Dvorak Designs - Web Design Blog

Around the Web: Klout, Social Page Evaluator, Internet Business, and SEO

It’s time for another Around the Web article! This month I found a couple cool services that will evaluate you Twitter and Facebook pages, and tell you ways you can improve their usefulness. I also found a couple articles I found interesting, and thought might be worth sharing.

First up is Klout. Klout is a service analyzes the influence of your Twitter account based on certain criteria. Some of the criteria includes: how many followers you have, how many of your tweets were re-tweeted, how many @ messages were directed at your account, you get the idea. Once your account as been analyzed, you’re then given a score which is used to rank your account against others. Another unique feature is their Klout Classification, which more or less puts a name to your style of tweeting. For example, @dvorakdesigns is a Syndicator. According to Klout, this means I look at what’s trending, and share only the most important information with my followers. There are several other categories to check out, just take a look at the graph-like image under the “Influence Matrix” header, and mouse over the different squares.

If you’re anything like me, after using Klout you wanted to see how your Facebook page was doing. Luckily I found a service from Virtue, called the Social Page Evaluator. This works similar to Klout in that it tells you how your page is doing by looking at several criteria. Only instead of a score, you get a monetary value. Not only do you get the current value of your page, but you also get the potential value, too. They also tell you ways you can help improve your value, like posting more per day, and getting more of your fans (or are they called “likes” now?) involved in the things you post. Another really cool feature is the “Fan-tasize” tab, which likes you put in a fan count, and then play around with posts per day and engagement sliders to see how your page value changes when the variables change.

As an example for using all of these tools, the Dvorak Designs Facebook page has a current value of $50, and a potential value of $497. So if I go to the Fan-tasize tab, I can move the variables around until I get the value to about $497 without bringing up any warnings (if you put the post per day too high, it will tell you that may lower engagement). Once I have everything stable, I’ll know what I need to do to make my value rise! They even have a tab that lets you compare your page with up to three other Facebook pages at a time. Which is a really great feature if you want to feel like you’re spying on the competition!

As a still semi-new business owner, who deals primarily over the internet, I found this article by Manta particularly interesting. It’s title: “7 Things the Internet Will NEVER Change About Doing Business“ caught my attention simply because it’s something I had never thought about. While reading the article, all of their points makes quite a bit of sense. I wish I had more to say, but you really just have to read the article if you want your own “well that makes sense” moment.

Lastly is an article that oDesk posted, “SEO Success: Get Found on the Web in 3 Steps.” Normally when I read an article about SEO techniques I end up needing to take a break in the middle, mostly because they can get really long and lean towards the complex side. Which isn’t the case for this article. It’s really short, and to the point, but the points it makes are huge and really easy to understand. Even if you’re not an SEO wiz. So if you still don’t know where to start with SEO, or if you’re like me and just read every SEO article you find, this is definitely worth checking out.

3 Free Social Bookmarking Widgets/Services for Your Website

Allowing your visitors to quickly and easily share content from your website is important. When someone shares a page from your website on a social networking website, it more or less translates into free advertising and free traffic. This free traffic requires little to no direct work from you, either. All you need to do is make sure your visitors have the tools they need to share your pages. Luckily, there are several services out there that take the work out of letting your visitors share their content (literally) however they want.

1. AddThis

Features

• Customization of default buttons and popups (through editing simple code)
• Support for hundreds of social networks, including popular ones in other countries
• Special implementation support for WordPress, Blogger, and MySpace (in addition to the standard website code)
• Analytics data for what people are sharing and on what social network they’re sharing it

http://www.addthis.com

2. ShareThis

Features

• Default button styles are similar to those of specific social network widgets
• Support for many popular social networks, plus email and text message sharing
• Special implementation support for WordPress, Blogger, and TypePad (in addition to standard website code)
• Analytics and traffic tracking for your shared articles

http://sharethis.com

3. AddToAny

Features

• Customization of default buttons (through editing simple code)
• Support for many popular social networks
• Special implementation support for Email Newsletters, WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, Drupal, TypePad, Joomla, FeedFlare, Elgg, and Widget Box (in addition to the standard website code)

http://www.addtoany.com

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Enable and Configure Gzip in .htacces to Speed Up Your Website

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how to disable ETags and configure caching and expires headers to help improve the speed of your website. While those alone work pretty well, there’s still one more simple thing you can enable through .htaccess that will help your website’s speed. That thing happens to be Gzip compression.

Basically what Gzip compression does is similar to what compressing a file on your computer does. The smaller file size means the file transfers to your visitor’s browser faster than it would if your server was transferring the full sized file. While compression of a single file may not net you a lot of saved transfer time, when you compress an entire website you may see a noticeable difference.

Luckily, Gzip is pretty easy to enable and configure. As with my first article, this article assumes you have a working knowledge of, and are comfortable accessing and making changes to, your .htaccess file. The file will either be in the root directory of your website, or in a sub folder where you have any websites or files you want to enable Gzip for.

To turn on Gzip, simply add the following lines into your .htaccess file.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
<FilesMatch "\.(js|css)$">
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
</FilesMatch>
</IfModule>

The first line will handle all of the text and html of your pages, as well as any embedded JavaScript or CSS (at least from what I’ve seen). Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to handle external JavaScript or CSS. That’s where the next set of lines come in. They’re setup to handle files with the extension of .js and .css, so it will work for all of your external files you have linked into a document that your visitor loads up.

That’s it! See how easy these things are? Having a faster website doesn’t have to be hard, and I hope these posts have helped you speed up your website. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment. Also, if you liked these posts, please subscribe to our RSS feed so you don’t miss others like it.

Around the Web – AboutUs.com

Alright, it’s time for another Around the Web article. I only have one thing for this month, since I’ve been pretty busy with all kinds of projects. Hopefully next month I’ll have more to share.

What I want to mention is a website called AboutUs.com, not to be confused with AboutUs.org (which I mentioned in a previous article). The best way I can think of to describe AboutUs.com is to think of a communal Twitter page. On it, anyone can post things about any website they want (in 120 characters or less). Each post is called an Insight, and they look fairly similar to tweets, only they’re about websites as opposed to what people are doing. Once an Insight is posted, other members can rate it up if they think it describes the website well, is something witty, or something useful.

When you click on a website that’s mentioned in any of the Insights, you’re brought to a page that shows every Insight ever posted about that website. This makes it pretty easy to discover new websites, and then immediately see what people are saying about it. It’s quite a bit of fun just to pop in once in awhile and share something about a website you were just using. This should keep anyone that spends time browsing the web pretty occupied! Not to mention it feels constructive since your Insight might be enough for something to visit that website.

That’s it for this month. Be sure to subscribe to our RSS Feed so you don’t miss next month’s post (which should have more to it), along with all of our other web design tips and tricks coming in the month of June.

Disable ETags and Configure Caching/Expires Headers With .htaccess

Website speed has always been a big deal, though I would argue that it’s an even bigger deal in today’s world where people are used to instant information. If you’re anything like me, when a website takes longer than 15 seconds to load, you probably go elsewhere. Improving your website’s speed isn’t just good for keeping your visitors on it longer, it can even save you bandwidth each month. Why load something off of your server again if you don’t have to? Or, why load something off your server that you’re not even using? I’m going to help you configure some things so you’re doing less of both.

To add to the website speed “craze,” Google announced that it now uses website speed in determining search ranking. This prompted me to analyze the speed of all of my websites using tools like Yslow, PageSpeed, and WebPageTest.org. I used so many different tools because it seems like each of them has their own weighting system when it comes what’s best for improving your website’s speed. So, by using them together you cover a wider range of things from different perspectives.

There are a lot of easy ways to make your website faster, like getting rid of unused coding, optimizing images, and combining Javascript files. However, some of the more “advanced” methods, such as ETags and Caching, may not be so easy to implement. Well, they’re actually very easy to implement, once you know what you’re implementing and where to put it – which is what I’m going to show you.

This guide assumes you have a working knowledge of web servers and are comfortable accessing and making changes to your .htaccess files; either in the root folder of your website, or in any sub directories where you have websites hosted that you want these changes to apply to.

The first thing I want to show you how to do is disable ETags. From the research I’ve, it sounds like that unless you’re explicitly using ETags for something, you can disable them. If you don’t even know what ETags are, or have never done anything with them that you can remember, you’re likely not using them. To disable ETags, simply add the following two lines into your .htaccess file.

Header unset ETag
FileETag None

That’s it, you’re done with that! Pretty easy, huh? If you want to double check to make sure this worked, you can use any of the programs I mentioned in the second paragraph. All of them have a section for ETags that checks to make sure they’re disabled.

The second thing is adding Expires Headers for Browser Caching. These will tell the browser how long it should cache each file type you specify. This is useful because it allows you to define certain lengths of time based on file types. For example, you probably don’t want your pages to be cached as long as an image, since generally your pages are going to be changing more often. To get started with the Expires Headers, add the following section to your .htaccess file.

# 1 YEAR
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=29030400, public"
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 years"
</FilesMatch>

# 2 MONTHS
<FilesMatch "\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=4838400, public"
ExpiresDefault "access plus 2 months"
</FilesMatch>

# 1 WEEK
<FilesMatch "\.(xml|txt|css|js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 weeks"
</FilesMatch>

# 30 MIN
<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm|php)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=1800, private, proxy-revalidate"
ExpiresDefault "access plus 30 minutes"
</FilesMatch>

As you can see, I have different sections for different lengths of time. While most of the programs I cited in the second paragraph want you to have all of your Expires Headers set to expire in a month or more, that’s really not very practical when you think about it. Even just having the expiration set for 30 minutes will increase website load time drastically for a person who is actively browsing your website. All while ensuring if you add new content they’ll see it without needing to reload the website, or empty their browser cache.

For each of the sections, the first line is where you define the file type extension to cache for each length of time. Just be sure you don’t add in a period before each one, if you look closely there’s already a period in front of the opening parenthesis, which gets added to each file extension you put in.

On the second line, max-age= is where you define the length of time, in seconds, that you want the particular items to be cached for.

Finally, the third line is technically the Expires Headers. For this, you define the length of time until the item expires using a certain expression: “access plus [length of time]”. What this means is the item will expire that length of time from when it was accessed. You should set this to the same length of time you did with the Cache-Control setting.

That’s it for Expires Headers, now all of your content will be cached by your visitors. Leading to a faster browsing experience, while saving you bandwidth each time your page is reloaded by a previous visitor.

Be sure to subscribe to our RSS Feed so you don’t miss next week’s post about enabling GZip for your website, for even faster load times!