Google estimates 20% of searches are now related to location. It’s always been good business sense to make sure your site ranks well for local search terms, but with the exponential growth of mobile / smartphone usage to locate local services via web search and map-based apps, small businesses can’t afford to miss out on the chance to put themselves on the map.

However small your business, or however long you’ve managed without an online presence, you can benefit from the investment in a local search targeted website to increase the reach of your company. And if you’re worried about the potential time and difficulty required to run your own website, WordPress makes it simple for even the most technophobic client to maintain a professional and effective website.

Walsh & Company are a small firm of solicitors based between Falmouth and Truro here in Cornwall. They’d had their domain name for years but like so many small businesses were unsure of the need for a website, and how complicated it would be to run it – as well as understandably being busy with running a successful legal practice.

As well as offering the opportunity to add SEO metadata via the WordPress admin, any site can now easily add Geotag metadata easily using a service such as this geometatag generator. Combine with relevant, locally targeted keyword phrases in the content to attract search queries in the area, and you have a well optimised, targeted local search friendly website.

And even if the thought of operating a content management system based website makes you shudder, after an hour of training, Walsh and Company were armed with all the information they need to grow their site even further.

Emphasising legibility and whitespace, it’s easy on the eye and suitable for all types of content. There’s a useful set of theme options built in, making it easy to adjust the theme to your needs via the admin.

• 4 page layouts, which can be assigned to different page types
• 6 widget areas
• 7 accent color options
• 3 font stack choices
• upload a logo or use the default text link to your homepage
• jQuery dropdown menu
• ready for WordPress 3.x – custom menu support
• editable footer/copyright text
• optionally display Twitter and RSS feed icons
• tested on Firefox, Safari, Chrome and IE 7-9
• validates XHTML Transitional and CSS 2.1
• checked against official WordPress unit tests

Hope it’s useful to y’all.

Download the theme

Sample content makes it easy to check your stylesheet and theme files have accounted for most, if not all, eventualities once your theme is in someone else hands.

These are a few of the resources I’ve found useful in testing whilst hacking away at a WordPress theme. One thing to note is that it’s a good idea to bring this dummy content in as early as possible in your development process – before you add much of your ‘real’ content – otherwise deleting this content can be a bit of a chore (especially with the larger imports).

Easier Theme Development with Sample WordPress Content – WPCandy

This gem from WPCandy has been around for a while now but I still find myself using it at the start of most new projects.

It’s not too much content to have to remove once you’ve checked everything in your theme is working, so is ideal to use on a client site.

It includes multiple posts with different elements in each (including a couple of really useful ‘Another Post With Everything In It’ types that use most all the selectors you’ll want to have declared in your style.css), 12 posts so pagination is forced, comments, parent / child / grandchild categories and pages, tags and archives.

It’s just a simple import into your WordPress install via Tools > Import. Get it here.

Theme Unit Test – WordPress Codex

Straight from the horse’s mouth. If you’re planning to make a theme available for public download on the Free Themes Directory, it’s a good idea to test against this. It’s a pretty exhaustive set of content that will expose any errors in your code before you get to the submission stage.

The copious referencing of requirements your theme should stand up to are also detailed on this page, so it’s a useful reference if you’re planning to submit to the WordPress.org gallery or plan on selling your work. Get it here.

Demo Data Creator – for Multisite/Buddypress

This could be a very useful plugin option (it’s not just an imported file like the above) if you are setting out on a WordPress multi-site or BuddyPress project. Not for the faint of heart though: see the issue here.

It’s intensely laborious setting up dummy accounts and trying to hypothesise every action on your site – this can help with fresh installs / local test sites.

If you’re experimenting with WordPress 3.0 multisite features and/or Buddypress and feel like giving it a spin on a test install, get it here.

Duh, what have I missed?

These are just the resources I’ve been using – if you know of better or just have an opinion, please feel free to go nuts in the comments.

Naga Jolokia, also know as the ‘ghost chilli’, is widely considered the hottest chilli known to man, and in fact when handling in bulk it’s advised that “breathing apparatus, gloves and appropriate clothing should be worn”. And if that isn’t a recommendation to try something, then I don’t know what is.

Obviously plenty of people do indeed want to test the integrity of their digestive systems, as an initial product test on eBay has been hugely successful. I’ve been in discussions with the company and should be producing a new website for them soon, with the aim of spreading the chilli madness to as wide an audience of masochists as possible.

It’s great to be involved with something that promotes a good cause and REOC provides a wealth of useful information on clean energy
initiatives in Cornwall, both at a business and domestic level. Cornwall location and geography offers such a unique environment for taking advantage of a vast array of renewable tecnologies, and hopefully the website will help promote REOC’s aim to establish Cornwall as a leading example of practical implementation of these technologies, and a source of expert knowledge for the industry.

In terms of functionality, site visitors can register to receive updates, or make paid contributions to get more closely involved in the future direction of the group and gain exposure for their own organisations in a Cornwall renewable technology business directory. I decided to use a combination of Drupal, it’s e-commerce package Ubercart, and a community module called Userpoints to acheive these goals, and on the whole I think this combination worked out very well. Members are awarded site credits on payment of their member subscription, which can then be used for posting a defined number of blog entries or other content on the site.

Ubercart in particular is an awesome set of modules, offering a very high level of customisation and options. This is the second time I have used it and the developers and community behind it are always on hand to solve problems and put a lot of hard work into making it the de facto e-commerce solution for Drupal.

Go take a look at the new site here.

I was delighted to be given the opportunity to contribute to their ongoing success. With a website already in place, but not being done justice by their separate blog hosted at free providers blog.co.uk, the time was right for them to move to a more powerful blogging system which would actually help their main site do better in Google.

Enter WordPress, and after copy/pasting 100+ articles by hand (like many free-hosted blog services, blog.co.uk doesn’t feature tools such as XML exports which allow you to easily move all your posts from one blog system to another – although it should be noted WordPress.com is a free service which includes this!), Honeybuns had 2 years of blog posts chronicling the highs and lows of their business, within their site domain and set up for easy and relevant indexing by Google.

Integrating WordPress into an existing site is often a good solution for those who want to see the full benefits of a modern CMS system before ditching table based, static sites that many are probably still familiar with. Happily, my custom WordPress theme slipped into the existing code at honeybuns.co.uk without too much trouble, blending well into the existing site. A small but fun project to work on!

With WordPress justifiably gaining ground as a fully-fledged content management system rather than just something to get a half-decent blog together, and the continuing popularity of Joomla (despite Joomla in my experience being an ultimately extremely unmalleable solution for anything but the most simple sites), it’s brilliant news that top design firm Mark Boulton Design are in the midst of giving the Drupal website a much needed redesign.

As most people’s first experience of Drupal, the project’s home site has always been functional more than a beautiful example of design, and until the last few months, few of the available themes for skinning your Drupal website have compared to the quality and choice available for WordPress and Joomla in particular. Faced with the critical decision of choosing the correct CMS for a project, WP and Joomla have always offered in my opinion a ‘friendlier’ face from the outset. Unfortunately there’s maybe been a tendency to go for something that looks good out of the box, rather than choose the most suitable platform and a skilled Drupal designer to create a good-looking theme on top.

The new drupal.org designs should go a long way to both addressing this first impression of the project and challenging the image of Drupal as a ‘developer’s platform’ rather than a designers’ one. It still looks ‘like Drupal’ – but cleaner, more approachable and like something you’d want to be involved in.

Thousands of Drupal developers across the globe have contributed their time skills to the project, hopefully the new-look site and redesigned architecture that promises to make search a lot easier than the present system will encourage more designers to get involved too.

Whenever I put together a new theme it’ll be available for download from the WordPress Theme Directory under the free open source/GPL license, and also mentioned here on the blog. You can use these themes for free in any project using WordPress.

The Neonglow theme is now available. A dark, clean and well-balanced theme, it’s suitable for any kind of blog and seems to have been taken up by lots of tech-focussed blogs.

Download the .zip here