Erik’s Blog: Board Shorts and Business Suits

I’m definitely not the first to say that google analytics is new and improved. The word has been spreading about them taking urchin site tracker to the next level.

My Google Analytics account has just been switched over to the new look and feel and I have to say that it is Googlefied to the max. It gives you more information right at login that it ever did so you don’t have to go digging through all the crazy sidebar items. Speaking of which, the sidebar options have been majorly trimmed which is great!

The nice thing about the streamlined version is that it’s not really streamlined at all. I still see all the information it used to have just now it’s much easier to find and know it’s there (I even found stuff that I didn’t know analytics tracked.)

What do you all think of the new look?

About two months ago I wrote about feeling the digg effect where I talked about the great feeling of getting your article to the front page of digg and then quickly seeing your shared server plan crash to ground.

The residual effect of getting to the top of digg is immense. Although if you feel the effect and your server crashes that is a bummer in the short term, but all the links you get will help your page rank, your site promotion, and boost your readership (so long as you keep up the writing.)
Based on what the surrounding hours were receiving, the time I was down cost me about 30K visitors for the 3 articles I had dugg to the front page. Ouch!!!

It even prompted me to switch servers and plans.

I recently came across a interesting niche hosting idea started by this guy and another called SurviveDigg.com. A great idea, especially if they can keep up with staying true to their name and get to the top of Google’s search results for hosting plan that can survive digg (that should help ).

I don’t know how many times I searched for that on Google as well as all the forums I could find. It’s a tough subject because it seems like everyone has different answers about the same hosts and the same hosting plans. (ie it’s a crapshoot)

But the idea is definitely a great niche to go after and a product that I would have thought about trying had it been launched back when I was mulling over the decision to switch hosting plans because of the digg effect.

OK, the actual design of Aloha Update wasn’t automatic, but the way it’s setup creates quite a few automatic adjustments to the blog.

Wordpress Static Front Page
First off, I’ve decided to use Wordpress’ built in static front page to create a more news like, content in your face. It was tough at first because the addition is rather new to Wordpress and there isn’t much documentation out there.

If you are trying to add a static front page with a working inner page that shows all posts you need to remember that the page you setup as the “all posts” page needs to be run off the index.php file. If you don’t do this, wordpress pagination, ie /page/2/, will not work. At least it didn’t work for me. The other page, the static front page, can be created from a template page. Check out Aloha Update and our All Posts Page.

Adding a Drop-Down Horizontal Menu to Show Categories
The next sweet thing I did was add a drop-down menu using some javascript and a css/.js method I found over a A List Apart.

The menu drops down and reveals the sites categories which are organized based on the different islands of Hawaii. The cool thing is, the drop down menu is smart. It is able to recoginze which category you are in, be a single post or a category, or a sub category, of one of the main categories. This way, you don’t have to setup separate headers and nav bars for each category.

It took me a while to get it right and I’ll surely write a little wordpress tutorial for you all soon as in my searching I found a lot of people wanting to have this happen.

Added Tabbed Interactive Boxes
Next I added some tabbed interactive boxes as you can see on the front page where I list the images as well as on the inner pages where I list top things about Aloha Update.

I found everything I needed over at BarelyFitz Designs. This was probably the easiest to implement out of everything. All you have to do is cut and paste and FTP some files over and you’re done.

UPDATE:
Automatic Picture Formating
The last thing I did which is probably the most automatic thing and took a while is utilize the “read more” tag in wordpress, along with The Excerpt Reloaded plugin.

Basically what I do is within a post I first put a thumbnail image, then I put the more tag, then the noteaser tag, then the large image, and finish it off by adding an excerpt. This allows me to control what image shows up where.

On the front page I have the latest image show up as a sized version of the large image using the php “the_content(’ ‘, ‘TRUE’)”. Next within each sub tab of that same area I show the thumbnail image as a link to the page, then the title (also a link) and finally the excerpt as I wrote it in the post.

Next, in the image category I have it show the thumbnail image, and then when you go to individual pages you will have the full image and that full image will be link to the large image.

I’ll try and do tutorials of all these because I know from searching around that there are others out there that would like this help as well.

As you may have been reading in a few of my recent posts I am working on creating a blog network and I am starting out with developing a design that I can apply to multiple blogs easily using CSS and wordpress. I have developed several blog looks and those keep evolving as my design skills evolve and I learn more about what attracts and keeps a visitor.

With my blog network design I am spending a little more time on the design, looking at all the current network layouts (why reinvent the wheel) and also looking into sites that I like to visit and think have a nice layout with a little flare. Searching around has brought up the question, “Do I go simple, or simple and Web 2.0ey?

What is Web 2.0? Well basically it has come to mean white space, bubble letters, bubble icons, and a few vibrant colors. Coincidentally JC over at jcCommerce recently posted an article about Web 2.0 that had quite a few useful points and links. I guess I would call it more of a rant than an article but he basically ranted about Web 2.0 and how some feel just making their site look good or “joining the fad” will make it popular. He voices his opinion that a user should be more concerned with content at first and less with design.

Well, I see his displeasure with people joining the fad, and I also agree with him that for a site to be good you need to have quality content that contributes something to people. Just look at how simple Steve Pavlina’s site is and he gets a lot of traffic and repeat visitors. However, I like the way “Web 2.0″ sites look and I find the rounded corners, color patterns, big print and faded backgrounds enjoyable to look at and usually keep me on a page.

Since posting that article and since I began writing this JC has actually made his page a little more web 2.0ey and the color scheme is pretty nice, check it out. The reason for mentioning his post was that he found some interesting sites that I think would help anyone looking into web design and creating a more in the now web page.

One of the best sites he linked to deals with a basic description of Web 2.0 called Web Design From Scratch. It has tons of great resources about what exactly Web 2.0 is and examples of interesting Web 2.0 Sites such as 9 rules (evolotion of their design), mozilla, and iomega, among others. I think also they could have added technorati since that’s one bloggers are most familiar with but you’ll get the idea. There are also links to other example sites at the bottom of that page of which I found Web Creme to give a lot of good 2.0 Designs.

There are tons of great site designs out there and a few decent explanations of designs as well. I am working hard to come up with a great design and will be sharing my search, design, testing, and publishing experience with Web 2.0 as I go along. The links above should get you started and on your way.

Do you want to add a post to del.icio.us link to your post’s without using the WordPress plugin that is available from Arne Brachhold? Or maybe you want to just add it to you blog that’s not php based. Then you can use this simple html link.

<a href=”http://del.icio.us/post?url=< ?php the_permalink() ?>title=< ?php the_title(); ?>” target=”blank”>post to del.icio.us</a>

All it is is a link to del.icio.us using their post link and adding some of your php code. If you look at your main or index.php template from your presentation-theme editor tab you should find the if posts loop. Follow this loop down to the bottom just before you begin to see the php code for the comments section. Right above that is the end of your posts. Copy and past the above code below the php the_content code. This will insert a post to del.icio.us link on every one of your posts.

You can play around with the code and add it elsewhere if you’d like. If you don’t have a php blog figure out what you use to insert the permalink and title, or you can just insert real html http:// links after the “url=” portion and different titles in the “title=” section. Mess around with it but this is the easy way to add the post to del.icio.us link at the end of your posts.

Aloha,
Erik

Thanks to two helpful sites (one at moshu the wordpress moderator’s site and the other at Jonathan Wold’s great site) as well as a lot of trial and error, I was able to add a WordPress Blog to my existing site. The other site AlohaUpdate.com used to be a very cumbersome static html only site that was created using a Dreamweaver template that I hacked up into my own. Now it has all the functionality of a blog with the same static pages it did before.

I added the blog in order to have a daily update as to all the crazy adventures my girlfriend and I have around the islands. This way I can easily build content within the site and attract more search results without having to labor through all of the static html programming. I am still going to keep updating all the static pages but at a more gradual pace. Plus a blog allows visitors to believe that you are updating the site regularly rather than once and leave it. The islands are always changing and adding new adventures for us so we thought it only right to show our visitors this.

There are basically two ways to add a blog to an existing site. One way is to place a simple php loop within the area that you want your blog text to appear. The other is to design a theme around your existing html site using CSS (cascading style sheets) and update your links accordingly. I chose to do the second option because the first has a few drawbacks for someone looking for a quick solution. The loop only allows the page to retrieve the post from the WordPress file. WordPress has no control over the setup of the links within the site and therefore makes the post title link, comments link, categories link, and paged navigation link useless. I would imaging on would have to develop quite a few php files to create the illusion that the links discussed above came from the WordPress engine.

The second option on the other hand allows the blog page (in my case the index page) to be its own control of the blog, and as long as the links out of the blog direct themselves to the proper folders and files there will be no problems with all those mentioned links. For example, on AlohaUpdate.com there are links at the top of the page to navigate to our pages on the different islands. At first when I created the index.php file within my new theme folder I kept the links the same thinking the index.php rerouted to the index.php within the main blog folder. (I am using an “Out of the Box” WordPress setup so I assume as long as you didn’t change anything these files and folders will make sense) This is not the case. the index.php file you can access from the WordPress administration site is within the wp-content/themes/ folder structure so the static links that worked before won’t work unless you paste all your linked files to the themes folder, messy. Instead what you can do is direct each of these links on the main them template (index.php) to the URL of your blog (http://www.yoursite.com/folder/file/etc/etc) and this will give you the same functionality as if you were starting from the main folder.

Another thing I noticed from this that was a little odd was when I used copy and paste within my host (netfirms) it changed all the pictures to .JPG rather than keeping them what I had as .jpg. This does make a difference. So, if you use your hosting company’s file manager to copy and paste files, check to make sure it didn’t decide to redo your file extensions, especially if your pictures don’t work afterwards.

I would write more about how to integrate and add a WordPress blog to your existing site but I think Moshu and Jonathan do a pretty darn good job of it. If there are any questions or concerns I would be glad to make another post about this but will save my time for cleaning up Aloha Update. I have some links that seem to not be working and I need to redirect some of those includes.

With the launch of my site about things to do in Hawaii www.alohaupdate.com I have become obsessed with Google and Yahoo and whether or not they are indexing my sites. This one, erikvossman.com, is going into its 7th week online and got 145 people to visit through search engines this past week. 124 were from Google and 2 from Yahoo, with the rest from MSN, AOL, and some other generic ones. Not bad for a month and a half of being online.

Quick Side-Bar

Have you ever wondered, “How do I know if my site is getting indexed by Google or Yahoo?” Simple, go to your recent visitors section and check for googlebot.com for Google or inktomisearch.com for Yahoo. If they come to your site a lot they should be in your top visitors section. The other search engines have crawlers that index sites but don’t have names associated with their IP addresses, that I know of. You can however do a search for crawler IP addresses and see if all of them are indexing you site. These statistics are available with my hosting company, Netfirms. Only trouble is they offer webstats for all of my sites as one not individual. That means I am not sure which site is being indexed. The free service I am using, addfreestats.com doesn’t show googlebot and only shows inktomisearch once a day if it visits. There are some out there that do but now all of them. Look around and give them a try or check out my article on web stat services.

…Back to it

As I was saying, I check my stats about 5 times a day looking to see if anyone was referred to my site through Google or some other search engine. Submitting them is only half the battle, getting them to index you is the key. In order to build traffic through Google or Yahoo I have been working through strategies such as links, content, and site map submission. One site I have found extremely helpful for SEO (search engine optimization) is entrpreneuers-journey.com. If you need some tips I suggest paying him a visit.

My other method of Blogclicker, blogxchange, etc, I have basically stopped. I am going to stick with Google and quality links as my source to develop traffic. This has brought my overall hits down but unique visitors is climbing every day. I will keep you informed of both sites stats. For now I call out to googlebot to index alohaudpate.com. Let’s hope it happens.

Aloha,
Erik

Keeping people coming back and getting them to stay. That’s the name of the game when it comes to developing profitable websites. First thing you need to start out with is content. Content, content, content. Getting a good Google search ranking is all about content. It needs to be updated regularly and there needs to be a lot of it. Second is links. The page rank from most search engines and web directories is also based on the amount of quality links from other sites. No bogus spamming links, genuine links from similar content sites.

Starting out with content you’ll need to write clearly and you need to write prolifically. Focus on a niche and don’t worry about your writing at first. It should be good but don’t over analyze. Quality writing will come with practice. The other thing you need to do is to get out there and promote your site. You can start with the directories and then venture to similar sites. See if they’ll link exchange with you. Just let people know you’re here. I have been employing a couple different methods of my own which I explain, with results in my increasing traffic within the first two weeks post.

Once you’ve got a good start on those two things you should move on to creating a good looking site. What is a good looking site? Well, an example of a bad site is those that you stay on for only a second. When you reached it your brain was probably saying, “you won’t find what you need here, move on.” So you listened, without even skipping a beat. Those are the sites that don’t look good. The ones that you don’t even wait to see what the content is. The next question is how do you create a site that people stick around to see the content? Well, tons of people have studied this and rightly so.

Luckily for us many people share their research free and post them all over the internet. Before visiting these though I suggest paying attention to the sites you go to often. I sometimes wonder to myself such as, why do I go to gizmodo.com over engadget.com. The navigation, the color, the text, the spacing, look at it all and make note of it.

Aside from just paying attention to good sites you should visit sites that inform you of the techniques that have worked for them. Below I listed some sites I have used to help me develop my site. They range from ideas on site layout to tools for color matching. Try them out and find your own. There’s a bunch out there.

One Minute Designer - The whole website is really good, efuse, but I found the one minute design article to be the most helpful. It’s a quick primer to getting you thinking in the right direction of keeping traffic surfing your site. I would start with this article if I were you.

7 ways to keep customers coming back - This is an article by Microsoft about keeping your customers coming back. Little tricks you can use to keep people involved with you site. The list is short and sweet but outlines some good points. One thing I have employed is a newsletter. Not many people have joined yet but as my traffic grows a newsletter will be a good way to keep forgetful surfers coming back.

Color Schemer Online - color schemer online is the free web based version of the Color Schemer software. This company has made the color wheel quick and easy to use. If you go to the online version you will be able to pick one of the standard 256 colors and then the software chooses 16 colors that match it the best. This can be used to make your website color friendly. I am currently going through some color changes myself to make things a bit easier on the eyes. Browsing around I have notice that the color factor is a big portion of whether I will stay or not.

Seth Godin - Anything Seth Godin will help you on your path to internet marketing, advertising, and just plane old grabbing attention. I have read the combo Free Prize Inside and Purple Cow and think this man is a genius. Simple and to the point. Soak up all he has to say. I believe this is his blog as well. Check it out.

I would also like to mention that you should try out as many text possibilities as possible. There are some that work and some that don’t. Also use the line-spacing: and text-spacing: attributes within your CSS style sheets (or your in line styles). Having good spacing makes a world of difference towards the readability of your site.

Good luck, pay attention, and try, try, try as much as you can.

From those of us who were two days late hearing about the release of Google Analytics I say, “When will Google Analytics be available again!?!” If you haven’t heard than let me be the first to tell you. Google recently purchased a web stats company called Urchin. Urchin used to be a payed for service and Google made it free. They released it November 15,2005 and closed it to new sign ups November 17, 2005. Their site claims that you are able to track all incoming links, where people get stuck on your pages, AdSense keyword-click through and conversion words, countries, outgoing links, time spent, etc, etc, etc. More information than you get in some payed services supposedly.

Now it is closed to those of us who are not regularly reading the press releases and nobody is talking over at Googleplex about when it will be available again. Although they claim they are beefing up servers and bandwidth I have been unable to find out any information as to when they will open up to new members again. Let me be the first to tell them this might be bad for business. They do realize that Microsoft has now entered the realm of the online advertising and marketing world with both guns blazing, right? If Google is going to stay in the game, buying out a smaller company and then closing what I hear was a great service isn’t the best way to garner support; even if it is free. (See my article on why Microsoft is a strong buy.)

From what I have managed to pick up Google Analytics will not be available for a while. Maybe Costco ran out of servers or Google’s web hosting company isn’t having a sale on bandwidth this month. Either way, I have scoured the forums, searched the press releases, Googled the crap out of “When will Google Analytics be available again,” only to find nothing.

So with that I have begun to search for alternative web stat counters for my web pages. If you haven’t been following me I recently (November 11, 2005) jumped into the online world with both feet. Don’t get me wrong, I have started websites before for school, and some for pleasure, but never really kept anything going. Well, I was inspired by a great blog and am now focused on becoming independently wealthy. I am also in the process accomplishing many other goals that I set for myself but never strove to meet.

All of these are free web stat counters which I have tinkered with at some point or another. I like some of them and others I don’t, below I review each and tell you what I think.

ALTERNATIVES TO GOOGLE ANALYTICS

1. StatCounter.com - Free for up to 250,000 page views per month. After that they have payed upgrades. For those of you just starting out this is a great service. Very extensive web stats and can be used on multiple sites (just free to a total of 250K page views.) They offer a summary with page loads (impressions), unique, and returning visitors. They also have countless stats to help optimize your page; entry pages, exit pages, popular pages, referrals, keyword analysis, search engine referrals, country/state/city/ISP, browser, visit length, and a few more random stats. Visit length and exit pages are great stats that can help you optimize your page to keep visitors hanging around.

The layout is easy to navigate although I would like more information on the summary page, possibly a customize option. Currently each option above has its own page, (by the way this is a great way to increase page impressions on your site, thus increasing Google AdSense revenue.)

Overall I recommend this stat counter to anyone who is just starting out their website or if you are looking for an in depth analysis of your visitors, for free. The “freeness” is due to the discrete Google Ads at the top of the page.

2. AddFreeStats.com- Don’t be fooled. AddFreeStats.com is not free of ads. You can just add it to your site for free. (I looked quickly and missed the second “d” in ad.)The site is supported by Google AdSense placed on every stat page right in the middle of your viewing window, super. The service does have one nice feature that StatCounter.com does not have, Google AdSense Click through (or link out.) It will tell you which ads were clicked on. This is a great way to optimize your AdSense Keywords and AdSense placement.

Like StatCounter.com they have a plethora of stats such as visit length, referral, search engines keywords, entry pages, exit pages, etc, etc. If you are monetizing your web site or blog then this is a great free counter for you with the added AdSense tracking. Other than that the ads they use are kind of annoying. But I am assuming they are paying for the fact that it seems to get you unlimited page loads (Also a great thing!)

For an ad supported free unlimited counter use this one, it has the most. You’ll get used to the ads, don’t worry.

3. ActiveMeter.com - This is another free hit counter offering a detailed analysis of visitors to your web pages. Their look is very clean, and their graphs are similar to that of what I have seen with Google Analytics. Their stats aren’t quite as extensive as the first two hit counters but they do offer unlimited page views which the first one does not. Also they do not have blaring ads on their site which is another plus.

Like StatCounter.com they don’t offer AdSense analysis. Another big thing ActiveMeter doesn’t offer that I find useful is length of visit. To me this is very interesting.

Overall ActiveMeter is a middle of the road free stat counter and analyzer. I suggest it for those of you looking for more extensive stats than the small time hit counters and not all the bells and whistles of the first two mentioned.

4. RiteCounter.com - RiteCounter.com is another middle of the road free analyzer that offers a wide variety of stats analyses. This is a newer counter to the mix and is in its beta version. It is free of course and ad supported by none other than Google AdSense ads. The nice thing about this stats counter is that it looks heavily into the links that your site receives. This can be very helpful when trying to figure out where the heck people are coming from. Knowing that information you can then try and get links from similar content or it can even drive the focus of your content.

Being a newer counter it doesn’t offer all the bells and whistles of others out there but it does have a clean interface and the ads are off to the side.

Less Involved Hit Counters and Stat Analysis Sites

Those already mentioned give a great analysis of a lot of different visitors stats. The following are some that are basically just hit counters and are of course free. Some have a minor stat analysis but nothing like the previous four.

1. Blogclicker Hit Counter - quite a few stats, easy to view all
2. Amazing Counters - few web stats
3. TDStats.com - very generic looking
4. WebCounter.com - lots of stats but low budget looking, has an affiliate program?
5. MyWebStats - fun looking page with a few stats, nothing cluttered
6. RoboCounter - simple hit counter
7. Free-Easy-Counters.com - another simple hit counter

There are lots more out there than I mentioned here. Hopefully Google Analytics will open up its services again sometime soon. If anyone hears anything feel free to leave me a comment. I would really like to know what’s going on over there and I’m sure others would too.

Happy Statistics Browsing.

If you use WordPress or another content manager you probably realize there isn’t much in the way of a spell check to use. You either end up copying and pasting your entry into word or just writing it in there in the first place. You could also use a posting program such as blogjet which is described nicely here.

A quick and easy way to spell check any online form be it a blog entry in a content manager like WordPress, an online submission form for a question, or all the forum posts one might do is to use the google toolbar. Once you download the toolbar which fits right into your web browser, internet explorer or firefox!, you are ready to go. It takes about 20 seconds to visit the site, download the toolbar and get started.

Once it’s in your browser just look for the abc check mark button and start spell checking.

Enjoy!

More Tips
If you liked this tip you might want to also know how to quickly and easily wrap text around Google AdSense or you might want to visit here to see more tips on using WordPress and Netfirms.