The community of Drupal developers is constantly working to improve the Drupal platform. The first major update of these improvements in a couple years is Drupal 7, which will most likely be released in the next couple of months. (The core Drupal development team prefers to not set a release date but instead to release it when all critical bugs have been resolved. If you are a PHP developer who can smash bugs, you can help get Drupal 7.0 released sooner.) There are many improvements to Drupal with Drupal 7, but the decision to upgrade at this point should not be taken lightly.

How does upgrading to Drupal 7 Help My Website?

An upgrade to Drupal 7 improves the future of your website. Updates to the administration of Drupal 7 are the result of hours and hours in professional software testing labs making sure administration is more usable and straightforward. Also, newer database systems mean you can run your Drupal site on different types of database setups to better fit your business needs. And major updates to different portions of the module and themeing systems mean smoother, quicker and more flexible custom module development for your Drupal site.

What should I consider when upgrading?

There are a lot of details to consider when upgrading your Drupal site. In fact, for many sites, the process of upgrading may involve completely reworking how the site is structured and managed. When Drupal 7 is released, all core functionality will have a working upgrade path. However, the majority of current sites use some community-contributed Drupal modules to complete their functionality. Most of the major contributed modules do have a version that will work for Drupal 7, but not all do. And not all Drupal 7 modules will have a smooth upgrade path from earlier versions of Drupal. Similarly, all custom modules for the site will require at least a minor rewrite due to changes in the database and themeing systems within Drupal 7.

It may be a little early to start the Drupal 7 upgrade process, but it’s not too early to start thinking about when and what is involved in upgrading your site. It will be at least a couple months before August Ash starts using Drupal 7 for new production sites; we have to evaluate Drupal 7 further to make sure it meets our needs. If you are looking to update and improve your website in major ways over the next couple years, an upgrade to Drupal 7 within the next six months would be recommended. If you want to keep your website much the same for the next couple years, there is much less reason to upgrade. As with any web site change or upgrade, the answer to the question for you comes down to cost. Is it worth it for you?

Contact us at August Ash to find out how much a Drupal website upgrade may cost for your site.

Creating a website with a content management system in today’s web world is almost a necessity. In the web of yesteryear, we used to make sites like we make brochures; if we need to include some new information, we open up the file and change it and then upload it to the website. Content Management Systems such as Drupal or WordPress save us the hassle of finding files, copying them, and uploading them. Read the rest of this entry »

Keywords play a large role in optimizing a website and often there is confusion surrounding exactly what they are and how they work.

Plain and simple keywords are the words that people are typing into the search engines. So if you can show the search engines that your site is the most relevant for a specific word or phrase, then when people type in that word/phrase—and if you’ve done it right–your site should rank well in the search engines.

There are other factors search engines take into account when ranking sites, such as internal and external links, domain age, URL’s, etc, but for now we will just focus on keywords.

So knowing this, how should you use keywords? Which ones should you target? Where should you place them? And how many do you need? These are all great questions and things you will want to consider when optimizing. Read the rest of this entry »

Almost everyone in your organization has something valuable to add to this discussion. Why not ask them which keyword they think customers are searching for?

For example, start with your office manager, or whoever answers the phones for your company. That person is usually your first point of contact for potential customers who have questions. And those questions are like gold to you. Determine what people are asking when they call you for the first time (or if you get a lot of walk-in customers, consider what they’re asking for at the front counter). Chances are, your receptionist could rattle off 15 commonly asked questions along with a slew of “keywords” most people are using when they contact your organization.
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Summer’s Here! Are you targeting seasonal keywords for a solid PPC campaign?

When taking advantage of search engine optimization and Pay Per Click (PPC) to increase your traffic and profits, the use of well-researched keywords is crucial. If you have an e-commerce site, for example, your relevant and targeted keywords are key to cultivating return customers. Read the rest of this entry »

These days you’re in the minority if you haven’t heard of Twitter, but actually using Twitter might be something entirely new for you. So this will be dedicated to all those people who are new to using Twitter.
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Keyword research is foundational to the success of your site’s performance in search engines. You already know that. You also know that few people understand your industry better than you do, making you a great resource for keywords to target on your site.

What you may not realize, though, is how many keywords you’ve already overlooked.
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Don't let this funny-looking fellow run your SEO campaign!

While researching current events in SEO this week, I ended up on a few SEO and online marketing websites that really took me by surprise.  Not because they had innovative and useful ideas that I had to immediately take note of.  No, these sites were full of freshly blogged tips and tricks for improving your search engine presence that have been proven to be outmoded, if not detrimental to your standings in the search engines.   
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Sit back, relax, and leave the website to us. That’s our invitation to every client, and it’s not an arrangement we take lightly. August Ash Inc has established itself as a leading provider of website design, internet marketing, and e-commerce solutions in the Midwest and nationwide. With the help of strong leadership, talented staff and wonderful clientele, we have earned wide acclaim and were ranked in the top 25 of web development and design firms in the Twin Cities by the Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal in 2009.
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Want to have a contest? Let’s see who can create the most social media profiles by the end of the week. Sure, you’ve got your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts up and running already, but I’m talking about all the others out there. There are hundreds of them; social networking sites as far as the eye can see, each with a name more whimsical than the next.
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