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Design/Development•11 July 2009

Benefits of RSS Feeds – All Your Favourite News and Content in One Place

RSS Feeds are a very useful and powerful feature of websites that are still little understood by website owners and internet users. Many website owners I meet have either not heard of them or do not know the benefit they could bring to their online website or blog or for their own benefit it keeping up to date with news and information online. This blog hopes to explain what RSS Feeds are the benefits to you either as a website owner or as a website reader for keeping up to date with information on line.

Technical•16 June 2009

Exporting Joomla Content as a RSS Feed

Joomla 1.5 supports exporting your section or category listing page as a RSS Feed right out of the box. So if you have a menu item linking to your latest news category for example, you can export this as a RSS Feed for others to add to their RSS Readers. The benefit is of course those readers will read your news updates without having to visit your site.

Amity News•15 June 2009

To Better Serve Caerphilly Web Design, We’ve Moved Office to Bedwas Industrial Estate

To provide an even better Caerphilly Web Design service we have moved into a new office based in the Valleys Enterprise Centre, Bedwas Industrial Estate, Greenway, Caerphilly. The office move is part of our expansion plan to take on more staff and so we can be located in a more convenient location to service and support our customers.

Technical•15 June 2009

Installing Tweetdeck and AdobeAir on 64bit Ubuntu 9.04

Here is an overview on how to install Tweetdeck and AdobeAir on 64bit Ubuntu. There are a few sites with instruction but none of them worked in total, so have spent a few hours combining them together which worked for me. You will need Flash Player 10 installed, a link is provided for this if you don’t have it.

Design/Development•31 May 2009

Interspire Email Marketer – Integrating with Other Systems

Interspire Email Marketer (IEM), in my opinion, is the best newsletter system on the market that can be downloaded and installed on your own server. At least, I cannot find any other that comes close to it’s features, and I have looked hard. It does have one drawback though, and that’s the system API does not support integrating it into third party applications so subscribers can update their newsletter preferences from within another system. Interspire stated they don’t provide support on technical aspects of the API, so I have had to create my own API functions until they realise the benefit of this and write one themselves. This blog gives you a quick overview of the files to edit.

Design/Development•29 May 2009

Adding Dynamic Joomla Modules and Content to Other Websites

Just after publishing my latest blog, Integrating Joomla and Zencart (Sort Of) Using CURL and Standalone Templates, I realised that this method can be used to show Joomla modules on just about any website that you can add code to. The blog is mainly about Zencart because that’s what I use it for, but I realised if you have any other website you can access the code for, then you can follow these instructions to add Joomla modules to your website.

Design/Development•29 May 2009

Integrating Joomla and Zencart (Sort Of) Using CURL and Standalone Templates

I’ve developed quite a few Joomla and Zencart sites, some clients taking both together for their website. Joomla being great for the website CMS, and Zencart great for the shopping cart. The problem is, no complete, working integration exists between them. None that I have found anyway. A couple have been written and are work in progress in my mind, but still lacking in fundamental functionality. So the website ends up clearly as two separate systems to the website visitor which is not ideal. So I have spent some time trying to think of a way to integrate the two together and have come up with what looks to be a good solution… CURL.

SEO•26 May 2009

Joomla Tutorial – Creating a Custom Page Title (Title Tag) to Improve SEO

In a previous blog I mentioned that your page title (Browser Title or Title Tag) is one of the most important aspects to rank your website for keyword searches. For example, “About Amity Web Solutions, Web Design in Caerphilly” is better than “About Us” because it not only shows the search engine reader the company name but additional keywords which is important for ranking (see previous blog about 10 basic search optimisation techniques to improve your website rankings).

CMS•25 May 2009

Blog to Your WordPress Blog from Your iPhone

I’m always looking for great iPhone apps that can help with my interests such as work and social media. Today I found what may end up being one of my favourites, a WordPress app for the iPhone.

Amity News•24 May 2009

Our Jobs Manager for Recruitment Agencies has been Updated for Joomla 1.5

We have now released the Jobs Manager component for Joomla 1.5. Our previous version would not work on the much improved Joomla 1.5. This gave us the opportunity to re-develop the system from scratch using MVC (model view controller) architecture for a much better designed and built system.

SEO•19 May 2009

Twitter for Business – Where Do I Start!

Well I’ve jumped on the twitter bandwaggon and have started Twittering on at http://twitter.com/AmityWeb. I actually think I am quite late. I’ve found many successful Twitterers (?) that have been doing it for a couple of years now and have built up quite a reputation and following. I wish I started a couple of years ago. But now I am here I am trying to embrace the Twitter community with open arms and just hope I can provide some useful information (you will be pleased to know I don’t have a cat so you wont be getting updates on that!). This blog post is just to raise some questions at this time and hopefully to obtain some feedback from you readers, so please feel free to add comments.

SEO•17 May 2009

10 Basic Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Techniques to Improve Your Website Rankings

There are so many websites still not being developed with the fundamental and necessary techniques that can dramatically increase their search engine rankings. Most of them are easy to implement. So I thought I would write a brief article on what I consider the top 10 best and fundamental techniques to try to improve search engine rankings. It is by no means a complete solution, and may or not work for you, but can be considered the bare minimum necessary techniques you should implement.

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