Before WordPress 3.0, integrating your WordPress blog into your website meant following the instructions at WordPress.org to include a wp-blog-header.php require statement and some other goodies to make the connection. This method no longer works with WordPress 3.0.

But you won’t know at first glance that anything is wrong! Your website will load just fine. Your blog posts will display correctly. You’ll soon discover a terrible problem though. Your first indication of any issue may come a week later in an email from Google telling you that your Adwords campaign has been suspended because of 404 errors. Or Google will mysteriously start reporting 404 crawl errors. And this is what makes it such a heinous bug, because even though its obvious your website is loading just fine, it’s erroneously being reported as a 404! Potentially destroying all of your SEO efforts.

The fix. Instead of using:require('./wp-blog-header.php');
use, require('./wp-load.php');
Suddenly all your problems will disappear. Huge problem. Easy fix. Whew!

(A quick way to test the status response of your web page is to visit http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/headers and enter your url.)

Ecommerce. For an ecommerce website, Google Analytics ecommerce tools are invaluable for understanding store performance. You’ll be able to track your sales conversion rate, understand referral sources where your sales come from, learn which search keywords are generating the most revenue, and more. While it’s easy to turn on the ecommerce function in Google Analytics, it’s a little more difficult to make your website deliver the ecommerce data. In order for ecommerce data to be represented in Google Analytics, the standard GA script needs to modified to show order and transaction data on the conversion page. The conversion page is the “Thank You” page after an order is completed. The level of difficulty to implement this is dependent on the website and ecommerce setup. But it’s impressive data worth to having at your fingertips.

Goals. Regardless of whether your website is ecommerce or not, it’s important to setup Goals to monitor performance. An ecommerce site of course has a goal of making a sale. A different site might have a goal of registering a visitor, getting visitors to sign up for a newsletter, visit a certain page, etc. Whatever the goal, by tracking them in Google Analytics, you’ll be able to see trends, monitor the impact of site changes, and judge the performance of your marketing.

Funnel Visualization. Funnel Visualization is a tool that goes hand in hand with your goal. Many times a visitor must go through a series of steps to complete a goal. For an ecommerce website, this might be the checkout process. In a 3-step process for example, many visitors will make it to step 1, some people will make it to step 2, and then finally some will make it all the way through to the goal. Assuming your goal process isn’t perfect (aka 100 visitors see your offer and 100 visitors sign up for it), then the process takes on a sort of funnel shape as some visitors drop out at each step. Funnel Visualization will show you a visual representation of your process and makes it easy to judge performance. Now you have a tool to spot trouble areas in your process and can make changes with purpose.

Event Tracking. This is relative newcomer to the Google Analytics family of metrics. But has become one of my favorites. Often I setup javascript-generated links to take action when a button is clicked. This is sort of a “virtual link” and won’t normally be tracked by GA because they don’t generate a page view. But Event Tracking allows us to employ javascript event actions to track that click. It’s great for keeping track of any in-page event, such as a javascript popup form, discovering which of your sales feature graphics are generating the most results, learning which of your videos are being watched, tracking page load times, etc.

While these have been my “go-to” advanced metric tools in Google Analtyics, it’s also worth mentioning Advanced Segments, Custom Reporting, and Site Search. These are a few of my other tools and allow a website to be viewed in even more detail.

Google Analytics is a great tool and provides valuable insight into your website right out of the box. But with just a little further effort you can turn all that data into real and actionable information. If you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear from you.

It’s too early to use HTML 5 on a website where full browser compatibility is a must (the vast majority of browsers do not support HTML 5 yet). But with the help of a little javascript “shiv”, I’m able to get pretty good browser coverage on my implementation. The javascript shiv is a little bit of code that creates element structures used by HTML 5 and is needed for browsers not yet supporting the new rev (namely Internet Explorer). I’m using the javascript shiv at http://html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js .

While HTML 5 isn’t ready for prime time just yet, it is interesting to see how it develops. Adding video and audio without requiring proprietary plugins has obvious benefits. But I think I’m most curious to see how the semantic structure of the new language will ultimately be used.

My particular flash used a pair of 2/3 C-size batteries. This type of battery wasn’t available at my local (Dallas) RC hobby shop. (Although they had plenty of sub-C types.) I was able to find two replacement batteries at Batteries Plus (75 & Park Lane). These particular batteries were rated at 1100mAh and are probably more powerful than the originals. The batteries come without wire connection tabs, but Batteries Plus assembles the two batteries in sequence, and attaches connection tabs right there in the store while you wait. The finished product looked almost exactly like the original. Bravo.

Following the great instructions in the link, I was able to disassemble the flash in short order. One tip I would add is using small putty knife to remove the aluminum label covering the two hidden screws in the back of the flash. With the putty knife I was able to carefully remove the label without damaging it. My flash is now reassembled and no one would know it was ever taken apart.

Another note on the actual process of replacing the battery. Don’t cut the leads from the original battery too short. I would cut them right at the tab, or unsolder them. Polaroid didn’t give much excess wire to play with and if you’re not careful you’ll cut the wires too short to mount the replacement battery.

Once the battery replacement is complete, it’s time to put it on the charger. In my experience it took several charge cycles to get the battery power to full. The first time I put the flash on the charger, the charging light came on, but only stayed lit for about 10 minutes. I put the flash on the camera (loved hearing that high-pitched whine as the flash charged) and got one flash burst out of the batteries. In the second round of charge, the light stayed on a little longer and I was able to get four bursts out of the flash. Now that I’m four or five charge cycles into the battery, I’m getting 20 flashes per charge. Awesome! That’s two full packs of film! The charger works pretty quickly and can have the batteries back up to power in less than an hour.

According to the instructions printed on the flash, when the flash is ready to fire, an indicator on the back of my camera should light. I’m not seeing this happen on my camera. But I am noticing that after 15 or 20 seconds, the high-pitched whine of the flash changes to a regular intermittent interval. I’m taking this to mean it’s ready to fire. Fire the shutter and bang goes the flash. Oh, be sure you set the camera to flash. (The switch is on the front panel.)

Let’s here it for the great Polaroid 360!

• 1. Back up your files and make sure you have your mysql database login info. (You’ll need this later.) If you’re upgrading a live store I recommend doing the upgrade in a sub-folder rather than the main location. That way you have some leeway to deal with issues without affecting the main site.
• 2. Install fresh versions of Joomla and Virtuemart using new databases to keep your old installations safe.
• 3. Install MTW-Migrator. This extension will connect to the old database (this is where you’ll need your mysql database login credentials) and place all the data from your old database into your new database. It’s a must-have because Joomla 1.0 data has to be “migrated” to 1.5 due to differences in database structure.
• 4. Install any new extensions required. Not all extensions available are 1.5-compatible. But Joomla 1.5 can operated in “legacy mode” if Joomla 1.0 compatibility is necessary.
• 5. Copy over your themes from the Joomla 1.0 store into their new homes.
• 6. Modify your themes to fit the Joomla 1.5 way of doing things.
• 7. Test, test test.

IMPORTANT: Your first attempt to load your newly upgraded site will most likely result in a “Direct access…” error message. This is caused by a change in the PHP tag Joomla uses at the top of the page to identify valid pages. In your index.php file, or any of your theme files causing this issues, look at the top of the file for:
defined( '_VALID_MOS' ) or die( 'Direct Access to this location is not allowed.' ); and change it to defined( '_JEXEC' ) or die( 'Direct Access to this location is not allowed.' );

On moving over Virtuemart files. If your Virtuemart files are of a more recent version, you can copy over your entire /compnents/com_virtuemart and /administrator/components/com_virtuemart folders over to their new homes. Newer versions are compatible with both Joomla 1.0 and Joomla 1.5. For example, I’ve been able to do this with Virtuemart versions 1.1.2 or greater.

On Joomla 1.5 theming. Joomla 1.5 uses a different method for managing module positions in it’s theme structure. For example, defining a module position in your Joomla 1.0 theme would look something like this:
mosLoadModules ( 'left', -2 ); But in Joomla 1.5, module positions are defined this way:
jdoc:include type="modules" name="left" style="xhtml"

This isn’t meant to be the definitive Joomla upgrade guide for your Virtuemart store. But I hope it gives you a heads-up about what the upgrade entails.

Content Management Without A CMS

Cushy CMS bills itself as a “truly simple” content management system. That it is, and why I wanted to use it for this project. Other content management systems are more powerful and capable, but they are also more complicated to install/setup and require a greater learning curve to use. Cushy CMS has no installation and setup is nothing more than creating an account and giving a Cushy CMS class to the text area you want to make editable on the page. Then to edit pages, all you have to do is log in to your cushycms.com account, click the page to edit, and make the changes. Once you click apply, the changes immediately take effect. What a great solution for simple edits.

Recommended

Cushy CMS is the best way I’ve found of providing basic content editing for small sites. Not only is it simple to use for new sites, it’s also easy to retro-fit an existing site.

The power of custom variables lies in the fact that you can build your custom template to take advantage of these variables. For example, you could modify your template to display a custom image above the post, and then assign a custom variable to each post that would tell the template which image to use. This is exactly what I do for my Work posts. I used the template override system to create a modified version of the single.php file to look for custom variables. In my case I use custom variables to display info about project name, client, image, site url, and role. Here’s an example of the php used in the template used to retrieve the project name variable:
<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, 'project-name', true); ?>
I did this for each custom variable I wanted to used an inserted the code at the desired place in my template. Now when I write a post for my Work category, I just write it as normal but insert these custom variables and the page automaticallys fills up with this data.

Adding a custom variable to your post is also really simple. On the Add New Post page in the WordPress administrative interface, just look down the page and you’ll a Custom Variables input. Just click to enter a new custom variable, give it a name, give it the desired value, and then just click the add button. You’re now on your way to customizing your WordPress post.

Oh, and to find the category id, go to the Categories list in the admin and place your mouse over the category in question. Then look at your browsers status bar and you’ll see a url with the ID, such as “http://url…Cat_ID=12″.

Patience

Probably the most important thing to know about optimizing a website is that it’s an ongoing process and not a one-time proposition. Optimizing requires maintenance, trial and error testing to find the best keywords, refining content, and keeping up with the ever-changing ranking algorithms of search engines. There are many ads online that will guarantee placement for say a one-time fee of $49.95, but that just isn’t real. That might have been possible in 1995, but today there’s just too much competition. If anyone guarantees a specific ranking placement, then either they are lying or they don’t know what they’re talking about. If they really could live up to the guarantee, would they really only be charging $49.95? No. So lets talk about some tried and true methods of putting your site on the right path to a high ranking.

Good Content

This might seem too basic, but having good relevant content on your site is one of the most important things to a high search ranking. Search engines crawl over a site in search of relevant content and will rank a site based on that content. Where the site then ranks depends on each search engines proprietary ranking algorithm. Every search engine uses a different method and keeps it super secret to prevent spammers from diluting the results. But without enough content to sink its teeth into, a search engine can’t rank a website highly, unless its a very niche product or content that has very little competition.

Proper Keywords

Keyword selection is another very important step. Keywords are the words a user types in the search box to hopefully find your site. Targeting the proper keywords for your audience is necessary to drive the most relevant traffic to your site. For example, you can target “air filters” and that would generate a lot of traffic to your air filter website. But if you have a furnace air filter website, you’ll be seeing a lot of wasted traffic. A better keyword to target in this case would be “furnace filter.” Knowing how your audience will search for your website will help you write your content and optimize your site for how your audience uses search engines.

Head Tags

Next, structuring the html code and writing it properly comes into play. Making sure the website doesn’t have any blatant errors in validation or structure will make it easier for search engines to read your website and it’s good practice for any website. Proper use of tags in the head section of the code are also good practice. The title tag is in my opinion the most important of the head section tags. This represents the title of the page and search engines consider the title an important factor in determining rank. Of less importance are the description and keyword tag. The description tag is used by the search engine to provide a brief synopsis of the page in the search engine listing. That alone makes it important to include. But it’s believed that the description is not an important player in determining rank. Same with the keyword tag. Because it’s so easy for spammers to use fake descriptions and keywords to falsify the content of a website, search engines give these tags less importance, if any, in their ranking algorithms.

H1 Tags

Another code structure tip is the use of h1 tags. This tag stands for “heading 1″ and is intended to provide hierarchy to site content. It works as h1 for the most important heading, then h2, h3, etc. Using keywords in h1 tags provide more relevance than search engines pick up on. Also, using alt tags in every image and title tags in every link are good practice.

The Beginning…

While this post doesn’t cover all of the tactics used to make a website rank well with search engines, the tactics above are a great, universal start. There isn’t one thing you can do to get a high listing, short of paying for placement. But with patience and ongoing maintenance these steps will get you on your way.

If you’ve never seen a laserdisc (like me until about a week ago), they are very impressive looking discs. They are huge 12″ platters that look like overgrown CD’s. The CD format was actually born from the laserdisc format according to my research. They hold about 60 minutes of video per side. So at some point during a movie it needs to be flipped to the other side to continue viewing. The picture quality is better than VHS, but worse than DVD depending on the mastering source. Although, being an analog format, audio quality is outstanding and true CD quality. Another interesting fact is that you can jump back and forth to chapters like you can with DVD’s. No big deal nowadays, but it must have been pretty amazing back in the days of VHS.

My new interest in the laserdisc format has been a fun distraction and a nice addition to my ever-growing collection of obsolete technology. Not to mention the expansive cover artwork available on the laserdisc jackets. The two movies that took me down this road were the cult classic Danger:Diabolik and The Day of the Triffids. The Day of the Triffids is not available on DVD and if you do find a copy on ebay its a copy of the LD or VHS version of the movie and not the original film source. So laserdisc marks the highest quality that movie may ever be available. I’m looking forward to what other out of print movie “classics” I can find. I already have my eye on a couple of movies on 16mm film.