http://www.robgilmour.com/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron rob@rasweb.co.za http://www.robgilmour.com/items/view/2578/making-a-success-out-of-your-website Getting heard above all the noise on the web is becoming harder. The old matra of, “build it and they will come” certainly does hold true on the web in many cases. There are many obvious success stories of this, ala google, but as more of your competitors or even other websites compete for your customers eyeballs, standing out of the crowd is what you need to get right. What is certainly true for all sites/products/services on the web is that information is king. He (or she) who holds the data and presents it in the most useful/usable format normally wins. Data can come in multiple forms: text, images, video, maps, news etc and can be presented in multiple formats: blogs, news sites, facebook, twitter, email, newsletter, etc. So, how do you become successful? 1. Be interesting Ego plays a massive part in developing a good web presence. Tell your visitors that you are good. A good way to do this with industry recognition, testimonals from customers etc. So to stroke your ego, get connected on Twitter & Facebook and talk about yourself, your product and your site. Build up your network of followers to some decent numbers and compare yourself against your competition. Intice customers & new twitter followers with interesting campaigns, maybe do a product discount when you increase your twitter followers to 100 (for newbies) or up it by 10% or some other strategic number. 2. KISS – Keep it simple stupid Simplicity and usability are two of the most important factors on the web. Its one thing having great data, but if your delivery mechanism isnt good, its worth nothing. Change things slowly, introduce new concepts and see how they perform. Are you getting more visitor traffic through a new page or menu item you created since last week? 3. If you cant measure it, how can you manage it? Tracking is one of those vital feedback mechanisms. You need to know how people are getting to your site, what they are searching for, how long they stayed, how many pages did they view, what was their average staying time? (you need to track this via Google Analytics) Analytics provides a FREE & amazingly powerful tool to track your users. You can also track ‘conversions’ and evaluate how these customers got to your site. Conversions can be a specific page view, like a contact form submission or a newsletter signup or even a product order. 4. Build, release. FAST (for online applications) If your development cycle is months, by the time you have finished building it, is your product even going to suite the users? Taking a lesson from the Agile/Scrum approach to development, build something quickly and release it. Get user feedback comments and see if they like it. Customers know what they want, you can make an educated guess, but thats exactly it, a guess. Stop guessing, release new features quickly, take a features poll from users and stop trying to understand the customers needs, get them to tell you what THEY want. Decide, build, release, get feedback, reiterate. (in 1-2 months cycles max) 5. Leverage your userbase Engage your users on facebook, twitter and other social media applications. Happy users are great promoters of your products. If you are selling something, create an affiliate marketing program, giving them a % of the revenue from the sale. The power of twitter and other social media allows interesting products/services to go viral. When a new user signs up, encourage them to follow you on twitter. Possibly offer new features in advance to users that ‘retweet’ your message to their friends (this is a great way to get followers) 6. Offline Actions The biggest debate always revolves around what offline actions one should take. Talk to as many people as possible about your product/service. Get networking, attend conferences, get invited to speak at conferences (this happens when you become the ‘expert’ in your field) and tell friends & family. Be passionate. 7. The bigger picture Dont expect overnight success, all these things take time to get right. Quality content & good presentation is the key, the more useful information thats presented in a good format, the more success you can expect to have. Summing up We often see companies advertising “Get listed on Google” or some other marketing to entice customers to signup for a website or a web hosting, dont be tempted, if it actually worked, everyone would be using it (even us and we dont!). Customers also get a website built by someone else and then wonder why they dont get any visitors. Realistically its all about your content and who links to your content. Be interesting, put some effort into marketing your website and people will come, be boring and people will stay away. Google Adwords is also the fastest way to get your website out there (you pay money for people clicking on adverts). Read up on SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing) – start implementing these strategies, they do require a lot of time and energy, but they do really work. Related Stories Wordpress Tutorial Series – making the most of your website Pimp your wordpress website with plugins How to setup your first website using wordpress Our website evolves Have you seen our new Data Centre? Take the tour Making a success out of your website ]]> Mon, 09 Nov 2009 21:56:00 +0200 http://www.robgilmour.com/items/view/2578/making-a-success-out-of-your-website http://www.robgilmour.com/items/view/2461/pimp-your-wordpress-website-with-plugins Wordpress plugins can add awesome functionality to your blog without writing a single line of ‘code’. We detail below which plugins we use and think can add a lot of value to your website. To find and install any of these plugins, login to your wordpress admin panel and go to ‘Plugins’ and ‘Add New’, type in the plugin name below and click ‘Install’ – you may need to configure the plugin thereafter, most of the time this is done in the admin panel. Gravatars Gravatars are a great way to bring interactivity to the comments section of your posts. The Gravatars plugin gives your comments personalisation. The Gravatar service is one that users upload a photo once and it will be retrieved if they comment on your site or other sites and the photo will be displayed. Many of your visitors may already have a Gravatar. Its a simple easy way to identify users and a great way for you to have a profile picture that interacts with your users when you comment. Google XML Sitemaps Sitemaps assist search engines by making content easier to find, by generating an XML sitemap that all major search engines can view you give your site additional visibility that other competiting websites probably wont have. Everytime you create a new post or page, the sitemap is generated and Google is notified of your new page. This is definitely a must. Google Analytics Google Analytics is the defacto standard now for evaluating your website’s traffic. This essential tool shows you all sorts of data, learning to interpret it can take your website from good to great. Installing this plugin means you dont have to go and fiddle the code manually to add Google Analytics tracking code into your theme. Google Analytics Dashboard This nifty dashboard plugin shows you your visitor statistics on your wordpress admin dashboard. This gives you a quick overview to how many visitors you are receiving and other interesting stats without having to login to Google Analytics. Wordpress Caching with Hypercache Caching can give your users a much faster webpage load time. It allows the server that your wordpress site is installed on to do less work. We have typically seen on busy wordpress sites of drops of up to 80% CPU utilisation on busy servers because caching was not installed, this can make a massive difference to your end users as the page will load significantly faster and their experience will be significantly improved. Dont use WP-Cache, but rather WP-Super-Cache or Hyper cache, both are excellent. Hyper cache is easier to install and disrupts existing wordpress sites less. Akismet Antispam This antispam plugin word wonders for spammers trying to post rubbish in your comments section. You will need to get a Wordpress API key – very simple, its free and insert into the settings of the Akismet plugin in wordpress. Dont worry, you can do all this via the Wordpress Admin panel. Wordpress Database Backup A simple plugin that backs up your valuable website. Once installed, you can backup your websites database and download it via FTP from an RSAWEB Web Hosting or get it emailed to an address (not always guaranteed to work due to the large potential size) actually a backup happens whenever you do anything major. Its always better to be safe. All in One SEO Pack This enables your website to have proper ‘Title’ tags – this makes Google like your site more, its more descriptive (see the blue bar at the top of the window? Thats the ‘title bar’) and its essential to have good Search Engine Optimisation. Subscribe to comments Also a definite for websites/blogs that want to allow comments on articles. This allows a user to leave a comment and get notified of a reply. Eliminating the need for them to return to check the page to see if someone has replied. A definite must. Conclusion We regularly use these plugins and there are many different variants of some of these plugins. They will greatly improve your ability to manage your wordpress site and make it more appealing to the end user. All the plugins above can be installed directly from the Wordpress Admin interface by going to ‘Plugins’ and ‘Add New’ and then searching for the name as they appear above. How is your wordpress experience is going, post a comment about it and which plugins you like. What other plugins do you want to see mentioned in this list? For Wordpress Web Hosting check us out. Related Stories Easy ways to make your wordpress site look world class with themes How to setup your first website using wordpress Wordpress Tutorial Series – making the most of your website Our website evolves Have you seen our new Data Centre? Take the tour Pimp your wordpress website with plugins ]]> Mon, 19 Oct 2009 10:00:00 +0200 http://www.robgilmour.com/items/view/2461/pimp-your-wordpress-website-with-plugins http://www.robgilmour.com/items/view/2430/easy-ways-to-make-your-wordpress-site-look-world-class-with-themes Themes allow you to easily extend your wordpress based website or blog and make it look good. The advantages of using a prebuilt theme are numberous. Some of the major factors, being time and cost. Choose a theme, upload it, tweak it a bit and you’re ready to roll. Theme providers like Woothemes and OboxDesign allow you download prebuilt themes at a superlow cost and they even allow you to reuse them. Doing design for a traditional website can cost you thousands, but using a prebuilt theme will either cost you nothing or for the more sexier themes anything from $30-$100. The three themes below are examples of wordpress templates. Before choosing a theme, key points to consider: Layout – people are using fairly standard layouts to navigating the web, look at the templates, they work. Dont go for anything outlandish, your users wont wont be able to navigate your site Flash – websites built exclusively in flash are a disaster. Google and Bing will never find you. What the point of building a site and nobody can find you? Thats like having a postal address with no post code. Clutter – dont load every wordpress widget you can find, make sure the menu structure works nicely, only ones that are essential. Once you have chosen a custom template and are ready to get cracking: Get your theme (pay or not) and download it to your computer. It usually comes as a zip file (thats fine) Login to your Wordpress Admin Go to “Appearance” and “Add new themes” (red marker 1) Click the ‘Upload’ button (marker 2) Click ‘Browse’  and find your theme file (where you downloaded it to) Click ‘Install Now’ If you are asked, please enter the FTP connection info and the hostname is your websites name eg. http://www.blognow.co.za (your FTP account details that came with your hosting account – For RSAWEB Customers –> you can get them from the webhosting section in the MyRSAWEB Control Panel) It may take 2-3 minutes to complete. Then click ‘Activate’ Your theme is now installed! Check it out by going to your website. The http://www.Blognow.co.za demo looks like this: Go and test our the new theme, add some content! Look out for the next in the series of the “RSAWEB Wordpress Tutorial Series 101” – you can follow us on Twitter or signup to receive emails when a new release is announced Related Stories How to setup your first website using wordpress Wordpress Tutorial Series – making the most of your website Online convenience for tax payers Your home page is valuable Have you seen our new Data Centre? Take the tour Easy ways to make your wordpress site look world class with themes ]]> Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:00:00 +0200 http://www.robgilmour.com/items/view/2430/easy-ways-to-make-your-wordpress-site-look-world-class-with-themes http://www.robgilmour.com/items/view/2423/how-to-setup-your-first-website-using-wordpress Creating your first website or blog using Wordpress can be quite a daunting process. Most people have in the past chosen to fully outsource their website and most probably still need to. Websites have evolved and many more people are launching their own personal and business blogs. Wordpress is one of the most widely used blogging tools that can be installed on your web hosting very easily using the Wordpress auto-installer we have developed in our MyRSAWeb control panel. Worpress while primarily being blogging software can be used to build far more than a standard blog, we often see our clients hosting increadibly elaborate websites built on Wordpress. The Content Management System at the core of the software allows you to easily update website content and embed rich media like videos and photo’s easily via a web interface. You can install wordpress manually yourself or  you can signup for a business web hosting with RSAWEB and install wordpress automatically from the MyRSAWEB control panel. This makes creating your site ultra simple without having to FTP or manually edit settings in random files. For the inexperienced user, we recommend this option to get you started. How to install Wordpress with RSAWEB: Order a Linux Business Hosting Wait for the confirmation email from RSAWEB Login to the http://www.myrsaweb.co.za control panel Go to “Webhosting Services” and click on your new website Click ‘Wordpress’, fill in the details and click ‘Install’ Your site should be up and running! Go and check it out http://www.yoursitename.co.za – dont worry it probably wont look like much yet, you havent entered any content. Now go to http://www.yoursitename.co.za/wp-admin/ and login. You will see the control panel (like below) Create some new ‘Posts’ and ‘Pages’ and see how it looks on your site. Thats it! You now have a wordpress website up and running! You will probably not be happy with the look of the site as its the basic Wordpress default template. Wordpress can be themed and skinned to your hearts content to get your website to look the way you want it. The next article in this series will tackle the design aspects of Wordpress and help you make your website look amazing without the need for advanced design skills! Manual Wordpress Install Installing Wordpress manually can be a challenge and should only be attempted by those with a understanding of basic web development. If you want to do attempt the manual install yourself  this article will help. Related Stories Wordpress Tutorial Series – making the most of your website Online convenience for tax payers Your home page is valuable Getting the most out of virtualisation & dedicated servers Have you seen our new Data Centre? Take the tour How to setup your first website using wordpress ]]> Wed, 14 Oct 2009 13:23:00 +0200 http://www.robgilmour.com/items/view/2423/how-to-setup-your-first-website-using-wordpress http://www.robgilmour.com/items/view/2412/wordpress-tutorial-series-making-your-website-go-round Wordpress is an easy to use website management system. It also happens to be one of the most popular blogging platforms available. Over the next few weeks we will discuss wordpress and post our thoughts and advice for getting the most out of wordpress on a budget. Topics include: Setting up your site/blog Design – easy ways to make your site look amazing with themes Plugins – plugins we recommend and how they can help you Optimising Wordpress – make sure your wordpress is giving customers a great experience Wordpress Security – securing your site Make a success out of your website This series should put you on the right path to building a successful website and possibly even a sustainable business. Wordpress isnt for everyone, RSAWEB actually uses an alternative called Joomla for our main site because it gives us more fine control for what we want to use it for, but our blog site is on Wordpress. That said its an awesome tool and always worth using. Please let us know if you would like to see any further topics and subscribe to our twitter feed at http://twitter.com/RSAWEB to receive updates about any new posts. Click on the ‘Get Updates’ and ‘Get Tweets’ icons on the right to follow this series. Related Stories Online convenience for tax payers Does online advertising work for your business Our website evolves Your home page is valuable Have you seen our new Data Centre? Take the tour Wordpress Tutorial Series – making your website go roundShare this on FacebookTweet This!Add this to Google BookmarksShare this on del.icio.usShare this on LinkedinStumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUponShare this on FriendFeed ]]> Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:43:00 +0200 http://www.robgilmour.com/items/view/2412/wordpress-tutorial-series-making-your-website-go-round