Being a web application it is easy to host / share across organisational / geographical boundaries. Being written in PHP means hosting is easy to find and cheap, and, as it is open source it will not cost you anything to use!

The stated aims of the developers of dotProject were as follows:

Originally commenced in 2000 by dotmarketing.org, dotProject was developed as a state of the art Project Management tool from the start.

The original theme (still available in the first release of 2005) flagged dotProject as an open source alternative to Microsoft products and other expensive, commercial applications.

Right from the start, dotProject had, as it’s core aims a number of simple requirements:

• Clean, simple and consistent user interface
• Project Management functionality – not another CMS, groupware environment or all things to all people collaboration tool, but a project management environment
• Open source / open access / free usage.

And right up until the current day, these aims remain the core aim of the current administration team.

I have recently started using this software and have found it very useful and reliable.

It has all the features you would expect of project management software, a monthly calendar showing tasks:

Detail of tasks to be completed:

Which can be expanded to show Gantt Charts:

And some less common features such as problem ticketing:

If you want to play with dotProject they have a demo site which you can log into (which is where I decided to take the screen shots from, hence junk data…).

In my opinion its well worth a look, even if you have no use for it right now, its one of those app’s that it pays to be aware of!

Last month Kieron of here.org.uk wrote a short tutorial on how to build an affiliate site from scratch with WordPress, Kirsty from AffiliateStuff.co.uk introduced a really nice feed driven lingerie site using the revolution theme and Monty from LeavingTheDayJob.co.uk built a niche site promoting vibration platforms, also using the revolution theme.

It is interesting to see the revolution theme being used so frequently, as I had planned to use it for my own offering, but for the short term I went with the free Mandigo Theme. The Mandigo theme is quite an advanced template which can be rendered at different widths. It also allows you to control which links appear in the header navigation… a very useful feature… particularly for the site I built.

So, the site I built is a feed driven mobile phone comparison site.

Everything runs within WordPress itself using the excellent PHP Exec Plugin which allows you to execute PHP within your pages / posts.

I wrote code to import the data feed and build a local database with it, as well as code to query the database and render the comparison tables. Then I just “included” this code within the pages I wanted to display results in. This means I can create a custom comparison page within a minute or so, for example this page on this page you can see I am able to add my own content before including the results from the comparison. This is really where the Mandigo theme comes in handy, as, I do not want all these pages linked in the header navigation. From the WP admin panel I can de-select pages from the header (instead linking pages in the footer with a small mod I made).

The “news” page is the WordPress (loop) blog which I populated with a few pages of paid content.

I’m pretty pleased with the way the site works, but, I am not sure it will make any money as Mobile Phones are such a competitive market. Also, the comparison feed I am using creams a percentage off the affiliate sales, which is pretty expensive. In time I could write aggregate my own feeds to claw this back, but at this stage I am not sure it is worth it, in fact, I think the site may be nothing more than a white elephant .

Still, I learned a lot from building this and will be looking to do more feed driven sites in the future… in less competitive niches .

It does this by getting users to install a toolbar into Internet Explorer. This toolbar sends data to Alexa about which site you are visiting allowing Alexa to track how many visitors a site receives. Alexa then sends back a ranking to the toolbar, allowing the user to see how popular the site is.

As only a minority of users have the plug it, the results are considered worthless by many. Alexa have to use an algorithm to calculate the actual traffic, multiplying the number of ping’s they receive by the number of users who don’t have the toolbar installed.

For example, if one in a hundred people have the toolbar installed, they multiply each ping by 100 to estimate traffic. (in reality it is a lot more complex than this, combining stat’s from different sources).

For this reason it is considered worthless by many within the industry, for all but the largest sites (whose statistics will be more stable, and consistent with Alexa’s algorithm), for smaller sites it is very erratic.

If you have the toolbar installed you often see sites with no Alexa ranking, this is not necessarily because they do not receive visitors, but because they do not have visitors with the toolbar. Conversely, some smaller sites (like this one) have an inflated Alexa ranking, by virtue of the fact that the person that spends most time on the site (me) has the toolbar installed.

Whilst many consider the toolbar worthless, there is no real alternative, and sites such as ReviewMe (who pay site owners to publish articles) use Alexa ranking as a metric.

I myself have used it to try and assess a sites traffic when considering placing advertising on it. The toolbar cannot confirm someones stats, but can help you identify a blatant liar!

A common misconception about Alexa is that only IE users add to the ranking, as the toolbar is not available for Firefox, or other browsers.

Fortunately, as firefox is an open source application, someone was able to write an Alexa Plug in for it. This plug in shows both Google and Alexa rank:

Right clicking the @ symbol reveals a number of really useful SEO tools, such the ability to highlight a keyword, in the image below the word “the” has been highlighted:

Keyword density analysis:

Backlink’s to a page:

I use this in both Windows and Linux and it works very nicely!

So if your using Firefox and want to learn more about the site you are visiting, GO GET IT!.

If you don’t have or want the toolbar you can still get Alexa stats for a site, which are fun to look at if you have a blog or a website, well, its fun as long as the traffic goes up!

Down the left hand pane of the stats screen you will also find the Wayback machine, which has snapshots of how websites looked in the past. This can be a bit embarrassing, especially if you unwittingly bought a domain previously used by someone in Larry Flints line of work.

If your using IE, try downloading Firefox, its free, you can still keep IE on your system (in fact you will find it very difficult to remove it, a common complaint), decide for yourself which is better (or I can tell you… Firefox is better).

You can learn a lot more useful stuff about Alexa on HMTK.com

Be careful, there are hundreds of people who will take your money in return for an all singing all dancing site, myself included but, without careful planning it will be nothing but a white elephant.

To sell online you need to compete in one of two areas

1. Price, you need to be significantly cheaper than the high street (and competitive with other online retailers)
2. Niche, you need to offer products not easily available on the high street, i.e. become a specialist

If you cannot compete strongly in one of these areas, forget it.

Then you need a marketing strategy, do not underestimate the cost and difficulty of this exercise. You will need both an online and offline marketing strategy, both of which can be expensive.

Both on and offline you will need to consider advertising costs in magazines, on websites or using technologies such as Adwords.

An online store is not like a physical shop, there is no ‘passing trade’, it is an extremely competitive industry and good search engine rankings are difficult to achieve, and take time to establish.

You need to consider payment gateways, on this note never store customers credit card details on your site (which a lot of open source applications have the facility to do). To store credit card details you really need to employ a security specialist, and if your reading this, the chances are you cannot afford one.

A famous example of what happens when you store credit card details on a site is a story of Playboy dot Com, whose customers received an E-Mail, containing their personal details and credit card number, informing them that the aforementioned credit card details were circulating the criminal underworld, and making some useful suggestions on how Playboy dot Com could improve their security .

A stunt like that would put most companies out of business.

In a nutshell, if you store credit card numbers on your site you will become a target for hackers, and they are good, way ahead of most of the people deploying E-Commerce sites, so leave that side of things to the professionals running payment gateways (Protx is a good one in the UK).

Then you need to consider shipping costs and packaging, what shipping options you will make available to customers. Most couriers factor weight and size into their shipping costs. This means knowing what your products and packaging weigh, and in some cases the volume too.

You need professional images of all your products, not a good photographer, find out how much that will cost too. There is little point in putting up a nice site if the images are poor.

Consider the time it will take to load (with the weight and shipping options), describe and price your products. It is not sufficient to give a brief description.

1. You need to explain products properly to customers
2. Google will not rank your site well if it has poor product descriptions

If you have an existing retail business, you need to reconcile your on and offline sales / stock. Integrating offline systems with your online store can be difficult, and consequently expensive. The alternative is to manually reconcile the systems, i.e. run two stock figures and keep jumping between them to keep them the same. Your online customer will not be happy if you have to mail them to say ‘I just sold my last one in the shop today’.

I think that’s enough for the time being, there is a lot more which I will post shortly…

• The Open Source Web Directory

I love this site, they have so many great design listed you really are spoilt for choice

One of my favorite free web design templates is:

• Greenery Free Web Design Template

I love this template and am looking forward to using it.

Like all the Free Web Design Templates listed on the Open Source Web Directory it is XHTML Valid and like most of the templates uses a table-less CSS structure.

There is a greenery template available for WordPress (the software used to run this site / Blog) too, though it doesn’t work to well at the moment. I have found elements jumping out of place when using this with wordpress, but I am sure they are only minor glitches. When I have time I will modify this template for one of my blogs.

Another favorite Free Web Design Template is Nautica 05 which I recently used on a site I deployed.

It is a very flexible template with a lot of styles / layouts and good navigation.

The Nautica series of Free Web Design Templates is made available by Studio 7 Designs and is a good illustration of why these designs are given away free.

Studio 7 include their backlink in templates, and ask that users of their templates leave them in place (which it is only fair of you to do should do if using one of these templates).

Looking at the Studio 7 site it has a good page rank (7) and a high Alexa ranking, and this is why:

• Google Links to Studio 7

They have 1700 backlinks from people happily using their template.

This is why web design templates are becoming free. There is no need to charge for templates, you can give web design templates away for free and still earn money from the traffic they generate.

Unlike a lot of bloggers I am not really into the blogsphere as such, preferring to use Google, Digg and Dmoz to find sites of interest, so, naturally I want this site to index well in Google.

If you want to Googalize your WordPress blog your in luck as SEO (Search Engine Optimisations) in WordPress is good out of the box:

• Containing many internal links to different pages (by month, category, author)
• Not using images for links
• Not using JavaScript for navigation

WordPress keeps things simple for search engines, so you are already off to a good start!

However there are some tweaks you can apply.

Change the order of page titles in WordPress

If you look at the page titles on this site, the title of the post appears first, followed by >> and the name of the blog (you will need to click on a post to see this, in the bar at the very top of your browser.

Page title is an important factor for search engines, it is usually used in the first line of Google entries, in bold above the other gumph about the page.

The problem with WordPress is that, out of the box, it puts the Blog name (in this case Site Logic Web Development) before the title of the post. This means that all your pages will start with the same keywords, whereas you probably want more emphasis to be put on different post titles to help users find them. To remedy this you can manually edit the file:

• wp-content / themes / yourTheme / header.php

There are a couple of lines of code near the top of the page between the title tags.

Simple reverse the order of:

• php wp_title(”); (Blog post title, in this case Google your WordPress Blog)
• bloginfo(‘name’); (Blog / site title, in this case SiteLogic Web Development)

Alternatively use this plug in, which should work on all your templates:

• http://elasticdog.com/2004/09/optimal-title/

Personally I think a plug in is overkill to solve a problem that can be overcome with such a simple code edit, but if you want the additional control it is a benefit.

So that’s it, amend that snippet of code, or install the plug in and your google entries will start with the title of your post, as opposed to the name of your blog.

Set Permalinks

Another important factor in SEO is the filename of a page. page_1.html says nothing about your site, but Google_your_Wordpress_Blog.html does. The problem here is that wordpress does not use HTML pages, all information is stored within a database, however there is a built in solution. Go to Options / Permalinks and have a play.

If you select ‘Custom Structure’ and insert ‘/%postname%/’ as the value, then the title of your posts will be used to create the ‘file path’.

Note when you do this code will be generated below which you then need to insert into your .htaccess file. Once you have done this, you will see more descriptive text displayed in the URL, a good thing!

Get your site listed in Google

To get your site indexed in Google you will need a back-link from a site that is already indexed, or submit your URL to Google manually.

Then you will want a Google account so you can use Google’s Webmaster Tools.

To get the most out of the Webmaster tools you will need to verify your site. The easiest way in my opinion is to select “Add a META Tag” from the verification options. Google will generate a small piece of code for you. Again in header.php, insert this code below the line starting:

The second tag containing the ‘verify’ code from Google.

Once you have inserted this you can click a verify button within the google webmaster tool. This proves that the site belongs to you (or at least that you are working on it) and allows you to access a lot more information about the site.

Upload A Sitemap to Google

Finally you will benefit from uploading a sitemap. For this I would recommend you install the Sitemap Generator 2.7.1 (version at time of writing) plug in. This plug in will automatically generate an XML sitemap of your blog helping Google index the whole site. If you don’t use this plug in, it is still likely your site will be indexed due to the number of internal links used by WordPress, but in my experience using a the sitemap speeds up the process.

Once your sitemap has been built (using the plug in), submit the sitemap to Google using the Webmaster tools provided and wait for your pages to index!

The thing I really like about the Sitemap Plug In is that it automatically updates whenever you post, there is also a manual button for creating the sitemap if you want to be sure its working!

I have not given detailed instructions on the use of Google Webmaster tools as they are so easy to use.

These are only minor tweaks, as I said, WordPress is great out of the box, but the beauty of Open Source software is that you are free to improve (or ruin it) as you see fit

After writing this post I found another blog on the same topic with more comprehensive information if you want to learn more then visit:

http://www.johnwiseman.ca/blogging/wordpress-seo/brilliant-wordpress-seo-tips-for-bloggers-and-webmasters/

Update!!If you want to run PHP within your wordpress posts forget reading this post and check out Exec-php by Soren Weber. Within the (very comprehensive) documentation are comparisons with other plugins that allow you to run PHP within WordPress posts.

My latest scheme is to build some afilliate sites…Most of the competing sites I look at are skinny little nasties that would be very difficult to add content to, and thus a lot harder to optimise in search engines.

So, I decided to make mine a bit ‘fatter’, and for that I need a CMS.

Joomla! would be the obvious choice, however, Joomla! is a bit heavy for what I want, and it requires a lot of additional work to bring it up to the standard of WordPress in terms of SEO.

In fact, I have never got a Joomla install up to that standard… only certain elements.

The problem with WordPress is that it is almost exclusively geared towards blogging, however, with a few tweaks you can quickly bend it to your will .

First off you can set any static page as your homepage.

Then put the blog / wordpress loop on another page, called “news” for example.

Then get a php plugin that allows you to add code within your pages, such as Run PHP.

And with that I am on my way, I can easily import bespoke components into my pages / posts and start building!

The home of Run PHP (no sq) is a strange mix of ballet / art / technology and programming… not seen that one before…. I also see they have a theme based on one of the Nautica series of open source templates, one I have used many times myself

To be able modify the software yourself you will need to understand:

• PHP
• (X)HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript (an advantage rather than a requirement)

All come with installation scripts to help you deploy the application. Prior to installing you should read the accompanying documentation, particularly any information regarding security.

osCommerce (Open Source Commerce)

osCommerce is my favorite E-Commerce application, though it really shouldnt be! I say that because the default installation of osCommerce is ugly and contains a lot of really poor clip art that takes time to remove. Also, changing the design / layout in osCommerce can be difficult. There are a lot of features included within osCommerce, some of which you will probably want to disable, again this is a time consuming process.

The reason I still favor osCommerce in spite of its weaknesses is the large amount of contributions available. Contributions are programs (or modifications to existing code) submitted by users of the system, such as:

• STS (a templating system to allow the design to be changed mor easily)
• Froogle data feeder (submits all your products to Froogle, Googles price comparison tool)
• PDF catalog generators (automatically generates a PDF document containing all your products which your customers can download)
• Information Pages Unlimited (allows you to add information pages very easily)
• Lightbox (adds lightbox.js to your product image views)
• Auto Thumbnailers (create small thumbnails of your larger product images to save bandwidth / speed page load)

I have not added links to any of the above as they would become out of date very quickly. Instead search the osCommerce contributions section for the latest additions!

ZenCart

Zen Cart is a popular solution as it works more easily out of the box than osCommerce does. The default design used in the installation looks a lot better than that of osCommerce (in my opinion) and it is considered more secure than osCommerce. There are contributions available for Zen Cart, but nowhere near as many as there are for osCommerce. If you want a store thats quick to set up and reliable then you should definately consider it.

Virtue Mart

Ok, earlier on I said osCommerce was my favorite E-Commerce application, but that it shouldnt be. I said that because, in all honesty Virtue Mart should be the hands down winner. The reason I dont favor Virtue Mart is because of the lack of contributions, however, if you compare the ‘live shops’ built with osCommerce, Zen Cart and Virtue Mart there is no contest. Sites built with Virtue Mart are in a different class.

This is because Virtue Mart is not just a ‘shopping cart’. When I first heard this phrase I was confused as to what it meant. The answer is that neither osCommerce or Zen Cart allow you to build a website, they only allow you to deploy an online store.

Virtue Mart allows you to build a professional looking website with an integrated store, if you check out the live stores for Virtue Mart (choose sites with three or more stars) you will see what I am talking about.
These sites look more like websites as opposed to looking like standard E-Commerce sites. This is because VIrtueMart contains a content management system, originally designed for creating websites (as opposed to online stores).

I believe Virtue Mart was originally an integration of Mambo CMS and PHP Shop. Virtue Mart still works with Mambo CMS, but the integrated installer uses Joomla! (if you want to use Mambo it will be a little more work).

The later releases of VirtuMart solve some of the integration problems (integrating CMS with PHP Shop) and now installs far more cleanly.

Unfortunately Virtue Mart currently has very few contributions, but I am sure that will improve as the user community grows (which I am sure it will).

In summary:

• osCommerce – more bells and whistles than you can handle!
• Zen Cart – get up and running quickly and reliably
• Virtue Mart – build something stunning!

You can see I now have it installed in my sidebar and although I am displaying only six languages (including my own ), there are several others available depending on whether you use the Google Translation Service:

		Italian
		German
		Spanish
		French
		Portuguese
		Japanese
		Korean
		Chinese
		Arabic
		Russian

Or Alta Vista’s Bablefish:

		Chinese (Simplified)
		Chinese (Traditional)
		Dutch
		French
		German
		Greek
		Italian
		Japanese
		Korean
		Portuguese
		Russian
		Spanish

A neat trick with this plug in is that it will cache translated pages to speed up page load times. I did have a slight problem with this plug in as the use of Bablefish causes my template to collapse. I have not bothered to investigate why this is, I just switched over to the Google Translation Service and everything was fine.

Its fun to see your pages translated into other languages and wonder what they could possibly mean and I will be interested to see if I receive more visitors from Europe.

Unfortunately I know these translators are not particularly effective, and am not overly confident that the site will make complete sense to non English readers, but that wont stop Google indexing the pages

I would have liked to include all foreign languages available, but an advertising network I have applied to does not support them, If I get rejected by that network then I will be activating all languages immediately!