Initially we looked at the search results and have made a significant difference to the ranking for their key terms.  Over the past couple of weeks we have been adding the new seasons fashions from the leading designers, giving a page to each to show the newest wedding outfits.  There are many stunning images like my favourite one shown here from Condici.

The new pages are doing well, achieving page one listings and climbing.

The site aims to showcase the hard work John and Carole have put in during the last 5 years or so and has information about them, their alpacas and the alpacas for sale.

Once again, it’s been our pleasure to work with this client and we wish them the greatest success with the site, and our continuing partnership to improve it still more.

Checking  Google I saw that it was listed for the combinations of the terms for searching such a download, and getting hits for all kinds of variations including someone searching for list of counties of united kingdom web developers.

Glad to be of service.

How wrong can you be? Lots of lists, but none of them complete and most out of date. Spent far too long looking and eventually had to make my own. I think it’s pretty complete, though, as ever, you probably know better.

I’ve added a text file with just each County name that you can use as you like.

Please let me know what you think or if there are any missing by adding a comment. I promise I’ll be grateful and will add any missing counties.

Finally if you make use of the list, feel free to link back to this page http://www.imaker.co.uk/blog/list-of-uk-counties/

For such a major upgrade, giving a totally new look admin, it was much easier that previous releases (2.6) and gave no problems at all.

Upgraded to WordPress version 2.6 today and unfortunately, the blog collapsed giving 404, page not found errors on every post.

The site was hosted on a wind-oze server where .htaccess was not allowed and so I used a custom permalink as in /index.php/%postname%/ as the recommended work around. This is causing the problems with WordPress 2.6 throwing errors since the /index.php/ was “forgotten about (?).

Since I have now moved to Linux hosting and can use htaccess again I decided to abandon the workarounds and get back to htaccess and redirect from my main WordPress directory directly to the posts and remove the /index.php/ workaround.

How to fix it.

WordPress say that if you have blank category base and tag base in your permalinks then setting them to anything will temporarily fix the problem until the next release. Then presumably you have to change them back.

How I fixed it

I decided not to use anymore workarounds and so used the following to get rid of the cause and the problem itself.

First I changed the custom permalink from index.php/%postname%/ to /%postname%/ and saved it. On the permalinks page – near the bottom WordPress then gives you the redirect code for your htaccess file. I copied that and pasted it into the .htaccess file and, guess what, it worked. All my pages are now bearing the new urls and if I use a search engine for one of my blog posts and click it, that gets redirected too, and all without the /index.php/ extra!

In the meantime WordPress are working on release 2.6.1 to fix the problem.

Those nice people at Mozilla, as well as releasing version 3 of the Firefox browser in the next few days are also going to try for the Guinness world record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours.

I’ll certainly be one of the downloaders, it’s a much better browser than IE. If you feel like committing to the download click the image to register your pledge.

What does it give me?
At the least your web hosting will provide your site pages to anyone that requests them, however most hosting provides a whole lot more. It will maintain a log of all the requests and show these as a statistical analysis of where the requests came from, what was requested as well as information about the browser and computer. The stats will even tell you which search engines were used and what was searched for.

As well as hosting the site it will also provide email facilities, with possible a webmail service so you can access your email anywhere, a number of addresses in the format of name@yourdomain.com, you should also expect antivirus and spam filters for your email.

Depending on the level of your hosting you may also have access to one or more databases that can be useful if you have a “dynamic” website or a content management system.

There is a whole lot more that hosting is capable of, but this post hopefully has given you an overview.

What is a domain name?

In simple terms you may know it as a URL or a web address for example www.imaker.co.uk . It is the name you register for your website for a period (in the case of co.uk of 2 years, a .com for 1 year) that no-one else can use while the name remains registered.

What a domain name does.

The main advantage of having a domain name is that it allows you to set up a website with that name. The domain contains information about it’s owner, contact information and other references to the ownership and registration details of the name. The domain also has something called the MX records and Name server details. Put simply the MX records point at where emails will be sent, while the name server record points to the physical address of the website, that is the address of the machine where the website is stored.

What will a domain name give you.

Full control over the name. That doesn’t sound too impressive, but gives you total control over the name, where the site is hosted, where emails are sent and received which is very important should something happen to your existing services. It means you can change any detail at will. You don’t necessarily have to have a web site to own a domain name. It is possible to use the name to provide a unique email address. Some registrars will provide email free when you register the name and some hosts will let you use the name solely for email.

How to register a domain name

A domain registrar will arrange the registration for you. There are many of them and it’s a matter of your personal choice which one you use, some are better than others. You pay your money and take your choice!

Why then do I receive so many pointless mass emails asking imaker to link to them in return for a very poor reciprocal link. Always on the look-out for something interesting, unusual and / or the worthwhile amongst the rubbish, I do look through them, even though the majority are rubbish.

So, what do I class as rubbish?

• Three ways with no relevancy.
• Links where the site is about 5 minutes old (or less).
• Mass mailed and have been picked up as spam.
• Links from sites I have linked to before only to see their link back vanish shortly after (oh yes I do keep a record).
• Any site that is either banned or not indexed.
• Link pages that have no link from the home page.
• Spelling errors that really should have been picked up.
• Anything from gmail, hotmail. yahoo etc etc.

Having said that I suppose at risk of another flood of link request emails I had better say what makes me give a link.

• email is from the site requesting the link
• a personal (not mass) message
• the site is relevant to my site
• my users may be interested
• the requesting site has some history
• listed in search engines
• the link has value to my site
• it’s written in such a way it’s hard to refuse
• a relevant site asking for a reciprocal link on a page with a higher pr than mine!
• all of the above