New Resource for Irish Designers, Developers and Start-ups

D Hayes

websitedevelopment.ie

The domain name became available a month ago and I snapped it up. I wasn't sure what I wanted to do with it. In the end I decided to undertake a little side-project.

It's a personal bookmarking site. If I see any interesting articles, I add a link to this site.

The site itself is very basic, as you can see. The set-up is simple - a Wordpress install, the new Twenty Thirteen theme and a few standard plugins.

Here's the interesting part:

The website is automated. I don't manually add the posts as you'd normally do with a Wordpress site.

I'm using a combination of Pinboard and an IFTTT recipe to automatically add any interesting articles to the website.

I paid the once-off registration fee to join Pinboard. This site allows you to bookmark articles to your private feed. It comes with a Chrome extension that allows you to bookmark articles on the go.

I then signed up for IFTTT, and found a recipe that automatically posts any Pinboard articles to your Wordpress site.

So, all I have to do is to find an interesting article online, click on the Pinboard extension, add a title, a description and a category; and a blog post is automatically created on my site, with a link to the article.

A few things are not automated yet - like adding multiple categories (to organise the articles), or adding meta descriptions.

If you're interested in subscribing to the site, the RSS feed is http://websitedevelopment.ie/feed/.

Any feedback is appreciated. I'd like to possibly get multiple contributors going. Any other suggestions are welcome.

Mr. G

I wouldn't use the default wordpress theme. Would be much better choosing a different design

D Hayes

Thanks for the feedback. I agree - changing the theme is one of the things on my To Do list.

For now, I think the Twenty Thirteen theme is fresh enough though, and new to most people. It looks better on a mobile screen than a desktop screen, in my opinion.

cormee

Not a bad idea for a site. You'll have your work cut out trying to rank on search engines though, as you really don't have any unique content per-se. For your USP maybe try aggregate articles with an Irish slant

- Yes, as mentioned above, the theme could be easier on the eye, with a site like this (one that has no emphasis on imagery) look for a theme that focuses on typography

- Large fonts are nice, but I think in this case the headings are excessively large.

- If I was you I'd give it a catchier name - domain name doesn't always have to match site name - see www.diy.com for a successful example

- homepage title could be more SEO friendly

- The link to the article itself could be more prominent

D Hayes

Thanks cormee, much appreciated.

It may be an interesting experiment to see how it ranks over time on Google, actually. To see if it gets penalised for duplicate content, unoriginal material etc. I might start tracking it for a few keywords and monitor their performance over a few months.

Good call on the name - web[dev] has a nice ring to it and and I like the square bracket effect.

I think I'll add an Irish category too, to keep it someway relevant to the Irish market. Irish Start-Up of the Day, or something to that effect.

Points noted on the aesthetic front, cheers. That's something I'll work on soon.