Grey Matter's Blog
Wordpress is one of the most powerful CMS platforms you can use, if not the most powerful. WordPress has many tools that draw traffic to you, including plugins that generate strong meta tags on the fly. Through years of testing I’ve found that the code that makes up your Theme on a WordPress site plays a big role in how you Blog does on Search Engines. This site uses clean, valid code that has few errors and is easy for Search Engines to read and index. Grey Matters is often found by people searching on Google and Bing. Grey Matters is new to the internet but is already finding success with his first Blog and RS Solution's is happy to help!
PostPiper & PostPiper Network
Overview
Currently, PostPiper is a fully functional Twitter Alternative. This is an ASP.NET MVC 2.0 online application that is being developed into a new form of Social networking that will integrate live chat with both live and archived online television. This is a collaborative work with 3 companies; RS Design is working with a Game/Comic Development company and a Filming agency to bring this project to fruition.
Part of the trouble twitter has run into is funding. Our project is taking this into consideration from the start, charging a fee of $1/mo. to fund itself long term. The reasons we believe users will pay $1 are quite simple, privacy and security. Twitter is openly sharing private messages along with public conversations to the Library of Congress for anyone to read. There has also been more and more personal attacks on individuals and people’s accounts are getting hacked. Kids will be safe on our site because stalkers won’t be able to hide behind an anonymous account.
SEO
Another aspect that should be a part of every website is SEO. SEO starts with good programming and the use of keywords throughout a website. PostPiper is no exception, the whole site is based around the use of keywords (referred to as hash tags on twitter). Linking pages of relevance together not only benefits users, helping them to find people with similar interests, but also gives search engines a way to correlate content.
The Technology
ASP.NET MVC 2.0 jQuery MS SQL XHTML Compliant
There are a lot of factors to consider when building a site of this size; Hosting, Databases, Scripting Languages, Financials, Functionality, & Security. Hosting is more important than people usually think, but more and more people count on a fast, data-rich website. Page load times play a huge factor in Search Engine Recognition and the first impression on a customer. We are building a backbone that will run on the fastest CDN, delivering images and video at the fastest possible rate. Using Cloud technology along with Microsoft SQL Server 2008, our application runs the same whether there are 5 people or 500,000 people accessing data on the site. Combining jQuery and ASP.NET C# data access is kept to a minimum of what people need while being secure and harder to hack.
Completion
PostPiper is far from done, there is much video to shoot and there is still funding required to cover the cost of the initial startup. However, a large chunk of the coding has been completed and is ready to start putting media out as soon as it is available. There are also lots of plans for upgrading and improving service. The expected launch is summer 2011.
M & J Antique Auction
Overview
Our longest time customer, M & J is an ever expanding Auction house that does Estate sales and Consignments. This website is updated several times a year to feature upcoming sale items to be auctioned. There is also an archive of most of the auctions held by M & J for users to see what has been featured in the past.
The Technology
Because of the frequent updates we went with a PHP website. PHP makes it quite easy to have a template for repeated content, leaving little work to update the items that span the several hundred pages this site is growing into. Simple tricks like keeping the archive menu in a separate file that is accessed by all pages reduce the amount of time it takes to edit the site; saving the client money for updates. A splash of jQuery gives a nice, easy to use animated menu for users to browse through the years of auctions.
Using the latest image compression techniques with compressed CSS and clean XHTML that doesn’t waste space help to keep this site lean and mean. On a more advanced level adding automated "expiration headers" to images and files that are not changed frequently help reduce traffic on the site, allowing the servers to spend its efforts on delivering the fresh content the users are looking for.
The Future of M & J
With the success of their website complimenting their store they will be upgrading their site to include an online shopping cart to compliment their auction sales and help increase revenue. We have experience theming many different platforms, freeing you up to choose the online application that suites your needs. For M & J, I helped them select Magento Commerce shopping cart solution; this will allow great sales tracking and allow their customers to make purchases right from their smart phone.
A Voice in the Desert
Overview
A Voice in the Desert is a website to archive the radio shows from 2003 and intregrate two ongoing blogs using wordpress and a custom theme to match the front pages for a consistent theme throughout the site.
Randomization
This site is also one of our early attemps at incorporating an ASP.NET randomizing engine. Random done right gives search engines fresh content every time they show up to your site, making your site look active and full of life. We have since rewritten this randomizing engine to be more advanced and have as small a footprint as possible for fast loading. Whether you choose ASP.NET or PHP this engine increases your search engine scores significantly.
Treasures Forever Estate Sales
A simple inexpensive business card site. This guy’s purpose is to give an online presence. A design so clean you could almost print it out and hand it to your customers as a business card. Pure HTML with CSS make up the languages that help this layout look the same in IE and Firefox.
CDM Construction Management and Development
This site is CDM’s Project Portfolio. Handling such clients as Whole Foods and the McPherson Center (Santa Cruz), this company has a lot to feature. This site is currently undergoing a large facelift, so come back in about a month or two for an update and a look at the changes that took place.