SEO Guy’s Website Rebuild

Posted by comauth on May 18, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Well, regular visitors may have noticed a change of design layout and architecture. After a marathon 3-4 days, during which I’ve been extremely focused and very unsociable, I’ve finally – after a shaky start 5 months ago – now 95% completed the extreme makeover on www.ComAuth.co.nz What a mission! As an aside, for anyone who’s ever wondered – the domain name goes back many years, when I was a free-lance Computer consultant primarily working for Local Authorities (city / district goverment).

Main Site – this was comprsied of a large number of static HTML pages that had evolved over many years – disjointed, complicated, masses of information but not particularly well organised. Previously, it had been managed in MS Frontpage, which was, in 1998, a pretty clever bit of software! Conversion to a WordPress CMS provided an opportunity to solve all perceived site management and maintenance problems.

WordPress Blog – several years old, in a subdirectory, and its content needed to be moved seamlessly to the main site so that all indexed / bookmarked pages were not lost track of by Google / previous visitors / incoming website links etc. This required a Mod-Rewrite auto-301 domain redirection (upwards) on the directory. Unfortunately, the desire to automate the process meant I was stuck with using the same Permalink structure on the new site.. /%postname%.htm instead of the preferred /$category%/%postname.htm

Anyway, its almost all working as it should, with the exception of;

Search – a part of the “Corporate” theme - using it just generates a blank page…
Tags – no idea whats up with this – just get a blank page with either Simple Tags or std WordPress tags… but the internal tagging functions all work fine!
Images: added 255px images in widget areas – they get auto-shrunk to 233px Must be a template function at work there!

Apologies if you encounter any difficulties – its a work in progress, and may take a week or two to fix everything. Content revision is also ongoing…

Filed under Website Makeovers · Tagged with

Case Study: Website Rebuild and Search Engine Rankings

Posted by comauth on April 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Fasteners Direct is an Auckland-based company specialising in supply of fasteners & hardware to the construction, building & engineering industries. Their old website was static HTML pages originally done in MS Frontpage, but which basically contained a lot of picture and not much text. We were asked to carry out an SEO Review on 24th Feb 2009, and as part of that, pointed out that the old site really would benefit from need updating.

Managing director Andrew Benton agreed and gave us the go-ahead to rebuild the website in a WordPress CMS so they could easily add / edit content as required. The additional ability to use the blog aspects of WordPress to create news, DIY articles, product reviews and distribute newsletters etc is also a consideration…