I joined Google+ and decided that I didn’t want another public platform yet.

I like Twitter. I tolerate Facebook. Google+ seemed (for me) like an awkward mash-up of the two. I found the continual stream of notifications telling me that another 500 people I did not know had put me into circles and that lots of other people I didn’t know had mentioned me really irritating and distracting, and I couldn’t turn them off or easily find the signal in the noise (or find my friends in the flood of people putting me into circles), and when I grumbled about it mildly (agreeing with Warren Ellis that I couldn’t find friends I’d actually want to put in circles among the thousands of people who I was being told were putting me in circles) a couple of hundred people explained to me that I was Doing It Wrong.

It was the “You’re Doing It Wrong” messages that were my personal tipping point. As far as I’m concerned, the mark of a good social network is that it either does what it was made to do easily and cleanly, or it’s bendy enough that you can make it do what you want. And being told “you’re trying to use it like Facebook but really it’s like Twitter!” just made me strangely nostalgic for Twitter. And as Twitter was still there, I cancelled my Google+ account, feeling at this point that I didn’t need another time sink, another place to check, another distraction from work or from life.

(If you cancel your Google+ account, Google+ will then start helpfully emailing you notifications every time someone puts you in a circle or mentions you, even if you had all of the “Email notifications” options previously turned off. This is fixable when you discover the “unsubscribe” option at the bottom of the emails that wasn’t visible when they came in on your phone, but you shouldn’t have to unsubscribe from something you didn’t subscribe to.)

Anyway, I wish Google+ all the best. I’ll probably check it out again in a year or so, if I’m still on the Internet, or sooner than that if they make things so I can’t blog without it. And it may well be an excellent Social Network eventually. It’s still in Beta, after all, and most users aren’t going to get a huge instant flood of followers (circlers?).

So that’s a social network I said goodbye to.

I said hello to Turntable.fm, however, a service (currently US only, alas) that lets you make a room, or join a room, and DJ in it. You and four other people can DJ at a time, sharing music you’ve taken from Turntable’s extensive databases or uploaded. I loved DJing, especially once I decided that there should be more spoken-word stuff out there, and that people might like it, and created http://turntable.fm/neilhimselfs_house_of_poetry and have slipped in there from time to time and just played poetry, and been delighted as other people DJ poetry too.

Technologies used: XHTML, PHP, jQuery, WordPress, XML, RSS
Work completed: June 2011

www.vamos-london.com

Technologies used: XHTML, PHP, WordPress, XML, RSS
Work completed: July 2011

www.retaileconomics.co.uk

The first step then was to completely gut out the entire site, looking for any HTML tags which weren’t even needed. There were many of these. I also completely took out all text from the tables and deleted the tables completely. The sooner I got rid of those the better. Instead of using tables I set-up CSS using the float command and relative positioning to get everything into place.

The next step I took was to rename all the files and photos so that they were relevant. This including adding extra descriptive words into filenames. Instead of about.php, we now had about-vera-paradise.php. The more description the better. I also optimised all of the images used on the site. Some of them had huge file sizes despite being the size of postage stamps.

The last stage was going through each page, creating unique meta keywords, meta descriptions and page titles, and then also making sure that the words used in those recurred somewhere in the text. It’s very important to make sure that each page is optimised individually for the search engines.

And that was essentially it. A complete revamp that has already seen the site gain traffic.

After that I was asked to turn that site into a completely new site, with different branding, logos, design, a completely new experience basically. As a lot of the SEO had already been down this was a far easier job.

This is the first site, Vera Paradise. The second site, which was based on Vera Paradise, is Naturist Apartments.

Technologies used: XHTML, PHP
Work completed: May 2011
naturist-apartments.com/

Technologies used: XHTML, PHP, WordPress
Work completed: April 2011
whatslater.com

Technologies used: WordPress, PHP, CSS, XHTML
Work completed: May 2010
soundsandcolours.com

In the past three years we’ve seen so many changes that have completely changed the way we design web sites. In the same time that we used to be able to design small personal web sites we can now design huge resources capable of offering a highly-valuable service. We like to think we’ve stayed on top of things.

Our recent projects have revolved around WordPress, mainly because this is what our clients like to use. It is simple, professional and it gets the job done. Recent projects including Sounds and Colours, Brazilian Football, CCA and On the Road to Find Out have all made the most of this software.

If you like what you see, and fancy your own website built using WordPress, then please get in touch.

Technologies used: XHTML, PHP, WordPress, XML, RSS
Work completed: November 2010
brazilian-football.com

Technologies used: XHTML, PHP
Work completed: April 2011
veraparadise.com