I just finished my latest site, Triumphcollectors.com. This WordPress 2.5 site uses PHPBay Pro, an excellent Wordpress plugin that turns a basic blog into an Ebay reseller. In this case, the site provides targeted keyword content on the Icon British sports cars from Triumph Motor Corporation.

The theme framework was selected from themes.wordpress.com because it was a basic two column theme with a plain header and menu bar. The objective was to customize the theme as much as possible as an exercise towards building my own multilevel theme I’m starting to build now. Also since this was my first experience with PHPbay Pro I did not want to go too crazy with a complicated theme.

I was able to easily add the customized features to the theme, such as a rotating header image, splitting the header to show the Union Jack, having separately designed sidebars appear within select categories. This was key because the site required different Amazon reseller ads for each topic. Now the articles in the Triumph Spitfire category are matched with relevant ads. I also rewrote most of the CSS, changed the formating some and customized the background images as well as the other framework images.

Installing PHPbay Pro was a breeze. This $50 plugin is worth every penny. The license is for a single user, but you can put it on as many sites as you own. There are many documents and videos explaining how to use the plugin. Actually I found it very intuitive and only had to refer the PDF manual a couple of times. In fact I hate Ebay and have not been to the site in a few years. So I can image how quickly someone could set this up if they were more acclimated to Ebay and how the categories are set up and such.

The site also features my normal roster of recommended WordPress plugins.

I installed BBPress, but never fully implemented it. I quickly realized the previous theme would not work, plus I’ve been getting into magazine style themes lately and was looking for an excuse to get deeper into custom fields, excerpt construction and magazine style layouts.

I found an excellent theme called Arthemia 1.0 by Michael Jubel. This theme fit my site perfectly, and was free, which is always good. I’ve just about got it setup, and have added several custom field functions and added my flickr stream without incident. The new layout allowed me to add other income producing features such as a 468×60 Commission Junction banner, and an amazon affiliate block.

I had to drop BBPress integration to finish editing my photos and putting a book together on my recent adventure journey to Belize. Once I get back to it I’ll build the forum. The site is live and getting a good response so far. I highly recommend this them. I was able to configure it over a couple of weekend mornings. The code is solid, and the instructions are well documented.

Definitions

One-Way Links: When a website links to you but you don’t link to them. One-way links are the most valuable as they carry more “link juice” weight in terms of Google Ranking.

Reciprocal Links: Links shared between sites. A logical link between two sites retains value. A link from sites that share not common interests carries the least weight.

How to Build High Quality Links:

Create Authoritative Content

Creating valuable, helpful content is the first step to getting other sites to link to your site.  If a webmaster or blogger finds information of value to their users then they might place a link to your site on theirs.

Ask for Links

Find web sites that have complimentary content to yours and email them with a link request. For example, a poker site might find your information of value to their users. This exchange will require a reciprocal link exchange.

Join Social Networks

Stumbleupon.com is a good resource for meeting like minded people that are interested in your product or service. As you make “friends” they will “stumble” your content which helps to build traffic. “Stumble” means that they post a recommendation on their Stumbleupon account and others see it and check it out.

Often people on Stumbleupon have sites they want to promote. I’ve gotten some good links to my travel site, Croatiatravelblog.com, using this method.

Article Marketing

There are Over 100 article publishing sites that accept articles from expert writers and post them either for readers or other publishers to post them on their websites. The terms are that the author retains links back to his site.

If you submit an article that gets picked up 50 times by different publishers, then that creates 50 highly valuable one-way links to your site. Over time this can pay off.

You can not use the same articles that you use on your site. This would create duplicate content, which Google hates. Doing this risks your main site. It’s much better to get a writer to produce content strictly for article marketing.

There are services that will submit your articles to all of the publishers for you. I have not tested these yet, so I can’t offer any confirmed successes from using them.

http://www.articlemarketer.com is a good example of these services.

Buying Links

There are webmaster that sell links and companies that will place links on sites for a fee.

http://www.textlinkads.com is one of the largest.

I’m not a big fan of this method because links have gotten very expensive. As much as $40 per month for one link. In my opinion there are other ways to spend money for more effective results.

Forums and Social Book Marking Sites

Find forums that have topics on your niche and post in them with a link back to your site. Most use “No-Follow” links which means they purposely eliminate the search bots from treating the link as a legitimate resource. However, forums can attract visitors who might link to you from their blogs.

Social bookmarking sites enable a blog owner to post updates to their blog for others to see. This requires having a blog configured site, and can be quite effective if done correctly.

Wow, that’s a lot of stuff!

Getting backlinks is the only goal a website owner should have. A successful linking campaign will get focused traffic that should translate into conversions and sales.

To there requires diligence in producing compelling content, technological knowhow in building the site in a framework that complies with what Google likes, and reaching out to other sites in order to build inbound links.

The admin showed the orders were being processed, so the data was hitting the database. I had no where to go, and was looking at either systematically going through each template file and each database table to see if I could find any evidence of what was causing the errors.

The more I thought about doing this the reality of the tedious hours it would take to just find it began to sink in. I did research and found other developers that had encountered this issue, but none seemed to offer any clear path that would fix my issue. Basically they were even more lost than I was on the blank page horror.

Finally I found the Zen Cart Error-Logging Utility. This little app saved the day and boosted my confidence for future Zen Cart installs. First, the download page explains that the blank page effect is the result of PHP syntax errors. This can happen by tinkering around in the template files and mistyping an operator. Ok, that sounded good. However, I had purposely set my customizations from the admin just for this reason.

Apparently Zen Cart version 1.3.8 has this bug. It’s recommended to upgrade to 1.3.8a, which I had already done. I was still getting the error.

I proceeded to download and install the Debugging Tool per their instructions.

I ran the transaction again and returned this error in the log file

I replaced these files and thought I got it working until the confirmation page came up blank. After more research I discovered that functions_general.php is not the correct file to swap, it’s english.php in the languages file. At this point I just uploaded the whole damn languages folder from a fresh download of Zen Cart 1.3.8a. Boom! it all worked. It tested and retested with no errors.

If you run into this issue, or any other Zen Cart weirdness, please download this file. It will save tons of time and frustration, when you need to squash little pain-in-the-ass bugs like this.

I created the first version of Broadcastsolutions.com, a broadcast video pre-owned equipment reseller,  in 1995. It was one of the first sites I built. When the owners Rick and Teresa contacted me about revamping the site a couple of months ago, I was astonished to see that they were still using the old site, frames and all.

Even though the old site was working for them, it desperately needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. the current site could not display images of the equipment they were selling, the admin was clunky, and they were not ranking for any of their primary keywords. I won’t even go into the whole thing with frames. Hey! it was 1995, frames were in back then.

This made it a perfect fit for my Wordpress and Zen-Cart combination. They loved the idea and the samples I showed from nexugen.com and georgetemerson.com. The blog was pretty standard issue, it only required a custom homepage. I did create a custom header with a nice CSS navigation bar that maximizes their keyword text in header, and is very user friendly.

I made strong use of the All-In-One-SEO wordpress plugin to set the site up for what will hopefully be a quick rise for their primary keyword rankings. With a domain that is over 10 years old, I have to think that they can get ranked once some basic optimizing techniques are applied. In this case I’ve got them on a course of content creation that should stock their blog with quality content in just a few months.

The store required much more customization because they don’t directly take orders from the site. The requirement was for a “catalog” only interface that would mail equipment requests, which would be followed up and transacted over the phone between Rick or Teresa and the client.

I was able to accomplish most of this through the standard Zen Cart admin. The rest was done through gentle tweeks to the core code. Zen Cart can be very finicky, I’ve come to learn, so I’m not a fan of tinkering too much under hood except when there is no other choice. Ultimately I turned off the all of the payment and shipping module admin settings, leaving only the Check/Money order function live.

In the individual product listing I tried various combinations of the shipping options until I found one that removed the shipping feature by configuring the product “Virtual” which removed the shipping options and form inputs for shipping address information.

The result is that their specific needs are met, yet if they want to start taking online payments in the future, we can transition to that method quickly and efficiently.

It was on the development of Zen Cart for this store that I experienced the nightmare “Blank Zen Cart Checkout Page” error for the first time. I’ve explained how I dealt with it another post. If you are attempting custom Zen Cart work, I highly suggest reading it.

The entire project took about 6 weeks to complete. The site in now officially launched with over 200 products, featuring pictures, blog articles, and no frames.

]]> http://www.brackettdesign.com/broadcastsolutionscom/feed/ http://www.brackettdesign.com/beat-writers-block-hire-a-writer/ http://www.brackettdesign.com/beat-writers-block-hire-a-writer/#comments Wed, 16 Apr 2008 01:35:57 +0000 John Brackett http://www.brackettdesign.com/?p=37 I’ll be writing about article marketing often as it as safe and proven method for acquiring backlinks and building Page Rank (PR). Submitting articles to the major article directories is an excellent way to build traffic to your site. First it does not get any more “White Hat”, which Google just loves. Second, you can get others to market your content for free simply because they are too lazy to create their own. Third, it builds credibility for you as an authority for your product or service.

This all sounds great right? Yes, right up to point of sitting down to write your first article. Then it comes back, the flashback to your Freshmen year in high school during finals when you had to write that Essay on post modern industrialization in the 19th century. You freeze, your finger wont’ work and your mind, normally filled with ideas, is frozen solid. What do you do?  Hire a writer.

I’ve built several sites that hosted content solely produced by freelance authors. I’ve found it a wonderful way to ensure quality content, well written material that is relatively typo free, and thoughtfully written on the topic at hand. My main concern was finding writers that understand the subject matter well enough to write articles of value. After the using this method for project ranging from skin care, to entertainment to personal finance. I have to say that it’s pretty easy to get informed writers on a wide range of subjects.

The most important aspect from a designer and SEO standpoint is that by hiring several writers for a project I get a variety of writing styles that add flavor to a site, and the delivery of finished content is lightning fast. I recently built a financial site for SEO arbitrage that included almost 90 articles. I hired 5 writers and assigned them as many topics as they could handle. I then set the due date and fired the starting pistol. Within a week I had a finished site, ready to deliver to the client.

The beauty was that I was able to focus on design and coding while they took care of the content. This made the entire project fast and fun. Getting their feedback and take on what is normally boring subject matter added to the enjoyment of the project, which ultimately made for a better product.

I’ve had great success getting writers from CraigsList.com. I vet them through their responses, with great success so for. If someone sends a resume I immediately delete it. I always pick writers that create short and entertaining intro email, along with links to their writing samples. I figure it they work then they are too busy to tell me their life story.

The rate I pay can vary. Normally between $15 and $20 per each 500-750 article. this includes typo corrections. for really big project I’ll hire and editor to double check and correct their work. I’m a big believer in a second set of eyes on all aspects of my web design projects.

Here’s the SEO part. often I’ll  duplicate the topics list to two writers. Once list will be used for the site while other will be used for marketing articles. This way my keyword structure stays focused, all while keeping the content original.

At this point I’ve built a good stable of writers who I can rely on to get assignment done in a timely and correct manner. I can not recommend this technique enough. Find a great writer or two and see what I mean.

]]> http://www.brackettdesign.com/beat-writers-block-hire-a-writer/feed/ http://www.brackettdesign.com/protect-your-typography-with-em/ http://www.brackettdesign.com/protect-your-typography-with-em/#comments Sat, 12 Apr 2008 13:37:59 +0000 John Brackett http://www.brackettdesign.com/?p=45 The main reason is to accommodate varying screen resolutions and protect your site from going haywire on different monitors. First, IE6 and IE7will not allow users to resize text that has been sized in pixels. Face it, your readers will need to resize text at some point for a whole host of reasons. They could have bad eyesight, or they could be using a super hi-rez laptop monitor, or they might be be giving a presentation.

My transition to EM’s from Pixels has been one of experimenting to learn the methods so I can code in EM’s with the same flow that I use with Pixels. I’m at the point now where it’s easier to code in EM’s because I know what the result will be and I feel more in control of the typography.

EM is taken from the print world. Typographers use it as a unit of measurement for horizontal spacing. It’s a relative unit of measure: 1em is a distance equal to the text size. For example, in a 10px type, an em is 10 pixels, in 16 pixel type it is 16em. Basically 1 em of padding is equal to the text size. Confused? Don’t worry about it. Let’s code.

Let’s code for EM:

First. let’s set the stage with a browser set to “medium” text size. This makes the default pixel size for the page 16px. Now let’s reduce the overall size of the text by 10% by setting the font-size in the CSS to 62.5%. This makes the corresponding font size 10px.

16 x .625 = 10

Now that we have a round number we can see how to equate EM’s with Pixels for this exercise.

16px = 1.6em
8px = .8em
10px = 1em

Don’t worry about all this math. I hate math. What is simply illustrates is a way to change your thought patterns from Pixels to EM by using a multiple of 10 as a reference.

What about H tags?

This is where I love EM. As you might already know, H tags are key to good SEO discipline. The bots love seeing a page with a correct title tag structure:

H1 followed by H2 followed by H3 followed by H4 … and so on.

This issue is that creatively we often need to have different sized title tags. but who wants to head a page with an H4 tag? No me. Using EM, we can easily control the screen size of the font while keeping the SEO hierarchy we are looking for.

Using our medium text setting above, the default size for our font is 10px.


H1 {font-size: 2em} /*pixel equivalent- 20px */

H3 {font-size: 1.5em} /*pixel equivalent- 15px */

H4 {font-size: .9em} /*pixel equivalent- 9px */

How about Changing the body text?

Since we’ve set the overall body text at 10px, the body text will default to 10px. But what if you want the text to be 12px? That’s easy enough.

Change the global “p” style or a defined style to 1.2 em

12/ 10 = 1.2em

p {font-size: 1.2em}

or

.maintext p {font-size:1.2em;}

The same rules apply to List values (UL, LI tags), and even table cells, But don’t use tables, CSS is so much better!

Description: George is a talented jazz pianist that wanted a site to promote and sell his albums and tickets to his show. With his long list of contacts in the world of Jazz, George wanted to build a comprehensive jazz site to showcase and reflect his expertise and interest in the world of jazz. This would include interviews, music, and video posts. To achieve this I decided to use the Structure WordPress Theme by Justin Tadlock. Just is doing some really innovative development with WordPress themes, so I had been wanting to use one to learn his methods.

I considered WP-Ecommerce for the store portion of this site, but once I got into I realized it is a very flawed product. It’s built in tables, which is always horrible, and there is no easy way to set it up for a SSL (encrypted connection). I used Zen Cart which actually ended up being a far better choice.

In the end the client was very please with what I created for him. The site seems to fit his objectives and provides the content management features he needed, in an format that easy to maintain.

Technology: WordPress, Zen Cart

Description: WordPress site designed at an SEO optimized article site. I used the core framework of WordPress 2.5 to manage the content of over 80 long-tail keyword targeted articles. The normal blog features such as comments, sidebar components, and category methods have been altered or removed in order to keep this site lean and mean and direct the readers to focused content. I added an interesting method to specify search keywords in the advertising block at the top of the content pages.

The homepage for this site is customized and features a snazzy flash header.

Description: Croatiatravelblog.com is travel information site based on my own adventures traveling throughout Croatia in 2006.

The site is build on Word Press and utilizes several revolutionary Word Press Plugins that extend the site from a normal blog to a sophisticated Content Management System. One of the best features is the Flickr Album that enables the site to showcase and rotate images from my Flickr account. Natural search optimization is promoted through various means including relevant articles, keywords and link trading with other Croatia related sites.

Technology: Wordpress (used as CMS). Various Word Press Plugins.