Migrating the Department for Transport website to WordPress

By Joe Gardiner Monday, 23rd August 2010

From the conclusions made in the article UK government's spending on hosting and development, I decided to migrate the Government site DFT (Department for Transport) to a php application, specifically WordPress, as this is a CMS we have much experience developing and hosting.

Summary

The key points from the rest of this report follow:

Migration - We migrated dft.gov.uk from it's current management system to WordPress to illustrate the ease of the process and that the site can be moved to an open source, free management system for very little cost. We had no access to any site files but used a small script to crawl the sites content and images.

Hosting - The copied site is now hosted on our php platform vCluster and was developed on the same platform it is now hosted on.

Expenditure - The migration and hosting process resulted in costs to us of £5000. This small investment could save up to £64,800 per month, £777,600 per annum, and this is for a single Government site.

You can view the result of the migration and our sample site running on WordPress here: DFT sample site.

How accurate is Alexa?

By Joe Gardiner Monday, 16th August 2010

Alexa Internet is a web company owned by Amazon that provides a toolbar that offers advice to it's user on navigation, and tracks a users behaviour transmitting it to Alexa for analysis of browsing patterns.

Alexa is widely used, especially when attempting to value a website for a potential sale. Some Webmasters focus on improving their Alexa ranking over improving their content in the pursuit of valuing their site higher. This seems like a waste of effort to me, but this practice does take place, but then you already knew that! With this behaviour taking place, and discrepancies when comparing Alexa rankings with analytic services such as Google's, some concerns over Alexa's accuracy have been raised.

MySQL Best Practices

By Ollie Armstrong Thursday, 12th August 2010

Do you know how to best design a MySQL database, or how to best structure a MySQL query? If not then this post will certainly interest you. Here we will be discussing the best MySQL practices you can use not only to keep your database running smoothly and quickly but also to keep it user friendly.

10 - Use sensible field names

Have you ever started on a project and designed the database using ambiguous field names like read more...

Posted in Guides, MySQL | 2 Comments »

Setting up WordPress Multi-Site

By Joe Gardiner Monday, 9th August 2010

WordPress 3.0 integrates the old WordPress MU (Multi User) version into a single version that supports multiple sites on multiple domains on a single WordPress install.

Your CatN vCluster makes an ideal platform for running a WordPress blog farm. If you're looking for unlimited domains (including vanity domains!) from a single WordPress installation, this guide will get you up and running in no time.

Note: This guide only applies to WordPress version 3.0 and above.

This guide is dependant on you installing WordPress in your root directory, not in a subdomain. e.g. install WordPress in your www/sites/fubra-customer/http folder

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