We continue to roll out exciting new features for use with Perceptive OBP.  These features, which have been implemented as a result of our customers' requests, address the need to make the platform more customizable, SEO friendly, and supportive for both clients and their audience.

Among the updates included in the newest release of Perceptive OBP:

• Device-Specific Site Wide Templates
• SEO-Friendly URLs for WebApps
• Recursive Modules
• Partial URL Matching
• Improvements to Order and Work Flow Notification
• Forum Subscriptions
• Updated Social Integration

These updates and fixes will enable Perceptive OBP to do more for your business by allowing you to easily customize your site with the features for which you've been asking.

Device Specific Site Wide Templates

Now you can make your site mobile with the device-specific templates that have been created for desktop, tablets, and smartphones.  These site-wide templates detect the type of device your customer is using and display the appropriate template and resolution.  By making your site mobile, customers and users can view your site and interact with it using iPhone, iPad, Android phones, smartphones, and tablet PCs. The templates are customizable through the Perceptive OBP admin panel and may be uploaded via FTP from the Templates folder.

SEO Friendly URLs for Web Apps

Perceptive OBP now offers support for customizable, SEO friendly URLs in the Web Apps Module.  This feature is available through the Search Engine Optimization settings page.  Your web apps' URL will appear as follows, but you may edit the URL in your Manage Web Apps screen:  http://www.yoursite.com/webapp-name/webapp-item-nameRecursive Modules

Recursive modules are essentially "modules within modules."  By implementing recursive modules, Perceptive OBP now allows you to:

• Place modules within content holders
• Add products or catalogs within blog posts
• Insert any module, such as a webform module, catalogs/products, or literature items, into a web app list or detailed view 

The module rendering engine now allows recursive modules up to three levels deep, and in order for you to take full advantage of the recursive module feature, the module limit per page has been increased to 75.

Partial URL Matching

This feature allows your site to become more user friendly for your customers and directs users to their intended target.  Partial URL matching is available for announcements, catalogs, products, and web app items.  With partial URL matching, which may be turned on and off in the Search Engine Optimization settings page, your site's users may type an abbreviated form of the URL and be redirected toward the appropriate page.

Work Flow and Order Notification Improvements

Customizable workflow notifiications and order notifications have been improved by the addition of layouts available through FTP.  Further improvements include the addition of new tags to the Packing Slip layout and Packing Label layout:

• Packing Slip - {tag_shippingattention}
• Packing Label - {tag_shippingattention}, {tag_shippingdescription}, {tag_shippinginstructions}, {tag_invoicenumber}

Forum Subscriptions 

Users can now subscribe to forums and receive email notifications whenever a new topic is opened.  The email template can use both the forum name and topic in the email subject line, making it easier for subscribers to sort, filter, and read forum email.

Updated Social Integration

The new Social Media capabilities of Perceptive OBP have necessitated easier social integration with the platform.  Along with the Facebook Like Module, we have added support for the Facebook activity feed and Facebook Send.

We are excited about the new features and fixes in the latest release of Perceptive OBP and hope that you will find that our latest improvements boost your online success and make keeping up with your business site easier than ever.

Social media is perhaps the biggest tool in marketing your site through networking and customer interaction.  In order to make Perceptive OBP an even more effective online business platform, we have integrated three new social media modules as part of our recent updates. 

Two of the largest, most active social networking sites include Facebook and Twitter, so for these first three social media modules, that's where we've placed our efforts.  Perceptive OBP's newest social media modules include:

• Facebook Likes
• Facebook Comments
• Twitter Tweets

Each of these modules is designed to increase your visibility and to promote social media sharing across your community, thus boosting your online presence.

The Facebook Likes module simply adds a "Like" button to your web pages, templates, blogs, web apps, and bookings.  When a customer "likes" an article, blog post, or page on your site, it show on his or her Facebook page, effectively sharing the site with his or her entire social network.  One click can lead to visibility to hundreds, even thousands, of potential customers.

Facebook Comments is a social media module which further harnesses the power of Facebook as a leading social networking tool.  While other programs allow commenting on your posts, Facebook Comments offers some unique benefits:

• Comments are socially viral
• Allows for inline moderation of comments
• Reduction of trolling and spamming with Facebook verified real identities
• Captcha not required
• Automatic sign-in
• Follow-up notification
• User profile picture

The Facebook Comments module allows for customer ease of use as well as improvement of admin interaction and increased social media presence.

The third social media module provided by Perceptive OBP is the Twitter Tweets module.  This module, much like the Facebook Likes module, allows users to share your content across the social media network with a simple click.  With Twitter Tweets, your content can be re-tweeted infinitely among Twitter's 100 million active users and 400 million monthly visitors.

Perceptive OBP is developed for your online success.  With the addition of new features including social media modules, we allow you to further your online presence and engage with millions of prospective clients and customers through the facilitation of social networking.

Our newest feature - InContext Editing - is now available in the Administration area and ready for use. It's a next generation tool that gives business owners greater control over their websites. You can now make changes more easily without compromising the overall design of your website. Some of the main benefits include:

• The ability to set editable regions within any web page to limit scope of change and preserve design quality
• Content editing is more intuitive - you edit "InContext" on the page rather than having an editor pop-up as was the case with Sitewalk
• The new InContext content editor is much more robust compared with the Sitewalk text editor

Please note that InContext Editing will be in Beta for the next 12 weeks during which Sitewalk will continue to remain available. When the Beta period ends, Sitewalk will reach end-of-life and will be removed from the Administration area. During the Beta period for InContext Editing we will continue to make small improvements.

Earlier, I explained how to GeoTag your site to reach local clients and customers.  Another way to reach your local market is through the hCard Microformat.

At its simplest, the hCard is a 1:1 XHTML representation of the vCard, which has long been the standard in electronic business cards.  The hCard takes electronic business card contact information and formats it for any HTML, Atom, RSS, or XML file.  Your hCard can be formatted so that it is invisible to your site's visitors, but the contact information is collected by search engine spiders.

A simple hCard format, providing just your name and URL, would look something like this:

[ code ]

<div class="vcard">
   <a class="url fn" href="http://www.travislangley.com/">
      Travis Langley
   </a>
</div>

Of course, by adding classes, you can add detail to your contact information, as in the following example:

[ code ]

<div class="vcard">
   <span class="n">
      <span class="given-name">Travis</span>
      <span class="family-name">Langley</span>
   </span>
   <div class="org">Travis Langley & Associates</div>
   <a href="mailto:travis@travislangley.com">
      travis@travislangley.com
   </a>
   <div class="adr">
      <span class="locality">Edmond</span>
      <abbr class="region" title="Oklahoma">OK</abbr>
      <span class="country-name">United States</span>
   </div>
   <div>+1.405.923.5810</div>
</div>

For help creating an hCard for your site, you can use the hCard generator from Microformats.org.  You can learn how to hide your hCard in your website in the article "Everything About the hCard Microformat" at Qreative Zone.

The hCard is only one of the many microformats that add information to your site and make that data available for searching.  Microformats can also help you perform tasks quickly and easily:

• Use XFN to link to friends and contacts.
• hCalendar allows you to add events to your site.
• With hReview, you can review books, movies, and products.

Microformats.org has tools and creators for all of the above microformats to help you with coding microformats for your site

Here's a little plug for my sister, who is an aspiring work-at-home mom.  She'll be documenting her journey to go from employee to self-employed while trying to balance all the issues that go along with that.  You can follow the progress on her blog at nix9to5.com.  Should be quite an adventure... or at least an interesting read.

It's been awhile since my last post, and that means business has been good.  I have a series of great new client projects to work, and that has kept me pretty busy.  However, I needed a break from the layout and coding, so I thought I would add a new entry to the blog - actually, this is a recycled post from my old site..  This one deals with the use, or lack of use, of www on your sites URL, how it can affect your search engine rankings, and what you can do to correct the issue.

First, what really is the issue with using www or not you might ask.  For one, it's an issue of what is the best URL to serve for a given web page, otherwise referred to as canonicalization.  Most of us would consider the following to be the same thing:

grademyshades.com
www.grademyshades.com
www.grademyshades.com/index.htm

Actually, the  list could be a lot longer, and in this case these all point to the same page... but they don't have to.  Each of these URLs could actually represent a different page, and that's how the search engines see it, as different pages.  Just check out the following image for reference:



Notice above how Google has listed both grademyshades.com and www.grademyshades.com as two separate listings.  So what's the big deal?  The deal is two-fold.  First, search engines don't like duplicate content and will very often hand out penalties because of it.  This is exactly how the search engines see this - as duplicate content - two different pages with identical information and this is something you should definitely avoid. Second, search engines place a lot of weight on links from other sites to your pages.  Let's say that some of those links include the www in the url, and some do not.  You are essentially splitting those links up between what the search engine sees as two different pages, and neither version of your page will rank as well as if all those links were pointed to the same page.

Good news, there is a simple fix that essentially makes the non-www version non existent.  Just add the following bit of code to your .htaccess file (place in the root directory of your website - and replace domain.com with your domain) :

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

What this does is redirect any requests for the non-www version of you site to use the www version.  It also issues a 301 permanent redirect code, so that the search engines will know to only index the www version.  And there you have it - 2 simple lines of code to prevent or help correct what could be a big problem for your search engine optimization efforts.

Want more information on the subject?  Here's a good link from an industry insider on the subject of canonical urls (primarily from a google point of view) that should help answer more questions.

I've seen a lot of complaints about the new look of Facebook.  There's even 3 large Facebook Groups against the new layout with almost 5 million members between them (could be some duplicate members - I didn't check).  If you visit any of these groups, almost everyone is demanding that Facebook change it back.  Well, the good news is that, for the most part, you can change it back yourself.  If you want to get away from the confusing News Feeds and get back to your beloved Status Updates, check out this very short video - this is pretty simple :



So to sum it up, go to your Facebook Home page, click "more" at the bottom of the left menu, drag "status updates" to the top of the list, and then click "status updates".  Now things are pretty much back to the way they were and you can enjoy Facebook like you did before.

---

UPDATED:

After some input, it turns out the solution above may not be the best.  If Status Updates is the default, you don't see links, images and video.  Therefore, it might be best to make Live Feeds your default.  The problem with the feeds is that they limit the number of friends they show posts for by default.  The good news is that you can change this as well.  Again, here's a video to show how this is done:



To recap,

1. click more on the left menu
2. drag "news feeds" to the top (if it's not already)
3. click "live feed" above your content if "news feed" is currently the default
4. scroll to the bottom of the page and click edit option
5. replace the number of friends with 5000 (the maximum allowed)
6. click save. 

This should be more like the Facebook most of you are used to.

The FTC just released its Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising, and if you blog or are involved in social media and ever make product review or testimonial, this is guide is must read for you.  The guidelines go into effect December 1, 2009 and outline disclosure requirements when you post about a product or service.

The Guide provides a large list of examples of scenarious in which you would or would not be required to disclose relationships with product or service provides.  Even in cases where you provide honest endorsement in which the product or service provider has no control over your content, you may still be required to disclose.   Failure to include proper disclosure can result in fines up to $11,000 per instance, so the rule here is, don't take chances.  Be sure to read the Guide and understand your responsibilities.  It's just 81 pages and could be well worth your time.

I believe disclosure when making endorsements is the ethical thing to do and support the intent of the Guide.  My personal feeling is that some of the requirements are subjective, so it's best to err on the side of caution.  Also, the Guide fails to tell how you should make your disclosure - it just tells when you should make a disclosure.  Another issue with the Guide is that it doesn't directly address your requirements for existing endorsements - are you required to check your entire history of reviews and testimonials to ensure the relationships have been properly disclosed?  For these reasons, a site-wide Disclosure Policy (similar to your site's privacy policy or terms of use) might be a good idea.  A good resource is DisclosurePolicy.org, which has a free policy generator, a great blog on the subject and additional information about blog disclosure -  (DISCLOSURE : I do not have any relationship with DisclosurePolicy.org, nor did I receive any compensation for making this endorsement). 

As of this posting, I don't have a disclosure policy, but it is definitely in my To Do list.

Also, if you've read the FTC Guide on Endorsements, I would love to hear your opinion.

The web is global and has really expanded the reach of many businesses, and search engines are a great tool to give them exposure in the world marketplace.  However, a lot of folks don't realize that these same engines are an excellent way to reach those customers and clients that are just around the corner.  It's also a lot easier to achieve visibility locally than to compete for good search engine placement against business worldwide.  Even if you provide your products and services worldwide, don't forget to reach out to those a little more close to home.  Here's some tips to help you succeed with local search.

• Get Listed
  
  The big search engines all provide tools to allow you to submit your business details to be included in their local search indexes with plenty of detail.  In addition to your just your website and business name, you can include your address and phone (obviously) as well as business category, hours of operation, accepted forms of payment, an image of your business, if free or paid parking is available and other relevant information.  After providing your business details, you will generally be required to verify that you are the owner (or a representative of the business).  This may be done by mail, email or phone, and varies depending on the search engine.  You should start by submitting your site to the following local search services:
  
  www.google.com/local/add
  listings.local.yahoo.com/csubmit
  ssl.bing.com/listings/BusinessSearch.aspx
  biz.yelp.com/signup
  
  Also, google shows listings from other local search services (like yahoo, yelp and others as shown below), so if you want to try to increase your market share, it helps to list your business in a variety of sources.




• GeoTag Your Site
  
  In your HTML, you can place some tags in the header to help the search engines know where your site is located.  This is done by setting up Geotags, and it's a pretty simple process.  GeoTags look something like this:
  
  
  [ code ]

  <meta name="geo.position" content="35.644707, -97.545419">
  <meta name="geo.placename" content="Travis Langley & Associates, Edmond, Oklahoma, United States">
  <meta name="geo.region" content="US-OK">
  
  
  If you need to convert and address to lattitude and longitude for the geo.position tag, try mygeoposition.com.

Up Next - hCards and Microformats.
Check back soon for part 2 of this article.  It's late -  I'm off to bed...

If you have a website, it's important that you have a good analytics (web stats) so that you can monitor the performance of your site.  This is especially true if you run a business or ecommerce website, but can apply to personal and informational sites as well.

The biggest problem most individuals have when collecting stats related to their site is that they focus on the wrong numbers.  For a long time and in the not so distant past, the defacto standard metric was the hit counter, which basically told how many times a page was viewed.   With today's powerful analytics, people are still often concerned with the number of page views or how many visitors, which really isn't a vast improvement over the hit counter of days past.  There are so many more vital metrics that could be monitored to give an accurate picture of your site's performance.

First, let me just qualify why I say the number of visitors or the amount of traffic your site receives is a meaningless metric.  I do understand that without traffic to your site, there's really not much point to having a site other than for your own personal satisfaction.  But just the sheer quantity of visitors doesn't indicate any real level of success if those visitors don't take some sort of action.  For example, I have a site that receives quite a bit of traffic for it's niche, in the order of a few unique visitors ever minute or so (well over 1500 visitors a day).  However, almost 40% of that traffic comes from Canada, and only a small portion of the products available on that site are available for shipping to Canada.  That's why I can't base success on just the amount of traffic alone.

Good analytics will track visitor actions that are important to your business.  Why is your site reaching out to those visitors?  This is the kind of information you should be monitoring and you should have some clear goals so that you can determine if your site is performing like you need it too.  Some examples of the metrics you might consider monitoring include:

• Number of New Customer Leads
  If your site has a contact form or phone number, how many people are contacting you through the website?  Do you have a target for the number of leads you need to generate through your site for it to be worthwhile for you to maintain?   Your goal could be to generate 5 new customer leads a weak through your website.

• Dollar Amount of Sales
  Got a product to sell?  You should be tracking the dollar amount your site is generating.  Are you generating a profit, or does your website maintenance and online marketing costs exceed your website revenue?  You might have a goal to generate $2500 in sales weekly, or to maintain a ROI (return on investment) of 120%.

• Growth of Your Marketing Database
  Do you offer a newsletter or maintain a distribution list?  Perhaps you should monitor and set goals related to the size of your list.  Your strategy might include setting a goal of 10,000 subscribers to your list by the end of the year.

The metrics you track should be directly related to your business goals, and these are almost always related to leads, revenue and cost.  Your web developer and marketing professional should be able to help you work out a plan and systems to achieve those goals and accurately monitor your websites performance.

If you are not already maintaining business oriented metrics, let me offer a couple of good resources:

One resource to consider is Perceptive, our Online Business Platform.  In addition to content management (CMS) and customer relation management (CRM), Perceptive offers built in analytics that give quick insight related to sales and lead generation and historical performance.  If you are running, or plan to run, and online business, you should investigate the Perceptive Online Business Platform to understand the power in can bring to your online venture.

Another great solution and one of the best values on the web today, for sites not hosted on Perceptive, would be Google Analytics.  Google Analytics offers a powerful set of enterprise-class website statistics that rivals some of the best systems currently available, and for a price that's hard to beat (it's Free).