hal9000.ie

WordPress has gazillions of plugins to perform a variety of functions. Here are a few that are my favourites, either because they save time or look good – or both.

While you may have come across some of these before, hopefully there’s something new.

1. Social

One of my favourites is the TweetMeme Retweet button. It easily allows your posts to be retweeted and shows a count of how many times. You can see it above this post.

And it’s used by TechCrunch, so you’ll be in good company.

2. Mobile

If you check your analytics, you may  be surprised how much of your traffic is coming from mobile platforms. WP-Touch is one of the most popular plugins to render your site for the smartphone screen size. There is now an updated version available, WP Touch Pro with more colour customization.

Here’s what a website looks like rendered on a smartphone without any plugin or mobile-enabled functionality – very difficult to use:

And here’s what a blog site with WP Touch looks like:

3. Sitemap

This site map is for your visitors. If your site is more than a few pages then it’s always a good idea to give your visitors a sitemap in the footer to supplement the navigation and help them find what they want. The one I use is Dagon and was recommended to me by Inspiration, a Dublin Web Design company that specialises in WordPress implementations.

4. SEO

With WordPress, you need an search engine optimization (SEO) plugin in order to customize your meta title and description tags. All In One SEO by Michael Tarbert is probably the most common SEO plugin, but Yoast’s WordPress SEO has more functionality.

5. Broken Links

Broken Link Checker is a handy one to tell you your broken links. Links can become broken either because of typos or because the site your linking to has changed. This one is a time-saver. It’s better for you to find your broken links than Google’s spiders.

6. Related Posts

If one of your readers gets to the bottom of your post, then they’re probably interested in what you have to say. So, offer them some other related posts. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is great for this. It allows some customization so that categories or tags can be excluded and it can also display them in your RSS feed.

7. Widget Placement

This is one of my favourites. You can choose to display a specific widget on the pages/ posts of your choice. In this way, you can customize your sidebars to be more relevant to the page. It’s called Widget Context.

8. Back-ups

In anything to do with computers, back-ups have to be the most boring task. Let this plugin take care of it for you behind the scenes. BackUpWordPress can back-up your entire site, including database, each day. You can even choose to have it emailed to you. Email it to a gmail account and have Google store it for you for free.

You’ll find all of them at WordPress.Org.

What’s your favourite plugin?

This is the easy peasy guide to adding a Slideshow to your Blog or Website. It’s done using Flickr, so all you need are the images!

If you already have a Yahoo account or a Gmail account, you can use either of these to sign in to Flickr. Otherwise, it’s easy to create an account.

1. Create an account with Flickr (or sign in if you have one)
2. Upload your pictures
3. Add Title and Description and Tag them
4. Set the privacy to ‘Public’
5. Set the Licence (what rights others have to the images) – see Creative Commons to see what kind of licencing you can do
6. Add your pictures to a Set
7. Start a Slideshow of the Set
8. Click on the Share button in the upper-right corner of the Slideshow
9. Copy the Embed code to your clipboard
10. Paste the code to your Blog post

Here’s a slideshow example so you can see what it will look like. This one uses a WordPress platform and the code is simply pasted into the post in the HTML editor.

You can also create your own Flickr Badge which can be used to brand your slideshow with your company logo for example.

For WordPress users, there is also a Flickr Photo Album Plugin which will give you more control over the look and feel of your slideshow and you can put one in the sidebar.

User Experience (UX) conjures up notions of surround-sound web surfing, with the users’ senses being stimulated in a luxuriant and fluid way, as they do whatever it is they enjoy doing.

In reality, however, this nirvana of web experience is often one where the user is subjected to a frustrating and trying encounter with a poorly designed website – poorly designed from a usability perspective that is. It can look great, but still be wonky and clunky to use.

Don’t Make Me Think

The title of Steve Krug’s book on the subject sums up the goal of usability in 4 words. This is his First Law of Usability.  A website scores highly in the usability stakes if the users don’t have to think about what they’re trying to do, where they’re supposed to click, how to navigate through, how to get back out again etc.

Web journey

A website shouldn’t be like a Las Vegas casino where users get trapped – shortly after coming in they’re lost and can’t find their way out again. The exit is signed, but is deliberately obscure. It may work for casinos, but your audience probably aren’t there for the weekend and are trying to achieve something. Your mission is to make it as easy as possible to achieve that goal – without having to stop and think about which way to go, or get lost down a cul-de-sac.

A few of the things to put on your web usability checklist include:

• Navigation – keep it clear & consistent throughout the site.
• What’s clickable – Buttons and links should be obvious.
• What’s it about – a clear title for each page should indicate the content.
• Scannable content – users scan text and pick out keywords of interest – make sure the keywords are there.
• Forms – brevity is the good (do you need to know the dog’s name?).
• Search box – help them find what they want, they’ll stay longer.
• Above the fold – keep the ‘call to actions’ on the top half of the page.
• Test in various browsers – which ones are your users likely to use?
• Create online-specific content – a pdf of an offline brochure, which takes ages to load and is hard to read (it’s one of my pet hates).

Sites like Amazon.co.uk have the user in mind all the time. Their web journey from beginning to end is without stumbling blocks. (My only quibble with them is they default the currency to Euro, when it’s often cheaper to purchase in Sterling as the credit card company’s conversion rate is more advantageous than Amazon’s.)

On the other hand, the user experience on the site of car clampers NCPS is less pleasant. The Appeals page is initially easy to find on the top navigation bar and the persistent navigation is good. But then it all falls apart as the user (I can’t really say customer!) is faced with a large message in red telling them to use Internet Explorer. This doesn’t inspire confidence in the technology. Firefox and other browser users have to open up IE to carry on with their web journey.

Then the Buttons ( ‘Email Us’, ‘Fine Details’ and ‘View Evidence’) don’t work. So the user doesn’t know what to do now. If you back to the first Appeals page there’s a link to www.webappeals.ie, but if the user tries this it redirects to the page they’re already on. So they do it again, in case they made a mistake. In the end the user gives up and looks for a Contact heading on the navigation bar and sends them an email.

All in all a poor experience. Though it’s in keeping with the poor NCPS experience of being clamped on the school run outside Monkstown Educate Together National School while picking up my 5 year-old (who cried at the upset).

If you want to see other ‘poor’ experiences of contact with NCPS head on over to Brightspark-Consulting.

This is a possible new logo for us here at hal9000. What do you think? Does it say who we are? Or is it back to the drawing board?

It’s not enough to be online these days, you need to be online and mobile! Increasing amounts of web traffic are now coming from new generation mobile phones, or smartphones, Apple’s iPhone being one of the most popular.

Mobile Web

The best solution for your online business is to have a site designed for the desktop/laptop and a separate one designed for the mobile. The appropriate one should be picked up by the browser being used. In this way, a WAP enabled site can be used for the older mobile phones and a site optimised for the small screen can be picked up by the newer Smartphones. See the difference between www.rte.ie and m.rte.ie   Or the difference between www.gmail.com and m.gmail.com.

The .mobi top level domain names can now be used for mobile sites. While there is no specific technology required, the aim is to have .mobi sites optimised for mobile browsing and user experiences should be consistent with guidelines. Critics of the .mobi approach point to the overhead involved in maintaining 2 different sites, and to the more fundamental issue of breaking from the device-independent nature of the web up to now.

Alternatively, there are other technical solutions which can render the screen to a small size eg. Opera Mobile. However, these may still be loading/accessing the full web page and so may not be so well optimised in terms of load time.

You can get a scoring for how your site will perform on a smartphone by going to ready.mobi.

Some tips for design for mobile include:

• Avoid specific image sizing and use percentage and relative measures such as em, ex, bolder, larger and thick.
• Keep pages short.
• Keep images small (for quick load time).

Apps

Then, when it comes to Apps, the question is how an app could be developed which could fulfil some ‘need’ or ‘desire’ in your customers. App development is not cheap, but will become more competitive as people enter the market. So, is there a business case for you for developing an app?

There was for payment gateway, Worldnet TPS, who have answered the ‘call to innovate’  and have just launched the first app which turns an iPhone into a virtual credit card terminal. The app allows businesses to accept secure card payment transactions through their iPhone and it is now available on iTunes.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2010/0312/1224266101298.html

Site Load times now a significant factor in Google Indexing

At WordCamp last weekend in Kilkenny, I asked the Google search representatives why a Posterous blog I maintain might be slow to be indexed by Google. Elena responded that she couldn’t comment on any individual site, but that the site load time is a significant factor in Google’s new algorithm.

In the case of the Posterous blog, it is being indexed, but is not being returned in search results for Ireland as it is hosted in the US. The load time is not an issue.

The SEO advice is always to optimise the site load time where Google ranking is critical to the site. The site load time is increased by running Flash (Adobe) visuals, and the number of Javascripts – the number of calls to the server in order to build the page. Obviously, there is a trade-off between design and making your site attractive to customer and ensuring that it loads quickly.  

For sites that run on WordPress, the WP-SuperCache Plugin (or WP-Cache Plugin), which is freely available, can be installed to allow the ‘caching’ of pages, so that the page is built and stored as a static file and served to visitors. In this way, the page is served more quickly as it does not require to build the page from the database again.

Check your own site and see if it’s unnecessarily slow. After all, Google’s bots are only put off by slowness because actual visitors are!

You can check to see how long your site takes to load by running it through Pingdom Tools. This will show you how long each part of your web page is taking to load.

Check your own site and see if it’s unnecessarily slow. After all, Google’s bots are only put off by slowness because actual visitors are!

Here’s the data from this site’s Home page:

Website information

Total loading time:    3.7 seconds

Total objects:  22 (165 KB)

External objects: 0

(X)HTML: 1 (13.9KB)

RSS/XML: 0

CSS: 2 (22KB)

Scripts: 4 (70.7KB)

Images: 15 (58.3KB)

Plugins: 0

Other: 0

Redirected: 0

Google speaks

I’m just back from WordCampIreland held in Kilkenny over the weekend and have a notebook full of juicy tips. This was the first WordCamp to be held in Ireland and proved to be a rich resource for the SEO-minded and online marketer. For those not familiar, WordCamps are a professional meet-up of individuals using, or interested in, WordPress as a site platform. So while it was primarily about WordPress use, the online visibility (SEO and Digital Marketing) of those users was a theme running throughout the sessions.

Google search home page

There were two representatives from Google’s organic search team there (Luisella Mazza and Elena) and the good news is that they listed a number of SEO tips for increasing your Google ranking and enabling easier site crawling for the Google bots. The bad news is that they stated that there are now over 200 factors used by Google in determining page rank!

And they didn’t list them all.

So SEO isn’t getting any simpler. But here are some of the points they made:

Keywords

Use words that people search for.

Categorise your content (blog posts) with keywords.

Use keywords in your URL path.

Have keywords in your Title (Meta Title tag).

Have keywords and ‘English’ description of your site in your Meta Description tag.

Avoid Duplicate Content and Indexing

Use canonicalisation: avoid duplicates by having only 1 version of URL ie. either www.name.com or name.com, not both so as not to have a situation where back-links are pointing to different versions of the same URL. This is to avoid the dilution of link popularity.

If using WordPress, select your preferred domain on the WP Admin panel.

Images

Google’s crawlers cannot ‘see’ images, so they suggest the following to allow them to index what’s on the page:

Give images relevant file names.

Add ALT attributes to your images.

Include a textual description of images.

Spammers, Nasties and Security Best Practice

Check using Google search to see if spammers have made it onto your site. Google gives a ‘malware’ warning if it detects dubious content. This is a sure-fire way to lose ranking.

Spammers hack sites for two reasons: 1) to add links 2) to distribute malware.

Security suggestions include:

• keep an eye on site
• add .htaccess file to increase security
• keep WordPress (or software) up to date

Site Maps and Navigation

Create an XML site map for Google and submit to them.

Create a sitemap for your visitors.

Ensure all pages are linked back to rest of site.