I really am sick of using Dragonfly CMS over at Koh Phangan Parties, the support from the developers is terrible, the code itself is complete garbage in places and the style sheets are a complete joke.

I would like to switch to using WordPress, ok I would have to customise it quite significantly but I think it would be a better solution in the long run. Also I like the fact I can make WordPress a lot more SEO friendly than Dragonfly, it took me 2 weeks of pain just to get the on the page issues sorted with my Dragonfly install.

The real problem will be maintaining the posts and the image gallery, I may have to back the whole lot up and re-write the news items as WordPress posts on a fresh install. That’s just a complete pain, plus the downtime whilst I did it would be less than beneficial.

Maybe I could write some custom SQL scripts to convert the news items but that’s likely to take longer than just re-writing them.

I swear I am more and more impressed with WordPress the more I use it. I have been looking into some SEO type tweaks for my sites, nothing much new except for some tagging but I was forced to review what I had done so far which is:

1. Change post titles to something more friendly- Obviously Google and friends take the page title pretty seriously as we all know.
2. Change the permalink structure – This give a more readable URL and once again we know that the major search engines like to use the content of the URL as a big chunk of SERP weight.
3. Create a sitemap – this is probably the single most useful thing I have done for my WordPress pages, it is completely automated and gets pinged to Google every time I write or update a post.

Now, there is nothing very special with either of those three things I have done to improve my on the page SEO, where it gets really cool is in the fact this took me a total of around 30 minutes to do.

The only code change I had to make was to the header.php to change the way the page title is displayed at the top of the browser, this was a 2 minute fix really, nothing difficult at all.

When I run my pages through my SEO optimisation software now I get much better results, let’s hope the search engines feel the same way! I really should get around to sorting out the SEO for a couple more of my pages, the problem is finding the time to get it done.

I have managed to get my hands on a really nice SEO friendly domain name, it really is a good one, lots of daily worlds searches in the particular niche it covers and very little competition.

I’m considering setting up a full blown money making blog using it. I’ve been working recently with the guy who owns Online Tech Tips and he has promised to give me a few pointers in getting stertep with blogging for money.

I would really liek to move more into this type of work and drop some of the junk copywriting I have to do these days, some of it I will keep becasue it is enjoyable to do but the normal SEO optimised articles will be gone for sure.

I have taken on a couple of paid blogging jobs lately, this coupled with the need to update my own bogs fairly frequently has caused me something of a headache, I constantly needed to remember the URL and password of the various sites; this coupled with the fact my Internet connection here on the island is dead slow meaning it is painful to open graphic intensive sights was causing me problems.

The a friend turned me on to Windows Live Writer which is part of the Windows Live application suite released by Microsoft a while back. After installing it and patching it I can honestly say it’s made my life one hell of a lot easier. I can now post to any of the blogs I work on from a single application, furthermore I can prepare the posts offline and publish them when I have a decent connection.

Very cool stuff, thanks Microsoft, now and again you supply me with something really good.