Site news: Move to WordPress

November 3rd, 2009


About the Author

Dan Smart photo
I’m Dan Smart, a 32 year old website developer, based in Swansea, UK. I have worked in the software development industry for over 10 years, with experience in web development, mobile handset development, and mobile networks. My current focus is web development, working freelance with a number of clients, working both on design and implementation of websites and web applications with systems such as Wordpress, Joomla, and CodeIgniter. When I’m not developing websites and software, I am a keen runner, involved with mime performance group Innovo Physical Theatre, and also actively involved in my local church.

* Follow me on Twitter or contact me


Just as a note for those who are interested in what how this site is built, I have just relaunched it as a WordPress-based site. This will speed up my updates to this site, which in turn means that it stays up to date whilst I’m working on other projects. Blogger to this site via FTP just wasn’t cutting it. Plus I get to look to use some decent plugins to display code better.

Some useful plugins I’m using in the process:
- All in one SEO – this helps manage some of the SEO requirements of this site, especially when it comes to page titles and page meta descriptions. It allows me fine granular control over the descriptions on each page, or can automatically generate each one.

- Google Analytics For WordPress – manages the Google Analytics site tracking for me. There are a few different GA plugins, so I’ll be trying this one to see if it’s any good, and will review this in more detail at a later date.

- Twitter Tools – Twitter integration, allowing me to both tweet on Twitter when I publish a new post here, and also the sidebar shows my latest tweets. This is a good plugin, highly recommended!

Elements still in development:

  • with the move to WordPress, I need to choose the best mobile solution. I’m considering writing my own plugin, as I’ve not been totally happy with any of the other mobile plugins I’ve tried on client projects.
  • blog post thumbnails – this isn’t by default built into WordPress, so just need to add a custom field to incorporate this.
  • improved portfolio viewing – as the number of portfolio items grows, so the system I use to display them to the viewer needs to accomodate this.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-analytics-for-wordpress/

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