Templatesagogo

After a false start, we are about 2/3 done with the shopping cart. A little Pinot was consumed and some high fives were given out. At this point, the DYI cart and the personal website cart are done for now.

Doing everything from scratch is a hard thing to do and it takes time. Sometimes it gets to be a circular affair because as one page or idea matures it affects text on other pages. Sometimes your writing gets more focused and you need to go back and rewrite other pages so they flow better.

As the work progressed, there was discussion about price points. We are big believers in packages. You buy a package here and end up with a bunch of goodies for free plus the basics are discounted, sometimes a considerable amount. This is especially evident in the WS_1001 Web Creation Package. for $299.95, you get hundreds of dollars more in web design and our personal effort to make your site a success.

We thought about pricing this at $349.95 (and I’m sure we would see no difference in sales) but chose the $299.95 price because we can still make a reasonable amount per hour and if it was us paying, we would appreciate the extra 50 bucks staying in our wallet.

Because we aren’t out to get every last penny we think you have, we do something that few others do. We publish our prices so you can see up front what your web design will cost. In a way, that makes us poor salesmen because a good salesman would evaluate the client for shakedown potential and jack up the price.

Hang out, have fun and look around. Sorry, the Pinot is gone though.

In Validation Pt I, I talked about using the validator to massage a theme into passing the validation engine’s tests.

That is only the first step in making your site validate. Plugin and Widget authors are notoriously lazy in making sure their code is perfect. As you add to your plugins list, code is added to the site when it is rendered. If enough bad code is added, especially in the head, the site may look broken to the crawler. Sometimes different plugins interact badly with each other and actually break the layout.

For validation errors, some common things that plugins and widgets miss are alt tags, target=”blank” is target=”_blank” or ” blank”, malformed JS in the head, meta statements in the body, incorrectly nested elements and XHTML self closing tags not self closed. An example of a self closing tag would be an hr, br or img tag.

How can you fix this? Lets say your web site is up and running but a validation disaster. Deactivate all of the plugins that affect the front end. Did the validation errors go away? If not, look at the errors and you will probably see a plugin that still puts code in the head but otherwise doesn’t output anything to the pages or posts.

If you can fix it, fix it. There are many different ways to do this depending on the problem. We do this all day long and do it as a part of the SEO work we do. If you can’t fix it, send a note to the author and see if he can issue an update. As a last resort, find another plugin that does the same thing but validates.

Activate the plugins one at a time, rinse and repeat. Eventually your errors will be nonexistent or little ones that won’t matter to the crawler.

Validating your web site helps the search engine crawl it and helps get you a better page rank. If your markup is confusing to the crawler, it might give up entirely or at least miss things. While I was working on this theme here at Templatesagogo, I discovered the footer in the forum page was misaligned and a quick check of the php files showed everything appeared OK with align and clear things.

This left me to fire up the validator. Woops! 20 something errors. Some errors are because the validator looks at the world through a very narrow eye and what is written is actually OK. Other, more severe errors affect rendering of the page, which is the problem I had. Since the errors were the result of some JS in the head, a /div that I didn’t remove when I created the single column page for the forum and some random /li and /ul tags, I started with the easy one first.

I looked at the JS text in the head. It is for the buttons in the sidebar. Since I don’t like JS anyway, my first impulse was to remove it and see if it would work anyway. I checked the site functionality to see how it works with the JS then removed the offending text to see about the after. Just as I thought, no difference. This is in FF v3.0+ but not tested in other browsers.

That brought the error count down to about eight. To troubleshoot the /div issue, I had to do some typing. I annotated the single column php files with comment tags (view source to see) so I knew which opening tags belonged to which closing tags. The extra /div stuck out. I now needed to verify that the tag really didn’t belong there. I annotated the original two column php file and there was no extra /div tag. I removed the tag and the errors went down to two.

I still had the /li and /ul errors. These were around the back button functionality I added. (See registered users page for code). I moved the code up a little and rechecked. It worked fine and validated with zero errors. I had inadvertently put the code in a place outside of the unordered list. Like most errors, it was my own sloppy work that caused the error.

You have to remember, the validator is black and white, right or wrong. Close is wrong, only perfect is right.

A client liked Kim Kardashians’ website so much that they wanted one just like it in a WordPress theme. In the end, it turned out to be far different due to the graphics but it is still a black and white theme that looks sharp. It is a single column widgetized theme with space for a slide show and other neat things.

It comes with a menu plugin that must be installed in order to nav the theme. This is a free theme just like all the others we offer. To use it, unzip the files, upload the theme and menu via FTP and activate them. The basic theme is simple but what makes it shine is your images. Once you add images, it comes alive.

We added several new plugins to the DIY CD that we sell. The plugins (and widgets) are mostly admin related with one really cool functionality for Event Registration. If you are a photographer doing workshops, you can integrate this into your cart and calendar to automate the signup process for your participants.

How cool is that? We try to make your WordPress website DIY design easier.

Spend more time out there making money and less time at the computer doing manual entry. For all businesses, this is our goal. We want to bring you the best available WordPress features so you can concentrate on what you do best.

Get the DIY CD here.

You might have read the About page by now. This is the third iteration of the site. It keeps getting better and better. We picked this theme just for the iPhone look. It actually has been a pain in the neck to massage into what we needed.

Someone new to web design or new to making their own web site would not have been able to do it. We hacked the theme heavily and added PHP pages to accommodate the single column layout of the forum page. The style.css file was hacked too, to add styles for the single page, the mood widget and the login/logout. Photoshop was used to add images here and there plus to change a jpg or two to png files.

At this point in time, the SEO has not been done and the shopping cart has not been worked on past installing the plugin and reading some documentation.

We are doing all of this for two reasons, don’t forget. One, we need a platform for you to buy the services and packages we offer. Two, we wanted to have a forum for you to ask questions in. This particular forum is very easy to use and setup was a breeze.

Enjoy the site and please register and stop by the forum and say hi!