Dating Site Blog & SEO

So we now finally have a launch date set for Clickinlove on Friday 5th December.

On this date users will be able to complete their profiles and start messaging other members.  There may be small bugs which need ironed-out, but I am confident that most major features are working smoothly.

For the first few days however, I shall limit the search feature and the display of random photos on the front page.  This is to allow enough members to upload their photos and for the database to pad out a bit.  We have 7000 members waiting to complete their profile, so it should not take too long to get a sizeable number of profiles populated with photos.

From Friday 5th December, members will start to receive an email informing them of the site launch and how to fill out their profile and upload their photos.  I anticipate high bandwidth usage during this period.  If this persists and is a problem, then the site may need to be relocated to another faster server.

Best regards, Will

Will datingsite dating, dating site

Are you the type to get stressed when you have many things to do and consequently fail to complete your tasks?  I find it is a good idea to break everything down into small bite-sized chunks of work and then to spend a little amount of time every day chipping away at the work.  The problem is to organise the many small tasks into something manageable and easy to follow.

One such tool I use is TiddlyWiki (download it free from tiddlywiki.com).  This is basically a single web page which allows you to write entries, update your journal, create a ‘to do’ list etc.  It is very easy to use and self-contained.  You can create your page and save it to a memory stick to carry around with you.  You view and edit your page on a web browser and the functionality it provides is very impressive, considering how small it is.

For my Wiki I have a few menu items which I use regularly: Todo list, Favourite links, Journal, Appointments, and others.  The page loads quickly and you only view on the page the things you are currently interested in looking at.  It is a great portable tool that is intuitive to use and perfect for organising your small projects.

Will website_technology TiddlyWiki, wiki

Following on from earlier articles about graphic design, today I want to touch upon a concept that most people may feel is beyond them: designing the artwork for your own site.

Art is, well… an art!  However, even naturally-gifted artists need to learn the tools of their trade and this is where science plays a part.  I am assuming that, as a webmaster and hopefully a competent programmer, you have a decent ability to logically approach any subject you set your mind to learning.  Well art is no different. By learning the science behind the art, you can develop skill in knowing what colours work well with other colours; how to utilise negative space; when to use gradients; how to shade and create contours of shapes, to name but a few. By learning these techniques and teaching yourself the basics of sketching, it should soon become apparent to you that creating web images/designs is actually not beyond your ability.

Instead of searching for hours online for an image you can use (with permission from the owner of course), would it not be more fulfilling to create your own.  If you practice your art skills, you can even create the image you wish just as fast as googling and then photoshoping it.  Furthermore, by becoming proficient at Photoshop, you can scan your image and then vectorise it, allowing you to manipulate it to your heart’s content.  This is often easier than taken an exisiting image and trying to change it to fit in with what you want.

Drawing and creating artwork for your own site can be an engaging and enjoyable way to create your site and give it a unique feel.  Of course you need to practise your art and to pay attention to the subtle techniques employed by graphic designers to give your work a polished look.  Yet, by doing it, you will get better and better and eventually you will have created a great level of freedom for yourself and your web design abilities. Be brave, do some online tutorials and utilise any talent you may or may not have known you had.  Do not despair or give up if you find you lack artistic ability… as I said, a fair portion of ‘art’ is actually a science and for this you only need dedication and perseverance.  Give it a try and see if you get the taste for doing your own graphic design – just be patient.

Will website_technology art, graphic design, photoshop

It is becoming more apparent in SEO circles that site bounce rates are increasingly being used to help rank a site.  For those in the dark, the bounce rate refers to the action of visitors landing on a site’s page and effectively bouncing straight back off into the ether, without having explored the rest of your site.  If 100 visitors within a certain time-frame, e.g. one hour, viewed a page on your site and 10 of them left that page without viewing others, then your page would have a bounce rate of 10% (which is excellent).

You can see why Google might treat site bounce rate with a certain level of importance.  If your visitors can’t be bothered to stay, then this is effectively a big thumbs-down on your site… they are voting with their feet, or in this case, fingers.  Google can use this knowledge to compare how people view your site and your competitors.  The more relevant and useful your site is, the lower the bounce rate and this is exactly what Google wants to promote.  Hence, if you can maintain a lower bounce rate than your competitors, then you stand a better chance of achieving a higher Page Rank as your site is considered more relevant than that of the competition.

Will website_technology bounce rate

The Munich Christmas Markets are just around the corner and one of the biggest actually starts on Wednesday 26th November.  Tollwood is held at Theresienwiese where the Oktoberfest is held (though obviously at a different time of year) and is definitely worth visiting if you have never been before.  Not only is it very large, but it also houses many stalls within large tents, which is quite nice to shelter you from the often icy weather that greets you around this time of year.

As usual the omnipresent Xmas Market ware is on offer, the same as with most other markets around this time, but Tollwood also specialises in alternative gifts and splits from the traditional crafts to include handmade products that have a slightly less than festive feel.  If you fancy a skull-shaped candle, or a bone necklace, then Tollwood is the place to be.

There are also tents offering various types of exotic foods as well as the more common Currywurst and Pommes, half-metre hot-dogs and the like.  Gluehwein is available in abundance and there is no shortage of bar stalls to provide you with a little something to help you wash down the Xmas indulgences.

Opening times are:
Mon-Fri: 14:00 – 01:00
Sat/Sun and holiday: 11:00 – 01:00

Tollwood runs from: 26-Nov – 31-Dec-2008

On Silvester (New Years Eve) there is a big party to close the 2008 Tollwood Xmas Market.  Read more here.

Will munich Theresienwiese, Tollwood

If you plan to pay someone to design your site for you, then there are certain questions you should ask to protect yourself.  But how do you know what questions to ask and if their responses are correct?  That is a little more tricky.  You can use forums to explain your situation and seek the solutions.  Also, feel free to comment on this entry with your question and I will answer it.

The one question I would ask, is to see the web designers oldest and latest works.  Then I would look at ‘wayback machine’ to verify her/his claims to the dates.  Check the PR of the old site.  Verify XHTML compliance.  Email the owner of the site via their contact page and ask them to verify the designer was involved in creating their site.

These steps are important and become more so with the intended complexity of your site.  If you intend on having a payment system or a database, then making sure the web designer/programmer is competent is critical.  If they are not then they may take a lot longer, leave the site open to attack and charge more to fix their own errors.

On the subject of attacks, I noticed one designer promoting himself recently.  His own website was powered by Wordpress.  Now, here is a designer of websites who did not even bother to create a flagship website for himself, but instead put one up based on open source software.  He did change the design, which looked nice and professional.  However, the point is that I suspect he will create sites for other people based on this free software and he will get paid for it.  Ok, there is still work to do to make it look good and suit the customers’ needs, but using Wordpress for a customer’s site is a bad idea.  Wordpress on the whole is great but is unfortunately (because of its success) a notorious hacking target.  By putting someone’s site online and then walking away, he is leaving them with a site which in a few months or years will definitely need upgrading to protect it from the various attacks that this software invites.  A hacker could in 6 months use a commonly available script to access the customer site’s code.  

The point is that you need to be careful that your designer is not a cowboy and this is especially true if you intend to host a payment system and store customer’s details.  If in doubt, find a forum and ask questions.  If you are still lost or confused, post your question here.

Will website_technology site design, Wordpress

Look at the top Alexa rankings and check to see where Google.com is placed.  Now check out the other search engines like Windows Live, Yahoo Search, Rambler, Baidu and Yandex.  You will see them littered all over the top 100 sites on Alexa (Note: Alexa is not totally accurate, but can be used as a very, very rough guide to what is the most popular sites online).

Why is this important?  Well it is important for two reasons:

1. Google may be the biggest SE and accounts for over half of all searches, however, there are other search engines which can drive considerable traffic to your site.
2. recent research has shown that the most competitive keywords do not actually bring as much traffic as originally though.  Long-tail search terms seem to grab the majority of the traffic.

What this means is that webmasters should not spend so much time focusing on Google optimisation for competitive keywords.  By aiming for longer keyword phrases (called long-tail keywords) and optimising for other search engines, you can reduce the number of your competitors and size of competition.  This may result in increased traffic with decreased workload in getting it.

Another benefit of aiming for optimisation of other search engines is that demographics play a part and Google is not always the most popular search engine for a particular country, especially non-English speaking countries.  For example in Russia, Yandex and Rambler are the big sites for search.  They have a different set of ranking criteria to Google and whatever techniques you employ for Google.com will probably fail to work for the Russian SE’s.  By ignoring their algorithm you are effectively cutting out a target audience of many 10’s of millions.  China is another example of a massive market which Google is not penetrating too well.  Baidu is the biggest search engine there and targets the largest online nation in the world, i.e. the Chinese.  Furthermore, a very high percentage of Chinese users access the Internet via their mobile phones, which in turn brings new challenges for webmasters.

Keeping track of the changing landscape of search engines may help you find new traffic and opportunites. Do not be frightened of branching out to other languages and targeting non-English speaking countries. Also try to optimise for sites other than Google; it is wise not to place all your SEO eggs in one Google basket.

Will datingsite Baidu, Google, Rambler, Search engines, Yandex

I was just researching the benefits of trackbacks and trying to determine if I should enable them on this blog or not and I have to admit I am still not convinced of their value.  The problem lies in the way spammers attack every little vulnerability they can find… and trackback links just strike me as very open to abuse.  The problem is that there are so many of them and moderating can become a full-time job.  It would be easy to miss the odd link or two which is actually spam; trust me when I say you do not want to be linking to some of those dodgy sites which spam blogs.  Google can be a little merciless at times and making mistakes such as this can be costly.

Yes, the trackback links can be useful to your readers, but also they can dilute the look and content of the real comments to your article/blog post.  I personally do not like to scroll to the comments on a blog only to spend an extra 10 seconds scrolling past the trackbacks which make up the majority of the ‘comments’.

Additionally, I prefer to pass on my PR to those sites I deem worthy.  I will link to only useful content for my visitors (to provide them with more information), but also to provide the author of the blog a big thumbs up with some added PR value for her/his efforts.

Will website_technology inbound links, pr, trackback

When dealing with any task that requires a learning curve, there is always the risk that motivation will run out long before finishing the task.  For instance, if you are new to web design and you want to put up your own site, you are faced with a plethora of skills to acquire, as well as having to apply those skills to generate the end result, i.e. a well designed, successful site.  Keep in mind what web development has come to mean these days: HTML, XHTML, SHTML, Javascript, PHP, ASP, MySQL, XML, XSL, XSLT, XPointer, XQuery, XLink, Graphic Design, Photoshop (or equivalent), and a host of other tools.  You do not need to be an expert in all of these to do a website, but it helps to know some or all of them and this list is not exhaustive by any means.

However, whilst learrning those skills your motivation to complete the learning process and apply your new talent might waver and the project may never get completed.  That is why it is important to establish a working principle prior to starting any large piece of work.  By that I mean agreeing with yourself a set of rules to which you will adhere and which by doing so will help bypass the motivation obstacles you will face. In short, you need to detach emotions from your work.  Self-discipline and motivation are great allies in your attempts to finish that site, but only self-discipline will get you there.  The problem with motivation is that it comes and goes.  Sure it gives you a huge burst of emotional energy to get you started or running for a while, but it inevitably disappears to be replaced with apathy or complete disinterest.  Self-discipline however, will keep you focused and paying attention to the end goal.  With self-discipline it won’t matter if the weather is a bit overcast today, or you had an argument with your partner.  A little bit of self-discipline every day will keep your goals alive and bring you closer to them, slowly and surely.

The trick is to make sure you do a little bit of work everyday.  This is especially important when you are not motivated to do the work that day.  By forcing yourself to do it, even if you don’t feel like it, you can be sure that the project will be completed.  This is because the only thing that can stop the project being finished is your lack of effort to finish it.  With a little bit of work everyday, you are investing effort in your project and eventually the goal will be achieved.  Furthermore, this self-discipline will extend to unexpected areas of your life and have far-reaching impact on the level of success you enjoy in various arenas.

Will datingsite, website_technology ambition, motivation, self-discipline, web design

In the next few weeks Munich’s Xmas markets will have been assembled and ready for the Christmas festivities. Already in places around the city, the characteristic wooden huts are being put up, wired for electricity and being decorated.  Among my favourite of these markets in Munich, are those located at Weisenburger Platz and English Garden at the Chinese Tower.  The one at Marienplatz can be a little too busy and consequently turns into something other than the relaxing/exciting atmosphere it should be.  The Tollwood market is good if you catch it when it is less busy and it has the added benefit of many stalls being in tents and hence sheltered from the chilly weather.

Outside Munich, I would definitely recommend the Xmas market at Passau in the old city.  Passau has a charm all of its own and this carries to the market as well.  It takes about 2.5 hours to get there by train, but is well worth the day trip.

Will munich Christmas Market, Tollwood, Xmas market

The media is forever picking up on the latest research in different areas, but one arena of particular interest is that of relationships.  Journalists know that a mixture of social commentary and recent hard stats on factors concerning relationships is extremely readable and a proven hit with the public, especially women.  Certain publications thrive on these stats.  For instance, a recent article examined the relationship between women and promiscuity, as seen over a trend of 4 years.  The result that women appear to be getting more promiscuous is a headline catching snippet and a surefire way of getting the author noticed.

If you own a dating website and if you are mathematically inclined (my own background is in mathematics), you can create legitimate statistical experiments which produce results which can act as linkbait.  It is possible to put up an online questionnaire and ask members to fill it out; conduct an email questionnaire campaign or just analayse the logs olinkbaitf your site users. By gathering these stats and statistically analysing the results, you may be able to produce evidence of certain trends which are both useful to your visitors and the population in general.  Compose a press release based on these stats and publish your findings.  Be inventive and try to gain as much publicity as possibly.  If you make the effort and do your homework, these stats will be a major source of linkbait and traffic.

Will datingsite dating site linkbait, dating statistics

Further to yesterday’s comments on Javascript libraries, today I would like to touch on the server side of things and focus on PHP.

PHP, like Javascript is a object-orientated scripting language.  This means classes can be created and instantiated when needed.  However, online resources for PHP most often fail to treat it as an OO language and instead prefer to offer tutorials and solutions based on the procedural side of things.  This is a big mistake and makes the code hard to port and reuse.

If you take the time, you can create classes which perform many tasks and which you can cleanly use over and over again.  You can create a library of such classes and use the ‘require_once’ construct to include them in your code.  All very straightforward.  An example of a predefined class is the PDO class.  This wraps around your database and provides a nice consistent interface to connecting to your MySQL DB.  PHP has many such classes which come pre-installed with the package, depending on the version you are currently using.

Besides creating your own classes and using those already defined as part of the PHP package, there are sites where people upload classes they have created.  With care you can use these classes and increase the modularity of your code.  For instance, it is possible to find classes for standard form manipulation, emails systems, payment systems and others.

There is not much you cannot pack into a PHP class and keep for reuse later.  Not only is this design methodology good for reusing your code, it also promotes good coding practices and reduces bugs due to the increased amount of testing on each instantiation of the class.

Another step in good website programming practices (after reusing PHP classes and standard Javascript libraries), is to decouple your logic from your site design.  I shall leave this discussion for tomorrow, but in the meantime you can read about Smarty to give yourself a headstart.

Will website_technology OOP, PDO, PHP, PHP classes, website tutorial

Have you ever looked at a website and seen some cool feature which you thought you would like to implement on your own site?  Many times I have hit this scenario and I am surprised at the number of times I have traced the feature down to one of a number of popular javascript libraries.  The point to take from this is that using one or more of these javascript libraries appears to be the fastest and neatest way to implement client-side functionality on your site.  Some of the benefits of using these libraries include:

• a set of API interfaces already written for you
• encapsulation of the data – classes are already well designed and implemented
• regular updates keep the code current
• well tested and open-source availability (and all the benefits that come with that)
• well documented APIs
• impressive feature set

One downside is that some of them can be relatively large and it is an unnecessary bandwidth overhead (for both you and your visitors) if you only want one or two of the features the library provides.  However, Google has anticipated this issue and now provides a service to host these libraries for free on their servers.  If you use the libraries hosted on their servers, there can be many benefits.  Most notably of which is the improved load speed for your site visitors.  The more webmasters use these libraries hosted by Google, the more their visitors are exposed to them and hence have already downloaded the relevant libs.  The obvious benefit is that many visitors will have loaded the library into their cache prior to visiting your site, which both saves your bandwidth and increases their speed of access.  It is a win-win situation.

Current popular libraries which are hosted by Google are:

• jQuery
• jQuery UI
• Prototype
• script.aculo.us
• MooTools
• Dojo
• SWFObject

Click on the links above to visit the respective sites and find out which features they offer. For instance, on the clickinlove dating site, you have the ability to upload multiple images and see a loading progress bar for each image. This feature is not technically available using just javascript functionality, but is possible by combining javascript with a Flash module). The SWFObject library makes this relatively easy to implement and the end result is a streamlined intuitive interface for visitors to clickinlove to utilise.  The development time for me to have written this by myself would have been much longer than simply using the library they provide.

I anticipate that the future of web development will make good use of centrally-served popular libraries, such as what Google is offering.  To me it makes sense to utilise these libraries for the reasons mentioned above, i.e. well-tested code, great functionality, good support and easy to implement.  In addition, it makes sense to have them centrally retrievable (as opposed to storing them on your own server), as it provides bandwidth savings, increased download speed for visitors and a convenient one-stop shop for all the scripts you need.

Will website_technology Dojo, jQuery, jQuery UI, MooTools, Prototype, scriptaculous, SWFObject

How easy is it to design a site when you are not a grapic designer?  I can vouch that creating a professional-looking site is a lot harder than it appears.  ’The devil is in the detail’ is a common phrase which applies in this case and basically means that some of the more important aspects of creating a good looking site are wrapped up in small subtle details which can be easily overlooked.  The key areas of site design (i.e. the look and usability) I have had difficulty with are:

• colours – you need to choose a complimentary colour scheme which not only looks well, but actually fits in with the theme of your site and reinforces the image you are trying to project.  
• positioning – the positioning of on-page elements (text, images, buttons, etc) should be the right size and spaced appropriately.  Different spacing strategies can give a site a completely different feel and one which may pull the user in the opposite direction to what you are intending.  An awareness of how to place the content relative to other content is subtle but important.
• gradients – these are the subtle transitions in colour between adjacent areas which allows elements on the page to look smoother and more natural.  It adds a professional touch as it takes time to create the gradient effect and doing it properly is an art… without using gradients, graphic edges can appear sharp and look less professional.  Gradients are one of the more subtle effects you can use but which can have quite a dramatic effect if used correctly.
• negative space – this is the name given to blank space on a canvas.  On a website, negative space can aid in providing a Zen-like atmosphere, which is useful if you are aiming for a calming, relaxing user experience.  Negative space also works by placing extra emphasis on the visible content.
• lines – factors to consider when using lines in web design are length, orientation, colour, thickness, composite lines (made up of things like dots, small shapes, etc).  Lines can (and often are) combined to form shapes and this is a complete science in itself which you should not underestimate. 
• shapes – different graphic shapes unconsciously imply different meanings and instill feelings which may or may not reinforce your site theme.  Choose the shape and orientation of shapes on the site carefully and try to made them strengthen the message you are imparting.
• font – this is greatly underestimated and can completely ruin a site.  Choosing a suitable font is critical.  The wrong font can make a site look unprofessional. Certain fonts are better suited to certain types of sites and an awareness of this can help you strengthen your site’s theme, as opposed to pulling it in a different direction.
• packing – this refers to trying to get all your useful content onto the page in question.  Sometimes doing so can cause a site to be cluttered and difficult to navigate, which adds to the feeling of confusion.  You need to remember that new users will be looking upon an unfamiliar page and won’t know where all the critical data is… you need to give them what they are looking for within a few seconds, else they may go elsewhere.  Internet users are an impatient market to cater for and your content must be uncluttered enough to allow them to easily find what they want.  This may involve using tried and tested navigation techniques (which new users may be already familiar with) or somehow masking less-important content until required.
• usability – being innovative is good, but if you have completely re-engineered standard navigation features, then your users might struggle to use the site.  Stick to common usability features.
• SEO – when designing a site, always have an eye on SEO.  Though this is primarily a technical consideration, factors such as image sizes, masked-out content, duplicate content and other such influences can all have a progressively bigger impact on the on-page rating of a site by a search engine.

These are just a few of the major considerations you need to be aware of if you plan to design the look of your site yourself.  You do not need to be a graphic designer, but a basic knowledge of these concepts can help you get closer to the type of site design you want and also help you avoid making common mistakes which can look unprofessional.

Will website_technology graphic design, site layout, website design

There are so many dating sites online that it is hard to break into this field with a new site.  Extensive SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) ability can help reduce the headstart other sites have.  By this I mean being innovative in the use and implementation of unique SEO strategies.  ’Link Bait’ is a hot SEO term at the moment and refers to the organic harvesting of inbound links (links from other sites pointing to yours).  Get the link bait correct and you stand a chance of ramping-up link growth to a useful level which will bring an increase in traffic (people visiting your site).

What is link bait exactly?  It is any site content which causes your visitors to naturally want to link to your site.  Perhaps it is a piece of code which you give away for free which does something useful, i.e. an innovative script to allow visitors with their own website to track graphically what part of the world their own  visitors come from.  If you are able to offer your visitors something which they can use and for which they will require a link back to your site, then you are on your way to creating useful link-bait.

The trick to a successful SEO campaign is to be consistent in manually acquiring inbound links, whilst at the same time being innovative in generating genuinely useful link bait for your users.  After a while you should reap the rewards of your dedicated link-building attempts.

Will datingsite, website_technology dating, link bait, seo

Using CSS it is relatively easy to position page elements and produce a design where the content is where it is meant to be (I am ignoring cross-browser compatibility for the moment).  What is less easy is to generate a site design which is pleasing to the eye and follows mainstream graphic design principles.  For the clickinlove dating site I have opted to use a clean zen design, intended to be ordered, uncluttered and very simple to navigate.  The benefits to site users are obvious, i.e. a more relaxing and less confusing experience, intuitive usability and quick loading times.  The benefit to the designer is that CSS is more simple to implement with less clutter on the page to align.  Cross-browser compatibility can be quite tricky when using certain CSS attributes, so the less content you need to position, the more likely your site will look uniform across browsers.

Implementing a zen design is a win-win situation.  On saying that, making a simple clean design look professional, is another thing altogether and requires close attention to the graphic elements on your site. The Clickinlove zen stlye for the dating site will be live next week.

Will datingsite css zen, dating site, online dating

Recently a number of blogs I own were hacked and spam links added to the posts automatically.  The solution to removing the hacked code involved delving into the footer code in the default template folder and modifying the footer.php file to reflect what it was prior to the hack.  Needless to say this took a few hours of diffing files to find the main culprit.  The outcome is that the wordpress blog software has been updated and security has been improved.  However, Wordpress is a prime target for hackers and it is only a matter of time before it is hit again.  Therefore, make sure you do regular backups and keep your blog software current and patched.

Will website_technology blog, fix, hack, patch, spam