Just wanted to post a quick note on creating Universal iPhone/iPad Applications. Before today I wasn’t quite sure how to make a universal app. By this I mean I wasn’t sure how the code was supposed to be added to your current project.

So a quick background. We just submitted our first iPhone App (Wooo!) and are interested in also having a universal iPad app. So I started looking around the Apple Developer site and couldn’t find anything about where the code for the application was supposed to go. So I started Googling and reaching out on twitter to see what I could come up with.

After a few minutes I found a pretty useful link (even though it was built with the old SDK). It shows you what is needed as far as building your code and updating your info.plist to show what nib file the iPad should use.

I’ve attached a screenshot of the file structure incase you don’t want to download the .zip file from PigTailSoft.

This is more of an internal list but I figured I’d make it into a blog post because this might help other designers/developers who do work for small businesses as well.

This list covers the final checklist for a small business site; if you have any ideas to add, please leave those in the comments. We would love to add more ideas to help out not only our future, but our current clients as well.

1. XML Sitemaps

Every site, large or small, should have a sitemap. If you’re using WordPress, there is a great plugin that will create a sitemap for you called Google XML Sitemaps. If you are not using WordPress, even though you should be, you can use the XML Sitemap Generator.

2. Google Webmaster Tools

Adding a site to the Google Webmaster Tools seems like a minor detail, but it can provide a vast amount of information and details about your site.  A few features of Google’s webmaster tools include: Malware diagnostics, Crawl errors, Crawl stats, search queries, and links to your site.

3. Analytics

Even if your client doesn’t want the statistics for their website, you should install analytics to give you the ability to track the site and set goals. Personally, I think Google Analytics is top notch but some other good ones are Mint and GoSquared.

4. Google Local Business Center

To allow your client to get the most bang for their buck, you should make sure they are listed in the Google Local Business Center so that they will appear in Google Maps and related search results. If you can’t do this for them, then consider shooting them an email with a link to the local business center, so they can do it themselves.

5. SEO Checkup

This seems minor, I know, but I often overlook setting the page titles and descriptions. The key to the SEO checkup is making sure none of the pages have the same title, tags, or descriptions, as this could have a negative effect on your rankings. Some prefer to do this while building the pages and some prefer to do it all at the end. It is all based on personal preference; no right or wrong way to do it as long as it gets done.

6. Social Security

Not the program run by the United States, but  take the opportunity to lock up names on social media sites for your clients such as twitter, facebook and more. This will not only allow them future room to move into social media but prevent someone else from taking the names.

Wrap Up

Some might think this list is common sense, but you would be surprised how often I forget to do one, if not more, of the above before we launch a site. Most of these take only a few minutes, but it is time no less. We budget in an extra hour into each project to make sure we can accomplish all of the above for our clients.

At the least, we send the client an email with instructions on how to do this themselves. I have found little tips like this really help build trust with your clients and it shows that you care about their business and that you want their business to succeed on the web.

Many thanks to Meredith Marsh of FLX Creative for proof reading this post!

Strengths

Inline editor

Personally I like to be able to have a WYSWYG and an HTML option much like WordPress offers but I can understand why the Eden Platform uses inline. Our clients are more visual so this helps them edit the site and see exactly how it will look. So we feel the inline editor, while not made for the advanced user, is a great strength to the Eden platform.

SEO Features

Business owners are always looking for easy ways to SEO their sites they want to rank higher and achieve more page views. While this feature is basic knowledge and a reminder at best for the experienced web design/developer it is a must have for the clientele Preation is trying to reach with the Eden Platform, small business owners. So for the Search Engine Optimization feature Preation get an A+.

Drag & Drop interface

Raise your hand if you like drag & drop! If you don’t have your hand up you’re not being truthful. Well Preation gets another A+ for their drag & drop interfaces. You can not only drag and drop the navagation and layout of your site but the actual layout of the page as well!

Pricing

Pricing is great and affordable for any business large or small. Not much more to say here!

Training

Personalized training is included with every Eden Platform account which is a must for a small business owner looking to dive right into building and managing their web site.

Weaknesses

While we have highlighted many strengths we have to be fair and note a few things that we see as weaknesses.

Hosted

Eden platform is a hosted solution built on the SaaS model, this can be viewed two ways. Some people see this as an advantage because they don’t have to manage hosting and they never have to upgrade software manually. As a web design/development company not being able to touch and update our software and code is something that can make us cringe. So depending on where you stand you can see this as a strength or weakness but as a web design/development company we view this as a weakness.

URL Structure/Control

The URL’s Eden spits out are rather funky. As you can see below eden uses a plus(+) versus the popular dash(-). Also a content folder is added to the URL, along with a lot of unneeded numbers. Anyone who has spent more then 15 minutes studying Search Optimization will know that the more relevant your URL’s are to your content the better your chances are to rank well in search engines such as Google, Bing,  Yahoo! and more. Preation does let you create custom URL’s similar to Facebook’s vanity URL’s but it will still redirect to an address like the one below.

Well we checked out some CMS’s last year to see which one we wanted to make a “flagship” CMS and we had three finalist. Two are really the most common CMS’s and one probably not many of you have heard of. Since I wasn’t in the typing mood I made a quick video and uploaded it.

Links

WordPress

ExpressionEngine

Preation – Eden Platform