Reverb Studios Blog » Website Optimization Tips

Mobile Detection & Optimization

Leon — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 09:00:08 +0000

As a kind of follow on from a recent article of mine re Optimising your Website for iPhone viewing, I’d like to expand on a few points and talk about general optimisation for Mobile phones and how to detect which Browser or User Agent your site visitors might be using.

I’ve recently added some detection code to my main (Non WordPress) site that basically looks to see which user agent or mobile phone platform my visitors are using and if it’s a non-iPhone phone then they get redirected to my other site ReverbStudios.Mobi, a site I built specifically to render fast and well on most mobile browsers. If they are not on a phone and at a normal PC or Mac then they just get to see the main site ReverbStudios.ie

As far as building an optimised site for mobiles is concerned, here’s my best advice:

Have very few, if any, Images and Scripts,
Make any images you really do need to use smaller than 200px wide max,
Specify the dimensions of all images used,
Only include basic content such as an outline of services and contact details,
Use “Callto:” links on any phone numbers you include so people can click the number to initiate a call,
Add links to your main site or social networking precences for users with smartphones.

I use the WP-Touch plugin for my WordPress blog to allow Smartphone users to choose either a normal view of the site or a simplified version. The plugin handles detection and design.

Here’s the code I’ve used on my main, static site to detect people’s browsers, it’s courtesy of Richard Shepherd but with a few changes with help from Justin Knecht.

Mobile Detection.txt

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Speed Up Your Website for Google

Leon — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:00:52 +0000

Since Google and other search engines take the size and download speed (among many other factors) of your site into account when deciding where to rank you in results, it makes sense to make sure it’s fast! It will also give your impatient visitors a much better experience. Here’s a few things you should consider doing:

Make sure your hsoting server is decent/fast.
Build your site with CSS/DIV’s rather than with Tables.
Be efficient, tidy and semantic with your HTML and CSS code.
Validate your code.
Compress all images as much as possible.
Avoid Flash/Video/Audio files embedded on the home page.
Don’t use to0 many unnecessary fancy scripts or widgets just to show off, eg – Facebook, Live Chat, Google Gadgets, etc…
Merge your external CSS files into one (the less external file calling the better).
Merge your scripts files into one (as above).
Place script calls at the footer of your page so they load last – WordPress Plugin.

Compressing via Gzip:

I’ve just done this belatedly for both my main static site and my WordPress blog. To turn on Gzip for a static PHP page for example, I’ve used this code:

Your server and the visitors browser both need to support compression for the above command to work. Test whether your site is compressed or not here:

www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php

For my wordpress blog I’ve used the WP HTTP Compression plugin. There are a few excellent Caching plugins for WordPress such as WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache which both handle compression too but I found both of them a bit over the top and they played havoc with my auto publishing to Twitter and Facebook.

Try this website page speed tester to see where you’re at now!

www.iwebtool.com/speed_test

Leon.

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Optimise Your Site for iPhone – VERY Simply!

Leon — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 22:38:21 +0000

Here’s a quick method of fixing some common problems with your site that might cause it to display weirdly in the now ubiquitous iPhone/iPod devices. My own lovingly crafted main site and blog design were nearly fine on the iPhone but there was strange resizing of both the background image and some of the navigation links & text. The background image is central to my design so I had to do something!

For WordPress powered sites and blogs there are many great plugins to automatically render a stripped down version of the site but I really wanted my design to be visible. I found out that the iPhone Safari browser automatically resizes elements on a web page including text and background images so to combat this simply add the following to your body tag:

-webkit-background-size: 2000px 1024px; (The exact size of my background image in this case)
-webkit-text-size-adjust: none; (Stops the iPhone from resizing any text on a page)

“webkit” is specific to the Safari browser so adding this code will not mess up anything in other PC based browsers.

You could take this a stage further and try to detect iPhone visitors with the following code and give them an iPhone specific stylesheet and viewport:

This goes in your section:

if (ereg(‘iPhone’,$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
$iphone = 1;
}
elseif (ereg(‘iPod’,$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
$iphone = 1;
}
else {
$iphone = 0;
}
?>

Leon.

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Website Effectiveness

Leon — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:06:42 +0000

Well done on having a website for your business but is it doing what it should, ie generating hits and sales leads? Here’s a few things you should really be doing to measure and improve your website’s effectiveness if you feel its not doing anything for you:

SEO

Are you sure your site has been properly optimised to do as well as it possibly can in search results. Have you got the right keywords, url and relative content? Here’s some more info on SEO.

Call to Action

You need to decide what the most important part/page of your site is and make sure its easily accessible. That might mean putting a call to action button or link in a prominent place so visitors are left in no doubt about what to do or where to go to enquire or buy your products.

Analytics

You should have some decent system of checking your website stats to see how many visits you are getting, at what times, for how long, what pages viewed, what keywords used, etc.. I use Google Analytics for this. It’s free and fairly comprehensive.

Refferal URL

You should have some kind of form on your site with a question that asks people where they came from or how they found your site. Also, if someone rings, get into the habit of asking them how they found your number.

Internet & Social Media Marketing

Once you’ve done all of the above you need to tell the world about your website and product/service and the best methods of doing that these days are the likes of Blogging, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and Online Advertising.

Website ineffectiveness can be caused by ignoring the above but it might also be a reflection on your product or market so don’t rule that out!

Leon.

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8 Web Apps for Businesses

Leon — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 16:25:46 +0000

I’d like to list some applications/software that I think is essential for any business that takes the web seriously as a marketing tool and sales lead generator. I will presume that all businesses have a web site first and foremost, if not, why not, it’s 2009 and we’re in a recessionary period folks – don’t you want sales!?

In no order of importance:

A Blog

Draw visitors and potential clients interested in your market sector to your site by installing a blog and giving them the info anf interaction they need.

Google Alerts

Find out straight away what others are saying about you or your business on the net and find out who is linking to your site.

Newsletter

Offer an incentive and capture customer data by offering an auto newsletter signup, then keep in touch with your database offering promotions and discounts from time to time etc..

Zoho Invoice/CRM

Manage your customers, invoices and sales leads professionally and effectively and setup discreet auto payment reminders via email.

RSS

Setup an RSS feed on your site so that people can subscribe to your latest news posts and keep in touch with your business.

Google Analytics

Every web site needs to have some kind of tracking system that tells you who visited your site, when, from where and why. Google analytics is the industry standard.

Social Networking

Sign up and actively use at least 1 or 2 social networking sites such as Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook., the idea being that you create and communicate with your own business network in the hope of generating some sales leads or partnerships.

Skype

A widely used multi part instant communication system offering real time text chat, audio and video phone calls and file transfers.

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Website Accessibility

Leon — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:57:38 +0000

Making your Website ‘Accessible’ means making it easy to navigate for all visitors and in particular visitors with disabilities such as Blindness and Mobility. Its an important consideration these days as more and more people use the internet.Here are some of the more obvious and simple things you can do to make your site more accessible:

Include ‘Alt’ descriptive text on all images that are not decorative, ie – graphic navigation or informational images.
Omit the ‘Alt’ text on images that are purely decorative only.
Use the ‘Title’ html attribute on all navigational links and images to describe the purpose of the link/image.
Avoid using fixed size text including pixels, points, etc if possible, instead use a relative font size such as ‘em’ or ‘%’. This allows visitors to set their own font size and easier read your content.
Use ‘Label’ and ‘ID’ attributes on Forms.
Choose design colors that offer good text contrast, ie – black text on a white background or white text on a black background.
Keep your navigation the same on each page if possible. Every page on the site should be reachable within 1 click from whatever page you’re on.
Avoid Flash animation, Pop-up windows or any unnecessary tricks.
Make sure all your written content is clear, concise and simple to understand.

Leon.

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Blog 1 Year Old!

Leon — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:32:23 +0000

Today, the Reverb Studios Blog is exactly one year old (heres my first post!) and its been a great year business wise for me. Whether the blog is responsible in some way or not I’m not sure but Blogging has been a great excercise for me in a lot of ways and its definetly brought more visitors to my site and increased my profile on the net. As of now, I’ve posted about 160 Articles in 13 different Categories and received about 180 comments from various visitors. I regularly get between 50 to 100 unique visits a day compared to about 5 to 20 this time last year!

Thanks to all Visitors and Contributors,

Leon.

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Google Analytics Services

Leon — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:55:53 +0000

I’ve been studying the more complicated aspects of the Google Analytics Website Statistical service recently and can now offer advanced help with instalation of this professional service for monitoring traffic to your Website or Blog.

I can add the Google Analytics tracking code on your website or blog and setup the following features:

Basic:

Your most visited pages
Referring sites traffic (who is linking to you)
The Keywords& Phrases that lead people to your site
Your visitors Browsers and Screen Resolutions
Your visitors Internet Speeds
Visitor Locations
Site Bounce Rate

Advanced:

Setup Goals and monitor visitors activity on the most important parts of your site
Setup Funnels to monitor paths taken through your site ie – Checkout process completion
Setup e-commerce values and visualize your click through rate, ie – total visitors versus visitors that buy from you.
Block your own website visits

I can either provide access to your own stats or provide detailed monthly email reports.

Using a statistical package like Google Analytics on your site is an essential process to better understand your visitor trends, how they find you and what they do while on your site. The statistics can give you invaluable information on how best to optimize your site and maximize its marketing impact.

Leon

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Web Site Mistakes

Leon — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:38:49 +0000

With more and more businesses finally moving with the times and getting themselves a website, I’d like to take the opportunity to point out a few common pitfalls to owning and running a site.

All to often, people pay a fortune for a site, get it up and then leave it there either not knowing what to do with it or not bothering to use it to its maximum potential. Also, people kind of expect the site to do the work and bring home the bacon! The amount of outdated sites out there both in terms of look and feel and age-old copyright notices is amazing.

Theres three main things you need to do when you have a site:

Promote it – simply having a site doesn’t mean people will visit it, you have to tell people about it by printing the address on your business cards etc, and submitting the site to search engines, directories and the like.
Update it – if people see, over the course of a year or two, that your site hasn’t changed a bit then it will reflect badly on you. You need to post regular news items, blog or change colors and layout once in a while to keep things fresh and let people know the site hasn’t been neglected. The search engines love sites that constantly get updated too.
Humanize it – websites can be a bit impersonal so try to write friendly welcoming content and add your picture someone on the home page. Also make sure you answer all communication from the site, especially emails, as soon as possible. Things like Blogs and Discussion Forums also create interaction with your customers/potential clients. All of this helps to prove that theres real people behind the site!

Leon.

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Website Marketing & SEO

Leon — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:55:19 +0000

Theres not much point in having a website unless people can find it and its bringing you business or busines leads at least. I constantly see websites or get re-design work for sites that have been built and neglected for years, with outdated design, content and copyright dates at the bottom!

Ideally websites should be built with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind. That is to say, while your designer is actually building or installing the site he should be thinking of how the site will do best in the search engines. After that a lot of work needs to be done either by you or the designer or some other expert to make sure the site gains a high profile and keeps it.

Heres a rundown of the Online Marketing services I offer:

FREE SEO Audit/Report on your site including:

Home page and Website Keyword Analysis
Title Analysis
Text Formatting
Content Relevance
Linking Strategy
Google Ranking
Alexa Ranking
Yahoo & Google Sitemaps
Error 404 Customisation
Website Statistical/Log Analysis
Competing Markets research
Code Analysis

Based on the findings above I can reccommend and implement solutions including the following:

Forum Content Generation
Blog Content Generation
RSS Feeds
Email Marketing
Pay per click Advertising strategies
Statistics setup

For more info or a FREE SEO Audit, please contact me.

Leon.

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Website Grader SEO Tool

Leon — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:57:54 +0000

Came accross www.websitegrader.com which is a free online tool/website for grading or providing a search engine optimization report for your website. I like it if only for the reason that it gave my site a great score! Shows I’m on the right track at least!

The site gave my main address www.reverbstudios.ie the following results:

Overall Score – 91/100 which means my site scores better than 91% of all previous site reported on for marketing effectivness!
My Title tag and Meta Description were both a bit long.
Important Heading tags were found on my home page which is good.
I have too many images on the home page which will slow down site loading (dont care!)
My site Readability Level is suited to ‘College Undergraduates’ only – oops!
I have a Google Page rank of 4.
There are 738 of my pages in Google, the more the better.
My Traffic Rank is in the top 0.97% of all websites on the net – WOW!!
I have 8,007 inbound links, again – WOW!!
My Technorati Blog Rank is in the top 0.74% of all blogs.

Pretty Impressive gatering of info on my site I thought. It also makes reccommendations for improving your sites marketing strategy or visibility in the search engines and there was one in particular which I’d never heard of but which I implemented straight away, the ’301 redirect’.

Basically www.reverbstudios.ie is classed as a different site to reverbstudios.ie (the www. makes a big difference) so you need to tell the search engines to ‘redirect’ themselves to the full domain when they come accross your www. less domain. Lets see if my site jumps up in the rankings since I implemented the redirect.

All in all, its an impressive tool, give it a bash – www.websitegrader.com

Heres my full report.

Leon.

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Meta Tags

Leon — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:48:06 +0000

You may have heard the term Meta Tags in relation to adding keywords to your website. I would like to go over a few of the more important tags here.

Title Tag:
This is by far the most important tag on the page and it determines what you see in the title bar of the browser window (very top left). The Title Tag should be about 40 – 60 characters long and contain your most important keywords, that is, the words you think people are most likely to type in to find your site in the search engines. No need to write your life story here and no need to be eloquent or include words like the, and, or, etc..or even use punctuation – just your keywords. When you do a search on google and see the list of results, the actual link you click on to take you to a website more often than not shows content from the Title Tag so thats how important it is. If you have no info in your title tag then google would look in the tags below.

Description Meta Tag:
This tag allows for a more literate description of your website but still try to include all your keywords as it may appear in a list of google results. The Description tag should go immediately below the Title Tag.

Keywords Meta Tag:
This is the tag that most people get exited about but in reality its not really noticed by google anymore – we think! It might come in handy if you havn’t bothered with any of the tags above and don’t have any content on your home page – an unlikely scenario! To include it, simply write in about 10 – 12 keywords separated by commas, some of which you may already have included in the tags above.

And Finally..!
There are no other Meta Tags that really matter to the search engines despite the fact that people put them in constantly. The only other thing you need do, especially on the home page is to just write your page content with with lots of keywords included and using Bold text, Heading text, Bulleted lists and Text links. Give any images you insert an Alt tag or image description as this will allow your images and content to be found in google also. Remember to include