How to....add your business to Google Places

When you perform a search in Google you may have noticed that you now get a few different types of results. So before I carry on with this guide, I'll explain the differences.


(1) & (5) are paid for ads. You'll notice that (1) is in a slightly shaded box and that both tell you they are 'Ads'.

(2) is a natural or organic search listing, so these people are there thanks to SEO.

(3) are the results based on Google Places and conincide with the map (4) to show you physically where, in this case, each shoe shop is located. These results are not based purely on your location and you still need to optimise your website to ensure you're placed towards the top.

However, as the Google Places results often appear above many of the natural listings and take up most of the first page of results, if you rely on local searches and haven't added your business now is the time to do it!

In the example below, we’ll set up a cake making business in Swansea.

Step 1

In your web browser go to http://www.google.co.uk/places, if you have a Google account sign in. If you don’t yet have a Google account click on the ‘Sign up now’ link.

(If you already have a Google account, skip ahead to Step 2.)

All you need to set up an account is an email address. Enter your details and follow the on-screen instructions. You will need to validate your email address in order to continue.

When you validate your email address you should get the following message:

Use the 'Click here to continue' link and you should be directed back to the Google places page.

Step 2

Click 'Add new business' to get started, then on the next screen add your phone number and click 'Find business information'.

If your business is already on Google Maps, you'll see a message similar to this:

If this is your business, you can claim the listing by clicking 'edit'. If it is not your listing, click 'Add a new listing' to enter your details.

If you are setting up a new busines, it is unlikely that Google will have any data about your business, so you will get the following screen for you to input all of your information.

As you enter your details you'll notice the map on the right hand side move down the screen with you and update to match your details, see example below:

When you are happy, click the 'Submit' button.

Step 3

In order to publish the listing you need to validate it. At the moment Google offers validation by postcard, which unfortunately can take a few weeks!



Click Finish & you'll get the following message:



Within the next two weeks you should recieve a letter with your validation code. When you receive this, log in to your Google Places account and enter the PIN where indicated.

I'll update this post with further details when our validation letter arrives!

MODx Revolution Tutorial for beginners – Part 3 - Your first MODx site

Introduction
Ok, so in the last tutorial, we had a nice introduction to the MODx manager, looked at some important System Settings, had a quick look into Templates, and installed our first add-on.

Today, I’m going to look a little further into Templates, and actually build a new site (based on a free CSS Template).

Building Sites with MODx
In most cases, you’ll design you site in Photoshop, or your graphics program of choice, slice up all the images, then start coding it with squeaky clean XHTML and CSS. Or at least, that’s what we do! One of the nice things about MODx is that it’s incredibly flexible. You can build a site almost completely static, with just a few little MODx features used, or you can go the whole way, producing a dynamic website jam-packed with interactivity and space dust.

By using a CSS template, I can show you how to get your site up and running once you’ve coded it, then add in all those nice MODx features afterwards. The template I’m going to use can be found here. This template contains several different features that lend themselves well to a MODx site, like a site search, recent posts, recent comments, tags, categories and archives.

So after unzipping the template, I can see that it has an index file, folder for the images and a CSS file. These are the only files we’ll need to get the site up and running.



File Upload
So we want to transfer the images into our MODx installation. There are a few different ways that we can do this with MODx Revolution. We could either use an FTP client and simply drag the folders into the “assets/images” folder, or we can use the new file upload feature of MODx Revolution. Seeing as we’re here to learn, let’s do it the MODx way!

In your Manager, click on the Files tab. In the top right-hand corner, you’ll see a little blue and white icon.



This is your MODx Browser! A quick and easy way to see all of the files associated with your installation of MODx. So click on the icon, and your MODx Browser will open up, overlaying the manager screen.

On the left, you’ll see a number of folders. If you go into assets, then click on images, you’ll see all of the files in that folder on the right. Don’t have any images? Good. Me neither. We’re about to sort that out.



Click on the small icon that’s furthest right out of all the icons above the document tree on the left. This will open up the MODx file upload facility. When the file upload box has appeared, click the ‘Add’ button, and browse to the images in the free template.



Once you’ve selected all of them, you should see them all listed, ‘Queued for upload’. Then just click Upload, and you’re done. You should now see all of your images in your images folder.



So that’s the images done, let’s just get the CSS and pop that into our styles.css file. We already linked up our index file and our CSS in the last tutorial, so it makes sense just to copy the template CSS, and paste it into our CSS file. Once you’ve copied the CSS from the template file, you can use the MODx text editor to paste it into. One thing to note here is that the image paths shown in the Template CSS file are slightly different to what we’re going to need, so we need to amend them slightly. Instead of having ‘images/image_name.jpg’, we’ll need to change them to ‘../images/image-name.jpg’. Once that’s done, we’ll go and make the final change to the template.

Template editing
Open up your BaseTemplate (under the Elements tab, and then inside the Templates folder) and copy the contents of the index file from the template file. Paste all of this over whatever you already have in your BaseTemplate. If you hit Save, and refresh your website in a browser, you’ll see that we have a load of ugly, un-styled content. We need to adjust the path to our CSS file in our BaseTemplate.

The line that reads:


<link href="default.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen">


Needs to be altered to:


<link href="assets/styles/styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen">


Refresh your site now, and you should see something pretty similar to the template we downloaded.



Update the image path of the flowery image in your BaseTemplate, and you’ll be done.



CodeMirror
Going off on a little tangent, I just want to introduce this fantastic add-on. Its best to get this in now, because it can really help you while you’re building your site.

The add-on is called CodeMirror. It makes the MODx text-editors much more user-friendly from a coding point of view. You can download it from Package Management (Remember when we installed TinyMCE in the last tutorial??) and it can be found in MODx Add-ons > RichTextEditors. Once you’ve downloaded and installed it, you’ll notice that your BaseTemplate now has text highlighting and line numbers. It may be small, but it’s much easier to manage all of your coding inside MODx with this add-on.

MODx-ing your template
Now, we’ve essentially got a one page static site, with all of the code being stored in our BaseTemplate. But we’re using MODx, so we should take advantage of some MODx tags to help us along the way.

In all honesty, the coding shown in the BaseTemplate (that we got from our free template) is a little outdated. I’m going to update it, and add a few MODx tags in one sweep.

The current head tag looks like:


<meta equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

<title>Premium Series by Free CSS Templates</title>

<meta name="keywords" content="">

<meta name="Premium Series" content="">

<link href="assets/styles/styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen">


I’ve changed mine so it reads:


<meta charset="[[++modx_charset]]">

<base href="[[++site_url]]">



<title>[[++site_name]] | [[*pagetitle]]</title>



<meta name="description" content="[[*description]]">

<meta name="keywords" content="">



<link href="assets/styles/styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen">




Apart from adding a few MODx tags, I’ve added an HTML5 DOCTYPE, a base href tag and a meta description tag. This keeps things nice and up to date. We’ve also removed some of the bits that aren’t required when a HTML5 DOCTYPE is declared.

So let’s just take a look at each of the MODx tag and explain what they’re doing:

[[++modx_charset]] – This is the character encoding that is used for your site. You selected it during installation. MODx primarily works with UTF-8.

[[++site_url]] – This is the URL of your site and was determined when you installed the site.

[[++site_name]] – This is the name of your site, as specified in the System Settings.

[[*pagetitle]] – This is the title of each of your resources. The only one we have at the moment has the title of ‘Home’.

[[*description]] – Again, this is specified in your resources. This tag is very handy for the SEO of your site as generally, the content of the description tag is shown in the Google search results (other search engines are available!)

So if you now Save your BaseTemplate, and refresh the website, you won’t see too much change, but if you view the source, you’ll be able to see exactly what we’ve done.



Summary
In the next tutorial, we’ll look further into Chunks, and why they’re so cool.

If you have anything to say about this tutorial, or how it could be improved please feel free to leave a comment.

If you need help with a MODx website, why not give us a call or get in touch?