If you’re running a website with a number of pages, you might want to disable comments on all pages and posts at once. There’s no feature within Wordpress to do this, however, you can achieve this result using a little bit of SQL.

For this tip, I’m assuming that you’re comfortable using phpMyAdmin with your web hosting package.

I’m not aware of a plugin that disables comments, but if you do hear of a plugin that’s able to do this, please let me know. I have no plans to add this to a plugin any time soon. In phpMyAdmin, execute the following SQL, which will disable comments and pingbacks on all currently published (and draft) pages and posts.

UPDATE wp_posts
SET comment_status = 'closed', ping_status = 'closed';

© 2009-2010 Daniel J. Harrison. Need some custom Wordpress development work done? Check out Dan's Wordpress development services.

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Happy New Year! I’m planning for 2010 to be my most successful year ever, in terms of financial independence and growth. My goals are a mixture of personal development, business goals and lifestyle design. I’m often told I work too hard, so that’s why I’m making plans to play just as hard!

1. Massively increase my website income

I have a number of websites that I run and maintain, but none of them are earning me a fortune. I think that my biggest downfall is that I spread myself too thinly over too many projects. My aim is to have 3-4 great websites rather than 10-20 so-so websites.

To achieve this, I’ll be letting some domains expire, selling a few websites, and pushing some projects firmly into the background. This includes putting my mentoring consultancy on the backburner. Projects that I’ll be focusing on this year include SpyGadgets.org.uk, EnviroGadget.com and BlogSynergy.com.

I’m very unhappy with my current website income, as I feel that it’s very low and has much more potential. My goal is to increase my monthly earnings by 1400% by the end of this year! I’ve intentionally not specified my current earnings, however, to give you some idea, they are well below minimum wage.

Considering I run my websites as my full-time job, I want to be doing much better. It’s a matter of pride as well as necessity.

2. ‘Crack’ affiliate marketing

I started venturing into affiliate marketing in 2009, with some good results (i.e. I actually made money via commissions). However, I’ve still got a great deal to learn. I think I’ve worked out what mistakes I’m making (i.e. why I’m getting poor conversions), and I have several plans to resolve those mistakes in 2010.

I want to thank a couple of people who’ve been helping me on my affiliate marketing journey, particularly Mark Boyd (@hairycornflakes) and Kirsty McCubbin (@AffiliateStuff), plus everyone over at Affiliate Doctors. No doubt they’ll be getting more questions from me over the next few months, but I am really grateful for their support so far.

3. Conquer my issues with demotivation

One of by biggest weaknesses is that I get easily discouraged if something goes wrong. In 2010, I will beat this weakness, and become an expert at handling problems with grace and optimism.

4. Clear out unwanted possessions

We all end up collecting crap. I’ve got a load of bits around the home that I’ve been meaning to clear out. In 2010, I will sell off or give away all of the ’stuff’ that I have that I no longer need or want. I did clear out a lot of stuff in the first half of 2009. Now I need to clear out the stuff that I collected in the 2nd half of 2009.

I get a great sense of achievement when I clear out my unwanted possessions, and all it takes is a little time and effort!

5. Do an evening class at least once a week

I’ve got some money saved, so I plan to do a pottery class once a week. Pottery is something I’ve always wanted to do, but never got around to doing. I didn’t get to do it when I was at school for some reason, maybe I was off sick. Anyway, I’m calling the local college as soon as they’re back from the Christmas break.

6. Do 15 or more professional firework shows

Those of you who know me well, know that I love pyrotechnics! In 2009, I was lucky enough to get a part-time job working for a very reputable professional fireworks and special effects company. In 2009, I got to do a total of 8 shows, including New Year’s Eve 2009.

Now that I’ve done my basic training, I’m keen to do at least 15 professional firework shows in 2010. I absolutely love doing it, and it keeps me happy!

And so it begins!

I’m going to make 2010 my best every year in terms of professional and personal growth. I’m really excited to get started!

Please let me know what goals you’ve set for the new year. You can either write them as a comment, or post a URL to a blog post about your goals. I look forward to reading them.

© 2009-2010 Daniel J. Harrison. Need some custom Wordpress development work done? Check out Dan's Wordpress development services.

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For most people the upcoming holiday season will be one for relaxing and spending quality time with the family. But, for some of us it gives us the opportunity to roll up our sleeves and do some SEO work. Here are 10 suggestions for SEO work which can improve your ranking in time for 2010.

Image Optimisation Tweaks

Optimising images across the site can help drive up web traffic from Google image search and normal search.

1. Rename your images – To help the search engines index and rank your images, you’ll need to help them just a bit. Each product or service should have its own image with a descriptive name as close as possible to the product or service. For example, blue-mobile-cover.jpg has much better potential to rank well for the term ‘blue mobile cover’ than blue-4567-s.jpg.

2. Save in the correct format – Another important factor for optimising images is saving them in the correct format. The best results I’ve seen are when images are saved as .jpg as apposed to tiff or bmp.

3. Populate the ‘alt text’ field – The search engines cannot see the image however they can see its name and alternative text. You can view your ‘alt text’ by surfing your site with the images switched off. Take the time to add ‘alt text’ to each image including the product or service title.

3 Content Optimisation Tweaks

Here we are increasing the worthiness of each page to rank better.

4. Forget the manufacturer’s description and write your own – We all do that at times. We get the product live and use the manufacturer’s description word for word. While it might save you some time, other sites have used the same text as well which will make your version less unique. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, just add some notes of your own which could be as simple as ‘recommended for…’ or ‘product benefits….’. 

5. Use keywords within the text – The keywords for which you’re trying to rank for should appear in the text. Avoid keyword stuffing because mentioning terms 10 times won’t improve your ranking. Instead place the keywords within the context of the page and make sure it reads well. Remember the search engines aren’t your customers, you and I are!

6. Add quality content – One of the best ways to increase your worthiness is to add quality content that your competitors don’t. It could be in the shape of editorial reviews, customer reviews and even how-to guides.

3 Code Optimisation Tweaks

7. Unify homepage versions – Your homepage is your most valuable page in terms of SEO potential. So it makes sense that you’d have one version of it instead of multiple versions. The most common versions of homepage duplication which will require your intervention are www and non www versions, .co.uk and .com versions and the biggest perpetrator is different file extensions such as sitename.co.uk/index.php / index.html etc. You should unify around one version of your homepage and set 301 redirects from duplicates to the source.   

8. Speed up the site – Google recently announced that at some point during 2010 the speed of your site will effect your ranking. SEO aside, it has always affected your conversion so you should look to improve its speed regardless. The more costly option is to invest in more hosting resources and the cheaper option is to display less products or services on one page,  save images as jpg (see tip 2) and improve your text to code ratio. 

9. Find and fix error pages – These 404 error pages could prove to be a pain. Some of them, such as old product pages, old press releases and newsletter copies might have some SEO value as back links. Try and point them to more appropriate pages on your site using 301 redirect to such pages as the product’s category or a closely related product.

A final piece of advice

10. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket – Optimising your site to achieve high levels of web traffic can take time, sweat and a few tries to get it right. In the mean time, look at other channels of traffic such as social networks, paid search and even affiliate marketing.

Good luck in 2010!

This is a guest article by Joseph Eitan founder of Photo Paper Direct. Inkjet consumables online store selling products from Inkjet cartridges to photo paper. 

© 2009-2010 Daniel J. Harrison. Need some custom Wordpress development work done? Check out Dan's Wordpress development services.

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Regardless of what website you have, are you tracking your visitors? The usual answer I get to that question, is “no”. However, if you’re not tracking your visitors, you should be. If you don’t know where to start, use Google Analytics because it’s effective and free.

The aim this article is to get you using some slightly more advanced visitor tracking enabled on your website. I’m writing the article from the perspective of an affiliate marketeer, however this Google Analytics advice can be applied to any website, such as landing pages, online shops, blogs, and so much more.

Affiliate Marketing – Very Quick Intro

Affiliates are people who advertise products and services that you can buy from a third-party merchant. In return for a sale, affiliates earn a commission from that merchant. To reach a larger audience and to save merchants hassle, affiliate networks look after the tracking and payments from merchants to affiliates.

Affiliate Link Tracking Codes

Typically as an affiliate, you create a direct link to a product or service page (called a deep link) that you encourage your visitors to click. You typically generate these deep links using the affiliate network’s deep link generator too.

As part of that deep link, you can include a reference. For example, a deep link on the Webgains network looks a bit like this (programme and affiliate IDs have been changed to protect the innocent!):

http://track.webgains.com/click.html?wgcampaignid=5678&wgprogramid=1234&clickref=my-useful-reference&wgtarget=http://www.mytargeturl.com/product.html

And a deep link via on the AffiliateWindow network looks like this:

http://www.awin1.com/cread.php?awinmid=123&awinaffid=456789&clickref=my-useful-reference&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mytargeturl.com%2Fproduct.html

I use a different reference for each product, and therefore affiliate link that I have to the merchant. Here are a few examples.

• Product A – http://www.affnetwork.com?merchant=999&product=1&clickref=product-a
• Product B – http://www.affnetwork.com?merchant=999&product=2&clickref=product-b
• Product C – http://www.affnetwork.com?merchant=999&product=3&clickref=product-c

When you get a commission, that click reference shows up next to the commission that you’ve made (in the reports generated by the affiliate network). For example, here’s a small slice of my earnings via Webgains:

Webgains Transaction Report (click to enlarge)

In the diagram above, you can see the date of the transaction, the merchant, the commission and the click reference. That means I know exactly which product and link is generating a commission for me.

What’s the key benefit? I can determine which products make me money, and therefore spend more time on those product pages to earn even more! You basically get extremely valuable information about the products that either do or do not earn you money.

However, that’s only half the story. What about tracking what buttons/links/images your visitors are clicking on? Don’t forget, only a small number of visitors to your site will actually purchase something from your merchant.

We also want to know how successful we are at sending visitors to your merchant. That’s where we use Events in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Events

Google has a very comprehensive guide to events, so I won’t repeat it here. Essentially it’s an extra bit of javascript code that you add on to your outgoing links that allows you to track some information when a visitor clicks on that link.

This is ripped straight out of the Google’s Event Tracking Guide:

pageTracker._trackEvent(category, action, optional_label, optional_value);

• category (required) – The name you supply for the group of objects you want to track.
• action (required) – A string that is uniquely paired with each category, and commonly used to define the type of user interaction for the web object.
• label (optional) – An optional string to provide additional dimensions to the event data.
• value (optional) – An integer that you can use to provide numerical data about the user event.

This is how I suggest that you use it:

<a href="#" onClick="pageTracker._trackEvent('Affiliate', 'Click', 'The Product Name');">Shop Now button, etc</a>

This means we group all outgoing clicks to affiliates under the category ‘Affiliate‘, and we call the action a ‘Click‘, and we label each link for each affiliate with ‘The Product Name‘. I’ve ignored the value parameter because we don’t need it. You’ll probably be using big red Shop Now buttons rather than a text link too.

Assuming that tracking code exists on all links that go out to your merchants, that means we’re tracking all clicks by your visitors to your merchants. We are also tracking exactly what link they are clicking, i.e. what product is causing them to visit the merchant.

Why bother? Well, we need a screenshot.

Event Tracking Labels (click to enlarge)

This is a summary of labels from one of my websites, namely my Spy Gadgets mini site (Content > Event Tracking > Labels in Google Analtyics). The chart shows the number of clicks per day on one of my affiliate links. The table below the chart shows the most popular products, i.e. those which received the most clicks out to the merchant.

What’s the key benefit? You discover which products encourage clicks to the merchant. That information can then be used to work out where you should focus your attention with the view of getting further clicks to the merchant (and hopefully a sale too!).

Conclusion

I’ve shown you simple ways to track what visitors click on, and what products/links actually generate the commission. That information will help you avoid speculation and actually focus on products/links that work for you. You also get data that allows you to measure the changes that you make to see if they’re an improvement.

Those of you who are experts on Google Analytics will notice that I am just scratching the surface. That’s intentional. I don’t want to give you all of my juicy tricks do I? :)

© 2009-2010 Daniel J. Harrison. Need some custom Wordpress development work done? Check out Dan's Wordpress development services.

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When I’m talking to people about what I do, one of the most common misconceptions I face is that there’s still a strong belief that running a website is easy to do. Running a successful website is far from easy, it’s blooming hard work!

So I’ve put together a list of the top 7 problems and issues you’ll soon discover when running a website. My goal is not to put you off, but to highlight that it takes experience, skill and bucket-loads of effort to sustain a great website.

1) Web hosting downtime and poor response times

Your web hosting will go down at some point. Forget those claims of 99.9% uptime guarantees from your hosting company, which mean nothing anyway. Sometimes the server might still be accessible, but the page loads so slowly that your website becomes unusable.

Just accept it. When you least want your website to go down, it will go down. The trick is to find a web host who is proactive about their server management, namely that they’re already working on fixes by the time you’ve noticed your website is not working.

2) Random drops in visitors

Any seasoned website owner will agree with this problem. At some point your visitor levels (and/or sales) will just drop for no apparent reason. You’ll spend hours looking over the statistics trying to work out why. Sometimes you might be able to determine that you’ve had a a random drop in rankings in the search engines.

Get up, dust yourself down, and move on. Often it’s better to spend time getting more visitors rather than establishing the actual cause of the drop.

3) You get demotivated and bored

When you’ve been running a website for a while, you do lose interest. Perhaps your earnings aren’t increasing as quickly as you’d like? Perhaps you’re not making any sales? Perhaps you’ve run out of ideas? It’s usually people who persevere through the low periods that become successful.

Try to find ways to inject new ideas and inspiration into your website to give you fresh motivation. I recently wrote a great article on how to come up with fresh ideas.

4) You’re being sued

If you have a website that allows visitor-generated content, such as reviews, comments or forum posts, then there’s every chance that you’ll end up with something offensive on your website. Offensive remarks, in their various guises, can lead to law suits.

Moderate all visitor-generated content. No exceptions. If the content sounds as if it might be an issue, remove or reject it. Moderating user-created content is hard work, but it’s cheaper than being sued.

5) You have no time to update your website

Updating your website includes many aspects, such as moderating comments, adding new articles, adding new products, adjusting the site design, etc. Great websites are constantly evolving and growing.

If you don’t have the time to update your website, then hire someone, be it by outsourcing, via a contract or an employee. If your time is worth more focused on other tasks, then it’s worth spending a little money to keep your website fresh and up-to-date.

6) You need to promote your website

If you want your website to grow, you need to promote your website. However, promoting a website is easily one of the most time consuming aspects of running a website. You need to spend time getting links to your website, you need to create a presence on social networking platforms, you need to establish relationships with other individuals in your community, you need to spend time on marketing materials, etc. The list just goes on.

Just because you have a website, it doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get visitors. Promotion is hard work, and there are no quick solutions either.

7) Competition and copycats

Once you have a great website, it’s not long before someone copies you or starts doing something that’s very similar to you. It’s often because someone wants to replicate your success for themselves. However, they usually don’t realise that they’d be better off doing something different and unique.

Don’t resort to childish behavior (as tempting as it might be to throw a tantrum)! Sometimes you might have a legal case if there’s a copyright dispute. However, I’ve found that working with the competition can yield some great results. This includes advertising exchanges, selling adverts on your website, possibly selling your website to the competition, or even buying the competition!

Any more challenges?

These are the challenges that I’ve personally faced with running my portfolio. What challenges have you encountered with running a website?

© 2009-2010 Daniel J. Harrison. Need some custom Wordpress development work done? Check out Dan's Wordpress development services.

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Did you benefit from my article on How to Quickly Triple your Click-Thru-Rate (CTR)? Have you seen increased sales as a direct result of trying out your own tests with different coloured buttons? If so, I want to know!

1. Tell me your success story

If you’ve seen increased sales and click-throughs as a direct result of using my research, I’d love to publish that information. Please put some numbers on it, e.g. 43% increase in CTR, and 22% increase in sales.

I’m looking for about 50 to 150 words on what benefits you’ve seen. I’ll publish your story on this blog with a link to your website and a link to your twitter profile if you wish. Please send your story via my contact form.

2. Write me a testimonial

This is optional, but it would be great if you could write me a short testimonial based on your results. This is to help illustrate that the advice I give achieves great results, and the testimonials will be used for my Streamlined Thinking website mentoring service.

Glassy Buttons

I’ve been asked a couple of times how I created my buttons. I did so using the Glassy Button generator tool. It’s so simple to use and I highly recommend it.

© 2009-2010 Daniel J. Harrison. Need some custom Wordpress development work done? Check out Dan's Wordpress development services.

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When I review people’s websites as part of my website mentoring service, I seem to come across certain problems time and time again. So I’ve compiled all of the commonly made mistakes into a single article. I bet that most of you are making at least 1 mistake on this list!

Initial Impact

These are issues relating to a website when you visit a website for the first time.

1. Purpose of website not obvious

When you first see a webpage, you want visitors to know what the website is about in the first 10 seconds or so. If the website appears irrelevant (even though it is actually relevant) to the visitor, then they will leave. Give the user cues such as related images or short introductory paragraphs of text.

2. Website appears unfinished

If a website looks as if it’s incomplete, you’re giving your visitors a negative impression, particularly if you run a service or business. An incomplete website can imply a lazy or poor service, as if you can’t look after your website, how can you be expected to look after your customers?

3. Websites that take too long to load (if at all)

You should aim to have your website loading within 6 seconds. The faster the better. However, if your website doesn’t load at all, or it takes far too long, you’ll probably lose visitors and they are unlikely to return.

4. Shockwave Flash intro pages

Flash intro pages are very old-fashioned now, where most users will click on the skip link or leave straight away. From a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) perspective, you want your home page to have your most important information, not a flash intro which has little benefit when it comes to search engines.

5. Website breaks in major web browsers

Make sure your website works in the major browsers, including IE (6, 7, 8), Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. Significant issues due to using one of those web browsers will typically not be tolerated by visitors (such as broken layouts, no navigation functionality, etc).

6. Lack of a domain name

Don’t rely on free web hosting for your website address. e.g. mysite.freehosting.com looks very unprofessional. Buy a domain name, they start at around £7 for 2 years for a .co.uk domain.

7. Audio that plays when you visit a website

Any kind of audio that plays when you visit a website I feel is tacky. I don’t like surprises, and that counts as a surprise. It’s annoying at any rate.

Bad design

What constitutes a good or bad design is highly subjective, however, there are a few things that will definitely annoy users. Here are some of the worst offenders.

8. Poor choice of colours

Eye-bleeding bright colours or unreadable text makes using your website particularly difficult to read. Make life easy for your readers by giving your colour scheme a contrasting, yet pleasant feel.

9. Poor site navigation

If a visitor cannot find what they are looking for, they will leave. Make it as simple as possible to find different pages on the website, using a sensible menu and navigation layout.

10. Using Frames

Using HTML frames is an old-fashioned and troublesome website technique. They can damage a user’s experience, and additionally can cause havoc with a web browser’s next/previous navigation buttons.

11. Images that are too small

If you have images that contain vital information or that demonstrate your product (or services), then users should be able to zoom in or view a larger version of an image. I’ve seen far too many online shops where the product image is 125px x 125px where you can’t even see the product. How can you convince your customers to buy something if they can’t even see what they are buying?

12. Popup Adverts

Just say no! Popup adverts annoy users and are associated with spyware. Avoid at all costs.

13. No about page

Visitors these days often like to read about a company or a website to get an idea of what the website is all about. The about page is a great way to explain the origins of a business or a website. You can go a little further by having photos of people involve with a company or website. This helps remind visitors that there are real people behind a website, which also helps with trust.

14. No contact page

You want visitors to get in touch, so add a postal address, email contact form, email address, telephone number, etc. Make it as easy as possible for people to contact you. Adding a registered business address adds a degree of trust for online shops too.

15. No calls to action

You want visitors to do something, such as register for an account, buy something, sign up to a newsletter, call you, etc. Therefore tell them! Have strong calls to action to encourage your visitors to do what you want.

16. Over-reliance on Javascript or Flash

Javascript and Flash should only be used on a website to improve the user experience, not to replace basic functionality such as links or site navigation. Additionally, some users disable Javascript or block Flash, so your website should gracefully degrade so that those visitors can still use your website.

17. Visible script errors

Script errors do occur on occasion, however script error messages that are visible to the user do give your visitors a negative impression.

Website content

The information and ’stuff’ on a website is what you want your visitors to see and engage with. So here are a few common issues relating to the content on websites.

18. Broken links and images

Checking images is pretty quick for a website, as it’s pretty obvious if something is missing. Therefore there is no excuse. Broken links are harder to find, but there are plenty of free tools to help you. The last thing any visitor wants to see is a 404 – Page Not Found message. Check your most important links manually, e.g. Twitter, Newsletter Signups and RSS feed links.

19. Lack of text on the website

Whatever you offer, you need to have some text on your website that describes your product/service/club, etc. Lots of relevant and useful textual content on your website will also help with search engine rankings. This is because potential visitors will type a range of generic and long-tail keyword phrases into search engines to find websites like yours. Lots of useful text-based content increases the chance that potential visitors will find you via the search engines.

20. Sign up before you can read anything

I’ve noticed a few websites now that require you to register before you read anything. Getting a visitor to create an account is a significant request compared to just reading your website. I would never sign up to a website unless I knew what I was going to get, so you should have at least some content on your website that doesn’t require users to create an account first.

21. Advertising – too much or unrelated

Advertising on a website is absolutely fine if done correctly. Beware of having irrelevant adverts on your website, particularly adverts that are known to be annoying or have a bad reputation. Also, don’t plaster your website with adverts, keep it balanced.

22. Avoid animated GIFS

Animated GIFs are so 1990s. Avoid them where possible. They do look tacky, and they can distract your users from looking at the good parts of your website.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is a very large topic, however, here are a few obvious mistakes that I frequently see on websites I review.

23. Not using the <title> tags correctly

Make sure you use the HTML <title> tags on every page to describe what’s on that page. Don’t keyword stuff, but the title should describe what that page is about. What’s in the <title> tags is very important from an SEO perspective because they have a strong weighting in the rankings. Additionally, if someone bookmarks one of your web pages, it reminds them of what is in that web page.

24. No search engine friendly URLs

Important keywords in your URL structure can help benefit your search engine rankings. Additionally, page titles that appear in URLs give prospective visitors a hint to what the article contains just from the URL alone. e.g. www.mywebsite.com/?p=344 is not descriptive, however, www.mywebsite.com/how-to-grow-your-business is much more descriptive and gives users an idea what to expect if they click on that link.

25. Click HERE links

The text that is used for text links is a small but still an important ranking factor for search engines. Therefore avoid having links that look like “Click here for the download”. Try using something like “Please sign up to download the free business worksheet“. (Please note, those links just go to my home page and are for illustration only).

Your pet hates?

I hope that you found those tips useful. Please let me know what your pet hates are in the comments below!

Thank You

The following people helped me write this article by giving me a few more ideas, so I’d like to say thank you to them all.

• http://www.twitter.com/wonder_lander (Jon Cook)
• http://www.twitter.com/Tintop (John Edwards)
• http://www.twitter.com/Noidontdrinktea (Fee Fee)
• http://www.twitter.com/The_Landlord (The Landlord)
• http://www.twitter.com/chimpdonk (Crispin Read)

© 2009-2010 Daniel J. Harrison. Need some custom Wordpress development work done? Check out Dan's Wordpress development services.

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I’m speaking on behalf of BCS Dorset on Thursday 22nd October, I’m talking about The basics of Creating and Running a Website. The event is completely free, but you need you book a place as there are limited spaces available. The event is open to all, regardless if you’re a BCS member or not.

Location: Wessex Hotel, West Cliff Road, Bournemouth, Dorset, BH2 5EU, UK.
When: Thursday 22nd Oct 2009 – 7pm for start at 7:30pm

In the presentation, I will be covering the following topics.

• Starting a blog, discussion board, online shop or general website (and what tools to use)
• How to track and understand your visitors
• Useful free or cheap tools you can use to run your website
• Some golden rules to stick to when running a website.
• Read the BCS Dorset event details for the full brief.

There will also be an opportunity to ask me plenty of questions too!

My presentations on the basics of running a website have proven to be very popular, and I’m frequently asked to run similar presentations again and again. This is some recent feedback that I had on a presentation I gave on website basics.

Excellent presentation, very useful and informative; brilliant knowledgeable speaker. Best thing I’ve been to for years!

© 2009-2010 Daniel J. Harrison. Need some custom Wordpress development work done? Check out Dan's Wordpress development services.

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Table of Contents

• Common Web Terms
• Registering a Domain Name
• Visitor Tracking
• Content Management Systems
• Wordpress Resources
• Google Tools
• Building Backlinks
• Growing a network
• Business Cards
• Logo Design
• Asking Questions and Getting Help

Common Web Terms

These are terms and acronyms that you’ll frequently come across whilst running a website.

URL – Uniform Resource Locator

String that identifies a specific resource on the web

e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8054699.stm

HTTP – Hypertext Transfer Protocol

Way of transferring data from server to web browser

HTML – Hypertext Markup Language

A basic language defining structure and content of a web page

CSS – Cascading Style Sheets

A layer on top of HTML, adds formatting. e.g. fonts, colours, sizes, alignment, position

SSL – Secure Sockets Layer

Cryptographic protocols for securely transmitting data over the internet

PHP – Hypertext Preprocessor

Server-side programming language

AJAX – Asynchronous JavaScript and XML

A group of internet technologies for interactive web applications/pages/web sites

RSS – Really Simple Syndication

Format for delivering info from a regularly updated website

There are loads more common terms. Here’s where you can find out more:

• W3Schools Web Glossary
• Daily Blog Tips – Bloggers Glossary
• Web Design Industry Jargon: Glossary and Resources (very useful)

Registering a Domain Name

There are lots of tips and tricks for registering a domain name, so I’ve dedicated a whole site that gives you a great deal of UK domain name advice, called Pure Domains.

Visitor Tracking

You should track who visits your website. This allows you to determine how people are finding your site, and what keywords they use when searching for your site on the search engines.

• Google Analytics – probably the most useful free tracking tool. You get very detailed analysis of your traffic, more than you’ll need for quite a while. Excellent for beginners and advanced users.
• StatCounter – a free tracking tool that gives you up-to-the-minute updates on who’s visiting your site. The analysis tools are not great, but it’s useful if you’ve got a massive peak in traffic and you want to know why. More suited to advanced users.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Content Management Systems are a fancy way of saying:

software that allows me to easily update the pages on my website without fiddling with the design aspects

There are many free content management systems, since they’re developed on the open-source model.

• Wordpress – My personal favourite. Primarily a blogging platform, but is perfectly suited any website where there are potentially lots of pages of information.
• Drupal – A popular CMS, but definitely aimed at users wanting more technical control over their site.
• Joomla – more of a portal-based CMS.
• Want more? You can try out lots of open-source content management systems for yourself at Open Source CMS

Wordpress Resources

Wordpress is an extremely customisable content management system (CMS), originally designed for running blogs, but is suitable for running any website that releases periodic information (such as news articles). Wordpress is not suited to ecommerce, but you could use Wordpress for pretty much any other type of website. Wordpress allows you to have multiple users with different access who can contribute and help run the site.

• Wordpress.org – The organisation that develops Wordpress, and where you can download it to install on your own web hosting.
• Wordpress.com – Where you can create your own free Wordpress blog without having your own web hosting. A great place to start if you’ve never used Wordpress before.

Google Tools

• Google Webmaster Tools – Allows you to submit a sitemap, which allows Google to find all of the pages on your website. It also provides statistics on how often your website is being crawled, and what position your site appears in Google search results for keywords.
• Google Local Business Center – Allows you to register your business address and contact details. When someone searches for a business like yours in your area, your details will typically be shown about the normal search results. Those details will be shown on a map with a pin pointing your business location. It’s free, and it’s a great way to get your business, club or society listed in Google.

Building Backlinks

The Do’s

• Do ask for links from related sites
• Exchanges (ok if only a few)
• One way links (ideal)
• Do get involved in guest blogging
• Do put your link in forum signatures
• Do build up networks (on and offline)

The Don’ts

• Don’t buy links
• Don’t spam blogs/forums/etc
• Avoid getting links from unrelated websites
• Don’t ask for links on link pages
• Don’t focus too much on directories
• Don’t do too much of any 1 thing.

Recommended Resources

The do’s and don’ts listed above are very high level. Here are some more detailed tips on link building.

• SEOMoz – Link Building from A to Z – SEOMoz are highly respected in the SEO world. These tips are the current best practice tips.

Growing a network

Growing a network is one of the most important ways to promote your website. Find people with similar interests if you run a club or society. If you run a business, find a business networking group to expand your contacts. This is a great way to get visitors to your site, and sometimes a way for you to exchange links.

Business Cards

If you run a society or a business, business cards are a simple and easy way to remind people of your website. I really recommend Moo.com for getting business cards done. They are pretty cheap (around £10 for 50 cards), and extremely high quality. The best aspect of their service is that you can choose up to 50 different images per order, which means you can create really interesting cards at no extra cost.

Logo Design

Creating a logo that represents your website or business is a fundamental step that can help you establish your brand. Having a memorable logo also means your customers and visitors are more likely to remember you.

I’ve written a detailed article on how to get cheap logo graphics designed, which I highly recommend if you need a new logo.

Asking Questions and Getting Help

No doubt there will be questions that you have in the future, so here are two forums that I recommend where you can ask all kinds of website questions.

• LovingTech Forums – Forums dedicated to everything that’s webmaster related.
• UK Business Forums – Forums dedicated to UK business, but they have very good Internet and IT boards.

© 2009-2010 Daniel J. Harrison. Need some custom Wordpress development work done? Check out Dan's Wordpress development services.

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• Dan Harrison Website Launched

In an attempt to boost my commissions via affiliates on my eco-gadget review site EnviroGadget, I wanted to see if I could improve the number of visitors clicking through to the merchant website. I don’t get a commission for all of the products I review on EnviroGadget. However, for the products I do earn a commission, I wanted to make sure that I was getting as many people clicking through my affiliate links as possible.

Therefore I decided to run some experiments with different types of button. Just by changing the colour of a button and changing its text a little, I found a way to triple my click-through rates (CTRs)! Yep, you read that right, triple! Read on to find out how.

The Technology

I have some relatively complex code that I’ve written to handle the affiliate tracking, and it’s beyond the scope of this article to explain it in detail. However, I’ll cover the basics. My affiliate tracking code allows me to create a URL like this:

http://www.envirogadget.com/recommends/a-solar-powered-gadget/g_bn

When that URL is clicked, it redirects the user to the product page on the merchants website, dropping a cookie to ensure that if the user makes a purchase on that website, I get a commission.

The ‘a-solar-powered-gadget‘ part of the URL is the code for a particular product. The ‘recommends‘ part of the URL tells a script on EnviroGadget to redirect a user to a product page using the product code I just mentioned.

The ‘g_bn‘ part of the URL is an example of a special tag that I can use for additional tracking. So I could link to a product using the URL above using many different coloured buttons. If I used a different tag for each different button, it means I can track how many times each button can get clicked. This is what I used to test the different buttons in the experiments below.

Experiment 1 – The Hypothesis

All my affiliate buttons started off being a green Buy Now button. However, I wondered if a contrasting button colour would out-perform my green button (especially as the rest of the site is themed with green). I also wanted to test different button texts too, just too see if the wording had any effect.

Hypothesis 1:

“I expect contrasting blue buttons to outperform the more subtle orange buttons on click through rates”.

Hypothesis 2:

“I expect that the less imperative More Info buttons would outperform the stronger Buy Now buttons”.

Experiment 1 – The Results Data

Button Experiment 1 - Orange and Blue

Notes: I was told that “Shop Now” was a good button text to use, so I wanted to test that. For some reason, I didn’t use green in the first experiment. Can’t remember why!

Experiment 1 – Conclusion

From the results, it’s clear that my initial theories were completely wrong!

So the results show that the orange buttons considerably outperformed the blue buttons. The orange Shop Now button more than doubles the CTR compared to the blue button. Perhaps this has something to do with the emotive effect of colours, e.g. warm v.s. cold colours. Even still, the orange buttons are harder to see with a green background, and blue is more of a contrast to green.

The results show that More Info is a waste of time, performing the worst overall. However, Shop Now is the strongest performing text, with Buy Now being a close second.

Based on these results, I realised I needed to test some more combinations as my assumptions were very wrong.

Experiment 2 – The Hypothesis

Following on from the first experiment, I thought it would be wise to compare the performance of my existing green Buy Now button against orange buttons. I also wanted to test red against orange and green to see if it had any significant impact.

Hypothesis 3:

“I expect that the brighter red buttons will outperform the green and orange buttons, with the red Shop Now button being the best button for the highest CTR “.

Experiment 2 – The Results Data

Button Test 2 - Red, Orange and Green

Experiment 2 – Conclusion

I had clearly learnt something from the first experiment, and my theory was spot on correct in the second experiment. However, the range of values I obtained was very interesting.

The results showed that using a red Shop Now button (21% of clicks), rather than a green Buy Now button (7% of clicks), there’s a 3-fold increase in clicks through to the merchant website!

In general, red outperforms orange and green. The Buy Now and Shop Now are strong call-to-actions, which resulted in a high CTR compared to Buy This. I’ve not been able to come up with a reasonable explanation for the poor performance of the Buy This button text.

Overall Conclusion

From running these experiments, I learnt 3 things. These 3 lessons are:

• Check your assumptions – I was making incorrect assumptions, so testing my assumptions really paid off. I spotted my mistakes.
• Experiment and track everything – When you do test something, collect as much data as possible so you can analyse it.
• No-one will do it for you – I had to run my own experiments to learn my own lessons. Don’t rely on my data either, test your sites yourself too!

I hope you enjoyed the article and that it motivated you to run your own tests. If you like the pretty graphs, please leave a nice comment, as they took me ages to create!

Update – 30th Sept 2009

John Andrews wrote a great complement to this article on Always Be Link Building. John quite rightly emphasises the point that button colours, and therefore their respective click-through rates, are very specific to a website and its design. So just to re-iterate, test different button combinations yourself, don’t rely on my data alone!

© 2009-2010 Daniel J. Harrison. Need some custom Wordpress development work done? Check out Dan's Wordpress development services.

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