David Slack - Web developer

SEM or Search Engine Marketing is a way to get your website on to and up as high as posible on the search engines. You do this by link-backs and links.

Link-backs are links to and from your website so you link to a page on the web and they link back to you. Search engines pick up on this and move you up the rankings depending on how valid the link-back is (do the two sites/pages have info in common?) and also how valid the site is (is it a spamming forum or a .gov website?)

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the black art of making your site easier for search engines to see and list. The better your SEO, the higher the site is ranked in the search engine. There are lots of ways of optimizing websites for search engines but here is how I do it.

Once you have the site optimised for Search engines you can start to market it with SEM and offline marketing.

Modules

As usual we need to add in some modules to extend the Drupal website. Lets start with these:

Now we need to tell the site how to display the files using our ImageCache presets. To do this click the 'Display fields' tab at the top. Now use the pull-downs to get the setting below

Images

• Label = <Hidden>
• Teaser = no styling
• Full node = no styling

Main Image

Now we have the modules all installed and setup we'll go and make it so the user can upload an image on the page. You will have to do tis for each content type, but we will only do page and story for now

1. Go to admin
2. On the left click Content Types
3. Click 'Manage Fields' to the right of 'Page'

Group

We'll add a group for our images so under New Group type Images in the box for Label and 'images' for the box for Group name now hit the Save button. Now to configure the group

Now to set up the main part of the image modules, we'll setup ImageCache

1. Go to admin
2. On the right hit 'ImageCache'

There will probably be only one preset for ImageCash at the moment and this is for the iTweak upload module. This preset will set up an images size for any image uploaded using iTweak upload. We won't touch this at the moment but we will create our own

From the image the user will upload we will create 4 images

Once we have the modules installed we need to configure them

1. First go to www.example.com/admin/settings/file-system/transliteration and click the Transliterate button if it asks you to. This will fix any problems with URLs you might have
2. Click the 'Save configuration button

1. Go to admin
2. Click ImageAPI on the right
3. Make sure ImageAPI GD2 is selected
4. Click the Save Configuration button

Now Lightbox2 to setup:

First we'll download the modules for images:

If you've followed the tutorials you'll know IMCE is great for adding images to content, but what about an image that 'represents' a piece of content?

For example your user will upload an image and we have to make sure it is a nice large image, say a width of between 1000px and 2000px (if you don't know what a px is read on). From that we need to create 3 images

• one at 600px width by 300px height for the main image
• one at 950px width with any height for the full size image
• one at 200px width by 200px height for the teaser image

So you've chosen to use Drupal as your CMS of choice for your new website? Read on to find out how to create a basic CMS website. From here we will go on to add user profiles, blogs and other social aspects like Facebook, MySpace or twitter. We will then go on to add translation to the site and finally add eCommerce.

At this point you will know what the client wants so you can judge if the client will need a CMS, eCommerce, huge web-space, dedicated server or what ever. So the first job is to buy the domain and hosting. I use Dataflame because they have good prices, a good help service and the servers are in London so relatively quick. I've also been with them for a long time so I trust them which I cannot say for the 'bigger' companies I've worked with.

Creating a website is fraught with problems! Whether your a salesman, Graphic Designer, programmer or whatever there are many things you know and many you don't (you don't know you don't know them until you find you don't know).

Here are my musings on what to do. There are other ways and bits I've missed so feel free to comment and let me know