GraphicDesignMe | Blog

It’s almost a new year and time to take stock of your website situation. So are you looking for a reason to redesign your site? If your website has some or all of these you should seriously consider hiring a designer to take you into the new decade with a modern looking website.

1. Frames

If most of your site uses frames, you’re in design trouble. While the occasional iFrame might not be anything to worry about since they are often used for widgets, frames have been outdated for about 10 years. Get rid of them!

2.Intro/Splash Pages

Everyone had to have an intro/splash page in the early 2000s. Most used Flash with or without sound. And what do most users do when they see an intro page now…THEY LEAVE THE SITE. Or at the very least they get aggravated and try to find a way to get off it ASAP. Now, before your potential viewer/customer has even viewed one bit of your content, you’ve angered them. Not a good idea. It’s probably time for a redesign.

3. Flash

If your site was built with only Flash, it’s likely you’re SEO is suffering not to mention the usability of your website. You need to have some code in the backend of your site so google and other search engines can spider your site.

4. Tables

Tables were pretty much the way to layout a website a few years ago but that’s not what they were meant for — they were intended for formatting data. If your current site is designed using tables, it’s time for a redesign.

5. Trendy Designs

Web 2.0 glossy buttons — all the rage for the last couple of years — but that trend is starting to fade. Going they way of the hit counter, the scrolling marque and blinking text. Don’t wait until you’re the last site around using an outdated trend.

I always think twice when, in business, someone gives me an aol or gmail email address. There are usually 3 reasons why people do this:

1. Not technically inclined - these people are usually afraid of computers and hat that they even have to use email.

2. Lazy - They already have a perfectly good email address and see no need to have another

3. Cheap - Why pay for something when you can get it for free.

For all these people here’s why you need to get a new email address:

Professional looking email is not expensive. You can find domain names and hosting for next to nothing. If you want to play with the big boys pony up.

Added bonus - As Far as advertising and marketing goes, websites are cheap. In later posts I’ll go into more about how you can use your site to advertise your business.

Start using an email like yourname@yourdomain.com not yourname@gmail.com. If you want, you can always forward your email to any address you want. It just looks way more professional with your very own email address

A little background

When I started working on adding this blog to my site I immediately went to Wordpress and downloaded the latest version. I followed the instructions and looked up a few tutorials, and thought I had this thing down pat. I then downloaded MySql installed it and ran into a huge problem. I’m behind a firewall. What’s a girl to do? Go to google that’s what! So I looked up blogs that don’t require a database and low and behold I come across Flatpress. Now flatpress has a wiki with instructions on how to install but I thought I could make it a little simpler for people to understand exactly what they should do. If you’re in the same situation as me and want this stuff explained as straight forward as possible then keep reading.

Step 1. Download Flatpress

It’s free, just like Wordpress so just do it. Go to: http://sourceforge.net/projects/flatpress/files/ and grab the latest version.

Step 2. Unpackage the file

Just double click on the file and all should be well.

Step 3. Upload Flatpress files to your website

Once the package is opened a folder should pop up called, surprisingly, flatpress. Using your FTP program of choice (I use Fetch but there’s a ton out there) place this folder in your public folder - or in my case, to make my life easier I created a new folder called blog and placed the contents of the flatpress folder in there.

Step 4. Set up Flatpress

Next you need to set this baby up, so what you want to do is to make sure the folder fp-content should have “777” permissions. What?!?!
All that means is that in the permissions for the folder fp-content, all the check boxes should be checked.

Next the easy part:

Once that’s done you need to go through the setup. To do this you need to type in your domain/flatpress. i.e. http://www.mydomain.com/flatpress. This is pretty straight forward, there’s only 3 steps:

1. Welcome dialogue
2. Enter user name, password (these you give yourself to login to your site so just make something up that you’ll remember and is pretty secure), URL and e-mail address
3. Provided, setup was successful, you are then asked whether you want to login or view your blog.

Make sure, for security reasons, that you delete the folder setup and the file setup.php once you have your blog up and running

And that’s it!

Your done - unless you want a theme or have it match your site.
I’ll go into that in detail in a future post.