Google Webmaster Tools

It’s been a while since I logged into Google Webmaster Tools. There are some terrific new features there, and some old ones that make life easier – I really must develop the habit of checking at least weekly.

One new feature that stands out immediately is Site Performance.

Site Load Time Performance 16th December - 3.5 Seconds

The chart is accompanied by the comment:

Performance overview

On average, pages in your site take 3.5 seconds to load (updated on Dec 16, 2009). This is slower than 58% of sites.

There is also a list of page speed suggestions for 10 individual pages and a recommendation to install the Page Speed Firefox add-on. It is not obvious why the 10 pages were selected – maybe it’s a random thing, but I’ll check later. All the pages listed are old pages that I am gradually reformatting in WordPress, so I was not too worried.

I was intrigued by the overall fairly poor performance, as I know that for a shared host, the service I use is pretty fast. WordPress has some critics regarding speed, so I decided to install Page Speed and investigate further.

One disappointment is that the Page Speed tool does not report the page load time – or at least not in any easy-to-understand way. I was hoping for something simple to give a few straightforward suggestions. Instead I found a real geek tool that analyzes everything (it seems), but makes you search for solutions.

Over the next few weeks, I will implement the main recommendations, and update my WordPress installation guide to suit. Let’s see how soon I can get into that fastest 20%.

The most prominent warning from Page Speed was to do with cache expiration times on static data like images, css, and js files. I specifically do not want to add WordPress plugins to deal with the issues raised by Page Speed – I’ve had one or two problems with cache plugins recently, and I’ve disabled them all.

Anyway, this is simply solved by the addition of a few lines to .htaccess:

<ifmodule mod_expires.c>
<filesmatch "\.(jpg|gif|png|css|js)$">
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
</filesmatch>
</ifmodule>

Weirdly, after changing this, Page Speed still reports a problem until I refreshed the page! I thought it was complaining that it had to refresh anyway.
The next most important recommendation is gzipping, but I’m going to wait a few days to see what effect this first improvement has.

freeche.com is almost ready to launch.

During refinement of the pre-launch blueprint preparation, I refined the Purpose since preparing the PROSPRA page. The idea of niche marketing is fine, but the whole idea goes beyond niche marketing now. This was hinted at in the original purpose:

Develop website building tool based on niche exploitation. Supports niche expansion to build authority sites and web empires.

“Niche expansion” is the idea that once your niche is established, you usually expand it (unless you are really determined to focus). Most niches are not true niches in the sense that a niche is isolated.

For example, if you started a WordPress red theme page, you would have a fairly well defined niche. But pure red soon expands to near pink or near purple. If you include themes with options do they all have to be red? And if you are following the very useful web business route of building a community, you will soon find visitors who want to push the boundaries to many different aspects of redness theme-ness and WordPress-ness.

So, what started out as a focus on website traffic AND niche marketing, has rightly become traffic. Niche marketing may well be part of an opening strategy, but it is not a business goal. Creating customers is the main purpose of any business, and for a web business, website traffic is crucial, so that is the focus for freeche.

The newly defined purpose makes it much clearer that the site is specifically aimed at supporting the website traffic building tool. It will certainly do that for small niche sites and large web businesses. However, the emphasis is on the tool itself – how it is applied is still important, though secondary. I anticipate that most of the discussion around the scope of your site will be discussed on shrewdies.com.

Back With A Purpose

It’s nice to get going again when you know exactly where you want to be.

I’ve replaced the old About page with a new one describing the Purpose of this web business site.

As the purpose has a lot to do with my collection of PROSPRA web business sites, I’ve added another page summarizing them.

Early impressions of the P2 theme are mixed, but I’ll give it a bit longer. Group blogging feature is rubbish for anything other than plain text – but that is probably the whole point of it. I will reserve judgment until I’ve had more time to use it. I expect something that departs so far from the norm to be a bit more intuitive, or at least have some notes on the Admin pages – Mentions are never mentioned!

For now, I proclaim the prospect of PROSPRA site promotion. (That means I’m off to work elsewhere, and will be back soon)

Starting Again

Starting again.

This is a celebration of freedom from the shackles of Site Build It (AKA SiteSell). I’m not even going to bother finishing the help on moving the site. If any body else is stuck, just call out on the web business forum at shrewdies, and I’ll be happy to help (but don’t leave it too long, as I’m anxious to move on and forget the drawbacks)

Final word on the subject – earnings up 10% since the move, and I’ve only just started reformatting and adding.

Now for the good stuff.

Free web traffic building tool now on the way. Free web business sites now on the way. The way to prosper on purpose is on the way with management and technical backup sites.

Some in the planning stages, some just starting, some delivering the goods. I’ll tie it all together here.

For now, I’m going to experiment with this rather strange P2 theme, and see if it suits the purpose of this site

SBI Site Export Plan

To move a SiteSell website to a new platform takes plenty of planning and preparation.

The overview is:

Planning New Site

Do a proper shrewdies site plan.

Prepare Old Site

Change or disable features proprietary features that will not convert. There are alternatives for all the proprietary services of SiteSell. I’ll cover specifics in detail later – if you are stuck on something, add your problem below and I’ll answer it immediately (probably at shrewdies.net). The newsletter can be a problem if you have lots of subscribers (I had 2500 when I started moving and 2700 by the time of the big switch)

Prepare New Site

Develop layout and categories. Prepare new navigation and explanatory pages to create a framework to accept old pages.

Transfer Site

Copy all files to your new platform as static HTML files.

Convert Formats

Change old static pages to new dynamic posts and pages. Often, this means a complete rewrite, and redirect.

Add new content

Now you are free of the shackles of that dodgy editor, get cracking on new content.

Preparing your old SBI site is usually the biggest chore if you have used lots of their proprietary features like voting forms. If you haven’t got much traffic it is tempting to just scrap the lot and start again, salvaging your best content and using redirects to keep the search engine traffic.

I have plenty of traffic, so I have to make the changes. Hard work, but acheivable if you follow a step-by-step approach.

Back With[out] A Purpose

After a long year in the doldrums, it is time to relaunch this site.

The revised purpose is to document the move away from SiteSell.

There are good and bad points to SBI, but for me the bad points outweigh the bad.

Despite the help for complete newbies, it is overcomplicated and overhyped.

When I’m trying to push forward on a world beating site with over 100 pages, I do not want to be held back by slow, clunky page editors. Worse, I do not want to be distracted by sales pitches purporting to be support newsletters that never tell me what is changing – just point me to long rambling forum posts that jump all over the place.

Haven’t these people heard of:

• Bullet Points
• ?

So the purpose of this site is now to help people avoid the pitfalls with SiteSell, and help people move away if they have had enough.

I’ll make a few quick posts about moving a site away from SiteSell, then come back and tidy up the old posts, and get a better theme.

Web Business Focus

1. Focus on profitable niche
2. Focus on demand until visitors reach (100 per day)
3. Focus on profitable pages

Profitable Niche

Easy – Niche Inspector
Harder – Google adwords tool. But not that hard.

Focus on demand

Start with list of demand keywords from Adwords, WordTracker, Niche Inspector

Focus on multiple key word phrases or specialist terms. Generic single keywords might make good categories. Should definitely be used frequently in text, and add appropriate thesaurus alternatives. (Sidebar: the answer to “What’s another word for thesaurus,” according to thesaurus.com, is “dictionary or lexicon”.)

This is where SBI falls down. Too many distractions unless you’re focussed enough to ignore the constant exhortation to become an affiliate, buy more copies of SBI (why would you?), or waste time in the forums.

Add to keywords as you go:

• Hittail
• Analytics or logs or other stats program
• More keyword research on Adwords, WordTracker, Niche Inspector
• related WordPress tags

Be methodical on your treatment.
Create Categories on WP blog (using sub categories where appropriate). Quite a big task, so don’t let it get in the way of creating content.

Create Hover/Ubernyms records on main blog (sql import)

When page written:
WP blog – create post linking to new post (text can be page description), add page to blogroll.
Main blog – complete Hover/Ubernyms record
Consider Twittering or other social network updates (respectfully)

Website Development For Dummies

It’s time to stop seeking website development for dummies.
Time to restart website development for shrewdies.

I’ve left my web business ticking over for a few months, but now I need to restart. What better way than to start a new web business site, documenting the key stages and discussing alternatives.

The first step is always to develop the concept. What are the aims and objectives of the business. In short, a web business plan.

Starting and Running an Online Business for Dummies

UK

See below for USA and elsewhere

Christopher Morgan “Chris” (Liverpool, England) bought this book and was only slighlty hesitant about labelling himself a dummy. The book is, infact, not just for people with no experience, Chris has already created his own website before and was looking at a more general book that could tell him the legal and financial aspects of running an e-business, and this book did just that.

The book doesnt offer much in the way of programming for your website and merely gives you ideas on this front and advice on which programming suite to use. However, Chris found the book to be a brilliant source of the ‘important’ information. It tells you how to get your website registered with a host, sort through the legal stuff such as trademarking, set up a payment system and create a merchant account. Absolutely fantastic. This was just what Chris needed and having read the book skimming through it in a day he now feels confident that he could put his business online.

This is a cost effective must have for anybody thinking of setting up a business online or doing general research into what it would require to do so, whats more its right up to date and the websites the book refers you to are very useful and often essential for creating your website. Definitely not for dummies as if your smart enough to buy this book you’ll be well on your way.

USA & Global

ToS A Load of Toss

It looks like this might be YAAP. Yet Another Abandoned Project.

I wanted to compare free WordPress.com accounts with systems that are prohibitively expensive for the poor startup web business newbie with zero budget.

Nothing in the Terms of Service that I could see to prevent this. The only paragraph relating to commercial use is highlighted:

the Content is not spam, and does not contain unethical or unwanted commercial content designed to drive traffic to third party sites or boost the search engine rankings of third party sites, or to further unlawful acts (such as phishing) or mislead recipients as to the source of the material (such as spoofing);

I wasn’t surprised that I couldn’t put AdSense on this site. After all, you open one javascript hole, and before long you’ve got an avalanche of spotty coders trying to break the system.

What did surprise me was this note tucked away in the FAQ:

We have a very low tolerance for blogs created purely for … commercial purposes … and will continue to nuke them, so if that’s what you’re interested in WordPress.com is not for you.

Now, I honestly believe this blog is for educational purposes. It has a commercial aspect because I believe underprivileged people should have a chance to improve their lives through Internet web businesses. It could become a fantastic business model for governments, charities etc to provide a few hours access each week. People with no hope might find a few dollars a week from their own efforts to free themselves from grinding poverty.

Not here it seems.

I quite understand the WordPress.com stance. But why could they not make it clear in the ToS?

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