Entries from July 2008

Elements of SEO Update

July 30, 2008 // Drew Stauffer

***UPDATE: Elements of SEO version 1.3 is now available. Get it while its hot!

After submitting my theme to the new Wordpress Theme Directory, I was required to make a few tweaks. Elements of SEO 1.1 now has some exciting new features, including:

  • Gravatar support
  • Tag support

While I was making these edits I also decided to fix the widget bullets that were appearing. Ordinarily, if you downloaded the theme, uploaded it and didn’t activate any widgets then you would have the exact same setup in the sidebars as the demo site.

After reviewing a few sites that were using the theme, I noticed that a lot of people were implementing widgets. The problem that I was seeing was on the widget sections, there was a random bullet being added to the heading.

I didn’t really like how that looked since nothing else in the design had bullets styled like that, so I decided to remove them. Now you can add widgets all day long and it will look exactly the same as the demo site.

Download Elements of SEO 1.2 to get the new features and fix the widget heading bug.

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5 Steps to Improve Conversion Rates

July 23, 2008 // Drew Stauffer

Whether you’re redesigning your website or starting from scratch, you need to make sure that whatever you have online is converting users. Some sites sell products while others measure success by how many users contact them; either way, you have to be able to determine what’s working.

There are many ways to test your website, but the most important step is to just get started. You can debate with colleagues about color and style for weeks, but in the end you have to let the users determine what works and what doesn’t.
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Looking for a Cure

July 23, 2008 // Drew Stauffer

Blogging can be a challenge - it takes a lot of time to create decent content that people are actually going to want to read. The last three months I have been very active over at the Cure for Common Marketing blog.

The Cure is a blog that I started at my 9-5 job, Jackson Dawson, to try and bring them up to speed in the blogosphere. I am very proud of JD because, while a lot of companies say they want to get involved, for some reason or another they never do. It took JD a while to get on board, but they’re finally coming around.

The blog is one of many upcoming projects for JD, and I’m glad to see it getting underway. It’s very exciting to be behind the scenes in a corporate environment, making changes and shaking things up.
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Google Now Indexing and Crawling Flash

July 2, 2008 // Drew Stauffer

Judging by the buzz around the web today you would think that Google can now index all flash files. While this is partially true, I’m still a bit hesitant.

Adobe announced the news today, while Google explained things a bit, here and here and Vanessa Fox from Search Engine Land wrote up a very informative post explaining more clearly what Adobe and Google were trying to say.

One part that really puzzled me was the wording that Google used when explaining their new process for indexing flash files.
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