Online site builders

You can do a search on this top on this site, but yes, there is somewhat of a negative impact. Site builders have a tendancy to inject more code into the page than is really necessary, which makes it more inefficient for search engines to read and index your site. However, these sites do get indexed, so don't be too put off. A slightly inefficient website is better than no website at all, me thinks.

You can have a gallery based site on wordpress if set up properly with the right plugins and template. Very search engine friendly and a good backend user system for adding images.

Hope this helps

serendipitybusiness said:

You can have a gallery based site on wordpress if set up properly with the right plugins and template. Very search engine friendly and a good backend user system for adding images.

Hope this helps

Click to expand...

So, SerendipityBusiness, you wouldn't use, well, the Serendipity WebLog system? http://www.s9y.org/

Lol, no I like the flexibility of wordpress you can do pretty much anything with it and it is great as a customer cms because of its versatility. The fact that it is still in it's infancy is the most exciting part of it.

For instance if you have a look at
http://tributeproductions.co.uk/the-kylie-show

The gallery on here (ignore the actual pictures they are due to be updated and reloaded) is just one of the effects that you can have. Not to mention music and video. Plus it can all be updated by the average computer user giving the control back to the customer.

Opposed to say www.nicolaselby.com which is a standard template where the user needs to rename every photo to match the gallery/photo number and upload them manually via ftp.

Plus it can be very search engine friendly. For instance

http://www.motion-som.co.uk
is no 10 on google for driving lessons manchester without any onpage optimisation and no link pop going into it for that target phrase. It is a mature site so that helps, however, it shows how effective wordpress is.

But what I like best is the fact that if you get board with the design you can simply create a template, upload, select it in wordpress and the whole look and structure of the site can be completely different.

What can I say, it brings out the geek in me

Hi Murdoch

This was the second client site I did on wordpress. It is an adapted theme http://osc3.template-help.com/wordpress_20436/ bought from template monster. This was to help our client keep the costs down (although this will probably not be the case for long as I have found out some information on some nice tools this morning that I need to have a look at, I will keep you posted).

However, you can adapt any template without php knowledge as long as the structure is right from the beginning. If you go into themes/images you can substitute your own images in place of the original template images, making it very versatile.

The design was done by myself and it has quite a selection of plugins. I had to hack into the code to remove author, date and comments and make it more of a professional site. Unfortunatly i haven't found any plugins for this yet. Design wise I am self taught this was actually done on coral paint shop pro with quite a few layers. I prefer this to photoshop for usabililty and speed.

Hacking into the code self taught (and much easier than oscommerce or the system instant downloads is on) and once your php head on it is actually not to hard to figure out what is happening (although it is never as simple as you first thought!! )

My friend pointed me to some very useful plugins and I trawled endlessly to find the others. However Ky-lie wanted a dramatic site she could have downloads on, sell things on, put music, a gallery and video on. She also wanted to be able to edit it herself, run newsletters on, add acts etc. So this was the perfect solution.

Nicola Selby has done some new photographs so the design may change a little and the gallery will then be fine tuned. The video has also been done so that should be on soon as well.

All you need is to be brave and experiment on a test installation, choose a good host with fantastico and you are on your way. Its not as hard as you thing once you get under the bonnet.

Some plugins still have some way to go but as I said it is in its infancy and is changing for the better constantly. The only problem is the time it takes to update and maintain it because of this, however I am sure some genius will come up with an answer to that at some point.

Hope this helps