Archives for March 2011

WordPress Security

Peter Shilling · Mar 30, 2011 · 4 Comments

Over the weekend I came across a new resource on the topic that I had not seen before, wptavern.com. The reason for stopping by there was a note on twitter that mentioned there was a post about wordpress security. After reading it I’ve bookmarked it to ensure that the steps are implemented with each new wordpress install we do.

There are loads of tweets about top 5 this and top 20 that to do with wordpress, this was stands out as its authored by a fellow who is very active in the wordpress community (Jeff Chandler) but more so that the 5 security ideas are both very simple to do but also should be mandatory for every wordpress installation.

If you manage your own wordpress site you should definitely give it a read and implement, if you’re not too sure what it all means feel free to contact us at The Internet Incubator, perhaps we can help you out.

Here is a link to the article.

[This post was originally published on the TII site]

Is your web site looking its best?

Peter Shilling · Mar 29, 2011 · Leave a Comment

It’s true, the web browser wars of the late 90’s are over but it doesn’t mean as a web developer or a web site owner that it is time to be complacent. When said ‘wars’ were still running hot it was hard work for web developers. Trying to make your site look good in Internet Explorer and Netscape was like dressing Hulk Hogan and Paris Hilton in the same clothes and expecting both to look hot.

The modern web browsers certainly do a better job at conforming to standards, and rendering sites to those standards, but you’d be surprised still how different the exact same web site can look through different browsers.

So as a web site owner, you really should take the time to ensure that your site looks acceptable in at least the most popular browsers.

So how should you test your web site?

I think it is pretty easy these days to test your site in a number of browsers regardless of what operating system (Mac, Windows, Linux etc..) you are using.

Below is a graph of browsers that people have used in the past month to access one of our sites. This gives you a good overview of where to start.

I would recommend that you start at the top and work your way down. If you run Windows, you’ll have Internet Explorer (make sure you’ve upgraded from version 6 – it’s not something you want to be using), so then it’s a matter of installing a couple of the others.

Mac users, you will have Safari, again though it is trivial to install Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera – they are all free (see links at the bottom of this post to the individual downloads).

Internet Explorer is going to be a little more tricky, you may already be running Bootcamp that allows you to run Windows on your Mac. Alternatively try some virtual machine software that will allow you to run Windows from inside your Mac OS X system. VirtualBox from Sun is probably a good place to start, again it free.

Once you’ve got a variety of browsers installed (aim for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome) it is then a matter of viewing your site in each one, looking for strange behaviour.

It’s worth noting, you’re not going to get a site to look exactly the same in each browser, what you’re aiming to do is to have the site display in each without wonky columns or massive fonts from nowhere, things like that!

One more thing: don’t forget smart phones and mobiles

More and more now users will start to come across your web site with a smart phone or a mobile phone. Obviously it’s going to be more difficult to see your site as you won’t have each mobile. Whatever phone you have at least try that, surely you will know someone with an iPhone (just get on a bus you’ll find 5 people playing with them on their trip), or ask around your staff or friends and try to view your site with these mini browsers as well.

If your site is built on WordPress there is a great plugin called WPTouch, it will detect when someone is viewing your site with an iPhone and render the site specifically for them. It takes the whole “what will my site look like on an iPhone” problem and solves it in a snap!

Talk to us if you’d like us to configure this great plugin for your WordPress site.

Happy testing, I hope you don’t find too many problems when you start to look at your site through different eyes!

Links to browsers

Web Site Statistics: Are your users coming via the front door?

Peter Shilling · Mar 21, 2011 · 2 Comments

Understanding Entry Pages.

In our previous article we discussed some basics on understanding the traffic coming to your web site; visitor numbers, page views and traffic sources. We still have to cover entry and exit pages.

Again let’s be generic so it does not matter if you are using statistics software like, Webalizer, AWstats or Google Analytics the concept is roughly the same.

Entry and Exit pages are just that: the page that a user enters your web site and the page that a user exits your web site. Ideally they won’t be the same page, or you have just lost a visitor without impressing them!

When constructing a web site a lot of focus is usually placed on the Home Page, web developers still consistently make this a very big focus during the design process. Sure it needs to be slick and do all the things that a Home Page does, but the reality is not everyone is going to visit your site via the front door.

A user will only enter via the front door when they type in your domain name – sampledomain.com.au and then visit your site, or perhaps when you have a link to your site from another.

The longer your web site is on the Internet, the more it will be indexed by search engines, hopefully you will have many interesting pages that a search engine will spider through and display in the results when people search for keywords relevant to your site.

Here’s the catch. The search engine won’t always show up your Home Page. More often than not Google or Yahoo will display an internal page within your site in the result set that it shows a user. The user clicks on that and they enter your site directly at that level, not the Home Page.

Let’s take a practical look at this.

Go to your Web Site Statistics software that you use and look specifically for Entry Pages.

Most good software will show you for a given period (eg a month) what the top Entry Page was followed by perhaps the top 10 Entry Pages? Your Home Page may be on the list, don’t be surprised if its not at the top of the list.

Now use these results to retrace your user’s experience. Work out from the results what the entry page was, get that URL and visit that first up. See your web site from the perspective of a user coming off a search engine.

When looking at this page, ask yourself this.

Does not coming via the Home Page mean that a users misses some of the key focuses of your web site?
Is vital information available to the user on this page, telephone numbers, address or similar?
Are you running a promotion or other important information that is only available on the Home Page and so a users will miss it?

If the answer to all of the above is positive then you don’t have a problem, if not you perhaps need to consider the layout of the internal pages of your site to rectify the problem(s)

Automate newsletter signups with Mailchimp & Gravity Forms

Peter Shilling · Mar 15, 2011 · Leave a Comment

There are a lot of online systems to manage your newsletters, however you have to try hard to find one that is better value for money or comes close in functionality to our favourite – MailChimp.

As well as a great user interface for building email templates and sending and recording stats of email campaigns, one of its real strong points is the ability to integrate with many different systems. Lucky for us that WordPress is included in this!

There are a couple of different ways to have a user sign up on your WordPress site and have the data placed directly into MailChimp. The most powerful involves the form plugin Gravity Forms.

If you’re not familiar with it, it is a very popular form creation tool that allows for simple, through to very complicated forms to be easily created in a point and click interface, right inside WordPress.

Gravity Forms also has a plugin available that supports MailChimp and this is a combination that we use all the time for our customers. It gives you the ability to create a form for a signup, a user submits it but stays right on your site and in the background the signup is passed over to MailChimp. You don’t have to go for it but Gravity Forms has the option of an Ajax front end that does all of this while the user remains on the same page.

One thing that we have found is that if you combine say a contact us form with a newsletter form you have a situation where people can send you a message and you can give them the option right there to sign up for your newsletter as well – in our experience this does increase newsletter sign up.

Here is an example.

The trick is in Gravity’s ability to have logic in a form, so it says “if the newsletter option is ticked I’ll send this one to MailChimp, if it’s not ticked then I’ll just send the enquiry through”.

The below screen shot is MailChimp plugin for Gravity and shows this logic being configured.

MailChimp also provides another two methods of integration, the first is just a simple link that you place on your web site that moves a user through to a page that is hosted in the MailChimp system where the users then does the sign up. You’re able to customise the look of this page, with logo and other simple branding.

The second way involves MailChimp creating a HTML form that then is embedded info the WordPress site. While this method is easy to do it can often have problems in getting the form supplied to fit in with the rest of your WordPress theme.

Web Site Statistics: Understand Your Site’s Performance

Peter Shilling · Mar 14, 2011 · Leave a Comment

If your web site was an employee would you sack it?

Well to be fair you need to know if the employee (Mr www.yoursite ) is doing its job. You can’t know this without delving into the statistics!

When developing a web site for a small / medium business much of the focus is on what the site looks like, how it works, and the functionality delivered to end users. Commonly the site gets final approval, the owner of the business is very happy, the site goes live, and then that’s it.

A little times passes, the site doesn’t do that well (we think, because we don’t really know) and everyone concerned looses a little interest. The web developer is busy working on their next project and the business owner, well, he’s running his or her business.

So much of the internet is full of web sites that don’t ever meet the expectations of the people they were created for, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

So who’s responsible?

Without getting into the finger pointing game, ultimately it has to rest with the business owners. A web site should be like any other marketing effort that a business takes on. Any decent marketing expert will tell you, measuring is the key. There are many in the marketing world that will go as far as stating “if you don’t measure it, don’t do it!”. This is true for your web site as much as any other marketing activity, if not more so.

It does not have to be hard and does not have to take hours a week to achieve, but with a little effort and with some free tools you can gain an insight into what is happening when a visitors looks at your web site. Once thing is for sure: the way a visitor uses your site will almost always not be the way you envisaged it when you built the site (that fancy flash introduction you put on your homepage… that’s right no one cares).

Get some statistics

When buy hosting for your web site, commonly you will be provided with some kind of web site statistics software. These are often free packages that will show you basic information, such as:

Numbers of unique visitors
Numbers of page views
Traffic sources; is the traffic coming from search engines, other web sites or direct traffic?

The way that this software works is by parsing the web server logs where your web site is hosted. It usually will be updated once a day and is usually fairly accurate. Two common options shown here are Webalizer and AWStats, see below for a screen shot of each (you might recognise them):

What do you want to learn from the website statistics?

Let’s start with the simple things, but having said that look past the most common statistic; how many people are visiting my site? Even the most basic web site statistics software will answer that one, but we really need to dig a little deeper.

Website Visitors versus Website Page Views

When talking about visitors make sure you are looking at just that, unique visitors (not ‘hits’ or ‘files’ etc..). This (perhaps obviously) is the number of people coming to your web site each day. Now compare that to the Page Views statistic and we are getting somewhere. These two stats together do a couple of things for us.

Let’s look at an example:

samplesite.com has 1200 visitors a month and 1400 page views giving us 1.16 page views per visitor
testsite.com has 750 visitors a month and 1600 page views giving 2.13 page views per visitor

Which is best?

While initially you may think samplesite.com is doing better as it has almost twice the number of visitors as testsite.com, chances are however testsite.com is performing better. Visitors when they come to the site are looking around more, finding something that they are interested in and general working out better for the web site owner as converted leads or sales.

Similarly, more advanced web site statistics software will also show you a ‘Bounce Rate’, that is derived from visitors and page views. This is important as it shows you how many people hit a page of your site (perhaps the home page) and bounce right away, that is they view one page and that’s it. A high bounce rate would mean that people don’t find or can’t find what they are looking for and so they go elsewhere. Whereas a lower bounce rate indicates that visitors come, are engaged by your site and look at multiple pages.

So what conclusions can be drawn?

Continuing with the above example, if I was the owner of samplesite.com I would start to look at why visitors are not ‘sticking’ around on the site. Perhaps the web site navigation is poor, they can’t find what they are looking for, or there is not enough engaging content to get a visitor interested.

Have a look at a lot of popular web sites and you will see that there is a lot of visual appeal to the pages, each article will have a large image associated with it, good clear headlines and copy that is laid out in an easy to read format. All of these things contribute to a better performing site.

Why specialise in wordpress?

Peter Shilling · Mar 12, 2011 · Leave a Comment

It is true, here at The DMA we love WordPress.

We use it for 100% of our own web site properties, and we also use it exclusively for our client work.

So, what is it?

WordPress started life as a blogging tool but now it is very well regarded as a complete content management system, suitable for building not just web site blogs but also pretty much any other kind of web site as well.

WordPress has been developed by literally hundreds of software developers, so most of the hard work has been done. For many commercial and personal web sites, starting from scratch without a framework like WordPress means you miss out on a lot of functionality and create a lot more work in building a site.

Naturally this translates to cost, if you going to develop every piece of functionality from the ground up, it’s going to cost more money.

Some of the things we love (and you’ll love too!) about wordpress:

Very easy to use CMS (content management system); if you can use a word processor, you can manage the content on your web site
Integrated advanced search engine optimisation (SEO) features, it’s our experience that sites built on wordpress out perform others when it comes to google ranking
Support for user permissions, so multiple users can contribute to your site
Seemingly endless list of great plugins that provide additional functionality, no need to always pay for programming when adding functionality to your site
Manages media (images and video)
Encourages discussion with user comments
It’s open source – rather than a proprietary system that locks you in

What does it look like?

It’s a web based tool that you can access with almost any web browser and computer, as opposed to software that you have to install on your computer. Take a look at the screen shot below, it shows the interface that is used to create this very page in our web site!

[click to view larger]

Wordpress editing screen — WordPress editing screen

View our Featured Projects page here and see for yourself that many a great looking web site has been built on top of the WordPress platform.

Designing for wordpress? – Part II

Peter Shilling · Mar 11, 2011 · Leave a Comment

If you have arrived here without reading part 1, you might like to start there.

In this post we look at the functionality that is available with wordpress plugins so that when you’re designing for wordpress you have more of an idea of what is possible and what to include in your design that is easy to implement in wordpress.

WordPress Plugins

One of the key features of the wordpress system is the abundant availability of plugins. There are many thousands of plugins available and they each in turn allow the core system to be extended. What follows is a short summary of some of the main types of plugins we use regularly use.

Image Display

Designing-for-wordpress-figure-6 — figure-6

Designing-for-wordpress-figure-7 — figure-7

Using a javascript layered effect to display images is a popular way to show off artwork or a gallery of pictures. Figure 6 shows an example of this in use, the image overlaying the main web page. This effect is commonly triggered by clicking on a smaller thumb-nail version of the image (see figure 7) which wordpress automatically creates when you upload the main image.

Commonly a web site requires content to be featured on the home page of the site.

Again there are a number of good plugins that allow for images and text to be displayed on the home or other internal pages in a slider. See figure 8 for an example.

Designing-for-wordpress-figure-8 — figure-8

This style of ‘featured – content’ plugin is popular as it allows an end user to easily create content that is featured on the home page without advanced graphic design skills. In turn it keeps the web site looking fresh and new, while highlighting to the end user a featured piece of information; be it a new product, event or simply the latest blog post.

figure-9
Forms

Figure 9 shows a simple newsletter sign-up form. The plugins available make creating even very complicated forms with advanced logic an easy task. Most of the plugins allow a designer to control the look with standard CSS, keeping the forms in touch with the design of the overall web site.

There are several good plugins for forms that allow you to:

Send data via email
Store data in the WordPress database
Export form data as a CSV file
Validation forms, required fields and form logic
Export the form data directly to some CRM systems
Control the look of the form
Easily build new forms with text boxes, drop down menus and click boxes
Prevention spam

Comments, Discussion & Sharing

Depending on your web site, you will commonly want to encourage user feedback. WordPress by default has a very good comment system where a user can easily add their point of view directly to the end of a post. Other users can then comment as well or respond to the original comment as they require.

By default this does not require a plugin as it’s built right into WordPress, but it should be given some consideration when you are designing a page layout. Figure 10 shows the standard WordPress comment form that is placed at the end of each post.

Administrators of the site are able to moderate comments added to WordPress through the admin panel.

Designing-for-wordpress-figure-10 — figure-10

Equally as important these days is giving users the ability to share the content on your site with their network of online friends, through sites like twitter and facebook. Web users often want to be able to post a link to something they think their friends will be interested in. Below in figure 11 is an example of a plugin that can be placed at the bottom of each post to allow users to do just this.

Designing for wordpress?

Peter Shilling · Mar 11, 2011 · 1 Comment

While wordpress is very flexible it’s worth having a few things in your mind when doing the site design. We commonly work with external graphic designers who are working for one of our clients or come to us directly to build a wordpress theme for a site they are creating. We have been providing for a while now a group of ideas that are worth taking into consideration when putting a design together that will eventually end up as a wordpress site.

We thought it would be good to share this for designers, so here goes!

Why WordPress & Thesis?

After the design and setup of the site is complete, wordpress provides a great platform to manage your site on and ongoing basis. Read here for more thoughts on choosing wordpress.

Thesis is a theme framework that operates inside WordPress, creating a rapid theme development environment. It creates very clean and well organised HTML/CSS that search engines love.

WordPress page layout ideas

When designing for WordPress & Thesis you can have commonly used elements, including header & footer as well as 1, 2 or 3 columns of content. See the diagram above, figure 1, all of these example layouts are possible. The size of the various sections may vary to give large amounts of freedom when creating a design.

designing for wordpress figure-2 — figure-2

Figure 2 below exemplifies this idea where you can create a design that has a much larger header that could accommodate large images or a flash heading.

The main content area on any of these example layouts is also very flexible when filling it with content. It could be a page of static material, a list of blog post excerpts or blog posts in the full version.

It is also possible to have a mix of all of the above. For example some static content to introduce the site, one blog post in full and then a number of blog excepts with ‘read more’ links.

Figure 3 below shows an example of this.

Designing-for-wordpress-figure-3 — figure-3

Thesis elements

There is a lot of functionality built right into the thesis framework that can be taken into consideration when creating a design.

Designing-for-wordpress-figure-4 — figure-4

Multimedia Box

Figure 4 shows the Multimedia box. It can be used to display one or more images, either linked to specific pages or a random image on each page load. The box can also be used to embed video objects (eg youtube clips) or display advertising.

Post Images

Thesis has post image functionality which means you can assign an image to each post that appears on the page with the post but also is thumb-nailed to show in small format when viewing search result pages or archive pages.

Figure 5 shows an example of post images on a search result page.

Designing-for-wordpress-figure-5 — figure-5

Ideas & Examples

Sometimes it’s good to have a look at some examples, there’s no shortage of great looking sites that use wordpress.

Start here at our featured work page, all of the sites you see here are wordpress based.

Thesis has a showcase of sites that use the system, it can be viewed here.
http://diythemes.com/showcase/

Finally WPFloat is a gallery of WordPress sites and demonstrates the designs that are possible with WordPress.

Read part II here, it goes on to discuss the functionality available in wordpress plugins.

WordPress post excerpts and custom fields

Peter Shilling · Mar 10, 2011 · 3 Comments

Here’s a quick tip for our WordPress users.

There is a little change in WordPress 3.1 that we found out about today and rather than thinking you’ve gone mad we thought we’d share the solution.

I’ve just spent 2 days looking for the missing excerpts and custom fields sections that I use quiet a bit in WordPress. I first noticed while doing a training session on Skype with a client that they were gone.

Turns out that this is a ‘feature’ of the new WordPress 3.1 – it turns both post excepts and custom fields off in the editing screen. To turn them back on is very simple, just click the ‘Screen Options’ tab that is at the top right corner of your WordPress admin screen and select excerpts and/or custom fields – whichever you need.

Click the screen shot below to view where to do this.

Will the Google changes affect your site ?

Peter Shilling · Mar 2, 2011 · Leave a Comment

Google is well known for constantly, and secretly, making tweaks to the algorithm that returns the page of search engine results. This algorithm analyses the text you have entered, looks at the keywords, and returns a page of content (and paid advertisements from Google AdWords). They make these changes to return the best quality search results to you – the user – so that you continue to use Google to search the web.

Last week, Google made a massive change that algorithm (in the USA for now), so massive that they published the details on the official Google blog. In their own words, this change will “noticeably impact 11.8% of our queries”.

This change has been designed to reduce the number of low quality search results and return a better quality result to Google users. The change has dramatically affected sites that rely on content farms (like ezinearticles.com, findarticles.com etc) for links back to their pages. Google has done that by discounting the links from these sites, sometimes by 75% to 95% according to some analysts.

Interestingly, it appears that these changes also rank links from YouTube, eBay, Facebook, Wikipedia and other social media sites higher than previously.

Australia Next

While this change has not yet been rolled out at google.com.au, expect that it will very soon. We believe this is a good thing for our clients, where we recommend a solid, “timeless” strategy that will not be easily affected by changes to the search engine algorithms, or even between one search engine or the other. This strategy includes:

Knowing your “trophy” keywords, that describe your business and your USP,
Correct site structure and on-page basics,
Adding content regularly and consistently on your site (ideally with an integrated Blog),
Building links from reputable sources,
Using your own social media channels for links

Using an integrated strategy across your website, email newsletters, social media, Google Adwords – will ensure a balance of traffic sources and will build a solid, approach to maximising your ranking in the search engines for your site.