Do I feel stupid!

I’m crushed! I have just discovered that all the vague, short comments with a web address at the end are leading to sites promoting Viagra, etc. I guess spam now comes in sincere-seeming comments. From here on all comments will be moderated. Any with real content will be allowed unless a listed web address leads to some obviously commercial, unrelated site. Also, any “comment” with no readable content will be denied. I apologize to anyone with real comments and I will do my best to approve within a day any (positive or negative) comment that relates to the topics of the site.

Web analysis terms

For those of you who are watching me struggle to get up to speed with web site stuff, let me report a new breakthrough. As I mentioned earlier, I have set up with Google Analytics for the 4 sites I am developing. It was interesting (but of no special importance) to see from what countries visitors came in the last week or so (when I started getting data). But some of the BIG statistics had no meaning. So I looked them up in Google and here are the (mostly Wikipedia) meanings:

Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of people who arrive at any of my pages and never go to any other of my pages from there. Either they came by mistake or else, having arrived, they decided nothing else was interesting enough to click on. I learn that 50% is generally considered good–only one in two stays around. Continue reading “Web analysis terms”

Higher-speed glitz

My friend Carl agreed to test out my new improved pages. He has a “tablet” of some sort (non-iPad) as well as a hard-wired networked computer. The latter seems to behave just like my Dell Laptop but the tablet seemed to take forever to load. Perhaps the wireless-ness of the network connection was part of the problem, but my goal is to have the pages work well for anyone, regardless of the degree of state-of-the-art they represent. As I went back to the graphics (pictures) that I added at the top, I was going to reduce the JPEG quality to “low” to reduce the file size, but I discovered Photoshop has a choice to save pictures “for the web.” Continue reading “Higher-speed glitz”

Glitz at last

I now have the basic machinery of these sites working. The Word Press 2011 theme provides all I need (as far as I can tell at this moment) in terms of putting up posts and pages as well as receiving comments and getting data on site visits. It seemed like it was finally time to add some graphics to give a bit more visual interest to the sites. Continue reading “Glitz at last”

Subscribers and notifications

Having encountered web sites that required me to identify myself before I could post a comment and offered to notify me when new things were posted, I had a passing familiarity with the (annoying) process. When someone commented that they wished my site had such a feature, I was flattered. I take that to indicate I am progressing in the crawl-walk-run sequence relative to WordPress. As evidence I immediately knew to search for a plugin to add notification and sure enough I found several including one called subscribe2.

As the administrator it is difficult to see how the plugin looks to a new visitor, so I welcome comments from you who visit the sites. You may post a comment or email me at schultz@pei.sympatico.ca.

Have I mentioned that a next step may be to bring web-related emails over to an address associated with the account?

How much information is enough?

Being dragged inexorably along, I now have several days of Google Analytics information on my 4 web sites. My friend Carl showed me how I could go directly to analytics and find out all sorts of things. There are things like pageloads, exits and uniques which I assume are counts of how many people have gone to each of the pages of each site. I can find out where in the world these viewers were located: France, India, China and several eastern European countries as well as the US. I could even find out that the 2 hits in the US were from Indiana (and that they were me or my friends here where we are visiting grandchildren!). Continue reading “How much information is enough?”

Content vs. Glitz

Today I have been discussing web sites with a friend and It has become clear to me that it is content that is key. Having a very attention-getting set of graphics and dynamic moving pictures looks very modern (and young), but I saw a page that had marvelous graphics with colored text that just invited clicking for more information, only to find that it was not a real “click” spot and nothing came up. The few pages had almost no “content” except the graphics–almost no text describing anything about which one might wish to find more information. Continue reading “Content vs. Glitz”

Starting a blog site

Getting a web “presence” is not as easy as it is claimed. Good advice told me, if I wanted to have any hope of finding a market for the new books I am developing, I should start a set of blogs to grow a community of people who share my interests. The good advice was to not have a wide variety of blog posts all in one thread. I have at least three separate interests, so I am wrestling with how to have blogs threads clearly delineated. I have just discovered that separate addresses (URLs) make everykthing easier. It is a case of beating my head against a (software) wall or going with what the software tools make easiest. WordPress seemed easy (and free) and it claimed to have the most powerful tools so that is how it has gone. Continue reading “Starting a blog site”

Web site development

I have been struggling to develop new web pages and posts so I can be more interactive with those who are interested. I expect to be posting new blogs several times a week in the various categories as they develop. Today I am working on the multiple layers of this web site–it isn’t so much that I have to get the tools to do what I want as it is to get my wants to line up with what is easy to do! I think the best analogy is that of banging my head against the wall when all I need to do is look up and move over to the doorway which has been there all along.