I use Balsamiq quite a lot for screen mockups for clients. Over the years I found that users get very fixated on a prototype that it too ‘polished’ as they expect the end result to be identical to that (I learned that one the hard way). I like Balsamiq as the mockups are clearly rough and can’t be mistaken for a finished product. Unlike Axure RP, it’s not really designed for fully interactive prototypes but when you just need a quick ‘n’ dirty way to communicate a mockup with the users it’s perfect for the job.

Balsamiq is a great tool and at a budget price of $79 it’s tough to beat.
www.balsamiq.com

There are four steps required to setup a domain mapped to a WP Multisite subsite on a shared hosting account with a shared IP address.

1. Create the subsite
2. Get the web host to recognise your Subsite
3. Steer your domain to your WP Multisite
4. Use Domain Mapping to tie your domain to the subsite.

Step 1: Create The Subsite on WP MultiSite
Go to your Network Admin (or Super Admin for pre-WP3.1) area of your WP Multisite and add a new site.Example: setup a site called ‘test’. If you are using subdomains on your Multsite then this will be ‘test.mydomain.com’.

At this point you have created a site but your shared hosting plan does not know that ‘test.yourdomain.com’ is a valid address. If you try to view your site you will get a ‘Page Not Found’ type of error.

Step 2: Get Your Web Host to see your Subsite
Go to your hosting package and add a Server Alias to your main domain. In this case add ‘test’ as the server alias. Your hosting package will now know that test.yourdomain.com is tied to your main www.yourdomain.com. This can take a little time for the internal DNS to sort itself out – give it an hour or so (could be more depending on your hosting company). Tip: Do Not use H-Sphere to create the subdomain manually as that doesn’t work in this case - Multisite needs to resolve it so just steer it to the Multisite.

Eventually when you go to test.mydomain.com you will see the subsite you setup in your MultiSite. At this point your site is good to go – you only need the following steps if you want to map a domain to that new website.

Step 3: Steer Your Domain to your WP MultiSite.Before you attempt any domain mapping, you must first steer your domain to your MultiSite. If you intend to do this with a shared hosting package and use a shared IP address here’s how to do it. In this example, we will steer www.myotherdomain.com to our MultiSite and in Step 4 will map it to test.mydomain.com.

Go to your HSphere control panel and add ‘myotherdomain.com’ a Domain Alias to ‘mydomain.com’. If you get an error that there is already a DNS zone for this domain then delete myotherdomain.com from your HSphere and then try again to add it as a domain alias. (In order for this to work the domain MUST be using the same name servers as those used by the shared hosting with your Multisite. If it is not, you need to create additional DNS A records for the domain to point it to the IP address of your shared hosting package).

This can take several hours or longer to propagate so be patient.

You will know the change has taken effect when you click on www.myotherdomain.com and you are taken to the new registration page on your MultiSite. Your domain is steering correctly to MultiSite but you haven’t told WP yet where to send it to on your site network.

Step 4: Domain Maping.You now have a subsite that is working. You also have a domain that is resolving properly to your MultiSite network. Domain Mapping simply joins www.myotherdomain.com to the subsite ‘test.mydomain.com’.

Go to your Domain Mapping administration interface and add www.myotherdomain.com as a mapped domain for test.mydomain.com.

This solution is not really suitable where you want to have on-demand subsites created by your Multisite e.g. blog networks. If that is a requirement find a shared hosting provider that supports wildcard DNS or get yourself a dedicated IP on a VPS or cloud instance. However, if you want to manage a number of WP sites through a single dashboard and you don’t mind spending a few minutes on the config then you can get Multisite and Domain Mapping working on pretty much any shared hosting provider.

Interesting video by Dr. Susan Weinschenk on increasing website engagement through Persuasion, Emotion and Trust.

The greatest problem I’ve encountered is the ‘all your eggs in one basket’ problem that is common to all of these hosting solutions. That is why I was intrigued by the prospect of cloud infrastructure where I could build my systems to be completely resilient and capable of recovery regardless of any underlying hardware or network problems.
 
Cloud Infrastructure, also known as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), provides you with components to build your own hosting infrastructure on the Internet to suit your specific requirements. Common components provided by cloud providers include databases, storage, load balancers and virtual servers on demand. The main difference between regular web hosting and cloud infrastructure is that cloud is fully ‘a la carte’ as you can pick and choose your components and set your own rules for scaling, redundancy etc.

Key Features of Cloud Infrastructure

• Scalable – you can scale your infrastructure up and down automatically depending on demand/workflow without any manual intervention. This ensures your site/application can grow to meet demands but can scale back down and reduce costs when demand is lower.
• Economical – you don’t need to pay large upfront costs for a large hosting plan or large VPS server as you pay only for what you use. In a traditional server environment you have to provision for your peak demand and this results in wasted resources at quieter times. With cloud infrastructure you do not have the responsibility of managing the hardware or the costs of software licensing as these are typically bundled into your hourly costs.
• Fault Tolerant – if you design your infrastructure properly you can build your application to tolerate significant failures and still continue with minimal impact to customers. This can be achieved by splitting your infrastructure over multiple regions and/or setting up load balancers on your servers and spinning up new servers to meet demand or replace failed servers. If you are really paranoid you can even use multiple cloud providers and duplicate your infrastructure. It depends on how paranoid you are and how deep your pockets are!
• More Control – with both Hosted Services and regular Web Hosting you are the mercy of the hosting provider in case of service disruption (as you are at the mercy of your IT department or support company when there is an internal IT problem). With cloud infrastructure you typically have the ability to automatically or manually start resources in unaffected areas of your cloud provider’s infrastructure and failover to these new resources. Cloud infrastructure empowers developers and administrators!
• Limitless Resources – a major benefit to Cloud infrastructure is that you effectively have limitless resources at your disposal. You can scale both horizontally (more servers) and vertically (larger servers) in seconds. The limitless resources can be a negative if they are used to compensate for badly designed applications that under perform or are resource-hungry. Better to fix the problem than throw resources at it – that’s one of the age old IT problems and it hasn’t gone away with the advent of the Cloud. 

Things to be aware of before making the move to Cloud Infrastructure

• Learning Curve – there is a learning curve involved when moving to Cloud infrastructure. You have to learn all the components, the limitations and features of those components, how to build your application architecture properly to allow for scaling/balancing/fault tolerance. In some cases you even need to learn new command line tools to manage your cloud resources effectively. This is not a trivial task.
• Beware Bad Architecture – if you haven’t done your homework on your architecture you could accidentally authorise servers to launch based on demand but then not shutdown again when demand drops off. This will rack up charges on your account so watch your bills for signs of this.
• Redundancy Isn’t Automagically There - you can’t expect your application to survive a service disruption if you haven’t designed for this! If you are stuck in a one-box one-location mindset and don’t use the redundant capabilities supplied by your cloud provider then you are no better off than you would be in a single VPS environment.

As that great philosopher Uncle Ben (Peter Parker’s uncle in Spiderman) once said “With great power comes great responsiblity”. He was probably talking about the super powers stuff but I think the same is true of using Cloud Infrastructure. You have great power at your fingertips but you have to know how to use it to get the most from it.

1. Display Google Ads

This is the easiest option for website owners. You simply go to Google AdSense and sign up for an account. Once approved you can add a block of code into a widget or template file on your website and targeted ads will display alongside your content. Generally, you won’t make much money with Google Ads unless you have significant numbers of visitors to your site.

2. Display Affiliate Ads
This is a potentially more lucrative option than option 1 but it involves more effort. You must find suitable affiliate programmes, sign up and get banners and links with affiliate codes to add to your website. You’ll notice this tech blog has affiliate advertising for a number of WordPress and UX related affiliates displayed after posts. The ads are relevant to the content and the affiliate commissions are pretty decent if the clickthrough turns into a sale.

You may decide that you want to display a number of affiliate ads in rotation. If you do so make sure to download consistent banner sizes from the affiliate programmes e.g. 468×60. You can then use a free plugin like DataFeedr  Random Rotating Ads to randomly display the ads on your site. DataFeedr is a terrific plugin for simple ad rotation and can be used in widgets or templates.

3. Sell Your Own Ads
Let’s say you want to take ad management to a whole new level and allow advertisers to directly purchase ad slots on your site. I worked with two tools on a client project and had very different experiences. Initially I tried Google Ad Manager which then became Google DFP (Doubleclick for Publishers). This tool offered lots of functionality, different pricing models for cost-per-impression, cost-per-click, cost per day etc. There was plenty of reporting. Lots of scope to have users to administer the system and for advertisers to purchase directly online. Sounds great right? Well it wasn’t. It was simply too big, too complex, too much. I just wanted a simple tool to sell directly sold ads and manage them easily.

Then I found OIO Publisher and I haven’t looked back since. It has just the right balance of complexity versus functionality. Advertisers can book and pay for ad slots online. Advertisers get emailed reports on page impressions, clicks etc. There is a very easy-to-use interface to manage ad uploads and ad slots. The only downside is that unlike Google DFP it is not free. It currently costs $47 but this is for an unlimited licence to use it on all sites you own. Personally, I think it’s a small price to pay for such an excellent ad management tool.

( Bonus – you can get $10 off OIO Publisher right now with this coupon code SPRING11-MULREANY so download it now )

This post was about general ad management for WordPress websites and recommendations for useful tools. My next post will be a more detailed look at targeting ads based on content categories, tags and even custom taxonomies.

You can download Widget Logic from WordPress.org (opens in a new window). You must download and activate the widget before trying out the examples below.

Example -Display ‘Recent Posts’ on the sidebar everywhere except the Homepage

Say you have a homepage that displays a list of your recent posts. You might decide that you want a list of 5 recent posts in your sidebar everywhere on your site except for the homepage (no point showing duplicate content). Here’s how to achieve this using the Widget Logic plug-in.

Step 1: Add ‘Recent Posts’ widget to your sidebar

Go to your Widgets area of your WP dashboard. Drag the ‘Recent Posts’ widget to your sidebar and configure your options e.g. specify 5 as the number of recent posts. Save your changes and you should now see your latest 5 posts everywhere on your site including the homepage.

Step 2: Add the conditional logic to the widget

At the bottom of all your widgets you will now see a text box called ‘Widget Logic’ (see image below). This is where you enter the conditional statement that tells WordPress whether or not to display this widget.

You will need to know the WordPress Conditional Statements to use this effectively and the codex has an excellent article about them here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags (opens in a new window).

In this case we need a conditional statement that says “show this widget if it is NOT the homepage”.

The WordPress conditional statement for homepage is the following: is_home()

If you add this to your widget logic box and save changes this will ONLY show your recent posts on the homepage sidebar. Save this and give it a try.

Ok, now we want to change it from IS homepage to IS NOT homepage. Simply add a ! so your conditional statement becomes: !is_home() – see the example below. Save your changes and you should see your recent posts everywhere except for your homepage. All done

More Advanced Conditionals

There is no limit to the complexity of the conditionals you can build with Widget Logic. Here are some popular conditionals to get you started. You will need to know page/post/category IDs for many of these conditionals – if you don’t know how to find these check out my post on Finding WordPress Category, Page or Post IDs.

• is_single() -> if this is a single post
• is_page() -> is a page
• is_page(‘about’) -> is the About page
• is_page(’25′) -> is the page with Page ID of 25.
• is_archive() -> is any archive on your site e.g. category, tag, author or date archive.
• is_category(‘wordpress’) -> is a category with the slug ‘wordpress’
• is_category(’37′) -> is the category with ID number 37.
• has_tag (‘bananas’) -> has the tag ‘bananas’.

You can also use logic operators to give you more control. || represents OR while && represents AND.

Example 1
Show the widget only if this is the page titled ‘Fruit’ OR is the category archive ‘Food’ OR has tag ‘banana’

is_page(‘fruit’) || is_category(‘food’) || has_tag(‘banana’)

Example 2
Show the widget only if this is a single post and it is not in specified categories. You need to use Category IDs for the ‘in_category’ conditional as slugs and names don’t work.

is_single() && !in_category( array(23,30,78))

As mentioned earlier you should refer to the codex for a more comprehensive list of conditionals. I will be doing a post shortly about using Widget Logic for controlling Ad Displays so watch this space.

Widget Logic Testing Tip

If I’m trying to do something complex with Widget Logic I usually drag an ordinary text box to my sidebar and put plain text in the box e.g. Hey It Worked! I first make sure I can see the “Hey It Worked!” text everywhere on my site. Then I try my widget logic on the widget – if my text appears only where I want it to appear I know it’s working. Then, and only then, do I try it with my real widgets.

Why bother with this? Sometimes if you’re trying to display dynamic ad code or something complex it is easy to make a mistake. Then you don’t know if the error was with the code/widget or with the widget logic. By using a plain text box first you can ensure you widget logic is sound before trying it for real. That’s what I generally do but to each their own!

FYI The same rule applies for categories, pages, posts and even tags. In this example we will get the Category IDs for this site.

Step 1: Open the Post Menu

If the Post menu is closed, click on the dropdown arrow to open the box as per the image below.

Step 2: Display Categories List

Click on ‘Categories’ in the Post menu. This will open a page displaying all the categories on your site. The example in the image below are categories on this site.

Step 3: Hover Over the Category Name

To get the Category ID for any category simply hover over the category name. You will see the status bar at the bottom of your browser changes to show information on the category.

In my example I hover over the category named WordPress and the following appears in my browser bar.

The category ID is the number that appears in the browser bar (highlighted in red in the image below). In this example the Category ID for my category WordPress is 37.

Getting Other IDs

You get the IDs for pages, posts and tags in the same way. Go to your Pages list and hover over any page title. The ID will appear in your browser bar at the bottom of your screen.

Plug-Ins To Show IDs

There are a number of handy plug-ins that you can use to display the IDs for you. I’ve used Simply Show IDs in the past and it adds a column to your listings that shows the IDs. There are a number of other plug-ins on WordPress.org that do the same thing so it’s a matter of choice which you go for. You can find these ID plug-ins on this search result on WordPress.org

Usability ROI

The latest research from Nielsen Norman Group (top US usability consultancy) shows that spending just 10% of your website development budget on usability will result in 83% increase in your business metrics, including your website conversions.

The Visitors x Conversions Formula

Let’s say 1000 visitors hit your website each day but only 10 of those visitors become customers then your conversion rate is 1%. The visitors to your website are typically drawn in through expensive paid programmes such as Google Adwords or other marketing initiatives. To double the number of visitors to your website means doubling your advertising budget! Not an attractive proposition during touch economic times.

But what if you could get 1000 visitors to your website and 20 of them proceeded to do business with you instead of just 10? Well you would instantly double your sales. Even small improvements to the usability and user experience of your website can achieve this for you.

Start with a Website Evaluation

Before you can improve the usability and overall user experience on your website you must first figure out the areas for improvement. You need to evaluate your website. This can be done very inexpensively – you can contact us for a quote for an expert evaluation. Resolving any major usability issues with your site helps retain customers as well as increase sales – customer retention is undoubtedly the best way to sustain your business through these tough times.

Make More Services Available Online

Another smart strategy is to use your website to reduce your administration costs and save you both time and money. Online banking is a great example of an online service that works well for the users and for the business. Users get the convenience of 24/7 secure banking while the banks get to reduce their staffing costs and make their services more efficient. It’s a win-win. Banks who do not provide this service are now at a major competitive disadvantage.

In your business area, look at the most time-consuming and manual interactions with your customers. Perhaps your company spends a lot of time answer phone calls about their products / services or managing the staff calendar and scheduling appointments. Perhaps you have to manually generate quotations for house alarm installations or check stock levels and reserve items in your shop for customers. These can all potentially be done online and often prove even more useful than the ‘human’ version e.g. the appointment system that texts/emails you a reminder of your dentist visit.

Word of warning – I can’t stress enough how important it is that you get user input on all new features you intend to add to your website. Figure out what the users want (user surveys) and when developing the features get user feedback (user testing). Otherwise, you may invest in website features that users don’t actually want or that don’t work so the users won’t use them and will resort to the old way of doing things. That would be a disaster but it is avoidable!

If you need more advice…

I hope this post has given you a few ideas on how to use your website more effectively during these times of Recession.

1. Email Newsletters – publish an email newsletter as this will help you establish a closer relationship with your users. Don’t publish it too often and make sure the newsletter contains content that will be of interest to the users.  This is the top method of bringing repeat business to your site and forging a closer bond with your online customers. [Always give users an easy way to opt-out of your newsletter or you run the risk of losing their trust].
2. Informative Product Pages – ensure your pages contain all the information any customer may require on your products. According to Neilsen 10% of user failures (i.e. serious enough problem to quit the website) are caused by poor product information pages.
3. High-Quality Photography – one of the big disadvantages of the web is that customers “can’t touch and feel your products”. The best way to compensate for that is to provide really large product photos, photos from different angles and photos showing the product being used in context (e.g. backpack viewed on a girl’s back to show scale etc). It’s ok to display thumbnails first but make sure that when users click for a large photo they are not disappointed. Users will endure a minor delay for a photo to load when they have expressly requested it.
4. Product Comparisons – when users are worried they will make the wrong purchasing decision they tend to postpone their decision which means no sale! Explain clearly what differentiates your products, provide tools that allow users to easily compare price, features and specifications andclearly highlight the key differences between the products.
5. Support Reordering – make it easy for previous customers to reorder from your website. One example is an online grocery that enables users to reorder using their previous shopping list. People are more likely to spend their money when you make it easy for them to reorder or buy supplemental items e.g. consumables or parts for items previously purchased.
6. Simplified Text – rewrite the text on your website to follow the guidelines for online content. This is an ongoing process but when done correctly can double the usability of your site.
7. Cater to Older People – some reasons to make your site cater to older users. They are the fastest growing segment of Internet users, they have free time and in many cases money to spend and they are more loyal to sites than younger users. However they are also the segment most likely to have physical or cognitive impairments and most website discriminate horribly against them. Make sure to adhere to best practice for Accessible Design. See the Web Accessibility Initiative website (opens in new window) for more information on accessible design.
8. Wishlists & Gift Certificates – these cost very little to implement on your site but they tend to draw repeat customers and increase your online sales. Of course, for these to work they must be very usable so get your wishlists and gift certificates tested with some users to help this strategy fulfil its potential for generating sales.
9. Search - users rely very heavily on Search to find what they are looking for on websites. [This is probably due to the huge improvements in Search Engine accuracy with sites such as Google over the past few years]. Most websites search is pretty poor and it is worth investing in better search software so users can find your products / information and do business with you.
10. User Testing – this is the BEST way to increase your sales. Small usability projects can yield 100% plus increases in customers conversions and testing your site with real users is the only way to find and resolve the real usability problems.

The Evolution of the Web

1. Broadband – a sizable proportion of the population now has access to high-speed Internet access either at home or at work. This means that slow websites can no longer be blamed on poor Internet connections.

2. Web 2.0 – static websites are dead and the Internet is now heaving with e-commerce systems, blogs, forums,  knowledge-bases and dynamic websites with live interactive content. Any website worth its salt now has a content management system that allows the website owner to easily and quickly update their content. This means that the majority of websites are now using databases instead of static pages.

3. Cheap web hosting – Web hosting has become ridiculously cheap over the past few years. You can now buy a shared hosting plan from most Irish hosting companies for about €50 per annum and you can put perhaps 30 websites on that package. You often get unlimited databases, lots of disk space and a huge traffic allowance. So you could theoretically have a database-driven website (blog, CMS, ecommerce) hosted and supported for under €2 per annum. How could they possibly provide decent hosting for that price, you may ask. Well as the saying goes, if something looks to be too good to be true it probably is…

The Problem

So here’s the problem. Web hosting companies are supplying extremely cheap hosting and the majority of websites that are running on their servers are using databases. With some hosting companies the database response times are not fast enough due to limitations on numbers of concurrent connections and other limits specified.

Website Load Times

Web Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has this to say in an interview with eConsultancy.com about website load times:

“The rules are; if it is faster than one tenth of a second, you don’t feel like you are waiting at all. If it is more than one tenth of a second, you can tell you are waiting, but up to one second, it still feels like smooth navigation. Between one and ten seconds is the limit for your attention. If you go the best websites, like Google, that’s what they do – they give you the page like that [clicks fingers].”

Everyone Is Judged Against Google

It may seem grossly unfair but now every other website is judged against Google or Amazon and the other ‘big’ websites. If your site is slow to load a page of content and Google can return a web search of the entire Internet in a fraction of a second then it looks bad for you. Google and other such sites are setting the bar very high for the rest of us.

So when your website is slow to respond, the user starts to get impatient. They know it is your website causing the delay because Google loads for them almost instantly. If every page on your website is slow to load because of the poor database responses then the cumulative annoyance will more than likely cause the user to leave. Those users casually browsing will be first to leave followed quickly by those who are genuinely interested in your website but can’t be bothered waiting for every page to load. That may not leave many users to ‘convert’ into paying customers. This would obviously be a disaster for your business and needs to be resolved.

Back to Web 1.0?

Am I suggesting that we abandon interactive websites and we all go back to the ‘good old days’ of Web 1.0 with static websites updated once a century? Definitely not. What we need to do is adapt to the current realities of the web – we need to find technical answers to these problems that are impacting our websites. We may not have the resources Google has but we can all use smarter technology to speed up our websites and improve our users’ experiences online.

Solutions

There are a number of ways to alleviate this problem.

Move your business to a hosting company that has a reputation for fast website serving and good uptime. Check out support forums and online communities  to get a gauge for the types of issues other users have with that company.  If a lot of customers are complaining about slow load times obviously AVOID that hosting company!

If you are running a WordPress system you could use a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache to speed up your site. This can result in your site responding up to 10 times faster! This works by storing a HTML copy of your dynamic page once it has been loaded so other users can access the HTML version rather than wait for the dynamic page to load. Simple, slick and effective.

Other than that, you should optimise your website graphics, reduce the number of unnecessary scripts and plugins you are using and generally do housekeeping on your website. It all makes a difference.

Regardless of the solution you opt for, website response times can’t be ignored. Google is now using load times as a metric for site rankings so it’s in your interests to fix slow response times.