Image X Media

In our increasingly tech-savvy world, the company website is the new face of the organization. And just like in the non-virtual world, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. The first thing your prospective clients, customers or donors read needs to give them the information they want, the way they want it, and quickly move them along to the important business of taking the next step.

ImageX Media was recently awarded first place at the American Design Awards (ADA) for their design of the Delta School District website. “We are thrilled to receive top honours for design excellence by the ADA,” says Glenn Hilton, President of ImageX Media.

When a page no longer exists on your site, a visitor will see a 404 page.

Last week members of our management team and I had the opportunity to travel to Washington DC to attend the Drupalcon convention. It was a jam packed week with sessions running solid from morning to night with too many good options to choose from in many cases. It was our first Drupalcon to attend, and I have to admit that we were all quite impressed with how tight the event was planned and executed.

ImageX Media is excited to be sponsoring and attending Drupalcon DC this week. Besides the excellent sessions we are excited to connect with others in the Drupal community. It is always a pleasure to swap build-out tips or put a face to a familiar Drupal.org username. Don’t hesitate to visit our booth to say hi! Our team will also be on Twitter if you want to ping us online.

Background on DrupalSN Recently I was involved in the launch of a new Drupal site on the scene called Drupal Social Network (or DrupalSN for short). Now, I know that there are a lot of other Drupal based social networking sites out there, but DrupalSN is different, it’s not just built with Drupal, it’s actually meant for people interested in interacting and connecting with other Drupal enthusiasts. Over the past six months DrupalSN has grown rapidly.

Our last blog post explained what duplicate content is and how it can affect your site’s search engine indexing and ranking. In a nutshell, when multiple copies of a block of content or even an entire page live on more than one URL, search engines will attempt to pick the “best” version and filter out the copies when returning search results, and sometimes even drop duplicate pages from their indexes all together.

If a search engine returned a bunch of results for your search query that were all pretty much the same, you would get a bit irritated, wouldn’t you? Search engines understand this, and have tweaked their algorithms to filter very similar pages so you get a range of results that are relevant, but still different enough. According to Google, duplicate content generally refers to blocks of content on one website or across multiple domains that are either identical or almost identical.

Have you Googled yourself or your company lately? Or rather, have you typed in keywords you hope to rank well for to check what spot in search engine results you hold? Have you hired an SEO to take you to the top, or at least as high as you can get? Many site owners and marketers can put too much stock in an absolute search engine ranking (what position you are in). I say this for several reasons: 1. Search engine rankings are affected by the exact keyword search. If your most desired keyword is “murphy beds” – you might Google yourself and find you’re #5 for that term.

At ImageX Media all of our projects are managed through Subversion. Most of our sites all share the same base (the latest version of Acquia Drupal, a few contributed modules all our sites use, and an install profile based on packgr). For those of you who also manage your sites in SVN you know that simply copying the latest version of Drupal over top of the old version doesn’t cut it.