“Principles of Designing & Releasing Web Products” is the subtitle of the book and I think fairly describes what makes this book unique compared to other web design books you may have read. Rather than focusing on any particular programming language or industry, Hunt provides an interesting framework for thinking that will help you make better web products no matter the vertical or CMS you are working with.

Let’s get the standard book review out of the way: This book is a quick read and written in a refreshing and straighforward manner. The physical quality is great and could easily make it a coffee table book or book to have around the office. The drawings in the book are quirky and bring the content to life. Now let’s get to the more interesting stuff…

First, let’s talk about what Hunt means by “Web Product”. These are web products: Most apps for your phone, Etsy, eBay, Facebook, WordPress (if you are using it to write a site instead of just viewing a site), Skype, etc. These are not web products: This website (for you, the reader), your standard restaurant website, most websites that you just read.

I think the easiest distinction is that a website “typically passes content (text, photos, video, or audio) in only one direction- from site to visitor- a Web product will both deliever and receive content. In other words, a website is often a consumption-only experience, whereas a Web product is a creative or participative experience.”

Lots of Web Products have these, too:

• Presence of user accounts
• High frequency of use
• Participation rather than navigation
• Specified flows through the website

Now that we agree on what a “web product” is in this context, let’s move right along.

Hunt shared some interesting ideas in the book that really struck me. Here they are:

The World > Your Product

You have to understand your user before you can design a product that works for them. What is the user doing when they use your product? If you are google maps, there is a good chance the user is driving. If you are Strava (an app that tracks your runs), there is a good chance your user is sweaty and tired and has their iphone on their arm. If you are Facebook then you know about 70% of your users are on their mobile device seeing what their friends are up to. If you are youtube, your user is more likely to be relaxed and willing to stick around a bit longer for their content. (Imagine if you had to watch a 30 second commercial like on Youtube to get directions on Google Maps!).

The point of all of this is that your product fits somewhere into people’s lives. You should have a crystal clear understanding of what your users are doing when they are using your product. This will help you design better to their needs.

Remember the invisible features

A product has dozens of invisible features that are often overlooked because they don’t show up in mockups or prototypes, yet these invisible features have an emotional effect on the user. What are some invisible features?

Performance: Your product needs to work well, have few errors, and generally be problem-free.

Speed: Your product needs to feel fast and responsive to the user. This can be tricky on mobile devices that might lose connectivity. Find ways to make the product feel responsive.

Community: Just that. Have a community of people using the product that can help or at least show social proof that the product is beneficial.

Support: Your support team should be spot on.

Effective over Clever

Focus on being effective over being clever. Most people don’t want to think in order to use your product. Make sure things are clearly labelled with the most common terminology. As much as you may want to make your website memorable, never do so at the expense of utility.

(I’d like to interject here that I think quirkiness is very effective in web design. But most important when you are using quirkiness… do it in a way that enhances and delights the user without confusing them.)

Minimize Choices

Let’s offer less choices. Minimize the options for your users to either 1)The best next step in the page flow or 2)If they aren’t in a flow yet, curate your list of options to just the best stuff. Be like a host to a party for your users and show them a good time.

Thanks for reading my first book review. If you’d like to get other book reviews by email, then sign up to get new blog posts by email. You can sign up below.

The post Book Review: Product Design for the Web by Randy Hunt appeared first on Bradley Spencer.

WordPress Startup Theme (& Community)

There is plenty of money to be made in WordPress themes.  Don’t just take me at my word… here are some data points to consider:

WooThemes was worth reportedly $2,000,000+ as far back as 2010, and in February of 2013 the WooThemes owner tweeted they had surpassing 400,000 customers. This is an estimated revenue in the $40,000,000 range for their lifetime.

Theme marketplaces like ThemeForest have (at the time of writing) about 14,000 WordPress themes offered for download.  To my knowledge, all of the themes on themeforest are created by individuals who collect a percentage of the revenue that Themeforest generates on their theme.  The highest theme in sales was by theme creator Themefusion and has 56,000 sales of just one theme (Avada).  At $55 a pop, Avada has generated $3,080,000 in revenue for Themeforest and Themefusion.

If you think that Themefusion’s Avada theme is a freak occurrence, you would be partially right.  Most themes do not sell 56,000 copies.  But you have to go 215 pages deep into Themeforest’s theme listings (when ranked by number of sales) to find themes that have sold less than 100 copies.  This means Themeforest has about 6450 themes that have sold one hundred or more copies.

That’s a lot of WordPress themes.

—

But we know the presence of a market doesn’t necessarily mean there is a business opportunity.  The next question is what, if anything, could a new theme company do to disrupt the market and take on the incumbents?

Business Hypothesis:

Sophisticated business owners  primarily want their wordpress theme to push their business’ KPIs (time on site, conversion rate, etc.) and very few themes target this customer need.  A theme that was built on sound Usability, SEO, and Conversion Rate Optimization principles would be able to segment the existing market into two markets: aesthetic-focused (almost all current themes are based on this) and KPI-focused (the new market).

How to Monetize:

I would personally release the theme for free initially in order to get traction and then eventually ratchet up the theme’s cost as you get a feel for the market and you move past early adopters and into the larger market.

The real streams of income would come from the following:

Custom Development:  Within the theme’s files would be modifications to the dashboard of the user’s WordPress theme that allowed the user to make custom development requests for their theme.  A group of developers who know this particular theme inside and out would bid on the jobs.  The bids would be more accurate due to the developer’s familiarity with the theme, and the jobs would likely be much faster for the same reason.

Plug-and-Play Enhancements:  This new theme company would have ux and conversion experts on staff who create excellent enhancements that are commonly asked for.  Thinking email drip campaigns, responsive layouts, javascript animations, SEO enhancements, etc.  The users could purchase these and know they are going to work perfectly in their theme.

Support: No surprises here, but support tickets could generate recurring revenue for the firm and alleviate the customer’s pain in finding freelance developers.

Hosting, Backups, Etc: Productize common requests from customers and do so in a way that creates revenue for the theme company but also works for the customer.

In summary, I think the tack this theme company would take is to solve the theme purchasers ultimate pain point- sales for their company- rather than trying to sell a theme on only appearance or features.  The customers this company would acquire would be an excellent demographic to work with for many years and would generally be agreeable to theme enhancements that drove the needle in their business.

The post Here’s a Business Idea: WordPress Startup Theme & Community appeared first on Bradley Spencer.

Don't be as confused as this pooch about WordPress Backups!

Backing up a WordPress site is very important and very simple, yet many people don’t realize this until it is too late. The intention of this article is to provide a reference for people new to backing up WordPress websites without the bias of pushing a particular backup product. Let’s dive in…

Emergency Blog Recovery?

Before we dive into the reference guide, if you have lost your website and do not have a working backup already then we strongly suggest reaching out to your web host to see if they have a backup handy. Backups from web hosts can be deleted quickly (sometimes within 24 hours) so act quickly.

Reasons to Backup Your WordPress Site

Creating a backup process for your WordPress site can seem unnecessary, so it’s fair to want some compelling reasons to do it.

These are common reasons people make backups, or wish they had made a backup:

1. You upgraded WordPress and now your website is broken
2. You installed a plugin, and now the website is just a white screen
3. You accidently deleted a file, page, post, and it’s gone for good
4. Your site gets infected with a virus and you don’t have a clean backup to revert to

You really don’t want to deal with rebuilding your site when something bad happens, right? So now that you understand the importance of backups, let’s take a look at how to make them.

Overview: How to Backup Your WordPress Blog or Website

A good backup process for your site will automatically create a full backup of your website at certain intervals and will alert you if there were any problems that stopped the backup from being created. The first time you setup your WordPress backup, you’ll have to test it to make sure that the backup it creates isn’t faulty. Let’s take a look at what exactly needs to be backed up…

WordPress “Pieces” That Require Backing Up:

WordPress is made of two separate pieces that need to be backed up. They are:

1. MySQL Database (all of the posts, users, pages, and more…)
2. Files (this includes themes, images, movies, and the files that make WP run…)

A surprising number of so-called backup solutions only backup either the MySQL database or the files. Make sure that you are getting full backups of both the files and database, or you won’t be able to recreate your site when it needs to be backed up. Let’s take a look at some common backup solutions…

Free WordPress Backup Plugins:

There are a lot of backup plugins out there. Some are free and some cost money, and paid plugins aren’t nessesarily better. The free plugins I’ve used and like are…

1. WordPress Backup to Dropbox – Makes a backup of your site and uploads it to Dropbox!
2. XCloner – Makes backups and also helps you restore the backup if need be.

Paid WordPress Backup Plugins:

1. BackupBuddy – A lot of people seem to like this plugin, but I personally had a hard time getting it set up.
2. VaultPress – Vaultpress is run by the folks behind WordPress.org, so they are very qualified. Vaultpress also scans your site for viruses while it makes backups. This is a great solution but you pay for it!

Non-Plugin Backup Options:

If you are technically-minded or your web host offers the service then you can always have your web host create the backups on your behalf. In my opinion, this is the easiest way to have backups continually created. You just want to make sure that your backups are stored either in multiple physical locations or in a different location than your host. In other words, if your host’s physical location gets hit by a tornado, you don’t want your backups to be ruined with your site!

Some hosts make this easier than others. Arguably the best host available, RackSpace, has an excellent service called CloudSites that didn’t have an easy backup solution so I helped create one at Backup Sites in Cloud. What I mean to show you is that your host may have the ability to make backups, or may be making them already, but it’s crucial that you don’t just assume that there will be backups if you need them.

How to Create Your WordPress Backups

Once you choose your favorite backup plugin, follow the instructions to get it setup. I won’t discuss the steps for each plugin as they all differ and there are plenty of resources out there to help you. If you have specific questions, feel free to contact me or ask in the comments.

You Must Test the Backup!

Most people don’t test the results of their backup build and occasionally it can really bite you on the rump. So to ensure that your backups work perfectly, make sure to take this extra step and test your backup.

Testing your backup is as simple as using a throw-away url (or make a subdomain url if you don’t have a throw-away domain for this) and trying to restore your site on the new blog. If you restore your blog and it doesn’t look exactly the same as the blog you backed up, you have some problems to solve.

Your WordPress Backup Should be Automated

Backups need to be automated to protect you from forgetfulness, procrastination, and allow you to focus on more important things than backing up your website. All of the plugins list above allow you to automate backups with cron jobs. Make sure to setup the recurring backups when you install the plugins.

Now Your WordPress site is Backed Up!

If you have automated backups being created and you’ve tested the backups to ensure that they are valid, then you can rest easy knowing that if your WordPress site gets a virus or you accidently delete something essential, you’ll have a backup handy.

Photo from flickr.

The post WordPress Backup Guide – How to Backup WordPress on Google, Dropbox, or with WordPress Plugins appeared first on Bradley Spencer.

Rob Ftizpatrick

After writing this post about the 10k Pound Boostrap Challenge, I decided to reach out to Rob Fitzpatrick and see if he’d like to answer a few questions about his project.  He was kind enough to agree and below is our conversation:

What made you decide to start this Bootstrap Challenge?

I was spending too much time talking and not enough time building. I was feeling a bit cynical about how I made my money and unexcited about my days, so I decided to get back to products.

As for why I chose to publicise it… So it’s definitely a perk that more people will hear about what I build. Visibility is always good. But at the same time, I just want to leave an honest case study of how it went, regardless of whether I succeed or fail.

Lots of people have bootstrapped successful companies, which usually happens behind closed doors. If I can peel back some of the hand-waving and mysticism about starting a company, then that’s a win.

Do you have a particular school of entrepreneurial thought, ie Lean Startups or something else?

It’s changing as I go. I’ve studied most of them and have learned a ton from founders of all different perspectives. I’d say lean startup is my core perspective, but I didn’t get real value out of it until I started tempering it with other bodies of knowledge. Any business approach tends to become a caricature of itself when you go completely “pure”.

As a coder, what percentage of success in entrepreneurship do you attribute to your coding talent versus your business talent?

A little coding and a little business are both necessary. Though you’ll get farther as just-a-hacker then you will as just-a-business-guy (unless you have a great team, a ton of cash to burn, or are willing to work on non-tech businesses).

How do you choose a niche to build a product for?

I prioritise things which are fast, and then things which are fun, and then those which might be profitable. I’m not exactly approaching this as serious business though. If I was, I’d basically follow Amy Hoy‘s approach of finding a customer segment who makes money and who you like, finding out their problems, and then building subscription software to address those.

Why only 3 hours per day?

I would love to be able to productively code for 10 hours a day, but I just can’t. However, I can be extremely productive for 3 hours of coding a day. Plus, there’s all the other junk. I spend an hour a day updating the blog and my financial reports. Two hours a day talking with other founders. I spend at least a day a week at events and conferences and whatever else. I kind of think 3 hours isn’t so bad, all things considered.

It’s so easy to get into the hours-worked-spiral-of-guilt where you spend more and more hours staring at the screen, getting less and less done because you’re too tired to focus. Or you work real hard, but end up doing the wrong thing extremely well.

I heard about a “luck test”, where people were asked to count how many pictures were in a newspaper. The people who considered themselves lucky ended up averaging like 10 seconds to finish the test, whereas people who thought of themselves as unlucky would spend 100x as long. On the second page of the newspaper was a big square which said “There are 55 pictures in this newspaper”. Were they lucky to see that? Na. They were just relaxed, so they were able to take in the unexpected.

And finally, the whole point of this challenge is to see if it’s viable to build my dream business. My dream business doesn’t involve me coding for 8 hours a day

Has your mindset changed over the course of the first few weeks?

I initially thought I would build a new product every week. I don’t really think that’s viable anymore, but I haven’t quite figured out how to cope with it.

Do you have any suggestions for people who want to start their own web/mobile company?

Start building stuff with your friends. Projects turn into businesses. And if you’re like me, choose small projects you can finish in a weekend or they’ll never get shipped!

The post Interview with Rob Fitzpatrick of the 10k Pound Bootstrap Challenge appeared first on Bradley Spencer.

Mueller starts out by explaining what the sitemap file does:

A Sitemap file helps search engines to discover new and updated URLs on your website. In particular, if your website is fairly large, then this can help them to be able to focus on the new & updated content, instead of having to blindly crawl through everything to see if anything has changed. That can result in new content being found much faster, which can be quite noticeable especially if the site is larger or more complex.

None of that information is especially interesting.  But it gets a bit more interesting…

Find the number of indexed URLs for your website: These statistics are recalculated daily and very accurate. You can find these in the Sitemaps detail page.

Interesting.  I wonder why Google would recalculate these every day.

Discover canonicalization issues: If the numbers there don’t match up, that’s frequently a sign that you’re specifying URLs in the Sitemap file that don’t match what we find during our crawling. That’s usually a sign that you need to work on canonicalization.

This is handy.  Canonicalization issues are notoriously hard to define and then ensure that you’ve fixed, so this is a helpful tool to that end.

Help with canonicalization: When we find multiple URLs on your site that show identical content, we will give any URL that’s listed in a Sitemap an extra edge, even if you don’t use other canonicalization methods.

Well that’s clear.  Sitemaps are a tie-breaker.

Find badly-indexed parts of your site: These counts are supplied per Sitemap file, so you can create separate Sitemap files for logical sections of your site, to discover areas where Google isn’t indexing as much as you’d like.

This is an idea people have talked about (this post on Video Sitemaps comes to mind) for a while but you don’t see in use very often.

Prioritize crawl errors: In the crawl errors section, URLs that were specified in Sitemaps files are listed separately. Since you specifically supplied these URLs, we assume that you want them indexed, and that any crawl errors there are important.

When you give a URL to Google in your sitemap, any errors on that page are listed separately so they are given a heightened priority.

Finally Mueller came back to the discussion and added an addendum…

Edited to add: another thing that I personally find extremely useful with regards to Sitemaps is that if you’re not generating them directly with your CMS, you invariably find out a lot about how your website is crawlable, and what kind of URLs are discovered during that process. I’ve seen many cases where crawling a website with a tool on your side (eg a Sitemaps generator) will bubble up issues that you might miss otherwise, be that session-IDs in URLs, duplicate content through URL differences, infinite spaces (such as endless calendars), or even parts of a site that aren’t linked at all.

We’ve found the same thing Mueller is talking about in doing SEO Audits for clients.  Running a spider through your site (especially one like Screaming Frog for Mac or Xenu for Windows) is one of the most enlightening things you can do for any site.  Over time, you get a sixth sense for how search engines view a site and spot problems quickly.

All and all, it’s nice to see Google Employees in public forums giving concrete answers.  Hopefully this continues!

The post 5 Purposes of a Sitemap.xml as Explained by a Google Employee appeared first on Bradley Spencer.

What makes the website so unique is how very condensed the experience will be.

Plenty of people dream of starting their own web startup, fewer people give startups a try with a big safety net, and then there are the handful of folks like Rob Fitzpatrick (the entrepreneur) who purposefully paint themselves into a corner so their only option is to succeed.  It’s truly inspiring to see someone stare the potential of failure directly in the face and keep going.  No hedging there!

Check out the 10k Bootstrap Challenge if you are interested in starting your own web business.  I think you’ll like it a lot.

The post How to Launch Your Startup Before You Run Out of Money appeared first on Bradley Spencer.

We’ve talked about the importance of Click-Thru Rate in the SERPS and Rich Snippets in SEO before, but this is the best tip I’ve had yet for you guys.

I was delighted this morning to see the Search Engine Results Page showing this:

New Search Engine Results Page

See my face next to the Search Result?  Now it’s one thing if it shows when people search for you by name.  That’s cool but it’s not going to help much because people are already looking for you.  What if it showed in a more competitive search?

Author Picture in SERPS

See my face on the 4th result down?  Now even though my site is still showing at position 4, I guarantee there are more clicks on it than there were before because we know that faces help conversion rates.

How to Add Your Face to Your Google Results

It’s as simple as following these instructions from Google.  If you have any questions or problems, just leave a comment!

The post How to Add Your Face Next to Your Blog in Google appeared first on Bradley Spencer.

After trying a few different plugins, he eventually settled on Cookies for Comments, which takes a very unique approach to cutting down on spam.  From the plugin’s description:

This plugin adds a stylesheet or image to your blog’s html source code. When a browser loads that stylesheet or image a cookie is dropped. If that user then leaves a comment the cookie is checked. If it doesn’t exist the comment is marked as spam. The plugin can also check how long it took a user to enter a comment. If it’s too fast it’s probably a spam bot. How fast can a legitimate user enter their name, email, web address and enter a well thought out comment?

His blog has been spam free since installing the plugin yesterday.  So if you ever need to cut down on comment spam without using Akismet, give Cookies for Comments a try!

Thanks to Marco for all his help with this!

The post How to Eliminate Spam When You Can’t Use Akismet appeared first on Bradley Spencer.

I’m not as familiar with SquareSpace as WordPress and had to write some javascript code to run on a contact form tracking page.  Since no PHP was available to write, Eric and I did it strictly in Javascript.  Here’s the final code:

[code lang=”js”]
<script type="text/javascript">
if ((location.href)=="http:www.yoursite.com/trackingpage") {
/* <![CDATA[ */
var google_conversion_id = xxxxxxxx;
var google_conversion_language = "en";
var google_conversion_format = "1";
var google_conversion_color = "000000";
var google_conversion_label = "xxxxxxxxxxx";
var google_conversion_value = 0;
/* ]]> */
}
</script>
[/code]

Naturally you’ll need to change these three values:

1. Change http:www.yoursite.com/trackingpage to the exact URL of the transaction URL.
2. Replace the xxxxxxxx after google_conversion_id to whatever your actual conversion is is.
3. You’ll also need to change xxxxxxxx after google_conversion_label to whatever your actual label is, too.

That’s it!  Now this code can be included on every page but will still only trigger on the conversion page.

The post Javascript Conditional Code for Conversion Tracking in Google Adwords appeared first on Bradley Spencer.

As a primer, comment spam is any comment left on your blog that adds nothing to the conversation and was likely mass posted.  These comments sometimes look like:

Great post!  This makes me really think.

Or something like….

Wow, I couldn’t have said it better myself!

You can spot spam comments because they are usually positive in vibe and could fit just about any blog post.  The spammers do this in the hopes that the link behind their name will help their website rank better.  So if you aren’t sure if the comment is spam, a good way to tell is to look at where their name links to.  If it looks fishy, then you’ve got a spam commenter on your hands.

How Bad is the Spam Industry?

I was amazed and what I found this evening when searching through “WordPress” related keywords.  Check this out:

Top Searched Keyword Terms for WordPress

If you look closely at the terms with the red arrows, you’ll see a disturbing pattern.  These are all terms that spammers would use to locate blogs that are powered by WordPress and accept comments.

What’s most disturbing is the fact that the relative volumes of the 5 spam terms add up to 72, while people legitamately searching for WordPress are only 88 in relative volume.  That means the spammers almost outnumber real people searching for WordPress!

But this article isn’t meant to employ scare tactics.  It’s not a scary situation once you get your blog setup correctly.  So let’s talk about setting your WP blog up to avoid comment spam.

How to Kill Comment Spam

1. Have Akismet Set-Up
2. The stats above would imply you should remove the ‘powered by wordpress’ and ‘leave a comment’ text from your site.  I’ve never tested it before, but it can’t hurt!
3. Finally, if your spam is coming from a contact form and not from a comment form, read Protecting Contact Form 7 from Spam.  It’s a bit more involved to protect your contact form than your comments form, but it’s well worth the time.

Do you have any suggestions for cutting down on WordPress spam comments?  Let me know in the comments section below!

The post WordPress Comment Spam: How to get less comment spam on your WP Blog appeared first on Bradley Spencer.