Glowing Praise. Now, What the Hell is Gantry?

Gantry is a theme development framework, I was originally exposed to when I was developing templates for Joomla! It’s absolutely brilliant, and over the years it has become the Samwise to my web design Frodo, and I’ve often sung its praises.

For whatever reason, development of Gantry for WordPress has lagged behind its Joomla! counterpart. Still, when I struck camp and moved my operations primarily to WordPress, I brought my love for Gantry with me and continued to be awed by its robust flexibility. I’ve saved so much time using it that my clients probably owe the team at RocketTheme over $100,000 by now.

“Sam” 5000

Recently, I’d been a little saddened that Gantry was remaining mired in older implementations of HTML and CSS. Having investigated Bones as a starter theme and found it lacking, I was actually preparing to bite the bullet and integrate Gantry with HTML5 Boilerplate my damn self. The jump from major version 1 to 4 has completely changed the face of Gantry.

The Gantry admin UI has been thoroughly, beautifully re-worked.

More to Come

I’m scrapping the continuation of my previous Gantry for WordPress: From Mockup to Reality series. This changes everything…

The Real Mercury

Steven Lance needed a distinctive brand identity. He’s been fascinated by all things Mercury since forever, and he was shopping ideas for a design he could center his marketing efforts around. We arrived at this design almost immediately.

The ‘Mercury’ Device

Steven and I had discussed creating a logo based upon the Mercury dime. While this is a classic, highly recognizable icon, I felt that it’s too complicated to be represented as a logo. As I do so often in my logo designs, I started by trying various fonts in order to get the personality dialed in.
What emerged was a simplified art deco theme, which I capitalized upon in rendering the device itself. The numeral 3 I worked into the device is an allusion to the M3 moniker (which stands for ‘Mix Master Mercury’) Steven has more recently adopted. I further emboldened the design by using layered gradients and drop shadows to create a retro lithograph look.

Various Applications

Later, I saw that Steven appeared to be struggling to employ this logo design across various display platforms. I sprang to, and broke the device into its modular constituents to create different design formats for different applications.

A Place All His Own

One of the original reasons Steven contacted me was his need for a custom web presence. He and I discussed his needs and determined that, for the sake of maintaining the integrity of his emerging brand identity, it would be more sensible to centralize his activities than to farm out to a mishmash of service providers. I deployed WordPress and created a site to his specifications.

It has been a true joy and an honor to work with Steven on his web project. He’s highly amenable to suggestions for improvement, and has been incredibly patient while I ply my craft in a manner I feel befits his online property. After all, Steven is an amazingly talented mix engineer and album producer – another creative professional serving creative professionals – and I want my work on his site to honor the love he infuses into his own work. Please visit Steven “Mercury” Lance and support him in his endeavors.

What Does SEO Mean?

It’s a generic marketing term for various activities calculated to improve the search engine rankings of a particular page or an entire website. Beyond that, there is no concise answer. Successful, professional practitioners of the craft will often enough disagree about what sorts of tactics are most fruitful to achieve their common goal.

There are plenty of ways to improve search engine rankings. It’s a topic I’ve written about often enough. Rather than rehash what’s already been said by everyone, I wanted to put a slightly different spin on the information presented here. I’m going to discuss what SEO isn’t.

The SEO Rundown

• SEO Is Not A Way To Game The System

  Google has proven time an again that they’re paying attention to trends in SEO. They’ve provided a nifty guide for content creators which describes more or less exactly what they’re looking for. Still, SEOs persist in running experiments, trying to find chinks in the Google algorithms to exploit. What this means for smaller outfits is that, unless you’ve got the resources to invest in consistently staying abreast of Google’s ceaselessly morphing indexing scheme, you need to just play it straight. If you’re screwing around, trying to artificially inflate your search precedence and actually succeeding, Google is sooner or later going to get around to punishing you. If you’re totally in the dark on this, try searching for articles about Penguin and Panda to see what I’m talking about.

• SEO Is Not Its Own Secret Discipline

  I think this is my biggest issue with the term SEO. As any number of well respected practitioners in the trade have previously stated, SEO is practically synonymous with proper design and development. If pages are designed and content structured in such a manner as to be most intelligible by search crawlers (and human beings), a fair portion of the SEO battle is already won. The research involved, also, isn’t some double-secret eyes-only craft — it’s a matter of knowing how to research target search terms and conduct market analysis. There are commercial tools which can assist in the process, but as with most anything, whether or not you choose to invest in such things will simply depend upon how much your time is worth to you.

• SEO Is Not Marketing (exactly)

  I see many, many people equating search engine optimization to marketing, often going so far as to describe it as a form of marketing, per se. I believe that this is the wrong way to look at it. Instead, I explain it to my clients thus:
  

  Google is constantly tuning their search indexing systems to more closely mimic the way an astute human reader would regard the contents of a web page. The Internet is a marketing tool, sure, but it is foremost a source of information. Your best way of establishing your bona fides within the information-hungry Internet community is to use your website to provide things of value.

  Your web site itself is your form of marketing. SEO is like the difference between having a yard sign and a billboard: a billboard is more readable, better placed, and allows better presentation of information.

Last Words

There is no shortage of caveat emptor pieces treating the practice of search engine optimization. Let me perhaps reiterate what has been stated at numerous times in numerous places: If your designer/developer are doing their job, your site itself is more or less optimized already. You can focus on other ways to promote your web site or your core business. Chances are, if you’ve got the sort of web presence which demands routine, ongoing SEO, you’re either dedicated enough to invest your own time and effort directly, or you’ve got someone in-house who (at least ostensibly) knows what they’re doing.

Background

I’ve seen an uptick in the amount of traffic coming to CraniumStorm from searches related to ‘Gantry for WordPress‘. Also, I’ve had a couple of email requests for me to continue this series. I think it’s time to take this topic back up and run with it for a bit. Here goes nothing…

The Mockup

The first step in any of my design projects is to design a mockup. This design will be my guide as I progress through the development process. Here, I’m using Adobe Illustrator to lay out all of the elements I want in my final homepage design.

I like to set my mockup artboard area to 1920×1080 to try to catch the top end of the desktop resolutions I might be deling with. Also, that’s the resolution of my working monitor, so working at 100% magnification shows me just what size something is going to be in the finished product.

I put the different conceptual layers on virtual layers in Illustrator. That way, I can lock the layers I’m not working on.

Notice the hot pink stroke outlining the content area. This is on my ‘Structure’ layer, which will remain locked unless I need to modify my wireframe.

My Workaround Doesn’t Work??

I’d posted a fix for the broken WordPress permalinks issue which had plagued so many Yahoo Small Business Hosting customers. At the time, I’d just finished spending a couple of days solving a raft of issues for one of my clients and was completely over the top with YSB. I believe my frustration was evident. So, it was with no small measure of pride that I documented my triumphant workaround for Yahoo’s refusal to allow their hosted sites the use of .htaccess files.

Now, it’s been brought to my attention that the proposed fix no longer works. It isn’t clear to me whether this issue is being caused by recent updates to WordPress’ implementation of redirects in conjunction with Yahoo’s pre-existing systems, or whether it’s attributable to some inscrutable changes on the part of Yahoo, et al., to their hosting infrastructure. In any case, the least WordPress-friendly hosting provider I’ve encountered is now even less friendly.

Dear Yahoo Small Business Hosting,

I apologize if I’ve unfairly characterized your products or services at any point. It’s never been my intention to malign anyone personally in the forums available to me, but in the best interests of my readership I consider it necessary to be as effective as possible in sharing the fruits of my professional experience.

Having said all this, I’d still rather light a candle than curse the darkness. In the spirit of cooperation with the booming WordPress community I would take this opportunity to call upon you, Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting, to redeem yourselves. Please, please comment here or contact me personally to help explain how I’m off base, or why the WordPress permalinks issue has gone unresolved lo these many years.

What I Love About Django

What I < Love About Django

WP e-Commerce and Mysitemyway Themes: In Hell I Will Have to Integrate Them

I’ve been kicking these issues around for a couple of months. Mysitemyway themes are domineering things, quite insistent upon having the things they display be formatted a certain way. WP e-Commerce’s default templates output a hash of strangely formatted code and are fairly tedious to re-design. The combination of the two can be almost torturous to work with.

The Sub-Category Display Issue

So, let’s say you’ve got an online store which sells clothing. You’ve got main product categories (Men, Women, and Kids), and sub-categories for each of them (Shirts, Pants, Shoes, Accessories). When your customers come to your site, you’d like for them to be able to click ‘Men’ and come to a page which presents all of the subcategories for men’s clothing. Seems like pretty standard stuff, right?

No, I’m sorry, you’re totally wrong. In fact, you’re so wrong that you’re going to have to modify your default WP e-Commerce theme template files in order to accomplish this. Many thanks to chrismarie from the getshopped.org user forums for the snippet I modified to achieve the results I was looking for:

< ?php
global $wp_query;
?>
<div id="grid_view_products_page_container">
< ?php echo do_shortcode('[raw]'); ?> // I'll explain this in another post. This is DEFINITELY the best way I've found to do this!!
< ?php wpsc_output_breadcrumbs(); ?>
	
	< ?php do_action('wpsc_top_of_products_page'); // Plugin hook for adding things to the top of the products page, like the live search ?>
	<div class="product_grid_display group">
	< ?php if(wpsc_display_categories()): ?>
	  < ?php if(get_option('wpsc_category_grid_view') == 1) :?>
			<div class="wpsc_categories wpsc_category_grid group">
            	< ?php $category_id = wpsc_category_id();
    			$getsubs = "SELECT term_id FROM wp_term_taxonomy WHERE taxonomy = 'wpsc_product_category' AND parent = '".$category_id."'";
			$subcats = mysql_query($getsubs); //this gets the ids of the subcategories
			$num_subcats = mysql_num_rows($subcats); //this is a count of how many subcategories the current category has
				
			while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($subcats)) {
				foreach ($row as $subcat)
				$catname = wpsc_category_name($subcat); // Gets the category name for use below
				$catimage = wpsc_category_image($subcat); // Gets the URL of the category image
				$catlink = get_term_link((int)$subcat, 'wpsc_product_category'); // Gets the link URL to the category page
					
				if ($category_id >= 0 || $category_id != '') { ?>
					<a href="<?php echo $catlink; ?>" class="wpsc_category_grid_item" title="< ?php echo $catname; ?>">
						< ?php
						// Here I did something a little different. I wanted to be able to display the category
						// title whether there is a category image or not. I made the category image the background
						// of a div and superimposed the title over it. No category image means the url for the
						// background property is empty. It's janky, but it won't break anything.
						?>
                        			<div class="cat_image" style="background:url('<?php echo $catimage; ?>') top center no-repeat; background-size: < ?php echo get_option('category_image_width'); ?>px < ?php echo get_option('category_image_height'); ?>px;width:< ?php echo get_option('category_image_width'); ?>px;height:< ?php echo get_option('category_image_height'); ?>px">
                            				< ?php if ($category_id != 0 || $category_id != '') { ?>
                        				<h4 style="z-index:200;color:#C00"><span>< ?php echo $catname; ?></span></h4>
                            				< ?php } ?>
                            			</div>
					</a>
                        	< ?php
				} 
			} ?>
            		</div>
		</div><!--close wpsc_categories BC-->
</div>

The Stage is Set

This site is one that I’ve worked on before, and so I’ve accustomed myself to having to go plowing through dependency trees in order to get things to function correctly. The Mysitemyway themes are beautiful, and would work beautifully so long as one is prepared to color inside the lines. Under the hood, they’re sprawling, massively complicated things.

The issue I was having was that the product category list would display fine, and an empty category would appear with pagination controls and a message stating that there were no products in the category. However, as soon as I started adding products and tried to view a non-empty category, I would get back a page with the ‘Archives’ heading and no additional content whatever.

The most recent activity I found on this particular issue in their forums had them putting the problem back on WP e-Commerce and encouraging people to switch to another shopping cart plugin for which they’ve developed sub-theme support.

My Nutshell Du Jour

I’m not switching plugins, okay? I tested WP e-Commerce in development on a standard WordPress theme and found it working perfectly. I will hack my way around styling snafus, many of which were left hanging by a prior developer who got in way over their head on this site, and are in no way Mysitemyway’s issue. I will craft workarounds for idiosyncratic theme functionality if I absolutely must. What I won’t do is scrap a viable product because it refuses to play well with something else which was pre-installed, particularly after I encouraged a client to purchase premium upgrades for the thing which are surely non-refundable on a problem like this.

The Workaround Fix

Mysitemyway’s documentation says that standard page searching is broken in their themes by default. They suggest a workaround which breaks any number of other things about the site, removing the menu from the header and doing other goofy things. I took their suggestion and modified it to come up with a fix that works splendidly.

function mysite_custom_search($query)
{
	if ($query->is_archive) { $query->set('post_type', 'any'); } return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','mysite_custom_search');

What do these Google updates mean for me?

Lewes SEO nailed it pretty well:

SEO’s are going to have to acquire deeper skill sets. Linkbuilding alone is not SEO, but a tiny niche within SEO. Having quality and attracting people is going to be as important as raw links from now on.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, which is why I’m quoting directly. If you’re suffering at the hands of an apparently malevolent animal, seeing your expensive and time-consuming search engine optimization results going down the drain, this is a very stressful time for you.

How Search Rankings are Determined

The short answer is: nobody knows but Google, Bing, etc., and they’re not telling.

Google (or any other search engine) uses highly specialized and proprietary algorithms to determine where a page will be ranked within their index. The variables in these algorithms and the various weights they’re assigned are more secret than the Colonel’s Recipie, and the only way SEO-ers have of determining what Google is paying attention to is to perform deliberate experiments or make educated guesses based upon what they know about the content of a website and how well it seems to be performing at any given time.

This Much is Clear

What Google is trying to do is read web pages as an intelligent human being would. The net effect of their updates is an ongoing process of penalization for optimization techniques which are seen by their algorithms as sneaky. Sneaky, in this context is a self-qualifying term. If you’re doing something which is intended to trick Google or other search engines into paying more attention to you than they otherwise might, you’re being sneaky and you should take a look at stopping.

What isn’t sneaky:

• Delivering informative, quality content
• Paying attention to how your pages are structured, making proper use of HTML formatting
• Including links to quality sources of outside information
• Including images and making proper use of image accessibility features
• Generating outside links by participating in the online community in meaningful ways

Improving your search engine rankings takes time. There simply isn’t anything else for it.

Have you been bitten by Google Panda? Contact me for a free consultation. It’s a lot less painful than a course of rabies injections, and it doesn’t take a month.

Dave wanted a logo design that was simple and distinctive. I opted for a modular design which could be represented a variety of ways on various media. I think that utilizing the Greek Lambda for the capital ‘A’ served beautifully, creating an uncluttered and highly versatile icon.

Stationery

We tried to keep the letterhead design minimal and effective at communicating the brand identity. The basic color scheme and the simplicity of the ‘A’ device anchor the top of the page perfectly. Then, to hold down the bottom of the layout, I employed the print version of the full logo and a tagline describing Dave’s services. We were very happy with how this design came off.

This double-sided business card was a lot of fun. I managed to talk Dave into springing for the four-color logo on one side. On the info side, I worked in a little section for writing notes because all of the business cards I pick up are covered in marginal notations. The overall look of the business cards was very distinctive.

Vehicle Magnets

Reproducing the logo in a larger format for use on vehicle magnets gave me the opportunity to have a bit more fun with the design. I wanted to emphasize the reflective nature of the gold, so I manipulated the levels on an antique New York skyline photo, created a clipping mask of it in the shape of the Lambda ‘A’, and set the transparency effect to multiply. Dave didn’t even notice until the magnets were printed full-size. He loved the extra touch.