Just write your request in the comments below and I will send the invitation to the e-mail address you give in the comment form. (Your e-mail address will not be exposed to the public or transferred to any third party).

Invites will be given out on a first-come-first-served basis.

Free Google+ invitations is a post from: Stephen Mulligan Website Design

The Problem

Usually payment for web development works like this:

• Negotiate the deal with the developer
• Pay 50% up front
• Site gets developed
• Pay the remaining 50%

This system has a number of flaws:

• The client is risking 50% of full payment up front
• When the full amount is paid at the end of the development cycle the client has still not received any benefit from the site as it will not have developed any revenue yet
• The developer has no motivation to continue tuning the site or recommending to the client how they can make it perform better

The Solution

For qualifying clients I am offering a subscription service with the following features:

• Fixed payment every month for the life of the site
• Typically £50 to £150 per month
• Includes Hosting
• Includes site redesign every two years
• Includes mentoring service

Subscription is a post from: Stephen Mulligan Website Design

Alltop was created by Guy Kawasaki, Kathryn Henkens and Will Mayall and they say:

“You can think of Alltop as the “online magazine rack” of the web. We’ve subscribed to thousands of sources to provide “aggregation without aggravation.” To be clear, Alltop pages are starting points—they are not destinations per se. Ultimately, our goal is to enhance your online reading by displaying stories from sources that you’re already visiting plus helping you discover sources that you didn’t know existed.”

So it’s an RSS aggregator.

The upshot is this: if you want a free link from a PR6 page just fill in the form on this page here. When your site finds itself at the bottom of a topic page don’t be surprised if you don’t get any traffic from it. I imagine the traffic levels build up gradually as you climb up the page positions. (currently I’m languishing in second-to-last place).

Machines that go Bing makes it into Alltop is a post from: Stephen Mulligan Website Design

After you click on ‘Subscribe’ you must do two things:

1. Wait for a new window to open and type in the warped text that you see in the box (this is to prove that you are not a software program)
2. Wait for a new e-mail to appear in your ‘in’ box from the Feedburner. When it arrives click on the link in the e-mail message

If you do not do both of these things your subscription will not be successful.

Thank you

E-mail Subscription is a post from: Stephen Mulligan Website Design

Now usernames are no security at all and usually easy to guess. Passwords should be more difficult but most people are bad at choosing them. In an effort to make passwords easy to remember they are usually easy to guess and lists of the most common passwords used on the internet are easy to find making a dictionary attack trivial in most cases. In addition to your id number HSBC’s login system now requires a secret question to be answered and a one-time login number generated from the Digipass gadget. This make breaking in much more difficult without the security number generator.

For the rest of us

Wouldn’t it be great if this system were available to all websites? Well fortunately there is something available which can be added to all WordPress sites and its absolutely free. The requirements are:

• Mobile phone running one of the following OSs:
  • Android version 1.5 or later
  • BlackBerry OS 4.2 – 4.7
  • iPhone iOS 4 or later
• WordPress Site
• PHP installation including SHA1 and SHA256 hashing algorithms

The plugin is based on Google’s 2-step authentication systems which have also been being rolled out over the last few months. What Google has done is made their system open-source so any website can use it. For WordPress users all the code has been bound up in a simple-to-install plugin. So here’s how to install it:

Through the admin side of your WordPress installation install the ‘Google Authenticator’ plugin in the usual way (go to plugins->add new, search for ‘Google Authenticator’, click ‘install’). If you want to use the plugin on your admin account you should install the plugin ‘network-wide’.

The Google Authenticator is activated on a user-by-user basis and some people don’t have the phones required for Google Authentication to work so it’s best to make users aware of the plugin and let them set up their accounts themselves. You will probably want to activate Google Authenticator for your own admin account at the very least, so…

Find your user profile and you will see a new section inserted into the list of data. Click on the checkbox next to ‘activate’. Enter the description you want to use to identify your site on the phone application.

Click on ‘Create new secret’ and a new code will appear. Now you need to get this code and other information into your phone so on your phone download and install the ‘Google Authenticator’. The phone app has the facility to read a range of bar-codes including the QRcode above so scan the QRcode using the app and the account will be installed in you phone app.

Now, when you try to log into your account your login screen will include an additional field labelled ‘Google Authenticator’.

To fill in this field get your phone and start the Google Authenticator App. Under the description you gave you will see a login code. This code changes every minute because it is time-based so you shouldmake sure your phone and your WordPress Installation have their times set accurately. If you are travelling make sure the time-zone is set properly on your phone.

Type this code in the third field.

If you did everything right you should now have gained access to your site with all the normal facilities available.

Two-step authentication for your website is a post from: Stephen Mulligan Website Design

The Honorary Doctors Association required a means of managing their database from any point in the World and with the ability to grow and adapt with the changing needs of a growing organisation.

Their full requirements were:

• Low running costs
• A secure password-protected installation
• Similar domain name to public site but able to be physically separate
• Columnar ‘side-by-side’ user interface already developed for Chairman’s private practice
• Automatic handling of Doctors’ ‘rota’
• Calendar

Low Running Costs

The site runs on the classic Linux / Apache / MySQL / PHP platform and so all technologies are open-source and therefore free of license fees, purchase fees or royalties. The system is designed so that the client can make all necessary changes over the life of the system without interaction from programmers or server managers.

Secure Protected Installation.

We used Apache’s built-in url-based Basic password protection scheme to provide secure accounts without the development cost of writing or purchasing an account framework.

Domain Name Branding

The system runs on a ‘admin’ sub-domain of the main domain ‘honorarydoctors.org’. Currently the admin system and the public site run on the same server. If the need ever arose to run both from different locations we would simply set up a CNAME DNS record to point to the new admin-systems location.

Columnar user interface

Inspired by the Mac OS X user interface used throughout the offices of the HDA I was asked to re-produce the side-by-side column interface. This allows a new block of information to appear when clicking a link but the original page remains visible on the page. Each further click brings up the new information to the right hand side. When a user has buried their way deep into the data that can clearly see the rout they have taken to get there.

This represents a very user-friendly way of navigating a complicated data-space even for users with no database experience.

Rota handling

The pro-bono work has to be distributed evenly among specialists in any one particular area and this required a disciplined system to be set up for when a referral was made:

1. The GP refers the patient or the patient refers themselves to the HDA
2. The system selects a specialist based on speciality and how long ago they did some work for the HDA
3. A referral e-mail is sent to the specialist introducing the patient
4. The specialist reports back to the HDA regularly throughout the episode where a diary on the system logs each entry
5. The specialist informs the HDA that the referral has terminated and this is entered into the system

The system accommodates all of the above steps and enhances many of them by automatically selecting the appropriate specialist and recording regular diary incidents relating to the case.

Testemonial

“Having worked with Stephen for many years I know him to be among the most reliable of London IT professionals. For this reason we asked him to develop our back-end systems for the HDA. As expected they are easy to use and was completed on time and to budget. I can highly recommend him for any web-based project.”

The Honorary Doctors Association Admin is a post from: Stephen Mulligan Website Design

If you hire a web developer, a web designer, a copy writer and a search engine optimizer such a team can result in commitment problems. While each professional is able to commit themselves to the project they cannot guarantee the commitment of any of the other team members. Inevitably, some drop out and you are left with the task of finding a replacement and acclimatizing them to the project and its history.

Since I offer all of these services I can guarantee full provision of all services for your site for the lifetime of the project including:

• Search engine optimization
• Content mentoring
• Social site mentoring
• Development
• Marketing
• Hosting

Long-Term Management is a post from: Stephen Mulligan Website Design

Content Mentoring

Most of the sites I produce have a blog included. While this may seem unnecessary it’s a fact that search engines love blogs and here’s why:

• Blogs produce fresh content
• Blogs are interactive and generate comments and links
• Blogging software provides search-engine-friendly resources

It is therefore to your advantage to have a blog on your site into which you make regular keyword-rich posts. I can provide training, copy advice and keyword recommendations to your staff and help them to keep to an agreed schedule of posting and content production.

Social Media Mentoring

Similarly social media sites are great for generating conversations about your brand and products. But it takes time and skill to develop a family of followers who want to hear what you have to say. I can help you build a following on Facebook, Twitter and any niche social sites relevant to your industry.

Mentoring is a post from: Stephen Mulligan Website Design

Once your site is built you’ve got to get those conversations going. This might be in the form of FaceBook status postings, perhaps even a FaceBook App, and certainly a Twitter account with regular pertinent posts linking to your site.

I can either run a campaign, set up your site to automatically publish posts or help you run your own social media campaign in any of the following sites:

• Delicious
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Twitter

Social Media is a post from: Stephen Mulligan Website Design

I have therefore developed a platform based on WordPress which allows many of my clients to share the same code but still have a completely different appearance and navigation trees. For an insight into how different two sites can be take a look at www.honorarydoctors.org and rnp.conservativeassociation.org.

Advantages

The greatest advantage of this system is that if I discover a new coding technique that enhances the functionality or the search engine optimization of the site I can implement it across all the sites in my portfolio instantly and free of charge to the client. This means that your site improves with age! As new techniques become available and standardized they can be added to your site at no risk or cost.

No Lock-in

This is not the same as development companies that ‘have their own content management system’. This is just a poor excuse for locking you into their hosting accounts and making it expensive for you to move to a new hosting provider if you’re not satisfied. This means that although you might be able to get all your graphics and text back you will have to hire a developer to build a site to contain it again.

If at some time you decide to host your site somewhere else and you are using my shared-deployment system I will convert your site to a stand-alone site at no charge. You will then be able to upload the files I give you into any WordPress installation and none of your visitors will be any the wiser.

Shared Deployment is a post from: Stephen Mulligan Website Design