consider WordPress. It’s open source, easy to learn, and great for SEO . If you considering building a new web site and would like to get a free half hour consultation and web site design estimate, please don’t hesitate to call 888-266-5449 or contact me@armandgilbert.com via email.