Alex Pooley's Blog

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My old blog design was looking a little untidy both on screen and under the hood. I recently undertook the arguably pointless task of overhauling my blog design, and upgrading to the latest Wordpress. The emphasis of this new design is on the content. I was able to crunch the side bar in to a tiny area by using a dynamic multi-level menu that fades in/out.

Updating the design was an interesting exercise and I came across a few impressive tools to help with the design and performance of the page. Here they are in no particular order:

Wordpress Theme Generator

I’ve always wanted to use Yahoo’s User Interface components with my blog design. YUI provides an excellent library of css and javascript to build rich interactive sites, while still maintaining cross browser compatibility. The navigation menu with the fade in/out to the left of the blog is an example of the YUI menu component.

The Wordpress Theme Generator allows you to modify the design in real time. I found the interface a little quirky and resorted to downloading the convenient Zip of my partial design and then hacking it to bits with vi.

All in all it’s a nice tool to get you up and going with a YUI compatible Wordpress theme.

YSlow

YSlow is an excellent FireFox plugin to determine how well your pages load, and where exactly performance improvements can be had. You will need FireBug installed to run YSlow. I managed to shave seconds in loading time by concatenating my javascript and css assets, and then deflating (mod_deflate) them via my .htaccess. The page went from about 330Kb to 80Kb.

YSlow grades your page based on several criteria, and these criteria combined result in an overall page grade. One of the criteria I believe most small time sites can safely ignore and that is the content delivery network (CDN) criteria.

Another great aspect of YSlow is that you can click on each of the criteria to learn more about the criteria. It’s a very efficient way to learn.

My site loses the majority of it’s grade because of widgets I have incorporated from third parties. For instance, MyBlogLog attaches ETags for the image files which YSlow believes are pointless. This highlights how important it is to be selective of the widgets you add to your pages (anyone been reading TechCrunch lately? ouch).

Online Stripe Generator

Wow, you know you’re around web 2.0 when the only purpose of a site is to create a tilable, striped image for web backgrounds. The interface of this tool is slick. I’ve always wanted to create striped tiles as they seem like a subtle way to brighten up a page, without distracting from the content.

WP-Cache

This Wordpress plugin is an absolute must for anyone who cares about their site visitors. WP-Cache lazy caches pages so that after the first load, the page is fetched from disk. By installing this plugin I improved my blog performance by 20% by going from a 5 second page load, to a 4 second page load. I don’t think you can really lose with this plugin, and in most cases you just need to turn it on.

Conclusion
The primary goal of this new design has been to focus on the content of the site without obtrusive distractions. The design is not fancy, but I think it’s achieved it’s goal. The tools I’ve mentioned above were a great help and I highly recommend them.

It’s been over a year since I left full time work and I’ve had the privilege of seeing business from many perspectives. I am beginning to form the conclusion that business is all about turning unpredictable circumstances in to predictable ones.

Let’s say that you sell puppies in a shopping center. You know that you will average x number of people walking in the store each day, of which you can predict y% will purchase. Though you will experience cycles, you know that some breeds will outsell others. You also have a known margin on your puppies, and you also have
predictable monthly revenue, costs, and hence profits.

The biggest hurdle facing anyone starting a business is to discover these “knowns”. You don’t know what you haven’t seen, and you will never see what you never try. And don’t assume! Measure! Test! You know what they say right.. “when you assume you make an ass out of u and me”

The biggest personal challenge is to get your feet wet. Once you’re in though, don’t hesitate or you will eventually freeze to death. Make sure that before you hop in, you set a soft budget of money and time. Spend as little money and time as possible but kick as hard as possible in every direction you can. Build channels and test.

My first mistake was to not budget my time. My second mistake was to not budget any money. You need money, and you need time. Without money, it takes too much time. Without time, you won’t make any money! ;)

My definition of business: predictable channels from your customers to a sale.

Good luck!

I haven’t posted to my blog for a while because I’ve been in the lab working all hours to finish my latest product. I’ve just released a new product for the search engine marketing crowd. Keyword Explode is a desktop application that will build a list of base keywords so quickly and so comprehensive that you will literally blindside your competition.

For those who are unaware, there are two sides to the search engine optimization equation. There are the searchers that send out queries to search engines, and there are publishers that provide what searchers are looking for. The job of a search engine is to connect these two groups as efficiently as possible. The more accurately a web page can tailor it’s content, back links, and adverts around search terms, the better the page will rank in the search engines for those particular search terms.

The typical strategy is to create a base set of keywords that broadly defines what content/search terms a site is targeting, and then to use the base keyword list to create more specific terms that pages, links, ads will target. So, say you wanted to start a blog about horses. Your base keyword list may be something like:

• horse
• donkey
• pony

If you could, you would target these keywords directly in your content/links/ads but they are way too competitive. Therefore, it’s necessary to target something we are more likely to compete with. To do this, we create more specific terms using modifiers and the base keywords above. Modifiers we may use include:

• brown
• American
• evil

Then you permute the modifiers with the base keywords so you get:

• brown horse
• American horse
• evil horse
• brown donkey
• American donkey
• evil donkey
• brown pony
• American pony
• evil pony

Another option instead of adding modifiers to the base keyword list is to use search mining services. These services mine what search terms users search with, and can return more specific search terms for whatever keywords you have. Say you ask for more searches that include the term “horse”. The mining service may return a bunch of results and one of them might be the query “American brown horse” with an estimated 1,500 searches over the last 30 days.

By creating more specific keywords we have narrowed the amount of other publishers we have to compete with. The problem is that the process I’ve just gone through is pretty much the process everyone goes through. So now instead of competing against 100 people with “horse”, we’re targeting 80 of those 100 by aiming for “brown horse”.

To gain an edge, extensive keyword research is performed in the hope of finding keywords that other people haven’t thought of. There’s a few problems with this:

1. It’s very time consuming
2. There are still other people that will perform the same research you do. This includes reading the same top 10 Google results that you read.
3. Because the English language is finite, there is a finite set of keywords. Yet, you never know how many more unknown words there are to find. Imagine researching for an extra half day for nothing because you already had an exhaustive list of keywords.

The trick in keyword research is to find the most base keywords possible, because all your other efforts derive from the base keyword list. Adding just one extra base keyword can result in exponentially more content, links, and ads. The bonus with lots of base keywords, is that the more you find, the less likely your competition will have all of them.

Keyword Explode solves these problems through it’s understanding of words and word relationships. With Keyword Explode, you can very quickly build a comprehensive list of base keywords that you can use to build content, links, and ads. All you need to do is think of some seed words for your niche, to use the previous example above we could simply use “horse”. Then you iterate through a process of expanding your current list of keywords, and culling what you don’t want. It’s essentially a three button process that will only take you a few minutes. You can watch a demo of the keyword research tool.

Keyword Explode is much more than a fancy thesaurus. A thesaurus only understands similar words, Keyword Explode knows similar words too, but it also understands that a beagle is a dog, a tire is part of a car, and that a house contains a toilet. You simply will not find anything else like this on the market. There are some services that return keywords your competition are using, but what good is it using the same keywords our competition are using? That’s exactly what we are trying to minimize!

I have more information about keyword research and information on related stuff like latent semantic indexing and the long tail over at the Keyword Explode product page. Check out those links and you will see that Keyword Explode is the easiest, and most comprehensive keyword generation tool around.