[Re]Encoded.com has a useful article entitled 10 Ways to Save Time While Building a Website. It includes tips and tricks about drop down menus, creating web forms, testing your website in different browsers, and lots more! Not everyone is going to need or use all of these time-saving tips but there’s enough there that there’s bound to be at least a few things of use for most webmasters.
10 ways to save time while building a website
27 July 2009Free website development classes
21 July 2009I’m signed up to Jennifer Kyrnin’s free email newsletter. There’s often some very useful information in there, and I think she really knows what she’s talking about. She’s the About.com guide to website design.
Her latest newsletter has information about free web development classes on About.com. Well worth a look!
You can also sign up for her free newsletter from that page. Give it a try – and if you don’t like it, you can have your money back.
Tracking your blog’s performance: Analytics360°
20 July 2009Once you’ve set up your WordPress blog and signed up for AdSense, you’ll want to know how well you’re performing.
There are all sorts of tools you can use to provide the information you need – and generally the more information you have, the better. Otherwise how are you going to be able to refine your blog so that you’re maximising your income?
GoogleAnalytics gives you a lot of information, of course. But a friend, Adi Gaskell of The Management Blog, recently pointed us in the direction of a WordPress plugin called Analytics360° which integrates GA into your blog so that you can tell what effect your posts have had on your earnings. You can also integrate MailChimp stats if you’re using MailChimp for email marketing or publicity campaigns. (In case you hadn’t guessed, the plugin’s written by MailChimp.)
We installed it on a couple of our blogs to evaluate it. It was moderately useful in that it saved you having to go to the GA site. (We don’t use MailChimp, so that particular plugin facility wasn’t relevant to us.)
However, it had its limitations too. Most importantly, it didn’t provide nearly so much information as GA. But the integration – correlating traffic to posts – was limited to the first post on any given day. So if you’d made several posts on the same day, there was nothing on the traffic graph to show you that.
Verdict: It might be worth installing if you’ve got a MailChimp account. Otherwise, you’re as well to just open GA in a separate browser window and compare it with your post history.