Web dev | Arron Woods

Website design price guide

I was reading through the Web Design survey by AListApart and found some of the results quite interesting. As a director of a web design company it was good to see how we compare to other companies. One statistic I’ve always wanted to know is the average price a website design/development project.

Broad I know but the price of website design and development fluctuates greatly and its something that has always bothered me. I tried looking for a decent guide or survey on the matter but couldn’t find anything. If anybody knows of one please let me know!

On some quick research of this topic I put “website design prices” in to some search engines hoping to find some sites or blogs that gave an overview of prices across the industry but to my surprise all I got were company guides for individual companies. From these results and a little experience, I grouped prices in to the type of company. I got it down to:

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My second plugin

RB Internal Example As promised I’ve written another wordpress plug-in. I am hoping this plug-in will become a useful tool for bloggers when linking to posts and pages within their sites.

When I came to link to a couple of pages from my {{post id=”extras” text=”Extras”}} page I presumed there would be an easy way to do this. I couldn’t find one anywhere and there didn’t seem to be any plugins either. I took a look at the plugin ideas forum over at wordpress and it seems I wasn’t the only one wanting a simple and flexible way to add internal links to my posts.

For more information and to download the beta version of this plugin visit the {{post id=”rb-internal-links-plugin” text=”plugin page”}}.

Random Blog Article WordPress Plugin

Introducing my first ever word press plug-in: Random Blog Article v1.0 (yay!).

Having set-up wordpress and had a play around I was very impressed by

the usability of the administration panel
how powerful and yet easy to install the plugins were

I did some research in to how wordpress had done this and discovered that making a plug-in myself wouldn’t be too difficult. On a side note, if you are interested in developing a plug-in, definitely start here: Writing a Plugin

On to the plug-in (at last). For more information on what it does, how to download it and how to install it, click {{post id=”random-blog-article-plugin” text=”here”}}.

Put simply it is a replacement for the blogroll only it displays just one random article from each of your favourite blogs and, by default, only one at a time. More than one at a time will have to wait for v1.1 if people take up any interest. At a set interval the current blog and article is replaced with a random new one via AJAX.

Using the admin panel page you can add as many of your favourite blogs to the plug-in as you wish, all cached to keep things speedy.

Take a look at the screenshots or just scroll to the top of the page for a preview.

It is in-fact a lot like the “Hot Blog” plug-in I’ve seen on the WordPress Stats dashboard page. I couldn’t find any plug-ins like it, hence writing my own. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were in fact hundreds and I was just looking in the wrong place but at least I can say I tried! 🙂

I’m thinking for my next plug-in, something that will allow me to easily link to other posts and pages within a blog without having to put in the full URL. That way if I ever change my permalink structure (for some strange reason) I don’t have to go back and change all my links. After some research I could only find one other plug-in like it which was Easy Post-To-Post. Please let me know if there is already a better way of doing this and I’ll stop reinventing the wheel.

Testing cat link

The history of a website

Having just launched the blog I’m setting up as many SEO tools as I can, ensuring that the blog has a reasonable chance of getting any audience at all. I just set up the site in Google Webmaster Tools and noticed that google already had data for the site.

My first reaction was “blimey, that was fast!” thinking that Google had started to index my site in under 12 hours. After a little research I realised that Google had kept data from the last owners website in its records. To no surprise it seems my blog name is a little unoriginal.

Thanks to the way back machine I managed to find out a little about the previous site. I’m not sure how it was styled but at least you get to see the content. I wonder whether the data Google has from the previous site will have any advantages or disadvantages to my future rankings.

I’ve never really thought about the history of a domain name before but in tribute to the previous random blog: http://web.archive.org/web/20070504032044/http://www.blograndom.com/