Well, fear not Something Fishy fans, this is now the games permanent home, hit the image below and have fun!

There are plenty of specialist companies out there offering to optimise your site, and there is a lot that can be done to existing sites, but, in our experience, by far the most effective method is to build the site from the ground up with search engines in mind. Before the content is written, and the design even thought about, the first questions should be “What key words and phrases are we aiming for?”

Convincing clients that this actually more important than their site looking really pretty can be tough. Think about when you do searches in Google - the top results are nearly always pig ugly sites!

However - if you build from the ground up for SEO and code properly, it is possible to have sites that perform well and look great.

A good example of this is this Cuban Cigar site we coded (designed externally by graphic designer Henri Phillips) - it looks great and has performed exceptionally well - Number 2 out of 1.6 million results in a google search for “mail order cigars”.(done today)

One that we launched today was a site designed by Hill Solomon for Health and Safety Posters. This could be a trickier challenge, as there isn’t a huge amount of content for the search engines, but we have targeted the the term “Safety Posters”, so lets see how it goes!

If it works, then Binamic are the gods of search engine optimised sites!

Andy’s done a fine job geting this live with the limited time available (”Oh - Andy - just get us a blog up would you? - you know - in between all that client work - it can’t be that hard can it?”)

We hope to keep it updated with all sorts of stuff about Binamic - what we are up to, how, and who with etc. We might even give away some of our secrets to creating flabbergastingly good web sites and multimedia.

We’ll also add anyhing else we think might be interesting or useful. For example - we try to run the company as ecologically as possible. For a company who’s core activities rely on computers you might think that’s hard, but there is plenty we can do. (For example - none of our staff drive to work - we either walk or bus it.)

Anyway more of this as we go.

Here’s to the good ship Blognamic!

Development

We wanted to get the site up and running as quickly as possible which is why I choose to use Wordpress instead of building a custom content management system. Wordpress is a great platform which allows for vast customisation and has a large array of plugins created by the brilliant community.

Making use of plugins is a key part of Wordpress development, chances are that anything you can think of has already been done and implemented as a plugin. Start off by trying the Wordpress Codex plugin page, though usually Google will get you there quicker!

Plugins Used on this Site

• Akismet is provided in the Wordpress package as standard, you will need a wordpress.com API Key but this plugin is a must have if you want to keep your blog spam free.
• Customizable Comment Listings let’s you display the latest comments anywhere on your blog and we are using it on the front page.
• Customizable Post Listings does the same as Customizable Comment Listings but with posts! Again used on the front page.
• Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Created by John Gruber and ported to PHP by Michel Fortin. Markdown makes marking up posts a complete dream!
• Widon’t is a tiny but essential plugin for typographic perfection. It eliminates Widows in a post title and can be configured to perform it’s magic on any html element inside a post.

At the time of writing the Coffee 2 Code site which hosts Customizable Comment Listings and Customizable Post Listings is acting a little “funky” but I managed to get to the PHP source for both the files, here and here respectively. 

Coming Soon

There are still a lot of features I would like to roll out on this blog as it is pretty bare bones at the moment. Features will include a Search, Archive and any other cool things I can think of! Keep your eyes peeled!