February 3rd, 2010 by James
We have recently upgraded the OM4 platform to include the lastest WordPress (2.9 and 2.9.1) features.
There are quite a few improvements, including:
- Undo/trash feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash).
- Built-in image editor, which allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, and scale your images.
- Easier video embeds that allow you to just paste a URL on its own line and have it magically turn it into the proper embed code, with Oembed support for YouTube, Daily Motion, Blip.tv, Flickr, Hulu, Viddler, Qik, Revision3, Scribd, Google Video, Photobucket, PollDaddy, and WordPress.tv.
- Improved visual editor
- Create custom galleries with the new include and exclude attributes that allow you to pull attachments from any post, not just the current one.
- and many more
The full list of over 500 new features, changes upgrades and improvements can be found here.
We hope these performance improvements make administering your website a much more enjoyable task.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask below or post your question on our forums.
Tags: Images, trash, videos, wordpress 2.9
Categories: News, OM4 Features, WordPress
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February 1st, 2010 by Glenn
Mark Greenland, Photographer and Poet
We’ve recently worked with designer Tracy Graffin (again) to launch the new Mark Greenland Photography website.
Mark’s photography is stunning, and Tracy has put together a design that is elegant in its simplicity. Don’t be fooled, achieving a simple and clean design is not as easy as it looks.
You can catch Mark at the upcoming Light Fantastic 2010 event, organised by Nick Melidonis and Dale Neill.
Layered Gallery Thumbnails
We’ve used a layered thumbnail technique to present the galleries for this website. This required some modifications to our Simple Gallery plugin that we are using for a few photography projects. By displaying a thumbnail for each gallery image at the bottom of the image area it is very easy to navigate the gallery. Those who like using the next/previous approach (using buttons or keys) can still navigate that way, but overall we wanted to make it very easy to scan the gallery and access specific images.
Tags: mark greenland, photography websites
Categories: OM4 Clients
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January 11th, 2010 by Glenn
We’ve recently upgraded our email mapping function for Google Apps to automatically create SPF records.
This means that when we map a domain for Google Apps we:
- create the standard MX records needed to send/receive mail
- create the CNAMEs needed to access mail from subdomains (e.g. mail.yourdomain.com)
- create the SPF record to make it harder for spammers to send mail pretending to come from you
This is Google’s article on how to add an SPF record if you are managing your own DNS: Set SPF records
Categories: Business Email, OM4 Features
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December 24th, 2009 by Glenn
Recently we had the pleasure of working with Hilary Colero of Rockpool Kikoy to launch a new website for her range of Rockpool Kikoy Sarongs.
Sarongs Online: sarong.net.au
The site was designed by the talented Paul Dennis of
Paul Dennis Design.
We implemented this site using the WP e-Commerce plugin for WordPress – James put quite a bit of work in to making sure it worked correctly for our WordPress and WordPress MU installations. So we now support two separate eCommerce plugins – QuickShop and WP e-Commerce.
In addition, James developed a new interface to the Australia Post shipping calculator so that during checkout customers are presented with actual shipping costs. The costs are calculated from a base postcode in Australia to any other postcode in Australia, or for international customers, to any country that Australia Post ships to.
Getting these costs requires the weight as well as the dimensions of the product, and Australia Post charges you for either the weight or the volumetric weight, whichever is greater.
The extensions have been contributed to the WP e-Commerce development team, so they should make their way into the core plugin soon.
Categories: Shopping Carts and eCommerce
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December 13th, 2009 by Glenn
Have you ever searched on Google for something and noticed page titles like this:
Car Polish Keywords
Page titles that load (or stuff) keywords into the title don’t work as well as page titles that use relevant keywords written in a natural way – for readers. You might not notice this effect where there is little or no competition for search results, but it gets a lot more important when you are dealing with competitive keywords.
Google’s Webmaster Quality Guidelines advise:
Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
Google Webmaster Guidelines
This applies in the title as well as in the page body copy.
A good principle to follow is to write natural language titles that include your keywords within the first 60-70 characters. Avoid any temptation to load the title with lots and lots of keywords.
To get more value from your page titles, use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to research relevant phrases. When you are using this, localise the tool to your country so you can see Local search history, and also change Match Type to Exact rather than Broad if you want to understand exactly what keywords people are searching for.
Choose niche keywords in preference to ‘mega’ keywords – you’ll have more chance of ranking on them initially, and they will help you rank on higher value keywords later.
This excellent video tutorial from Aaron Wall provides detailed instructions on page titles:
Google SEO Friendly Page Titles
This is an article – also from Aaron Wall – that describes the ‘natural language’ issue in more detail:
Search Engine Friendly Copywriting – What Does ‘Write Naturally’ Mean for SEO?
This article from Michael Gray provides excellent detailed guidance on how to prepare page titles, headings and permalinks. Optimizing Wordpress Page Titles, Post Titles and Page Slugs
Categories: Search Engines
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December 3rd, 2009 by James
We recently had a project where the graphic designer used a non web safe font (GothamHTF Bold Condensed) for 90% of the text in the Photoshop PSD file.
Whilst we were converting/slicing this PSD into a HTML/CSS website, we had several options for the non web-safe font:
- Use images (exported from the Photoshop PSD file) to display the text on the website.
- Use a standard web-safe font (eg Arial or Verdana) instead.
- Use Typekit (in combination with our new Typekit for WordPress plugin) so the website could contain plain text that could be displayed in a non-standard font.
From a design point of view, option 1 is the best option. This means that the website’s text is accurately displayed in images in the same font. However from a search engine and usability point of view, this approach is far from ideal. Search engines wouldn’t be able to index the content properly, and also visitors that use screen readers wouldn’t be able to understand the content very well.
Option 2 is best from a technical point of view – the website’s content/text is easily accessible for visitors and search engines, however from a design/visual point of view this means that the website wouldn’t accurately match the design that the designer came up with.
Option 3 is probably the best solution from both a design and a technical point of view (the text would be readable by search engines and visitors, and the font would display in the correct font). However in this case there was a problem – Typekit does not have the Gotham font family available.
So what was the next best solution? In this case we decided to try and find an alternative font that is available in Typekit (and is as similar to Gotham as possible).
Now came the next challenge – browsing the Typekit site for a suitable alternative font. This would have potentially taken hours, if it wasn’t for a neat suggestion from one of our associates, Dave Young.
He suggested that we used Identifont to help us find an alternative font. Using this service, we easily found a list of alternative fonts. It was then a matter of finding the best ones, and then searching in Typekit to see which ones are available in Typekit.
I think that Typekit is a really valuable service, and I think that they would really benefit to adding a “similar fonts” option to their site.
If you know of any other ways to solve this problem, feel free to drop us a note in the comments.
Tags: fonts, identifont, photoshop, Typekit
Categories: Graphic Design
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November 17th, 2009 by Glenn
We’ve recently helped bring a new website online for Modern Motor Trimmers.
ModernTrimmers.com.au
The site was designed by Sean McKay’s team at
Forge Creative.
Forge have put together a simple and clean design, making use of dropdown menus for simple site navigation.
I’m looking forward to seeing what Garry and his team achieve with their new site.
Tags: forge creative, modern motor trimmers
Categories: OM4 Clients
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November 16th, 2009 by Glenn
When the team from Typekit announced back in May they were planning a new font service, it sounded really interesting.
But now they have released it. And what a release it is.
The easiest way to use Real Fonts on your website.
We’ve upgraded om4.com.au to use Proxima Nova as our base font. And the fancy handwritten font in this post is Bello Pro, the font du jour on typekit.com at the time this post was published.
Given how hard it was to use non web-safe fonts previously, Typekit have just hit this one so far out of the park it isn’t funny.
Update: 16/11 James has completed our Typekit Fonts for WordPress plugin and published it to the WordPress plugin respository.
We will be integrating Typekit in to our WordPress sites via a new plugin, and I’m sure there will be a lot of options for WordPress sites in the near future.
Tags: fonts, Typekit
Categories: Graphic Design
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October 31st, 2009 by Glenn
I love this little chart about Needles and Haystacks.
Perfect description of running a business online.
Found courtesy of Paul Boomer on Twitter.
Categories: Online Business
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