WordPress 2.7 RC1 Released
December 2, 2008
Release Candidate 1 of WordPress 2.7 is officaially out the door. While I haven’t had time to install and play with RC1 we’ll be doing so shortly and contacting our customers with an offer to upgrade them at a discounted rate once WordPress 2.7 is “officially” released. If you would like to get at the top of the list you can contact us before we send out our e-mail. If you are not a current BlackBox customer feel free to drop us a line if you need assistance with an upgrade and we’ll extend the same discount to you.
Download WordPress 2.7 RC1 Here
WordPress 2.7 Beta 1 Release
November 1, 2008
This morning WordPress announced the release of WordPress 2.7 Beta 1. The original release date for 2.7 was scheduled for November 10th but is expected to be delayed for two weeks putting a probable release date of November 24 on the calendar. What this means is that you can download WordPress 2.7 but it’s not quite ready for primetime and isn’t recommended for general sites. Rather, a release candidate (ready for use but tentatively a little buggy) will be released on November 10th.
For most of our clients, the BlackBox team will recommend upgrading to 2.7 when the final release is made available on or around the 24th.
There is a great deal of anticipation around WordPress 2.7 because of the newly designed administrative interface into which Automattic put a great deal of time and research. We also expect some other ehancements to the system that uses should find benificial.
Read the official announcement on the WordPress site at: http://wordpress.org/development/2008/11/wordpress-27-beta-1/
Please note, at this time BlackBox is not supporting or upgrading to 2.7 Beta 1. We will send an announcement to our customers when the general release is made.
WordPress Pumpkin
October 31, 2008
Most of you already know how much we love the WordPress Platform but Eric Martin might actually love it more… he carved a WordPress logo pumpkin that looks outstanding.
Happy Halloween Everyone and enjoy a safe and happy kic
http://www.ericmmartin.com/wordpress-pumpkin/
WordPress 2.7 Wireframes
October 2, 2008
The guys at Automattic (makers of WordPress) released wireframes yesterday of the new administration interface for WordPress 2.7. While some of the wireframes are still rough, all are in black and white and all are subject to change it gives us a good glimpse into the next release. I continue to be impressed at the openness and transparency with which Automattic conducts themselves and they depth of research that has gone into preparing for 2.7 is nothing short of astonishing, particularly when you consider that WordPress is an open source project. It should come as no surprise while wordpress continues to displace numerous other blog systems and content management systems across the board while getting better with every release. It should also be no surprise that the same software that runs your site is also on board at places like CNET, The Wall St. Journal, New York Times and others. Cheers to Automattic, keep up the good work.
WordPress 2.7 Survey
September 29, 2008
Wordpress 2.7 is well under way and the guys at Automattic are doing extensive research and development to make next generation improvements to the administrative interface. In addition to more scientific forms of research they are polling WordPress users for their thoughts and opinions on various features, in this case the placement of some existng and new elements in the admin UI. The poll will automatically close after 5000 responses but it’s still not too late to get yours it. Visit the WordPress poll on PollDaddy.com and give them your thoughts if if you are a WordPress user.
It is also advisable to upgrade to 2.6.2 if you have not done so already. While 2.6.1. was an opitonal upgrade 2.6.2 is mandatory from a security stand point. Feel free to contact us if you need help. Existing clients can be upgraded for free while a nominal charge will be incurred by non-clients or those whom we have not completed work for in more than one year.
Natural Search or Paid Search?
September 2, 2008
There is a great deal of noise about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) these days and well there should be, if no one can find your site the odds are you’re loosing immediate business and long-term opportunity. There is also an equal amount of discussion about paid search (e.g. Google Adwords) to drive traffic and business. The question faced by many business owners, particularly small to medium sized businesses, is “Which one to focus on?” to which the answer is (as always) “it depends.” Before beginning an online ad campaign or optimizing your site for SEO, there are a few common misconceptions business owners should be aware of:
- “Once I optimize my site, I’ll start getting a lot more traffic.” You might, but there are a few dependencies like whether or not anyone is looking for what you are selling to start with, and how crowded your market it. It’s also important to understand that it takes time and traffic may not flood in all of a sudden and, most importantly, optimizing your site is an ongoing effort. It’s not something you do once and are done. If you don’t keep it up, you won’t see the results.
- “Paid search will help me sell a lot more.” Again, it depends. How many competitors do you have? How well written are your ads and where do they show up in the search results. If they aren’t on the first page, you’re not getting nearly the effect you want. Like SEO, and even more so, running a paid search campaign is an ongoing effort and it is absolutely a science which demands testing and validation of results then tweaking the formula and ads to improve performance. If you don’t have the time be very careful about diving into an online advertising campaign (consider paying an expert to do it for you). Many a small business has lost a tremendous about of capital running such campaigns without knowing what they were doing. Splashing up ads on Google or Yahoo does not equal certain sales, only certain bills from the search companies.
Along those lines, when you run a paid search campaign or have a site which sells something, conversion rates are still traditionally fairly low. About 3%-8% of visitors to your site actually making a purchase is typical. I’ve had clients disappointed when they didn’t get 90% so expectations had to be reset. A lot of site visitors are just curious, are looking for information or just want to kick the tires.
Now back to Paid Search vs. Natural Search…
Paid search will get you more traffic faster and can be optimal for those selling on-line since you can measure the cost per transaction of running your campaign and adjust accordingly. But paid search isn’t necessarily the best choice for everyone. If you’re running an informational site for your niche business paid search can get very expensive very quickly. Ultimately, there are aspects of SEO (like how you configure your URL’s) which will aid you in natural search as well as paid search so my recommendation to any business is to at least a perform a fundamental SEO review and revision. Ultimately, the combination of SEO for natural search and paid search is going to be your biggest bang for the buck and finding the balance will depend largely on the needs and nature of your business.
When looking for someone to help you with SEO and paid search, look for a company with experience and who will leave you with an on-going plan. You might hire them to execute it for you (which might be a very good idea) but if you are capable of the maintenance and want to maintain it yourself an education should be a part of what you get from those you hire.
WordCamp 2008, San Francisco
August 15, 2008
Over the span of my career I’ve logged enough hours at conferences and seminars to have earned another college degree, and enough money has been spent sending me to pay for one. And for all of the benefit (and fun) I’ve gotten from them (ok, most of them were fairly useless in terms of real benefit), none of them have rivaled the usefulness, networking or value that I got from attending WordCamp Dallas in March of 2008… for $20.
In fact, we gained so much from that event that it became the springboard for BlackBox Technologies.
For those not in the know, WordCamp is really a series of conferences about blogging, new media, social media, etc.. revolving around the use of WordPress, the open-source blogging/content management system that is used to run everything from individual blogs to sites like CNET.
So my business partner Martin and I decided to head out to WordCamp 2008, the biggie in San Francisco. The conference is one day and based on the quality of speakers and the value of WordCamp Dallas, we have high expectations for WordCamp San Francisco. I look forward to taking back to our clients the latest and greatest in WordPress thinking, ideas, techniques and approaches that are sure to come from this conference in addition to learning what the future holds for this platform.
If you haven’t attended a WordCamp, look for one near you and think about going, even if you are not technical (many of the attendees are not). Otherwise, keep your eyes posted here for updates, links and other info from WordCamp 2008.
Search Engine Optimization - Images
July 29, 2008
There are a lot of people out there that will tell you how to optimize your website for search engines. In fact, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become so popular that it’s spawned many of the usual product and service offerings to “ensure your success” or “guarantee a top page placement.” Do yourself a favor and don’t buy the hype, there is an abundance of free information out there to help. There are undoubtedly reputable publications which offer lots of helpful info at a price, and rightly so, people should be able to charge for the time and effort spent compiling all the good things you can do to optimize your site for search, it really is that important, but no one can guarantee your a particular page rank. There are just too many variables that you can’t control which get factored into the search algorithms.
However, you can do better and improve your standings which over time can have the same effect as compiled interest. It may not be much day-to-day but after a year or two it really adds up.
One of the big things a lot of people overlook is how they handle meta-data with respect to their images so here are a couple of helpful hints to improve your chances of being found through the pictures you use on your site:
- Don’t use names like IMG00279, give your image a REAL and MEANINGFUL name like telluride-mountains.pg.
- Use the ALT tag and include a meaningful name or description. It might just be the name of the image again or something else but USE it.
- Use a “-” rather than in underscore “_” or blank space between words. To a search engine a “-” is a “white-space” character the others are special characters which means if you use a dash the search engine will read the name of the image as “telluride mountains”, but if you use an underscore it will be read as “telluride_mountains” (one word to a computer) and people aren’t likely to search for that. A good explanation (though somewhat technical) of why can be found here.
- Host your own images. I know it adds a little load and uses more space but image searches are common and you can use them to drive drive traffic to your site.
Do this for ALL images on your site. Don’t use names like “header-logo.jpg.” Use something like “Scott-Ellis-header.jpg.” Hmmm….. now that I think about it, I might have some cleaning up to do myself.