Rippln is taking the internet by storm with a viral soft launch of their pre-beta social platform. We've never seen a company grow so quickly and in such a short space of time. Here's a couple of facts:-

We're switching to 100% renewable energy web hosting

Did you know that every second you spend on the internet 20milligrams of CO2 emissions are released in to the atmosphere? That may not sound like a huge amount but the internet in total accounts for around 2.5% of global CO2 emissions in the world.



Our new server is powered by 100% renewable energy, not a single ounce of fossil fuel is burned to power it. Normal data centres use a phenomenal amount of energy to cool the servers which blow out hot air, almost as much as they use to power them. The data centre we use runs a highly efficient method of drawing all the hot air outside and pulling cool air back in, rather than having the coolers running at full power all the time.

Why are we doing this?

We just want to do our bit! If it means we can reduce carbon emissions hosting all your websites, it's the least we can do for the environment. Have a look at this little video put together about emissions:

When will your website be moved over?

If you're an existing client of ours, we will be moving all accounts over in the next couple of weeks. You don't have to do anything, we will take care of everything and you won't notice any difference. All your passwords and logins will remain the same, as well as your email accounts, phone email settings, etc.

One of the biggest benefits of us moving to the new server is un-metered space and bandwidth. This means we will be able to offer much bigger hosting packages so you won't need to keep deleting emails or be conscious of how much space you're using up.

 

When you consider email marketing over direct mail marketing, the benefits hugely outweigh conventional snail mail methods. Email marketing is a much easier, faster and cost effective way of reaching out to your customers. Consumers need to see your product offerings several times before they will consider buying from you, so using email marketing, you can showcase your products and services to potential customers using a series of e-shots that you can send out to your subscriber list.

Launching a new product? Have a promotional offer? This is where email marketing flourishes and enables you to deliver messages directly to your customers inbox within minutes.

How can we help you?

We've been doing email marketing for a long time and we know what works and what doesn't. Using our e-marketing design and distribution service, we can design newsletter campaigns that compliment your branding / website perfectly, to deliver professional e-shots to your customers.

We don't work like other large e-marketing companies by giving you an account and letting you work it all out yourself. Recoil web design offers a fully managed email marketing design and distribution service so that you don't have to worry about it.

All we need from you is the content and a subscriber list of emails and we'll do the rest! We can help you build subscriber lists by embedding sign up capture forms on your website / blog / Facebook.

If you want to know how email marketing can work for your business, get in touch with us today and let's have a chat about what we can do for you.

The National Estates Council contacted Recoil Web Design looking for a professional image and online presence for their property business. As well as a bespoke corporate web design, an initial logo branding was also designed for the company.



Logo concept design

Well, it's been a while since the last blog post and from now on, we will be updating our development projects on the blog each month. We have several exciting new projects in the pipeline this month.

• 
• 

• Igloo Liverpool Re-design
• Stockport Kickboxing Design

Igloo Bar Liverpool is having a fresh re-design for 2012 to bring it up to date. Stockport Kickboxing has also approached us to re-design their current site.

We've just launched the new Penthouse Bar Liverpool website! Designed and developed by Recoil Web Design utilizing Joomla and Wordpress CMS at the core. The club launches on June 2nd 2012 with some fantastic live performances from Doneao, Krept and Konan, Kelle Le Roc and Radio 1 DJ, Charlie Sloth. The brief was simple, to design and build a professional and smart looking website to appeal to Liverpool's elite crowd with exclusivity and membership as the concept for the bar.

http://www.penthouseliverpool.com

WEB DESIGN LIVERPOOL

Recoil Web Design specialises in content managed websites. If you're looking for a reliable web design company, we offer services to clients through-out the UK, including Liverpool, Manchester, Wigan and the North West. Get in touch with us today to find out how we can take your online presence to the next level.

Recoil Web Design is a web development company based in Wigan, specialising in content managed, bespoke web design.

WEB DESIGN WIGAN, MANCHESTER & LIVERPOOL

We're experts in content management systems and we're happy to discuss your project on the phone, via email or in person if needed. We provide a professional service from individuals to businesses. If you're looking to get your business online or even redesign your existing website, we're here to help.

RECOIL WEB DESIGN - WIGAN, MANCHESTER & LIVERPOOL SERVICES

Please take a look at our extensive range of web design services we offer and take a look at our portfolio of work.

See our web design Wigan, Manchester & Liverpool portfolio.

READY TO PROCEED? GET IN TOUCH...

Call us on 01942 366 732 or you can email us at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or use the contact form.

Welcome to the first of many tutorials in templating Joomla & Wordpress. It was our intention to start offering tutorials on how to build custom templates in Joomla and Wordpress for a while now and we will be adding more and more tutorials over time. In this first tutorial we will be covering a common question, which is, how do you seamlessly integrate the navigation from Joomla in to Wordpress? There are many different methods to do this and one great solution is CorePHPs Joomla extension to fully integrate Wordpress in to your website. If you have $69.99 to spare, this is probably the best option to use as there are no other extensions that come close to this integration.

Our method is free and just takes little time and patience. In this tutorial, our setup is as follows:

• Joomla is installed in the root of our website /public_html/ ( Joomla 1.5.25 )


• Wordpress is installed in a folder /blog/ ( Wordpress 3.3.1 )


• Each use their own database independent of the other ( You can install them on the same database with different prefixes )

The menu component we're using is swMenuFree for Joomla 1.5 which will be used to build and style the navigation for the main website. Once you have downloaded the component, proceed to your admin area on your Joomla website and install it. After you have successfully installed swMenuFree, you will now have to configure and style your menu.

SETTING UP JOOMLA NAVIGATION

Go to Components > swMenuFree to configure.




Now you may configure the menu to your liking. We're using the following settings, yours may be slightly different depending on how you want the menu to act but one setting you should make sure is correct, is the Stylesheet. Make sure your stylesheet is set to load externally ( highlighted in red ). This setting will make the component write the style sheet to a directory and place a link in your template to it. It's a handy feature as otherwise, the component writes the CSS directly into your template which can get pretty messy.



External stylesheet location is written to: /public_html/modules/mod_swmenufree/styles/menu.css

You should go through each of the tabs and style the menu to match your Joomla template. When you're satisfied with your menu and everything is working in the front end how you'd like, it's time to add the menu in to your Wordpress template.

INTEGRATING JOOMLA MENUS WITH WORDPRESS

Depending on how your Wordpress template is setup, you will need to open up either header.php or index.php to place the swMenuFree HTML. Some people prefer to split their Wordpress templates up into many different PHP files and others prefer to have it all load in the index.php file.

First, you will need to copy the HTML code from the Joomla template. The easiest way to do this is to go to your website front end and view the page source. It's slightly different depending what browser you're using but in Firefox, you simply right click on the background somewhere and select "View Page Source".



Scroll down the code until you find the comment that starts with:

<!--swMenuFree6.0 superfishmenu by http://www.swmenupro.com-->

Copy everything starting with the above line and finish with the below line.

<!--End swMenuFree menu module--> >

Click here to see what it should look like.

Now that you have copied the swMenuFree HTML code, you need to go to your Wordpress template file ( index.php or header.php ) and paste in the code where your navigation is to appear. This takes care of the menu structure but now you need to include the CSS, Javascript and jQuery in your Wordpress template to make it work.

To do this, you will need to use the same method as before and view the page source on your Joomla website. Copy the following lines.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.YOURWEBSITE.co.uk/modules/mod_swmenufree/styles/menu.css" type="text/css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.YOURWEBSITE.co.uk/modules/mod_swmenufree/jquery-1.2.6.pack.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.YOURWEBSITE.co.uk/modules/mod_swmenufree/hoverIntent.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.YOURWEBSITE.co.uk/modules/mod_swmenufree/superfish.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.YOURWEBSITE.co.uk/modules/mod_swmenufree/supersubs.js"></script>

Paste this code in to your Wordpress template before the closing </head> tag. Make sure you leave the absolute URLs in there and don't use relative links or they will not work.

Note the menu stylesheet, menu.css that you configured in the swMenuFree component to write to an external stylesheet earlier.

SUMMARY

That's all there is to it, you have successfully implemented your Joomla navigation menu in to your Wordpress template. If you update your Joomla menu with more pages you will need to update the HTML in your Wordpress template by copying the code again by viewing the page source. The CSS will update autoamtically because of the absolute link to the swMenuFree external stylesheet.

Just about everyone you speak to uses some form of social media, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Linked In or one of many others. If you're running a business, it's important to engage with your customers and one easy way of doing that is by having a presence on leading social media sites.

We're going to use Facebook for our example and explain to you the benefits of having a fan page. Fan pages work by users "liking" your page which then shows in their friends newsfeeds and in turn, maximises the potential for generating more "likes" from users curious about their friends endorsement of your page. Another interesting fact is that people are more inclined to buy a product or use a service that has been endorsed by one of their friends or someone they know as they trust them.

FACEBOOK STATISTICS

First of all, we'd like to wish a very happy new year to all of our clients and thank you all for your custom, past and present. Over the festive holiday we've been very busy rebranding Recoil Web Design. We've redesigned our logo, the website and rebuilt it from the ground up. We wanted to showcase what we're about as a company and the quality of our work to come in 2012. We've utilised Joomla for the main site and Wordpress for this blog and created a bridge between them to show off the capabilities of content management at the core of a website. We specialise in content managed sites and it's what we will provide to all of our customers.



Let us know what you think of the new site, good or bad, we'd love to hear from you!