This was also a great project because it involved a remodel of an existing site, without any changing of the content. Many website are made more complicated by using non-standard classes and id’s to style output, instead of building a cross browser compliant website design, seamlessly integrated into a theme which can then be upgraded and updated. It also retain 100% of the original search engine optimization advantages for which the Thesis theme is renowned.

Arizona WordPress Website Design by My Favorite Web Design of Mesa is a terrifically valuable web design service. Our WP customers are able to jump up the search engine rankings far fast and easier than customers without this advantage. In fact, the Natural Choice has ranked many #1 keywords with the benefits of their article system, so they can create landing pages at will.

WP e-commerce is a terrific platform for doing commerce online. Though it had a rocky reputation in its earlier development, it now is on a very stable development line, and is the most widely supported and used E-commerce software on WordPress. In fact, the team at Get Shopped is an 8 man development core, that has been working together for years, and the future for this software just keeps getting brighter and brighter. As an Arizona WordPress E-commerce Designer, I have designed for storage shops, home health remedies, diet pages like this, and even complex product types like upload and print interfaces.

This client is local to Scottsdale Arizona, and I am of course in Mesa, East Mesa. So, we usually meet up for design meetings and website consultations at a Dunkin Donuts halfway between us on Thomas and Hayden, which is the reason I got into this field in the first places. The website itself is pretty straightforward. The writer does articles that are occasionally syndicated or republished by major sports networks , more frequently as his influence rises. This in turn drives large amounts of website traffic – hence the ads on the site. The writer makes his profit via the advertisements and through sales of T-shirts on website ecommerce store, designed by yours truly using WP E-Commerce 3.7

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This site was designed for an ASU student in Tempe, Arizona. He needed a social media site, where users would be able to post their stories from college. The site was themed for ASU colors, and served Arizona State and University of Arizona. I customized several plugins for the required features, including the quick post widget, which was needed because it is WPMU and Buddypress compatible.

Their was also a Jquery slider, which enabled the website owner to display advertisements from local businesses in the college’s own area. This was a great marketing tool, and carried plenty of SEO benefit as well.

The last part of the implementation was to enable a rating system for the posts, using a customized GD star rating, a gem from the folks at WPMU developers. I coded several custom post loops, so the posts could be shown for each author, or by most popular, or by latest post. I also used a translation file to alter the language so posts became stories, which is a lightweight non-intrusive workaround.

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My Favorite Web Designs rebuilt a search engine friendly website for PJO Insurance Brokerage and we perform monthly seo services for PJO Insurance Brokerage. Before we started the monthly seo services for PJO, they were not found on the first 100 listings on google. During their first month of searh engine optimization in Phoenix, we were able to get the following rankings:

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The Law Offices of Fife & Cesta has been a client of My Favorite Web Designs since April 2011. They came to us to help boost their rankings for bankruptcy attorneys in Mesa Arizona. With just two months of search engine optimization, we were able to significantly boost their rankings.

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When most people think of WordPress, they think of blogs. The fact of the matter is that in capable hands, WordPress is simply a content management framework, with terrific data structuring, permalink support, seo plugins galore, automatic sitemaps, auto rss, pinging, commenting, facebook integration, microdata support, and the list goes on.

Traditional website optimization, as done by a company of SEO personnel, consists mainly of doing alt tags and adding keywords. We do this of course, but we also add title tags to pages, images and links, as well as extra meta data when needed, canonical urls, sitemap with webmaster and analytics, rss feed submittals and pinging. Most importantly of all, we build data into data silos using taxonomy.

In the field of website optimization, data taxonomies are very misunderstood. It simply means to group content by relevance, and then assign categories to the groups. The specific optimization comes when you are able to apply this to everything on the site, from link structuring to page and paragraph headings.

There is also the matter of easy to add additional data types, including products, reviews, PDFs, galleries, slideshows, and more. Adding them in the correct fashion without alarming Google’s very sensitive radar is a skill that cannot be mastered without thousands of hours of practice, as much of the data I have learned has been from trial and error, field testing, and taking SEO research and turning it into a workable formula for SEO success.

The fun thing about creating and designing a thesis theme is the restrictions. Anyone familiar with designing wordpress websites knows that when you upgrade, core files are overridden. Due to this, you have several different ways to design a WordPress website theme.

Most themes would be static, meaning they are coded once, and then the content is controlled through the database and widgets. This regular type of setup is a standard WordPress theme. When you upgrade the WordPress installation, the theme files displaying the data remain the same. the advantage is that you can upgrade to your hearts content. The downside is that the code will eventually degrade, and the people using your theme will need to switch. You won’t be able to upgrade your theme without overwriting the individuals changes.

So how do you code a theme that can be upgraded? The answer is to use overrides. Thesis very intelligently provided a section that does not get overwritten during upgrades, where we can place custom functions and CSS. Since they override existing CSS or hook to current functions, all the Thesis authors need to do is stick to their current naming conventions when designing and coding the upgrades, and they will install seamlessly.

This becomes fun for me as the Website Designer, since I am achieving things I do everyday anyway, but in a different way than I would normally do them. As a CSS purist and fanatic, I prefer to use CSS over Javascript or PHP when possible, it is a cleaner, lighter weight language and can often accomplish the same objective with less load on the server.

Anyway, the new site looks great, I hope you guys take the time to check it out. Many thanks to Ken Risley and his Wife Kim, great people to work for, I look forward to helping them maintain a dominant web presence well into the future.

A basic design, this web site has many defining characteristics, such as front page contact form so your online traffic can go right to conversion. It also features three column layout, which was embedded into the CMS, so all three columns could be edited without utilizing widget areas or custom post queries. Both of these common WordPress CMS techniques have drawbacks.

WordPress Websites have Widgets that often serialize the data that is stored in them, which means that it is stored in a coded shorthand. The reason this sucks is database transfer. Lets say Sampair wants to change their URL. The website can be easily transferred over to another server or another hosting account, except for the widget data, which cannot be changed easily Via PHPmyAdmin. Normally, if we changed from one URL to another or one IP to another, I can simply do a find and replace on the database. With serialized data, this does not work. The scripts that exist to circumvent this common and frustrating database storage technique frankly suck, and often break databases or do not work at all. All this in addition to complicating the websites CMS for users, which of course is a bad idea.

We could also do Custom Post queries in WordPress. We could have a post, give it a category, and call it from the template file. the problem with this technique is added load time, as a second set of database queries is executed, but it cannot be called until the first set of code gets called, so it results in more http requests. I could swing this on my private server, which is dedicated and the hardware and VM is managed by my boys at hostgator, but it is a mistake to assume all users will have this, and it is a mistake to not design with resource limitations in mind. It may have worked in this smaller, simpler website, but it is a dirty habit to start thinking of solutions that are resource heavy.

The best resource, for users who can handle a little HTML in their website content management system, is to create the additional data inside the primary data call – so all data is coming from one database table, one row. This would be problematic for more inexperienced users, since they would break the layout and not use HTML mode to edit their WordPress web design. For those, I recommend the other two methods. For myself, I train my employees to use the wordpress CMS, so i am able to have multiple SEO and content crews working on websites without being technical masters, which would drive my costs too far up.

Many thanks to Patrick Sampair and his right hand man, Rick Gordon for the opportunity, I look forward to working with you guys on optimizing and expanding your web presence in the near future!