As a supporter of the open source initiative and GPL, I was happy to get to attend Phoenix WordCamp 2009! If you’re not sure what WordCamp is all about, just imagine 500 nerds getting together under a giant white tent, having conversations, collaborating, and spreading their love for WordPress.  If that’s not a clear enough picture, read more about what WordCamp is.

So, I admit, until this year, I was a WordCamp virgin. But no more! I learned a lot and met some great people at WordCamp, including a computer guru, a phoenix website designer, and JDog, the dating coach. If you missed the event, don’t worry, you can watch the WordCamp video on GoDaddy starting Nov 18, 2009. 

Here are some of the things I took away from my experience at Phoenix WordCamp 2009:

From Lorelle on WordPress – Blog Content and Writing

• #1 Rule – There are no rules
• Don’t work for your blog; make your blog your bitch (yes, she really said that)
• Headings pull readers
• Don’t copycat
• Many people say "Write what you know" – Lorelle doesn’t agree with that
• Learn how to talk
• Blog for you, then for like minded people
• Publish content with intent

From Merlin Mann on Social Media

• Decide what you can’t / won’t do – set priorities
• Make people feel awesome
• Don’t pretend
• Respect people
• Manage expectations
• Figure out who you are
• Be you without apology
• Know what you have to say and say it
• Talk about things that interest people
• Be yourself

Poignant quotes from Merlin Mann:

"How much are you going to pretend to pay attention to people?

"Social media is a lot of people who aren’t you, telling you what they think about you."

"People sweat brand management when they don’t know who they are."

Web 3.0 is going to be a filter for Web 2.0. Do you want to be the noise or the filter?

Matt Mullenweg Rountable

Matt’s awesome! He took a lot of questions. Two things I took away from his answers are: "The biggest opportunities on WordPress are in education, not more features," and "The greatest innovation in the next few years is Geo location." Hence, WordPress has a new geotagging feature.

Dave Moyer on Multimedia

• If you want to stand out, you must be outstanding
• Go beyond words with multimedia
• Awesome WordPress plugins include:
  • Audioplayer Plugin
  • WPXSPF Flash Player
  • PowerPress
  • PodPress (but it’s broken…)

 Jim Christian on Search Engine Optimization

• Track what you’re doing
• Stay organized and track each page and it’s position in the search engines
• Use tools
  • Adwords Keyword Tool
  • Google Trends
  • Touch Graph
  • Backlinks Analyzer
  • Advanced WebRanking

Jason Cote on WordPress for Business

• Branding is You!
• Engage your community
• Publishing content is only half your job – building relationships is the other half
• Look for problems in your community and provide solutions
• Crowd sourcing – leverage the talents of others to be successful
• Build your business around your heart

John Hawkins on Building a WordPress Plugin

Everything you need to know about building a WordPress Plugin.

Clintus on Video Blogging and Video Marketing

Just take a look at his blog to see how it’s done. All you need is a NokiaN95 and Adobe Premier if you’re a PC, or Final Cut Pro if you’re a Mac.  Use video hosting sites like Vimeo for hosting and embed on your blog.

Were you at Phoenix WordCamp 2009? Did you watch the video? Leave your take away moment in a comment below!

Ralphm

More Posts – Website

Well we can hardly believe it.  WE PULLED IT OFF!  If this is your first time to our blog you may be asking did what?  For the last month we have documented the process of moving our web site to a new hosting company, redesigning and updating it and integrating our blog Link Building Best Practices in to our new web site blog location you are looking at now.  It was all done at the same time and you are now looking at the new site that went live effective December 7th 2008.

In our last post we shared some of the planning and specific action items we identified to make it happen.  One of our biggest concerns was making sure we don’t lose any of our excellent search engine position and it seems we achieved that goal as well as transferred our page rank.  

I think the best way to wrap up this series is to tell you about what DID go "wrong".   Although we felt like we planned it out carefully and we followed our plan there were things that happened that we just could not have anticipated and maybe sharing this information with you might help your next project as well.

What went wrong

Last Friday night we finished all the "Pre" items and the final step before taking the new site live was to use the excellent built in "export" feature WordPress has.  It exports all your posts, post categories and Authors.  The plan was to export that data and then import it to the new blog (you are on now) so everything is current.  I had already done this once before a few weeks ago just to populate the development version of the blog with some data etc. and I was very impressed with how easy and smooth it went so I wasn’t expecting what happened next.  Before I get in to that though here is where I made my first mistake…I hopped over to GoDaddy and updated the name servers for the site and blog to begin propagation.  Then here is where things got ugly.  I exported all the data just fine, then jumped in the admin panel for the new site and started the import.  It seemed like it was taking a long time but finally it finished.  The first thing I noticed was the post count was twice what it should be (oh oh) so I opened the site and took a look.  The entire site was all out of whack!  Things were not where they should be at all and the main navigation had extra items. HUH?

The next thing that went wrong was where it got REALLY ugly.  The entire site went down!  When I tried to view the site all I saw was "A CONNECTION CAN NOT BE MADE TO THE DATABASE" in big black letters.  YIKES!  This didn’t make sense because the site was just up and no changes were made that would impact the database connection.  I logged in to the database via PHP MyAdmin and everything seemed fine. By this time it was 2:30 am and after poking around a while I decided the best thing to do was change the name servers back to the old sites, get some rest and pick it up again in the "morning" when I was fresh.

All hail WordPress the self healing blogging platform!

At 5:30 am (yeah 3 hours later) I woke up and started thinking about the problem, came up with a few ideas and headed in to the office to attack it again.  Guess what, the site was up! (at the dev address of course) but still out of whack.  After inspecting the main navigation I noticed there were actually just a couple extra items I realized were the PAGES (not posts) from the old blog site.  (Well no kidding because pages are stored in the posts table so those were imported as well) Ok, fine I’ll just log in and delete them because we don’t need them any more.  I logged in and right away noticed the post count was back to normal!  NICE! I have no idea how…so I proceeded to delete the few extra pages.  I went back to the site and just like that the world was a happy place again!  The site looked perfect and the blog was completely populated.  All hail WordPress the self healing blogging platform!  Since everything looked ok I switched the name servers again to make the new site live and since I had no idea how long propagation was going to take I went back to bed for a while.

Oops, another big problem

I woke up checked my email and had a few from Arnie with the most glaring being all the images on the blog were dead!  Obviously I didn’t know  that before I retired for the evening.  All the paths to the images were wrong!  Normally this might seem like an easy problem to solve right?  Just add a copy of all the images to a directory found at the correct path and moving forward all images will be in a new correct location.  Nope, that isn’t going to happen.  The problem is that since we had a 301 redirect in place for linkbuildingbestpractices.com to verticalmeasures.com/blog there was no real physical path that could be used.  We decided the best thing to do (rather than manually change the path on all the images on the entire blog) was was to use mod_rewrite on the .htaccess file to point all the image paths to the correct location. This little beauty did the trick: RewriteRule [^/]+(/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/.+) $1 [R=301,L] It 301 redirects all the image paths to the standard directory in WordPress where all images reside.  Problem solved!

While we are on the topic of mod_rewrite there was another problem we needed to resolve and mod_rewrite came through once again.  On our old site we had a series of website marketing and link building articles and press releases that used an unusual query string path.  (They were dynamically generated from a content system developed)  We needed to make sure they redirected to the matching page on the new site to pass link juice and authority.  Here is an example of the mod_rewrite we used:

Articles:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} articles?Outsource-Link-Building-The-Right-Company-Is-Vital.html
RewriteRule articles http://www.verticalmeasures.com/outsource-link-building-the-right-company-is-vital/ [R=301,L

Press Releases:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Link-Building-Company-Earns-TOP-SEO-Award.html
RewriteRule press http://www.verticalmeasures.com/link-building-company-earns-top-seo-award/? [R=301,L]

Unfortunately we had to write one for each article and press release but it had to be done.  Also for extra fun we had to change the case of the new path on each to lower case as well (since PHP is case sensitive)  and a "http://UrlLikeThis" is not the same as a "http://urllikethis".  They would be considered different pages and duplicate content!  Ouch…

Our video didn’t work either

There was one other small problem that required some fast thinking and innovation.  If you were familiar with our old site you may recall we had a video built using Camtasia studio explaining the importance of natural search ranking.  The video worked great (on the old site) but for some reason on the new site it would stop about 15 seconds in.  Well it was time for an upgrade so we just uploaded the .flv file to the Vertical Measures YouTube account and it worked perfectly there.  Thanks to YouTube we were able to embed it on a new page and the result is a more visually appealing and professional wrapper for the video.  If you haven’t seen it before you should take a few minutes and watch our very informative higher search rankings video.

So that wraps it up!  There were a few other little kinks along the way but we wont bore you with all the details.  We hope you found this post and the others informative and a little entertaining.  Please be sure to take a moment and tell us what you think about the new site. We would value and appreciate your feedback. 

 ArnieK.gooruze.com

Vertical Measures

More Posts – Website

Welcome back!  This is the 3rd part of the 4 part series on moving our website to a new hosting company, redesigning the verticalmeasures.com website and integrating this blog linkbuildingbestpractices.com in to the new website so they are all one site.  

Last week we talked about why we chose WordPress as the platform for the entire project and we showed you what the raw theme looks like that we are modifying to meet our design and functionality needs.  This week I will share some of the specific action items we indentified, problems we encountered and decisions we made to ensure we have a user friendly site and our excellent search engine rank is not negatively affected by all the change. Our hope is that with the new platform and the blog integration we will see better search engine results and PR when the dust clears.

Give your opinion and get some exposure!

First things first…with the exception of a few tweaks here and there we would like to get your feedback on the new design and colors we choose.  Although our team is busy updating and revising content we have settled on a color and design and invite you to take a look on the temporary development site.  Here is the link: [link removed] Again don’t pay too much attention to the content, just tell us what you think of the design, colors and layout in a comment below.  If you suggest something we love and implement we may mention you and/or your business in our 4th and final post next week after the site is live!

Road map to moving the site:

Here are most of the steps we identified so far to accomplish the goal:

1. Review current content and decide on what pages will be included on the new site and which ones wont as well as which pages need to be revised.
2. Identify the pages that will be considered the main pages available from the primary horizontal navigation
3. Patty Adams was given the responsibility of writing new content and updating the old content
4. Chose a WordPress "theme" and have the team vote on it
5. Set up the new hosting account and install the current version of WordPress
6. Add to the database the tables verticalmeasures.com uses so there will only be one database for the entire site
7. Install and configure any plug-ins needed for the blog or site
8. We used the awesome Xenu Link Sleuth to get a list of all the URL’s from the old site to make sure we dont miss anything. It also shows us any broken links.  We’ll be running it against the new site to check for broken links also.
9. Add any widgets and widget content to WordPress
10. Update the 404 template page with custom content to make it more user friendly for our visitors.  We considered Google’s new 404 page helper script but I decided against it because it could take our visitors offsite and it allows Google to change the content of the page at will.  Instead I added our site search functionality to the 404 page, a link to our sitemap and a link suggesting they email us for help.
11. Forms: We have 2 primary forms on the site. The contact us page and the (now Orange) inquiry form on the right sidebar.  Although we could use the cFormsII plugin to quickly and easily add the forms we wanted complete control of everythng from the look and feel to the functionality and user experience so we developed our own forms and processing functionality.  In additon we implemented a new free captcha system by Simon Jarvis.
12. Design the header graphic for the new site, (we unanimously agreed the old one was outdated) and we didn’t like the color of the default clouds.
13. Decide on, purchase and customize the main feature images that fade in and out on the home page.  You’ll also notice we went with a straight arrow in the main black feature section versus the half circle that came with the template.  That was Arnie’s excellent idea.  We think that minor change made a huge improvement to drawing the eye to the messages.
14. ORANGE?  After much debate our Link Manager Eli (pronounced "L + E") suggested orange for the Inquiry form.  The fact is it’s all over the web lately and we think it works well with the blues.  I wont share how many different shades of Orange we tried before picking the current one but it was easily double digits.
15. 301 Redirects: This is a BIGGIE…Since many of our pages currently rank very well with the search engines we have to make sure to transfer that link juice to the new site. We have to create a 301 redirect for every page from both sites to the new corresponding page on the new site. All totaled there are about 200.  Tedious but critical.  We are about halfway done.  Once we make the switch we will be testing them also to be sure there are no 404 errors.
16. Meta Tags: cant forget the extremely important meta tags!  They all had to be transferred from the old pages to the new pages.  Kaila Strong handled that task.

There are more steps involved (and I know I am missing some we have done) but that is basically where we are right now so I will save the rest for out final post next week.

Once again I encourage you to click the link above or here: [link removed] to our dev site and give us some feedback via comments below on the new design, layout and colors. 

We will be taking the new site live some time in the next 48 hours so wish us luck!

Vertical Measures

More Posts – Website

The decision to consider WordPress as a platform for the entire new site came almost as a no brainer.  It’s the most popular blogging platform on the web and quickly becoming the #1 choice for websites.  If you are not that familiar with WorPress here are the strong points you should be aware of:

1. You can’t beat it for SEO
2. Super easy to set up, configure and customize
3. Built in CMS (content management system) which makes it easy for non technical people to work with the site content.
4. It has a huge community of developers writing useful “plugins”
5. Hundreds of free themes to choose from for design, look and feel
6. It’s free!

Of course the fact that this blog is built on a WordPress platform was part of the final decision in trying to keep the project as painless as possible.  Decision made!  WordPress it is.

Finding a theme/layout

The next thing we did is set out to find a “theme” for our new site.  Since adding new content and updating our old content was part of the plan we wanted to finalize a layout for the new site 1st thing so we could get our team working on writing and moving content.  We were looking for a theme that would work well as a website and a blog. NOT an easy feat!  We searched through all the WordPress.org free themes as well as a number of paid themes until finally finding  iThemes.com.  Believe it or not they had a Real Estate theme we felt was a perfect fit : http://realestatethemes.com/irealestate/ It has a non flash based fading main image powered by as many images as you want and we loved the sidebar “tabber” feature.  It also has a very “website looking” home page and the integrated blog we were looking for as well as a lot of flexibility for customization.   A great bargain at $79.00. 

Before making the purchase we had the staff look at that theme and several others.  It was the unanimous winner so we made the purchase and installed it on the already in progress new site.

We need a plan

In order to pull this off effectively we needed a step by step plan to work off of.  We have to make sure all details are covered and things are done in the correct order or disaster could occur.  We wrote down each step and assigned one of three categories based on at what stage that step will occur. (Pre, Move, Post) “Pre” is the prep stage before the new site goes live and includes anything that will not affect either verticalmeasures.com or linkbuildingbestpractices.com.  “Move” includes steps that will occur once all “Pre” work is finished and we are taking the new site live. “Post” is steps that will occur in the frantic moments after the new site is live and we are seeing everything we didn’t think of! (hopefully not)

In our next post we will talk more about actual action items we indentified, where we are at in the process and some major decisions we have made as far as content and functionality.   Be sure to tune in!

As always your questions and comments are encouraged.

Vertical Measures

More Posts – Website