Tag Archives: web design

aneclecticmind.com Has Moved

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Didn’t notice, did you? Good!

As stated somewhere in Murphy’s Law, “A Web server will run smoothly every day, for days on end — until the Webmaster takes a few days off.”

Well, I got a little tired of my office-based Web server going down when I went away for a few days and decided to do something about it. I’ve begun moving my Web sites and the other sites I host off my Web server and onto a Deluxe Hosting account on GoDaddy.com.

GoDaddy.com is a domain registration/hosting company that is either loved or hated by everyone who knows of it. I happen to be on the love side. The rates are incredibly low, all account/server maintenance can be done remotely without contacting a GoDaddy representative, and online help and technical support are reasonably good (although I admit far from perfect).

I’ve been hosting theflyingm.com on GoDaddy for years now. I don’t use it as a Web site. I use it for reliable e-mail and to host the podcast files for Maria Speaks and KBSZ-AM.

The Economy hosting plan, which should be good enough for 95% of Web publishers, offers 5 GB of hard disk space and 250 GB of bandwidth per month. theflyingm.com was using up about two thirds of the disk space and maybe a quarter of the bandwidth. (Remember, I’m hosting podcasts, not high-def movies.) That cost $3.99/month, but you can get a 10% discount if you sign up for a year at a time. The Economy plan also includes subdomains (for example, maria.theflyingm.com) mapped to their own folders on the server (I didn’t use this feature) and 5 mySQL databases. There’s some other stuff, too, but I don’t use it.

The Deluxe hosting plan offers 100 GB of hard disk space and 1000 GB of bandwidth per month. I think I’m paying $6.99 for that each month. The same discount applies and there are higher discounts for longer renewal periods. This plan supports subdomains as well as multiple domain hosting. So although my account is set up for theflyingm.com, it can also host aneclecticmind.com, wickenburg-az.com, etc. It also supports up to 15 (I think) mySQL databases, making it easy for me to keep individual databases for all of my WordPress-based sites. I can set up all of my sites on one account, so I can shut down my pesky server without spending an arm and a leg for hosting.

And, as Miraz told me the other day, if you use the coupon code DIGG when checking out, you can save another 10% on the purchase. Unfortunately, I got that message too late to use it. (Next time.)

You can learn more about GoDaddy’s hosting plans and features on their Web site.

So now I’m in the process of moving my sites to the new setup at GoDaddy.com. aneclecticmind.com and MacCowboys.com are both done. wickenburg-az.com is next.

I will be writing a detailed article about making the move as a how-to article for our WordPress VQS book companion Web site (which will also be moving soon). It’s a relatively tricky process, but not difficult if you know what to do.

Now if you’d like to comment about your experiences with GoDaddy.com, please use the comments link for this post. If you’re a hater, try to keep your temper in check and explain why you don’t like GoDaddy.com. If you’re a lover, tell us what you like best. If you’re sitting on the fence or have questions, don’t be shy about speaking up.

Melon Investor Services Online

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A poorly designed Web site.

You think that with the money they obviously have to spend, the folks at Mellon Investor Services would have used some real talent to build their Web site. They obviously didn’t.

Sure, it looks pretty, but it’s nearly impossible to navigate without clicking a bunch of wrong navigation buttons. And half the buttons you press spawn a new little window that displays a stop-light graphic and the message that the information is being accessed. The thing that bugged me the most was when I was required to change my pin to a 6-15 character number. It took me four tries to enter a number the system liked, and when I did, the dialog that appeared gave me the impression that I’d screwed up so bad that they were offering to do it for me. I later discovered that the PIN Manager wasn’t a person but a feature of the site that had been unlabeled as such.

Jakob Nielsen of Web usability fame would have a field day with the Mellon site.

I called for help when a feature I was trying to use kept displaying an error message. After various discussion and hold sessions with two different people on two different calls, I was asked to confirm that I was using Internet Explorer. I told her that I wasn’t, that I was using Firefox on a Mac and wouldn’t waste space on my hard disk with a Web browser that hadn’t been updated for four years. She obviously didn’t understand my sarcasm because she told me to “exit” Firefox and “start” Explorer. I repeated that I was on a Mac and if their site didn’t work on a Mac they were alienating a lot of users.

After another hold, I was told that her supervisor could duplicate the error message and that there was probably something wrong with the site.

Duh.

She then suggested that I try another time. By this time (30 minutes after my initial attempt to use the system), I was fed up and ready to hang up. But she had to get one last dig in: “Have I helped you with all your concerns today?”

“No,” I said. And I hung up.

Prioritizing Web Usability

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“Don’t defend your interface. Fix it.”

Designing Web Usability : The Practice of SimplicityBack in 2000, I read Jakob Nielsen’s Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. This excellent book reinforced several theories of Web design that I had already suspected: simpler was better, Flash animations and splash pages were idiotic, and sites should be built to convey information in a way that was easy for visitors to find and understand.

Nielsen’s book was a summary of thousands of hours of usability testing with people and Web sites all over the world. It wasn’t just the opinions of an outside observer. He could make statements because he had proof that his statements were valid.

I liked his book so much that I mentioned in — and I believe I even quoted from it — in my own book, Putting Your Small Business on the Web for Peachpit Press.

Prioritizing Web UsabilityPrioritizing Web Usability by Jakob Nielsen and Hoa Loranger revises and and expands the information in Designing Web Usability. Using new test results and taking into consideration new technologies and user experience levels, Nielsen and Loranger revisit many of the problem exposed in the first book, summarizing how important they are today. The goal of the book is to help Web designers create sites that are effective, easy to navigate, and informative. These are the sites that people want to visit and spend time on, the sites that communicate information and sell products or services.

Nielsen and Loranger are not shy about voicing their opinions. The book has hundreds of full color illustrations of Web pages, each with a detailed caption that points out page problems. For example, a caption for Burger King site page begins, “This is an example of the misuse of visual metaphors…” And, for a page on the Montblanc site, “Montblanc makes nice pens, but it’s impossible to find out anything about them on the company’s Web site…”

While I feel that some of their criticisms are a bit nit-picky, illustrating and commenting on what they see as problems gives the reader plenty to think about. You might not agree with what they have to say about a site’s problem, but you’ll remember it when you design the pages on your sites.

As for me, I learned a few tricks I can apply to my sites. But I’m more relieved that my sites don’t have most of the problems their book points out.

Do you design Web sites? Get and read this book!

[composed on top of a mesa in the middle of nowhere with ecto]

Search Engine Optimization

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Wickenburg business owners, beware of the snake oil salesman in our town.

From an article titled “3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic” by Nick Wilson of Performancing.com:

There are still die hard SEO’s out there that spend all their time trying to game the system, but most of them are pretty shit at it, only a very few have enough resources to manage it. There are also, a whole slew of con merchants masquerading as SEO’s, just as there are fake designers in the web design field, basing their credentials on the fact that they’ve read a few articles, or bought a keyword tracking tool.

These people are idiots, and should be avoided at all costs.

(Emphasis added.)

The point: if you’re paying money for someone to tell you how to make your site rank higher in search engine results or, worse yet, are actually paying someone to make your rank higher, you’re being taken for a ride. All the information you need about search engine optimization is available for free, on the Web. And the Performancing.com Web site is a good place to start.

So don’t give your hard-earned money to crooks, local or otherwise.

Site Stats and Why They’re Important

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Maria Speaks Episode 28: Site Stats and Why They’re Important.

In this episode I discuss a few stats software programs for Webmasters and bloggers. Then I tell you a little bit about some of the stats on one of my sites and why the stat is important. This podcast should be interesting to anyone interested in monitoring site statistics or improving a blog or site based on access information.

First of all, I want to welcome you all back to Maria Speaks. I said I’d try to publish podcasts more frequently and I’ve failed miserably. I suspect that it’s because I can’t always think of topics that are podcast-worthy. So, in an effort to release podcasts more frequently, I’ll throw the concept of podcast worthiness out the window and do short podcasts about the things I think my readers and site visitors will find interesting.. Since most of my podcasts are less than 10 minutes long, they’re really not a burden to download. If you happen to download one on a topic you don’t think is worthy of your time, just delete it.

Of course, you can always suggest podcast topics for me. It’s easy. Just go to aneclecticmind.com and use the Contact button at the top of any page to shoot me an e-mail message with your suggestion. I can’t make promises, but having something specific to talk about can sure get me started.

Now on to today’s topic: Site Stats.

I’m one of those people who love statistics. There’s something about numbers that I really like and when I get numbers that communicate real information — especially useful information — I’m in seventh heaven.

I’ve been running at least one Web site since 1995 or thereabouts. Before that, starting back in 1989, I ran a BBS — that’s short for bulletin board system. If you’re too old to remember those, imagine an online system with file downloads and discussion forums. Mine ran on a Mac SE/30 with a pair of 28.8 kbps modems.

Since 1989, I’ve been monitoring access of my BBS or Web sites. Sometimes I did it with software I purchased just for the purpose. Sometimes I did it with solutions I cooked up myself. For example, I had a kick butt FileMaker Pro database that would crunch the stats from my old WebSTAR sites and turn them into reports. The only trouble is, the darn scripts sometimes took hours to run. There was just too much data.

With my current blog-based sites, I have a variety of tools for monitoring access and checking site stats. It’s not because I need multiple tools. It’s because I just can’t decide on which ones I like best.

The four I’m playing with now include SiteMeter, W3Counter, Performancing Metrics, and WP-ShortStat.

  • SiteMeter, which is a free Web-based solution, puts a counter on the Web page. You can see it in action on our WordPress book companion Web site, wpvqs.com. But SiteMeter is more than just an ugly counter. Click it to display statistics about site visitors, page views, referrers, and more. There are even more statistics for an administrator than what is available for visitors to see. A subscription version with more features is also available.
  • w3Counter is another free Web-based solution that puts a counter on the Web page and keeps track of all kinds of statistics on its own site. And a subscription version with more features is also available. It was recommended to me by a blog reader who read my article about SiteMeter. He suggested it as an alternative and I tried it out. I liked it better, so I replaced the counter on my personal site, aneclecticmind.com, with a w3Counter counter.
  • Performancing Metrics is another free Web-based solution. It’s associated with the Performancing.com site, which has a lot of tips and ideas for bloggers. I figured I’d give it a try. Unfortunately, it does not seem to work well with WordPress. I’ve tried two different versions of the JavaScript code that must be inserted in my template file and even tried a WordPress-specific plugin. The stats I get are pretty meaningless. So I’m putting that on hold for a while. Perhaps I’ll get it to work right in the future. But if you’re looking for a solution and you don’t use WordPress, it’s definitely worth trying out.
  • WP-ShortStat is a WordPress plugin that keeps track of site access information and displays statistics right within a WordPress administration panel. It’s a nice little software package and I currently use it on my helicopter tour and charter Web site, FlyingMAir.com. If you’re a WordPress user and want to try this out, be sure to check out a tip I wrote on our WordPress book companion Web site where I explain how to get it to work right if it won’t work right out-of-the-box (so to speak).

Today I took a close look at the stats for the past month on aneclecticmind.com. I did it primarily to get a better picture of what was popular on the site, but as I took notes about what I saw, I realized that the information might be interesting to podcast listeners, especially those folks interested in starting or improving their own sites or blogs.

Before I get started, I need to define some terms.

  • A visitor is someone who comes to your site and browses around for a while. He might view one page or a dozen, but he’s doing it all during one session. Unique visitors is a subset of visitors. A visitor might come to your site five times in a specific day; if so, he’s counted as five visitors but just one unique visitor. A new visitor is a visitor who has never been to the site before. And a returning visitor is a visitor who has come back for more.
  • A hit or page hit is a page loaded for a visitor to view. In the old days — and probably still with some software — hits could include not just html or php content, but media within that content. So if an html page included five images, loading the page could count as six hits. That’s a really meaningless number. The stats software I use counts page hits only, which is far more meaningful.

My site, aneclecticmind.com only gets 100 to 200 visitors and a few hundred page hits a day. Could be better, could be worse. I’m not complaining. What I wanted to know was what these visitors were looking at, when they were visiting, and who sent them. That’s where my statistics software helped out.

For example, looking at visitor timing, I could see that I get more visitors at the beginning or end of the week than midweek. During that period, I also get more hits per visitor.

Looking at visitors and hits on a day-to-day perspective, I see that the vast majority of my visits and hits occur right around 4 PM local time. (Arizona is always 7 hours behind GMT; in the summer, we’re in the same time zone as California; in the winter, we’re the same as Colorado.) I can also see that I get more visitors between 9 AM and 4 PM than after 4 PM. Those visitors are looking at more pages, too. Could they be surfing my way during working hours? Sure looks that way to me.

The most visitors I had during the past month was on July 6. Oddly enough, the most page hits I had for the past month was on July 5. So more visitors viewed fewer pages on July 6. That seems odd to me.

The most popular pages on my site are, in order:

  • Home Page – 20% of the views
  • Books Page – 3% of the views
  • Excel Visual QuickProject Guide Book Support Page – 3% of the views
  • Excel Visual QuickStart Guide Book Support Page – 2% of the views
  • Mac OS X Visual QuickStart Guide Book Support Page – 2% of the views

This tells me that people come to my site to learn more about my books, specifically the books I’ve written about Excel and Mac OS X. To better serve those visitors so they come back for more, I should write more articles about those topics.

Next, I looked at information about the computers my site’s visitors were using to access the site. That’s where I got a few surprises.

First of all, a full 75% of my site’s visitors access the site using Windows XP while only 12% access using Mac OS X. Now you might think that’s a high percentage of Mac OS X users, but when you consider the fact that most of my work is about Mac OS X, the high percentage of users seems reasonable. What seems odd to me is that so many visitors access using Windows PCs. I do write books about Windows software — as a matter of fact, I’ve written several about Word and Excel — but I’ve never considered myself a Windows author. So the 75% figure seems outrageously high to me. It also suggests that I should write fewer articles on my site about Mac OS-specific topics and more about cross-platform or Windows-specific topics. That’ll take some doing, since I really prefer writing about Macs.

On the browser front, 60% of my site’s visitors use Microsoft Internet Explorer, with most of those using Explorer 6. 23% use Firefox, which is my preferred browser. A bunch of other browsers were listed, of course, as well as a PlayStation 2, which I didn’t even know could access the Web. (I’m willing to bet my site looked pretty crappy on that device.) This is important information, too. I recently discovered that Explorer for Windows is more likely to choke on XHTML and CSS errors than any other browser. In fact, with an error on one of my sites, none of the pages on that site rendered correctly in Explorer. That means that 60% of the site’s visitors weren’t getting the intended user experience. I’ve since fixed the problem, of course, but now I’ll be extra careful to prevent similar problems in the future.

I also noted that 90% of site visitors had monitor resolution set to 1024 x 768 pixels or larger. That’s good news. It means that very, very few people need to use the horizontal scroll bars to see page content. (Horizontal scrolling is a big no-no.) But it also means that I could redesign the site to make each fixed-width page a bit wider to take advantage of the screen real estate my site’s visitors have at their disposal. Wider pages mean larger images, which could make a better visitor experience.

Another important stat is referrers — that’s how you can find out where your site’s visitors come from. On my site, more than 60% of visitors come from search engines. 25% come from direct visits or bookmarks — in other words, the visitor either typed a URL in the address bar of their browser or used a bookmark to visit me.

Of the search engine referrals, 89% came from Google, 5% came from Yahoo!, and 3% came from MSN. Google is obviously widely used and I’m fortunate through some sort of dumb luck, I suppose, to rank highly in Google search results.

The top search phrases are the most fun. Obviously, my stats software listed dozens of them. Here are the top 5 for the past month; you can use them in Google to find the pages they refer to yourself:

  • drying cherries – 41 searches
  • maria langer – 31 searches
  • howard mesa ranch – 16 searches
  • bookmark synchronizer se – 13 searches
  • bisquick quiche – 9 searches

Although my cherry drying article is one of the top 20 articles on my site, it’s odd to me that none of the search phrases — other than my own name, of course — refer to any of the top 5 visited pages. Whodathunk I’d get nine page hits for people searching for Biquick recipes?

Reading through the list of search phrases also provides valuable insight as to how users construct searches. For example, a recent search phrase that brought a visitor to my site was “number of vehicles enter and depart at Lukeville border.” The searcher was treated to an article about my recent helicopter flight along the border with an ASU photojournalist.

This is just an example of the kinds of stats some of the stats solutions can provide. If you think these things through, you can use them to improve your site and make it more interesting to visitors. Hopefully, that’ll generate more visits and page hits, especially if you have something valuable to share.

Do you use stats software? How do you use it? Visit the transcript for this podcast at aneclecticmind.com and use the comments link to share your thoughts. I’ll read the comments I get in a future podcast.

That’s all for now. Thanks for listening. Keep checking in. I’ll be podcasting again soon.

site, statistics, metrics, Web, development, traffic