Content Analysis in Google Analytics
Posted on | July 16, 2009 | No Comments
In the Content section of Google Analytics, you can find an amazing amount of information about how visitors view and use your websites content. It shows you where people are entering and exiting your website, what sections of your site are visited the most, and how to optimize your site to draw in and captivate the most traffic. Read more
Learning About Your Visitors With Google Analytics
Posted on | July 16, 2009 | 1 Comment
The key to running a successful website is catching and keeping the attention of your visitors. Google Analytics offers many tools which can help you learn more about how users interact with your site.
After you enter your Google Analytics account, click on the visitors link on the left sidebar of the page. The first page you reach, the visitors overview page, presents a fairly robust way of learning about the visitors to your page. Like the main overview, the visitors overview shows you how many users have accessed your site and can be sorted by day, week, and month. It also has a number of other options which help you understand how your site is being used.
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Tags: benchmark > bounce rate > browser > Google Analytics > loyalty > pageviews > trending > Visitors > visits
Traffic Sources in Google Analytics
Posted on | July 16, 2009 | No Comments
Google Analytics also offers a lot of information in its ‘Traffic Sources’ section. By learning where your visitors visit most often, you can improve your website immensely.
The overview page contains the following:
- A pie chart showing where your traffic comes from. There are three possible sources:
- Direct Traffic is when a visitor types your website address directly into the address bar.
- Referring Sites occur when a site links to yours and shows how much traffic your site is receiving from links on other sites.
- Search Engine shows what percentage of your traffic is coming from search engines, such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo.
- Top Traffic Sources shows exactly where your traffic is coming from, whether it be direct, referring sites, or through a search engine. It will also say what websites are linking to you and the keywords that people used to find your website on search engines.
Traffic Sources Overview
Dynamic Headers for WordPress
Posted on | July 16, 2009 | 5 Comments
Dynamic Headers allow different posts and pages in WordPress to have different images or text on the header (the top of the page, above the content). This means that your Homepage header can be different from the header on your Contact page, for example, the Contact page could have a picture of a telephone on it, to help differentiate it from other pages. One of our favorite plugins to do this is Dynamic Headers by Nicasio Design.
Using Dynamic Headers is simple.
- Click on ‘Headers’ on the bottom of the left-hand navigation bar.
- Click on ‘Add New File’ to add a new Header or ‘Manage Files’ to manage existing headers.
- Upload the image you want to function as the header and fill in the alt text, link URL (optional), and link target or select an existing header and change the details.
- You can also change the default headers for all pages and for your homepage in ‘Settings.’
- While writing a new post or editing an already written post, you can change the header image the post will use by scrolling down to the ‘Nicasio Dynamic Header’ box and selecting the image that you want this particular post to use.
Add Dynamic Headers
Dynamic Header Selection
If you would like Pica to set this up for you, just ask and we’d be more than happy to accommodate.
Captcha Tools
Posted on | July 16, 2009 | No Comments
Captchas are a standard method to prevent spam on a website. CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” and almost everyone has used one at some point.
A Captcha
Since computers can’t read these images effectively, they are used as verification of a person posting a comment or filling out a form is a real person. If the captcha isn’t correct, the comment isn’t made.
Pica Design would be more than happy to place a captcha system on your website. While it takes time to be filled out, it ensures that your website isn’t overrun with spam.
Smart YouTube for WordPress
Posted on | July 16, 2009 | No Comments
With the Smart YouTube plugin for WordPress, embedding a YouTube video into a WordPress is extremely easy. All you have to do is add a few letters into the YouTube address.
- Find a video you want to embed into your WordPress post.
- Copy its URL into a WordPress post
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeacjOkLjZ0
- Insert a letter after the ‘http’ to have Smart YouTube embed the video into the post
- httpv:// - regular video
- httpvh:// - high quality
- httpvhd:// - HD quality
- You’re done!
A regular video post:
A high quality video post:
An HD quality video post:
Akismet in WordPress
Posted on | July 16, 2009 | No Comments
Akismet is a very intelligent spam filter you can install on your WordPress blog to keep spam comments to a minimum. Spam comments are becoming increasingly common as blogs grow in popularity but Akismet’s filtering system helps keep spam to a minimum.
Pica Design will set up your Akismet account when we set up your blog, and maintaining it is easy. To access the spam queue, click ‘Comments’ on the left menu, then ‘Spam’ under ‘Edit Comments.’ This takes you to your spam queue. Here you can see comments which Akismet has tagged as spam.
Spam Queue
Akismet usually does a fantastic job detecting what is and what isn’t spam. However, it isn’t infallible, and every so often you should check the queue to see if Akismet tagged a legitimate comment as spam by mistake. If it is, click the check box on the left of the comment, and then under ‘Bulk Actions,’ click ‘Approve.’
To see an overview of how Akismet is dealing with your comments, click ‘Akismet Stats’ under ‘Dashboard.’ Here are a number of charts showing how many spam comments have been caught, how many legitimate comments have passed through Akismet’s filter, and other options.
Akismet Stats
And that’s all there is to Akismet. Although it may seem simple, don’t be deceived. It uses a powerful system to detect and prevent spam, and I can attest myself that it works beautifully.
Using NextGEN Gallery
Posted on | July 10, 2009 | 2 Comments
NextGen Gallery is a very robust WordPress plugin for creating and managing an image gallery on your WordPress blog. It is best used for displaying a large amount of photos at once, and alleviates the need to insert pictures manually like we described in How to Insert a Picture into Post in WordPress.
Pica Design will install NextGen Gallery for you if you need photo management in your blog. It’s a free plugin, and if you feel that it would make your blog better don’t hesitate to ask us to install it.
This tutorial will be split into a few steps, uploading pictures, managing galleries, and adding your images to posts.
Intro to Google Analytics
Posted on | July 10, 2009 | No Comments
Google Analytics is a powerful tool for anyone with a website. Who wouldn’t want to know about how many people have visited their website, how they got there, and what they were most interested in? I also have to mention how easy Google Analytics is to use!
Pica Design will gladly set up a Google Analytics account for our clients, and that’s the hardest part of the whole ordeal (and all this really takes is a line of code on the bottom of your website).
Next you just have to log in to your Google Analytics Dashboard.
Google Analytics Dashboard
This may seem like a lot of information, but when broken down it is easy to see how useful Google Analytics is. It shows you visits to your site per day, week, or month, and makes detailed charts which yield a lot of data. It also shows information like total visits, how many unique visitors have browsed the site, how long they spend on the site, how people are finding your sites, and even where they are located!
The sidebar of Google Analytics contains links to even more detailed info. Browser statistics and screen size can be found (which is particularly relevant to us designers), as well as Search Engine Optimization data, such as what people are searching on Google to find your website and what pages are attracting the most attention.
Google Analytics is a great tool for any website. Not only does it offer detailed data on the use of your site, but it also can help you build a site more compelling for the user.
Cloud Tags in WordPress
Posted on | July 10, 2009 | No Comments
Cloud tags are a feature used in many blogs to show how popular certain subjects are to the writers. By making a list of all the tags used on a blog, WordPress can assign different font sizes and colors for tags used more often, creating a visual representation of what is popular in the blog.
Tag Cloud of Web 2.0 Terms
You can set up a tag cloud by assigning tags to your posts (learn more about posting items here) and then enabling the Tag Cloud sidebar widget.
- Go to the Widget Page by clicking the ‘Widgets’ subtab in the ‘Appearance’ tab.
- Drag the Tag Cloud Widget into a sidebar on the right.
Tag Cloud Widget