So with that understanding, if you want to only show a particular piece of content on the homepage of your WordPress and NOT have this content appear on any other page you can use the following snippet of code…

<?php

if (is_home()) { ;?>

<a href=”">Your link here</a>

<?php } ?>

Another option to code content to only show in the front page of your WordPress website is to code using the following snippet of code…

<?php

if (is_front_page()) { ;?>

<a href=”">Your link here</a>

<?php } ?>

Lastly, if you have content that you only want to show on a certain page (for example the “About” page) then you can use this code snippet…

<?php

if (is_page(‘about’)) { ;?>

<a href=”">Your link here</a>

<?php } ?>

Note: keep in mind that the above mentioned code snippets are useable with the standard WordPress functionality.  You’ll need to test to see if they work with your customized WordPress theme to ensure that they work.

Now you can hide certain content on your WordPress website depending on what and where you want to hide it!

Luc Arnold

Because of this, the Website Experts thought it was high time that we started to support and help the small business owners out there using these new technologies who are looking for some help installing, setting up and integrating which is why we are planning to release a pricing guide shortly that covers these small but important services.  Stay tuned in the coming weeks as we will be sending out an email campaign about this and if you haven’t downloaded our current pricing guide then please do so by clicking here!

Happy website building in the meantime!

Luc Arnold

This is where the idea of staging website changes comes in and it can allow you to test and test again before you deploy changes to your production or “live” website.  Pretty cool, right?  If you’re website runs using a database then you’ll need to create a backup copy first of the database for your staging environment.

1. Backup your website files including HTML, CSS and any other files you host on your website using an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) client and make a backup of your database if your site uses one.
2. Create a directory either locally in your website’s hosting or buy a domain name and web hosting and host it separately.  You may also want to add “no follow” conditions to the staged website as you might not want search engines to index the pages.  This is normally something to be concerned about if your website is a highly ranked site but you should be aware of it regardless.

After doing this you can stage the changes you make into your production website with ease and without frustration.

It also goes by other names like…

The white page of death – Not to be confused with windows “blue screen of death” the white page is simply all you’ll see as panic begins to set in, but relax all is not lost

The empty page – If you do a “view source” on the web page you’ll notice that the web page has absolutely no html source code

So if you are currently faced with this problem like I said, remain calm and don’t do anything irrational like deleting your database.  Here are a few places where the problem may exist…

WordPress Theme – The easiest fix that I personally know of is simply deleting the WordPress theme your site uses when you are logged in with an FTP client (make sure you’ve done your backups before doing this) and upload a new copy to your ‘wp-content/’ directory.

WordPress Site Files – The next thing to do is to check your WordPress files, if you think that they may be the cause of the problem then you can either downgrade or rollback the version of WordPress you are using or delete and replace the site files (again making sure you backup your site’s files before doing this).

If you happen to have any problems after looking at these two areas of your WordPress website then the next step may involve seeking professional help as this may be a more serious problem.

What you probably didn’t know is that you can use the flush method to clear the buffer when your web page loads because after all slower web page loading times mean fewer visitors and a higher bounce rate. It’s all about keeping those “fans in the stands” when you are developing websites for human consumption.

Using the flush() method

It’s a relatively simple piece of code to use…

1. Simply locate the head section of your website (Usually noted by the and HTML tags)
2. Place the following code after the end of the < head > HTML tag…

      ... <!-- css, js -->
    </head>
    <?php flush(); ?>

    <body>
      ... <!-- content goes here!-->

1. Its Rock N’ Roll time! Now your web pages will flush every time during a page load

I hope that you found this useful for your website and speeding up the performance on your PHP website.

So what kind of things can you improve with feedback?

When you understand the problems that your customers face with your website or software you can begin to understand how you can make improvements to your website or software.  That is the true beauty of feedback analytics.  Here are a few scenarios that feedback analytics can give you greater depth and insight into…

Having two or multiple versions of a website – Gaining insight into what your customers like and don’t like about your website when you are getting ready to make a change to your website can allow you to make a decision based on actual information allowing you to better predict the outcome.

Find out why customers are abandoning their shopping carts – Wouldn’t it be nice if your customers could tell you why they left your ecommerce website when they were checking out?  Feedback analytics can give you the power to ask the question “Why?” and give your customers a voice.

If you are looking to gain further insight into why and how people do what they do on your website then feedback analytics can take over where web analytics ends.  The real difference is that feedback analytics give true insight into why people did what they did.  Web analytics can accomplish some of this but feedback analytics can provide more insight into those unanswered questions.

Some ecommerce website owners prefer a longer checkout process while others prefer a quick one page checkout.  To some degree, it is sometimes more of a personal preference especially when the choice is not based on statistics to back up the decision.  With that being said, it’s important to remember that running an ecommerce website means that you need to think about your customers and how they are going to use the website, how do you want them to checkout and how do you want to allow them to perform this process.

Advantages of the one page checkout

The “all-in-one” solution – Just as it sounds a one page checkout is just that.  It allows you to checkout in one page (well technically 2 pages because once you’ve submitted sometimes a “thank you” page is generated but you get the point).  This is the selling point behind a one page checkout and it’s a great solution.

Sometimes the number of clicks a user must make to become a customer of yours causes them to drop off more than simply having the checkout process in one step however this isn’t always the case.  In the case of multi page checkouts, one common way to analyze the problem of people dropping off can be done using “sales funnel visualization” which can tell you a lot about where people are dropping off, where they entered the sales funnel and point you to possible reasons why they left without checking out of your ecommerce site.

Disadvantages of the one page checkout

The big guys don’t use it - Many fortune 500 online retailers don’t use the one page checkout process on their website.  People seem to follow businesses that are successful so just because the one step checkout option is available people may choose to follow the success of online retailers over trying something different.

There is no winning formula – When it comes to the checkout process on your ecommerce website there is no winning formula other then the formula that works for you.  Some ecommerce websites do better with a 3 step checkout and others perform better with just a single step checkout process.  In order to find what works best for your ecommerce website you need to plan, test, review and analyze the results and then do it all over again with a new test case.  The thing of it is that eventually you are going to find what works best for you.

If you are looking at your ecommerce website thinking “where do I start?” just remember to test and you may find that a one page checkout works just fine for you and if it doesn’t at least you know and in the meantime keep testing until you find your “checkout process mojo!”.

The number one thing that I hear when someone is looking to have a website developed for their business is that it they have to be able to make changes to it themselves which is one thing that implementing a content management system has going for it.

Depending on the content management system that you choose you can edit a number of things that make up the web pages in your website from the page title, meta tags, the URL path and the content of the page just to name a few areas without ever needing to touch the HTML source code of a web page.  Pretty cool indeed!

Some of the best vendors for content management systems

A number of web design and development firms have developed their own content management software to keep you dependent on them to make changes.  This goes against what a CMS (Content Management System) is supposed to for its users… make it easier to edit web pages.  So let me fill you in on a number of content management systems (CMS) that allow you to create and manage a website.

WordPress – This is one of the most heavily downloaded, used and modified content management systems in the world.  It is built using a combination of PHP and mySQL so you’ll need a Linux/Unix based hosting solution to run this on your website but since almost ever web hosting provider uses this it makes the technology behind it highly accessible and easy to use.  The other thing that makes WordPress a great option to run your website on is that there is an endless amount of plug-ins that independent web developers have built for community use (in other words they’re free) that help you get around common problems faced today by website owners, designers and developers and countless other people.  Check out WordPress by clicking here!

Drupal – Another heavily used content management solution that relies on its developer community.  Again it’s written using a blend of PHP and mySQL and is a good alternative to WordPress.  Click here for more information about this CMS solution

Joomla! – This CMS deserves a mention because it’s been around for a while, it has a good following of users and plenty of website owners use it every day to run their websites.  Click here to check it out!

Light CMS – Light CMS is a little bit different kind of content management system in part because there is a licensing fee to use it.  Light CMS has the added comfort of not needing you to do any upgrades on the software because they (Light CMS) offer this included in the price of having a website with them.  It’s a great solution for those of you that don’t want to tinker around with your website to keep on upgrading it… it might be worth a shot to try it out!

If you are looking to run a website and even if you don’t hire us for your next project consider the above options when you think about having your own website.  There are a lot of options to have your own website and some might say a few too many but if you stick to a few key points then you can have an awesome website too!

Add your business listing to Google Local Business Center

I’ve recently discussed adding your business listing to Google’s new Local Business Center.  If you haven’t had a chance to read up about it then click here and read the article.  It allows for a bunch of great features including being able to add your business hours, coupons for people interested in your business to use and most importantly your own listing available on Google Maps.  It’s a very good thing since there seems to be a movement towards local search.  Global search is great but people want to use the internet to find what’s around them quickly and easily and Google is helping you do this.  Yahoo! has also launched its own local search component on the Yahoo! search engine.

Create a sitemap for your website

Creating a sitemap won’t only help you get onto Google; it will also help you get onto other search engines.  Having a sitemap as a part of your website helps the bots also known as “spiders” or “crawlers” better index your website.

Add your website and sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools

The second thing that you can do to add your business to Google is what is known as submitting your website.  The great thing is that you can tell Google to go look for your website and you can even give it your sitemap if you’ve got one so that Google can crawl through your website and index it faster allowing you to get your business on Google.

Using these tools and best practices can help you gain visibility on Google.  Of course if you have the money to do so then using Google Adwords can also help you gain further exposure but I thought I would stick to the free ways of getting on Google.

Now go get your business on Google!

Luc

Website Change Logs

The concept of a “Change Log” is not a new thing and in fact it can be used on a project like a website and software development to document changes to a project and when you go back and look at any site analytics you are collecting and audit the changes made versus the health of your website you can begin to make insights into changes that had positive effects and also negative effects.

Change logs are also a great way to track work that web designers, programmers, developers and other web professionals are doing on your website because it allows you to go back in time and really see what changes may have lead to an issue you saw on your website. Otherwise it can be like hunting for a needle in a haystack.

A non-traditional take on a website change log

Google Analytics recently added the ability to add annotations to your web analytics. Annotations are just notes that you leave in Google Analytics and you can use them for anything. In this case we are using them as a pseudo website change log but they’ve got plenty of other excellent uses.

Creating an annotation in Google Analytics is as easy as clicking “Create new annotation”, choosing the date you want the annotation to get appended to and of course your notes for the website change that you just made.

When you start to analyze the changes you are making to your website you can really begin to understand just exactly how what you do online has an impact on how people shop, find information, use resources or whatever they do on your website.