It used to be that researching, designing and building a website was seen by many businesses as a one-off project with a set budget and delivered in a set time. Other than page content updates and blog post additions along with the SEO and Social Media side projects this was deemed to be it until the next refresh a few years down the line.

Times have changed however and more and more businesses are waking up to the fact that the initial build of a website is just the beginning and in fact it should be constantly evolving to suit the needs of those using the website.

So, what is Product Thinking?

Product thinking is a modern approach and process to developing customer-facing digital products, using customer-centric problem solving design techniques combined with modern engineering practices (such as lean development).

It’s an approach that ensures digital products are continually addressing real customer needs, and evolving, while simultaneously delivering real, measurable value for the organisation.

Product thinking is not a process in itself. It an ability to understand products along with the ecosystem they will exist along with people who will use and be indirectly affected by the product.

So, how can this work with CRO?

By focussing on particular sections of a website and ascertaining what the user wants you’ll likely end up with a couple of solutions that meet the users requirements but have a different visual appearance, whether that’s layout or content.

One of those design solutions would then be selected to be pushed into production however there’s an important step missing if it’s done that way.

Rather than select one of the viable design solutions, consider utilising them all and A/B test them as to which performs the particular task best by getting them all built by the production team.

Some might consider this wasted effort and argue that it increases costs but if you think in terms of increased interaction which could be the difference between a user purchasing an item from your website or not then it becomes obvious how this can be of benefit.

Even with a well thought out solution that covers the users requirements, it’s still possible for different ways of showing this visually to perform differently, don’t be left in any doubt what works best for your users but pushing any design out permanently without having tested it first.

Product thinking enables designers to build better products. It’s a way of examining every design decision in context with the problem the user wants to solve. By working in this manner you can continually evolve your website, section by section and by adding CRO into the equation you’ll be able to justify your design choices with hard numbers and more importantly, increased profit.

The post How Product Thinking can work with Conversion Rate Optimisation appeared first on Pixel Cellar.

With the various Google initiatives like Penguin and Panda changing the SEO landscape its more important than ever to ensure your strategy is both effective and clean. Anything that’s skirting the advice of search engines could come back and haunt you so caution is very much advised when it comes to entertaining the ideas of black hat or dubious techniques.

Fortunately, there are still a number of effective techniques that do work that won’t put you in the firing line with the search engines in the future; here’s five of the most important SEO fundamentals:

Google Authorship

Google Authorship has become a popular topic among those in the SEO business and using it can influence your standing in the world’s most popular search engine considerably. Part of Google +, it is designed to make it easy for people to define their intellectual rights by connecting authors with all of their content all over the Web. Those searching for content can, thanks to this feature, also search for content by author. Google Authorship helps you to build up rapport and confidence in your brand as it makes you a lot more noticeable thanks to your image appearing beside relevant search results.

Provide Killer Content

Content is king. This fact cannot be reiterated enough. Long gone are the days where effective SEO placed the emphasis on quantity over quality. Today, Google reads websites and catalogues them more similarly to how a human would than ever before. Creating engaging, original and quality content free of mistakes is no longer optional if you want to make a success online. Your content should offer value to human readers and this in itself is what today constitutes good SEO. When it comes to creating content for your website, you should be thinking about your human audience first.

Diversify Your Anchor Text

The anchor text consists of the underlined works in any link to your website. Anchor text has always been an important element of good search engine optimization and this is still the case today. However, there are a few extra considerations when it comes to making it more effective. Anchor text should ideally contain your chosen key word or phrase for that piece of content and then be strategically placed in such a way that it blends in naturally with the rest of the article. Make sure that it looks natural and do not overuse it.

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging presents a great opportunity for you to increase your exposure online. As a guest blogger, you will typically write a free post for a blog owner and this post will contain links back to your website. This way, you can get traffic while the blog owner gets some free content for their website. Many guest bloggers are regular columnists, providing a new article or news story on a weekly basis.

Social Media

Social media channel has for some years now been the number one thing that people use the Internet for, so it is hardly surprising that it is also very important for Internet marketers as well. Search engine marketing continues to be an important trend in the world of Internet marketing and you won’t do your business any harm by stepping up your Twitter and Facebook advertising campaigns. However, it is also of great importance to remember that social networking is all about interacting with others rather than just posting sales pitches or using other traditional forms of advertising. Get more social by getting involved with the community.

The post SEO Fundamentals That Work In The Ever Changing SEO Landscape appeared first on Pixel Cellar.

One piece of tab associated functionality allows you to “Merge All Windows” which is a great addition although unusually there’s no keyboard shortcut to achieve this built in to the OS; you can only access it using your mouse. Whilst not a show stopper, it’s a strange decision but fortunately one that we can rectify reasonably easily, here’s how:

1. Go to System Preferences and then keyboard.
2. Open the Shortcuts tab and select App Shortcuts in the section underneath.
3. Click on the + to add a custom keyboard shortcut.
4. Select Finder as your application and type “Merge All Windows” into the menu title section.
5. Choose which combination of keys you wish to use as your shortcut and then click add.

Looking for more steps? Sorry to disappoint but it’s pretty straight forward, hope it makes the new feature in Finder easier to use for you now without having to resort to using the nav bar.

The post Create a Keyboard Shortcut To Merge All Finder Windows in OSX 10 appeared first on Pixel Cellar.

If you’re not logged in to your Google account then the keyword referral data is passed on but in an internet world reasonably dominated by Google the number of users not actually logged into a Google account is getting smaller as every day passes.

It’s now estimated that 1 in 3 searches now don’t pass on keyword referral data, certainly from websites we have access to this figure is quite accurate, some sites we’ve seen have less so this is a problem that isn’t going to go away; it’ll likely get worse.

Why do you need keyword referral data anyway?

Referral data is used within analytical solutions for a number of reason but is most valuable to those that are responsible for the content of a website. Knowing that people are searching for a particular terms within Google or other search engines allows the website owner to focus effort on certain pages or content and improve it to try and get it to rank better in the search engines.

Not having the keyword referral data is starting to make certain sections of analytical data less valuable; it’s still of use but only getting a small subset keyword referral data you used to get limits the information and impacts decisions that can be made from the data.

Why would Google do this?

Anti Google conspiracy theorists would say that this can only be a good thing for Google as they don’t make revenue from Google Analytics (the free version at least) but they do from Adwords where keyword data is fully available. Adwords profits have been soaring since the turn of the year but there has been a decline in the average “cost per click”, mainly due to increasing mobile targeted ads that are significantly cheaper at present. The recent privacy change would likely aid the growth in their Adwords product for website owners who need the keyword referral data. Data is after all a valuable commodity, without it you’re missing vital information required to make informed decisions.

What other options are there?

Now you could argue, use another analytical tool. You could do that, it’s an option but there aren’t exactly a huge range of choices out there that are free and have the advanced functionality that Google Analytics has.
You’d really be looking at using more advanced tools that attract licence fees like Omniture, Webtrends or Adobe’s SiteCatalyst as there are work rounds available to get around the keyword referral data issue.

You would also need to cover the additional expense, either time or monetary to get over the inevitable learning curve of a new system as well as having to re-tag all of your individual bespoke tracking which can be a big job in itself on some websites.

All of this adds up to a big step back as far as Google Analytics goes, a real shame considering how far its come.

Surely Google could anonymise the keyword referral data associated with a Google Account so that they couldn’t associate individual keyword referral data with a specific user?

The post Why is keyword referral data being killed off in Google Analytics? appeared first on Pixel Cellar.

There’s generally four main reasons that this can happen to you:

• Core WordPress files being out of date and therefore exploitable by the hacking community
• Incorrect file permissions and poor hosting environment configuration
• Using a WordPress theme that’s not from the official repository or a trusted source
• Using a WordPress plugin that’s not been written in the most secure manner

The first two in this list are relatively easy to prevent. Keeping your WordPress core files updated and giving the wordpress core files the right permissions will prevent the majority of random attacks. Configuring your hosting environment correctly is a little harder to manage but if you host your site with a decent provider then you should have no issues on that front either.

A special mention goes to the actual theme you use on your site. If you google “Free WordPress Themes” you’ll find a ton of them all available for free and they can look great too. However, these free themes are often pre-hacked with all kinds of malicious code that will do you and your site no favours and most likely cause lots of issues you don’t need. There’s a great blog post that highlights the dodgy WordPress themes out there with some links to safe sites you can use if required too. If you use a theme then try and make sure it’s one that WordPress themselves have approved and is available from their theme repository or another safe source.

Which brings us on to WordPress plugins. The vast majority of plugins out there available from WordPress’s Plugin Directory or other resources are perfectly harmless but there are others that aren’t. This isn’t to say that they were intentionally created to be harmful, its more likely that they’ve been written by someone inexperienced and whilst they do the job they’re supposed to do they can offer an easy way for unscrupulous people to exploit your site.

What can you do to prevent issues?

Obviously it’s out of a lot of people’s skill-set to be able to rip apart a plugin and check that its not leaving your site vulnerable, so what can you do to prevent issues?

1. Have a scheduled backup of both your WordPress site, it’s database and all your theme files and uploads is essential. If you’re not doing this already then go and get that sorted right now and then come back and read on.
   If you’ve already done that or have just gone and done that, well done. Prevention might be better than the cure but having a decent backup will ensure that if your site is ever compromised you’ll be able to put it right again.
2. Ensure you have some .htaccess rules in place that protect your wp-config.php file that contains your database access details.
3. Keep the usage of plugins to a minimum, this will keep your exposure minimal too and try and stick with plugins that have been created by experienced members of the WordPress community.
4. Install some WordPress security plugins.

WordPress security plugins seem to be appearing a lot now, likely because of the platforms huge popularity with something like 60 million websites being run on the platform as of June 2012.
We’ve been evaluating a number of plugins over the last few months and have now settled on a combination that cover all the bases. We won’t go in-depth on them here as you can read all about them on their respective sites:

WordPress Firewall 2

This is a great plugin that stops numerous things from happening on your WordPress site from detecting sql injection, stopping file uploads (when not legitimate) and remote file execution as well as preventing directory traversal. It also actively emails you if configured to do so with any malicious queries that have been made.

Wordfence Security

This plugin covers a lot of areas that can be exploited and is best described as an active plugin. It constantly monitors your WordPress installation for the presence of non core files, it can scan your WordPress theme to check for exploits within the code (it does cost extra though), prevents bots and robots other than official search engine ones from scanning your site, login protection and much more. If you have a reasonably popular site then you’ll be amazed at how many times in day someone somewhere tries to login to your site illegally.

It has to be said that Wordfence may well cover the items that WordPress Firewall 2 does but we’ve not seen any specific documentation to ascertain this for sure. It is however a highly configurable and comprehensive solution that works very well and whilst the extended functionality of scanning theme files costs a bit extra what you get for free is extremely good and well worth installing to protect your site.

Have you ever had your WordPress Security put to the test and come out on the losing side? What have you done to prevent it happening again and do you now use any plugins to help protect your website?

Update 3rd August 2017

There’s a great blog post on the specifics of setting up and configuring WordPress security by Alex Grant at Best VPN that I’d recomend reading if all the options available are a bit overwhelming.

The post Why You Should Get Serious About WordPress Security appeared first on Pixel Cellar.

All you have to do is drag this Responsinator link (don’t click on it, it won’t have the desired effect) to your Browsers Bookmark bar and you’re away.

That’s all there is to it! Told you it was simple, enjoy using it to explore all the responsive designs out there.

The post Responsinator Bookmarklet For Responsive Web Design Testing appeared first on Pixel Cellar.