Legacy links are links from your old site that get broken when the new site goes live.

For example, your product page might have been at:

www.mydomain.com/products.html

And now it’s at:

www.mydomain.com/products

But after you go live, you may still be receiving a lot of traffic to /products.html from Google and other sites which have links to the old page. If you don’t deal with this issue promptly, your Search Engine rankings will go down and you may lose a lot of traffic.

There are a few way to resolve this issue:

Manually redirect

You can make a list of all your old site pages and use the .htaccess to redirect them all to the new perspective pages. Here’s how to set up .htaccess for redirects. This solution is impractical with sites with hundreds or thousands of pages.

Use the WP plugin Redirect

WordPress has a useful plugin simply called Redirection. It allows you to enter redirects through the WordPress admin backend, and keeps track of how many times each link has been clicked upon.

This is what the WordPress Plugin Redirection looks like

How do I find out which are my most important Legacy Links?

An easy way is to use the Google Analytics Content report. After launching your new site (assuming you’ve also installed GA), go to Google Analytics and navigate to Content -> Pages.  On that page search for google. Here’s an example of the report you will see:

Legacy Links still in Google from the Google Analytics Content Report

For example Line 1 tells you that /community/garrigues-interview.html is legacy link in Google and needs a redirect. If you go through this exercise once a day in the first few weeks after launch, you will be able to deal with the legacy links issue efficiently.

This is a case study of one of our conference website clients, EIPBN.  EIPBN is an important international conference on Electron, Ion, and Photon Bean Technology and Nanofabrication. The conference takes place at different locations every year, such as Hawaii, Alaska, Las Vegas, but their website will always remain constant. This provides returning users and attendees the ability to find everything they need quickly every year.

With the EIBPN project we are able to create what appears to be a completely new conference website year after year through simply making changes to the images and the palette (the WordPress theme).  The pages are organized in the same way as previous years, but the look is completely different to give it a brand new appearance. All of the websites from the previous years are archived so that they can still  be accessed.

We use WordPress to archive the prior year’s versions of the website, so the whole process saves time and money. You won’t have to create a brand new website from the ground up because WordPress will make it appear as if you did, but you are going to save a lot of time during the process and implementation of your international conference website.

Here is are 3 iterations of the EIPBN site from 2010, 2011 and 2012:

EIPBN Conference Website 2010 Alaska

EIPBN Conference Website 2011 in Las Vegas

EIPBN Conference Website 2012 Hawaii

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When you’re trying to choose a database-backed, open-source CMS that can be easily managed by non-tecchies, the decision often seems to boil down to these two applications. While each side has its own advantages, drawback and supporters, we think that WordPress offers a better CMS solution.

Why? Two words sum it up: growth and ease.

WordPress.com growth (from dstevenwhite.com)

WordPress is growing rapidly. Since its release in 2003, WordPress:

• has been downloaded more than 32.5 million times
• powers more than 14.7 % of the top 1 million websites in the world
• operates 22 of every 100 new domains, as of August 2011

In contrast, only 1.6% of the top 1 million websites use Drupal. Its website receives about 55,000 unique visitors per month, as compared to 50 million unique visits each month to the WordPress website.

These figures emphasize WordPress’ more extensive support/code base and huge global community. WordPress was viewed as a blog engine, when in fact, 74% of WordPress installations are used as CMS, and not blogging.

As to ease of use, the comparison is even clearer. While both WordPress and Drupal are simple to install, once its configured, WordPress is ready to use – in as little as five minutes.

On the other hand, many administrators find Drupal’s learning curve confusing, overwhelming and steep. This is due in part to Drupal’s system of thousands of contributed modules; while they add flexibility, they also tend to have overlapping functionality.

Also, Drupal does not guarantee backward compatibility through revisions. While this reduces software bloat, it also may necessitate code rewriting, an activity that adds to your workload.

WordPress offers almost 1,400 themes, as compared to Drupal’s 885, and a range of user-friendly plug-ins, extensions and modules — about 17,000 to Drupal’s 9,000. WordPress plug-ins are extremely easy to use – just drop them in. In comparison, Drupal offers few ready-made plug-ins.

WordPress vs Drupal search references from Google Trends

Add a lower average set-up and customization cost – $250 for WordPress and $5,000 for Drupal — to a lower monthly maintenance cost – $250 for WordPress and $1,500 for Drupal — and WordPress looks even more attractive and practical.

For all but the largest commercial projects — which tend to require extensive customized developing — WordPress provides a better CMS solution.

SOURCES

• http://wordpress.org/news/2011/08/state-of-the-word/
• http://www.resourcenation.com/blog/comparing-the-numbers-wordpress-joomla-drupal/31988/
• http://poplarware.com/articles/drupal_vs_wordpress
• http://foliovision.com/2011/04/02/drupal-vs-joomla-mambo-vs-wordpress
• http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/drupal-joomla-wordpress-smackdown
• http://www.resourcenation.com/blog/comparing-the-numbers-wordpress-joomla-drupal/31988/

Matt Mullenweg taking questions at WordCamp SF 2010 courtesy of BloggingPro

First the keynote speech by WordPress co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, State of the Word.

WordPress 3.0 will have the following:

• New default theme Twenty Ten, with dropdown menus, custom post headers/images, custom backgrounds à la Twitter
• Custom Post types, making it easier to do what we’ve been doing for years using custom fields; this takes custom taxonomies to a new level and allows for Event-type posts, Press Release-type posts, each with their customized fields in the admin edit view.
• Custom Menus where users can define links in navigation menus in any way they please; this seems like the most important advanced in terms of WordPress as a CMS.

Matt mentioned some numbers too:

• 74% of WP installations are being used as CMSs.
• Core contributors went from 4 to 9.
• 1,400 users on Trac, the bug tracking software, double from 2009.
• 21m downloads of WP (10m in 2009).
• 35 billion page views for wordpress.com and wordpress.org.
• 8.5% of sites crawled by a Drupal-backed study were running WP.

The future:

• Making using WP more fun.
• Enhancing security, especially plugins via core (vetted) plugins.
• Improving publishing via mobile devices.
• WordPress.org being redesigned and to move to BuddyPress.

As you can see, the State of the Word is good.

even the "small" dowstairs hall was packed this year

Other highlights included:

• Joseph Scott on writing secure plugins. A must see talk which I will link to when it is posted on WordPress. tv. In the meantime, here’s a video about WordPress security, and a useful guide.
• Mitcho Erlewine on abstracting your code. Another must-see talk I will post (also Mitcho convinced me we should be making our plugins publicly available – more on that later).
• Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux OS. Richard explained the difference between Free software and Open Source software. As it says on the GNU.org site, it is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech” instead of “free beer”. From now on I will make a point not to confuse Open Source for Free Software.

All in all it was an excellent conference, and great value at $50. I truly appreciate Matt’s continued efforts to make the world a better place through software as opposed to trying to make as much money as possible.

One of the best ways to generate leads on the Internet is through SEO (Search Engine Optimization), i.e., increasing the quantity or quality of visits from search engines – Google, Yahoo & bing – to your website. These visits are called organic search or natural search visits, to differentiate them from paid search, or Pay-Per-Click.

Quantity of organic search visits is straightforward to measure, whereas Quality is a little harder to measure. We’ll address quality in a separate post. A quick & easy benchmark answers the question: “What is a reasonable increase in organic search for my website?”

The answer is:

Your organic searches should be increasing by at least 1.3% every month or 12-15% year over year, otherwise something is wrong!

We think the increase in organic search visits to a website – either month to month or year over year – compared to the growth in overall queries made on all search engines is a good benchmark.

This graph shows the total number of search engine queries in the United States by month (Compete.com and comScore provide this information for free – see Resources at the bottom of this post).

If the growth in organic search visits to your website is better than the overall growth in queries, your organic search engine optimization efforts are paying off.

The graph shows that an absolute decrease in organic search visits indicates something is probably very wrong with your website or your business!

We calculated a benchmark using data from comScore and Compete.com:

Growth in U.S. Search Engine Queries

The following monthly growth numbers for both providers shows that there’s quite a bit of variation between their estimates, so use these numbers accordingly (don’t tie people’s bonuses to outperforming these benchmarks).

Caveats

• Your business may be fairly different from the larger search engine universe which would make this benchmark less useful for your website.
• If your business is highly seasonal, you will want to compare year over year.
• This data is for the U.S. only.

Global numbers were made available by comScore for July 2009.

According to comScore, North America accounted for 22.2%, or about 1 out of every 5 searches, in July 2009.

Global growth did outpace U.S. growth. If the U.S. makes up a very small percentage of your website’s visits, this benchmark will be less useful. You can still use the numbers here as a benchmark – just know that if your website does not handily beat them, it is performing very poorly!

Growth varies by region. Global growth was 41% from June to July compared to 0% for “expanded search” (the number above) and a 3% decline for core search (as shown on our graphs above) in the United States.

Sources
comScore press releases
Compete.com press releases
Global Search Market Draws More than 100 Billion Searches per Month, August 31, 2009, comScore, Inc.

It will give you a solid foundation into the principles of Internet marketing, and how to put them into practical use for your own website. We will also be giving out a workbook to take with you as a guide to implement the workshop recommendations.

Sign up and get more information here.

The beauty about WordPress themes is that there are thousands available, both free and for less than $100.

We often tell clients that we can develop a custom theme from scratch, which we price at between $1,500 and $2,000. We also mention that modifying an existing theme can be done at a fraction of the cost and time, and it has the further advantage of being tested across browsers.

Here are some places where you can find free (open source) themes:

• http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/
• http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/08/100-excellent-free-high-quality-wordpress-themes/
• http://www.toptut.com/category/free-wordpress-themes/

And here are some fee-based themes we like:

• http://www.revolutiontwo.com
• http://www.woothemes.com/
• http://diythemes.com/

How to choose a theme?

Think about these two aspects when you are looking at themes: functionality and design.

Functionality is more important, because it defines the type of theme which will best fit your site. Is your site a content-heavy informational portal? Then go with a magazine-style theme such as Arthemia:

Arthemia from Indonesian designer Michael Jubel

Looking for a theme to run a fully-fledged blog? Then go for blog-friendly themes with blog functionality in the side columns such as Acamas:

The Acamas WordPress Theme

How about a simple business site? An elegant theme with a few links and information boxes on the homepage such as Several3 may be perfect:

Several3 WordPress Theme: it's clean

Once you’ve chosen a few possible themes, then look at the design. In particular, the color scheme and logo placement are important as they should fit your company’s look and feel. Let’s assume you already have a logo at this point.

Keep in mind that everything within the WordPress theme is flexible and can be changed: the banner photo, the placement of the columns, the height of the banner, the size of the headline fonts etc…

Last, here are a few sites which we have developed based on free themes:

• AshtangaNews.com, a blog about yoga
• HuangConsulting.com, a 10 page business site
• ForeclosuresIntel.com, another 10 page business site

Much-awaited because it is a giant leap for the backend admin interface, which should make it easier than ever to introduce newbie clients to updating content.

Also it has a built-in upgrade function for both the WP install and the plugins, saving a lot time. Talking about plugins, you can search and install them via the interface – no more searching for download links, unzipping, FTPing…

Plugin directory from within Admin dashboard

Anyway, this should have been called 3.0, but they are against “version number inflation”.

Another intriguing  features is the integration of Google Gears with WordPress when you click on the “Turbo” link in the top right. It crashed my FireFox 3 but worked on Chrome. Supposedly it speeds up posting and admin. We will write more on this later. 

Flash file upload now works, and here's another goodie: pretty Akismet spam comment stats

I would wait a few days for the inevitable security patches and aim to roll out installations in the beginning of 2009.

Firefox Downloads

That is definitely exciting for Mozilla and family and a big congratulations to them! But what does that mean for the average user and the average busy web developer?

First off, a new browser always presents some differences in how it displays pages, and this one is no different. Many of our clients have already experienced some cross version issues and we’re making sure to stay on top of any new fixes.

1. The Good

When I first downloaded Firefox 3, I didn’t notice any new benefits and didn’t understand what the hoopla was all about. But it didn’t take me long to realize that not only did it live up to its claim of being faster and lighter, but it is one of the fastest browsing experiences I have ever had. The best way to test its speed is to open an application that was previously sluggish (in FF2) such as GMAIL, do a “before and after” test and you’ll notice a huge speed difference. It felt like I just put another 4 GB of RAM in my computer.

Aside from the obvious speed benefits and security enhancements FF3 has a lot of tools for developers to quickly add extensions and toolbar features.

2. The Bad

A) Display Problems

We have all experienced at one time or another the quirky display and layout problems between Internet Explorer and Firefox. With FF3, we now have another browser that we must check for styling, layout and positioning problems. Here’s a sample of a positioning problem with our own site (which has since been fixed):

Firefox 2 Display Snapshot for NoDiamonds

Firefox 3 Display Snapshot for NoDiamonds.com

The search bar is positioned to the right in the older version (FF2) and to the left in the newer version (FF3). These are easy and straightforward CSS fixes, but it does mean there is extra work to be done checking sites in a new browser.

We’re building a library of quirks that will help us ensure this transition is seamless for all of our users. Note that the quirks may not be due to bugs but to FF3′s better implementation of CSS and XHTML standards. The jury is still out on this one.

All of our internal testing now requires cross browser checks for 6 browsers: FF2, FF3, IE6, IE7, Safari and Opera.

B) Crashes
Not sure if it is my computer , but since installing FF3 , I’ve encountered a few crashes. Some sites that I visited crashed pretty hard within a few hours of installation.

At any rate, I’m still a believer and am sure these hiccups will be worked out soon.

3) The Tips
A) Simultaneous Firefox Versions on a Single Computer

If you’re a developer, you may need to simultaneously run both versions of Firefox for some time before ultimately switching to the new version completely. We initially tried to run the 2 versions “out-of-the-box” but every time we clicked on the new desktop shortcut it would execute the new version without trying to access the old version. Here is a helpful tutorial which shows you exactly how to run 2 FF versions simultaneously.

B) URL bar

The old URL predictor bar in the older version (FF2) was simple and useful. Sometimes as the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. This could well be the case for the new and “improved” URLbar. If you have downloaded the latest version and tried to type in any url address , you’ll notice a lot of new jumbled text that makes the url bar seem cluttered. It is difficult to see the actual target site and degrades the experience. Here’s a way to turn off this new and improved feature.

Re-Cap

All in all, we think that the new Firefox release will definitely help FF increase its penetration into Internet Explorer’s currently dominant browser position. Perhaps the ease of use, speed and new security enhancements will help catapult FF3 past its 20% market share mark. Just watch out though because Microsoft is close behind with its IE8 version coming soon.

Firefox vs Microsoft Market Share Stats

Source: Net Applications ( http://marketshare.hitslink.com/ )