Web Dev News

Increasing Profits by using Marketing Tactics

Utah web design — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 21:07:17 +0000

Giving Your Visitors What They Want

Too many times a web master will create a site that has meaningless information about their business. The problem is, web traffic cares less about your business and more about the what they want. Don’t appeal to their interests, and you’ve lost them.

So how do you appeal to these visitors? The easy answer, “Give them what they want.” The more important question you should ask is, “What do my visitors want?” To answer this question, you need to research three imperatives

1. Who are your visitors?
2. What attracted them to your site originally?
3. What do they want when they come to your site? Once you know who your visitors are, what attracted them and what they are interested in, it becomes very simple to attract and retain them.

The next question, “How do I find this out about my visitors?” There are plenty of tools you can use to do this. First, ask them. Open up a dialogue with your visitor and find out more about them point blank. A second way way to learn more about your customers is by using traffic analysis software such as Google Analytics. Not only will this software track the number of customers and the number of pages accessed, but it will also show pinpoint locations where your visitors reside, how long visitors spend on your site, how often they return to your site, as well as the amount of visitors who come to your page and immediately exit it. With this valuable information it becomes much easier to provide unique and quality content that your customers will love.

Bring in More Traffic

Once you have created a reason for your visitors to stay on your site you need to learn how to attract more visitors to your unique content. You have many options to build a constant flow of traffic to your site. We discuss two of the most important tactics to build traffic in this section.

If you want immediate traffic now, Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is the way to go. I offer a fair warning though, carelessness and lack of expertise can lead to a waste of your money. If you are new to PPC advertising we recommended to use a budget of $5 or less a day and use one of the most popular PPC systems: Google Adwords. One great benefit of using Google Adwords is that it connects directly to Google Analytics for extra detailed reporting. If done right, you’ll find PPC advertising as a very valuable tool in bringing in new sales every month.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another must in traffic building for those who are serious about maximizing their profits. SEO is a way in which you can have your website ranked higher within search engines, thus creating more traffic to your website. SEO is done in two parts: First, your website must be search engine friendly. Second, there must be other websites linking to your site.

Gear your website to make money

While you want to provide your web traffic with the content that they want, you also need to make it easy for them to make you more money. Does your website make it difficult for your visitors to sign up for a membership or make a purchase? Why? Make it easy for them, and your visitors will respond appropriately.

You can make it difficult for your visitors to make you money in many ways. Give them too many options to nonprofitable actions, making your navigation confusing and cluttering your web pages with random text and graphics. Get your customers attention to a profitable action by using varying degrees of contrast, color and font choice. When in doubt use different approaches on different pages and measure the results.

Don’t stop there, there are other ways to increase your online sales. From branding, and benefit centered marketing to cross promotions and improving “Call to Action” you will see a major bump in website revenues.

Hire an Expert

Like trying to do your own plumbing, Trying to do web design and marketing by yourself can lead to more bad than good. Sure, if your dedicated and take time to get the proper experience you can do fine. But if your serious about turning a higher profit for your website right now, you’ll be better off hiring a professional.

70 Header Graphics

arwen54 — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 00:44:45 +0000

This year, more than ever, I wanted to do my part by giving back this holiday season. So here’s what I came up with:

I created a special package of 70 eye-catching header graphics to be used on your websites, blogs, or other projects. 20 of the header graphics are specifically to replace the Kubrick header on the WordPress default theme.

The price of the package is just $5 and I’m donating $2.50 of each sale to The Salvation Army. On December 24, I plan on issuing a cheque to The Salvation Army for the amount I’ve raised up to that point.

Your support is greatly appreciated. If you would like more information, please visit:
http://karenblundell.com/headers.php

ICANN: $185,000 for your own Top Level Domain Extension

Jeffrey Scott of TypeHost — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:00:09 +0000

With new rule changes in the management of top level domain name extensions, look to see a number of new web addresses become available over the next few years. ICANN has released its draft application guidebook for those who may be considering registering their ideas as an alternative to dot com. The summary is basically: $185,000 in application fees are required, you must be an organization in good standing with an established history and infrastructure in domain name licensing / registration, and you must pass a review period which will include the filing of objections from other claimants to the extension name under consideration. Organizations that claim to represent a particular community must establish proof that they actually do represent the group officially. The PDF file with all the information on the process can be downloaded at:

http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/draft-rfp-24oct08-en.pdf

The newest TLD to be launched under these guidelines is the .tel extension, a sponsored TLD registered with the Telnic Corporation. Telnic is planning a global telephone book type of directory with contact information linked to DNS settings. According to Wikipedia, “.tel is about publishing contact data: phone numbers, SIP addresses and so on directly in the DNS, not on html-based websites.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.tel

.tel registration has opened for registered trademark owners:
December 3rd, 2008 – February 2nd, 2009

After that, they are expecting a “landrush” – registrations open to the public but at a premium price: February 3rd, 2009 – March 23rd, 2009

With general availability under standard prices opening March 24th, 2009.

According to Telnic, with the .tel extension a business can:

Join a global online directory that provides you instant worldwide exposure…
Integrate all your means of communication in a single place under your control…
Update and manage your contact information and keywords in real time…
Increase your search engine visibility through descriptive keywords…
Provide a fast way for your customers to connect with you in a single click from any mobile device…

Individuals can:

Manage all the ways people can reach you in a single place that’s yours forever
Protect your private data
Take back control of your personal information and share it securely
… all without the need to build, host or manage a website.

Source: http://telnic.org/

There are 5 types of information that can be stored on a .tel domain.

Contact Information – telephone numbers, mobile phone numbers, email, VoIP, fax numbers, etc
Content Links – http & ftp addresses
Navigation Links – By country, city, branch, department, etc.
Geolocation – Map information
Indexable Text – Keywords & Information

Source: http://telnic.org/business-discover1.html

In a sense, Telnic is combining elements of a web directory, social network, and SEO link exchange with a TLD organization to standardize it, which is an interesting and innovative business model which separates it from the way all of the other TLDs operate. Apparently, Jeff Pulver also contested for this domain extension with a VoIP business model, but lost out in the end to Telnic.

See Jeff Pulver’s blog at: http://www.pulver.com/

Of the seven domains introduced in the last round of TLD expansion in 2001-2002, .biz, .info, .name, and .pro were unsponsored while .aero, .coop, and .museum were sponsored and restricted. Less than half of those are used popularly, and even then, .biz, .info, and .name are marginal to the point of being irrelevant for most published websites. Most people have probably never heard of .pro, which Wikipedia sites at less than 7,000 registrants at the beginning of 2008. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.pro)

So, will the new TLDs be successful, and what is coming next? In an old article written during the time that .mobi and .xxx were under consideration, the W3C committee actually came out against them.

“The addition of new top-levels domains is a very disturbing influence. It carries great cost. It should only be undertaken when there is a very clear benefit to the new domain. In the case of the proposed .mobi domain, the change is actually detrimental… The first effect is a little like printing more money. The value of one’s original registration drops. At the same time, the cost of protecting one’s brand goes up (from the cost of three domains to four, five, …).”

“The value of each domain name such as example.com also drops because of brand dilution and public confusion. Even though most people largely ignore the last segment of the name, when it is actually used to distinguish between different owners, this increases the mental effort required to remember which company has which top level domain. This makes the whole name space less usable. Is it fair to reduce the value of these domains which have been acquired at great cost by their owners?”

Source: http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD

It will be interesting to see what happens, expect the large multinational corporations to snap up proprietary TLD name extensions (.ibm, .mac, .ebay etc.) and registrars to gamble on launching another series of “landrushes” with TLDs based on marketing campaigns. Telnic has clearly set apart the management of .tel from other TLDs, hopefully other firms will come up with new business models that make the investment worthwhile. Even with the possibility of brand dilution, these improvements will only strengthen the value of dot com.

No Related Post

Mullenweg: Scale WordPress to 20,000,000 Views per Day for $100 p/month

Aaron D. Campbell — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 10:00:57 +0000

An interesting article appeared on the front page of the drupal.org website, detailing the migration of the popular “crooks and liars” blog from WordPress to Drupal. According to the developers, when the site was averaging around the “200,000 hits per day mark, we started experiencing a lot of down time from server overloads. We were utilizing the famous wp-cache plugin for Wordpress, as well as hosting the database on a single master and two slaves, using the HyperDB class for Wordpress to handle the replication.” After experiencing a high degree of server downtime from the massive number of comments on the site, “crooks and liars” began to consider porting the site to Drupal for performance issues.

According to the site development team, benchmark tests showed that a Drupal 5.x installation was able to serve more than 8 times the number of pages per second vs. a standard WordPress 2.3 set up:

“I setup default installations of Wordpress 2.3 and Drupal 5. I only enabled the core caching mechanisms in both setups and populated them with the exact same data and display options. Both systems also used the default themes and features. After running a series of tests through JMeter, I quickly confirmed my beliefs and even exceeded them as I saw Drupal was able to handle about eight times the requests per second as Wordpress, both on the front page and the same single post view with 157 comments.”

An interesting overview of the migration, and custom modules used in the development of the “crooks and liars” site can be found online here:

http://drupal.org/node/341231

What is more interesting, is after the post was published, WordPress / Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg weighed in personally on the issue, by commenting on the post and listing ways to configure WordPress to scale to 20 million hits per day – at a cost of only $100 per month. He writes:

“Always sorry to see someone leave WordPress, but you ended up pretty much the other best place I could think of. Features are a great reason to switch, but scaling doesn’t need to be. We host some of the largest poltical blogs like all of CNN’s which regularly get thousands of comments per day and we do about a billion pageviews a month on WordPress.com, so here are some tips for future people who may come across this post (some which may be useful to the Drupal community as well):

1. Every release of WP gets faster, so upgrading can get you sometimes significant boosts depending on your bottleneck.
2. Use the memcached object cache backend.
3. If memcached is set up, use Batcache instead of wp-cache.
4. If you get a lot of comments, consider using InnoDB as your storage engine instead of MyISAM inside of MySQL.
5. Double-check that your webserver is set up properly for static requests, this is the cause of 90%+ of the problems we see.

With the above and a single $100/month server from LT you can get around 20,000,000 pageviews a day. With shared Batcache and HyperDB (which you already used, nice) it’s a lot easier to scale out both the web and database tier independently as needed. We haven’t found the upper limit of this strategy yet.”

Included are links to Quantcast’s statistics proving 1 billion page hits per month on wordpress.com (globally): http://www.quantcast.com/p-18-mFEk4J448M/traffic

Link to the Memcache Plugin: http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/memcached/trunk

Link to the Batcache Plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/batcache/

According to the site:

“Development testing showed a 40x reduction in page generation times: pages generated in 200ms were served from the cache in 5ms. Traffic simulations with Siege demonstrate that WordPress can handle up to twenty times more traffic with Batcache installed.”

Based on Quantcast statistics, Drupal.org ranks 13,298 overall while WordPress.org ranks #11. Global tracking statistics are not available for drupal.org on the site.

http://www.quantcast.com/drupal.org

Styling the Drupal User Login Block - PHP Code & CSS

Jeffrey Scott of TypeHost — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 10:00:17 +0000

This tutorial goes through the steps of one way to create a custom user login block for Drupal. Best is to disable the original login block in the admin/build/block section, start with a new block with custom code, and then style the details with CSS. The requirements for this project are a rounded corner, blue background block with two custom tabs at the top.

1. in admin/build/blocks – click on the “add new block” tab

2. enter the following code:


uid) : ?>
Welcome,  name); ?> 

uid); ?> |



Log InSign Up!



Username:



Password:



Forgot your password?

This code originally came from: http://nossdutytask.com/node/240

There are also some nice examples at: http://nossdutytask.com/node/228

I modified the code to add some css IDs, classes, span tags, and also the text/links for the top tabs.

3. Select PHP code for the input and save the block.

4. From the main blocks page, click on “configure” for the block you just created. I selected to show this block only for “anonymous user” because I did not need the simplified display after the user has been logged in. The code generates a block that can also be customized to show the site status for authenticated users, but usually the navigation menu does this sufficiently. Enable the block and position it where you like in the display.

5. The rest is basically CSS – setting the image as the background for the login area and the tabs, positioning the text elements and fields. This example is based on a 250px wide column with a two column layout. It includes bold text on the display and overrides the default styling of the Drupal user login form elements.

There is a vertical-alignment fix to standardize the display in IE, and a 1px addition to the lower input field so that the form will align evenly on both ends. Add the following CSS to your theme in style.css, blocks.css, or wherever fits best.

#block-block-4 {
color: #fff;
}
#block-block-4 a {
color: #fff;
}
#umain {
font-weight: bold;
height: 127px;
width: 250px;
background: transparent url("../img/login_bg.jpg") no-repeat top left;
padding-top: 20px;
vertical-align: middle;
}
#usertabs {
height: 23px;
width: 250px;
background: transparent url("../img/tabs1.jpg") no-repeat top left;
}
#usertabs a {
color: #333;
}
.utabs1 {
font-weight: bold;
float: left;
padding-top: 4px;
padding-left: 25px;
}
.utabs2 {
font-weight: bold;
float: right;
color: #333;
padding-top: 4px;
padding-right: 60px;
}
.utabs3 {
font-weight: bold;
float: left;
padding-left: 25px;
padding-top: 4px;
}
#umain #edit-name {
margin-bottom: 5px;
width: 147px;
}
#umain #edit-pass {
margin-bottom: 10px;
width: 148px;
}

Note: the “block-block-4” value will be contingent on the name of the block that was created to input the custom PHP code of the login form.

IMAGES:

Upload to your theme’s “image” folder (in this case named ‘img’):

Tabs Background image: tabs1.jpg:

tabs1.jpg

login_bg.jpg

7. To add a custom button, also upload and add this CSS:

#umain #edit-submit {
float: right;
margin-right: 20px;
background-color: transparent;
color: #333;
border: none;
font: 9pt/1.5em Arial, Tahoma, Verdana, "Lucida Grande", sans-serif;
font-weight: bold;
background-image: url("../img/button1.jpg");
background-repeat: no-repeat;
height: 24px;
width: 58px;
cursor: pointer;
}

BUTTON IMAGE:

button1.jpg

FINAL RESULT:

screenshot-login.jpg

Hopefully, this will save some people a lot of time and is also a good base for doing further customization with the background images and CSS.

FURTHER REFERENCES:

http://drupal.org/node/134319
http://drupal.org/node/19855
http://drupal.org/node/92657
http://drupal.org/node/84724

Xavisys Acquires Attackr.com – Web Development News Network

Jeffrey Scott of TypeHost — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:45:12 +0000

Xavisys, a professional WordPress development company specializing in website design, custom module programming, WordPress themes, and ecommerce solutions, has acquired the blog site Attackr.com to add to their media and publishing division. Xavisys was founded by Aaron Campbell six years ago in Phoenix, Arizona, and is also the design group behind WebDevNews.net. Attackr.com is a collective of tech bloggers working primarily in WordPress development offering news, “how to” guides, and plenty of tips and tricks. Web developers are encouraged to share their thoughts, experience, and design tips on both Attackr.com and WebDevNews.net, and to participate in the Open Design Community.

Xavisys

Xavisys was started in 2002 as a web development firm specializing in custom PHP solutions for web applications, and subsequently began focusing in web design and web development for Open Source Content Management Systems. According to company founder Aaron Campbell, “the experience doing things from scratch helps a lot when it comes to creating custom solutions for an Open Source project.” Aaron is a PayPal Certified Developer, and many of their clients seek advanced ecommerce solutions with integration of the PayPal API. Xavisys creates modules and plug-ins for WordPress, as well as WordPress themes, and is also developing for the Magento, Joomla, and Drupal platforms. After launching WebDevNews.net this year as a place for blogging on web development news and information, the company has recently acquired Attackr.com. It is hoped that the partnership and shared communication between the sites in the Xavisys network will lead to enhanced personal and creative partnerships among Open Source developers, as well as increased business to business networking.

Xavisys - WordPress Plugins:

WordPress Google Analytics Plugin

Provides an easy way to integrate Google Analytics into your WordPress Blog
Download: http://xavisys.com/2007/02/wordpress-google-analytics-plugin/

WordPress Twitter Widget Pro Plugin

Add Twitter feeds to your WordPress blog, including friends, profile images, & link parsing
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/04/wordpress-twitter-widget/

Google Maps for Wordpress

Easily integrate Google Maps displays into your Wordpress blog and customize the settings
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/04/google-maps-for-wordpress/

WordPress Gallery Widget Pro Plugin

Displays rotating images from a post’s gallery in the sidebar of your site
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/05/gallery-widget-pro/

WordPress Reorder Gallery Plugin

Modifies the Wordpress “gallery shortcode” to allow you to manually reorder the images in embedded gallery slideshows. This was included into WordPress 2.6 core and is only needed for WordPress 2.5.x
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/05/wordpress-reorder-gallery-plugin/

WordPress Mark Parent Pages Plugin

Adds collapsible menus to WordPress by inserting custom CSS tags in list displays. This was included in WordPress 2.5 core, and is only needed for older version of WordPress
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/01/wordpress-mark-parent-pages-plugin/

Validate Empty Wordpress Posts/Pages

Fixes tag wrapping in empty pages, preventing them from being invalidated
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/01/validate-empty-wordpress-postspages/

Xavisys – Image Free Templates:

Minimalist:

An extremely light weight, configurable template, with no images at all
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/01/free-template-minimalist/

BlueBox:

A simple, fluid width, imageless, XHTML Strict 1.0 template
Download: http://xavisys.com/2008/01/free-template-bluebox/

Attackr

Attackr.com evolved from a partnership of WordPress developers active in the Open Design Community, and is a place for web designers to share news, information, “how to” guides, technology reviews, and personal thoughts on the development scene. The site has a core group of bloggers that post on these topics, and is open for new members who would like to share ideas on the platform. The Attackr theme is one of the best I’ve seen for WordPress, which is not surprising as that is the specialization of the design team behind the site.

Some more SILEX - usage statistics & new ressources (en / fr)

lexa — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 15:09:33 +0000

Statistics to go!

In September SILEX has been installed in the following countries: Australia, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Korea, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia.

Also in September, on the 1405 downloads, 141 installations have been made online and about 400 on local computer. For the online websites: Europe 60% - North America 30% - (27% France - 26% USA)

Over 30% of these installations have been made by webdesign agencies.

In October SILEX has been downloaded 2454 times, 75% increase as of September and 173% increase as of August.

New on silex-ria.org

With the new “subscribe” button on the silex-ria.org home page, choosing your mailing list is no longer a mission.

For this occasion, you have 2 tutorials (in French for now, still looking for translators):

You can find samples in the package “silex-samples” on SILEX website.

New documentation pages

- How to create a page? Yes, with an icon! (in French for now, still looking for translators)
- Tutorial “create a return button” for lovers of the past

Join us

- Positions are open for translation, design, animation, development, tutorial …
=> contact@silex-ria.org

Links

Archive news
SILEX official website
Download SILEX
SILEX Resources
List of themes
List of samples
Vote for SILEX feature requests (beta version)

+++ SILEX team

——————————————-

Silex en rajoute !

Le petit cafouillage entre Mailing List et Newsletter est rétablit. Mais rassurez vous, d’autres surprises vous attendent…

En avant les stats

En septembre Silex a été installé dans les pays suivant : Allemagne, Australie, Bangladesh, Belgique, Bosnie Herzegovine, Bresil, Canada, Colombie, Corée, Danemark, Espagne, Estonie, Etats-Unis, Finlande, Grande-Bretagne, Grece, Hongrie, Italie, Japon, Lituanie, Pays-Bas, Perou, Pologne, Portugal, Roumanie, Russie, Serbie.

Toujours en septembre, sur les 1405 téléchargements, il y a eu 141 installations en ligne et environ 400 en local. Pour les installations en ligne, la répartition est :
- Europe 60 % / Amérique du Nord 30 %
- France 27 % / USA 26 %

Plus de 30% de ces installations sont faites par des agences de webdesign.

En octobre il y a eu 2454 téléchargements soit une augmentation de 75% par rapport à septembre et une augmentation de 173% par rapport à août.

> les stats silex

Du nouveau sur silex-ria.org

Avec l’apparition du bouton “s’inscrire” sur le site silex-ria.org, choisir sa liste de diffusion n’est plus une mission. Le déchiffrage se fait en douceur.

Pour cette occasion, vous sont proposés 2 tutoriels.
- mettre en place un composant d’inscription à une mailing list
- faire un formulaire de contact dans son site SILEX

Vous trouverez les samples qui leur sont associés dans la distribution “silex_samples”.
Liste des samples

Du nouveau dans la doc

- Comment créer une page ? Oui, avec une icone !!!
- Tutoriel “créer un bouton retour” pour les amateurs du passé

Joignez vous à nous

- L’appel à contribution : traduction, design/animation, developpement, tutoriels
=> contact@silex-ria.org

Liens

Archives des news
Site officiel de SILEX
Téléchargement
Les ressources
Liste des thèmes
Liste des samples
Voter pour les futures fonctionnalités (version beta)

+++ SILEX team

Adding a YouTube Button to FCKeditor in Drupal

Jeffrey Scott of TypeHost — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:00:15 +0000

This is a reference article for adding a YouTube button for automatic video uploads in Drupal with FCKeditor. Basically, there are a few small issues that I ran into when setting up the plugin, but the process is simple and quick. If you want to give embedded video support through the WYSIWYG editor, without having your users cut and paste the embed code through the source directly, then this method may be of interest.

1. Install and configure FCKeditor in your Drupal installation.

2. Download the YouTube Plugin for FCKeditor at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/youtubepluginfo/

3. First Change – the documentation for the plugin says to upload it into the:
fckeditor/editor/plugins folder

Disregard this and upload it into the upper level folder of the Drupal FCKeditor module. The path should be:

sites/all/modules/fckeditor/plugins/youtube

4. Download and open the fckeditor.config.js file from the main module folder.

5. Add the following code to the end of the file, at the very bottom line:

FCKConfig.Plugins.Add( 'youtube', 'en,ja' ) ;

6. Add the YouTube button to your FCKeditor configuration, i.e. if you are using “Drupal Full,” “Drupal Basic,” “DrupalFiltered,” or whatever, change the fckeditor.config.js file to add the button like this:

BEFORE:
FCKConfig.ToolbarSets["Default"] = [
['Image','Flash']
]

AFTER:
FCKConfig.ToolbarSets["Default"] = [
['Image','Flash','YouTube']
]

7. Save and upload the modified fckeditor.config.js file to the site.

8. If you test the module out now (clearing the cache & refreshing the JavaScript), the button will display, and a pop up will load – it is a single screen that says “YouTube Property” and has a single text field for pasting the embed code from YouTube.

The problem – after pasting the code, and clicking “ok” – the window just stalls, it does not submit and it does not close.

9. Fix for this – in the “youtube” folder of the plugin, there is a HTML file named “youtube.html”. In the header, you will find the code:


YouTube Properties

For whatever reason, the file structure is incorrect here, so I entered the full path to the files on the server. Example:


YouTube Properties

10. Now – return to any page where the FCKeditor is enabled, and test the “YouTube Button” – it works perfectly.

References:

YouTube Plugin: http://sourceforge.net/projects/youtubepluginfo/
FCKeditor: http://www.fckeditor.net/
FCKeditor Module for Drupal: http://drupal.org/project/fckeditor

Note:

If you have the time, you can also vote on the question: “Should FCKeditor change its name?” at the fckeditor.net website.

http://www.fckeditor.net/poll

According to the site – 58% of the people surveyed said that the name should be changed, for whatever reason.

Automattic Acquires Poll Daddy - Integrated Polls & Surveys for WordPress

Jeffrey Scott of TypeHost — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:31:33 +0000

Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, announced on his blog that Automattic has just acquired the company Poll Daddy, to shore up a lack of integrated polling functionality on the popular Open Source blogging platform. According to Mullenweg, polling has become very popular with WordPress users, and there are over a dozen different companies developing polling plugins for the CMS. Yet, when looking at the top sites, the “Poll Daddy” functionality was most favored. Upon investigation, it turns out the company was run by two programmers in Ireland – Mullenweg traveled there, had a few beers with the crew, and acquired the company for Automattic.

Looking at the functionality of “Poll Daddy,” the main advantages are in its flexibility and ability to be customized. There are a number of skins available for the plugin, and developers can modify the display easily through CSS. HTML customizations can be used to add image, video, and multimedia files. Poll Daddy adds realtime data reporting from polls and surveys to a WordPress site, and the data can be exported through XML, RSS, or CSV. In setting up questions, there are over ten different formats to select from, which can be further configured in the control panel.

The use of conditional branching allows you to split surveys into different paths depending on the answers given by the user. Thus Poll Daddy allows you to create highly complex surveys on a WordPress site, and the pages themselves can be styled individually. Repeat visitors can be automatically blocked from retaking the poll using IP analysis tools, and with the “Pro” version, there are a lot more options for tracking and vote counting. Interestingly, Poll Daddy isn’t limited only to WordPress – it can also be integrated in other blogging software like Blogger and TypePad, as well as on social networking platforms.

There are three versions of Poll Daddy – Free, Pro, and Pro2. The biggest difference is when you pay for the software, the proprietary link to the developer’s website is removed. Other than that, you get support for more responses and questions per survey. The “Free” version only allows for 10 questions and 100 responses per month, which may be limiting to many. For reference, the “Pro” version upgrade is $200 per year and includes 1,000 survey responses per month plus unlimited questions, while the “Pro2” version is $899 per year with 10,000 survey responses. The two “Pro” versions also include tech support by phone.

The highest profile users of Poll Daddy are Wired, Fox, PC World, TechCrunch, and Read/Write Web. According to Mullenweg, the service has just been enabled for an additional 4.4 million blogs on wordpress.com. If you want to try out the plugin on a WordPress site hosted on your own servers, the download is available at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/polldaddy/ and more information can be found at the Poll Daddy site.

Looking at the announcement on wordpress.com, there doesn’t seem to be a single negative comment from the community on this:

http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/10/15/polldaddy/

Where other Open Source projects are meandering currently, the constant improvement of WordPress through version upgrades and 3rd party acquisitions such as IntenseDebate and Poll Daddy show Automattic leading the CMS project in a great, new direction, building on the success and popularity of the platform to make it even better.

WordPress 2.7 Wireframes Released - Previewing New CMS Design

Jeffrey Scott of TypeHost — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:00:26 +0000

The WordPress 2.7 release is scheduled to be ready on November 10th – for those interested in an early preview of the new features, a set of black and white wireframes showing the current navigation structure has been released at:

http://wpdotorg.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/wf-dashboard_v002_093008jw.pdf

What major changes will we see in the new 2.7 WordPress release? The biggest is that the main navigation menu has been shifted to the left side. The logic here is to reduce the amount of scrolling needed on pages and to increase the amount of content space in the main section. The header size has also been reduced and “includes breadcrumb navigation links in place of the large screen headline in the work area”. I see this as a nod in many ways to the trend highlighted by the release of Google Chrome, which includes quite a bit more active space in the main frame of the browser compared to IE and Firefox, and of course to the continued rise of AJAX in user interfaces to dynamically load content without refreshing the page.

WordPress 2.7 looks also to bring back a customizable “widget” configuration for the composition section, which will allow for the dragging and dropping of navigation elements to create a personalized admin area. There is also more ability to turn on and off elements in the write panel display. The “Add Media” buttons are condensed to a single widget, and is expected to include buttons for video, flash, and other file types as well as standard image files. A new feature is the “Quick Press” option, through which you can publish posts without going through the main editor page. The “What’s Hot” module is being evolved into a more comprehensive feed reader, and elements from the newly acquired “IntenseDebate” related to threaded comments are already being incorporated into the new release.

The main theme seen through most of the changes is condensation of all the page elements to fit on the screen without the need to scroll. This includes the ability to collapse and remove navigation elements to streamline the display. This is being applied to the category management, tags, media library, comment moderation, and post editing sections as well as the composition section and main dashboard. There has also been some renaming of major site sections, particularly related to the “Design” menu which will now be known as “Templates”. A new menu section for “Utilities” will be added, and a centralization of all the “Content” management sections under one tab.

The initial reaction from bloggers and alpha testers on the redesign announcements has been positive. For example, Allen Sterns of Information Week writes:

“The administration interface in the 2.7 release looks amazing. While I find the current version very strong, the new version makes the process of managing a blog even easier. There’s more flexibility for publishers to provide only the necessary features for different users. Another major change is the ability to install plugins with one click. The plugin gallery is now available directly from within the admin panel. Plugins can be installed with one click — no more download, unzip, upload, install. They are working to make the theme gallery function the same way so you can install a theme with one click. The navigation is now docked on the left side of the page and nearly all of the components can be shifted to make the perfect layout for your needs.”

Or as Mark Evans states:

“For all the excitement about Wordpress 2.5 with its pretty new design, Wordpress didn’t change all that much for me. The layout was different, the design (provided by hot-shot consulting firm, Happy Cog) was a lot more user-friendly but Wordpress continued to be Wordpress. By that, I didn’t do much with it other than install a few plugins - after getting used to the new widget system. Most important, I continued to ignore Wordpress’ publishing tool; using Ecto as my publishing tool. But judging by what I saw yesterday at WordCamp Toronto, that could all change with Wordpress 2.7, which Matt Mullenweg announced will be released next month. In particular, the dashboard and the writing tool are going to be overhauled in a major way that I think are going to be a lot more interesting and exciting than Wordpress 2.5.”

While some have suggested the new system will be difficult to learn, and that major design and navigational changes should have been pushed back to a 3.0 release, it is certain that there is already significant buzz rolling about the new changes in WordPress 2.7 and the new design looks certain to cement the CMS’s reputation as the favorite of bloggers around the world.

For more information on the wireframes, see the official WordPress blog at:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/10/wordpress-27-wireframes/

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