Good Job at Dundurn Press (Psst You May Have Been Hacked)
This post has been updated…see below.
Dundurn’s Blog
I am about a year late but I just found Dundurn Press’s blog — www.definingcanada.ca
Props to Dundurn for just doing it. How many bigger houses would have balked at the extra time investment? Dundurn used a free wordpress installation and a free (?) design template. All in all a very good looking and functional site. Good choice of sidebar gadgets too.
One of the choices publishers face with blogging is whether to put the blog in a subdirectory of the main domain or at its own TLD. Dundurn went with the latter — a good choice — but they could do a better job at optimizing the blog so it stands on its own. The title tag for the blog says very little. The tags on the posts aren’t being converted to meta-tags and the urls for the individual posts aren’t making them any friends. If anyone at Dundurn reads this — you also need a back button to Dundurn.com from definingcanada.ca. A site map on definingcanada.ca wouldn’t hurt either. Lucky for them, Wordpress will let them fix all that in about 5 minutes. Open source is your friend.
Dundurn.com Redesign
It appears they are well versed in the joys of open source software as I see their main site — dundurn.com — has been redesigned on a Joomla! platform. It looks good. Unfortunately, they have either an unscrupulous or lazy or clueless web developer on their hands.
In one case some code simply doesn’t add up. This is the description they have of their site:
“Dundurn - Defining Canada since 1972, The term war room, in political parlance, was coined by the team of U.S. strategists (specifically James Carville) who worked for Bill Clintonâs first presidential campaign in the early 1990s.” Wha?
And in another case it appears as if they have been hacked. Invisible links to shady websites (i.e., pornsites) appear to be randomly inserted at the bottom of their book page: see the bad code here.
Hopefully they can sort that out.
Bravo for Embracing Web Tools
Between the blog and the main site — minor problems notwithstanding — two huge thumbs to Dundurn for getting this together. Plus Dundurn is posting all their covers on Flickr. Another genius move. Dundurn truly seems to be using their size and speed to their advantage on the web. Good job.
Update 25/03/08: it turns out Dundurn hired talent instead of contracting for it. Another small bow. Their web marketing guy got in touch with me. He was prepared to give me the beat down for my above post. I pointed. He figured it out. All is well. Harmony returns.
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