Every so often I’m going to profile certain web design firms that specialize or offer excellent WordPress services. The first is BrightCherry, a web design company in Essex.
BrightCherry is a team of five people who focus on PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. The common tools of the trade. They offer the standard collection of web design services including design, coding and hosting and email packages.
BrightCherry has served a lot of clients since they started business. Their clients include hair salons, car dealerships and production companies. They’re well-equipped to handle your web design needs regardless of the industry your business is in.
What really sets BrightCherry apart as one of the premier web design Harlow firms is their appreciate and understanding of WordPress. BrightCherry understands the importance of blogging and will help you design and setup a brand new blog or re-design and modify an existing one you may be using.
In addition to offering paid WordPress services, the crew at BrightCherry maintain their own company blog in which they give away free tips for other WordPress developers and designers. Their posts range in topic from tutorials on modifying the core WordPress files to simple bug fixes for problems like empty RSS feeds.
On top of all of that WordPress stuff they’ve also gone ahead and started to release free WordPress themes for the public to use. Their first theme is already available on the official WordPress themes directory and they plan to add many more in the future to help them get the word out about their business and the services that they provide. That’s an excellent idea for other web design firms out there looking to make a name for themselves in the WordPress community.
So if you’re looking for web design Essex make sure and check out the folks at BrightCherry. They offer free quotes for anyone interested in their services.
There’s a nice post on Mashable that spammers are all over Knol already. Knol, for those of you who don’t know, is Google’s “Wikipedia killer” web application that lets users upload informative articles based on topics they’re particualrly knowledgeable about. Well, it looks like spammers are already finding ways to use Knol to their advantage.
WordPress has been, for a few years now, known as one of the most popular and easy to use tools for spammers. Splogs have been common on the web for a long time and the majority of them are powered by WordPress installs set to automatically update with scraped content from other sites online. It looks like this methodology is rapidly moving into Knol now.
A lot of the problem stems from the fact that, even so close after launch, Knol pages are rapidly ranking for search terms. WordPress is also well-known for helping rank sites quickly as well which is what draws the spammers in to using the software.
What does this mean for WordPress? Not much in the long run but at least it’ll divert some of the attention away from them as Google handles the pressure of these spammers abusing their service.
The world of WordPress themes is a dark place, my friends. I’ve written before about the dangers of using free WordPress themes but things are only getting worse for this topic.
Recently, many sites are popping up offering free WordPress themes for download. That should be no surprise as there are already many similar sites on the web today. The twist with this new breed is that they’re posting freely available themes from other sites and then stripping out or adding in spam links to each theme.
Of course, they are being paid for those links while the original theme designer receives nothing and also has his creation modified against his will. A lot of these sites are being found and reported to designers in the WordPress community each day.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure there is a whole lot that can be done to stop them. If one happens to be shut down it would be pretty trivial for another one to spring up and take its place in short order.
Just remember to be careful about what themes you’re downloading and from where.
