The Anne Boleyn Files is run by Claire Ridgway. The site has a HUGE (and we really do mean HUGE) following though both the website and also on social media such as Facebook. That’s why the look of the Facebook page is so important.

MadeGlobal have now updated the timeline header to reflect the themes of this Tudor website, and also the massive success of Claire Ridgway with her two new books “The Anne Boleyn Collection” and “The Fall of Anne Boleyn” which are both very high on the charts in Amazon.

This book has gone from strength to strength and we are proud to announce that Claire has now sold over 4000 books! That’s a huge success in anybody’s books (pun intended!)…

Claire is a force to be reckoned with as she has an unquenchable desire to uncover the true story of the Tudors, and in particular Anne Boleyn. She is deep into the final stages of her second book which is about the days leading up to the fall and execution of Anne Boleyn, and we’re confident that this book will be a success too.

Congratulations Claire!

Wordpress 3.4 Logo

Over the coming weeks we’ll be looking at how this upgrade will improve things for wordpress users, and for those that we host too. Fingers crossed it will all be amazing!

What an incredible achievement in such a short amount of time. We here at MadeGlobal think that this is a result of a huge amount of work by Claire, and also is a sign of the times that traditional publishing is dead. Self publishing, when managed in the correct way (yep, we’ll help!) is at least as good, if not better than the old stuck-in-the-mud publishers.

Why self publishing can be better than traditional publishing

• Up-to-the minute sales information
• Power to change the price you sell your self published book
• Get your book to market incredibly quickly
• Take advantage of the marketing power of Amazon
• Control your own marketing, for example using Google Ads
• Design your own cover (we recommend using a pro for this though!)
• Almost simultaneous launches in the UK, USA and the rest of the world
• Publish a book that the “traditional” book world would consider un-sellable
• Much, much higher royalty payments for each book sold
• No agents and publishers to please … just yourself!

Our congratulations go out once again to Best Selling Self-Publisher Claire Ridgway. Well done!

In just three weeks from publication, her debut book “The Anne Boleyn Collection” has sold over 1000 copies. That is an amazing achievement and we wish her every success for the next 1000 too!

There are many advantages to owning your own domain name and website rather than hosting using wordpress.com. Here are just a few:

Reasons to get your own domain name

1. simplicity – your email address would become info@yourname.com or whatever
2. add credibility – it costs so little but shows you are a serious author
3. truly promote yourself – don’t spend time advertising wordpress!
4. portability - if you decide to move domain host, you don’t lose your domain name
5. easier to remember – people know your name, and so they’ll know where to look for your website
6. keep the name for years – if website technology changes, you’ll still have your domain name
7. easier for search engine optimisation you COULD spend time on wordpress SEO, but it’s better to promote yourself!
8. build your own contact/email list -market to your own list at your will and really make money
9. google adsense – make money from your OWN adverts
10. it’s easy to do!

Fancy discussing with us how your own domain name and website would make you unbeatable? Want to know how to position yourself and your business as a true brand?

Speak to us at MadeGlobal…

We have been advising clients on how to own their own domain name and website, and as you can see from our portfolio, we’ve designed and implemented many personal and business websites over the years. Show the world that you mean business with your domain. And don’t listen to other companies … it is both simple and inexpensive to own your own website and domain, if you know the right people to speak to!

Why not take a look through our website design portfolio to see if there is something that is similar to what you are looking for … here!

We’ve been looking under the hood of WordPress 3.3 and we love it!

What is our favorite change? The wordpress media uploader. Let me explain…

In the past, for many of our clients, we have used the Nextgen gallery plugin. We love it so much because it is really easy to customise or theme the nextgen plugin to match the needs of our clients. We also love the admin user interface as it has been simple to explain to anyone using our themes. HOWEVER, it has always had one niggling downside which frustrated us … if you want to add images into a nextgen gallery you have to leave the post or page you are writing, and then go to the “add images” section to upload your images, before returning to the post and putting in the shortcode. That takes valuable time and can spoil the flow of your writing.

We’ve always recommended using the built in media uploaded above a post for putting in single pictures for a number of reasons, but never for a slideshow. And we absolutely hate the built in [ gallery ] shortcode from older wordpress versions.

But all that has changed with the wordpress 3.3 media uploader…

Now you can drag and drop images directly into the uploader. You can select multiple files to upload at the same time, and you can really easily manage the images from within the post. Without ever going out of the page. Excellent.

So, on our latest project (http://www.lift-n-shift.com) we have 100% used the built in media uploader. For every slideshow on the site. AND even better, we have overridden the gallery shortcode so that our custom slideshows show up within posts too. So now everything is finally within the wordpress editor, and easily explained to our clients.

How have you been finding the new wordpress media uploader?

Wordpress 3.3 Logo

The initial change you’ll see after an upgrade is the “tours” functionality which brings up little popup windows to talk you through the changes. As experienced wordpress users, we’ve found these a little distracting, but for the general public these are undoubtedly useful as they highlight features you might not notice otherwise.

The best change we’ve seen is, in the words of WordPress “Flexible Permalinks”.

You have more freedom when choosing a post permalink structure. Skip the date information or add a category slug without a performance penalty.

Why is that useful? Because now it doesn’t matter which “pretty permalinks” are used. They’ll all work nicely. And from our experience, all your old permalinks will still work too. Phew!

From a user interface point of view, it is nice that WordPress have now included the latest jQuery, something we’ve been overriding in our themes for years, and also that the entire jQuery UI stack is now included. That means that we won’t be working with the strange subset of UI that was there before. Nice.

WordPress also mention that they have completed an “Editor API Overhaul”. We need to see more about what this really means but from the WordPress site:

The new editor API automatically pulls in all the JS and CSS goodness for the editor. It even supports multiple editors on the same page.

Multiple editors on the same page …. hmmm … that opens up a lot of possibility!