Google Analytics makes a geopolitical statement
Google Analytics will tell you how many visitors came to your site from Taiwan, but takes care to show what it thinks of Chinese sovereignty. The company won't show, however, whether you had any visitors from the West Bank. The Palestinian territories don't exist in the Google Analytics world.
Read on >>Content migration: site links and SEO
Once you've migrated your content to a brand new content management system you may very well end up saving your valuable content but hiding it from hungry users. You finally got rid of those ugly parameter based links (you know, http://mysite.com/?product=espressomakers) but two of those old links were top hits on Google, and who knows how many inbound links you have - you don't control those.
There are a couple of solutions for this problem. The first and preferred method is to redirect all of the old links to the new locations. The second is to maintain a parallel and linked copy of the old content. More on that later.
If your site has a manageable number of pages (let's say 2-3 dozen for now, excluding a blog), you could map all of those pages to their new home, if they have one. What you'll need to do is add some rewrite rules in your Apache .htaccess file that create permanent redirections from the old locations to the new ones. Note: you could do this elsewhere, too, e.g. by using HttpResponsePermanentRedirect in a Django based system. Whatever you do you want to set up permanent redirects. We'll just use .htaccess here.
For our earlier example link, you might set up a redirect like so:
Content migration: basic strategy
When you're redesigning your website, the most exciting part of the process is the redesign itself. A fresh look, improved navigation, new interaction modules. None of which matters if you don't have any content. Content migration - moving and transforming content from your old site to your new site is frequently the most challenging step in launching a new site.
Migrating all of the content from your old system (or lack thereof) to your new system should be your primary goal. If you're moving from one IA to another then there may be content relationships which you want to retain; if the content is worth keeping it would easier maintained within the new system; and it makes it easier to find, as opposed to existing in another complimentary system. This is all predicated on the assumption that you're not abandoning content!
Read on >>Thank You, Professor Crankypants, Part 2
This is Part 2 of a three-part series on stubbornness, success, and the origins of Wellfire Interactive. Read Part 1 here. Read on >>Hype! Hysteria! Anxiety! Consultants Move Into Socialmediaville
Last week, I sat in on a webinar hosted by a social media consulting firm. The topic of the webinar: how to generate leads, increase sales, and foster engagement with your company's audiences using social media. Sounds good, right? I thought so, too. I was hoping to glean some solid tips that I could pass along to our clients.
But here's the funny thing. While the consultants' delivery on the webinar was metered and respectable -- dry, even -- the copy on the accompanying slides was vaudevillian. It wasn't a presentation, it was a show. (Granted, the fact that the company had the word "magic" in its name should have been my first tipoff that all was not as it seemed.) I felt like I was trapped inside an infomercial for the latest fitness doohickey or extreme fad diet.
Read on >>Thank You, Professor Crankypants, Part 1
I’ll admit it: I can be a bit stubborn and contrary sometimes. I hate being told that I can’t do something -- that I’m not capable, that you can’t picture me doing it, that I won’t succeed. When others doubt my ability to do something that I want and know I can accomplish, it makes me work that much harder to make it happen.
It’s how I beat snotty Seth’s rope-climbing record in 7th grade gym class. It’s one reason why I joined -- and loved being in -- a sorority in college. It motivated me to learn to ride a motorcycle. And it’s part of why my business partners and I started Wellfire Interactive.
Read on >>Client Launch! FairVote
The typical voter heads to the polls once every couple years to select legislative representation and executive leadership. We tally votes for offices ranging from the Oval Office to the local school board. As a country we devote untold hours of our lives to watch the sport of campaigning and spend billions of dollars to position our favorite candidates. In spite of these investments in our democracy, we end up with winners elected by a minority of voters, with costly runoff elections, and even unelected Senators.
One Washington area organization is trying to change that. And last week they launched the new site Wellfire designed for them.
Read on >>SEO and What Really Matters
There are many - many, many, many - people and businesses out there in the wild yonder of the Internet's myriad tubes hawking their wares to increase the number of hits your site gets. Triple your site traffic? Get 5,000 Twitter followers in a day? Wow! That's amazing stuff! Where can I sign up?
The only problem with this awesomeness is that it begs the question that all these visitors and followers represent any kind of, dare I say, value. Unless you happen to live in a magical land - such as Venture Capitalville - your business profits nothing from more eyeballs in and of themselves.
Read on >>