There are literally thousands of WordPress themes currently available online, spanning over dozens of genres, so it is generally easy to find a theme that will fit your site’s needs. However, there are times when a custom theme may be absolutely necessary. For someone with very little web experience building a WordPress theme from scratch can be quite a daunting task. However there are ways to do this without any special knowledge or experience whatsoever. The following three methods are the easiest ways to get a custom theme for your site.

Hire a Freelance Designer

OK, this isn’t creating it yourself but it is perhaps the easiest way to get a custom theme made. Hiring a WordPress designer from one of the many freelancing forums online can actually be very reasonably priced. (more…)

Joomla is one of the most commonly used content managements systems (CMS). One of the main reasons why this script is so widely used is because of its ability to create web sites and online applications with greatly varied functionality. Virtually any type of site with any purpose can be developed with Joomla. We offer an automated application installer called Installatron which allows for automated installs requiring just a few clicks, this downloads all the files, creates the database and admin user all for you which can get your site up and running in just a few minutes. There are many extensions that can be added that make the possibilities with this software unlimited.

Whatever your site’s needs may be, it is likely that the time will come when you are ready to monetise your Joomla site. This may seem daunting to you, but not to worry. There are many helpful extensions that will help you accomplish your goals. (more…)

The speed of a website isn’t something that should be left out of the web development process, but if it is, there are still many ways to improve it. Even if you aren’t the most web-savvy person in the world, some simple fixes can speed up your website significantly.

“Why does a website have to be fast?” I hear you ask – well there are a number of reasons. To start with, a planned update for Google named Caffeine is due anytime soon, with an emphasis on website speed and performance. This means that faster loading websites may start to rank higher in search engines. Another reason is that some Internet users may not necessarily have a fast connection (or even broadband), so it’s important to ensure you are catering for all of your users – not just a majority.

Here we explore some top tips to speed up a website running a WordPress CMS. (more…)

The amount of freeware available on the Internet today can seem overwhelming. Gone are the days when you have to spend lots of money to do simple online tasks. You can simply download the software you need, and start using it to achieve your goals. Firebug is such a tool, offered free to users, it provides a platform to debug problem code and scripting that may be preventing users from staying on your website.

For the purpose of this post, I’m going to touch on what this little do-it-yourself website debugging tool can do for the average user. Firebug works in real-time with your FireFox browser. It allows you to: View HTML, PHP, CSS, and Javascript, fix any problems with the script or code, view the changes as they will appear to visitors, then upload the changes to your host – all from your browser window! (more…)

What is the best CMS? This is a difficult question, and depends on what kind of site you are building. Content Management Systems (or CMS as they’re also known) are an essential tool for any webmaster who’s moved beyond basic blogging platforms such as Blogger. CMS’s offer a number of advantages which allow the user to modify and manage virtually every aspect of a website. They create a platform for dynamic management of web pages and can serve as an interface for both blogs as well as more advanced sites requiring a login system. Here we review some of the top free CMS’s and show which you should use for your site, depending on your needs.

1. WordPress
Primarily known as a blogging platform, WordPress offers enough customisations and plugins to be called a CMS. An excellent choice for a beginner, WP can be up and running in less than five minutes. A basic knowledge of HTML is not required to be able to work with WP as it comes with an in-built WYSIWYG editor allowing you to edit elements as you create your posts. The admin section is clean and self-explanatory, it requires no special knowledge and should be easy to use even for someone new to blogging. Updating WP is also efficient and painless with all back end code updated automatically with subsequent versions, along with the plugins as well. WordPress offers some of the most versatile plugins to address almost every need you may have, from SEO to controlling spam comments. WP comes with a vibrant developer community which offers thousands of free and paid templates suited to whatever kind of site you want. (more…)

The smaller images are on your webpages, the faster your site will load which will provide your users with a much better experience, especially those on slower connections and even dial-up access. This will also benefit you as you will be using less disk space to store the images, as well as less bandwidth to transmit them each time a user requests them, so it is beneficial all round!

If you have not optimised your images before or are not sure about this, I’ll give a quick example to show the benefits.

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These days almost any business you can think of has a website, be it the local pub or a multinational corporation, and the reason is that this can be a great source of advertisement and raise awareness of your business. For business that sell products or services to consumers, having a website is even more vital, and can enable you to extend your customer base much wider than for instance a single retail shop. A website costs a tiny fraction compared to the rent and other factors that would be necessary for a physical presence also, another clear advantage. (more…)

If you are building a new website from scratch, you may want to consider using a Content Management System (CMS) as the base for this. A CMS is a web application that is used for managing various types of content including images, videos, audio files, electronic documents and other forms of web content and digital media. These are often used for publishing web content on new websites as they allow for rapid website development and maintenance, generally offering powerful back-ends for administration, some even allowing drag and drop site creation. Most of the popular web CMS are open source, meaning that it won’t cost you a penny to use these, and they are very actively developed often with more collaborators working on a CMS than a commercial web app. Many of these have active communities offering helpful support around the clock for free also, and due to these points some very prolific sites make use of these CMS’s. Some examples of this are Ford (WordPress), The United Nations (Joomla) and MTV (Drupal) to name but a few. (more…)

During website development you may need to access a site without making changes to the DNS, for example if you wish to start developing a site on a new uk web hosting server without changing the live site. Often you will be able to access the site through a temporary address, but with the way that many of the current Content Management Systems work such as b2evolution, WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, PHP-Nuke, etc. then access through this temporary address may result in the site displaying incorrectly. There are a few ways around this (more…)

One of the primary purposes of a domain name is to translate a word or series of words into a numeric IP address which can be referenced globally on the internet by any other machine on the internet. An example of this would be www.nethosted.co.uk which can be resolved to 85.13.250.34. This use is facilitated by the use of the Domain Name System (DNS) and domain registrar authorities.

For domain name registration will need to use a domain registrar. In many cases web hosting companies also offer domain registration services so (more…)