Magnolia Blog

SEO first steps

2009-09-17T14:59:00.005+01:00

There are a number of very basic SEO steps that we recommend clients perform when starting their SEO strategy. None of these activities are going to revolutionise your rankings overnight but they do form a small part of established SEO best practice:

Submission to Yahoo! Directory Submit. For web sites that do not feature adult content or services, the Yahoo! Directory Submit service costs US$299 (nonrefundable) for each Directory listing that is submitted. For each listing accepted into the Directory, there is a recurring annual fee of US$299 to maintain the listing in the Directory for the subsequent year. You can begin this process by clicking here.
Submission to the Annual Business.com Directory Listings. Annual Directory Inclusion listings are a simple way to list your product or service on Business.com for an entire year for just $299. You can begin this process by clicking here.
Submission to Gimpsy for $49. If the site is not approved, you will be refunded 20 USD. You can begin this process by clicking here.
Submission to Zoominfo for Free. You can begin this process by clicking here.
Submission to DMOZ for Free. You can begin this process by clicking here.

Grouping items on the product picker

2009-09-10T15:40:00.003+01:00

We recommend that you offer simple choices to your customers, otherwise sales can be affected. However, if you choose to offer a large selection of printing options, then you may want to 'group' them into logical categories, to make them easier to find.

For example, if you offer 30 different types of frames, you may wish to group them into 'wooden', 'classic', 'modern', 'light', 'dark', etc.

Magnolia Soft allows you to group sizes, frames, mounts, glazes and finishes. An example can be seen here, where the different size options have been 'grouped' according to the number of panels it is made out of.

This is easy to achieve:

Log in to the admin tools
If prompted, select the store you wish to edit
From the left menu, select printing options, followed by the publisher which offers the print options you wish to group
Select the component type you wish to group (size / frame / mount / glaze / finish)
Using the check-boxes, and the 'New tag' input, tag the components with the group names you wish them to appear in. You can use any names
Test your changes by visiting a product on your store

Additional Artist Search Functionality Released

2009-08-14T17:34:00.007+01:00

As promised, we've improved the Artist search functionality further, allowing you to rapidly narrow down your search results using the artists surname.

The following screen grab highlights the new functionality:

So, if I am searching for an artist called Thomas Bewick, I begin typing his surname and the results are all reduced as follows:

The results then continue to filter, until there is only one possible option left.

This functionality will help improve the speed with which users can navigate through your artists profiles.

New artist page layouts designed to improve SEO

2009-08-06T14:48:00.011+01:00

We've recently redesigned the way our core application handles the display of Artists, their biographies and their artworks.

Our primary objective was to improve the SEO of each artists name, boosting the page rank and link juice that each artist passes through to their specific works of art.

We were also keen to improve the usability and searchability for web browsers, removing the automatic pre-fix filtering we previously used.

The following screen grabs highlight the ways in which we have developed the application:

You can visit this page here.

Once you click through from the main search page, you are now presented with an Artist Summary page containing Biographies, Popular Keywords, Categorisation of works, Popular Images:

You can visit this page here.

Joe does the Fastnet

2009-08-06T14:39:00.004+01:00

Joe will be setting off on the prestigious Fastnet race on Sunday 9th August.

The Fastnet race takes place every two years, and starts at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. From there, it's round the Fastnet rock off the soutwest coast of Ireland, and then back into Plymouth for the finish - a total of 608 miles.

We will all be tracking Joe's progress from the dry, warm and safe Magnolia Box office using the Fastnet Fleet Tracking site, which allows you to follow every boat throughout the race. If you want to follow Joe, he's aboard a Class40 boat called "Spliff".

The potential for severe weather means that the Fastnet has a justified reputation for being one of the most challenging offshore races. The tragedy of the 1979 race has been well-documented, and in 1985 Simon Le Bon was famously trapped under the hull of his boat "Drum" after her keel sheared off.

We obviously wish Joe all the best of luck. We are sure it will be an amazing experience, and we hope that he gets back to Plymouth speedily - but most of all that he just gets back.

Magnolia Soft have just launched in Australia

2009-07-24T16:20:00.006+01:00

We've recently been very busy customising the Magnolia Soft platform for launch into the Australian market in coordination with our partners Marks & Co. We've put together the following microsite for all Australian Framers, Australian Artists and Australian Photographers that are seeking to sell fine art prints and photographs online:

Email Newsletters Made Easy, and Fun!

2009-06-24T10:07:00.007+01:00

Email newsletter services such as MailChimp and Campaign Monitor offer a highly effective way to send out mass emails:

Automatically managed unsubscribes/subscribes
Track deliveries, click-throughs, unsubscribes, forwards, etc
Create and manage reusable email templates
Automatic spam filter detection
Avoid bulk-email sender warnings and bans from your ISP

If you are looking to send email newsletters, services such as these will make it a far simpler, and more enjoyable process, and the costs are low.

Customers Can Be Overwhelmed With Choice

2009-06-21T16:03:00.004+01:00

A common problem with e-commerce, especially art, is the ease at which we can overwhelm the customer with too much to choose from. More often than not, a customer's response to this situation is to choose nothing; not the result we are looking for!

This short article suggests that customers given too many choices are 10x less likely to buy. This should be considered when selecting both images, and printing options for your store.

Google Analytics: An Introduction

2009-05-15T12:18:00.006+01:00

When you get a new Magnolia store, we will always set up a Google Analytics account for you. Google Analytics is our preferred web analysis tool, and its job is to track visitors to your website. It collects a huge amount of data but it makes it easy to see which pages are popular (and which are not), which countries visit your site most often, and exactly how your visitors are finding your site. To use Google Analytics, you will need a Google Account. These are free to set up, and if you have a personalised Google search page (iGoogle), or have used any of Google's other products (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and so on) you will already have one. If you need to create a Google Account, visit https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount. Then simply send us the email associated with your Google Account and we will take care of the rest of the process. Google Analytics is very powerful, and future posts will go into more detail about some of the more advanced techniques available, but to start with, let's go through some of the basics.

Some key terms

Visits - A visit is a single session on your site. It is not the number of pages viewed - this is called "pageviews" in Google Analytics (and is also often referred to as "hits").
Average time on site - The length of time a visitor spent on your site. A visit starts when the user first arrives on your site and ends when the browser is closed or shut down, or if the user has been inactive on your site for 30 minutes.
Average pages/visit - The number of pages that each visitor looked at on your site before leaving.
Bounce rate - The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who visited only page on your site. There is no real guide as to what is a good bounce rate. A more detailed description of bounce rates will be in later post, but for revenue-generating sites it is a good idea to get your bounce rate as low as possible.
Unique visitors - The number of unduplicated visitors to your site over the specified time period. Google uses cookies to remember previous visits.
Source - How your visitors found your site. At the top level, the main types of (unpaid or "organic") sources are:
- Search engines. The visitor typed something into a search engine and then followed a link to your site from the search results. This statistic includes all search engines, not just Google, and it can also include the exact phrase that was used in the visitor's search.
- Referring sites. The visitor followed a link on another site which pointed directly to a page on your site.
- Direct traffic. The visitor either typed in your website address, or they used a bookmark.

Getting information about a particular page

By using Google Analytics, all the above stats are available for any individual page and over any specified time frame, so you can drill down to see very precise data. For example, if you click one of the pages listed in the "Content Overview", you can see all the above stats for just that page. And by adjusting the timeframe graph at the top of the screen you can alter the length of time covered by the report. Want to see how people found this one particular page? Just click on the Navigation Analysis links on the right-hand side.

Is absolutely every visit logged?

It's usually not a big issue, but you should be aware that not all visitors to your site will be included in the reports. The following types of visitors are not recorded.

Visitors who do not have JavaScript enabled on their browsers. By default JavaScript is turned on in most modern browsers; however, some people do choose to disable it. Since GA uses JavaScript to collect data, such visitors will not be logged. The exact percentage of non-JavaScript visitors will vary according to the demographic of your site, but as a guide across the web as whole approximately 5% of visits will not have JavaScript enabled.
Search engine spiders (since spiders are not JavaScript-enabled). This is definitely a good thing as you would not want your reports muddied with 100s of automated spider requests. You just want to see what real people are doing.

It is also possible to omit visits from certain computers (IP addresses). The main reason for doing this is to exclude your own visits from skewing the data. For example, we tend to exclude any visits from our Magnolia office. If you would like to exclude your own range of addresses, get in touch with us and we'll set it up.

Give your Online Store Some Bite

2009-05-06T12:02:00.007+01:00

This short article gets straight to the point, and offers some great advice on running an e-commerce business.

Web safe fonts

2009-03-16T16:57:00.002Z

Web safe fonts

When designing a website, it is important to use standard web safe fonts to ensure that the website will display correctly on any pc or mac. The table below outlines the website fonts that will safely render on any machine:

Arial	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
Arial Black	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy...
Comic Sans	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
Courier New	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy...
Georgia	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
Impact	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
Times New Roman	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
Trebuchet MS	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...
Verdana	The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog...

Magnolia Box Clients in Sunday Times

2009-03-02T10:34:00.005Z

Art by People got a small feature mentioned in 'The Sunday Times' home magazine on one of their pictures 'Darwin Was Wrong'. Good work Luke! We also have The Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre appearing in the next couple of weeks with an article in the Style section, advertising their Warhol Art on Demand Prints.

Building a Community of Customers, Online

2009-01-19T17:00:00.008Z

Recently, I have seen some great examples of online retailers using blogs and social media tools to build up a loyal and participating community of customers. Online coffee retailer www.hasbean.co.uk uses its blog to publish the fascinating day-to-day running of a coffee roasting business. They also use the free micro-blogging service Twitter, to connect with a community of coffee-lovers, and further promote their love for coffee!

Blogging your way into the big time is an article which describes how a small brewing business uses online media effectively; a must-read if you want ideas on how to build your online presence.

New Text and Alt Link SEO features added

2009-01-14T15:15:00.010Z

We have added some new SEO settings into the online store admin that are designed to increase the text used for common website links, allowing a far greater degree of customisation and keyword targeting for text links and alt text.

If you go to Store Settings > SEO Links & Text then you will the various options available to you:

For each link, there is a short and long version. The short version is used in cases where lots of links are shown together (e.g in a list of artists), where space is limited, or where it would be otherwise inappropriate to display lots of text in the links. Also please note that these settings do not affect all links on your website, the changes affect the pages which are most important to the search engines (Product pages, lists of products, home pages). In cases where custom content has been written, the links will not change.

Now, admittedly this page might be a little overwhelming at first and you may decide that this degree of flexibility simply isn’t required for your website. However, for those wishing to get stuck in you can use this section to adjust the default text used for common links to products, artists, tags, searches and categories. You can also customise the alt text used on product images (NB this is the text that is displayed to users who either choose, or are unable, to display images in their browser).

The text used in links, and the alt text of images are not only important for users, they are also used by search engines to help identify the content and value of your pages. A link to an artist page with the text “Monet framed prints” more accurately describes the content than a link with the text “Monet”. This example may be appropriate if you wish to target users searching for “Monet framed prints”.

WARNING!

Search engines regard links with great importance, but you can be penalised if you do not use them carefully. Two things you should be careful to avoid are a) ‘stuffing’ too many keywords into your links, and b) using keywords that do not relate to the target page; in both cases, search engines become suspicious. Therefore, the new tools should really be used with caution and consideration. They are likely to have high value is used in a focussed manner as part of your overall keyword strategy. If abused though, these tools could lead to your website being considered overtly ‘spammy’, leading to black-listing as a worst case scenario.

Some examples:

Setting name	Example value	Example output
Tag/search link	[term] prints	landscape prints
Category link	[categoryName] canvases	abstract canvases
Product link	[title] by [artistName]	Hunters in the Snow by Pieter the Elder Bruegel

Title Tag Best Practices – A 10 Step Guide

2009-01-14T15:08:00.007Z

Your title tag is the text that appears in the very top of your browser when looking at a web page.

The page title tag is a very strong indicator to search engines about what the topic of a page is and what search terms a page should highlight in the organic listings.

The page title is indexed by the search engines in its own right and its influence is emphasised if the keywords used within it are also used inside other key elements of the page such as the H1 tag. The title tag is read from left to right and the keywords towards the left have a higher relevance than those on the right.

The Magnolia Soft admin has several areas where you can manipulate your title tags and so we have put together the following 10 step title tag best practices primer to help clients exploit them to their fullest.

1. Move keywords to the front of your title tags

Your primary keywords and phrases should be he first words within the title tag and the title tag should be as close to 100% keyword rich as possible. It’s really simple to do but it really does work.

2. Repeat your title tag keywords the headline

Re-using the title tag of each page as the H1 header tag can be valuable from both a keyword targeting standpoint and a user experience improvement.

3. Branding is beneficial to your traffic

We believe that it is important to brand your traffic and recommend a combination of keywords and brand terms for your title tags. The ideal approach is “Keyword(s) – Brand Name”. If you use your brand name at the end of every title tag it helps searchers know where they're going and to increase return visits.

4. Try to be unique

Ensure that every page within the website has a unique title tag if possible. This will ensure maximum exposure and search engine saturation.

5. Limit length to 65 characters (including spaces) or less

Only the first 65-70 characters are shown in the various search engines so keep the titles relatively phith so you avoid the words being replaced with "...".

6. Incorporate keyword phrases

Don’t just stuff your titles with random keywords but actually include the phrases that you wish to target.

7. Use a separator

It is often useful when splitting up title tag content to use some form of separator or divider. When splitting up the brand from the descriptive, you may use the "|" symbol (e.g. the pipe bar), an arrow ">" or hyphen "-" or colon “:”. The use of such content separators also helps to change the format of the title tag and make things marginally more visually appealing when listed in the SERPs.

8. Focus on click-through rates & conversion rates

A title tag is listed in the organic search engine listings as follows:

The tag is very similar to sponsored adword text and can this have a significant impact on your click-through rates and conversion rates. If you are prominently offering things like “Sales”, “Special Offers”, “Discounts” then these emotive terms can definitely increase click rates. You may also want to consider using a call to action on title tags if you feel this is appropriate.

9. Be consistent

If you create a good formula for your title tags, keywords and product in a particular part of your website then be consistent and stick to it.

10. Monitor, review and amend

Once you’ve created your title tags, ensure that you monitor their performance and continue to review positive and negative progress. Keep making small amends and fine tuning as the search engine algorithms are always changing and you need to keep on top of things.

Meta Description Best Practices – A 6 Step Guide

2009-01-14T15:05:00.008Z

Your meta descriptions act as a summary of the content for each of your individual web pages. Meta descriptions are an effective tool for keyword promotion and help the search engine spiders to document what the website is about. Years ago, your meta data was extremely important for ensuring high search listings but over the years the relevance here has been massively reduced. Instead, meta descriptions are now important for ensuring high click through rates as the search engine results pages (SERPs) display this text as part of your listing.

Through the Magnolia Soft Admin you can manipulate quite a lot of your meta descriptions using the following form found in Settings > Search Engine Optimisation:

Therefore, it’s important that you consider the following best practices for writing effective meta descriptions:

1. Keep your Meta Descriptions short

Google currently displays up to 160 characters, Yahoo! displays up to 165, and MSN will display over 200. Any descriptions over these various limits will be cut-off by the search engines and replaced with “…”.

2. Incorporate a call-to-action

Your Meta Description can often benefit from a strong call-to-action along with the benefits of your product or service. A call-to-action encourages users to click on your link and ensures they understand exactly what you expect them to do when they reach your landing page. Some call-to-action phrases are Buy, Sell, Order, Browse, Sign up and Get a Quote.

3. Incorporate your primary keywords

The search engines will put keyword text in bold if the meta description contains instances of the searched for keyword. Make sure that your meta descriptions incorporate your target keywords. This can have a significant impact on click through rates (CTRs).

4. Write Unique Meta Descriptions

Just like your title tags, make sure that each meta description is unique and accurately reflects the page content. The search engines analyze each page of your site, so optimise each page according to its content.

5. Be informative and honest

Accurately describe your page content and be as honest as you can be. Don’t try to write a 160-character advertisement or overly ‘sex-up’ your content. And remember you don’t just want traffic per se, you want focussed targeted traffic with a high likelihood of buying.

6. Be careful with repetition

As with most aspects of your website, the search engines are keen to filter out spammy websites that abuse the use of keywords to try and gain higher rankings. Too much repetition will now hurt you rather than help you. To manage this risk, never insert the same word twice in a row in this tag, even if you're using different variations. It is advisable to use the same word in different phrases of your meta description but never use that word more than three or four times within the tag, even if you're using different variations of it.

Getting more traffic for new websites

2009-01-14T15:03:00.007Z

When running an online art and image website, one aspect of the online business process that always requires attention is driving more traffic to your site. There is a very simple correlation between More traffic equalling More Sales. So what can you do?

1. Research … Research … Research

The web makes searching for competitor information and keywords a quick and easy process and there are plenty of tools you can use. You can also have a look at your most popular keywords on Google Analytics (all our clients are set-up with this account so the information is readily available) and think of how you can maximise those keywords in the copywriting content of your website or in offline marketing material. NB We’ve recently had a client launch a website with a high degree of original written content, text and articles and it has been staggering to track how quickly it has risen up the search engine rankings. This has proven to us that you can’t spend too much time writing original articles, product and service description or news items. Finally, other obvious things to check out your closest competitor’s and evaluate their product offering, geographical location, marketing communications and price. Identify your primary advantages and structure your keywords and content to help differentiate yourselves from the competition.

2. Link Building

By linking your website to other websites (especially those within your industry sector) you can increase your site popularity and therefore your positioning on popular search engines. If you are associated with any governing bodies or associations you can link yourself to these sites to add credibility as well as increasing page rank. Type the following command (link:www.competitor-website-address.com) into the search engines to see who your competitors are linking to and register with those sites if appropriate. And there are a whole host of free directories out there that you can submit to. The value of these links may certainly be questioned but overall we still think they are a really positive thing to get involved with; especially if you are consistently targetting a very focussed number of keywords across all directories.

3. Utilise Free Web Tools

There are LOTS of free web tools available to improve your search engine ranking as well as measuring web traffic. We’ve listed some before - SEO TIPS AND ADVICE - If your business lends itself to local trade, you can register with Google’s Local Business Centre which will help you reach customers via Google maps and web search. Google’s web master tools can help you understand how your website interacts with Google allowing you to address issues and improve site performance. Google Analytics is a free tool to help you track traffic to your site from geographical region to identifying which online source your traffic is streaming from.

SEO Improvements

2008-12-12T09:57:00.003Z

Today we released some SEO-targetted updates to all Magnolia Box stores. We continually make tweaks to the platform, but today's update is large enough for us to shout about. In essence, what we have tried to do is to stop spiders indexing those pages that are of either of "low value" - in other words, pages that do not add anything useful or unique to the list of pages that are shown in, say, Google. By attempting to control the flow of so-called "link juice" through the site more effectively, any given page's "value" or page rank is concentrated on just the useful and relevant pages, and not wasted on pages that don't really matter. This helps search engines in several ways:

When faced with a given user's query, it makes it much easier for the search engine to decide which one of your 20-30 similar-looking pages it should direct the user to...
...and this one page benefits since its page rank is no longer split across those 20-30 other pages.
Spiders can crawl your site more efficiently, which is good for us and good for them.

An upshot of this is that you may see the number of your indexed pages in search engines actually go down. Do not panic; this is not a bad thing. We are not stopping search engines from seeing your any of your key pages, and we are not making any heavy-handed changes. We feel is it best to avoid lots of simultaneous or wide-ranging updates when it comes to SEO as it makes it harder to analyse their effect. We constantly monitor the SEO performance of our sites and this is just another step in our on-going efforts to give all our clients the best possible help in ranking well in all the major search engines.

Finding art gifts is fun with Cooliris

2008-12-04T12:19:00.007Z

The Cooliris 3D gallery offers a fun and easy way to browse our extensive art catalogues. With a focus on the images, it may just help you find a Christmas gift for someone special.

Getting started is easy:

Download and install the Cooliris plugin
Browse or search for products, you can try the Bestsellers on Bridgeman Art on Demand
Click on "Start Slideshow" located near the top right of the page

See our gift ideas for him, for her, or for parents. If you know what you want, then a search is the way to go.

Our flexible pricing model for art on demand

2008-11-21T16:41:00.005Z

Background

We recently introduced a new system for store owners to price their products and imagery on the MagnoliaSoft platform. Many different store owners, publishers and manufacturers use our platform, and we have discovered that there is no common consensus in how product prices are calculated. Whilst we would love all our clients to adopt the same pricing model, we recognise that this is either impractical or just plain impossible for many.

When we first started out, it was convenient to price art on demand products separately to prepublished images or originals, and we used "one print option = one price". In other words, for a canvas of a certain size, with a certain type of wrapped edged/gloss finish/etc., there was a set price of £X. Although this was sufficient for a while, this method does have a few major drawbacks, such as: all canvases of a certain type/size were the same price no matter what image was printed on it; and if you happened to sell more than a handful of sizes, media and frames, it meant you had to price up many hundreds of possible combinations.

The new model

The new pricing model works by allowing the price of any image on any print option to be the sum of the prices of all its parts.

Any item in one of our stores is made up of the following parts:

Media type - canvas, art paper
Frame or canvas wrap type
Selected size
Mount
Glaze - perspex or glass on framed prints, for example
Finish - such as matt, gloss, and so on.
Overall print option
Image itself

(There are other factors, such as special effects, taxes, voucher codes, price adjustments, and so on, but let's keep things reasonably simple!)

We call items 1-6 the print components and item 7 is the print option, a particular combination of the print components 1-6.

The original model, then, was just setting the print option price. With the new pricing mode, each of 1-8 above has an individual price, and the total price for any given image with any given print option is calculated by adding them all together.

Where things can get particularly useful/complicated is that for each of the print components 1-6 the price is based on either/both a fixed price or a per-area price (per perimeter in the case of frame/wraps).

Let's take some made-up prices for canvases as an example: up to 30cm²: Fixed price of £10, per-area price of £0.50 up to 60cm²: Fixed price of £10, per-area price of £0.25 per cm2 over 60cm²: Fixed price of £10, per-area price of £0.00

If the product was 40cm², then the price for the canvas part of the product would be: £10 + (£0.25*40) = £20.

Remember that this exact same method of pricing is used for each separate print component, so this £20 will be added to a similarly calculated price for the mount, the glaze, and so on. On top of this, any print option cost (no.7) and the price of the image (no.8) are also added to make the grand total.

And for any given product, this depth of pricing detail is available for its cost price, its trade price, its SRP as well as its actual selling price on the store.

Woah that's complicated!

There's no doubt that it can be, especially when you bring in discounts and price restrictions based on minimum margins.

However, you do not have to price every item (1-8) separately. Since the overall price is calculated by adding them all together, setting any item to £0 effectively removes it from pricing model and simplifies the whole process. For example, our original pricing method (pricing the print option only) is exactly the same as setting all the print components and image prices to £0.

In summary then...

Each print component ("canvas", "gallery wrap", etc.) can have its own price.
Each print component can use stepped pricing/breakpoints, but they do not have to.
For each step/breakpoint, you can define both a fixed price and a per-m² price.
The number of breakpoints and where these breakpoints occur do not need to be the same for each print component.
Each print component can just be priced at £0 if needed.
All these prices are added together to calculate the cost/trade/selling/SRP prices.

The only restriction (allow us one, at least) is that it is the printer who decides no whether to use stepped pricing and where the breakpoints are. Anyone who sells this print component on their store must also price according to these steps. Of course the store owner can decide to price all steps all the same, but what they can't do is change where the breakpoints are, or add more steps.

New photographic images available from Jupiterimages print website

2008-09-30T09:22:00.004+01:00

Magnolia Box have recently partnered with Jupiterimages to launch a print on demand website using a special selection of their exclusive photographic images. These photographs are now available for the first time as a range of print, framed print or canvas options. In addition, the collection is also available to existing Magnolia Soft clients that wish to offer these images for sale via their own Art on Demand websites. Please contact the Magnolia Box team for further information.

Magnolia Box declares Warhol (again!)

2008-09-30T09:12:00.004+01:00

We've recently supported The Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre with their latest Andy Warhol exhibition Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms which runs from 7 October 2008 - 18 January 2009. This is the second major Warhol exhibition we've been involved after the supporting the National Portraits Pop Art Portraits show last year. The Hayward exhibition features one of our e-commerce kiosks in their gallery shop and is supported by an Art on Demand website offering a range of Warhol prints for a limited time only. If you want some exclusive Warhol art on demand prints then you can buy here.

Easily combine and compress (minify) JavaScript and CSS in Coldfusion

2008-07-04T16:11:00.010+01:00

Introducing Combine.cfc. A project designed to speed up your website!

The problem

Adding lots of JavaScript and CSS to your website can have a detrimental effect on its performance.

Combine.cfc is an open source project I have released to help address this problem.

The solution

Combine.cfc can compress (minify) multiple JavaScript or CSS files into single requests.

Change this:

<script src='file1.js' type='text/javascript'></script>
<script src='file2.js' type='text/javascript'></script>

To this:

<script src='combine.cfm?files=file1.js,file2.js' type='text/javascript'></script>

Why?

The CSS and JavaScript content is minified, removing redundancy (comments, white space, etc). This keeps the bandwidth to a minimum.
You reduce the overhead of excessive HTTP requests.
You can be as liberal as you like with your comments and white space, it will all be stripped from the final output.
You can continue to separate your code into individual files, for ease of maintenance/development/version control and general developer well-being and sanity!

For more information, and to download the code, visit the Combine.cfc project page.

Tips on keyword tags and tagging

2008-07-01T12:27:00.004+01:00

As well as adding descriptive narratives to your images, categories, subjects and product groups it has also proven highly beneficial to add as many accurate keyword tags as possible to each product in your catalogue. These tags create new page unique pages in the search engines featuring all of the images that are similarly tagged with the same term. You can also change the way in which the headings for this tagged-page are entered into the search engine using the SEO settings available in your admin. All of which helps to make tags a very useful SEO tool and one which is also very HELPFUL for people wishing find your to relevant content.

When it comes to keyword tagging the Magnolia Soft search engine is optimised for speed and designed to recognise conventional plurals. For example, if you’ve added “dog” there’s no need to add “dogs” (and vice versa) when performing a search. This also applies to verbs, e.g. a search for "walk" will also find images tagged with "walking".

However, if you are searching for “octopus” then you wouldn’t also get the word “octopi”. Therefore, when tagging with keywords it is often best if in any doubt to also add the plural for good measure.

As potential customers use a number of different techniques for searching, it’s also advisable to try and include as many relevant words as possible; some of which may have the same meaning. For example, if you add “mother” you would also be advised to add “mum”.

As websites are international it is also worth considering both UK and US variations of meaning, so in the example above, you should probably also add the term “mom”. The same applies to differences in spelling, for example “colour” (the correct version) and “color” (the US version!)

Finally, I came across the following checklist of tips that is very useful to consider when applying keywords to images:

Literal: Simply describe what you can see - e.g. boy, girl, children, beach, sun, sand, sky, car, shadow.

Attributes: Attributes of the objects in the image - e.g. happy, smiling, walking, blue, young, old.

Location: That may be specific - e.g. The White House, Washington DC, USA; or it could be more generic - e.g. office, school, home.

Interaction: What’s happening in the image - chasing, playing, moving, touching, shouting, flying.

Concepts: Describe the concepts that the image evokes - think around the subject and don’t be afraid use concept keywords such as heat, power, happiness, strength, humour, teamwork, tranquillity etc.

Broad subjects: It’s amazing how many travel images we have without the word “travel” as a keyword. Describe the broad subject areas the image fits under such as lifestyle, travel, sport and business.

Techniques: Look at the photographic aspect of the image, e.g. predominant colours or shapes, black and white, grainy, blurred, digital manipulation.

In summary, it is always worth taking the time thinking carefully about your keywording to ensure that you do more than simply describing what you can see. Equally, it is very important that you do not use words that have no relevance to the image being described. We are always trying to help our browsers and generate focussed potential buyers, as these are the ones most likely to convert into genuine customers.

Hiring an SEO consultant

2008-07-01T12:23:00.004+01:00

Several clients have recently asked our opinion about hiring a third party SEO to help improve the visibility of their website.

Over the past 6+ years I’ve used many different third party SEO’s and the results have almost always been extremely disappointing (and expensive). Whilst there are undoubtedly excellent consultants and agencies out there it’s almost impossible to differentiate between those that will generate great results and those that will just burn through your cash.

In my experience SEO agencies are typically looking for between £500 and £1,500 per month to manage your SEO campaign. When put in the context of your overall technology spending this is a huge investment. What is more, your can easily perform a huge amount of this work directly for yourself as this post confirms:

http://www.promo-ho.com/2008/06/seo-guide-for-rest-of-us.html

This advice is fairly straightforward but it’s still a useful starting point for those tackling the same issues. The key things that I would highlight are the need for quality inbound links and original content (please see my earlier post - Original text is the best SEO technique you aren’t currently using)

For their part, the Big G has also published the following advice on the matter which provides plenty of sound advice to help prevent you being ripped off:

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291