"Eclipse Media Solutions has always come through with their work on time and perfectly delivered. He has always been a pleasure to work with and we will continue giving him more work in the future. "
Jim Lowenstern
CastlesMag.com

eclipse's blog

Embedding video on your site

Submitted by eclipse on Wed, 01/11/2012 - 18:13
There are a lot of ways you can post videos on your site...

RSS Feeds

Submitted by eclipse on Wed, 01/11/2012 - 18:13
In order to understand how RSS feeds can benefit your site or business, it helps to understand what they are. RSS is a way of stripping down content like blog posts or news updates into their bare bones in order to display them on other sites without worrying about style and formatting issues.  In short: Really Simple Script.
 
Here at Eclipse, there are two main ways that RSS can benefit your site.  

Beta Control goes live!

Submitted by eclipse on Wed, 01/11/2012 - 18:13

Hooray! Beta Control has gone live!  Take a look at the complete site at BetaControl.com.  We have been working with this wonderful company for the past two years on multiple projects, and are excited about the latest.

Managing Your Social Networks

Submitted by eclipse on Wed, 01/11/2012 - 18:13
"I want to do Facebook and Twitter and all that crap," one person told me the other day. Social networks are no doubt taking over the way we interact with each other.  It began in the personal realm with Facebook and MySpace.  Finally we can keep track of our friends and family no matter how distant they are.

Analytics: Bounce Rate vs. Exit Rate

Submitted by eclipse on Wed, 01/11/2012 - 18:13
Analyzing web traffic is a critical part of increasing both the quantity and quality of the overall traffic on your site.  Free tools such as Google Analytics provide a wealth of knowledge about site traffic.  In fact, Analytics provides so much data it is often overwhelming to try and sort through it all.

Step 4: Themeing

Submitted by eclipse on Tue, 06/07/2011 - 16:47

 

A drupal theme is the design files used to affect the look and feel of your website.  A big advantage of Drupal is that the theme is organized separately from your menu, content, or other code.  This means it is super easy to swap out your theme without screwing up anything else.  Below are two themes I swapped out in about 2 minutes.

This one is the default theme that is included in the Drupal files.

 
Below is the exact same site and site content, but with an alternative free theme (also available on Drupal.org).

Step 3: ckeditor, blog, & comments

Submitted by eclipse on Tue, 06/07/2011 - 15:36

The blog is really the centerpiece of our site.  It should be a major focus of your site too, if you intend to take optimization seriously.  To make the blogging process easy, we need to setup the blog within drupal, and allow people to comment on the blog entries.

Step 2: Install Drupal

Submitted by eclipse on Tue, 06/07/2011 - 15:13

Installing Drupal is a pretty painless process.  On a surface level, you download a bunch of files from Drupal.org, create a MySQL database on your server, and connect the two via a user interface at yourdomain.com/install.php.

Of course there are a few more details than that.  To learn all the details check out the Installation Guide.

What is Drupal?

Submitted by eclipse on Mon, 06/06/2011 - 18:00

Nearly every website I build is built with the Drupal open source content management system.  That's a lot of big words for some, so I'll define them below.

Open-source: Thousands of people work together to build something that can be used by anyone.  In this case it is all the code that is used to structure the website.  Having a community of people working together on the code means it is probably better than what you could build by yourself.  Some well known open-source projects are: Linux, Firefox, Wordpress, and Android.

Step 1: Domain and hosting

Submitted by eclipse on Mon, 06/06/2011 - 17:35

If you want a website, you first will need a domain name and a hosting account.