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Help with a design problem


chownsy

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Hello all, thank you all for your help so far on problems I have been having over the last few months with a couple of my websites. The one for my motorbike is finished now (I didnt get around to making a PHP contact form as got an apprenticeship so ran out of time to teach it as it was complicating things) I'm back on to my website for my product reviews. Its a 100% non profit organisation and just looks out dated in comparision to other sites that I have seen, plus I have been informed its not IE friendly and when I got it checked for errors it basically broke it with so many errors (totalled about 4000 errors) I have an issue that its not a simple site that I can just upload the content and leave it as it is as I am constantly imputting news and reviews onto the website.There are a few things that I want on the website 1. A news blog for posting news onto it from companies promoting their products that I will review2. Have drop down menus for content3. have content on a database (so a backend is needed) and be able to edit text fast, E.g Copy and paste from word as currently I C+P and then spend 20 mins formatting it as wordpress dont like word content it seems.4. Make it easier to imput pictures to the content where its needed.5, Make it SEO friendly so that I can gain higher rankings in the google searches so my website can then get a bigger audience6. be HTML 5 compatible and all browser friendly7. Have a stylish layout8. Allow changes easily.9. Be safe or safer from hacking. I know that it probably sounds like I am basically asking for the website to be made but I am not. What I am asking for it the time someone will take to suggest how to do something or to help me with a design. My basic website designs that I have 100% scratch built is www.repsolhondanc24.co.uk all but the contact form. The website in question is www.madmercsairsoft.co.uk and the facebook page I want to link to is www.facebook.com/madmercsairsoftreviews I really need to get this sorted soon even with an SEO widget on the site Its not helping at all and im now only hitting 1000 views a week compared to another site I know that gets 1000000 a month at times. I hope someone will help (I would even pay but I cannot afford much at all hence just asking for help finding the right editor/blogger which i can then with help make a theme around Richard

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Something like CMS (had to google it), I currently use wordpress which does the job poorly, It was fantastic a year ago but they changed it and now its worse. Ive tried PHPnuke, Joomla, Wordpress and they have all gone downhill. I would Love to be able to cross transfer the Database over if that is possible to save re-doing all the work?

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Assuming you don't want to rebuild everything yourself, have you looked at plugins for the various CMS applications to do what you want? I'm not sure what they do that you don't like, when you say you want to make it easier to add pictures I'm not sure what you're using now, what the problems with that are, and what you want to switch to, for example. Other than that, the quality that you get out is related to the quality that you put in. If you just paste in a bunch of stuff from Word, for example, and the software doesn't convert that, then it's not going to work on all browsers. Word does not produce content that works in all browsers, it produces text that lets you paste it back into Word without losing anything. When you're pasting the text into a web site then obviously not all of the Word markup applies, so you either need to edit that by hand or find something that will strip the Word-specific markup and try to keep the other stuff. I had to write that code myself, when people paste texts in the rich text boxes in my application it runs several regular expressions on the text to remove most of the Word markup and try to leave the other stuff alone. It's not perfect, which is why we tell people to paste their text into Notepad first, then copy it from Notepad into the application and apply the formatting there.

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when I copy from word it will put about 3 or 4 lines in between each paragraph instead of 1 line so I have to go back through the whole text and edit it. the editing window is so small I can hardly see what Im editing I then have to enter the pictures after all that and cannot see the text clearly to know where I am then putting the picture as the window is so small. Next we come on to the validation of the website, it comes up with near 4000 errors, Next we have the lack of style. I want to make it look a little more modern and snazzy (need a bigger logo but cannot find where the header image size is in any of the template files) Then Its lacking SEO optimisation, All in all the site is a mess and Im fed up of patching it up. I want to tear it down and start new but dont have the experience to make it look half decent like it is now let a lone stunning.

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when I copy from word it will put about 3 or 4 lines in between each paragraph instead of 1 line so I have to go back through the whole text and edit it.the editing window is so small I can hardly see what Im editing I then have to enter the pictures after all that and cannot see the text clearly to know where I am then putting the picture as the window is so small.
If the issue is just the size of the window then there may be settings or a plugin that would let you change the size.
Next we come on to the validation of the website, it comes up with near 4000 errors,
That could be attributed to the things you're pasting as well as the CMS. If you're pasting in text that has a bunch of errors then the final result will have errors, the CMS isn't necessarily going to fix that. If the text contains Word-specific markup, for example, that's going to be a validation error. But maybe the people writing the CMS don't care about validation. Or maybe you're using the wrong doctype. It's hard to guess what might be the causes of errors, but those are the big culprits.
Next we have the lack of style. I want to make it look a little more modern and snazzy (need a bigger logo but cannot find where the header image size is in any of the template files)
That sounds like it comes down to creating or using a template that you like.
Then Its lacking SEO optimisation
SEO is a very broad term. It's not a one-click feature. Certain aspects of SEO, like URL-rewriting, can be automated to an extent but SEO requires skill on the part of the designer to design a website that is optimized for search engines. Putting text in images, for example, does not work with search engines if you want it to find that text. Using Javascript to build a navigation menu isn't going to work with a search engine that doesn't execute Javascript. I've seen several applications that have URL-rewriting modules or plugins that will automatically replace URLs with ones that are more friendly for search engines, but again the entire topic of SEO isn't just a checkbox that you select.
All in all the site is a mess and Im fed up of patching it up. I want to tear it down and start new but dont have the experience to make it look half decent like it is now let a lone stunning.
It sounds like you should pick a CMS that you like, find a theme that you want to use for your site, and start building it from there. When you get to something that you want to change about the CMS then look for plugins to change the behavior. A CMS with a larger community will have more plugins available for it.
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What's the problem with WordPress? It will do exactly what you want it to do, and is highly extensible to include all the features you want without a massive amount of coding on your part. It is SEO friendly out of the box, and if you add in the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast, it's even better. It does URL rewriting as standard, is easy to update and extend, has contact form plugins, is easy to add images to, allows quick changes, has HTML5/responsive themes available and is hack proof (if you update and use security plugins). Why would you not want to use WP?

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