I’ve been upgrading Wordpress installations for clients this weekend. Ever since the Wordpress update process was included in the dashboard I’ve never seen it work successfully. Being this is a brand new next generation version of Wordpress (3.0), I decided to try the update option and once again it failed me.

This time I came up on a problem… not only did the update fail, but now the site was stuck in maintenance mode. This was a first, but fortunately I found a quick fix. Here is what you do in the event your wordpress site get’s stuck in maintenance mode.

1. Login to your Root folder (usually the same folder as your wp-config.php file) via your FTP client

2 Find a file named .maintenance and delete it.

That’s how you fix your Wordpress site when it get’s stuck in maintenance mode.

If you haven’t noticed, but the blog here has been a little quiet. Couple of reason…

1. Very busy with work, family, life, etc..

2. I started a new blog dedicated to creating Wordpress CMS Websites, not blogs but regular content management system websites.

This new project is called CMS With Wordpress (http://cmswithwordpress.com). I’ll still blog about Wordpress related material here on my main business blog. CMS with Wordpress is being set up more as a tutorial website to configuring things to be a real CMS, not just a poorly constructed blog that is pretending to be CMS website.

Enjoy and Happy 4th of July!

Was reading an article in the Search Engine Journal about effective blog design. Some of the tips included Prominent RSS Feed placement and Sharing Tools. Design wise what they ran home the most was don’t over clutter the site with tons of options to share with every possible network. This was part 1 and don’t thing part 2 has been published yet.

I’m going to try to pick up where SEJ left off. I agree your blog needs legs and the social sharing buttons are important. I like to use the Social Bookmarking and Share This! because they are relatively compact.

Simple Start Guide to Effective Blog Design

Top of the Page

Working from the top of the page; a good type face, prominent size and color for the main headline can make a huge difference. Take a look at a default install of Thesis Theme for Wordpress.. big and prominent. And very close to the headline.. a publish date. I’m always looking to see how out dated / fresh the content is and it drives me nuts when a blog doesn’t display a publish date.

Content Layout

Whether you have one or two sidebars.. they are better on the right side of the page with the main content column on the left. Whatever is on the left side of the page is typically where the users eye floats to after scanner through the top of the page. Plus it gets crawled first because its closer to the top of the page within the code. What would you rather have Google Bot see first, your wonderfully optimized content or a bunch of links diverting it away from the content? Probably best to include the sharing options mentioned above with in the content area. It seems to be most popular to include the retweet cloud and Facebook “Like This” buttons toward the top and other social bookmarks like Digg, StumbleUpon, Etc toward the bottom.

Sidebars and Footer Space

Top of the sidebar is a great place for your RSS Feed Subscription content. The rest of the area is all supporting content. In no particular order you want to have recent posts, recent comments, tags and categories. I personally think related posts and most popular posts are great options and are easily accomplished with a couple of simple plugins. In these spaces you also have to be realistic about how much content you can stuff into 2 sidebars and a footer and not have it appear crammed and splitting at the seems, especially if you are running affiliate ads.

An effective blog design can go a long way and with these simple guidelines you can take it even farther. Just remember that less is more and the design of your blog is equally as important as the content.

Need An Effective Blog Design for Your Blog?

We  create  custom WordPress themes. Contact us today to discuss building an effective design for your Wordpress blog.

If you follow Social Media or are a Facebook user then I’m sure you’re familiar with the whole Facebook privacy controversy.   I’m always concerned about my online privacy especially on Facebook.

I don’t like to share information about myself to the world so most of my profile is only accessible to people connected to me.  Which is why I was happy to find out about this cool bookmarklet to test my privacy on Facebook. Thanks Mashable. Good thing too because there were a couple of settings open to the world that I wasn’t aware of.

The bookmarklet is easy to use… simply drag to your browser bookmarks, log into your Facebook account and click the bookmarklet. At the top of your browser page will appear a list of the different areas of your profile that have privacy settings and a color coded image of how secure your privacy is, a small explanation and a link to that setting area to make any needed changes.

Reclaim your privacy on Facebook in a just a couple of minutes. Enjoy!

Ok, we know page speed is important because fast sites equal happy users. And from my last post we know how to run a test for page speed. But the big question remains is how does one go about optimizing their site using the feedback from the speed tests?

I’m glad you asked!

From the page speed tests you’ll see a number of different criteria with some suggestions. Here are the 3 most common suggestions you’ll see.

GZIP Compression:

One of the most common suggestions is GZIP Compression. This one sounds technical but its actually pretty easy. First you have to make sure that your server is configured to run GZIP compression. You can find out by using this gzip test. If the response comes back no.. then you need to contact your hosting company and ask them if they can enable it by compiling mod_deflate in apache.

Once gzip compression is enabled on the server you’ll need to initiate it by modifying your .htaccess file. You can add your handler a couple of different ways.

# compress all text & html:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

Or

#compress certain file types by extension:
<Files *.html>SetOutputFilter DEFLATE</Files>

Apache doesn’t make it easy to include multiple types. You can force it by having multiple sections, one for each extension. The “proper” way uses “FilesMatch” to match files by a regular expression and would look something like this (if you wanted to compress html, php,txt, css, js, gif, jpg & png)

# compress html, php,txt, css, js, gif, jpg & png:
<FilesMatch "\.(php|html|txt|css|js|gif|jpg)$">
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</FilesMatch>
# END Compression


For a better and more complete explanation on how GZIP Compression works as well as another explanation on how to implement gzip compression check out this great article.

Just by adding gzip compression to this website, I decreased the load time by more than 50%.

Compiling Stylesheets and Remove Excess Whitespace.

If you have multiple stylesheets then a good practice is to compile all of the css files into one single css file. Just copy and paste the code from each stylesheet into the compiled one. And be sure to comment the beginning and end each sheet section. Once compiled you may want to go through and clean up excess whites pace. In the old days css code was formatted like this…

body {
font-size: 62.5%; /* Resets 1em to 10px */
font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;
background: #d5d6d7 url('images/kubrickbgcolor.jpg');
color: #333;
text-align: center;
}
#page {
background-color: white;
border: 1px solid #959596;
text-align: left;
}
#header {
background: #73a0c5 url('images/kubrickheader.jpg') no-repeat bottom center;
}

This code could be tightened up quite a bit and would look something like this…

body {font-size: 62.5%; /* Resets 1em to 10px */ font-family: 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif; background: #d5d6d7 url('images/kubrickbgcolor.jpg'); color: #333; text-align: center; }
#page { background-color: white; border: 1px solid #959596; text-align: left; }
#header { background: #73a0c5 url('images/kubrickheader.jpg') no-repeat bottom center; }

By cleaning up the whitespace of the theme stylesheet on Search Friendly Web Design, I reduced the file from over 500 lines to under 80 lines and shaved a few milliseconds off my page speed.

Compiling JavaScript Files and Move Them Down Under

The last common optimization technique is to compile JavaScript files in the same manner as we just did with the CSS files. Once you’ve compiled your several JS files into one, move the JS call from the header down to the footer.

By optimizing your site in these 3 ways you will reduce the total number of http requests and at the same time compress those few files to produce optimum page speed.

Page loading speeds are important to websites, especially now that page speed is part of the Google search algorithm. To analyze the page speed or load time of your website, here are 3 free and easy ways to analyze your websites page speed.

WebsiteOptimization.com

The tool I’ve been using for more than 6 years is the WebsiteOptimization.com page speed analysis tool.  Simply enter the url of the site you want to analyze. You’ll get a diagnosis or output of object size totals, external objects, page objects, download times and recommendations to help speed up your websites load time

Google Webmaster Tools

If you have an account with Google Webmaster Tools you can find a Performance Overiew which details how fast your site is.  And you’ll also find a list of HTML suggestions to help increase load speeds. To find this data, login to your GWT account and under the Labs drop menu you’ll find a link to Site Performance. If you don’t have a webmaster tools set it.. you should go check it ASAP.

FireBug for Firefox

FireBug is a plugin for FireFox Browser. The way I’ve always set it up was install FireBug then install Google Page Speed which installs into FireBug.  Once installed, open the page you want to analyze and then click the little bug in the lower right corner of your FireFox browser. Look under Page Speed > Performance Tab then click the analyze button to receive and output of your score out 100 and suggestions on how to fix or speed up your page load times.

There you have it, 3 simple ways to analyze your website page speed and get recommendations on how to clean things up and speed up your sites load time.

Next Step Speed Optimization

Now that we have our page speed analysis and suggestions it’s time to get our hands dirty with a little bit of Web Page Speed Optimization.

According to Google Webmaster Blog, Page Speed is now part of the Google Search Algorithm.  So what does that mean exactly? It means that if you have a website that loads slow you get less points and for real fast sites… more points.

I’ve always considered Page Speed to more of a usability trait not so much a part of search engine optimization but I can see Google’s side of things.

Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don’t just improve user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites. — Full Article Here.

So what does the Page Speed signal mean for webmasters and website owners? First off it’s nothing to panic about because overall Page Speed isn’t going to tank your rankings if you have a really slow loading site. Second you should run a Page Speed test against your site and then third… follow the recommendations of the Page Speed Analysis and clean things up to make your site pages load faster.

Google Also stated… “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.”

Personally I’m glad Google added Page Speed to their search ranking algorithm because overall I hope it signals some poorly designed or extremely outdated websites to clean up their act and make for a better internet.

I recently posted an article  that discusses what exactly a content management system is. The next topic regarding content management systems that I want to address is whether or not your small business needs a CMS. While I do think that content management systems are a great fit for most businesses, they don’t necessarily fit every small business.

Most Small Businesses Can Benefit By Using A CMS

Websites that are continually updating products, services, prices, writing blog posts,  et cetera will benefit the most from a content management system. A small business can reduce their overall website content related costs by having the ability to make these changes in house. A CMS site gives the owner the power to update text and images without having to know any code.  A content management system also allows the ability to integrate other functions sometimes through a plug-n-play interface on the dashboard.

Another good reason for moving into or creating a content management system is the wide variety of available functionality. Most CMS’s are run using a scripting language called PHP in conjunction with a Database.  You can do almost anything you want with plugins or modules, again without having to know any code.  Things like syndicating your recent posts onto the homepage or allowing users to leave comments on the site using their facebook login, posting video or audio clips and creating photo galleries.  We’re just scratching the surface on the functions available without knowing any code.

Why A CMS Doesn’t Work for Every Company

We have several clients who have maintained traditional HTML websites and I wouldn’t recommend they convert to a CMS. Two of these clients don’t have a reason to update their site except for occasional price changes. These small periodic updates run them about $200 – $400 a year which makes the conversion to CMS an uneconomical approach. Another reason a content management system wouldn’t be efficient for some small business clients is that they simply just don’t have the time or the staff to maintain their own website which is one of the top reasons a small business would want a CMS to begin with.

Even small businesses have very large and complex websites and it takes a lot of time to achieve and maintain competitive search engine rankings.  Moving a website into a content management system will likely require the site to change all page URL’s which could have an adverse affect on search engine marketing if not addressed properly with  301 Redirects.

The ability to access, create and manage your own website content is a very powerful tool. Do you think your company could benefit by using a Content Management System?

Blogging takes time but it doesn’t have to absorb a lot of time.  I recommend devoting an hour a day.  This hour is NOT to be entirely devoted to writing, but an hour that focuses on the other important facets of a successful blog. To help inspire you, here are some blogging activities that can easily be done in an hour on a daily basis.

Your blog hour can be spent in so many ways

• Topic brainstorming
• Content planning
• Keyword research
• Editing or updating outdated posts
• Publishing and cross linking strategies
• Reviewing older posts for new cross linking opportunities
• Link building & networking with other blogs
• Software and plugin updates

There is so much more to developing a successful blog than publishing massive amounts of content. The overall health and SEO of your blog is just as important as the content you publish. And brainstorming for interesting topics that will keep readers engaged is more important than publishing vague and common posts.

All of these tasks combined may seem overwhelming but putting just one of the above tasks into action for just an hour each day will reap you great benefits. For a successful blog and to benefit your social community make sure to take the time to stay on top of behind-the-scenes dirty work which includes software and plugin updates.

If you already have a blog and need help with maintenance or development you can contact us, we can help.

I spent my blog hour today planning a new Wordpress CMS Tutorial blog. How did you spend your hour?

Yet another Wordpress security release!  However, this Wordpress Security update can be skipped for many who are the sole bloggers on their site…

2.8.6 fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges. ~ Wordpress.org

If your site has registered bloggers with posting privileges and need to upgrade, check out Upgrading Wordpress Using Dreamweaver. Or check out this great plugin.. Wordpress Automatic Upgrade.

If you need help upgrading your Wordpress installation contact us today.