Archive for the ‘Website Setup’ Category
How Many Gadgets Should I Have on a Page?
We want our customer experience on a site to be good, if not great; however, have you considered why they come to your site, and how those fancy effects change their experience?
I am still dealing with past experiments. I created a forum, so I could see how I could design a theme for it, and how I could work with the program. I never worked on visitors for the site. I created a real estate listing service for the same reason with the same situation for visitors. I never did play with adding flash. I set my browser to ignore it to load pages faster, and I noticed that this must be happening with others. I am glad for experimenting, but they had repercussions. I spent time last month creating redirects, because I found that other sites were referring visitors to those pages, which I had deleted. The problem was that my experimental blog had become a main vehicle for my business.
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The Art of Scheduling Your Posts
With WordPress, you can choose when your post goes live. With planning, you can make the most of bringing users into your site.
Most of my posts publish when I am out of the office. This fact was noticed by a friend who wondered how I accomplished such a feat, but I think the reason why I scheduled a post to publish at a certain time is more interesting. This is one of those “do you know your audience” posts. You see I could post my article after writing it, but I may not obtain all of the readers that I could by that means.
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Using Page Speed to Optimize WordPress
Site optimization can be wonderful and frustrating, but it could lead to a better user experience.
I was fairly satisfied with the load times on my main business site, so I never considered some optimization steps beyond what I had already accomplished. I decided to download Google’s Page Speed, and take another look at Yahoo’s Yslow to see what I could do for my site. This led me on an adventure that I thought would be good to share.
Page Speed and Your WordPress Theme
With a new emphasis on your site’s page loading time, you may find that your WordPress theme does not meet the standard.
The time taken to load a page into a browser is page speed, and the page speed value can differ depending upon the browser and the service being used to connect to the web. As WordPress is being used by more businesses as a content management system (CMS), I thought that discovering a means to improve page speed in their themes without the knowledge of coding may be helpful.
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Do you need a Blogroll?
How much content are you putting on a page, and is it useful to your visitors? Or could it be useful to you?
Could blogrolls be a thing of the past? I ask, because you may find that more sites are dumping their blogrolls for other features. Links pages are popular to a degree, but I think that they are taking on different forms. I debate about blogrolls on my sites. A few years back, I carefully crafted my blogroll to meet the best needs of my users. I began to use it as a social tool as well. I would include other blogs on my list that I wanted to interact with. Sometimes this tactic worked; sometimes not. As I became smarter about link building, I used the blogroll as a tool in this campaign: I will put you on mine if I am on yours. Eventually, the blogroll became a dead feature for me. I hardly ever clicked on anyone else’s list, and I did not go to many links/resource pages either.
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Creating Checklists to Maintain your Website
A good checklist can save you time and money, but you should think about the design to help your business get it right.
I have so many projects going on at the moment, that I decided to create some checklists to make sure that I am hitting all of my tasks. Checklists seem to be unacceptable to many people though. When I tried to help my fellow home inspectors out by creating a checklist to help them with the new rules for home inspection, I received several negative responses. The idea was that a person could not catch everything by following a checklist. Another person commented that you cannot be creative with a checklist. I beg to disagree.
The professionals who do their job best have designed their tasks to meet their goals. Part of that design starting point is a checklist. To create a checklist, you have to think about what you need to do to ensure success at each step. I will agree that going through the steps, checking them off, is not going to be the best option for your business. I leave space to write notes in my checklists. Note taking helps me to reach the next level; however, a not might not have occurred to me without having gone through the checklist first.
Multitasking requires organization if you wish to be effective. I began to think of how I would form a checklist for my websites. I began by looking at different tasks that I need to accomplish, and how those tasks can be handled on different days. Since this is a checklist for my website, and there are quite a few tasks which need to be taken care of while I am on the internet, I created an HTML version of my list, so I could set my browser home page to that list. When I open my browser, the first thing that I see is the task which I have to undertake. Here are my beginning notes. Your task could be very different, depending on what you need to accomplish.
Monday Google Analytics, Webmaster
Central, site optimization, rank check to fill out terms, forum
Procedure: 1) Find Top landing page articles to compare to the week before
2) Check if pages have been optimized by using term target or semager(need chart)
3) Find websites sending traffic to me; discover why (need chart)
4) Record Adsense revenue
5) Use Rank Check to discover where I sit with keyword ranking process (need to chart)
6) Find keywords that I am hitting with SEMrush report
7) Go to forum A to respond to questions
Tuesday article for free sites
distribution
Procedure: 1) Look up articles from week before
2) Rewrite sections or create a brief article referring back to original article
3) Places to submit to:
ezine Article
ehow
articles4ever
4) Go to forum B
Wednesday Keyword research on semrush, Google Insight, Google Trends, Website link building research
1)Pick a term to target that you have not been ranking for on the semrush report from Monday
2) Find a term with a high CPC and preferable low competition
3) Go to Google insight and Google Trends (Can this be done with tool on iGoogle?)
4) Pick terms to target for the next week
5)Find websites for dofollow comments on commenthunt(?); look for edu blogs; seospyglass?
6)forum A
Thursday Photograph editing for articles
Procedure:
1) Find or take photgraphs based upon keywords found on Wednesday
2) Use GIMP to Size them
3) Plan out articles (titles, h3, body paragraphs)
4) Go to forums B and C
Friday Write articles for the next week
Procedure: 1) Write articles when I have a chance on Friday and Saturday
2) Go to forum A and D
3) Commenting for linkbuilding
This web development checklist will be an ongoing process. Creating a checklist and never altering it can lead to failure. I found that doing these tasks can help improve my site. At one time, I performed them all on one day, which lead to a long work day. Currently, I am spending around two hours each day on this checklist; however, this is because I am getting into my groove, and I am trying to find ways to improve my website’s performance. Once my system is in place, these jobs should go fairly quick, yet I will still spend time evaluating the checklist.
Website Analytics for the New Small Business
There are free solutions for a small business when you need data from your site.
When I started off as a manager, I was not overly concerned with data. I was more focused on my staff, and the job at hand. As I developed as a manager, I saw how understanding an MIS report could help me perform better. I became involved with budgeting more, so I found that I really needed to understand my numbers. I think that some small business owners may ignore their operating metrics in areas where they are not familiar. Setting up a website may be one such area.
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Creating a Category Menu Bar for Your Site
Navigation Bars are great for visitors. They make it easy for users to find information quickly. Since they may wish to explore posts in certain categories, you may want to feature your categories in a navigation bar format.
Do I need a sitemap? Should I link to it?
When I was doing some research for some content, I decided to see if other blogs had written on the topic. This led me to several blogs, and an unexpected discovery.
Creating a New Look with a New Home Page
A look into the evolution of a home page. Thoughts behind a design change, and how it was done.
I have joked with a friend that websites are never done. We constantly tweak them in an attempt to find the optimal solution, which may never happen. When I had a static site, I saw that other home inspectors had main pages packed with information, and I kept changing my page to have various pieces appealing to users or to meet the latest data on what works for marketing. When I set up a landing page on my blog, I did the same. Packing content on that page in the hopes of a sale.