Web Design Archives

Building AI-Only Pages in WordPress (and Teaching Bots Where to Look)

September 9, 2025 by Phil Buckley 1 Comment

For the last week, I’ve been working on a side project: creating a WordPress plugin that generates AI-optimized versions of a page. The goal was simple, give large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity a version of a page that’s structured for them, not for humans.

That meant tackling three big challenges:

Generation: automatically producing a machine-friendly version of each post.
Routing: making sure bots get the AI version, while humans still see the normal page.
Logging: tracking who gets what, so I know if GPTBot or PerplexityBot actually found the /ai/ pages.

Here’s what I learned along the way.

[Read more…]

Why Your Website Is Taking Forever To Complete

July 27, 2016 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

I get to work with a lot of great clients and developers who have to work together to make the magic happen. There is always a certain amount of strain between what the marketing department needs and where the development team thinks it should fit into the schedule. Then once the dev team is actually working on it the stress level ratchets up again.

Marketing has already made a vague promise and now the developers have to meet the deadline. Sometimes it’s a fair deadline, almost always it’s an aggressive timeline and occasionally it’s just crazy.
[Read more…]

How I Shaved 10 Seconds Off Page Load Time

June 30, 2014 by Phil Buckley 9 Comments

Do you wish your site loaded quicker?

We all want our site to load as quick as possible for our users convenience and to keep Googlebot happy.

My friend Janet’s new site was dead slow when she asked me to take a look. Here’s how I spent about a couple of hours to get a WordPress site to load in about 2 seconds. When I started in was regularly taking over 10 seconds, sometimes hitting 20 seconds.

[Read more…]

The Ultimate Website Migration Checklist

February 17, 2014 by Phil Buckley 7 Comments

Groundwork

As early as possible gather together the teams that will have an impact on the final site launch. That may include project managers, design team, development team, user experience, copywriters, account executives, network administrators and possibly even legal if they need to give their approval.

Write on the whiteboard what the problems the new website will be solving. You are planning the migration for a reason, make sure everyone is aware of those reasons and understands why they are important enough to burn the resources to make all this happen. Knowing that the old site struggled with time-on-site or click-through rates will help the teams focus on making those better on the new site.

Plan the terribly expensive meeting for everyone to sit in one room at one time for no more than 1 hour. In that time everyone needs to offer up their concerns. No one can say “I have no concerns” because if they do, they’re lying.

Write all the hurdles down so the next time you meet with any members of the team you can address their concerns. A site migration is a big deal; you’ll need buy-in from the whole team.

[Read more…]

Google Author Photo Step By Step Tutorial For WordPress

March 18, 2012 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

I spent a couple hours this afternoon fixing one of my less popular blogs to include proper markup to have the authors linked to their Google profiles. The reason to do this is so that you can have your photo appear in the search results next to the article you wrote.

While I was modifying the code it got me thinking about how many other people might want to do the same thing. So I’m going to add som additional information to the already good overviews out there on how to get your photo to show up in the Google search results.

Follow the directions that Mark lays out in his post, but when you get to step 2 come back here… I’ll wait.

Ok, now you have to add two specific pieces of code to your WordPress blog to make this work. Each one of your articles has to have an author link back to your author page. That is core functionality in WordPress, just make sure it’s turned on – yes, even if it is a single author blog. The catch is that the link needs to have the rel=author attribute added to the link. You can add a link to your author bio but WordPress will strip out the rel attribute. You can attach it in a parameter like this: https://plus.google.com/107187240364808249726?rel=author

Many better themes now include this capability (or soon will), if they don’t you’ll need to create a filter in the functions.php file. A filter is a way of catching output from the database and reformatting it before it hits the page.

Before we get to filters, let’s add some new fields to the author’s section of each user. I don’t know about you but I’m not really a big AIM Yahoo Messenger or Jabber user, so I can get rid of those, but I’d like to include Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Here’s what I added to my functions.php file.

[php]
function my_new_contactmethods( $contactmethods ) {
unset($contactmethods[‘aim’]);
unset($contactmethods[‘jabber’]);
unset($contactmethods[‘yim’]);
// Add Twitter
$contactmethods[‘twitter’] = ‘Twitter profile URL’;
//add Facebook
$contactmethods[‘facebook’] = ‘Facebook profile URL’;
//add Google+
$contactmethods[‘google’] = ‘Google+ profile URL’;
return $contactmethods;
}
add_filter(‘user_contactmethods’,’my_new_contactmethods’,10,1);
[/php]

Great, now you can go update your blog author profile an make sure you include your Google profile url (which should look something like https://plus.google.com/107187240364808249726 (you don’t need anything after the number).

Now let’s build out that filter!

This is for your author archive page, for example, mine is at http://www.1918.com/author/phil-buckley/. The idea here is to link your name to your Google profile using the rel=me attribute. I accomplished it this way:

[php]
/** Customize the author box function */
add_filter( ‘genesis_author_box_title’, ‘author_box_title_filter’ );
function author_box_title_filter($author_box_title) {
if (is_author()) {
$author_box_title_filter = ‘‘. get_the_author() .’‘;
return $author_box_title_filter;
}}
[/php]

You might have noticed that mine is inside a Genesis child theme, but you can do the same thing with almost any theme.

The addition of get_the_author_meta(‘google’) is what pulls in the new author attribute.

Now you have remember to add your website to your Google profile. Make sure that under the About section of your profile you add the url for the site you just set up under the Contributor to section (in the right rail).

Once that’s done you can test your pages to see if all is well using the Rich Snippet Testing Tool. I suggest testing your homepage, a post page and your author archive page.

You can also fill out this form, it might help.

If you need any help, let me know and I’ll try to give you a hand.

How Gregory Ng Ruined My Morning

March 1, 2012 by Phil Buckley 13 Comments

Yesterday I attended the Triangle AMA Digital Training Camp where I listened to a lot of smart people speak. I was entertained by the great story telling of Peter Shankman and inspired by Brian Dally of Republic Wireless and his story of trying to fix the broken cell phone industry. But the one thing that really stuck in my head was something Gregory Ng said.

Gregory Ng

Greg is a friend of mine, but also the Chief Experience Officer at Brooks Bell. Sometimes I forget how good Greg is at both his job, and presenting meaningful data. Near the beginning of his talk on converting your visitors into customers, he mentioned that the average online conversion rate is 2.2%! That’s pathetic.

He went on to explain that many businesses focus on driving more traffic rather than converting the traffic they already have. As bad as a conversion rate of 2.2% sounds, it’s even worse when you flip it – it really means you’re not closing the deal on 97.8% of your visitors!

Can you imagine the general manager of your local Target saying to the staff, “We saw 10,000 people come through here today, and we rang up 220 of them? I’m guessing the store would stop everything and fix whatever was causing the problem.

This morning I walked into my friend’s new kids consignment store and started looking at it through this new prism. Was the store optimized? It really isn’t as well optimized as a Target or Wal-Mart. It could be better. I stood staring at the path from the front door, the high-profit items (for consignment) were not the focal point, what about the stuff way in back? What sells more, girls or boys stuff?

After a few minutes I had to leave because I wanted to start A/B testing her store.

When was the last time you sat and stared at your store/website/house/office and thought about ways you could optimize it?

When Web Development Gets Complicated

February 6, 2012 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

We launched a big website last week. The site soft-launched as a beautifully designed site that was fully functional but some features didn’t make it across the finish line.

The site is pretty big, roughly 35,000 lines of code. A few hundred more and those few final features will dive across the finish line. Launch was an anti-climatic mess that was more of capitulation than celebration. The development team had been running at full-speed for the final two weeks and was running on fumes. Nerves were raw, eyes were bleary and brains were foggy.

As the guy that is suppose to make that run a bit smoother than that, I felt like I had let my team down. What could I have done better?

Working at an agency has it’s pros and cons. At an agency a website is rarely just a website. It’s usually tied in to a plethora of other moving parts so moving a deadline once it’s been set is rarely an option, especially late in the game.

That means we must get the length of a project right months before we start, and often without all of the details. One the rare occasion that may happen, sometimes that schedule get’s over ruled by a clients own timeline that needs to be met.

At the point where the schedule gets compressed, we should have asked what functionality they would like to remove from the substantial list of features. I didn’t do that, instead we decided to just work a little bit more.

My friend Karl Sakas told me about a good analogy he had run across that compared development to a hike from SF to LA by Michael Wolfe, CEO, Pipewise. It’s one of the best analogies I’ve come across about why website scoping goes wrong.

The other insight I heard this week was about Blizzard Games and their mantra of “we’ll ship it when it’s done”.

A website is not a book. It’s never really “done”. It can be “launched”, but that’s different from done. There is always more you can do to a website. For many, a year after a launch you need to start thinking about updating the site.

How did your last website launch go?

Developer Grade SEO

October 5, 2011 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

findability-flower-aarron-walter — Findability Flower

A few months ago a friend of mine asked me if I knew of any SEO training specifically for web developers. I didn’t know of any off the top of my head, so I also asked around to a bunch of Twitter friends in the search industry – nobody knew of any.

It got me thinking about what a missed opportunity this is. The truth is that the way your website is constructed is ground zero for good search engine optimization. If your website is conceived and constructed without SEO in mind, it can sometimes be impossible to fix it without tearing it to the ground.

I decided to talk about the idea at the Raleigh SEO Meetup. It was a packed house that night and people came in from as far away as Charlotte. I was definitely on to something worthwhile.

I continued to work on my presentation over the weeks between the meetup and ConvergeSouth where I’m presenting on the same topic. I felt like I hadn’t offered enough details at the Meetup so I kept adding more.

The problem stems from the fact that everyone seems to hate the SEO person. The developer hates that they’re forced to modify code after the fact, the copywriter hates being forced to use keywords X number of times on a page.

I propose a new world order where SEO’s live in harmony with their co-workers and ride a unicorn over the double-rainbow to find the pot-o-gold!

That dream can only be realized if optimizer and developer can get together at the beginning of the project. Developers have to understand the importance of well written semantic html, microdata, ajax, title tags, header tags, bold and italics and how all that factors into an optimized site.

None of this is rocket science, but it requires web developers to go beyond the basic blocking and tackling of code. They need to start looking at the bigger issues like information architecture, structured data and content life-cycle.

If you’re doing web development, take a look at this checklist and tell me how many of the items you can check off as “done done done” on your last project.

I know the purpose of the website
I know what pages are the most important
I know where conversions will take place
I have a full understand of the lifespan of this site
I have built it to grow over time
The Information Architecture is solid and logical
Internal linking strategy is solid and logical
The html validates at W3C
I have thought through the robots.txt and it’s implications
I have built a sitemap
I have integrated analytics at a base level
I have event tracking implemented to track as much as possible
The site is indexable
I have proper canonicalization
I use a little markup as possible
I have tested the site in multiple browsers
I have tested the site on multiple mobile devices
I have tested the site in Lynx/seo-browser/Fetch as Googlebot
I am allowing search engines to fetch my ajax content in some manner
I am using microdata/rich snippets.RFDa
I have integrated social media sharing where it makes sense
I have made A/B testing as simple as possible the way I built the site
I have added the site to Google and Bing’s Webmaster Tools
I built a custom 404 page
I know the difference between 301 redirects and 302 redirects and am using them properly
I have a plan for if the site goes down

More importantly, can you ask these questions before starting your next project?

Here’s the slides from my Developer Grade SEO presentation at ConvergeSouth 2011:

Developer Grade SEO – part II from Phil Buckley

Is Being a Web Developer Enough?

August 19, 2011 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

I’ve been thinking a lot about the job title of “web developer” lately.

When I landed my first job as a real web developer in 1998 I was really excited. I had become pretty adept at slinging around html to make awesomely static pages using tables. I was proud to boast to my friends that I was a web developer!

After about 3 days I was introduced to connecting a website to a database using Perl. Then using Apache variables and PHP and, well you get the idea. The learning was fast and furious. After 6 months my head was spinning. I took a job as some sort of webmaster/developer/sysadmin hybrid at a tiny startup in Gloucester Massachusetts where I was FTE #2.

At that job I had to learn Red Hat Linux, networking and javascript and a dozen other skills. I even attempted to also learn java in my downtime but the company went under before I had a good understanding of it. After about a year there I felt pretty well versed in most of the internet technologies of the day.

Lets fast-forward a decade.

Web development is a narrowing niche. If all you can do is make traditional websites you may be in the same boat as a company that defined itself as a “newspaper company” instead of a “company that disseminates the news”. You may need to re-imagine yourself and your career.

What if you started thinking of yourself as a person that helped people achieve their digital desires? Is that different? What if their desire was a tweaked out mobile site – could you help? What about an Android app? How about automating some horrific manual process that they aren’t even aware can be automated?

Stop being a web developer and try thinking like a digital problem solver.

That doesn’t mean you need to stop being a kick-ass web designer, there’s a lot of problems that a better website can help solve. But what if you hand off the most awesome website ever created and nobody can find it – can you help? If you can’t help, do you know someone who can? What if the new site is so awesome the orders pour in too fast – can you help?

When was the last time you saw something that made you think, “That’s silly that their doing it that way, why don’t they just do X?” I see stuff like that all the time. When that happens you can either become an indispensable part of the solution or walk on by. Which do you usually choose?

Why I’m Joining Media Two Interactive

September 21, 2010 by Phil Buckley 30 Comments

Media Two Interactive Advertising Agency

Over a year ago I first ran into Michael Hubbard. He was offering his office as a last minute venue to hold the Raleigh SEO Meetup.

I had never met Michael before, but he immediately made me feel welcome and did everything he could to make the event a success. We chatted a bit after the event and started an easy friendship.

Within weeks I was dragging him over to lunch at The Pit to pitch an idea for SXSE. There’s not a lot of CEO’s that will take a lunch with a web developer with a dream, but not only did he accept my invitation, he listened to me and even grabbed the check.

I became friends with his new social media strategist, Morgan Siem and others. It seemed that Media Two was everywhere I wanted to be. Eventually we began to talk in passing about working together. Then a few months ago, it seemed to take a serious turn. Media Two had brought in some new high level clients and I was at a good point to make the transition.

I love that most of the “formal” back-and-forth took place over Twitter, but we actually had very little to work out.

So in a couple of weeks, I’ll officially get a desk at Media Two. It will be somewhere between social, search, copywriter and analytics as the Director of User Experience.

For me, the chance to work with the super talented people who inhabit the Media Two offices is a dream come true. Media Two may not be the biggest ad agency in town, but they are certainly doing some of the best and most creative work.

For me, the chance to work someplace that values its people, encourages discussion and idea generation is exactly what I’ve been looking for.

WordPress Permissions

September 8, 2010 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

I was helping a friend with some small items in a WordPress install when I noticed that it was prompting me for a username and password to FTP in files.

That’s a pain in the neck that is caused when WordPress is installed in a way that doesn’t allow the webserver to directly access the installation. A great hosting company will always make sure that you don’t have that additional hurdle.

I use Tiger Tech (affiliate link) as my host for just that reason, they totally kick ass as a WordPress host.

If you’re currently being asked for FTP login information, you may be able to fix the problem so that it all just works. The key is getting file and folder permissions correct.

Different files and directories have specific permissions that specify who (or what) can read, write, modify and access them. You need to know this because WordPress will need access to write to files in your wp-content directory to make the magic happen.

If you are already lost because you have no idea what file permissions even means, stop reading this post, go read this, then come back.

Some of WordPress’ coolest features come from allowing some files to be writable by your web server.

All of your WordPress files should be owned by your user account, and should be writable by you. Any file that needs write access from WordPress should be group-owned by the user account used by the webserver.

In some cases your host will run the webserver as your account, so you can really lock down the files, but often the webserver runs as a special privileged user (www, apache, nobody).

All folder permissions should be set to 755. Files should be set to 644. Files that you want to edit in the WordPress Theme editor should be 666. Never use 777 for WordPress permissions.

If all this sounds like Greek, come join us at the Blogger Roundtable so we can get you straightened out.

Photo by: Transguyjay

Real Estate BarCamp, the Raleigh, NC edition

September 5, 2010 by Phil Buckley 2 Comments

I was excited when I started talking with Meredith Morgan about speaking at this years RDU Real Estate BarCamp. I’ve long felt that there are a few industries that have had to figure out the Internet fast, or perish. One is the newspaper industry which I recently left, but another is real estate.

I remember back in the stone age (1990’s) when you would go to a real estate office and flip through giant binders and then the agent would take you for a drive to see them, chances were about 50/50 that she had never been to that property before. You learned to lean on the agent for almost everything.

Buying and selling a home will never be that way again. People have changed. The culture has changed. If you are web saavy you start your search at someplace like homes.com or realtor.com. The reason you start there is because when you search for houses for sale in Raleigh, those are the first two organic listings. Smartly Howard, Perry & Walston has decided to spend some money and grab the top paid spot for that query on Google.

Rounding out the top of the search results are Trulia American Homeguides and Zillow. Did I mention Google now incorporates listing into their super popular Google Maps platform?

How can John Q. Agent possible compete with that? It will require a change in the process. Marti Hampton competes by buying a sponsored listing at the top of the search results. The first organic listing for an agency (on page 2) is FMRealty, which goes about it the old school way – putting the phrase Raleigh and Real Estate on the page a zillion times. Paul Setliff also shows up doing a good job of putting a good blurb about all his properties on a page that is HIS page, not an iframe’d MLS page.

I’ve written before about bad realtor websites, and they continue to bother me. I’ve talked to a couple of agents about doing something better, but many don’t want to spend any money, which means the money they do spend on a site ends up getting wasted. I think most buyers and sellers would be more impressed with a kick-ass website that is a one time $2,500 investment than with a leased luxury car that runs $700/month.

I’ve talked to a bunch of real estate professionals that mostly get it, but say that they don’t have the time or resources to put towards their website/blog/Twitter/video blogging/Facebook/forums… you get the idea. The truth of the matter is that’s like someone in 1970 saying they don’t have time for talking to people on the phone. It’s just the way more and more people are doing business and leaders will take advantage of it and put even more space between themselves and the also-rans.

You don’t have to do everything, concentrate on channels that are working for you, or that you see working for others in your situation. If you’re selling mainly to retirees then Twitter is probably not going to be the most effective. If you are trying to attract newly married couples looking to buy downtown, the newspaper will not be where they are hanging out. What about the 45 year olds looking to upgrade?

One of the hardest part to teach people trying to expand into the new social space is the idea of listening. You do not have to be a selling machine to get sales.

That will be the hardest sell for me. Teaching sales people that they can take their foot off the gas pedal in social media, and probably get even better mileage.

These are just some of my ideas… your mileage may vary.

Calling Out Bad Realtor Websites

August 13, 2010 by Phil Buckley 6 Comments

One of my very early posts on this blog was about how bad realtor websites are. I wrote that post almost 2 years ago, yet there are still realtors putting up with less than awesome sites.

I was discussing the sad state of realtor websites on Twitter with a couple of friends when @vowconnect asks me to take a look at 2 of their sites.

Okay, so here’s what I think.

The first site is Cara Keys – Parrish Realty. I don’t know Cara or Parrish Realty, but I assume she’s a good realor who wants a good website that will attract new customers searching for a realtor. Let’s see how this site will do that.

Cara Keys - Parrish Realty Website Screenshot

It’s a nice looking website right? Nice colors, professional images and a nice balance.

Bad Sign #1: The only place the word “Real Estate” appears on the home page is in the small text in the footer, which is actually a link back to vowconnect’s website with the phrase Raleigh Real Estate Websites designed & hosted by CONNECT.

Bad Sign #2: There are 2 H1 tags on the home page. One of them is a link to /index.php with no other information contained inside the H1 header tag, the other H1 at line 190 has Cara Keys – Parrish Realty.

Bad Sign #3: Canonicalization problems. I can pull up all of the following pages as valid pages:

http://carakeys.com
http://carakeys.com/
http://carakeys.com/index.php
http://www.carakeys.com
http://www.carakeys.com/
http://www.carakeys.com/index.php

All of those pages produce a status code 200 meaning the server sees each one as a seperate valid file, and that means so will the search engines.

When I grab the cached site (This is Google’s cache of http://www.carakeys.com/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Aug 4, 2010 05:40:15 GMT), it looks like her old site. Interestingly it looks like her new site went up about 8/11 and still hasn’t been visited by Googlebot (bad sign #3.5).

Her old site has actual content on the home page! Although whatever images were once there are gone, at least it had a meta description.

Bad Sign #4:

Cached meta description: Cara Keys at Parrish Realty of Zebulon, Your local expert on the Eastern Wake County Real estate market, Home Page, Homepage,

Current meta description: none

Cara’s Twitter bio would be a decent meta description, certainly better than nothing.

Contact information on the old cached site is easily available. 4 different telephone numbers, physical address and an email link. All of those features help you appear in Google’s local search box.

Contact information on the new site is nowhere on the homepage. It’s only on 1 page – her contact page. Best practices is to have all of that information on every page, and the phyical address in an <address> tag.

Bad Sign #5: I’m a gig fan of seomoz’s term-extractor. It answers a simple question… Are these the words people use while searching for her site ?

realty
parrish
keys
cara
resources
links
blog
about
skip
login

No mention of Zebulon or Eastern Wake in that list, yet her old cached site’s title was: Your East Wake County NC Realtor

Bad Sign #6: The homepage doesn’t validate. Normally this isn’t the end of the world, especially since there are only a few errors, but in this case, the errors are all in the code that the designers touched. The base Joomla template code was fine.

Bad Sign #7: The blog. I love blogs as a way to add fresh content and keeping the search robots happy. The last blog post is dated Thursday, 25 June 2009 02:02. If that’s the case, don’t label it a blog, and certainly don’t put a date on it. Mark it “Articles” or “Reference” or just skip it all together. This bad sign is more a bad sign of judgment than anything else.

Wrap-up: What drives me crazy is that the fixes I mention are simple and don’t add any real time or expense to a big mass production company, you just bake it in the process early on.

I’d like to thank Connect for offering up a couple of their sites for scrutiny – not every development house has the stomach for it. I think they deserve an “attaboy” for being my test rat today.

Latent Semantic Indexing

June 18, 2010 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

Sometimes when you are trying to explain a simple idea, people zone out because they think they already know it all. That’s when you whip out a phrase like Latent Semantic Indexing.

semantic web think tank — Sign on door to Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambrige University

It’s a great phrase because it sounds like a super complicated scientific method for… well, something. In reality, it’s sort of what good search optimizers have been talking about for a while.

Latent Sematic Indexing can have a very technical sounding definition:

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is an indexing and retrieval method that uses a mathematical technique called Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to identify patterns in the relationships between the terms and concepts contained in an unstructured collection of text.

I usually only throw out LSI when I’m losing people while talking about simple semantic document structure as a “best practice”. When I explain the the title tag should encompass the main thrust of the content of the page, it seems almost silly to say that out loud to a room full of adults – but sometimes titles and headlines seem barely thought through.

When I explain that the header tags should be used in a nested fashion people roll their eyes, until I show them they their sites are doing the opposite. Header tags are not a style, they are a semantic queue about what is important on your site.

I actually use a cocktail approach to semantically related phrases and real LSI. If you have a page about Sesame Street, you wouldn’t just stuff it with the phrase “sesame street”, you also want to include oscar the grouch, elmo and big bird.

Learning what words Google thinks are semantically related can help you. Try using the tilde operator, for example: ~bbq and you get a slew of relationships: barbeque, bbq grilling, grilling, bar-b-que, grilled.

What that would tell me is that if I had a website for the best bar-b-que in downtown Raleigh, I would try to get inbound links around all of those semantically related phrases.

You may have heard people talk about a site, or a page being “over-optimized”. Usually in those cases the content is focused on a single term that ends up looking spammy and forced rather than a semantic mix of phrases.

Photo by: pshab

Speeding Up Your Site

March 20, 2010 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

I’ve written about the Yahoo and Google tools available for helping you find ways to speed up your site. There are lots of good suggestions that are easy to understand, but there’s one that isn’t so well known.

If you are getting an warning about The following resources are missing a cache expiration, here’s what that means, and how to fix it.

What that means is that those resources (images, javascript calls, css files) are missing a cache expiration. Resources that do not specify an expiration may not be cached by browsers. Caching improves performance by transparently storing data on your computer so that future requests for that data can be served faster than requesting it from the server.

You can modify your .htaccess file to make sure that the right type of things get cached on your site.

Here’s what I usually use:



	ExpiresActive On

	#Add Cache-Control Headers

	Header set Cache-Control "max-age=3153600, public"

	#Add Cache-Control Headers

	Header set Cache-Control "max-age=86400, public, must-revalidate"

	#Add Cache-Control Headers

	Header set Cache-Control "max-age=3600, must-revalidate"

Adding the above to your .htaccess file tells visiting browsers that if they request an icon, pdf, image, javascript, stylesheet or flash resource to store a temporary version of it for 60 days (5,184,000 seconds). That way, if it is need again it can be accessed quickly. The reason we can do that is because those files rarely (if ever) change.

In the next block, xml and txt live slightly shorter before having to be requested again, and finally html files only live for an hour before needing to be requested.

Putting the code inside of the <IfModule mod_expires.c> tag allows you to trap and test if mod_expires.c is included in your Apache build. If you try to insert the code and mod_expires.c isn’t included, you’ll usually see a 500 error displayed.

Speed of Light photo by John Talbot via Flickr

Newspaper Pay Wall Alternatives

August 30, 2009 by Phil Buckley 4 Comments

I saw a blurb on my friend Gary’s website this morning that I thought was smart, and I’d like to add my take on it.

It was an article at Portfolio that started like this:

Yesterday, over a very tasty seafood lunch, I watched Felix Salmon spend two hours trying to convince FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw to abandon his newspaper’s attempts to get its readers to pay for online content. He did not succeed.

Currently, FT.com has a hybrid model whereby readers are able to view a set number of articles for free each month but required to register and then to subscribe if they wish to exceed that ration. Felix hates this model because he believes it gets the incentives all wrong: Any reader who understands the model and doesn’t wish to subscribe will be careful only to click on stories that he absolutely must read, thus depriving FT of page views and ad revenue.

This is the same discussion going on inside my own company. Jeff Bercovici goes on to make a novel suggestion, but he’s unsure of where he’s going with it.

As you browse FT.com, you have a small status bar at the bottom of your screen, akin to the “life bar” in first-person shooter games that shows you how healthy or injured your character is. In this case, the status bar shows you how many free page views you have left. Now here’s the fun part: If you want to exceed your quota but you don’t want to pay, there are other ways. In video games, you can usually replenish your life bar by collecting floating gold coins or stars or mushrooms or what have you; why not do the same on a newspaper site?

I’m not sure about the mushrooms, but the general idea is brilliant. My take on it would be slightly more interactive. As you click around the site, and you notice your X number of free pages starting to wane, you can replenish by doing one of the following:

Email a story to a friend would give you one additional page view (each time).
Tweet out the story and earn 3 extra page views.
Post it to your Facebook page and earn 5 additional page views.
Link to a story from your blog and get unlimited page views for 3 days.

Bercovici goes on to add one more level which I also agree with, rewarding your best customers with specials.

Free admission to FT conferences, lunch with an FT writer, and so on.

That type of reward could also be built into the equation somehow. Obviously this sort of thing would take some additional work on the website infrastructure, but so does a pay wall.

I think I just found my next cause to start pushing at work.

Why You Need A Great Call To Action

August 18, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

Are you making as much as you think you should be? Maybe it’s because your visitors don’t know what you would like them to do next.

A common problem on sites put together by people who already know and love their product is that they already know exactly what to do when they look at their homepage. The problem comes when your conversion rate drops and you have no idea why.

An easy to find, easy to understand call to action is the answer.

If you’re selling widgets, why am I looking at your mission statement or a cute cartoon rendering of your dog? I scroll down quickly to see if you foolishly put the “buy now” button below the scroll line, nope. Now if I’m really, really motivated I’ll start reading your lame text to see where I’m suppose to go next, if not, I’ll hit the back button. You’ve lost me.

I doesn’t have to be that way. If your site’s goal is to make money then every single page has a specific reason for being there. You have looked at every page and decided that it is helpful in some way to move visitors towards the goal of them handing over their hard earned money.

Here’s some questions to think about while you pull up your site in your other monitor…. it’s ok, I’ll wait.

Are all your buttons the same size? If they are, are they all the same importance?

What if I already know exactly what I want at your site, can I click once then start the checkout process?

Ask yourself, “Is that really as powerful as I can make the process for someone who is trusting me with their purchase?”

Check out Lee Munroe’s post for more great pointers.

Google Page Speed Bitch Slaps YSlow

June 5, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

Although I sometimes refer to Google as the Soprano’s of the Internet, today they offered up a giant neighborhood feast for all of us peons.

Google’s Page Speed is a fantastic app that should be in every developers toolbox. Until today, we had to rely on Yahoo’s YSlow to try to make better decisions about how to optimize our pages. YSlow was good when it was our only option, but now compared to Page Speed it just looks like a half-finished firebug addon.

One of my favorite metrics reveals your css optimization. It tells you how many of your css rules are to broad or too narrow and shows you which ones they are. That alone could probably save some of us 30%-40% of our css declarations.

There is also a second tab installed which allows you to watch what’s happening in real time. Page Speed Activity lets you see what http requests are being fulfilled and how long all of that is taking. That part is nice to have in real-time, but I was okay with the “net” tab in Firebug, and probably still will use that just as often.

Google Page Speed displaying real time activity

I admit I’m a sucker for measurable metrics like this. I wasn’t impressed by Google’s latest boxed search, but this little gem is a keeper.

If you want to make faster loading pages, and who doesn’t, you need to go install this asap.

Get More Visitors From Google & Yahoo Search

April 7, 2009 by Phil Buckley Leave a Comment

What percentage of your visits are coming from search queries? Would you like more? When they find you, do they bounce away just as quickly?

If you want more people to find your site via search engines, you have to do a better job packaging your content. If you want them to stay, you need to make sure the important stuff is “front-loaded”.

basketball-hoop — Basketball Sky photo by: laffy4k

Let’s look at a very popular story today on the News & Observer’s site about UNC’s basketball championship last night. The title of the article is: “Not even close: UNC rolls to title”. The headline is the #1 story on their homepage.

Let’s look at a few different ways to view that headline.

From a pure search perspective, the only word in it that may get searched this morning is UNC. Nowhere in the headline are other words that will show up in searches, like tournament, ncaa, basketball, tar heels, michigan, detroit, college.

For a print newspaper, that title works fine, but not on the web. There is reams of research that shows you only a word or two to grab someone’s attention. Jakob Nielsen’s recent article suggests you have 11 characters. If you chopped all your headlines down to 11 characters, would your readers still understand what you are trying to say? In the example above: “Not even cl” = FAIL, we have no idea what that link is going to be about.

There’s no reason professional writers and editors should be making a mistake like that, it’s a simple change to get; “UNC wins title: not even close”. The first 11 characters: “UNC wins ti” gives you a pretty good idea of what the link is about.

When a visitor clicks on the link to go to the full story, the CMS injects the headline into the title tag of the page, meaning they’ve just increased the amount of “lame” in that headline by a factor of 2. For the search engines, the page title holds a lot of weight.

The funny part of the News & Observers weak headline is that their sub-headline is much better: “North Carolina sets records in building a 55-34 halftime lead, then holds off Michigan State to win its second NCAA championship in five seasons”.

Moving on to the second half of the equation, bounce rate. Visitors will bounce when they get to your page and it’s not what they want/expect/need/or it’s just lame looking. In this case, Google’s research shows that you have roughly 8 seconds to grab their attention. Let’s go back to the example. Here’s about what you get in 8 seconds, “DETROIT — As he went down the bench, alternately pumping a fist and hugging his teammates with a minute left Monday night, you could see it…”. Did that grab you? There is also some small color and black & white photos rotating within the story.

Once again, would work fine in print, but not so great on the web. It just seems a little flat to me, but I know my friends who are Tar Heels will tell me there’s nothing flat about a UNC championship story.

If the N&O had me on the payroll to advise them on SEO, I would have set up a special NCAA Tournament section 2 months ago. I would have been pouring small stories into it that were optimized for all the keywords March Madness generates. I would have been trying to tap into the craziness of the NC State, Duke and UNC fans. Getting them to text back updates from the tournament. Upload photos, tweets, facebook status updates and anything else that would overwhelm other tournament coverage sites (especially for ACC teams).

It’s not rocket science, it’s thinking about your content is a particular way. Our brains are processing information from left to right – so start thinking left to right when you’re composing.

Forcing Your Customers To Register

March 29, 2009 by Phil Buckley 3 Comments

I understand that newspaper sites are in turmoil. I understand they need to generate more revenue. I don’t understand some of they ways they try to accomplish it.

Many of the McClatchy newspaper sites set a threshold for the number of pages a visitor can view before forcing them to register. Some sites have that number as low as 10 pages every 6 months. The theory being that once you force a visitors to register, you can then tell the advertisers, “look I have X subscribers”. Advertisers will be impressed by the number and spend millions of dollars on gigantic flashing banner ads.

You still have time to turn around — Contemporary Art in Coppenhagen photo by: Cyb3rbl@ck

The rest of theory is a little fuzzier, but goes something like this, “Once they register they’ll also be able to sign up for daily emails which highlight our top stories. They’ll also have the privilege of commenting on stories.” The reason I think that part is a bit fuzzy, is that many of the people who register don’t use real information. 10 Minute Mail has made using your real email unnescessary. Why would I give a newspaper my real information? What good could possible come out of that information transaction for me?

I bought Avinash Kaushik’s book on Web Analytics a while ago and one thing he says in there rang especially true:

It is critical for near-long-term success and for long-term success that at the heart of your web analytics program you are asking not what the website is doing for your company, but this question: How is the website doing in terms of delivering for the customers?

The fact that sites like Bug Me Not even exist is a testament to how truely unhelpful forcing people to register is. Thousands of visitors hate the process enough to take extra steps so others can avoid registering. It means that there are probably thousands of “toxic accounts” in the registration databases.

There is nothing I can think of that a newspaper has that I can’t get somewhere else without registering. If it’s a local reporter that only writes one column a week, maybe I’d just stop reading it, but anything else I’ll just leave your site and find it at your competitors.

From an SEO perspective, locking down content means the search engines can’t get to it. To get around that, some sites use JavaScript to “lock down” visitors, which means visitors can just disable JavaScript and bypass the gate keepers.

So here’s a idea for newspaper sites that are still stuck in the mindset of the print era, where you controlled the flow of information, stop making me hate your site. You are no longer my only option. Realize that without me coming to your site, you will fail. If you make me hate your site enough, it may carry over to your print product. Give me a reason to love your site, then I’ll register because I’ll want more from you.