Based on a number of articles I have read, there is a changing tide of opinion that XML Sitemaps (or Google Sitemaps as they are often called) are now a good thing and you should submit them to Google (and other search engines) to help your site. As with all things, there is no definite confirmation from the search engines themselves that this has a benefit or not, and we are left to guess based on experience whether there is a benefit.

However, if we look at the situation objectively we can see a number of positive benefits for having an XML Sitemap. Here’s my list – please feel free to add yours in the comments below:

• For dynamic sites, and sites with regular, multiple postings, the XML Sitemap is a shortcut for search engines to identify the new content on the site and index it accordingly.
• For all sites, the XML Sitemap helps the search engine identify the real content on your site that you want considered for indexation.
• For small, static sites the XML Sitemap is a reminder to search engines that potentially ‘unqualified’ pages should be checked every now and then based on the period identified in the Sitemap.

Here’s my reasoning behind this.

A search engine is designed to index your site. It will access every page it can find based on the way you internally index your site, ie via navigation and internal linking. The search engine will then determine how important each page is relative to the others based on a number of factors including quality of content, META data (including the TITLE tage), and both external and internal links. Search engines are clever and there are many reasons they can demote or drop pages on your site. Here are a few reasons:

• If there are too many links pointing to a particular page, it may get penalised for being potentially deliberate link bait
• If there is too little content on the page to make it relevant to searches
• If there are not enough links to your page or site to suggest it is relevant to the wider Internet community
• If there is too much content (for example repetitive content or content over-stuffed with keywords)

Taken together (with many other factors) a search engine can decide if your pages are relevant to people searching on the Internet. As you change your content, the search engine will pick up the changes and adjust its own index and relevancy. However, this is an iterative process and once a page is demoted or dropped it could be a long time (maybe never) that that page returns to the index.

This is where the XML Sitemap comes in as it tells the search engine not to forget a page and to revisit it at a certain period (although this can be achieved through META tags equally well, it is sometimes easier to do it in the XML Sitemap). This tool can help promote your page back up the index more quickly if the search engine finds that it has ‘improved’ (by its terms – see the bad behaviour list above) and you could find better results in the long term.

Remember that on each crawl (indexation) of your site, a search engine does not index every page – only those it thinks it should check. An XML Sitemap is a way to tell the search engine about your entire site so it can check it against its version of your sitemap and determine which pages it should check this time. This won’t boost search rankings, but it should ensure you get indexed more quickly.

Content Management Systems such as WordPress have plugins that can build the XML Sitemap automatically for you, which means that as you add content these new pages and posts are added to the XML Sitemap automatically and the search engine will pick up the changes more quickly. Of course, if your site is well built (coded) and linked then this is icing on the cake, but then cakes should be iced, no?

Resources

Online XML Sitemap Generator (up to 500 pages)

What is Pinterest?

Pinterest, in case you haven’t heard of it, is essentially Tumblr with some different features. Like Tumblr, it allows you to post your own stuff, as well as stuff you find around the internet, with the click of a button. However, it is more akin to a scrapbook as it is focused on visual content and allows you to create ‘boards’ which are used to categorise the types of posts (called ‘pins’) that you make in your account.

You can also make some of your boards collaborative – as with many blogging tools – so that a team or group of friends can contribute to that board.

To illustrate Pinterest and its potential, head over to my Pin on the subject. Here is a quick profile summary of the users:

• ~80% are female
• ~55% are 24-44 years old
• ~70% have a reasonable to goo disposable income
• People typically spend longer on Pinterest than other social networks (higher potential engagement)
• UK users seem more business-focused than the bulk of the US user-base

So what?

For the individual, Pinterest is a great tool to help collate mood boards if you are doing a project at home. You can collect images of things you’d like to put together for your project – colours, fabrics, items of furniture, design styles, etc – all under one board. You can then review this at your leisure and filter it down (ie delete things) that don’t fit the project. Each item you pin here has a link back to the site you pinned it from, so you have a handy set of bookmarks to all the things you’d like. I used it recently to collate a series of mosaics that we were interested in for our restaurant.

For the business, you can apply the same logic and collate things related to specific topics. There are boards which contain great infographics (which is where I found the Pinterest infographic above), others for SEO, others for mens fashion, many for women’s fashion, make-up, etc. Your board can collate elements from all of these to represent your brand and provide a useful resource for your followers.

How should I use it for business?

In a word – carefully. Here are a few tips for getting the most out of the system courtesy of Entrepreneur.

Do tell stories and tap into emotions
Pinterest is a place for storytelling. Help consumers become emotionally connected to your brand by pinning content that reveals more about your brand personality than just your product line. Check out the pin boards from Birchbox to get some ideas. For example, the beauty-products subscription service features fun “unboxing videos” of people opening their purchases and sneak peaks into packages before they’re sent to customers.

Do get social and build relationships
Pinterest is a social destination, so get involved with its community. Find active Pinterest members and build relationships with them by following them, repinning their content and commenting on their pins. The commenting feature in Pinterest is still greatly underutilized, and you can stand out by using it frequently.

Do create group pinboards and crowdsource
You don’t have to go it alone on Pinterest. Create group pinboards and invite other users to pin content to those boards. For example, ask customers to pin pictures of themselves using your products. You also could hold a contest to crowdsource pins. Ask customers to review your business or product on your website and pin a quote from their review to a special contest pinboard. You benefit from more reviews and a pinboard that’s filled with testimonials.

Don’t use pinterest for direct marketing
Pinterest states that the site should not be used for direct marketing, advertising or sales. Excessive and overt self-promotion is clearly unacceptable, so make sure you’re pinning diverse content, not just pictures of your products. You need to get creative and use Pinterest for indirect marketing. For example, fill pin boards with seasonal items, color coordinated images, gift ideas and so on. For inspiration, Scholastic has a variety of creative pinboards that are excellent examples of indirect marketing.

Don’t forget who the Pinterest audience is
Approximately three out of four Pinterest users are currently women. While the site is beginning to attract more male users, you shouldn’t waste time pinning a lot of content that women are unlikely to be interested in.

Don’t pin anything and everything
Cluttering your pinboards with everything you think people might like is a mistake. Just as people don’t like to sift through clutter in search engine results and on websites, they don’t want to be overwhelmed on Pinterest. Stay focused, but don’t be afraid to pin interesting content that your target audience would enjoy and that’s at least loosely connected to your business. Such content can help give your brand more personality.

What about launching a brand?

Launching/positioning a brand is at a different level than simply setting up boards to help grow traffic and develop new channels for your business. Here are a few pointers, this time from Mashable on the subject:

Reserve Your Space
Just like you would reserve a Twitter handle for your brand, secure a Pinterest user name. Some Pinterest members are already using brand names and logos for which they have no affiliation. Some brands have jumped in to reserve their spaces without yet posting any content, including Karen Millen and Diane von Furstenberg. Registration only takes just a minute; plus you can use the graphics and profile information from your existing Twitter or Facebook page.

Leverage Your Brand Values
Think colours, style and brand values. You’ve already invested in expensive photography to showcase your products. This is where you can leverage that investment and bring your brand alive. Pinterest allows you to display big, high-quality images, like this full-length Nordstrom image. Don’t limit your pins to straight product shots, but leverage your entire catalog of photography.

Think themes, not Promotion
Pinterest is centered around interests, like weddings, baby showers, home décor, gifts, recipes, color, etc. Leverage these themes by creating mood boards relevant to your brand and its latest styles. These mood boards should convey a consistent image, not be a simple look book of your products. Scatter your products throughout the board, but be careful to make sure that you are also mixing external content which echoes your product themes. For example, West Elm built an “aquamarine” mood board. There are only three West Elm products on this page; the others are images from around the web, each of which expands on the theme. Remember that shameless self-promotion is a no-no on Pinterest and your boards and/or account could be pulled.

Include Prices
Prices help customers to identify particular items for sale. For example, Gap included a price banner by typing the dollar value in the pin description. Remember, however, to make price changes when items go on sale.

Use Hashtags
Many people are unaware that Pinterest supports hashtags, similar to Twitter. Because of the theme nature of Pinterest, hashtags can offer organisation support. For example, tagging each of the pinned photographs “#aquamarine” increases the chances that the West Elm mood board be found in search. As Pinterest grows, this will become increasingly important. Moreover, the sharing tools built into Pinterest will automatically pick up your hashtags, so when your pins are shared or repinned, they’ll carry your hashtags with them. You can also cross-post to Twitter, so the hashtags gain added value here also.

Add the “Pin It” Button
Add the Pinterest “Pin It” button to your ecommerce site, right next to your Facebook Like button. This makes it easy for your website visitors to add images from your product pages directly to their boards. Widgets such as AddThis or ShareThis embody all the social media sites, so it may be easier to adopt an off-the-shelf solution rather than integrate each social media sharing option individually – but that’s your call for the design of your site!

Getting Started with Pinterest

After you create your account, you will be asked to select a few topic areas you’d like to follow. Pinterest will then select a bunch of existing users and auto-follow their boards for you. You can refine this collection at this stage, or refine it later.

My approach was to use a rough-brush and select a bunch of suggested boards and then filter them out as time passed (ie unfollow individual boards) if I didn’t like the content. Unfollowing a board is very easy to do – just click on the board name under the image and then ‘unfollow’. You will soon remove the boards you are not interested in.

You can just as easily add boards by using the search tools – either keyword or theme (category) – and then follow the ones you like. My suggestion here is to follow individual boards and not follow users entire collection. Some users seem to have hundreds of boards and you could end up back with a lot of rubbish filling up your visual stream when you log in. It also makes a daily review easier and quicker.

Remember to monitor who is liking and repinning your posts also. These are like-minded souls who you can engage with and who may well post things you’d be interested in. Remember to follow relevant boards back and engage with their content – see notes above on business use, but this is generally how you’d use a social network anyway

Are there any tools to help me pin?

Why sure! Here is a list of 19 such tools from ‘pinfluence’ analytics, to pinning and curation tools. My personal favourites are:

• Official “Pin It” Pinterest Bookmarklet. Pinterest offers a “Pin It” bookmarklet on its goodies page. Just right when you want to pin that image and then be done.
• Pin a Quote (now Share as Image). Oddly for a visual pinboard site there are a lot of pictures of text (quotations), but we all like a little inspiration now and again don’t we? There are some superlative examples of typography, but you can join in and contribute using this simple bookmarklet which allows you to cut-and-pin text quotes from the web in a simple graphical format. For a small fee you can upgrade from the free tool to use additional fonts and backgrounds to add a bit of spice to the free version’s monochrome output.
• url2pin.it & Snapito. Both are great tools to take a screen grab of a website, the latter offering a full-length option to capture the whole page in its entirety. url2pin captures the screen above the fold and also adds a colour palette to the screengrab as a nice touch. Neither works with Flash websites and neither fully render special fonts (for example Google Fonts) which your theme/design may use, though url2pin.it appears to support more fonts. I am sure this will change in time to make them superlative screenshot tools for designers to build portfolio boards.
• If you are on a Mac (or iOS device) you can use Skitch (now owned by Evernote) to take full-screen grabs which do support the fonts (though not Flash). You can then save them and upload new pins on Pinterest. As a designer and developer, this is a better option as it provides a true representation of your work.

Are you using Pinterest? Post links to your boards below with any tips or suggestions. Thanks. You can find mine here.

There are a number of vectors at play here, but they resolve to 2 main attack paths:

• Third-party plugins within WordPress
• Third-party JavaScript (AJAX) frameworks

Both of these elements have something in common: they are both public, open source code and are outdated versions.

The problem; you’ve been framed

The problem arises when you use third-party, open source code. Over time, hackers find ways to exploit this code and then set up a botnet (or equivalent) to scour the web for installations of the outdated, third-party code and duly infect the website that contains it. These botnets can continue their activity for a period of time, which accounts for why these WordPress (and other) sites were repeatedly hacked every time the code was replaced with a clean copy – it still contained the outdated, third-party code.

For WordPress, the vulnerabilities are many and multiform as each installation can be customised with as many different plugins as the website owner, developer or designer wants. These third-party plugins may or may not be maintained, and can themselves contain further third-party code, and so on to many levels. Even if the plugin is maintained, any third-party code that it contains may not be updated and so propagate the vulnerability.

For other sites, the vulnerability may be something as innocuous as carrying third-party advertising. These third-party ads work by embedding an iFrame in your site and then embedding a whole load of JavaScript and content that forms the advert. Unscrupulous malvertisers use this technique to submit and serve ads to these networks with the intent of throwing a switch and infecting any site that happens to display their ad. Every time the infected ad is displayed, the infection of the site (or the visitors machine) occurs. Even Google announced last week that they had managed to dramatically reduce the number of ‘bad advertisers’ getting through their security systems. Note: dramatically reduce. Not eradicate. So even Google Adsense may be vulnerable.

Aside: In my case, it appeared that the WordPress plugin Jetpack had been targeted and, according to the logs, was the attack vector the hackers used to overcome the site, though ‘the timthumb hack‘ is the most likely third-party candidate. After I removed it (and its associated plugins) the attack subsided. In the other sites, it was the use of a third-party system that required an old version of jQuery (because it did not work with the later versions of jQuery) that caused the problem.

The implications; you’ve been maimed

When your site is infected you become a ‘bad place’ (eventually) according to Google and other repositories that monitor malware on the web. Many desktop anti-virus systems (e.g. Kaspersky) scan the web pages you visit for problems and block the page from your visitor, and in turn report the site as ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’. In time, browsers such as Chrome simply put up a warning page that the site may be harmful if the visitor proceeds and you get next to no visitors. Unfortunately, the Google Webmaster Tools which have been hailed as an early-warning system for such incursions don’t seem to be flagging them even though Chrome does (we monitor all our sites using Google’s Webmaster Tools and all were showing as ‘clean’ according to their malware report even though Chrome was showing a ‘warning, bad site ahead’ page).

The solution; you’ll be tamed

The best option is to keep your website (WordPress and plugins, or any third party code) fully updated to minimise the possibility of allowing hackers to exploit existing vulnerabilities. However, that requires maintenance which may in turn incur costs from your web developers. Content management systems such as WordPress itself gets frequent updates to minimise risks (which makes the core framework stable and secure), and contain an auto-update feature which makes life very easy. Third-party plugins are designed with this auto-update feature also, but may be less often maintained and therefore introduce greater risk. Choose which plugins you need wisely to minimise the number of potential vulnerabilities.

If you have a bespoke application, you should ensure that your web developers maintain any third-party code to reduce the risk of being hacked. After all, if this happens you could easily be offline and invisible on the web, or worse (your database could be hacked, information stolen, etc, etc.). This maintenance will incur additional costs unless you have a support agreement in place, but is a necessary evil on the Web today.

Useful Links

If your WordPress installation has been hacked, you will first need to recover your site. The code that runs it is relatively easy to fix – delete the site and replace the code with a fresh installation. The database is a little more tricky as you don’t want to lose your valuable content, but need to unpick any malware that may have been attached to it. This is a slow, painstaking process and there are very few shortcuts. Here are some useful links for resolving WordPress hacks, and helping to prevent them in the first place.

• How to completely clean a hacked WordPress installation
• Hardening WordPress against possible attack
• 10 Plugins to harden WordPress against possible attack

Be ready – one day your site will come under attack and you need to be ready to get things working again. This is a fact of being online in the 21st century and as we become dependent and totally connected through more prevalent and capable mobile (formerly edge) devices, we will see the number of attack vectors increase and threaten to black out more and more sites.

This term is very explicit and refers to allowing cookies for things like ecommerce sites that remember basket contents between pages – ie an integral part of the functioning of the website (application) itself. Anything that is not integral – like web stats, etc – is considered to require permission and you are told that you need to look at ways to implement this new requirement because “if the ICO receives a complaint about your website you will be in serious trouble” (to paraphrase).

I looked into this further and the change in the EU law was actually in 2011 (not this year) and, to be honest, the Internet landscape hasn’t suddenly changed, nor have we been deluged with requests by websites to ‘opt in’ to accepting cookies. In short, not much has changed in the last year as a result of the change in this law and life goes on as normal.

Despite the hype and scaremongering that such emails may generate in you by asking you to take immediate action, your approach should always be a pragmatic one. Do you think that the entire population of the EU is suddenly going to complain overnight if they find out you have used cookies for tracking web stats and not explicitly asked them to ‘opt in’? Unlikely.

Personally, I believe that the old law which required you to specifically outline how you use tools such as cookies on your site (via a privacy policy) to be much more realistic and workable. I understand the privacy concerns but I do not believe that the introduction of a new law really changes things. It is simply a sticking plaster over a concern to appease a minority of vociferous individuals. The real solution will come through innovative use of the technology that we use to interact with the Web itself, and maybe rank cookies in terms of ‘strictly necessary’, ‘generally functional’, and ‘tracking’ (for example) and be able to control which we accept through the browser.

To be fair, modern browsers allow us to choose if we accept cookies or not, if we delete them when we close the browser, if we accept third-part cookies (used mostly for advertising), etc. We have to dig into the options and preferences of the browser to do this, but the power to control it is at our fingertips and, over time, will become more refined. A “new” law does not solve this by forcing ‘opt in’ options when we already have the power to opt out. Be vigilant of any emails you receive urging you to “act now” and remember to ask your friendly web developer for their take as well as ask your business peers before rushing into action.

UPDATE: If you want to see the ICO’s guidance notes on cookies, please download their PDF. Interestingly, Domino’s have issued an updated cookie policy on their new website which can be seen in their legal section here.

Kiva – The Founding Father?

The idea of crowd-sourcing capital is not a new one and way back in 2005 Kiva launched with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty. Leveraging the internet and a worldwide network of microfinance institutions, Kiva lets individuals lend as little as $25 to help create opportunity around the world. Since Kiva was founded in 2005 they have 692,588 Kiva lenders, have raised $287 million in loans with a 98.91% Repayment rate and are operational in 61 different countries.

Wahooly – The New Kid

The essence of the system is simple. You join the community and agree to become an active beta user of new online startups. Through your level of activity you are rewarded with an equity stake in the startup service, and, if at some stage in the future said startup makes some money you can cash in your equity. You choose the startups you want to be involved in out of the portfolio presented to you.

Wahooly differs in that it does not require a financial stake – simply an investment of time and a leverage of your social network. Wahooly is a very new service and the initial launch had a few teething problems, but as time passes the incumbent rough edges will be smoothed out (as is true for any new startup) and I am sure the network will grow and there will be a few star performers in their portfolio.

Grow VC – The Quiet One

The idea of disruptive approaches to funding is not new, though we are seeing the emergence of other players in this arena now. Grow VC has been around since August 2010 and is, therefore, more mature in terms of its implementation. The concept is similar to Wahooly, although the platform allows for both time and financial investment, as well as the ability to post your own start-up. With Wahooly, you have to be approved and shortlisted by the Wahooly team to be eligible for investment.

“Grow Venture Community (Grow VC) is the first global, transparent, community-based platform dedicated to entrepreneurs and investors. Grow VC enables great ideas and great teams to get visibility with the right investing audience, funding and support earlier. Grow VC is more than crowd funding, it’s a nurturing ecosystem where entrepreneurs can connect with experts, funders, team members, new customers and partners to realize their ideas. Grow VC can help startups companies secure initial funding of up to 1M USD.”

GrowVC offers a more traditional investment model, and because anybody can post ideas the variety of choices in which to invest is completely open. By this virtue, there will be a lot more chaff than wheat, and we hope that Wahooly’s pre-selection process means that more of the opportunities available will be better thought-out.

Will life change as we know it?

I think it’s great that the Internet is enabling a horizontal vector which allows anybody to be involved with anything (to an extent). There are people out there with great ideas and who can add significant intellectual value (not just financial value) to startups. Some of this can be leveraged through these new platforms by allowing experienced entrepreneurs the ability to ‘pay it forward’ and get involved in a community to help develop new ideas and grow businesses.

However, while these companies do open up the possibilities, they also create a platform for exposing thousands of unrealistic business ideas which will never get off the ground simply because they don’t make sense. This exposes everybody in the network to a huge amount of noise and will make it difficult for the uninitiated investor (either of time or money) to filter and make decisions on which projects to invest in. The upside of this is that it’s a low risk opportunity to hone the skills needed to really assess business models and help pick and choose good ones.

The ‘low hanging fruit’ issue can be seen in how the businesses are or have evolved. Looking at Wahooly, we see that the Wahooly team pre-select (or shortlist) a small number of business ideas from all those submitted and release these to the community of would-be investors. This addresses the issue of new-business-noise that exists in GrowVC for example. GrowVC have also evolved and now have put together a traditional investment fund which they will be using to invest in the best performing businesses in the network – in other words those businesses that have received sufficient momentum from seed investment (time or money) from the crowd.

Overall, these systems do allow everybody to get involved in the network that surrounds the new businesses on them. However, it still appears that the real investment to take a good idea from fledgling to full-blown commercial status still happens the traditional way when an investor puts up a large sum of money in return for a good stake in the business. While the promise of ‘what if the business you invest your time in becomes the next Facebook’ is all well and good, the likelihood of this happening is very, very small. And when such a business does start to gain traction you can bet your bottom dollar that the hawks will be on hand to invest and/or buy out the initial investors to ensure they benefit from the lion’s share.

Investing is a calculated gamble, and even VCs work on odds of 10:1 most of the time. Getting involved at the entry level may seem like a great idea, but you’ll probably be working on odds closer to 1000:1 if not much, much higher so be prepared to put in the time early on before you start to see any kind of return on your investment.

As 2012 gets underway we note that the underlying trend for Internet access is mobile. More and more people are accessing websites from mobile devices and all credible industry analysis indicates that this trend is only going to strengthen.

Add to this the fact that both Apple and Microsoft do not support Flash on mobile devices, and that Adobe themselves have stated:

“Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.”

We are noticing the growth in mobile traffic to our clients’ websites. It’s not a huge shift but does represent a shift in traffic that needs to be taken notice of. Failing to create a website that your visitors can access irrespective of the device they choose to use is simply shortsighted for your business.

So, in my view Flash should not be used for website development (caveat: unless it is the only option).

Business to Consumer (B2C) mailings

Promotional mailings to consumers are tightly controlled, so the rules are very simple.

Put simply, you are not allowed to send unsolicited marketing emails to consumers unless you have express permission to do so.

Permission is normally gained by the recipient having opted in to receive emails from you. This permission can be either direct, or it may be via a third party. Instances of 3rd party permissions can be where a consumer has subscribed to a magazine and at the same time agreed to receive emails from selected businesses to whom the publisher may have ‘sold or rented’ his database. Another example is where the consumer has joined an online competition line with one of the conditions for free competition entry being that the consumer must agree to receive email marketing information from other parties to whom the competition organisers have rented their lists.

In the above instances it is generally safe to work with such lists.

In general, avoid renting or buying email lists from unknown list brokers or hard-to-verify sources such as eBay. The vendors of such lists may claim that the lists have permission but in many cases they are lists made up of harvested addresses, and using them for your consumer mailings may result in prosecution and having your website / email addresses blocked for spamming. It is no defence to say that you believed the list to be opt-in when you acquired it on-the-cheap.

Business to Business (B2B) mailings

Here, life is a little easier and oddly works almost in reverse.

It is permissible to email marketing messages to business addresses unless the recipient has specifically requested that he/she does not wish to receive further emails from you.

If after receiving such a request you continue to email them you are then committing an offence and are potentially liable to be fined – which could be as much as £5,000 per offence. An address such as james@aol.com is not considered to be a business address – even though some smaller businesses use AOL addresses. Other free email addresses such as jenny@hotmail.com or gary@gmail.com are also not considered legitimate business email addresses.

The law may be one thing, but being accused of spamming and having your site taken down and being blacklisted by the ISPs is another and can happen even if you follow these rules. Just because the law says you can send unsolicited commercial emails providing that the recipient is able to opt out, for the sake of your business you should play safe and stay with proven opt-in email addresses.

When building your list, we recommend that you get permission from your recipients at the various touch-points to your business. For example, they sign-up via an online form, or they drop their business card in the ‘send me promotional mail’ box, they fill in a survey or response form and are asked for their permission to send emails, etc. This way you will build a clean list with minimal risk of being flagged as a spammer. Take care to use credible sources of business mailing lists if you are purchasing lists to target specific audiences.