tips - Beantin

5 basic (and practical) ways to make your site load faster

Faster is better. There’s no arguing about it. Google likes faster pages, people like faster pages. Your 3G wireless connection loves leaner, slimmer pages. God damn, your shareholders love them too! Website performance optimisation, like search engine optimisation – or any optimisation – is a fine art. It also follows the

Analytics

Web analytics: Find your graveyard pages with no visitors

In web analytics we usually focus on things that have happened – visits, visitors, pageviews, events, conversions. You generally know what your most popular pages are. You probably have a good idea of the most common paths through your site. How about taking a look at what isn’t happening? No

tips

The complete website redesign: why you should avoid it

Never do a complete redesign & rewrite of your website in one go. Many companies are still locked in a 3-5 year redesign cycle – a point is reached when the unhappiness with their website reaches such a level that a total redesign is ordered. While we’re at it A

Analytics

Google Analytics: 7 things to do when you first start

If you are starting out with Google Analytics for a site (or sites), then there are a few first steps you should follow. Here are 7 tips to get you up and running… 1. Create an account Make sure you sign up using a company email address, Preferably a non-personal

facebook

Facebook Places: how to set who can see you

Facebook Places is continuing to roll-out across the world. Today it was launched in the nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark and Norway. To help you maintain a bit of control over your information and who gets to see where you’ve checked into I’ve created this guide. Control your

Best practice: Updating videos on YouTube

It’s not actually possible to upload new versions and “update” a video clip on YouTube. As someone who helps managers a number of websites for various clients, it’s not unusual for me to receive an email that says “Can you remove from our YouTube account. We’ve got

case

Search-engine friendly country site select boxes

Design often has the final say in a redesign project – or at best, a very powerful voice – which isn’t always a good, or acceptable, situation. Recently I was part of a project where I needed to preserve an aspect of the old design for SEO reasons. The new design

contentstrategy

SEO guidelines for content writers

Last week I published an SEO checklist for content writers. Here is some additional, practical, information and tips that expands upon that SEO checklist. Just like the checklist, I’m not claiming this is a definitive guide, but sharing these guidelines with your content writers will help you go a

checklist

SEO checklist for content writers

A situation that repeats itself again and again is that those asigned the task of writing content for websites are, well, writers of course. They aren’t webmasters or SEO experts. They are people who are good at gathering information and facts and producing great articles and content aimed at

Analytics

How to track per visit referrer with Google Analytics

Prevously I wrote about how traffic sources in Google Analytics perhaps aren’t what you think, mainly due to GA’s attribution of page views, visits & visitors to the latest source. It’s not possible using out-of-the-box Google Analytics for you to see the full referring page for each

facebook

For your reading pleasure... (week 11, 2010)

Matt Cutts Interviewed by Eric Enge Matt and the Google Webmaster Central blog are excellent sources of information regarding how Google works and what you should be doing. This is a long and interesting interview and gives some useful answers to a number of questions. For those of you who

firefox

Properties context menu item add-on for Firefox 3.6

Properties context menu item add-on for Firefox 3.6 For years I’ve used the “properties” option in the context menu of firefox to quickly check the alt and title attributes of various elements (especially images) and to grab the URL of images – amongst other useful things for someone working

contentstrategy

Readability Test Tool

Readability Test Tool This tool provides a quick way of testing the readability of your (english) content using a number of established readability indictors. Given the way we read online content, it is often best to create content that has a readability level suitable for children.

Analytics

Measuring browser viewport size with Google Analytics

I wrote about browser viewport statistics in November and how we spend far too much time measuring and focusing on screen resolution where we should be concentrating on browser viewport size. With just a simple bit of Google Analytics event tracking code you can collect some basic viewport size statistics

SEO

Redirect 301 cheat sheet

Inspired by Jesper Åström’s series of redirect articles, and because taking care of redirects is important, I thought I’d share the cheat sheet I keep in my personal wiki. Similar information is available elsewhere, but it’s worth repeating. As a LAMP-boy, some of these redirect methods (such

google

Keywords meta tag is not completely useless

Despite Google confirming that they do not use the keywords metatag for ranking purposes, the keyword meta tag is not completely without it’s uses. When you optimise the content of a page for a given set of keywords then that is an investment you have made, and the resultant

blogging

Blog comments using Twitter

Tumblr doesn’t have a comments function (although it does have Answers). Why should it? it’s a tumblelog; a form micro-blogging. Lengthy discussion sections on the page are not really suited to the concept. But at the same time, people like to comment and discuss – to engage in the

social networking

Follow people on Twitter without actually following them

At the time of writing I follow about 50 people and those 50 people generate about 300-400 tweets a day. The number of tweets passing before your eyes if you follow hundreds of people is going to be overwhelming. The obvious solution to tweet-overload is to stop following people, but

google

Geotargetting country-neutral top-level domains

If you have a country-specific domain, such as .co.uk (for the UK) or .se (for Sweden) then Google automatically presumes that your site is targeted to that region. It’s not something you can change yourself. If you have a country-neutral TLD (such as .com or .org) then Google

tips

An easy to read and easy to understand guide to web-standards

An easy to read and easy to understand guide to web-standards Finding, Understanding, and following the relevant web-standards for developing web-sites is no easy task. They don’t exist as a single entity. It’s a doctrine rather than a unique reference. Sure there are official standards described at W3C,

Fail

Taking care of RSS readers

DN, a national newspaper here in Sweden, have just launched their new site. They have managed to make quite a notable mistake, but one which is not uncommon. All of their existing RSS feeds have changed location. This in itself is not a mistake. Their mistake lies in not redirecting

CSS

X-Ray and see the CSS

X-Ray and see the CSS My favoured tool for seeing beneath the bonet and examining the CSS and mark-up behind the elements of a webpage. Anyone dealing with creating modern web pages based on web standards must have an X-Ray tool at their disposal.