With the big upsurge in the use of mobile devices to browse and make purchases it is essential for any business to offer a good user experience to these devices. It is NOT sufficient to just show a website that has been designed for a large desktop or laptop screen on these devices. All too often these are just not usable as the text is scaled so small it is not readable and when you try and click a button you often click something else as they are too small.

Saying the above is easy for a web design company but becomes a big burden for small businesses that need to get on with the business rather than administering a website.

If you have a bespoke website designed and created for you then the year on year costs are going to be high as you will need to engage with the design company to make adjustments. By far the best way is to go with one of the many frameworks  available as these are maintained and updated for you as technologies move on, leaving you to focus on the content and not the technology.

By far the biggest framework is WordPress. WordPress has 1000′s of plugins and themes available of which some are free and some are commercial but in most cases are significantly cheaper than engaging a developer to create something. One of the big WordPress plugin and theme companies is WPMU Dev that offer well supported plugins and themes.

If you need any advice on your website and in particular WordPress please get in touch.

Our WordPress specialist hosting package includes:

• UK Linux hosting
• .com domain name
• WordPress installed
• 1,00MB of Storage
• 10,000MB of bandwidth
• 100 eMail accounts

GREAT value at just £8.50/month or £85/year

Praeparo are WordPress design, development, hosting and support specialists and can provide supported plugins to:

• create a membership website
• add Classifieds to your blog
• powerful ecommerce / shopping cart
• manage events
• accommodation booking form
• fundraising
• create your own blog network

Need some advice just give us a call 020 8123 8159.

Coast Radar was faced with a problem that many other websites are also struggling with. The whole idea that visitors are using different sized devices and expect a tailored experience. At first we worked on a main website, mobile website and iphone application but this just became too expensive and complicated to keep in sync.

After listening to what the users were saying we decided on a completely new version of the website.

The beta is a mechanism where we can share our new vision and still have time to take on-board people’s comments.

At a high level the changes of the new website are:

• Clearer navigation outside of maps.
      We have provided a new text link navigation system where you start at a continent, then look at countries, then states, then actual listings.
• People who enter at a beach listing from the search engine said it is long winded to see other elements close by.
      We have added a breadcrumb at the top of a page labelled “You are at :: ” where the green parts are links to allow you to easily move backwards and forwards. This means you can easily move up from an entry to the region, from a region to the country, etc.
• People only want to be told about the area they are looking at rather than maps of the world with 1000′s of markers.
      We have changed the whole site to show information based on the context. For example, if you are looking at The United Kingdom you will see the regions/states, where as if you are looking at a state you will see the listings within it.
• People want a mechanism whereas they can ask businesses and other people for advice on a coastal area.
      We have expanded the community to provide a full social environment where people can freely ask questions and share experiences.
• People wanted a mechanism to plan plan and record a trip.
  We have allowed FREE travel Blogs within the community to plan, record and share a trip.
• People want a single website to map to the device they are using, a laptop, tablet or mobile phone and don’t want to have to swap between mobile, desktop and mobile application versions.
      This was a complete re-design to provide a responsive website that adapts to the screen size being used. We will discontinue our iphone and mobile website versions.
• Businesses wanted a mechanism to communicate with other businesses and people interested in the coast.
  The new community website allows people to discuss topics within what we calls groups. Groups can be PUBLIC – open to everyone, PRIVATE – people have to request membership of the group Admin or HIDDEN where people have top be invited. Anyone can start a group.
  
• People wanted a faster site.
  Although the beta does not use it, when the new website goes live it will use an international Content Delivery Network (CDN) to provide faster access to content.

Why not go and have a play at beta.coastradar.com

Technology wise, the main website is a custom HTML 5 fluid design and the community makes use of WordPress and Buddypress.

Any questions then just drop us an email or give us a call at +44 (0)20 8123 8159

In the last 12 months mobile devices have become the norm and now more people spend time researching using mobile devices. They now expect websites to be optimized for such devices.

This means if you designed your website 12-18 months ago you need to be thinking if it fits this model.

At Praeparo we point a lot of our customers towards WordPress nowadays for a number of reasons:

1) It is easy to keep up with trends. WordPress has lots of plugins to do all the latest things and provides upgrades that mean you don’t loose anything previously done.
2) You have full control and not your web design agency or web development team. For example, I am typing this on my FREE iPhone WordPress application whilst on the train. This used to be wasted time.
3) WordPress has mobile plugins that just detect a mobile device and then change automatically.
4) Want a new design just change the theme and don’t worry about the content.
5) Want a social media site, membership site, online shop; WordPress plugins exist for all.

These are just some reasons that enables organizations big or small to get a website to meet needs at a cost suitable to business size. The website then keeps with all the latest trends at a very cheap cost.

Speak to Praeparo today for ideas on how WordPress can eliminate the expensive task of a website rewrite every few years.

Get your website in front of all your customers.

This technically works but loses you points in the search engine optimisation game. Thus, it is much better to have a human understandable URL, for example www.mydomain.com/menswear/jumpers

However, this can create problems where the same end page can be reached through multiple navigation paths. This can result in what the search engine sees as duplicate content. A search engine flags duplicate content when it sees the same content at more than one URL.

You need to have a careful naming strategy to ensure this does not happen. For example in an ecommerce web site:

Categories: www.mydomain.com/category

Subcategories: www.mydomain.com/category/subcategory

Products: www.mydomain.com/products

The key element of the above strategy is that the products are not listed under categories. This means that if multiple categories have the same product they will point at the ONE product page, helping with much valued internal links.

The example above refers to an ecommerce site like oscommerce or OSCMax but the problem can also occur in blogging software like WordPress or web site builder packages.

Praeparo can work with you and help you understand the correct strategies for your web site and also help with an implementation plan that will have limited risk on your current search engine rankings.

One of the big challenges when blogging is having the time to keep adding content. Well, this iPhone app solves the problem by allowing all those wasted hours commuting or hanging around to become productive in creating or moderarting your wordpress blog.

Some of the features:

• Manage multiple blogs
• Add and manage pages
• Add and manage posts
• Moderate comments
• Add photos

It also features to autosave, so if you get interrupted your post will be saved locally.

All you need to do is enable XML-RPC on your blog and install the new app.