I figured I would address a question I get asked quite often - “Do I provide web hosting”, or “Who would I recommend for hosting”. First, I don’t offer this service myself. I don’t have the resources, facilities, expertise or time to manage site hosting properly. However, over the last decade I have had the opportunity to put several web hosting companies to the test. These hosts include everything from shared hosting to managed dedicated servers, and I have found one provider that has far exceeded the others.

So, if you’re wanting to know who I would recommend for hosting (for most applications), it would be SiteGround shared hosting, without reservation.

I’m sure you’d like to know why, and I don’t blame you. One reason is that they are affordable, but that’s just a minor consideration. There are a lot of inexpensive hosting options, so this criteria certainly can’t stand on it’s own. So lets take it one step further and say it’s because they are an incredible value - they offer a lot of features and have great specs (bandwidth, diskspace, hardware), especially for the price. Still that’s not enough. What I would say starts to really separate them from the slew of other web hosts I’ve dealt with is their customer service.

There are 4 great aspects of SiteGround’s customer service they I feel have made them such a great selection; they are responsive, flexible, proactive and knowledgeable.

• Responsive:
  To date, I have never had a support request take more than 15 minutes to be addressed. Most are actually answered within 5 minutes. That doesn’t necessarily mean the request is resolved in that amount of time - but most are. And if they aren’t resolved immediately, they are diligent and consistent in following up with the progress and requesting clarification.

• Flexibility:
  Also, I have not yet a request that they denied (and several of them I expected to be refused, especially in a shared hosting environmet). SiteGround has been willing to tailor the configuration of my accounts to my specific needs. With almost all of the other hosts I have dealt with, including the provider of the managed dedicated hosting I used for a time, would often respond with “we don’t do that”, “that can’t be done”, or “we could possibly do that for an additonal fee”.

• Proactive:
  One thing that really amazes me is that fairly regularly I will get a message from SiteGround that says something along the lines, “We have determined that the server your site is hosted on is no longer sufficient, and we will be moving your site to a new server on a certain date. You should not experience any downtime.” With many of the other hosts I have experience with, I would notice that my site was down, I would contact them, and they would let me know that they didn’t notice anything because they were still able to ping the server. Some have then replied that there was in fact a hardware failure, but it would take a few days to procure the parts they need to fix the situation.

• Knowledgeable:
  I think this goes hand it hand with the prior 3 aspects of SiteGround’s fantastic customer service. In order to be able to provide the timely responses, custom configurations and to eliminate problems before they occur, you have to have a lot of knowledge about what you are doing. Not much more really needs to be said about that.

Now there are obviously circumstances where a shared hosting account would not be adequate, but for most, SiteGround’s hosting will be much more than sufficient. And while I haven’t had the need, they do offer Virtual Private Servers (VPS) and Dedicated Hosting for those that require it. If I ever have the need for these services, I will definitely look to SiteGround first.

I have no doubt that with the number of web hosts out there, many will be comparable to SiteGround, but since I have had a good long history with SiteGround, I won’t hesitate to recommend them.

To get the full specs on their phenominal hosting, visit www.SiteGround.com

Today, Dr. Andy Harris’ Dynamic Practices was released and opened for business. Dynamic Practices is a business consulting and coaching program for chiropractors, and their mission is to “communicate time and location tested procedures to practicing doctors of chiropractic who are looking to grow their practices.”

In addition to the web design and development, this was the largest print project we’ve completed to date. We provided postcard design, copywriting services for the programs training manuals and standardized forms and scripts, logo design, and cd and case art for Dr. Harris’ audio products.

Due to the large amount of customer follow-up and correspondence that Dr. Harris’ business requires, it gave me the opportunity to work with and integrate an extraordinary CRM (customer relations management) service by InfusionSoft. This service has become an integral part of the Dynamic Practices website, and with Infusion CRM we are able to automate the marketing, lead capture, scheduling of follow-up (including email, fax and voice), as well as e-commerce functions, membership management and subscription and recurring billing.

You may have noticed that posts in this blog have been pretty sparse. That is mainly due to the number of client projects I have been working. Well, today, one of those - www.christianchronicle.org - is now live on the web. The Christian Chronicle is an international newspaper (not a doctrinal or teaching publication) with news and opinion related to the Churches of Christ.

The new site is a redesign with a customized content managment system. The old system was built on php-nuke and limited what the Christian Chronicle was able to do with their online presence. The site now features improved navigation, a more compact newspaper style layout, better ad managment and serving (including self serve ad placement), member comments, better photo galleries and graphical calendars, a more feature packed classifieds section, improved staff and contact areas, better search…

And there’s more to come. Over the next few months we will be adding advanced search, polls and surveys, a link directory, the ability for members to submit content, audio and video capability and newsletter management.

I owe a big thanks to the staff of The Christian Chronicle for allowing me to be a part of this project.

UPDATE:
Speed PPC has just launched version 3 of this powerful tool with even more search engine support (including Yahoo), keyword libraries, ad copying, advanced bidding, cleaning features…. You can find out more and get your copy of SpeedPPC.

Through April 15th, 2008 they are offering $100 Off Speed PPC and 12 months free access to their Clickbank Mining Tool.

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Well, it’s 2am and I just launched a new commercial site. The site, Subscriptionville.com, is a magazine store operated in affiliation with a 3rd party fullfillment center. This is phase 1 of the project, and I hope to eventually build this into a large magazine comparison shopping service, but that will have to wait until more time is available. One of the great things about this project is that the fullfillment company provides a datafeed of all the titles, which means I have about 1000 different items to promote and generate revenue from. One of the big disadvantages is that there are about 1000 different items to promote and keep track of. Since my primary form of advertising (at least in the early stages) will be through Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, that leaves a lot keywords and ad text to manage.Because of the volume of information to be managed, I decided it might be a good idea to invest in a tool to automate a lot of the tasks required to set up a large PPC campaign. The best tool I was able to locate is a software package and membership site called SpeedPPC. This is definitely a tool for somewhat experienced PPC advertisers, but if your comfortable with this type of advertising, then SpeedPPC can be a lifesaver for large volume, tightly focused PPC ad campaigns. That said, there were a couple of areas where it fell a little short - at least for what I needed in this case, but I expect I will get a lot of good use out of it on future projects. I plan to write a more detailed review of SpeedPPC in the near future, and will hopefully be able to offer some documentation to explain some of the shortcomings (there’s not many, but you need to be aware of them) and provide tools and information to help overcome them.Anyway, I am writing this as I have just finished building a Google Adwords campaign to advertise nearly 1000 magazine titles - 1600 ad groups, 3000 text ads and 50,000 keywords. All this in hopes that magazines might be a profitable business for the upcoming Christmas shopping season. Now that it’s 3am, I think I should head to bed…Such is the life of an web developer and affiliate marketer.

Travis Langley & Associates, Inc. today launched the new website of The McKinney Partnership Architects (www.tmparch.com). The site is part of a redesign and branding effort for which Travis Langley & Associates provided Flash development, a custom content management system with unique image management capabilities (including server side resizing and cropping), and a static, low-bandwidth version of the site.

Learn more about this project by visiting our portfolio.

The Christian Chronicle, one of the largest international news publications of the Churches of Christ, has selected Travis Langley & Associates for the redesign and development of their new website and customized content management system (CMS). The goal is to provide a more intuitive layout, better navigation and a greatly improved end-user experience. The new site will also make available several new features for members and subscribers. In addition, an improved CMS will ease management of the site, provide for the automation of several tasks, and help incorporate new functionality into the site.

Travis Langley & Associates will also provide the Christian Chronicle with tools for improved ad serving and managment, for encouraging and managing online membership, and for increasing revenue through strategic relationships.

Launch of the new site is expected in December 2007.

Visit the Christian Chronicle online at www.christianchronicle.org

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. 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.

One of the most important aspects to your website visitors’ experience is the navigation - how they get from place to place on your site. Too many times navigation is poorly thought out and can lead turn your visitors off. Here are a few simple rules for implementing effective site navigation.

1. Keep It Simple
   Don’t overwhelm your visitor with too many navigation choices. Present them with links to just the main content areas of your site. You can then provide links to deeper pages from withing those main content areas, or within your sitemap.
    
2. Think Inside the Box
   Your visitors will feel more comfortable if your navigation is in-line with common practice. If your menus are too unique or flashy, they could be confusing to your visitor, or possibly not easy for them to recognize as your navigation.
    
3. Show Them Where They Are
   With the nature of the web, it is common for visitors to arrive at you site on a page other than your home page. Your navigation should indicate to the visitor where they are on your site. If the visitor is on your “about us” page, the navigation should have some way to indicate that, whether it be showing that menu item in a different colored box, bolding the menu option, or placing an arrow beside the menu option just to name a few.
    
4. Make It Obvious To Your Visitor
   Your menu options should make it very clear where they will take your visitor. I have seen several sites that use icons or images only for the navigation, and while they may look nice and make sense to you or your web designer, your visitor may have no idea what that icon represents. Also, your text should be meaningful; don’t try to find unique ways to say things in your menu.
    
5. Keep Them Low Tech
   Avoid using flash or javascript for your navigation if possible. While most visitors browsers support these technologies, not all do, and it’s generally not necessary to use “high tech” for something that should be so simple. Also, this has implications beyond just the visitor. Search engines don’t follow javascript or flash links, so by using these technologies you are hiding most of your content from the search engines.
    

Following these rules should help make your visitors comfortable moving around your site.

I was going to include examples, but I think it would be simpler if I just point you to the great collection of bad navigation design I found at Web Pages that Suck.

I noticed yesterday that Google released a new tool for advertisers, the Website Optimizer. This new tool is included within the Adwords interface. If you have heard of AB Testing, or split testing, or multivariate testing, the Website Optimizer is suppose to simplify the process of tracking results. You can create multiple variations of a landing page, with different headers, product descriptions, link text, images, etc, and tag each variation. You also indicate what sort of action you are trying to encourage from a visitor, whether it be a sale, a newsletter subscription, a download, etc. The Website Optimizer tool will track results for a few days, and will then start reporting which variations do the best at delivering the desired action. One of the nicest features is that it shows which combinations (assuming you tried varying more than one item) produce the best results. This kind of insite can be crucial to improving the ROI of your online advertising and the profitability of your business.For more details, including sample reporst and a demo, visit

http://services.google.com/websiteoptimizer

I haven’t implemented this in any of my own projects yet, but am anxious to give it a try. It definitely sounds promising, and being a free tool, it’s hard to lose anything but the time involved in setting it up.

There is an issue with Internet Explorer adding white space when it isn’t really wanted (at least in my opinion). I haven’t noticed the problem with Firefox. The situation occurs when a line break exists in the html, but other than that there are no spaces or other elements that “should” display on the page in the browser. For example, let’s say I have several images that I want to appear side by side on the page and have no space between them, as when slicing images. My code might look like the following:

<img src="images/logo_left.gif" />
<img src="images/logo_right.gif" />

which would result in:

I think you see what I mean by unwanted space. One fix is to make sure there is no whitespace (carriage return, line feed, or space) between the image tags in the html, which is simple but can make for sloppy code and would look like this:

<img src="images/logo_left.gif" /><img src="images/logo_right.gif" />

It doesn’t look all that bad here, but if you have a lot of images, or a lot of parameters to include with your image (noborder, height, width, etc), it can make the underlying html pretty sloppy. But, you can get the layout you want:

However, I prefer a simple CSS solution. In my stylesheet, I add the following class:

.imageNowrap {
white-space:nowrap;
display:block;
float:left;
}

I can then add this class to each of my images (except the last image in the row), like so:

<img src="images/logo_left.gif" class="imageNowrap" />
<img src="images/logo_right.gif" />

and again get the desired result, this time with cleaner, more readable html. If your images span several rows, then something like this will work (remember to keep the <br /> on the same line of html as the last image on the row):

<!--// ROW 1 //-->
<img src="images/logo_top_left.gif" class="imageNowrap" />
<img src="images/logo_top_right.gif" /><br />
<!--// ROW 2 //-->
<img src="images/logo_low_left.gif" class="imageNowrap" />
<img src="images/logo_low_right.gif" /><br />
I am sure there are other solutions, so I would be happy to hear them.

UPDATE: 13 Feb 2008

I had a visitor contact me stating that he had used this solution with success on one page of his site, but the solution failed to work on another page. After reviewing his source, I noticed something critical that I thought I would pass on here. The page that was not working did not have a DocType specified. For this solution to work, be sure that the first line of HTML includes the following:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">