There’s also a questionable enhancement, however…

Did you notice that images on some Web sites appear darker than before or when viewing with a different browser? For example, go to istockphoto.com and you’ll see that all of their images are darker now, when viewing with Firefox 3.5.

My coder, Pat Heard, educated me on this new “feature.” I was asking him because the face image in the footer of MyGermanCity.com appeared darker. Pat pointed me to a thread in the Mozilla forums that provides a fix.

What I did, however, was I simply opened up the image in Adobe Fireworks, re-saved it and voila — the image now appears correctly again.

Why or when do images appear darker in FF 3.5? I’m not completely sure, but my guess is when you save images with an ICC profile or in an CMYK instead of RGB color set.

—Marcus Hochstadt

If you’re now wondering (like I was) what the heck CMS means and for what it should be good… outspoken it means Content Management System, and it can be useful for organizing and managing content that you publish on the Web. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_system

There are free or open source and paid content management systems available.

Up to that point, I was using Macromedia/Adobe Dreamweaver for my websites (except for this very blog). But when Daniel and I were talking about the future of my Blue Baby, MyGermanCity.com, a travel related content-rich website, and the plans I have with it in terms of features and number of pages, his reaction was: “You need a CMS!”

“CMS?” I asked.

“CMS,” he said. He then went on and explained what CMS means, what it is, does, and the advantages — and possible disatvantages — of using one.

It made sense to me so I went ahead and researched both costly and open source top content management systems. One tool I used was the CMSMatrix.org, although their database was — and still is — partially outdated. (Showing WordPress version 2.2.1 when the current version was 2.6? That’s a huge difference.)

I also went to OpenSourceCMS.com, but take it with a grain of salt since feedback is marbled by spammy comments of users and partners or owners of the respective software.

Additionally, there were at least 40 reviews and reports whose URLs I purged; though I’m sure you’ll find them using Google’s powerful search engine. ;-)

This entire research (plus testing, and testing, and testing…) took me almost three months.

Which content management systems did I test?

In alphabetical order:

• Bitrix Site Manager (7.0)
• Drupal (5.10 & 6.4)
• e107 (0.7 — six years old and still no version 1?)
• ExpressionEngine (1.6.5)
• eZ Publish (4.0)
• Joomla! (1.5.7)
• Mambo (4.6.5)
• MovableType (4.2), and…
• WordPress (2.6)

There were a few more, but due to the fact that I removed them from the test domain within a few minutes — or did not even bother installing them due to detailed reviews — I avoid mentioning them here.

Daniel also mentioned the name CMS400. At that time, the company behind this software, Ektron, did not provide prices on its website (hmm…). And when I contacted an Ektron representative, all the person did was ask questions… still no price.

End of conversation.

At the time of this writing, Ektron does provide prices on its website, starting at a whopping $5,000 per URL for the Standard Edition. But what I would have needed would have been the Professional Edition for which it says, “Ask your sales person for details.”

Sure…

You can see that I was not necessarily after a free or open source content management system. No CMS is “for free.” You always spend time (= money) and energy figuring everything out and familiarizing yourself with it. Or you have someone else do it for you, in which case you spend money, too.

Of course, I could have outsourced this task. The thing though is that I wanted to familiarize myself with it to know whether I want to work with it for the next few years, and to see which is the best or most appropriate CMS for MyGermanCity.com.

At one point I narrowed it down to Joomla! and Drupal with tendency towards Drupal. The thing was I would have spend at least $1,500 just for transitioning the existing template alone. Plus, I also needed someone for setting everything up.

What actually pushed me away from it, however, is the lack of plugin development (which they call modules).

You need to understand that modules are being developed for certain main Drupal releases (ex., 5 or 6) since the main Drupal versions are backward INcompatibel. Now, there were a couple modules that I needed upfront or soon, but they were not available for version 6. So I would have been forced to use Drupal 5 instead. Not that bad, perhaps, but what if I want or have to upgrade from 5 to 6?

That’s a huge task, they say.

This got me to remove both Drupal 5 & 6 from the test domain.

OK, then I was ready to use Joomla!.

Gosh, what a software… really impressive, speaking of customizability and features available right from the start! I even was about to fall in love with it (buy me a t-shirt!), but then…

Writing a simple content page, publishing it, and trying to access it on the Web (using the URL alias, not the ugly dynamic URL), displayed a 404 error… WTF?

The thing was this: If you do not assign a page to a left or right hand navigation bar, a Category, or a Section, you canNOT see the page on the Web using the pretty or search engine friendly URL!

End of discussion. What a pity, but Joomla! was removed from the server within a minute.

Another possible CMS was the Bitrix Site Manger. Again, it does have a cost upfront, but this can be compensated by the fact that most tools are already included. This may save you a lot of time later on.

As an example, one developer I got in contact with said that Drupal can do the same things Bitrix Site Manager does. The difference in terms of cost?

Almost non-existent.

I would have paid a similar amount of money for either CMS. The Bitrix Site Manager as it’s being shipped plus transitioning the theme: up to $3,000 altogether. Letting a developer set up Drupal, hand-code and/or customize certain modules, and have another or the same developer transfer the existing XHTML/CSS template to Drupal: up to $3,000 altogether.

Someone may argue that the Bitrix Site Manager does have a whole bunch of features built-in — tools one would need to develop for a Drupal powered site first. Plus, the assurance that Bitrix will maintain and improve those tools further since they’re part of the whole package, whereas one may need to hire a developer for maintaining and improving a Drupal powered site.

So again, both may sum up to an equal amount of time/money.

The thing that made me uninstall the Bitrix Site Manager was that file names are supposed to end in .php. They did say that it should work without the .php, but my testing consistently displayed nothing but error messages.

Another point was that this software is fairly complex (installation consists of thousands of files and folders), and, again, the need of someone to convert the existing site template to the Bitrix Site Manager would likely amount to up to $1,500 (which one may pay for a new but not for transitioning an existing custom template).

Next station was ExpressionEngine, which was recommended by the gentleman who created MyGermanCity.com’s site template — a coder extraordinaire, Pat Heard.

I can code HTML and CSS on my own, but Pat does it better, he does it in lightening speed, and he’s an expert in JavaScript.

If you’re ever in need of a first-class coder — one who exceeds your expectations — I highly recommend Pat Heard of fullahead.org. Let me warn you though… he’s usually booked out for weeks if not months.

Now, he did not only recommend EE, he also gave me a very important tip:

The choice of CMS is highly personal. Usually, once someone has invested the time to learn WordPress, TextPattern, Joomla, etc., they’ll swear up and down that it’s the best out there.

His comment set me up brilliantly. It made me look beyond the reviews of “raving fans.” ;-)

Back to ExpressionEngine…

The backend looked promising. Somehow, I felt comfortable right from the start. Plus, they promote their excellent forum and staff. Sounds good. They further promise to be extremely flexible. Also good. But then…

You CAN customize the layout to your hearts content. The downside, though, is that it affects the URL structure of your site!

As a side note: You can, somehow, program the software (or add something to the .htaccess file) to remove those template related words from URLs, but they strongly recommend you to not do that. “Extremely flexible?”

The other CMSs also just didn’t make it. e107 is too plain and doesn’t meet my needs; eZ Publish was a bit difficult to get to work, plus I couldn’t figure out how to do certain tasks; and Mambo — I dismissed that one, somehow… (doesn’t it lack development power now that some of Mambo’s previous core developers are in on developing Joomla!?).

That was the point where the thought of using WordPress as a content management system started to grow. But before that… “let me give MovableType a chance”.

First off, they consistently announce which websites use their software, and I don’t care who is using what. What interests me is what a software can do for me and my visitors, and its momentum in terms of development.

Long story short, what got me uninstall MovableType were mainly two things:

1) Somehow, it stands on its own. URLs with underscores?? And you have to be a registered user to enable things such as showing your own image next to your own comment?

2) To me it seems as though their marketing and vision is blurred and fuzzy. One day they decide to have this price; another day they decide to release MovableType as open source — with limited features over MovableType Pro. Yet another day they decide to remove those limitations and have the open source version match exactly the Pro version. Yet another day they change the price structure, again.

What about consistency and a clear plan?

Another thing that underscores my thesis is that their staff often writes mt.com or mt.org instead of movabletype.com or movabletype.org. Laziness (or fuzziness) can lead to strange destinations… ;-)

Enough said; on to WordPress.

But can it do what I need it to do?

I quickly realized that it can, and much more.

• Custom page templates without altering the URL.
• Custom breadcrumbs navigation (and many more custom fields) by utilizing the Custom Fields options when creating pages or posts.
• Customize the file name structure to your heart’s content. You could even add any file extension to it, if you wish.
• Compared to other CMSs, to create a WordPress template is very easy and pretty straight forward. In other words, the transition from a static XHTML/CSS template to a WordPress template was done within a few hours — by myself, a PHP newbie.
• The momentum and professionalism in terms of development and improvement is unmatched. Really impressive. New version after new version; plus, plugins are consistently developed and improved. And if not, it should be comparably simple to create a new custom plugin or alter an existing one — or to find someone who can alter or create and maintain one for a reasonable price.
• WordPress with its array of plugins may save you thousands of dollars in comparison to certain other content management systems.

That’s about my decision of using WordPress as a content management system for a content-rich website. :-)

—Marcus Hochstadt

Thank you, Otto, your 2.7 Comments Enhancements instructions were a big help. :-)

—Marcus Hochstadt

You already know how important keywords are in your copy. That almost goes without saying at this point. ;-) And you should put the most effort in your Web site development with the use of keywords. It’s not something to ever neglect. This is vital!

You may have already been told that it is ideal to have your main keyword within your URL. However, that’s not always possible at this late date. You might already have your URL and can’t go to the trouble of changing it.

But there are things you can do now to make your Web page better optimized. And you should take each page and treat it as a separate entity. I’ll explain…

The first trick here is to make good use of title tags. You do this by having each page with the targeted keyword appearing in the title of the page. If the entire Web site is about printers, then, depending on your market & keyword research results, most Web page files probably start with or contain the keyword printers. You can name them printershp.html and printerscanon.html and the like. I’ll bet the search engines will like this. ;-)

Another important point is to take care in using Header tags. You will find that most SEO people will recommend only having one single H1 tag per page that contains the main keyword. Then your other H2 and H3 tags should have within them the secondary keywords.

You could consider this a sort of puzzle game, listing out all the main keywords, the secondary keywords and then working out where to put them. The content will have to read correctly and be of high quality, of course.

These are changes you can easily make to optimize your Web site. Get those keywords in there where the search engines can find them. Use Headers and Titles intelligently.

You want those search engines liking your site, for when they do, you get indexed. And when you get indexed, you will likely show up higher and higher in the results when folks search for your product or service.

All these recommendations are geared to make you more successful with your site. I like to see my friends make more money and increase profits!

—Marcus Hochstadt

No, that’s not empty space. That’s just plain dead air. Dead air is bad. Empty space is good!

There are articles out there on the Internet that describe how to use empty space on your Web site. And the reason they are there is because they contain some valuable data… data you should have when working out the design of your Web pages.

For example, if you want to maximize the headlines on your site, you can use empty space below them or above them. This will make the headlines stand out. And that’s what you want… for them to be noticeable. (Headlines are what pulls the reader “in.”)

You want the font you choose to be easily read, but did you know that you could make it easier to read if you leave some empty space around the text? Don’t fill in that space with a bunch of pictures, graphics and the like. Let it go! :O)

Empty space is actually eye catching. It is like some music that can make you feel the emotion of the creativity.

Have you ever listened to a song where the music suddenly stops and you think the piece is over – then it starts up again with some powerful melody? It’s very effective! The music can even sound louder and more electric as a result.

The same goes for a Web site with text on it. It also applies to ad designs or any design.

The message or offer stands out when surrounded by empty space – or white space you could call it. It draws the eye in to the important part of the page.

If you think just enlarging an image of a graphic will work, well, you might be right. But it can make your page seem amateurish or rough. You may think that will grab someone’s attention… and it very well might. But to just draw the attention to the image with empty space can be even more effective.

The central focus is what you want people to see. You want their attention pulled to your message. And this focus can be made to catch the attention by the use of space. You don’t have to fill every blank spot with images or text. Let them go! :O)

Everything on your page should enhance the main message you are trying to get across. If you have too much information, it can be distracting. If you are selling a product, rather than stuff your Web site full of data, you could possibly make it available in a newsletter or a free report.

Although there are no “set in stone” rules about empty space on a Web page, just use the rule of thumb that you should leave about one fourth of your page empty, letting the main parts stand out.

Keeping your Web site uncluttered and focusing attention on your message will make your site professional and attractive. Your visitors will be impressed… and stay and browse.

It’s not always what you fill the space with but how you don’t fill the space that makes the difference.

. . .

And you? How did and/or do you feel about the empty space on my blog recently? ;-)

—Marcus Hochstadt

What is it that gets visitors to your Web site to stay there, browsing, looking and buying? Is it the design? Is it the layout? No, it’s the CONTENT. The written content keeps your visitors on your site and viewing your pages.

What causes your visitors to purchase from you? The content. They read, they read some more, they find good points that creates enough interest for them to purchase.

Let’s imagine you go to a Web site and the design is wonderful. Fancy, creative graphics. It really wows you. But the content is boring, or hard to understand, or it simply doesn’t capture your interest. Will you be encouraged to buy from them?

Another important question: Will you come back? It’s extremely doubtful. Maybe you’ll go back to get that wow effect from the design again, but not because of the content. Right?

On the other hand, if you go to a site that provides excellent content (like articles or informational text) you will likely bookmark that page. You will probably share that site with others.

Maybe this page with fantastic content has just a basic design, or an ugly default WordPress template. But you still bookmark and share it. You are likely to return for a visit. And this is because there is content that is more than interesting to read and that holds your attention.

Finding a template for a Web page should be a fast and painless process. Google doesn’t care about your design, they only care about the written content and the human behavior based on that content.

My opinion is that folks spend too much time on the design of their site, modifying the template, etc… way too much time. They miss the boat in this regard. What they should concentrate on is having great content that captures interest and encourages people to return.

High quality content goes a long way to getting your visitors to come and stay. You will attract many more visitors through the search engines. You will SELL your product because of that.

Obviously, the above wouldn’t necessarily apply to those selling templates or promoting design services… ;-)

And I can’t say I am completely innocent when it’s come to getting carried away sometimes with the design. But I am ridding myself of that compulsion step by step!

—Marcus Hochstadt

What I mean is when you know how to code (html, css, that sort of thing) and you do it correctly, the Firefox browser will display your code just the way you intended. Whereas when you deal with Internet Explorer’s and Safari’s idiosyncrasies, it can give you headaches as to why they behave to strangely.

Sorry, Safari enthusiasts, but how come a page displays and a video plays correctly in Firefox, IE, Mozilla, Opera and Netscape, but not so in Safari? I don’t get it…

Not only that though, Firefox is fast, too. In fact, it was faster than IE and now they made it even faster.

I downloaded Firefox 3 last night. Already after browsing a couple sites I discovered how fast it has become. Internet Explorer is now up to 20 times slower!

I know that 73% of my visitors are Firefox users. Therefore, I encourage you to download the newest version 3 from www.mozilla.com or the World Record page they’ve set up…

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

On that World Record page, you can see how many downloads where in which country.

What amazes (but not surprises) me is the numbers of Germany. Out of more than 8 Million downloads worldwide, there where almost (or, by now, probably more than) 1 Million downloads in Germany alone and more than 4 Million downloads in Europe, making Germany the #2 country and Europe the #1 continent in terms of downloads.

Anybody still concerned about the German and/or European Internet market? ;-)

—Marcus Hochstadt

Whether you link to another page on your own site or to an external one, it is a neat way to “help” your visitors navigating through the Web, and to not lose them when linking to external sites.

Without further ado, here’s what link targets are and how you can use them to your advantage in your Internet business endeavors…

NOTE: You may see curly quotes below due to a certain setting in my WordPress installation. Make sure you always use plain quotes in coding. Using curly quotes in HTML often results in strange symbols in other people’s browsers.

target=”_blank”
target=”_self”
target=”_top”
target=”_parent” -and-

target=”anything”

As an example…

<a href=”http://www.domain.com/” target=”_blank”>Link text</a>

Is old school HTML and was developed for when you use frame sets on your page. It’s commonly used in HTML nowadays and tells the browser where exactly should that other content be displayed when someone clicks on the link.

In other words, when you use the target=”_blank” it’s going to open in a new browser window. Whereas when you use any other word (and not the underscore at the beginning,) like target=”new” it will target the browser window that has been “tagged” with the title “new”. This is not necessarily a new browser window though!

For instance, you have plenty of photos on your site. You show them as thumbnails on your pages. When someone clicks on them, you want the larger version of that thumbnail image to open in a new browser window.

Now, to avoid that your visitor has 50+ windows open just from browsing your site and looking at the countless images you offer, you can “tag” that new browser window specifically and individually. Meaning, if you want all those large images open in the same new browser window then use target=”photo”. Then all other large photos will appear in the window that you tagged with “photo”. (The word ‘photo’ is just an example; you can use any other word. Just make sure the target attribute is without the underscore at the beginning, in this particular case.)

On the other hand, in cases where you rather want a completely new browser window to open you shall use the target=”_blank” though. For example, you use affiliate links and want them to open in a completely new window, and you want that new window to open up right in front of your visitor’s eyes. That way, you won’t loose your visitor, leaving your Web site underneath the new window. (The target=”anything” may appear underneath the current window.)

By the way, when going through my Internet business blog, you’ll see that I often use target=”external”.

—Marcus Hochstadt

I’d like to implement a plugin that sends e-mail notifications (or follow-up messages) to those commented on a blog article. Anyone knows of a plugin that works like a charm? Instead of testing and headaches, I’m more after using the collective wisdom of my wonderful readership as for which works best. :-)

Opinions and experiences, anyone? Which e-mail announcement or e-mail follow-up WordPress plugin would you recommend to your best friend?

Submit your findings, experiences and knowledge by posting a comment to this post.

Thanks in advance!

—Marcus Hochstadt

It’s not perfect yet though. Some spots are not behaving and looking the way I want.

I’ll play around with it in the next couple days (I like to play with/on code ;-), so don’t be surprised (or shocked?) when it looks a bit differently from today; although it shall not change that much.

If at all, your browsing experience will improve. :-)

—Marcus Hochstadt

After checking and looking and scratching my head a couple times, I remembered I created a new sub-domain with the same title of my RSS feed. This caused my feed to disappear.

It’s all working now again so feel free to subscribe. :-)

This brings back memories of my almost daily discoveries…

Folks, I encourage you to not only check your site at least one per day but also your RSS feed. I see so many sites and blogs that display an MySQL database or a WordPress error. Strange symbols or lines of code, some of them even come from the Webhost.

It can have many reasons, sure. Just make sure to know how your blog is doing and if it’s in good shape.

If you don’t have the time nor the inclination to perform this task yourself, why not hire someone doing it for you? The intelligence factor necessary to perform this kind of task is fairly low, so is the hourly rate. :-)

—Marcus Hochstadt

P.S. Now I still have to figure out what to do so the feed will be published in a sub-domain instead of a sub-folder. (I.e., instead of domain.com/feed to feed.domain.com.) Any ideas?

It was one of the very first plugins I enabled when I launched this blog. We have the ability to control and eliminate spam, therefore I saw and still see no reason why outgoing links are assigned with the “nofollow” tag.

Yes, it is a time consuming process to get rid of all the spam and delete spammy link-to URLs. Up to this point it is worth the time.

So again, when you comment on my blog I’m going to follow; provided your comment is in “good shape.”

That’s the way it should be. My 2 cents anyway.

—Marcus Hochstadt

#1 – Splash or “Welcome” pages

Imagine you clicked through and arrive at a home page with a large image. Nothing else, just a large image. Perhaps even good looking, yet what you gonna do? Looking? Clicking? Clicking! But where? No text, no visible link.

Even if there is an “Enter here” link, do you click to enter? You’re already there, why enter?

Solution? Remove (or decrease) the image and provide real content (in text form) and easily recognizable links. Ask your visitor what you want them to do in an easy to understand format.

#2 – Flashy Banner Ads

Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable virtual real estate.

Instead, provide content of high quality. If you’re in affiliate marketing, weave the links into your content and mark them as your personal recommendations. Don’t be pushy. Let your reader want to buy; it makes all the difference.

#3 – Complicated 3-fold Flash or JavaScript navigation

You’re trying to click through to another page on the site. They provide a hyper flashy navigation menu that may look great at the graphic designer desktop. But does average Joe know where or how to click through that graphical mumbo jumbo forest jungle?

Do you think it is useful to have the navigation text change its weight when someone hovers with the mouse over it and it starts to flicker?

Yup, I hear you saying “But *I* love how it looks; it might not pass usability test, but it’s MY site and *I* love it.”

Well, I thought you want to attract visitors and have them coming back over and over again. Do you think they will?

Perhaps (just perhaps) you’re better off providing a simple and very straightforward navigation structure so that even a 5 year old knows how to go from point A to point B.

Or in other words, avoid amateurish looking fancy stuff, complicated Flash menus, or multi-tiered JavaScript dropdown menus. Your visitor may leave your site instantaneously when they can’t figure out how to navigate.

#4 – It takes 50+ seconds to load a page

Do you use JavaScripts and external image references excessively? Does the user have to wait 50+ seconds until s/he sees the actual content? You want them to fall asleep? Like, “Go grab a cup of coffee and come back later, until I’m finished loading all that tracking stuff, and until those external affiliate banner JavaScript links are loaded so I can pitch you.”

That is, s/he’ll certainly click the Back button faster than you can watch it happening. (Those records where they stayed “0 seconds” on your site.)

#5 – Background Music

I can imagine you want to entertain your visitor or make their stay more desirable. But are you really sure they have the same taste you do? You think they’re in the same mood you are?

At least you should offer a huge, easily to recognize STOP button front and center of their eyes so they don’t have to annoyingly unplug the speakers.

–

Bottom line? Focus on simplicity. Excessively use of fancy, distracting stuff pushes your visitor away from your Most Wanted Response. Focus on what you want you visitor to do. Use a clean, light layout. Offer audio and video, yes, but give your visitor tools to control and adjust it to their hearts content.

Do not pull them to your site. Make them WANT to stay on and come back to your site. It makes all the difference.

—Marcus Hochstadt