A great time was had by all at Dan's stag weekend last weekend. Many thanks to Dan Tregidgo for the organisation, to Dan Jenks for being such a great stag/sport and to Fell End Farm in the Lake District for the top accommodation!

Invosoft have designed and developed a new blog for the leading UK log wholesaler and distributor Logs Direct.

Logs direct are leading supplier of hardwood, software, kiln dried firewood and other carbon nuetral fuels. They have their own state of the art processing and distribution facility.

The blog will allow Logs Direct customers to keep up with company news and promotions, as well as providing a valuable resource for the renewable fuel industry. With regular updates, articles and tips and tricks on how to get the most out of using firewood of various types (softwood, hardwood and kiln-dried), wood pellets, smokeless fuels and other wood fuels.

The new blog is called "Burning Logs":

 http://www.burning-logs.co.uk/ 

The site is based on wordpress which makes it incredible easy to update and add rich media content including videos and pictures. Keep checking back for regular informative articles on the Logs Direct and the industry in general.

Also, checkout their direct to consumer online store at www.logsdirect.co.uk.

Don’t be too put off by the system requirements on the Magentocommerce website, Magento is surprisingly easy to install and run on Windows and IIS 7.

We are currently developing a new ecommerce platform for an online t-shirt business specialising in music t-shirts.  In the past, we have used dashcommerce with great success, for example on Logs Direct. Unfortunately, dashcommerce has ceased to be living open source project.  Also, we develop primarily using mvc.net these days so I wanted to find an ecommerce solution based around mvc.net 3. 

The best mvc.net solution I could find was Orchard.  This is a really great platform but it doesn’t have a mature shop or ecommerce component, which is unfortunate, and perhaps somewhat strange, as I believe the codebase is founded upon Rob Connery’s MVC.NET ecommerce Kona project.

So, despite numerous reservations about Magento (the platform has a reputation for being slow, overly-complex, unwieldy, unsupported on Windows, good at marketing itself but lacklustre at delivering what it promises), I decided to have a bash at installing it on Windows Server 2008 running IIS 7.5 just to see what would happen/how hard it was.  It was surprisingly easy.

These are the steps I followed:

• Prerequisites: We already have a Windows 2008 IIS 7.5 server setup running a number of PHP platforms (SugarCRM and CakePHP based web applications) so I think this helped a bit.  I didn’t have to install any extra components but these are the relevant ones I believe you need to install using the web platform installer:
  1. PHP 5.2.17
  2. IIS: CGI
  3. Windows Cache Extension 1.1 for PHP 5.2
  4. URL Rewrite 2.0
• Install MYSQL: Once you have IIS setup, you also need a working mysql instance http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/
• Upload Magento Install: Create a new website in IIS and copy/FTP the Magento 1.5.10 install files into the website directory.
• Setting up the URL re-write rules:  This step is the key to a smooth Magento install.  Create a new web.config file in the base install directory and then copy the following URL rewrite rules in:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
   <configuration> 
    <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
    <rules> 
     <rule name="Imported Rule 1" stopProcessing="true"> 
      <match url=".*" ignoreCase="false"/>        <conditions> <add input="{URL}" pattern="^/(media|skin|js)/" ignoreCase="false" negate="true" /> 
      <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" /> 
      <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" /> 
    </conditions> <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php" /> 
    </rule> 
   </rules> 
   </rewrite> 
  </system.webServer> 
</configuration>

• Permissions: I also encountered some permission problems which were a little tricky to diagnose as magento hides errors by default.  You simply receive a generic “There has been an error processing your request” message.  To print errors to screen, I followed the guide here - http://www.designersandbox.com/magento/fix-for-magento-1-4-install-does-not-work/.  

Invosoft were asked to design and develop a new website for to South Lake District Holiday Home Park, Ings Mill Park.

The new website is based on Invosoft’s advanced content management system and features a bespoke facility to showcase their regularly updated Holiday Home and Static Caravan stock for sale.

Click here to visit Ings Mill Park.

Invosoft client Logs Direct have recently undergone a number of improvements to their e-commerce system to compliment the company’s new and improved product range.  Logs Direct, based near Lancaster are already UK market leaders for seasoned firewood logs and kiln dried logs. They hope to expand their range with a number of chimineas,  summer offerings and wood coal. Their e-commerce system has been improved, to enhance usability, cope with demand for new forthcoming product ranges, and their ever increasing customer base. 

Further improvements to improve the usability of the website and to upgrade the payments system are to follow shortly.

Invosoft have just completed construction of a new e-commerce website for national carbon-neutral fuel supplier, Logs Direct. The North Lancashire based company supply ethical fuel products to the likes of B&Q and the National Trust. They stock a range of softwood and hardwood fuel logs as well as kindling, firelighters and wood pellet fuels. They are also the main distributors for Blazers, an ethical and effective alternative to wood logs.

Not having a wood burner or multi-fuel stove myself (yet!), it was an area on which I knew little. One thing I do know is that wood burners perform best when burning very dry, seasoned wood. After chatting to Andrew Foulds, Managing Director of Logs Direct, it seems the best wood in terms of performance (heat output, efficiency and value for money) is kiln dried wood. Kiln-dried logs have a 10% to 15% moisture level which ensures they burn hotter for longer. We spent an afternoon in Andrew’s purpose-built production facility getting to know the products and the one thing that stands out from that day is aroma from the kiln dried stuff – nothing beats the fragrance of a real log fire!

The website is based on the 'dashcommerce' codebase –  kudos to the team there for all thier hard work! We found the platform very easy to customise, in both design and functionality terms.  We, however, added lots of custom features not present in the standard platform, such as our video guides section and delivery calculator based on postcode. The system is feature packed, user-friendly and easy to manage and maintain. You can view the results for yourselves at:

http://www.logsdirect.co.uk

and here are a few tips on using wood burning stoves and selecting the the right firewood.

One thing that becomes obvious very quickly once you have done a little bit of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is that choosing the right domain name is very important. What is not so clear – to me at least – is how important subtle differences in domain names are and how should one offset a keyword rich name with other factors such as succinctness and brevity?

I have been working recently on a new holiday property website project for a site based in Brixham, Devon. I was unfamiliar with Brixham. It’s a lovely historic resort nestled between the ports of Dartmouth and Paignton on the south coast. We secured 2 great website names for the site. www.brixhamholidayhome.com has more keywords packed into the domain name but www.brixhamhome.co.uk has the advantage of being shorter (and therefore easier to remember and less susceptible to typos) and being a .co.uk, which I personally think for an English holiday home is an advantage.

Brixham harbour at Sunset

In the end, I opted for more keyword-packed www.brixhamholidayhome.com with Brixhamhome.co.uk using a 301 re-direct back to it. Overall, I think having a short name isn’t too important these days as people tend to use search engines exclusively when finding websites, even when they know the domain name. When you are clicking on a link from search results, having a long name isn’t such an issue.

A further point in this particular case is, there is also a very highly ranked popular site www.brixhamholidayhomes.com, and there is a chance we can garner some of their traffic due to a phenomena called ”traffic leakage”. Traffic leakage is where a popular site will loose traffic to a site with a similar name due to people miss-typing it or simply mistaking it for the original site.

To summarise, here are my personal recommendations when choosing a domain name for your holiday let:

• 1. Generic is best: Convention says that you should choose a name based on your company or brand name. For holiday homes, this is not necessarily the case. Nobody really cares that your property is called “rose cottage” or that you trade under the name “Exclusive Lets ltd.”, what they care about is that you are located in the lake district (or wherever) and that you are a self-catering/holidaylet/holidayhome/vacation rental… In other words, stay generic and try and get your place name in and your property type, it will give you a great head-start in the search engines.
  
  
• 2. Get your location name in: this may be stating the obvious, but when choosing a property, a holiday maker will have already chosen their location so it’s a case of getting noticed amongst your local competition.  And getting your location in the domain name will weight you more favourably in the search engines.
  
  
• 3. Avoid hyphens: Again, this is more of a personal thing, but I believe non-hyphenated names are easier to remember, they are definitely shorter and no modern search engine will have difficulty picking out the relevant words. Just look at our main site www.propertyrentalsoftware.com as a case in point, we actually do very little active SEO on our own site and it has always been near the top for “property rental software” since its creation.
  
  
• 4. Go for a .co.uk: I know I did not do this in the above example but brixhamholidayhome.co.uk was already taken. Where possible, try and get all the TLD’s (top level domains) available for your chosen domain. This will avoid others picking up the alternatives and loosing traffic to name leakage (see the begining of this article). For example, invosoft.co.uk, invosoft.com, invosoft.net…but if you are a based in the UK, make the .co.uk your main domain and use 301 re-directs on the others to point back to the .co.uk. As well as identifying yourself as a UK based company/property you will be weighted more highly in the UK specific search engines google.co.uk, yahoo.co.uk, etc. If your holiday lets are not in the UK, I would use the .com as it’s pretty much ubiquitous.