Hyndburn Borough Council’s Regeneration Co-ordinator, Vladimir Pejcinovic approached Urbansoul to help develop a digital marketing strategy, which would raise awareness and increase wedding bookings.

How we helped…

Our approach was to build a digital strategy that was the perfect fit with Weddings At The Haworth target market. To get the best results possible for Weddings At The Haworth we chose to use Facebook, largely due to its targeted advertising and wide reaching access to the target market. Facebook’s advertising model allows us to display ads only to the Facebook users who fall within our clients demographic and geographic requirements. In addition to advertising we also provide Weddings At The Haworth with ongoing content support for their “Facebook Business Page” through regular posts, polls and interacting with customers.

Exciting times are ahead for this flourishing wedding venue and Urbansoul Design are proud to be part of such a great project.

View Weddings at The Haworth in our Portfolio >

Related posts:

1. Weddings at The Haworth, Lancashire
2. Online Marketing
3. Sacrifice Facebook Friends for likes

Related posts:

1. Oldham College Prospectus, Greater Manchester
2. The Oldham College Appoint Urbansoul Design
3. Huddersfield New College

WordPress SEO Plugins undoubtedly make SEO alot less labour intensive.  However it’s hard to keep control over the styling of the links these WordPress plugins automatically insert, especially if you use the ‘border-bottom’ CSS Property to decorate your links in your WordPress Theme. You could use the ‘text-decoration’ CSS Property instead, however you might consider this effect the be less palatable. Unlike the ‘text-decoration’ CSS property, the ‘border-bottom’ CSS property does not automatically inherit the text’s colour. This means possible clashes in colour; between the colour of the text and the underline colour when these SEO WordPress Plugin links are automatically inserted.

To get around this difficultly the jQuery code below will make CSS ‘border-bottom’ property inherit the text node’s colour, like the ‘text-decoration’ property.

$('.seo_link').each(function(){

var ghg = $(this).css('color');
$(this).css({'border-bottom-color':ghg});

});

For an example of this working please see the jsfiddle below.

http://jsfiddle.net/vct8s/

Related posts:

1. Register WordPress Shortcodes
2. CSS PIE: Troubleshooting
3. WordPress Templates

Related posts:

1. New Prospectus for The Oldham College
2. Oldham College Prospectus, Greater Manchester
3. Huddersfield New College

Muse (code name), I feel a bit weird keep typing Muse (code name) but that’s what it’s called, is in early beta and is free to test until early next year when Adobe will be releasing a full production version that will be available as pay as you go ($20 per month) or an annual subscription ($15 a month).

The software uses Adobe’s Air platform and runs very smoothly. Styled elements, positioning, page properties and widgets are all implemented by using an interface that many InDesign users will feel very comfortable with. The software includes a few basic widgets for adding items such as navigation, slideshows, tabbed areas, etc and I must say they are implemented very well.

The markup produced from this software is surprising well laid out. Good use of indents for organising nested code, a lot like their flagship Website Deisgn tool Dreamweaver, and nice use of comments to sectionalise the header section for Javascript, CSS, etc. The only difference being that with Dreamweaver you can jump straight into the code to make vital amendments, whereas with Muse you can only work visually. This drag and drop style of working is all well and good but it means that tweaking the code invariably means jumping into your favourite code editor to finish the job. There is the facility to insert your own Html onto the page but only in its own DIV so this is not ideal.

Simple page layouts and sitemaps can be made very easily and I can see Agencies using it as a prototyping tool – but an expensive one at that.

Overall the software just feels a little lightweight and I suppose the hope is that Adobe will add a lot more functionality to the interface and open up the API so that developers can release their own widgets. At the moment Muse (code name) is aimed at Designers or at Developers who want to throw together a very quick page layout. It might only be an early beta release but the signs are certainly positive. Web Design tools are making certain parts of our job easier and Muse (code name) can certainly be added to that list of tools.

Related posts:

1. jQuery for WordPress SEO Plugins
2. WordPress | Adding shortcodes to your widget area
3. WordPress Post and Page ID’s

Urban Soul Design, a graphic design company based in Bacup (near Manchester) kindly gave me the opportunity to work within their company for 2 days a week.
I came here thinking I knew quite a bit and confident with the programmes but working here has made me realize that I don’t know as much as I thought and there is so much more to learn.
Dave and Cheryl have given me lots of support throughout my time here so far and I have learnt so much in this time. The skills I have developed will help me massively when it comes to continuing my studies at university. This experience is invaluable to me! It is great working with a team of creative people and getting ideas from one another, which is very important within the industry.
I have used the same design programmes that I use at University but was unfamiliar with some of the tools used and what you can achieve with them but now I am becoming aware of these and more confident using them.
So far I have been involved in designing website flats, school prospectuses and ideas for logos.

Hopefully I can continue working at Urban Soul design and fit it around my studies when I’m back at university.

Sam

Related posts:

1. Work for us
2. Manchester and Cheshire Construction
3. New Prospectus for The Oldham College

We are now going to create a shortcode that produces a set of links to sub pages of a particular parent page. So when new pages are added under this parent page, the list of links that this shortcode produces will update automatically.

First we will register the shortcode in the WordPress theme’s function file.

add_shortcode('formslinks', 'formslinksfunction');

The two parameters ‘formslinksfunction’, ‘formslinks’ contain references to the function and the name of the shortcode respectively.

Now it’s time to write the function in our functions.php file that our short code ‘formlinks’ will call.

function formslinksfunction() {

 $args = array(
	'depth'        => 0,
	'show_date'    => '',
	'date_format'  => get_option('date_format'),
	'child_of'     => 1782,
	'exclude'      => '',
	'include'      => '',
	'title_li'     => __(''),
	'echo'         => 0,
	'authors'      => '',
	'sort_column'  => 'menu_order, post_title',
	'link_before'  => '',
	'link_after'   => '',
	'walker' => '' ); 

$list = wp_list_pages( $args );

return $list;

}

This function produces a list of sub or child WordPress pages for the parent WordPress page with an id of 1782.

Remember to return the variable or else your WordPress shortcode will produce nothing.

Now we have our function, we just have to put the shortcode in the WordPress wysiwyg in WordPress pages.

[formslinks]

Once the page is published the links to the WordPress sub pages will be shown.

Related posts:

1. WordPress | Adding shortcodes to your widget area
2. WordPress Templates
3. WordPress Post and Page ID’s

All it takes is 3 easy steps.

1. Add this single line to your functions.php file:-
   add_filter(‘widget_text’, ‘do_shortcode’);
2. In the Appearance->Widgets section, drag a Text widget to whichever widget area you want the content to appear and give it a Title
3. Put your shortcode in the large content area of the text/html widget and click SAVE.

Your done. Simple!

Image courtesy of http://vdvector.deviantart.com/. Nice work Jose.

Related posts:

1. Register WordPress Shortcodes
2. Muse | Code Name
3. WordPress Templates

In your WordPress theme folder simply make a template file by copying your default file and giving it a different name i.e. blog-template.php.

Change the comment in the header of your new template file to a descriptive name:

/**
* Template Name: blog
*
*/

Tweak the file to suit your desired layout. Then in the page section of WordPress Admin apply your template to a page.

And there you have it .

Related posts:

1. WordPress Post and Page ID’s
2. WordPress | Adding shortcodes to your widget area
3. Register WordPress Shortcodes

Just click here while you are logged in to your personal account.

BEWARE: you cannot go back for this step, but you can do a back up of your personal page.

Related posts:

1. 25 facebook likes
2. Love is in the air
3. Weddings at The Haworth, Lancashire