Archive for the ‘Technical Stuff’ Category

However generous the website bandwidth allowance there will always be times where mistakes / increases in traffic or design mistakes cause a website’s traffic to exceed what is normal, in this case its worth investigating as even if you have unlimited bandwidth the user experience could be negatively effected if a browser is having to download data that is not necessary. Here is a sample message that we sent out to a website that was technically designed by another website design company that shows how a website could suddenly begin to ‘consume’ more data that is ‘healthy’.

[Website Designers] Over the last few weeks we have noticed a massive increase in ‘bandwidth’ on your site, this the amount of data that gets transmitted from your ‘server’ to the person looking at your website. You have an ‘allowance’ of bandwidth to ensure each site doesn’t use up the complete allowance but your allowance has been breached multiple times now and is once again approaching the new allowance. To give you some idea of the amount of data your website was using, in the last 90 days your website has used more bandwidth that the next 400 websites put together ! That’s a lot and amounts to nearly 300 GB of data within a 30 day period.

To identify why your bandwidth is being used up we investigated this weekend and found a combination of the causes

1 You are getting more website visitors
2 The ‘admin maintained’ photos have been uploaded at sizes up to 6MB (which is massive and far to big for standard website browsing)
3 The photos website page was created to show the same image as a ‘thumbnail’ and as a full size image (meaning every time someone looks on this page) every full sized image is downloaded .
4 You have increased the amount of photos on that page by 100%

To remedy this we have downloaded all the photos and re-sized them to a size of between 100kb-150kb at a resolution of 800px*600px which is perfect for website images and you probably will not see or notice any difference to the massive 6MB images that were uploaded to your website page previously. The actions taken to remedy your website ‘health’ have ensured it remains ‘live’ and has avoided it being taken down and are ‘extra-ordinary and I hope you appreciate these needed to be done immediately and without your authorisation and will be adding a period of website support to the next invoice.

Short / Medium term Recommendations

You should ensure all uploaded images are no bigger than 800*600px and no larger than 150kb

Long Term

Its possible to re-design your system so that each image has an individual  thumbnail and a larger image to ensure all large images are not downloaded when the page is viewed.

[Website Client Response] Thanks for spotting this problem and fixing this before clients were adversely affected, the reason why the larger images were uploaded is because we have new manager who has been uploading the photos and I didn’t realise she didnt know how to re size and optimise the images prior to upload to the website.

Its a common problem we get asked when we make changes to a website but the client cannot see the changes, the technical problem is described below by a question and answer:

[Client] We have tried viewing the updates to the website but there is no new writing or changes on it am i doing something wrong?

[Delicious] Its possible that your browser has stored or ‘cached’ the old version of your website prior to our changes, try looking at the site pages then pressing (CTRL + R together) or (CTRL + F5 together) to refresh your browser

Here is an example website scope and proposal document

Major projects demand this level of investigation and documentation to ensure us as the website builders and the client knows exactly what to expect, when it will arrive and how much it will cost and when the milestones are.

Recently took on a new client who decided to come to us due to our complete project management proposal, initially they told us:

I still have absolutely zero business and zero inquires so far this year, well one I think from a directory enquiry, which is very, very worrying as I have just had to transfer money over here as simply do not have any in the bank here at all ?!?! … but at least the websites seem to be doing OK so it’s not that but what do you think?

Money is obviously in short demand at the moment with no work / in Jan and March this year, etc etc but I see what I would be getting for my money investing in my website with you.  My question is twofold: 1. What happens if I do not like the redesign and if the “rewrite” of the site is no good as regards content from a potential customer / client of view, i.e. you can rewrite it but it doesn’t necessarily then make any sense … how about the future SEO work which will be needed to keep it up there?

We answered and put the business owner’s mind at rest by assuring him that:

Yes understood about the money situation and think you will find they proposed project cost is very competitive. We hope you know that you will be getting very good value for money from this work. to address your questions:

1, The redesign can be as simple as your other website so there is nothing to dislike and obviously as always we will add some ‘website love’ to it so it would be better than your existing websties, if you wanted something completely different thats fine also but you need to give us direction as to what you want and then we give you some feedback and before proceeding 100% with the design we give you the opportunity to change / amend the look and feel of the site.

2 The rewording of the site will be done by our webcopy person, who is someone that has done web-content on a variety of sites (about 80% of new sites have webcopy completed by us) With direction from me and you and using the existing text as a guide to go by any new content would be only given to you for proof reading once she and I are happy with it, the new text would be written with a ‘keyword analysis’ report to ensure that the text contains a juicy mix of relevant, and appropriate keywords that is grammatically perfect (and has a fleish reading index score of over 60)

Looking at the future, this ‘new site’ would be SEO’ed or optimised to a professional standard and as I stated before I would recommend an arrangement whereby we update and tweak your sites on a monthly basis and add links to the new pages to keep them fresh and in Google’s eyes.

We are working on many sites now and as you know we love the PADI / diving websites and want to do more and hope these will be the start of many diving websites we do. Hoping that you two ‘compliment’ each others sites in terms of allowing each other to link to each others website as you have non-conflicting diving related businesses I think this will be good for you both in terms of SEO anyway.

Another alternative is to have us provide 10-20 pages of new content for your existing website  which will obviously be difficult and need direction from you but will put the icing on your cake and keep your rankings high and would add these pages steadily to the site as this will be better for your SEO. Main SEO principles have always been Content is the King and Links are the Queen and this is as true today as it was when Google first begun.

Its important to remember that if you use one of these tools you realise that its just a tool and not a search engine so the information may be incorrect or not worth worrying about, we use these tools for overviews to highlight problems we may not have noticed. In summary use with caution, here is some questions and answers about these tools from a client:

Our website is rated at 81% which is good – PADI for example get 99% – so we are doing good
I have been informed though of the following:

1. If we renew our Domain Name for several years in advance it will further help our ranking with Google. Therefore, how many years in advance can we renew the Domain Name for?
Delicious Comment: Up to 10 – its possibly a minor ranking factor ( but I have my domains renewed for more than 3 years)

2. That wonderful blog that you have done for us with Word Press – somehow cannot be found with the search criteria that the website grader uses?
Delicious Comment: You have a blog and its crawlable and indexed I changed the link from blogs to blog on every page. The reason the website grading tool cant find it is because you didnt install it in the /blog folder but in the /scubadivingphuket/ folder.

3 Apparently? (you would know much more about this than me anyway) we just need one line of code that links our website to our blog? You know anything about this? Once we do this then our blog will be found and we’ll achieve a rating higher than 81%!
Delicious Comment: You now have 84% but its only one metric (there are lots of graders) and the link is already there to your blog and its indexed

4. Even though we have loads of wicked images, the website grading tool can’t find ‘em? Again, I’ve been told (like it says on the summary!) that if are images are changed so that they have ‘ALT text’ (whatever that means!?) this will help us ALOT?
Delicious Comment: ALT text is alternative text and is a good SEO practise to label every image with a name / description but again dont worry too much about your grade here as the tool isn’t that important, rest assured that your images are fine and have alt text.

4. I have also been told that Social Networking Sites are super important. You already knew that anyway but apparently you wanna have the lot. I know we have FaceBook and Twitter but what what about My Space and Flickr?
Delicious Comment: Forget about myspace but you can use flikr to share your photos of diving courses and marine life.
Facebook Groups and Local Business as well as Twitter is your best bet, try to post and update regularly but concentrate on the blog first.

Then when you’ve got them all – they all need to be linked with EACH OTHER and then BACK to our website? The other thing is once they are all linked together – you don’t need to update them all! When you update one of them – it automatically updates the others! Is basically one big circle of links which brings you back to our website…
Yes you can set your facebook group to update twitter if you want
Delicious Comment: You have a fb group but 0 people like it why not put the new fb widget on your site, allowing people to ‘like’ you by just clicking on the ‘like’ button.

Delicious Comment: In general dont worry too much about website grader or any similar website grade tool as they are not perfect, much more important is your google ranking and visitors / traffic and how website visitors convert to become customers.

There’s hundreds of thousands of routers, networks and switches that make up the Internet. Not being able to reach one is generally just an indicator that the path taken is broken or misrouted. To identify whats wrong and where its wrong you run a traceroute

Do this (in Windows 7) by opening your command line (Windows Start > type “cmd” in the find line)

The command is:

tracert [domain name]

eg

tracert [scubacat.com]

then you can copy the trace by right-clicking > Select All > then pressing “enter”

Well actually we will if you ask nicely but its amazing how many of our clients ask for advice on PC / Windows / Office / internet problems they are having. We are obviously one of the few people that most of our clients know that are IT literate and having heard some of the stories people tell me about using high street PC support and the costs of them I dont blame them for asking advice on technical issues. I dont think I will be buying the tshirt ‘No I wont fix your PC’ yet but if this carries on will have to escalate all non website specific queries to our new Tech Help Desk person (aka PC Paul)