Edward Lewis's Blog | SEO, PPC & Online Marketing

Building a website in a weekend..

February 5th, 2011

The Turn off your Lights website project is coming along quite well.. The CMS is installed, quite a lot of the pages have been created and the contact form is working. I have made a start on the content – I usually do this last, which normally means it doesn’t get done until weeks after finishing a site!

black candy screenshot

Anyone who has used silverstripe should recognise the default black candy theme!

Next up, I will carry on writing the text to go on the pages that I have created. When I get bored of that I will do the page templates and the CSS. As well as doing the Silverstripe theme, there is also a WordPress theme for the blog. There is a blog module in the CMS which I have used on other sites, but I think it’s a bit clumsy and doesn’t work as well as it could. The blog on my site has been set up on a sub-domain and has a couple of years of content on there – moving it isn’t an option.

Last night I even found some time to update bits on this site too.. I have added quite a few links and information about my websites the my stuff page.

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Is it possible to build a website in a weekend?

February 4th, 2011

I have been working on one my Turn off your Lights website on and off for well over two years! It’s one of those things which always gets put it to the back of my to-do list, as other bits take priority over it. That is until now..

A few weeks ago I saw this, and it kind of inspired me..

I should have a good chunk of time over the weekend so I thought I’d spend it finishing the site,

The first stage.. finish off some small bits of work, which include:

A new landing page for a PPC campaign for L3 Living
Email a new prespective client about some SEO work
Publish some new episodes for the audiophile podcast
Update the audiophile page on the Subverb website
Empty the washing machine… bore!

After this I will instal Silverstripe and then get on with it! I think the biggest thing will be writing the content, so I think I will do this before doing the html and CSS for the pages. The site wont do anything particularly fancy to begin with, so that part should be pretty straight forward.. thats the plan anyway.

I wonder how its all going to pan out…

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Magento: Delete All Sample Data

September 14th, 2010

I was looking for a quick way of deleting all of the sample data out of a new Magento install this afternoon and didn’t really find much online. Most of the things I did come across were forum posts where people were moaning about how frustrating it is not being able to work out how to do it. Many of the solutions involved installing additional plugins or going through and manually deleting each individual item. It turns out its actually pretty simple to do..

Delete the Sample or Product Information from Magento

1. In the admin panel you need to select “Catalog” and then “Manage Products” from the drop down menu.

2. Change the view option so that you can see all of the data, then click “select all” to highlight all of the records.

highlight product information to delete

3. Over on the right hand side you will see an actions drop down list. Select “delete” from the options and then hit the submit button. Depending on where your site is hosted, this could take a while or so for all of the products to be removed.

delete product information drop down

That’s pretty much it.. all of your sample data or products will now have been removed.

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Review: Apple Airport Extreme

September 12th, 2010

apple airport extreme

As a reward for getting my new re-vamped Rectangle site online, for the freelance SEO Nottingham and online marketing services I offer, I decided to treat myself to a Airport Extreme router. I have been thinking about buying one for a while, and I have been getting really frustrated with slow wifi for the past few months.

My computer where I sit and do most of my work is quite a way from the router, so the range that the router offers was the main reason behind the purchase. I suppose it will be hard to judge how that goes until I have used it for a few weeks and up/downloaded some beefy files.. first impressions seem good though. The router allows you to use 802.11n wireless which is faster than most other routers which use 802.11g.

The installation and set up was fairly straight forward. I was surprised that I had to install the Airport Utility software which came on a cd, I thought that this would have been built into the OS and could have just been plugged straight in. Despite that though, it took about 2 minutes to run through and set up a new network and configure all of the passwords etc. During this process you can also set up a visitors network too, which allows you to give access to other users but restrict access to say shared drives or printers which may be available on your main network.

I’m going to plug in my printer in a mo, so fingers crossed that should just plug straight in and work. This was working on my old router so I’m not expecting any problems.

green light apple airport extreme

Overall I think it’s a good purchase. It was easy to set up, I’m getting good signal so far, and it looks quite cool too. One thing that is amazing is the lack of flashing lights.. nearly all routers I have used have lights that are constantly flickering when data is being transferred, if this is in your line of vision its normally really distracting.

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