About Scribble Designs
We help companies in Northern Ireland to establish their products and services on the Internet, to sell to the local or international market.
Scribble Designs specialise in standards-based web design and the creation of attractive websites that are easy to use. We believe that a well-designed site will provide the best return on investment by making it easier for your customers to buy your product or get in touch with you.
We have proven expertise in marketing websites through strong search engine optimisation and link-building techniques that will increase the number of visitors that come to your site.
In addition, we are one of the first web design firms in Northern Ireland to offer consulting on blogging based on solid, practical experience!
Find out more about our Web Design and Consulting Services or get in touch to find out more.
From The Blog...
Unreal Theme for WordPress released
We’re proud to announce that Scribble Designs has released our first ever free WordPress theme. Called ‘Unreal‘, it’s a subtle blue and grey two-column theme that uses the latest HTML5 and CSS3 features for a clean, modern look that’s also fully search engine optimised.
What you get
Thumbnail-enabled latest posts widget: The Unreal theme supports post thumbnails, allowing you to set a featured image for each post. We’ve included a widget that shows your most recent blog posts, complete with thumbnail. You can even customise the number of posts that are shown by default.
Updates: New site launches and design refreshes!
We’re excited to announce that Scribble Designs has just launched the new website for Crumlin-based tree surgery, The Tree Company. It’s an elegant brochure website with a clean, uncluttered design that focuses on the various arboicultural services the company offers.
Scribble were contacted by the client before Christmas and asked to come up with a design that would help The Tree Company market their services to a wider audience. We’ve also provided advice on Search Engine Optimisation and link building to help them drive traffic to their new site. Check out our portfolio page for this site.
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WordPress 3.0 has been released
Just a short note to say that WordPress 3.0 has recently been released. It’s a milestone release for the blog software, and includes some major leaps forward:
- Brand new default theme, the highly customizable Twenty Ten. The theme supports easily customisable tiled backgrounds and header images to help you create a custom look with little effort. Coolest thing about this? You can specify a header image for each post if you want!
- Support for new customisable hierarchical navigational menus. Easy to manage, drag and drop and no need to worry about code!
Backing Up Your Drupal Database
Being a WordPress devotee, the shocking thing about Drupal is that it doesn’t have a backup utility built into the core system. Any content management system that relies upon a back-end database should provide a way to back that database up regularly.
Shockingly, Drupal doesn’t. But it does have a dedicated community, and there are a number of options out there for backing up your database. The one which I’ve been using lately is the Backup/Migrate module.
Redesigning My Personal Blog
Something I’ll be putting on the portfolio here soon – a redesign of my personal blog.
This is a redesign of the blog, which runs on Drupal 6 and features a blog and photo galleries. It’s not the first Drupal-based theme I’ve ever created, but certainly the one I’m happiest with.
HowTo: Configuring Triggers and Actions in Drupal 6
Drupal 6 offers built-in actions that can be performed whenever something happens on your site. Typically, you want to use this to get an alert when someone publishes content on the site, or a new user signs up.
You might even want to mimic WordPress and get an email alert every time someone leaves a comment on the site. I’m going to show you how to set this up for your site.
Mollom: A Content Monitoring System
Developers Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen have announced the release of an all new anti-comment spam system called Mollom. Since Dries is the mastermind behind the community-building CMS Drupal, Mollom seems to have a wider remit than you might find with comparable systems like Akismet.
They’re not just going after the usual automated comment spam that most anti-spam focuses on. Mollom allows you to look at the entire spectrum of user contributed content and analyse it against a number of factors: spam, offensive/inflammatory content, aggressive content, etc.
How To Apply rel=”nofollow” To Content In Drupal
If you’ve got a community website using Drupal, you might want to protect your site from spammers by applying the rel=”nofollow” attribute to any links your users generate.
The theory behind this is that you protect your site from linking to ‘bad neighbourhoods’ an possibly incurring penalties with Google for spammy links. Rel=”nofollow” is your way of saying – as the site owner – that you can’t vouch for the quality of those links.
Comment Configuration In Drupal 6
I spent a frustrating hour searching for the comment configuration area in Drupal 6, so I’m putting this post together to hopefully save you time setting up comments in Drupal.
Basically, in contrast to previous editions of Drupal, comments are now configured by content type – allowing you to permit comments on blog entries, but not on image nodes.
A Drupal User Administration Tip
I’ve been working a lot with the Drupal content management system lately, and one tip I’d share with anybody managing a Drupal site is to keep the administration account separate from their user account.
