Major upgrades to hotcars.com, dreamwheels.com, biking.com & cycling.com have gone live today, the culmination of around two weeks hard coding by the team behind them (I had minimal input as I was on holiday for the majority).

Most of the changes are behind the scenes bug-fixes and tweaks all of which sure ensure a smoother error free experience whilst using the sites.

A big thank-you to everyone involved.

We are closing shop on the 11th April for a planned holiday to Ireland and will not be completing any significant work until we get back on the 21st April, if you are a current client I should have already spoken to you.

I you are wanting to contact us for new work, please be aware that there will be a delay in us getting back to you.

See you when we get back.

An Ecopod is an environmentally friendly, recycled, comfortable, contemporary living space ideal for holidaying in, the chap that creates them, Craig Banks, has asked Edge Designs to provide design and development services for both his ecopods.co.uk domain and a much larger upcoming venture, ecopodholidays.co.uk. We plan on working with Craig for some time as his fledgling business grows and we look forward to helping him create a greener future.

Just came across this via seobook.com. This simple but powerful Firefox extension allows you to easily check where any domain ranks against any amount of keywords. Rather than explain to you how it works I have instead included a video of the author walking through downloading, installing and using the extension. Useful no?

Been doing some reading, thought you might like to too.

• Shuzak.com | Anatomy of a Successful Social Network
• Social Networking Goes Niche
• The Nearly Never Ending Market for Niche Social Networks - ReadWriteWeb
• fabric of folly: The long tail of social networking

Since October 2007 I have been working almost exclusively with Namemedia Inc. A rather nice company from “across the pond”.

I have been wanting to post here about what we have been doing for some time as some of it is pretty exciting, however due to the huge amount of work and effort the various projects they have thrown our way have required, finding the time to blog has not been easy.

I am being allowed a rest however, in the form of a two week vacation and so now is the perfect time to take stock and post some info on what it is we have been up to.

Going for the Niche

As mentioned briefly on the site news blog, Namemedia have been and are in the process of building and launching niche social networks built on Wordpress and Bbpress, it is this that we have been assisting them with.

A niche social network is simply a social network aimed squarely at a niche interest, be it wine or geeks. You take the classic social network components: user profiles, friends lists, user messaging, forums and groups; and then you tailor the experience towards your intended niche. Throw in expert articles, regularly updated content and a strong multimedia element and there you have it.

Fast and Furious

We began working with them in October, offering Wordpress consultancy and development for the first site Mommy.com. When this launched we moved onto the next two sites, Biking.com & Cycling.com. We moved into the role of lead developer for these and worked within a multi-continent, multi-disciplinary team to bring these sites to launch. Boating.com & Yachting.com were also developed alongside Biking.com and Cycling.com by another team. These all launched quietly just after Christmas. Since then we have been working as project lead on Hotcars.com and Dreamwheels.com as well as pushing, 3 new minor versions (1.1, 1.2 & 1.3) of Biking and Cycling. We managed a small team of developers (There were more, its just they don’t have websites to link to).

More to come…

I intend to write more about the things we have been doing, mostly about some of the things i have learned from working remotely with people on large projects but I also want to talk about some of the things we have been doing with Wordpress, after all, how many social networks do you know that are built on it?

Edge Designs has been hired by Namemedia Inc. a world leader in the acquisition, development and trading of digital real estate through a network of highly targeted websites and a marketplace for premium domain names. We have been working with their highly skilled team since October 2007 leading the development of several niche social networks (hence the silence around here). Hang around (or subscribe to my RSS) as I plan on posting a lot more information on what we have been up to.