Attackr.com » Developer Portal for web designers, developers and programmers http://www.attackr.com Come To Share, Come To Learn Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:09:25 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Geo Caching For Fun & Profit (a.k.a How to find your arse with a funnel script) http://www.attackr.com/geo-caching-for-fun-profit-aka-how-to-find-your-arse-with-a-funnel-script/ http://www.attackr.com/geo-caching-for-fun-profit-aka-how-to-find-your-arse-with-a-funnel-script/#comments Tue, 26 May 2009 13:18:22 +0000 Gregory Milby http://www.attackr.com/?p=540 Test Page...]]> searchwww.syrbot.com – when you visit the site it should say, “Thanks for visiting from ______ . This can be a critical component since you could ideally store the information from this visit in a database, recording exact zip code regions that your are targeting your marketing to.
If you have any intention of selling advertising, this can be good ammunition to show that you know who your audience is – where they’re located and their demographic profile.
To get an idea of how many variables are available about the person browsing your web page – look at this test page for syrbot.com: Test Page.
The first part of the test page is the geo caching element (finding out where you are, the apache var’s profile you as to which os you’re using, resolution and on and on. All critical info when you want to find out who you’re designing your site for. Knowing if your visitors are all using handheld devices would be a critical piece of knowledge – especially if you think you need to have a heavy flash site or graphic rich site. You could make all your customers happy by trimming the site down to streamlined graphics and mostly text arranged in a friendly format for a tiny pocket pc or iphone/palm browser.
It’s an easy argument to stress the importance of keeping up with who you are serving your pages to.
Please leave a comment if you know of any uses for geo caching/etc that would be useful to other people. A stronger point is to have ammunition when assisting a client with assessing their needs.  Here is a good link if you want to keep tabs on a good thread for how to get started with geo caching. The link is updated periodically – mostly questions, but some time saving advice if you can read between the lines.

bloidericon

Dare I Dream of Becomming Bigger Than Craigs List?

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/geo-caching-for-fun-profit-aka-how-to-find-your-arse-with-a-funnel-script/feed/ 0 Steps to Greater Website Profits http://www.attackr.com/steps-to-greater-website-profits/ http://www.attackr.com/steps-to-greater-website-profits/#comments Fri, 26 Dec 2008 10:00:02 +0000 Utah web design http://www.attackr.com/?p=284 Giving Your Audience What it Wants

Too often web designers make a web site that only contain fluff. The problem is, visitors don’t come to your site to wast time, but usually have a distinct purpose. Don’t give them what they want, and they are gone!

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.

So now your wondering how you find this out about your visitors. luckily there are plenty of tactics to help you do this. First tactic, just ask them. Find a way to speak to them and ask them, you’ll find that this is a very helpful tool. Another tactic is using analysis software like Google Analytics. This software is easy to set up, and can tell you mounds of valuable information about your visitors. These are very helpful ways to learn more about your visitors, and in turn, helps you to provide unique and very valuable content to them.

Attract a Larger Targeted Audience

By catering to your customers needs you’ll see an increase in traffic from past visitors returning to your site. But by extending your marketing reach you can compound the number of visitors your site will recieve. In this section we talk about some of the most important traffic building methods used by professionals each day.

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.

If you like free relevant traffic, your going to love SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is about optimizing your web pages to become more search engine friendly, adding valuable and unique content and providing trusted links from within and outside of your website. The better ranked you can get your website in the search engines, the more free and relevant traffic you will receive.

Focus Your Website to Make Money

As mentioned earlier, you want to make it quick and easy for your visitors to get what they want. On the other side of the coin, you need to make it easy for your visitors to do what you want them to do. For example, why make them click through endless pages to sign up for a membership or newsletter? The easier you make it for your visitors to do what you want, the more they will do it.

Keep your website clean by only providing content that your customers want, and what you want your customers to do. Draw your visitors attention to a profitable action by using proper design such as color, contrast and varying fonts. Don’t forget to try new ways on different web pages to get your visitors attention.

The number of methods you can use to increase customer action seems enless. A few of the many worthy mentionables are branding, cross promotion, A/B testing and improving your call-to-action. Remember, the higher the rate of visitor to customer conversion the more revenue your website will receive.

Don’t Do it Alone

Too often we look to do our web design and marketing ourselves, and sometimes as a result, we lose more money than we save. Unless you’re dedicated and experienced in this area of specialties, you will find yourself beneath your competition when it comes to building an effective website.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/steps-to-greater-website-profits/feed/ 1 A Great Little Script for Affiliate Marketers http://www.attackr.com/a-great-little-script-for-affiliate-marketers/ http://www.attackr.com/a-great-little-script-for-affiliate-marketers/#comments Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:10:50 +0000 Karen http://www.attackr.com/a-great-little-script-for-affiliate-marketers/ There are, unfortunately, some dishonest people who will either hijack or try to bypass your affiliate links while you work your tail off wondering why you are not getting any sales. I’ve found the best solution to stop that from happening.

There are many services on the net offering shorter links, etc., but to me they don’t seem as professional as this script I found recently called simply Free Link Cloaker. Not only will this script mask your affiliate links, but it uses a friendly keyword format such as http://yourdomain.com/recommends/keyword
Nice!

Another added feature is that the script keeps track of the number of clicks your cloaked link gets, so you will know which affiliate products are converting for you.

It does require a MySQL database and it uses PHP rather than Javascript, making it a much more stable link cloaker than others you may find in your searches. It is easy to set up, taking only minutes, but you can get support if needed and upgrades for life. I find this little script to be an invaluable resource for every affiliate marketer, or for anyone who just wants shorter URLs.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/a-great-little-script-for-affiliate-marketers/feed/ 2 The Power of Free http://www.attackr.com/the-power-of-free/ http://www.attackr.com/the-power-of-free/#comments Thu, 31 Jan 2008 05:19:51 +0000 Karen http://www.attackr.com/the-power-of-free/ Nothing is as viral as giving away something for free that has a link back to your site. Really, it is that simple. For a freelance web designer or a WordPress specialist, creating free templates and WordPress themes would be the smart way to market your talents.

For other businesses, giving away free coupons, free samples, free info (ebooks, articles, etc.) would be the recommended strategies for creating viral traffic back to your site. Using a free blog, anyone can implement the power of good fresh content along with downloadable freebies to give their visitors a reason to return.

Writing free articles and submitting them to article directories is another way of sharing free information and if you are a decent writer or you decide to spend the money on a ghost writer, your free info could end up being syndicated on several sites, all of which link back to yours. Viral!

Everyone loves a bargain and everyone loves to get free stuff so start thinking about what you can give to your Web site visitors. It doesn’t have to be much. Just give them a reason to come back.

What are you doing to attract your site’s visitors and what strategies work for you?

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/the-power-of-free/feed/ 2 Alexa Ranking: What Is It and Why Should You Care? http://www.attackr.com/alexa-ranking-what-is-it-and-why-should-you-care/ http://www.attackr.com/alexa-ranking-what-is-it-and-why-should-you-care/#comments Wed, 20 Jun 2007 13:36:49 +0000 Aeriff http://www.attackr.com/alexa-ranking-what-is-it-and-why-should-you-care/ My fellow readers, to be honest, I haven’t paid much attention to my Alexa rank, but some recent posts around the interweb have prompted me to start thinking about it.

For those who don’t know, your website’s Alexa rank affects the amount of money that advertisers will pay to be shown on your site. The lower the numerical Alexa rank, the more money advertisers are prepared to pay. It’s not all that they will be looking for, but it’s an important factor regardless.

In short: a good Alexa ranking matters. So how do you go about ensuring a good ranking? Well, recently I’ve watched the Alexa ranking of this site get better and better over time so the waiting game is a crucial part of the rank improvement process.

So how do you go about improving your Alexa rank? Here’s a few simple tips to get you started:

Install the Alexa Toolbar
If you install the Alexa toolbar on your own web browser, then every time you view your own site, you register as a hit (and so does everyone else who vists your site with the toolbar installed). If you are an Internet Explorer user you can download it here. If Firefox is your browser of choice don’t feel excluded because you can install the SearchStatus Extension instead.

Encourage others to follow suit
Conformity isn’t such a bad thing in this case; so encourage your friends, fellow webmasters as well as site visitors/blog readers to install the toolbar or the Firefox extension. Give them motivation by placing a link to it on your site. (Hint, hint)

Install Alexa widgets
It seems every site offers a widget for your site these days and Alexa is no exception. Read all about their widgets here. They look something like this:

Use Alexa redirects
Use Alexa Redirects on your website URL. For example: http://redirect.alexa.com/redirect?www.forgedeuphoria.com. Replace forgedeuphoria.com with the URL for your website. Leave this redirected URL in blog comments as well as forum signatures. This redirect will only count each unique IP address once a day.

Write or Blog about Alexa
Webmasters and bloggers love to hear about ways to increase their Alexa rank. They’ll link to you and send you targeted traffic (i.e. visitors with the toolbar already installed). This gradually has an effect on your Alexa ranking.

Give people good links
The blogosphere is generally a nice place, so it’s only simple logic that the more times you give people good quality links with good anchor text, the more times you will get the same high quality links in return and hopefully when clicked, will increase your Alexa ranking.

Try Alexa Autosurfs
Do they work? Everyone says maybe for brand new sites with a very poor Alexa rank. Note that there might be problems when you try to use auto surfs alongside contextual ads like Adsense. They aren’t also long term solutions to improving your Alexa Rank so I suggest using this option with caution.

So there are just a few options/tips to increase your Alexa ranking and start moving up in the interweb hierarchy.

Got any other Alexa tips? I’d love to hear them.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/alexa-ranking-what-is-it-and-why-should-you-care/feed/ 2 Things to Consider When Choosing a Domain http://www.attackr.com/things-to-consider-when-choosing-a-domain/ http://www.attackr.com/things-to-consider-when-choosing-a-domain/#comments Sat, 02 Jun 2007 08:13:40 +0000 Aeriff http://www.attackr.com/things-to-consider-when-choosing-a-domain/ The worst mistake I’ve made with my blog (forgedeuphoria.com/blog) was not choosing a more appropriate domain name, which can be attributed to my attitude to simply rush in and do things without thinking them through.

These should be the steps taken when making a decision into which domain to buy:

  1. Select a niche or core topic for your site.
  2. Clearly define the purpose and goals of your site.
  3. Choose an appropriate domain name.

I think it’s obvious that I missed the boat on all of the steps when choosing my domain. When I started my blog I had no idea what I was going to write about and now that I’ve settled on some topics I’m starting to suffer for it.

Your choice of domain name can be the most important decision you make for your site and can make or break it too.

I’m #1 on Google’s search results page for “forged euphoria”. Surprisingly I’ve actually had a few hits from people looking for this. I have no idea what they expected to find.

Anyway, the reason I’m #1 for that term is because everyone links to this site with the anchor tag “Forged Euphoria”, so naturally I’m up there in the rankings; the only problem is this isn’t the term I want to rank high with.

The key is choosing a domain that relates specifically to your niche and has your desired keywords in the title.

For example if you were going to start a blog about cars, cars-blog.com or blog-about-cars.com would be two I’d consider using. When people link to you the majority of the time the anchor tag they’d use would be “Cars Blog” or “Blog About Cars”.

Having people link to you is great, having them link with relevant keywords in the anchor tag is much much better. If your domain name contains keywords relevant to your niche you force people to link to your site with the exact keywords which will help you get a better search engine ranking.

If you’re thinking of buying a new domain first consider your niche and the purpose of your blog before you even start throwing around ideas for names. Don’t make my mistake and get stuck trying to make the best of a bad situation and suffer for it in the future.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/things-to-consider-when-choosing-a-domain/feed/ 2 Google Analytics in 5 minutes http://www.attackr.com/google-analytics-in-5-minutes/ http://www.attackr.com/google-analytics-in-5-minutes/#comments Sat, 26 May 2007 06:17:49 +0000 niemi http://www.attackr.com/google-analytics-in-5-minutes/ For those of you unfamiliar with Google Analytics, it’s a tool that logs detailed information about your visitors. More details here.

How to integrate Google Analytics with your homepage or blog?

1. Sign up

2. After you have signed up, you will be asked to fill some forms. Enter your domain address (e.g. www.attackr.com), choose your account name and specify country and time zone.

3. You will be asked to fill in some personal information, do that continue and accept the terms.

4. Google now generates a JavaScript which will looke like this:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-1925799-1";
urchinTracker();
</script>

The unique part of that script is the numbers “1925799-1″.

5. Insert that JavaScript into your web site. Preferably into the footer or the header. Note that this should be done on all your pages (e.g. index.html, contact.html, portfolio.html).

If you’re running WordPress just paste the JavaScript to the footer.php or header.php. This ensures that the script is called on all pages.

6. Exclude yourself. It’s quite discouraging to see that your brand new blog have 20 visits only to find out that they all come from the same person, namely you. Therefore, after setting up your account and web site, you should immediately create a filter to exclude all hits from your own IP.

To do this go to the filter manager (beneath you web sites), click add filter, choose a name, from filter types select “Exclude all traffic from an IP-adress. Now you will have to enter your own exteranl IP-adress. If you don’t know it check it out here or here.

7. Typing the IP correctly. Now lets say that your IP-address is 80.175.125.99. You would then have to enter a backslash (like this \) before each stop. If you IP was 80.175.125.99 you would have to enter 80\.175\.125\.99

8. Last step. Choose the domain which you want the filter to be applied to and click “add”. Press finish and you’re done. Navigate back to the your welcome screen by clicking “Analytics Settings” and wait a couple of days for the first results.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/google-analytics-in-5-minutes/feed/ 0 Be a different Blogger, on your Blog http://www.attackr.com/be-a-different-blogger-on-your-blog/ http://www.attackr.com/be-a-different-blogger-on-your-blog/#comments Tue, 15 May 2007 16:10:54 +0000 TechZ http://www.attackr.com/be-a-different-blogger-on-your-blog/ Blogs, are inherently read by Bloggers. That’s your target audience, regardless of what people say to me, I believe this. Why? Because they are the ones that interact in the vast realm of the Blogosphere. Their opinions have shaped what we call the Blog world today, be it on any platform or language.

Knowing this, what can we do to improve ourselves?

Think beyond the basic Blog

Other Bloggers know the basics already. They don’t need you to hold their hand teaching them how to write a post and click Submit. Use that knowledge and smarts you gain with owning a blog for more than a day, you often discover tiny tricks… tips if you will that others may not know. Share it!

Ideas and originality

A Blog is all about the original content it brings to the internet. Bloggers alike find news and other bits of common knowledge from a variety of already well established sites, make yours stand out with the information you bring to them.

Involve your readers

Being part of your Blog is something any reader would like to do; the best way it to involve them by way of comments or participating events. Carolyn Manning recently had a Virtual Conference which really got her readers active…it’s a lot of work to put together such an event though, so start small and build into weekly or monthly events.

Give your Blog a human touch

Odd as it may sound, there are bloggers out there that forget they aren’t only dealing with wires and circuits…but people. People who read and in some way are connected to what they read. They feel and react to what they see on their screen. Bloggers are a community and as such driven by the groups of Blogger friends they make. Keep them coming back!

Hopefully we can keep the Blog world interesting for a good while to come, keep blogging!

Originally posted at my site.

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/be-a-different-blogger-on-your-blog/feed/ 0 Make readers feel comfortable in your Blog space http://www.attackr.com/make-readers-feel-comfortable-in-your-blog-space/ http://www.attackr.com/make-readers-feel-comfortable-in-your-blog-space/#comments Wed, 25 Oct 2006 07:04:16 +0000 TechZ http://www.attackr.com/make-readers-feel-comfortable-in-your-blog-space/ Your reasons for starting a Blog will most definitely be different than mine, it’s natural as we are all unique. But! Were coming from the same place, be it you, me or Matt for instance. Were either doing it for fun (a very rare thing, so don’t fool yourself) or were doing it for fame & fortune. I’d say 99% of us fall into the latter category without even knowing it. At the end of it all thought I think our readers are what we should be concerned about. It’s them for who we keep blogging, although we might tell ourselves different…

Here are a few things you can do to make your Blog, Reader-friendly:

About page: Liz summed it up quite well at SOB.com. I really enjoy reading the About page of bloggers and I’m sure it’s the same for others. It gives you a small idea of the human behind the font. I’m not saying give the readers your life story, no; give them a short read about you. I’ve decided that About page will be updated more frequently from now on.

Archives: A not-so-looked-at part of many blogs is the Archive section, again here too plugins can make your life easier. Archives are a nicely sorted area of your blog that contains links to all your posts; it’s a very good area for readers to quickly find your past posts. I often use a Blogs Archive page to find a post I’m looking for.

Comments: Readers for the most part don’t like to and are lazy to Comment. Here’s where you come in! Make their life easier and you’ll be rewarded with Comments galore. I like reading Comments on my posts, be it positive or otherwise. Comments let you have a conversation with your readers, it’s the only way you can hear their view point about what you write.

Comment Editing: A feature sorely lacking on my own blog, I am sure readers would appreciate being able to correct mistakes made by them. Digg.com has a similar feature. Here’s a plugin that let’s you allow Comment Editing for your readers.

Search: Erin & SeanRox have both mentioned this about my Sidebar, which I have taken some time to re-do, it’s not complete yet but it’s getting there. New readers who visit your blog would like to Search for past information, the related posts plugin gives them a quick view of preview posts, but having a ready/available and easy to spot Search box is a big help.

Subscribe: RSS/Atom et al. You know its part of mostly everyone’s list of web apps, an RSS feed reader of some sort. I think FeedBurner makes it very easy for you to run all your feeds via it and allow users to even Subscribe to your RSS feed via e-mail. Yvonne pointed out the importance of having a clean sidebar before and she’s right, make that RSS button nice and prominent so that new readers and visitors will have a look at it immediately on entering your site.

Readability: It’s tricky to put this aspect of your Blog into words, hah, how’s that for an odd statement in a blog post ;) For me it simply means don’t dumb down your writing and don’t over-do it. Neither get you good results and will definitely put off your readers. I write as though it was me reading my Blog, casually. Sure it depends on what topic you write about, but remember it’s your readers who are important.

If you have any more tips making your readers at ease, the comments are open for you!

Good related reading: Commenting: Common Sense and Respect

Originally posted at TechZOnline.net

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]]> http://www.attackr.com/make-readers-feel-comfortable-in-your-blog-space/feed/ 0 5 sites to promote your open source design http://www.attackr.com/5-sites-to-promote-your-open-source-design/ http://www.attackr.com/5-sites-to-promote-your-open-source-design/#comments Mon, 21 Aug 2006 09:09:49 +0000 Mike Yarmish http://www.attackr.com/5-sites-to-promote-your-open-source-design/ If you design open source templates, of course you want them to be downloaded and used by other people. You can just upload them to your own site but in most cases they won’t be downloaded a lot of times. Probably the site is not so popular. There are some exclusions like Andreas Viklund’s site but not a lot of them.

One more way is to upload your template to special sites for such things. Let’s see what sites are that.

1. Open Web Design. The site has a very good community which always ready to give some comments in the forum. If you upload your template there it won’t be showed on the site immediately. Standing in the queue usually takes about 3-4 weeks. That’s because they give templates a chance to be on the main page for some time. So be patient and wait. OWD can generate a lot of traffic and downloads if the template is good. There is also an images size restriction. They shouldn’t be more than 25kb in sum. (p.s. Looks like that changed a tradition with a long waiting at the queue at the last week. Probably that’s just for once but who knows€¦)

2. Free Layouts.com. This site doesn’t have such community like OWD, but it usually generates much more downloads and site visits. The queue usually takes 2-5 days. In contrast to OWD it hasn’t any size limits.

3. Free Web Templates. Do you like when a site have a lot of advertisements? If you hate that than you shouldn’t upload your templates there. That’s because you’ll see a lot of advertisements at its main page. If advertisements is okay for you than you can get some downloads from there. An amount of them probably would be somewhere between OWD and Free Layouts. This service doesn’t have any restrictions and templates stay in the queue for about a week.

4. Zeroweb.org. Advertisements, quite stupid UI and even less downloads than OWD don’t make this site very good. At the same moment, promotion is promotion so if you need it, you’d upload your templates even there.

5. Open Source Web Design. I think it was one of the first such services and very popular some time ago. At the moment it doesn’t takes new templates but probably will do that again. I heard that OWD was made by one of OSWD admins.

I think there are some others such sites. For example – 4LAYOUTS.COM. The site is very strange. Looks like you can’t upload templates there by yourself and it takes them from Free Web Templates by itself. That of course generates some trafic but not a lot of it. You also can upload screenshots of your templates to special section of deviantArt. But my experiments show me that that won’t give you a lot of traffic.

If somebody knows some more such services or promoting ways I will really glad to hear them from you. They also would be added to the article with proper credits.

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