Please read on for the latest news about:

• Updates to the online help files, including some new troubleshooting topics.
• Some important notes about image sizes.
• New insert gallery button.
• New distraction-free full-screen editing mode.

Online Help

Some of the early adopters of the template sites may not be aware of the online help files for the sites, as I don’t think they were quite ready before the first customers were knocking at my door. These are pretty much the same as the PDF guide you received when your site was set up, but additions and improvements will be updated here, so bookmark this link so you always have access to the latest help files:

http://www.megansweb.com.au/template-site-guide

Troubleshooting

I’ve started adding some troubleshooting topics to the help files, for some of the common issues that people come across.

Please let me know if there’s anything you found difficult or not clear in the documentation, and I’ll add to these where appropriate.

Image Sizes

Through some recent feedback I’ve had, a couple of issues have arisen regarding image sizes, which I hadn’t anticipated when working out how to set the sites up. In working out how best to set the image upload and display settings, I had to balance a number of factors:

• Ease of use, so that site owners didn’t necessarily have to resize their images before uploading
• File size, so images would load quickly
• Getting a consistent look and feel

It’s come to my attention recently that some unexpected things can happen when using images of certain sizes – most notably images with a non-standard aspect ratio, or images in the portfolio gallery that are smaller than 1024 x 768px.

Images of non-standard aspect ratios (slideshow home page only)

This issue should only apply to users who have the slideshow home page.  This is set up to display the home page images at 800 x 600px for landscape images, and, if portrait images are used, it displays them at 600px high.  I needed to put strict constraints on the images for the home page to ensure a neat, consistent look on the home page.

The downside however, is that images that aren’t a standard (4:3) photographic aspect ratio, may get stretched or distorted to fit the required container size. I’ll have to look back at this issue in more depth to see if there’s a better way to code the image sizing for the home page, but in the meantime, if you have this problem, try to only use standard image dimensions for the home page gallery.

If you have an image that is cropped to different dimensions, and you really want to use it on the home page, the best way to do it for now would be to copy the cropped image onto an 800 x 600px plain coloured image in black, white, or the same colour as your website background, and upload that image instead.

Images smaller than 1024 x 768px

The gallery programme on the template sites has been set to resize and compress your images for you when you upload them (unless you specifically asked me not to). I tested a lot of different settings when designing the sites, and finally came up with what seemed a good balance between file size and image quality.

In most cases this works great, and a full-size, 2MB image, ends up as a manageable 1024 x 768px image of around 50-100kb and still looks good. Recently though, when setting up a new client’s template site, I uploaded the images he had sent me, and found it hadn’t resized them, they were still around 500-700kb, which is way too big for a web page.

The reason?

His images were smaller in dimensions than 1024 x 768px, but were still full quality, so had a large file size. So, the “resize on upload” function doesn’t work on images smaller than 1024 x 768px (which is good, because images can look terrible if they are displayed larger than actual uploaded image file). The downside? It’s an all or nothing deal – if it determines the image is not to be resized (in dimensions), it won’t compress it (in file size) either.

So, what do you need to do?

• If you upload images that are at least 1024 x 768px in size, you shouldn’t have to worry – the software should just resize and compress your images as required.
• If you upload images that are smaller than 1024 x 768px in size, make sure their file size is also small (under 100kb is good, or set at 72dpi in your graphics programme).

If you prefer to resize and compress your own images before uploading, let me know and I can remove the resize on upload function altogether for you.

Apologies if any if this is confusing, please get in touch if anything is not clear. I don’t want to change anything straight away to fix this, as it took quite a lot of trial and error to get a good balance of settings, so I’ll need to give any changes thorough testing before implementing them. I have definitely noted it for future reference, and will be looking into it to see if I can find a better way of doing it in future versions.

Please let me know if any of this is not clear, or if you come across any other issues that are bothering you. It’s through your feedback that I can make improvements to the website templates.

New Features

Insert Gallery Button

I have enabled the gallery upload button for those using the sets of works portfolio. This should now be appearing at the right hand end of your toolbar, and allows you to select a photo gallery to put in the page, without having to type the shortcode in.  Just make sure you don’t change the settings in the window that pops up, as the default settings are the ones your site is set up to use.

More info: http://www.megansweb.com.au/help_files/place-the-gallery-in-your-page

Full Screen Editing

The latest update to WordPress comes with a very nifty distraction-free, full-screen editing mode. Just click the full screen button on your toolbar, which looks like this:

You should then see a white screen with just your text on it. Move your mouse back up to the top of the screen and the editing buttons as well as an “exit fullscreen’ link will appear.

Being of a suspicious nature when it come to matters of the web, I decided to take a look. Unfortunately, deserving of compliments though her blog posts are, I quickly identified that the vast majority of her apparent fan mail was, in fact, spam. Now this friend is not a fool, and if she can be caught out by the spammers, many others can too. Some of the tricks they use are easy to miss for the unaware, but very easy to spot if you know what to look for.

So, I thought this topic was worthy of a blog post. I’ll cover first how to stop most of the spam getting through in the first place, and then how to recognise the ones that have slipped through.

Filtering Out the Spam in the First Place

Install and Activate Anti-Spam Measures

If your blogging platform has an anti-spam filter available (and it should), ensure that this is activated. For WordPress, the anti-spam plugin Akismet comes with the standard setup. For blogs on wordpress.com, this is activated by default. For self-hosted blogs, you will need to get an Akismet key and activate the plugin. This only takes a couple of minutes.

Akismet itself is extremely effective at filtering out the spam, but I tend to install a second plugin as well. Bad Behavior is another handy WordPress plugin that blocks the robots from delivering the spam in the first place.

With these two measures in place, I rarely see a spam comment; they all get filtered straight into my spam folder.

Require comments to be moderated

Set up your discussion settings so that comments have to be moderated before they appear. WordPress gives you the option to require an administrator to approve all comments, or to require moderation for a comment author’s first comment only. Make sure at least one of those is enabled. Some spammers will start with an apparently innocuous first comment to get approved, and then start hitting with the spam, so be wary of the latter option.

Recognising the Spam that Does Get Through

While it may seem that a spam comment should be obvious as such, this is not always the case. Spammers are clever at making their comments look genuine, and they won’t always contain obvious references or links to Viagra or other common spam subjects.

Take this comment that arrived on my blog today:

At first glance, this may appear to be a simple complimentary comment from someone with a real name, who has enjoyed reading your blog. A couple of things set off alarm bells for me though.

Content – is what the commenter says relevant specifically to your post?

It’s always nice to get compliments. But look at what ‘Lucy’ has actually written – does it say anything specific about my blog post? Or could this comment have been left on any blog?

If you’re not sure, here’s a tip – Google it. If it’s spam, there’s a good chance the exact same comment will be left on lots and lots of blogs. Here’s what I find when I copy and paste this comment into Google:

Okay – either ‘Lucy’  is a prolific reader with very eclectic tastes, or there’s a good chance she’s a robot. My bet is on the latter.

Note: Another variant that was doing the rounds a while back was to claim some kind of technical problem with the website – something like “Hi, I’m having trouble viewing your website in Opera browser. You really need to fix this, as I’d love to read your blog but can’t!” If you can’t win them over with compliments, plant the seeds of doubt in their minds – the average blogger probably won’t have Opera browser installed to check this themselves, and may assume that their web developer hasn’t tested something properly. (All my sites are tested in Opera, by the way!)

Website link

Most blog comment forms have a space to allow commenters to leave their website URL, if they have one. When their comment is published, their name will become a link to that website.

This is the spammers’ main target – they are trying to drive traffic to their website, and generate backlinks to improve their search engine rankings (this won’t work, by the way – Google frowns on this practice, and they are much more likely to get their site blacklisted).

So, check out the URL they have left (don’t click on it, unless you’re fairly confident they’re legitimate, and you want to check it out). Note that ‘Lucy’ has left a website called www.loans4you-123.com. Now if you are writing a financial blog, this may be perfectly legitimate, as you may have a lot of readers who have business websites to do with loans, and linking back to their own website may make sense. But on my web design blog, that definitely screams link dumping to me.

Note, of course that you can always remove the website link and publish the comment anyway. If a comment is borderline, you can edit the comment, remove the website address, and approve the comment with no link. So if they are a spammer, they won’t gain any benefit from their comment being published. If the same person continues to interact with your blog posts with meaningful comments and you decide they are legitimate, you can always leave their website address on later comments.

Email address

One other flag, though I don’t think with as much weight as the previous two, is the email address they supply. Spammers will often use email addresses that look like they have been generated by a robot – usually strings of random numbers and letters. Lucy’s email address fits the pattern. However, some legitimate readers may also use disposable email addresses for commenting on blogs, as they want to protect their own email account from spam. So I personally wouldn’t judge a comment as spam solely on the email address, but when weighed in with the other factors, it can certainly help tip the balance.

So, I hope this has been helpful. If you implement the first couple of points to begin with, hopefully you won’t need the last three points too often. And for those few that do slip through, you should be in a better position to spot them and send them off to spam box hell where they belong.

Keep your domain name and hosting separate

Most web hosting companies will offer to register your domain name for you, and many domain name registrars also offer web hosting. As per the old saying, “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”, I prefer to always keep these two things separate, to know I can always move my site to wherever I want to host it, whenever I want to do so. Here’s why:

• In a worst-case scenario, some disreputable companies may register your domain name under their own name rather than yours, or otherwise make it very difficult to move your website to a different hosting company should you desire to do so later.
• Even if the company has done the right thing to begin with, things go wrong – companies go bust, get taken over by other companies and the service declines, your web developer arranged the hosting for you and has vanished off the face of the earth – or any other scenario where you find yourself wanting to quickly move your site to another hosting company. While in most cases it should still be possible to do so, having both functions tied up together can add hoops for you to jump through, unnecessarily complicating the process. It gives me peace of mind to know that if anything does go wrong, I am in complete control of the domain and can quickly and simply move it to wherever I want it.

So who should I register with?

Make sure the company you are registering with is an accredited registrar. In Australia the .au Domain Administration Ltd (auDA) keeps a list of accredited registrars.

There is also an international list of approved registrars maintained by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

Keep your contact details up to date with the registrar

Your domain name registrar should send you warning emails leading up to the time when your domain name is due for renewal, so make sure you keep your contact details up-to-date so you can receive these notifications.

Make sure that they also have an email address that is not linked to the domain, such as a Gmail or Yahoo account – remember, that if there’s a problem with your domain name, you will lose access to the domain’s email accounts as well.

Know who your domain is registered with, and when it’s due for renewal

I can’t stress this one enough. When you register your domain name, you will receive a welcome email, with all your login details for managing that domain name. Keep this email safe, and always refer back to it when you want to do anything with your domain name.

Many unsuspecting people have been caught out by a number of unscrupulous spammers, who send out either hardcopy letters, or emails, advising you that it is time to renew your domain name, and requesting a (usually inflated) sum of money to do so.

At best, they are trying to trick you into moving your domain registration to their company (and subsequently make it difficult to move it back again). At worst, they may just take your money and run, without doing anything to your domain at all. Some of the companies that I’ve received these kind of scams from include:

• Domain Registry of America

• Domain Renewal Group

• domainregistrationnoticesite.com

These letters look very official, and it can be easy to get sucked in by them – unless of course, you know very well that they are not the company you registered with!

Too late, I’ve lost my domain name! What can I do?

So you got up this morning and found your site is down, and suddenly remember that email from the registrar that you kept putting off dealing with. If your domain has only just expired, don’t panic! There is a grace period, and it goes through a number of stages:

• “Expired” status – 40 days. In this period, you can still renew your domain for the normal renewal fee. The site and your email will still be down until you do, but if you log in to your registrar, you should be able to just pay the fee to get your site up again.

• “Redemption” phase – 30 days. You can still renew the domain during this period, but there will be an extra fee. It may also be a longer and more complicated process to renew once it has reached this phase.

• “Pending delete” phase – 5 days. The domain is locked during this phase. You can’t renew it, and nobody else can buy it yet. Really, by this time it’s too late – the domain will be released back into the pool of available domain names, and you will need to compete with anyone else who wants that name to get it back again.

OK, I’ve missed the redemption period, how do I get the name back?

If you’re feeling lucky, you can take your chances and try and snap it up the minute it becomes available. I wouldn’t recommend this one though, as there are companies that buy up expiring domain names, just so they can ‘park’ them with ads on them for a while, and see if they can make money either from that, or from the previous owner willing to pay an inflated price for the domain. They are able to automate this process, sending repeated hits to the server much quicker than you can manually refresh your screen, so if they are after your domain, there’s a good chance they’ll get it.

The other option, is to go to one of the domain backorder services, who, for a fee, will watch the domain for you and try to grab it. Like the ‘domain squatters’, they automate the process, and so are much more likely to get hold of the domain for you. There are a number of companies that offer this service, which is outside the scope of this article, but if you are interested in this, have a look at Mike Davidson’s excellent article on How to Snatch an Expiring Domain. After reading Mike’s article last year, I managed to successfully get hold of a domain I wanted for a reasonable price, so his article is definitely worth a read, whether you’re trying to back your own domain, or have one that you have your eye on. (Hopefully after reading this blog post, you will only need his advice for the latter scenario, and not the former!)

Thanks to Mike’s article above, and to Cyberindian for information on the phases that expired domains go through.

People who know me will have heard my periodic rants about “the terrible code” in some website or another, and I can see you all rolling your eyes and thinking “who cares about the code, only geeks care about the code”. Here’s one of the reasons why I care about the code:

Ever been to a website that seems to take forever to load? All too frequently I’ll find a site that, despite having no large images or anything fancy, still seems to take forever to come up. Sometimes I check out the source code (you can do this easily by going to View>Source in your browser), and often I find huge, and I mean HUGE blocks of something that looks like this:

<mce:style><! st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } --> <!--[endif]--> <!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:35.4pt; mso-footer-margin:35.4pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <mce:style><! /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}

“So what?”, I hear you say. What this person has done, is to write the text for their website in Word, and then copy paste it directly into their website. While you can’t see it when you paste the text into your editing box, Word has sent with it a whole bunch of formatting code that gets added to your page.  Why does this matter?

• It can slow your site down enough to mean the difference between a visitor staying on your site, or giving up and leaving.
• At times the formatting code can also affect the look of your site, as it may interfere with the styling rules already set up for the site.
• It can affect your search engine rankings – the more extraneous code, the harder the search engine has to work to find the actual content of your site.

“So how else can I do it?” you say. ”I have to write the text up first, I can’t put it straight into the website!”

The safest ways to get your text from Word into your website are:

• Copy the text first into a plain text editor such as Notepad, then copy again from Notepad into your website editor. 
• If you have a WordPress website or blog, copy using the Paste as Plain text button provided. If you are using another blogging platform or WYSIWYG editor, check to see if it has a similar feature available. In WordPress it looks like this:

Copying by either of these methods will strip out any formatting code. Then you can use the tools that are available in your editing interface to add headings and any other formatting that you need. If you’ve already done your formatting in Word, it’s a little extra work to add it again, but if you get used to writing the material up as plain text and then adding formatting at the final stage, it’s a small change in your workflow that can have a big impact on the performance of your site.

What is SEO?

In the most literal sense, SEO means what it says - optimising your website so it can be easily found and indexed by search engines. If you just put a website up without SEO, there’s a good chance your site won’t be found, no matter how good it is. I’ve seen businesses here in Tasmania with websites (often those built in Flash) that don’t come up on Google even if you search for the exact business name and town – a good indication that something has not been done correctly right from the beginning.

But simply being found isn’t enough – you need to be found by the right users. There’s little point getting to the top of Google results if the users that search brings to your site don’t find what they want.

Another important aspect of SEO is online reputation management. You may not be able to control what others say about you or your company online, but you can do a lot to counter any negative or inaccurate material by working to make sure the information you want seen comes up higher in search results. (Antony Mayfield’s book and blog Me and My Web Shadow is an excellent resource on this subject.)

The good news is, SEO is not black magic; a lot of it just comes down to common sense. While the algorithms that search engines use to decide how to rank pages are extremely complex, there’s plenty of good commonsense things you can do that will start you out on a good footing.

SEO is the foundation of your website, not an add-on

The mistake many people make is putting up a website first and then thinking about optimising it for search engines. Search engine optimisation should begin before a line of website code is written, and a good web developer will incorporate this as part of the process right from square one.

Right from the start, you need to think about questions such as:

• What is the purpose of the site?
• Who is the audience?
• What keywords and phrases might they be searching with?
• How will they find what they want once they’ve got to my website?
• What do I want them to do once they arrive on the site? (buy something, sign up to a mailing list, etc.)

All these things should be thought out first, before deciding on the information architecture, or structure of your site. Sit down, work out what the site’s about, what’s important, and how the information will be put together.

Optimise for your users, not for search engines

Contradictory as it may sound, often the best way to rank in search engines is – don’t think about the search engine. Start by thinking what your site visitors will want.

• High quality, relevant content – post good content
• Up-to-date information – post regular updates
• Easy to find information – organise your content logically

Focus on the quality, not the quantity of backlinks

Beware the “SEO specialist” who offers to get you thousands of backlinks for a fee. Like most things in life, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. This is the point that was reiterated throughout this morning’s seminar - one quality backlink is worth more than thousands of low quality links.

So how to get quality backlinks?

• Write good content that people will want to link to and share.
• Good old fashioned PR – Contact bloggers or owners of reputable websites in your field who you think may review or share your page with their readers. Email people (but don’t spam them), get your name known.
• Encourage links to specific pages, not just your home page – include unique information on all your sub-pages.
• Participate actively and helpfully in forums relevant to your field (don’t comment just for the sake of dumping a link!)
• If there are REPUTABLE online directories for your field, ensure you are registered there. Directories that are vetted by a human being are worth much more than ones you can just submit to automatically.

Unfortunately there is no quick and easy way to building quality backlinks, it is something that should be considered as part of your entire marketing strategy.

Five things to improve search engine ratings

1. Do your research – understand what people are coming to your website for, and what search terms they are likely to be using.
2. Have unique and high quality content, and update it regularly.
3. Make sure your content is organised properly and grouped in relevant ways.
4. Get the right kind of backlinks.
5. Get links to the right pages.

What shouldn’t I do?

Avoiding doing the wrong thing is as important, or even more important, than doing the right things. Some of these “black hat SEO” methods can end up getting you banned, and it can be a long slow process to claw your way back from there. A good rule of thumb one of the presenters mentioned is “use your conscience – if you think what you’re doing is a bit dodgy, it probably is.” A few things you definitely shouldn’t be doing include:

• Paying for links
• Paying for reviews
• Dumping links on forums, blog comments etc.
• Stuffing meta tags with keywords – search engines these days pay little or no attention to keyword tags, due to too many people trying to use this practice to boost their rankings through this method.

To this I’d add one more that wasn’t discussed specifically this morning – don’t put essential content exclusively in Flash or images. If a text-only browser can’t read your site, Google probably can’t either.

Even in a simple one-hour webinar there was way too much discussed to cover in a single blog post, but I’ve tried to get the important points together here as a bit of a starter guide on the topic. Thanks to Sitepoint for hosting this helpful webinar!