I love WordPress.

The blogging platform is a great content management system (CMS) to run on your website. Not only as a blog, but it can host your entire site. For example, most of the info pages on Pristine are on WP. In fact over the past year or so, my team has been learning how to create themes for WordPress.

At Pristine, we are providing the training schedules course-wise and city-wise on our different pages viz., for CFA Level I page, we are giving the schedule for all cities where CFA Level I is being conducted, for the Mumbai page, we are giving the schedule for all courses which are being conducted.

It does not take a rocket scientist to figure that there is a lot of duplicate information (which needs to be constantly updated) on different pages. With 8-10 centers and 6-7 courses that means anywhere between 50 to 70 pages which need to be updated whenever the training schedule changes. What a nightmare!

That’s where Shortcodes come in. Shortcodes are essentially functions that you can call from the WordPress CMS. Those of you who have used WP in the past would know that the WP platform is very easy to publish content ensures that you can only enter HTML in the publishing mode. We cannot write PHP scripts within the WP pages.

One way is to customize your templates, but if you want to run the script within your WordPress Publishable Content, then Shortcodes is the elegant solution. All you have to do is declare a function in the theme’s corresponding functions.php file, declare your short code and bind that to your new function. Voila! Now you have your own short code!

So, in this example, all I have to do is create a filterable query for the training schedule and pass either the city or the course as an argument in all my pages. Every time the schedule changes, all I have to do is update it once in the database, and the content will get auto-updated in all my 50-70 pages.

Microsoft’s search engine is one of the lesser known search engines on the web. With lesser known I mean that its far behind in terms of market share with respect to the market leader – Google.

One thing that seems to be working in their favour though, is the So.cl is doing better than G+. Now, in an attempt to nudge out Google from the King of Search Engines, Microsoft has rolled out a new update with their Windows platform. The Bing Desktop.

Good features, and I do recommend this because I like beautiful wallpapers on my desktop , is that Bing auto-changes the desktop on my Windows. It’s a simple feature, but its different from what Google Desktop does. The rest of the features are pretty much the same as Google Desktop (including the search bar when you hit Ctrl twice).

Google increased their business by focusing on their main product – Search. I think Microsoft is taking a page from that strategic move … focus on pushing products via their flagship product – Windows.

My family loves pizzas, so whenever we spend a lazy holiday, we generally order for them. Unfortunately Pizza Hut does not deliver in my area , and the other niche brands take quite some time do deliver their wares. So we have adjusted our palates to enjoy Dominos. I don’t have anything against Dominos, no … in fact I have begun to enjoy their thin crust pizzas a lot (even when they get stale!). So when my wife asked me to find Dominos coupons, I did a quick Google and clicked on few of the top links.

Interestingly enough, one of the links was an ad by Dominos themselves. They are running ads on branded keywords, interesting I thought. On the landing page, I noticed that they are providing a decent coupon (50% off on 2nd pizza) if you order online.

The Domino’s storefront is pretty simple with you getting a list of pizzas and side orders which you can customize. No great shakes. Not a bad experience though, but nothing to ooh and ahh about. After adding the orders to the cart, I proceeded to check-out. On check-out, I was given an order receipt and also given the address and phone number of the store who would fulfill my delivery. Unfortunately, the facility for entering your own address was not that great, and I ended up entering only part of my address. After 10-15 minutes when there was no communication from Dominos (except the order confirmation with the partial address), I got a bit worried and called up the store responsible for the order fulfillment.

Now here’s the kicker, after I contacted them, they decided to check whether my address comes in their area! The order was confirmed, but the operator was prudent enough to provide me a disclaimer that it may take longer than 30 minutes! As I sat down and write this down, the delivery guy rang the doorbell (well within 30 minutes!).

All in all, it was a good experience – however the customer touch points need to be appraised of this online transition (had the operator whom I contacted been a bit more well informed about the online store, then my experience would have been far better!).

Btw, here’s the coupon code I used – FRIFRK50, and you can redeem it here.

On 2nd Feb 2012, I received a mail from FUSE Labs. It was about Microsoft Research team’s new experiment. Happy to get a beta invite, I jumped on-board – it was 7am early in the morning when I had decided to check my mail. I got so absorbed checking out the site that I hardly noticed an hour fly by!

Up front So.cl is less confusing than Google+, here’s what it seems to do -

• You can get in touch with random people and can follow-unfollow them (ala Twitter, G+)
• Rich media looks really good on the site
• A new feature which I found really cool was Video Parties (crowd-sourced video playlists which keep playing in one section of the site)

Here’s the catch!

To add posts on this social network, you have to search for terms … on Bing. Yes. on Bing.

They have really taken search social. Something that Google+ is doing slowly and carefully, Microsoft has twisted the entire approach and done a bold step under the name of an experiment.

It’s definitely worth a shot, do give it a whirl here.

You will require a Facebook ID to register and login, which kind of acknowledges FB as the king of all social networks.

Aside from being Pristine’s CTO, I also happen to be my company’s webmaster. I really do not mind this task, in fact I think its one of the under-rated jobs out there in the market.

The cool part about this role is how closely you have to work with the Google ecosystem of Analytics, Adwords and Webmaster tools. The thing about Google products is that many people might know about them, but how many of them use it the way they are intended to be?

In my quest to find the right person I have interviewed so many professionals, that its not funny. Almost all of them put everything but the kitchen sink on their resumes. That might be a good idea, but they all of them come down crashing in the interview. A royal waste of time.

In case if you want to differentiate yourself from the horde of wannabes out there, this is one of the things that you have to know!!

URL Builder Tool

Here’s the link to the tool.

* Ta-da! and all the fanfare *

What this tool allows you to do is allow you to track a segment of the visits which are generated on the provided link to be tracked as an individual campaign! The reason why anyone should be excited, is that now you can slice and dice all incoming links to your website (provided you can alter the incoming links).

Some of the ways in which it can be used is -

• Tracking a segment of your traffic which is coming via an online-ad – For example, I could put a banner ad on Timesjob, or some site. I could also have posted a job posting there with my website’s URL in the job description. Now instead of relying on the simply the data from Referral traffic to measure the ROI of this ad campaign, I can give them a generated URL and track it without worrying about any other source of traffic
• Email Campaigns clicks can now be tracked as a segment. With a little help of Goals and Conversions, I can calculate the ROI on a per email basis
• You can even measure the effectiveness of traffic being generated from different properties on your website

Well, this is just the start, you can go pretty much wild with this tool. Just remember folks! Slice and Dice data for better control and tracking.

Back in 2000, the dot com market in India was booming. Every company who wanted to have it’s presence online was scrambling to find domain names, hosting, email solutions, etc. Companies such as Net4India sprung up and came up with offerings with ridiculous prices (some of these offerings still exist to date!). Executives bought these websites thinking that somehow building a website would translate into revenues. In fact even today, the average “Indian IT company” continues to dole out development costs of websites propelled by content management systems (CMS) to be around 5-6 lakhs. If you are lucky, then that figure can go as high as 14-15 lakhs !!

What was the mistake then?

The single minded assumption that building a website will translate into revenues.

I still see folks who nurture this piece of ticking bomb waiting to explode and set their businesses to ruins. As a result, all derived-demand business also went bustville. It took a fair amount of years to clear the damage, and come back on track.

So why bring this up Now?

These days, whomsoever that I am talking (and you can include me in this list as well!!), is thinking about having an online enterprise. A sweet setup, where the person can run a business irrespective of where this aforesaid individual is. There are more than a fair share of success stories around, and these people have become heralded role models.

Yes, the online dream can become true. Yes.

Feels good to hear these words, don’t they? These days I am seeing a lot more structured approach, newsletters, opt-in forms, CRM systems, mass emailing systems, affiliate management systems, advertising networks, etc … the systems are all there. People just need to start using them and start churning the proverbial money mill.

But …

Back then it was IT firms, now I am seeing a large growth of Digital Marketing firms. It’s the same plot, just the players are different now. Organizations are again back to setting up websites, now with complex marketing and sales systems. But how are you doing in terms of sales? Is the juice worth the squeeze?

If you do own a website, could you share with me what are the plans that you are thinking of to generate sales? Are you creating value to generate those sales?

With the WordPress 3.3 update coming out, I decided that it was about time that I upgrade the wordpress running on our company’s website from the lowly 2.7.1 to the current version. This has been a thorn in my side from quite some time (about a year now). I had earlier attempted to correct this, however direct update options available in WP always resulted in broken themes or worse, broken functionality. It’s a nightmare when you have to consider the SEO juice you would be loosing because of the change in URLs. Even if I put in 301 redirects, it was too much of an effort to consider the update.

Installation

• Christmas and New Year is always a slow time for any business, the perfect time to update WordPress. Also, using Google Analytics, I noted the time of the day when we receive the least no. of visitors (2am to 7am IST, when the no. is around 300-400 visitors per hour, else it goes as high as 1700-2000 visitors per hour)
• The first thing I did was ensure that my hosting environment was compatible with WP 3.3. Turns out that my PHP version was not updated. I found this excellent guide to upgrade PHP from 5.1 to 5.3.
• Once that was done, I double checked to see if my existing packages were compatible with the updated PHP. Turns out, that a lot of the functions in the previous version were deprecated. My error_log was looking like a battlefield scarred with PHP Fatal Errors, and PHP Warnings. Some quick fixes, I was ready for the WP update.
• Using the awesome 5-minute WP install, I installed a dummy version on a hidden subdomain. I was sure to disable search engines on this deployment.
• I then exported all the data from our current system and imported it into this deployment. This was the easiest part!
• I then copied our theme files, and installed it into this new WP package (you have to check the theme files for deprecated methods)
• I then copied all the plug-ins from the old to the new WP. These were then updated. The good thing about updated plug-ins is that you get awesome set of functionalities and security updates that you so wanted. Note to New Webmasters: There are a lot of plug-ins out there whose older versions contain backdoors (more on this later), trigger false alarms on search engines, etc which need to be taken care of. Earlier I used to this clean-up using shell scripts, but not anymore
• Now with a bit of tweaking here and there, the site had URLs which were function properly (no more worrying about loosing on our SEO efforts).
• With adding a fair bit of plug-ins into the system, came a new problem – conflicting jQuery!! Earlier this month, I had asked our intern to hand script a jQuery menu, and that was conflicting with the other jQuery scripts. Fortunately, we have jQuery.noConflict().

A whole new World!

One part of my role at Pristine is building up the site traffic, be it via Paid Advertising, Referral traffic or via Search Engines.

Anyone who has indulged in Paid Advertising would know how expensive it can turn out to be if you do not know what you are doing. It can be very effective in the short term, however for long term and more sustainable results, relying on non-paid search results is far better. Hence SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

The problem with SEO is that almost everyone who has a website think that they should do SEO, and SEO is playing around with meta tags. Seems simplistic no? In the past month or so, the amount of people whom I have talked to regarding to SEO has shown how less people know about the workings. Add to it the complexity of the ever-changing algorithm of search engines such as Google, Bing, etc.

The idea behind SEO is to target specific keywords for specific pages on your site, so that when your target audience searches for those keywords, your site shows up in the search results.

Here are some tips which I would have appreciated when I started off. Please do keep in mind, that I am no self-professed expert in SEO, just that like all of us around here, even I am learning, and this post is one such humble attempt to share whatever that I have learned, and what I know works to get results. Having said that, I know it would help all of us if you could point out any errors that i have made, or make suggestions and provide additional tips!

• Read up on your meta tags, some of them are useful. Make a note of the description and author tags, you would be working with description the most.
• Do not target more than 2-3 keywords per page, since you have to use that keyword in all the different important sections of the page viz., description tag, title tag, h1 tag, main content, etc. you cannot really target 1-2 keywords without damaging the copy of your page.
• If you are working with a tight budget, then use a free tool such as Traffic Travis, the demo version is free. If you have a decent sized budget, then I would highly recommend Pro SEO MOz, it not only has a very comprehensive SEO tool, but also it has an extensive knowledge base on SEO
• Search Engine’s maintain the authority of websites, this is generally a factor of how well you write, and how many sites are linking to your content. Google especially is one search engine which rewards regular content creation, in fact the current search algo (don’t know why its called the panda update) also favors freshness of content. So the same page would rank higher if it were regularly updated.
• Always look at the different search terms via which people are coming to your site. Those are essentially content creation triggers!
• Many people swear by backlinking, citing different open directories to publish your site links. However, I am skeptical about this approach. The one thing I use this approach for is to check where are my competitors linking, and get my presence their as well. I think if you can create good quality content, then it will automatically fetch the backlinks that you require.
• Search engines are also influenced by social behavior, so typically the search results shown in Google would be influenced with what your friends are sharing on your social networks. E.g- If I share this post on say Twitter and if you are following me on Twitter, then you would definitely see this as a search result!
• SEO is a long drawn game, and it requires patience, practice and discipline. Do not expect magic to happen, it’s a slow and gradual process and does not happen over night. To hope for such miracles, either you need to be Larry Page or Steve Ballmer.

The good folks at Google have a great sense of humor. Ever since the launch of GMail on the 1st of April, and the subsequent April Fool jokes, we are always guessing what hidden joke lurks in each of the Google products. Here are some of them that I have found, you can check them out too!

I am also including some of the outputs, which you can try by yourself as well!

Do a Barrel Roll

Search this term in Google search, and watch the fun as the search queries take a tumble, and literally does a barrel roll!

Askew

Search this term in Google search, and see the screen go askew!!

Ascii Art

Search for this, and the Google logo shows you what Ascii Art is all about!

Recursion

Have you noticed that when search on Google, if you do typographical mistakes, Google corrects you by asking you “Did you mean <corrected spelling>”. Try searching recursion on Google!

There are more such easter eggs in Google, but they are time bound (for example searching football during the Soccer World Cup would give you an interested Pagination navigation on Google).

As a bonus, try this out in your Google Reader – up up down down left right left right b a b a (and beware of the ninja!).

No, I don’t drink and raid

I recently have taken a lot to playing World of Warcraft during my free time (I think this also reflects pretty well on the blog ). I also have bought a good powerhouse of a desktop, and had dual booted it with WinXP and Win7. The problem with Win7 is that I have the 64-bit trial distribution and it hangs a lot, it has driver issues. The problem with WinXP is that its WinXP

I am not that much of an operating system nazi, but the machine slows, down, the wireless network card that I am using is not fully utilized (WinXP sucks when it comes to driving the wireless interface!!). All in all, when it comes to playing an Online RPG, the environment does not deliver it’s 100%. Thus, I tried to give Ubuntu a try.

• I already had the 11.04 distro with me, so the first thing I did was update all the repositories, include the third party repositories, and install Wine. Wine stands for WINdows Emulator. You can read more about Wine here.
• After Wine, I went for installing Winetricks, which is a third party software. It’s used to easily streamline commands via a wizard which otherwise I would have been forced to use the console.
• Somehow the Wine commands that get integrated into the shell (the right click menu of your explorer) are a bit different from the wine that got installed. So at first the program refused to run giving some obscure access management errors.
• So, refusing to be let down, I went and searched for third party alternatives. You can skip this step, and definitely do not install the Crossover Games application because its just a trial, however, the PlayOnLinux (POL) application is recommended here, since after installing that, at least the icons of the .exe files will be visible
• However, when I ran the Launcher.exe of World of Warcraft via the custom command console (by right clicking on it and selecting Open with Other Application, and then simply typing wine in the command box)
• That’s it. Now the World of Warcraft launcher will run, and the game runs seamlessly

Since the game does not use the latest DirectX drivers, instead it replaces them with its own set, the textures and the games will be slightly different. I noticed a different texture for the water in WoW for example. But otherwise, the game is perfect for running. The network card works better, so I get a faster ping rate.