SMM has now launched a very useful website mini-review service. In doing market research on other website review services, some interesting aspects came to light that many will find of interest.

Free Is Never Free

That innovative thinker, Chris Anderson, will be publishing his new book, Free, at some time in 2008, we presume. This will discuss giving zero cost products/services away for free and then making money on upgraded versions. That’s one of the opportunities this zero-cost virtual world now gives us. A more important sub-theme in the book is that of course everyone pays for such products or services by investing their personal time in them. This means that you should be even more skeptical in checking the teeth of any gift horses. Looking after that horse could involve major effort and expense.

This is particularly important in thinking about website review processes. Whatever you learn from such a process may well involve you in major effort to implement the findings. Given the importance of your website and of your time, it’s important to make the right choice.

Who can best assess your website’s performance?

Whatever objectives you as the owner may have for your website, they can only be achieved if there are enough visitors to the website and if they can take the actions that you hope for. So it boils down to good visitor traffic and visitors having satisfactory experiences on the website. Both aspects are tough to evaluate. If you do not think so, just spend a little time checking out the excellent research work that Jared Spool, and his team at UIE (User Interface Engineering), do on website usability. There’s more to the way visitors move around a website than the you might have imagined.

Which website review process is best for you?

Assuming that you are not about to invest in a massive program of visitor testing of the website, some simpler process that looks at all aspects of performance must be found. All aspects of performance covers a lot of ground. To get a sense of this, you might wish to review a very long checklist for website review put out by Polson Enterprises. Unfortunately this has not been updated since 2006, but most of it is still very appropriate. It stretches to fifteen pages and includes almost 300, often meaty, paragraphs on different aspects of website performance.

A website review covering that degree of detail is a major undertaking. A better initial step is to take a ‘big picture‘ or ‘helicopter vision‘ approach. This will help to identify where work may be needed. If you are searching for free resources for this big picture approach, there are two main alternatives. Some Forums offer such ‘big picture’ website reviews and some experts will do such reviews but require the freedom to publish their work.

Forums Offering Website Reviews

The type of website review you will get from a Forum depends on the interests of its members and their skills and experience. You should only consider active forums where you’re likely to get a number of members commenting. Three Forums seem to do a reasonable job in this respect:

• Estetica Design Forum > Graphic Design & Web Design Critique
  Given the fields of interest of its members, you might expect a review that will put much more emphasis on graphic design aspects of the website.
• Web Design Forum, UK > Web Designing Resource > Website Reviews
  Checking on activity in other threads, although the main emphasis of the Forum is Web design, some attention is paid to other Internet marketing aspects.
• Cre8asite Forums > Web Site Building, Testing and Support > Website Hospital
  The Cre8asite Forums (where I moderate) covers all aspects of web design and Internet marketing. Reviewers would therefore bring a variety of perspectives in their comments.

Experts Offering Free Website Reviews

If you do not mind an expert giving a public review of your website, then there are a number of experts you can consult.

For example, Jackie Baker at Search Engine Guide offers a weekly site clinic column. As she says:

Small businesses are invited to submit their websites for review. Can’t beat a little free advice, right? I’ll be looking at the design, copy, usability, SEO, marketing, and any technical issues that may prevent websites from drawing loyal, active visitors and meeting goals. Each week, I’ll give the top five issues the website owner/manager can address to significantly improve performance.

Scott Hendison offers a Free SEO Site Review. As he explains:

For a limited time, you can get a video made of your own website, seeing how it complies with generally accepted search engine optimization best practices.
…
In exchange, all I ask from you is that you agree to allow me to make my information public, so that others may learn from the experience. Selected video reviews will be shared on my site and on my blog.

Such expert views are likely to be well-founded, particularly since the expert is also going public and their reputation will be affected by what they reveal.

Free Website Reviews Come With A Risk

There is a risk in having your website reviewed in public. The UK Web Design Forum outlines this well:

When posing a link to a site to be reviewed remember that some people may not like your site and could leave comments to that effect. These threads can appear on a search engine results for your website or other searches, so if you get negative comments people who search for your site may see these.

Please be sure that you don’t mind that some members may not like your design and may criticise the work you have done. Most of these members will offer opinions on how to improve, which is what this section of the forum is about. So if you are looking for helpful advice and a honest view of your site this is the perfect place to do it.

Really all we are saying is post your sites at your risks, this forum will not be held responsible for any loss of business or negative things that happen due to you deciding to place your site here for a review.

Time Is Money

Each webmaster will decide for herself or himself how to balance the usefulness of the website review, its cost and the time it takes to get it. However it is done, it is important to have your website performing well and that requires knowledge. SMM is now offering a Website Mini-Review service that gives good value in getting the right big picture view. It’s not free, but it may be less costly, taking everything into account, than these other free services.

If you have your preferred method of assessing the performance of a website that you think others might find useful, why not give details in a comment.

Other Related Posts

• March 15, 2008 -- Voice Search On Mobile Phones For A Better User Experience
• November 24, 2007 -- Do You Want The Full Web On Your Phone?
• October 23, 2007 -- Free 411: GOOG or CALL

You may be aware that the Internet is becoming very crowded. Google will attempt to help you get where you want to go, but is having increasing difficulties. Part of that is Google’s doing. Their methodology depends on links from other web pages, so naturally, everyone is producing web pages. Indeed, some use computer software to generate thousands of web pages to influence their Google ranking. Since Google will only use computer based algorithms, it becomes a battle of the giant computers.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, seems to be acknowledging that his protĂ©gĂ© has problems. He has accepted one of the Knight News Challenge 2008 awards for a project that will create a technology to give users more information about the origins and sourcing of digital content. He will be working with the BBC and Reuters on what has been dubbed “source tagging“.

Tags To Bring Order To The Cyber Sphere

Tagging certainly seems to be something that has real potential in helping us all navigate our way through the World Wide Web. Tags do of course come in two flavors. You can take a body of text and use a computer to determine what are the most frequently used terms. That is one way and it may be the route that Sir Tim is following. What is much more powerful is to encourage authors to choose a few tags that they feel will best represent their work. Thankfully this version seems to be attracting more and more attention, perhaps given the problems that Google is having with computer based algorithms.

A good example of the approach can be seen in the excellent blog of Kate Trgovac. Just look at her post on links for 2008-05-13. You will find for every entry she has added tags. If you wish to see more on what she believes is important on any given tag, then you can click through on that tag. There you will find the favorites she has collected, which are typified by that tag. She is using the website, del.icio.us, to hold these favorites. That is a free service and anyone can do it.

Picturing Tags - The Tag Cloud

If you want to get a sense of what Kate Trgovac feels is important and worth tagging, how can you best do that? The del.icio.us website does give a listing of all the tags she has used (1203 in all at the moment) with the numbers of web pages for each tag. Such a long listing is a little indigestible, so a visual approach seems more appropriate. This is where the tag cloud comes in. You can see a mini-example at the top of the right sidebar. Perhaps we should mention that the tagcloud.com website is somewhat confusing here, since it seems to be only a register of RSS newsfeeds.

If you’re working with del.icio.us, it would be nice to be able to easily display a tag cloud of your favorites. Nick Bouton seems to have attempted that in 2005 but apparently ran into problems with the server capabilities of the del.icio.us website.

It is perhaps an indication of the attraction of tag clouds that a number of people have worked on appropriate software. Eric (engtech) developed one in 2007, which was somewhat complex. If you can accept complexity, then you may even be tempted to use a Flash Tag Cloud WordPress plugin that Alex Cristache found. It is one developed by Roy Tanck and is called WP Cumulus, in a pleasing play of words on the notion of a tag cloud.

WordPress Has A Tag Cloud Feature

Luckily for those who are enthusiastic about tag clouds, and are authors of WordPress blogs, the whole situation has become dramatically simpler. With the latest upgrade (version 2.5), tags are now much more effectively supported. In particular, there is now a template tag function, wp_tag_cloud. That makes the addition of a mini tag cloud to a sidebar almost child’s play. You may have noticed a small example in the right sidebar when you arrived at this blog.

Making Your Very Easy WordPress Tag Cloud Web Page

Displaying the full set of tags generated for a blog is clearly inappropriate for a sidebar display. What is much preferable is a web page displaying the full set of tags. As it turns out, with a little ingenuity there is a very simple way of creating such a web page. This is done by creating a specific page template just for that page, which we suggest should be named tags.php. A suitable code for this in the basic Kubrics theme is shown below.

<?php /*
Template Name: Tag Cloud
*/ ?>

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div id="content" class="narrowcolumn">

<?php if ( function_exists('wp_tag_cloud') ) : ?>
<div style="margin:25px;border:1px solid #111;padding:15px;">
<ul  style="margin:0 0 0 8px;padding:0;">
<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=24&number=0'); ?>
</ul>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>

<p style="margin-left:33px;">
Tags:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tagcloud" rel="tag">tagcloud</a>
 in Technorati |
<a href="http://del.icio.us/bwelford/tagcloud" rel="tag">tagcloud</a>
 in del.icio.us</p>
</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

An example of the output can be seen in the tag cloud page for this blog. The only point to note is that the tags shown below the tag cloud are not a natural feature of a WordPress blog page. Wordpress posts do have tags, but WordPress pages do not, unless they are added manually as is done here. The left-hand tagcloud tag for Technorati is applicable to all tag clouds and can be left as is. The right-hand link for the del.icio.us tagcloud can be modified to link to the individual author’s del.icio.us tagcloud favorites, if so desired.

You can copy and paste the above code to create your own tags.php file and it can be FTP-ed to your own Theme folder. The properties of this file should be set to Read and Write for the Owner and Read only for others.

Once the tags.php file has been uploaded, the Tag Cloud web page is very easily created as a New Page in the ‘Write Page’ Subpanel. Select the template to be used at the very bottom of the Subpanel from the drop-down list. Its name is Tag Cloud. In the Title field, type a suitable Title such as ‘Tag Cloud for this Blog’. Within the Content field, type the text which should appear as the heading within the Page and this is all that is required. This could appear as follows:

<h2>Tag Cloud for this Blog</h2>

The template will then automatically add in the complete tag cloud together with the two tag links for tagcloud which appear below it.

Once the Tag Cloud Web Page has been created, a link to it can then be displayed at an appropriate point on the Home Page. Visitors to the blog can then easily use it to get a sense of what subjects the blog covers.

Related:
Tags Attract Eyes
Tag Clouds To Guide You

Other Related Posts

• April 5, 2008 -- We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links
• February 10, 2008 -- Fast Alarm For Hidden WordPress Hackers
• February 5, 2008 -- My Other Wordpress Blog Was Hacked Too

QuickTax is the Intuit Canada program that infuriated me into writing this blog post. I might have written a similar post some time back when Intuit Canada forced me to upgrade my version of Quicken, which I use merely to download my bank records. The upgrade was at full price with no recognition that I was already a customer. The upgrade had several non-intuitive features, which was not helped by an inability to access the online Help. They seemed to imply it was Microsoft’s problem when eventually customer service replied by e-mail after 48 hours and suggested a patch to give access. Life is short and one cannot blog about all egregious examples of poor customer service. .. and Mark Minasi has described well the Nonintuitive Actions from Quicken’s Maker about this Quicken forced upgrade, with many commenters expressing similar frustrations.

Then my bank encouraged me to check out the Intuit Canada QuickTax software for tax returns, with the added advantage of being able to submit returns online.

Perhaps I should have learnt. Leopards rarely change their spots. However the QuickTax offer was enticing. I did twice check with technical support on some questions I had and unfortunately on both occasions was misinformed. Surprisingly I had to call a Montreal number, 514-227-3063, which took some digging to find. From the contacts I made subsequently with this number, I was probably being redirected to India.

As suggested on the website I checked with the Canada Revenue Agency Netfile site to ensure QuickTax was certified and read the following:
*Free offering:
Each QuickTax product must be purchased and can produce a limited number of returns over $25,000. However, you can prepare up to 18 free tax returns for anyone who earns less than $25,000 net individual income per year (line 236 on T1).
This same information can also be found on the Intuit Canada website.

So having done sufficient due diligence, as we thought, we started preparing online returns. Perhaps we should have checked some of those reviews that Intuit Canada featured on the website. Here is what jord of Toronto wrote.

That is not an extreme review since more than 10% of reviewers rated the product even lower. One would have hoped that a company bold enough to call itself Intuit Canada would have produced an intuitive software. Sadly that is not the case. If only I had read what Jonathan Chevreau wrote in the Financial Post on the QuickTax package (neither quick nor painless), I could have avoided all this frustration.

Indeed by reading his article, I could have avoided an additional frustration that Intuit Canada creates. Using the online version of QuickTax, you must pay an additional fee for every tax return created. I believe his account is correct, although it’s somewhat tough to figure it out and technical support in my case gave incorrect information.

The CD versions of Quick-Tax Standard, Platinum or Unincorporated cost $40, $60 and $80, respectively, which permits the preparation of just two returns for gross incomes above $25,000, plus up to 18 Freedom returns for those with gross incomes below the threshold.

Beyond that, you can unlock the ability to process other returns for $10 extra per QuickTax Basic return or $15 extra for the other packages. So, for the 40% of its customers that need to process more than two $25,000-plus returns, it will cost more this year. Single users can pay just $20, $30 or $40, for the three Web applications, but couples will have to pay twice that to process joint Web returns.

Fortunately, you can find cheaper alternatives at Canada Revenue Agency’s NetFiling site (www.netfile.gc.ca). One alternative, UFile.ca, is still available for $16 for the Web version and $30 for the CD.

Intuit Canada may feel they are being reasonable in all this. After all you don’t need to pay if you try the product, find you don’t like it and decide not to use it for your return. Given that you have invested a great deal of time in entering data at that point, that’s a tough decision. In addition they suggest they will probably give you your money back in the very small print.

6. Try QuickTax for 60 days. If you are not 100% satisfied, simply e-mail quicktaxonline@intuit.com within sixty (60) days of purchase to request a full refund of the purchase price. Please provide your order number (see confirmation of purchase screen) and the reason our product did not meet your needs.

If Intuit Canada was at all customer-centric, they would realize what an extremely poor job they’re doing with their QuickTax online software.

Related: QuickTax Disappoints

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• December 16, 2007 -- Speech Technology Will Be Really Big - Watch Google
• July 16, 2006 -- T-Mobile, The Most Popular Mobile of All
• June 20, 2007 -- Bridging The Digital Divide Needs The Mobile Web

If you have a high-traffic blog, then you certainly deserve congratulations. Unfortunately some of your admirers may be hackers who would like to ride on your success. In a way there is good news and there is bad news. The bad news is they may well try to hack in to your website. The good news is they may do it in a way where you won’t even know. However that is no consolation.

Perhaps one of the most visible case studies on that is the blog of Matt Heaton, the Bluehost and Hostmonster CEO. The Kakkoi website provides a good account of what has been happening there. At the time of writing this post, the blog is still hacked although you would not know by looking at it.

How Can You Guard Against Hacking?

In some ways security for your blog is similar to security for your home. Almost every home security system is crackable, given time. However if you have a fast response to any signs of a break-in, then you may significantly limit any damage that is caused. Indeed any potential housebreaker may decide to go for an easier target.

The same principles apply in considering websites and blogs. The article, Guarding Your WordPress Blog, suggests two main priorities for your blog security. The first is continuing vigilance, since many hacking activities seem to take place during weekends and holidays. The second priority is to ensure that your blog is as secure as it can be by upgrading to the most recent secure WordPress version and by hardening your total WordPress installation.

A Rapid Way To Spot Intruders

Expert hackers often attempt to gain entry without leaving visible traces. So how much effort should you put into searching for signs of entry every day? One method that will often detect such entry is to look at the source code for a typical blog entry. It takes a little time, but usually signs of entry are fairly visible given the pharmaceutical and porn links that are included in the code.

A more rapid way of doing such a check is to create a test page within WordPress. WordPress supports the creation of both blog posts and pages. Pages are entries that are not tied to a particular date. All that is needed is a test page with the title of ‘Test’ and the content of ‘test’. Such a page is generated by the WordPress software in a similar way to each blog post. If a hacker has been able to gain entry and modify the blog post content, then this will also affect the Test page.

If Mozilla Firefox is your browser, then you can do a very rapid check of your blog security. Just visit the Test web page. Clicking on the Tools > Page Info navigation menu choice will give you information about that Test page including its size in bytes. Unless you change something in your Theme that affects the header, sidebar or footer that size should always be the same. Such a check of the size of the Test page can be done in seconds as often as you wish.

Unfortunately in other browsers such as Internet Explorer, checking the size of the Test web page takes just a little longer. One way is to look at the Source code in Notepad and save this as a text file. You can then check the size of this text file. Each time you do this you should find the text file is exactly the same size. If you have a number of blogs to check, then you might be advised to keep Firefox available as your way of doing this check as rapidly as possible.

One small note of caution is that you should do the check while not logged in to your Administration Panel. If you are logged in, then the resulting page contains a few extra bytes. Equally if you arrange a rapid cache arrangement for your blog using wp-cache, then this may add a few extra bytes. However if you use the default value where web pages are not cached for more than 3600 seconds, then a daily check of the Test web page should not run into problems.

Conclusion

The simplicity and rapidity of this method of checking for intruders is such that a daily check is only a matter of seconds. If you feel that your blog is less attractive to a hacker, then a weekly check each Monday morning should be sufficient. If you make regular backups of your blog and of its database, then if ever you find that a hacker has struck, putting things back in order should not be too onerous.

Related:
WordPress Blog Hacked
Hacked: It Could Never Happen to My Site (Famous Last Words)

Other Related Posts

• February 5, 2008 -- My Other Wordpress Blog Was Hacked Too
• May 20, 2008 -- A Very Easy WordPress Tag Cloud Web Page
• April 5, 2008 -- We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links

Spotting the intrusion was a matter of complete luck. I was involved in creating a new page for the blog. Reviewing the source code for the blog, which I almost never did, showed extra code had been added. Later it turned out this had happened only a few hours prior to that source code review.

More information on all this can be found in another blog post at BPWrap entitled Wordpress Blog Hacked. It’s information that all WordPress bloggers should be aware of.

Related: Matt Cutts: Three tips to protect your WordPress installation

Other Related Posts

• February 10, 2008 -- Fast Alarm For Hidden WordPress Hackers
• May 20, 2008 -- A Very Easy WordPress Tag Cloud Web Page
• April 5, 2008 -- We DoFollow And Remove NoFollow From Comment Links

Not surprisingly Microsoft and Yahoo seemed to be somewhat cool on the Open Handset Alliance initiative being promoted by Google. However part of Google’s thinking is music to the ears of developers in the Third World. Just listen to the words of C. Mohan Ram, founder of LatticeBridge Infotech Pvt Ltd (LB) of Chennai, India.

We are working on very simple devices with only a speaker and microphone and connectivity to a central server (a ‘personal assistant’ for everyone) to do connections, transactions and search for information, etc.

He believes these newer devices like a minimal mobile can help overcome the shortcomings of a low PC penetration in his country. Lattice Bridge (LBIT) is a pioneer in the Speech Technology space and empowers people to communicate with information systems using voice commands. In that way you can get rid of the keyboards on the PC or the key pad on the telephone and just communicate by speech. Mr. Ram believes that Speech Recognition can make this futuristic dream come true.

Related:
Surprise! Microsoft And Yahoo! Cool To Google Mobile Effort
More Speech-Enabled Applications With The Open Handset Alliance
Mobile Learning for Africa

Other Related Posts

• November 5, 2007 -- More Speech-Enabled Applications With The Open Handset Alliance
• June 13, 2008 -- Talent Management Losses At Yahoo
• June 5, 2008 -- Talk To Your Bank For Added Security

Blog Action Day is about MASS participation. Bloggers Unite About The Environment is the tagline. On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue - the environment - on everyone’s mind.

Bloggers are encouraged to participate in any or all three ways:

1. Post on your blog relating to the environment on Blog Action Day
2. Donate your day’s earnings to an environmental charity
3. Promote Blog Action Day around the web

Posts do not need to have any specific agenda, they simply need to relate to the larger issue in whatever way suits the blogger and readership. If bloggers are donating their day’s advertising earnings to an environmental charity, there is a list of “official” Blog Action Day charities on the website. They include

• Greenpeace International
• National Wildlife Federation (NWF)
• The Sierra Club
• The Conservation Fund

However bloggers are also free to choose an alternate environmental charity to donate to if they wish.

The important thing is that on that day the issue should be on everyone’s mind. It’s important to us all. It’s good to see that within only a few days of the launch, over 2,000 blogs have committed to get involved with a very minimum estimate of the readers already at over 1 million.

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• August 14, 2007 -- Cell Phone Telecoms Lock In Their Customers - For Now
• November 3, 2006 -- AGI, a multi-dimensional version of the URI
• May 15, 2008 -- Forget Typos, Watch Your Speakos

So to all our readers may we wish you joyful celebrations of a Merry Christmas, a Happy Hanukkah, a cheery Kwanzaa or a fun-filled Festivus. All best wishes to you and your family and may the New Year be the best ever for you.

Tags: Christmas, New Year

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• March 6, 2008 -- Our New Privacy Policy Is Adsense-friendly
• April 8, 2007 -- It’s A Small (Mobile) World After All
• August 14, 2007 -- Cell Phone Telecoms Lock In Their Customers - For Now

One chart for example shows the staggering growth for cell phones as compared with fixed lines that is so very apparent.

Another interesting chart compares the proportion of subscribers to the various ways of linking to the Internet. Europe and Oceania are far ahead of the US now and most of that is because of the huge impact of the Mobile Web.

This is only another aspect of the rapid growth of cell phone use. Clearly everyone should be thinking of how the growth of the Mobile Web influences how they can profit from this ever more popular technology.
Tags: Mobile, Cellphone

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• October 10, 2007 -- Friendly Manitoba Telephone Service
• May 8, 2007 -- Talking Your Way around the Mobile Web
• May 29, 2007 -- Voice On The Go

Largely the Internet world seems to be dividing into two separate worlds with not too much overlap or connection between them. Then comes along something that fits in neither or perhaps fits in both. It’s Chumby. Is it a sign of things to come or merely an aberration.

According to its makers, Chumby is a really low-cost, wireless (WiFi), Internet-connected device that will sit on your bedside table (or in your bathroom, or kitchen, or living room, or maybe even plug into your car somehow…) that could do a lot more than your old clock radio (or your cellphone, if that’s what you use to wake yourself up.)

Chumby was not created in the design department of some big consumer electronics company. Market analysis and focus groups were not performed. Chumby Industries was formed by hackers who wanted to create something interesting, useful and different. The starting point was the humble clock radio. So where will the finishing point be?

Tip of the hat to Frank Elley who described it in a Cre8asite Forum discussion as a Portable computer come PDA, alarm clock, MP3 player - for $150 US.

Tags: Mobile, device

Posts You May Like From The Archives

• October 3, 2006 -- News Feeds Provide Mobile Content For Now
• August 6, 2006 -- dotMobi, the Mobile Web enabler
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