Nick Schoonens - Building a web design business

7 Part Website Optimisation Series

Nick — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:40:13 -0500

My friend and colleague Will Swayne from Marketing-Results.com.au has just posted a great 7 part series on website optimisation, and outlines a lot of the tools he uses as an internet marketing consultant.

I'll be applying each of these techniques to my Restaurant Web Site Design service that I have just launched.

Drupal Showcase: Zero RC: RC Hobby Blog

Nick — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 18:29:13 -0500

Over the easter long weekend I setup a new blog that I plan to grow over the next 6 months. Zero RC is a RC hobby blog running Drupal 5.1, the Aurora theme (that I customised to be 760px wide and not full screen), and a lot of different modules. My aim is to get several key authors who each have a different expertise (RC Cars, RC Planes, RC Helicopters and RC Boats).

The modules I'm currently using are:

Blogs (to handle multiple blog authors)
Path, Pathauto, Metatags
Google Analytics, XML Sitemap, Adsense
Ping, Diggthis
Search
Comments, Trackback, Akismet, Captcha, Textimage

I've also customized the node.tpl.php file to insert Adsense code between paragraphs like this:

<?php
  //Split the content based on closing paragraph (</p>) tags
  $content_array = explode("</p>", $content);
  //Rebuild the content and add adsense in between
  $new_content = '';
  foreach ($content_array as $key => $value) {
    if ($key > 0) $new_content .= "</p>";
    if ($key == 1) $new_content .= adsense_display($format = '468x60', $group = 1, $channel = 1);
    if ($key == 4) $new_content .= adsense_display($format = '468x60', $group = 1, $channel = 1);
    $new_content .= $value;
  }
  $content = $new_content;
?>

So, if you're a fan of RC toys, check out the site and contact me if you would like to become an author (paid of course).

Google Adwords Keyword Organizer Tool

Nick — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 02:08:38 -0500

I have been setting up a couple of Google Adwords accounts lately and haven't found a tool that would take my keyword list and add Exact Match, and Phrase Match alternatives for each keyword automatically, so I decided to write my own.

What are the different match types?

Google Adwords has three different match types, to helps you drill down and only get the traffic you really want to your website.

Broad Match

The broad match type is the default option, and will match a query as long as your words appear anywhere in the phrase. For example, if I had the keyword web designer, it would match any queries that has both "web" and "designer" in any order.

Phrase Match

By placing quotation marks around your keywords, like "web designer", it will match any queries with the keywords web design in that order such as brisbane web designer, or web designer brisbane.

Exact Match

By placing square brackets around your keywords, like [web designer], it will only match queries contain that exact keyword, and nothing more.

Even though a broad match type would catch all the searches that I want, it helps to by able to see if any of the combinations convert better than the others.

To use this tool, simply paste your keywords into the text box, 1 per line, and select whether you want to remove duplicates, and add phrase and exact matching tags.

Drupal Showcase - Chevron Renaissance Gold Coast Apartments

Nick — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 18:19:28 -0500

I recently setup a small website for the owner of some apartments in the Chevron Renaissance resort in Surfers Paradise on the Gold Coast. The apartments are used as holiday rentals, and we wanted to be able to differentiate these apartments from the other Chevron Renaissance apartments on the market.

The site is very simple, and only required a few of my standard Drupal modules. These were:

Webform - to create the large enquiry form
Google Analytics
Google Sitemap
TinyMCE

I will soon be adding the GMap module to allow users to view the resort from above.

Opensource Content Management Systems comparison tools

Nick — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 07:38:18 -0500

When I went looking for an opensource content management system to use mid last year, I only knew of a couple, these were Mambo, and PHP Nuke. I had heard mixed reviews about these systems, and wanted to make sure I was using the best, I went in search of one that would do everything that I needed.

After a bit of searching I came across two of the most useful sites on the web (in my opinion)... OpenSourceCMS and CMSMatrix.

Changing the date format in osCommerce

Nick — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 23:23:30 -0500

To change the date format used in osCommerce (when members create their account) from mm/dd/yyyy to dd/mm/yyyy, you simply need to change the main language file. The file should be located at catalog/includes/languages/<language_name>.php (for example: catalog/includes/languages/english.php).

I found the solution at the osCommerce forums in this thread, but it is missing a couple of things that were overlooked.

Change the file from (around line 21):

define('DATE_FORMAT_SHORT', '%m/%d/%Y');  // this is used for strftime()
define('DATE_FORMAT_LONG', '%A %d %B, %Y'); // this is used for strftime()
define('DATE_FORMAT', 'm/d/Y'); // this is used for date()
define('DATE_TIME_FORMAT', DATE_FORMAT_SHORT . ' %H:%M:%S');

////
// Return date in raw format
// $date should be in format mm/dd/yyyy
// raw date is in format YYYYMMDD, or DDMMYYYY
function tep_date_raw($date, $reverse = false) {
  if ($reverse) {
    return substr($date, 3, 2) . substr($date, 0, 2) . substr($date, 6, 4);
  } else {
    return substr($date, 6, 4) . substr($date, 0, 2) . substr($date, 3, 2);
  }
}

To:

Brisbane Boat Hire

Nick — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 22:15:47 -0500

I recently designed a website for a new Brisbane boat hire company, Smart Power Boat Hire.

Smart Power Boat Hire, supply affordable hire of 16ft cuddy cabin fibreglass cruisers with all the modern technology and equipment on board one would expect. The boats are powered by quiet and economical 75hp Evinrude E-tec outboards and all boats come on trailers ready to hook up and drive away. Smart Power Boat Hire also offer the opportunity for customers who would like to get out on the water but do not have a licence or tow bar on their vehicle. They can arrange a licence in a weekend and a tow bar fitted up to your vehicle within 2-3 hours at you home, getting you on the water sooner. They are based on the north side of Brisbane at Albany Creek.

The thing with boating is that for most people, it is a hobby, and quite and expensive one at that. Most boat owners take their boats out on the water about 10 times per year, thats just under once a month. Now when you think about the costs of owning and maintaining a boat similar to the ones at Smart Power Boat Hire, which is just over $8,000 per year, that makes each trip out on the water about $800 worth. Compare this to the price that you can hire a boat from Smart Power Boat Hire, $300 for 24 hours, it doesn't make a lot of sense to buy your own.

And if you still think that its worth owning your own boat, why not try before you buy, and hire one for the weekend. Visit the brisbane boat hire specialists, Smart Power Boat Hire.

Setting up Paypal IPN with osCommerce for Australian Dollars (AUD)

Nick — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 21:40:03 -0500

I have just been setting up an osCommerce website to use Paypal's IPN as the payment method to accept credit card and paypal payments. I downloaded the official osCommerce Paypal IPN module from the contributions site, because the one that comes with 2.2MS2 is out of date.

After downloading this and installing it, I made a test order on the osCommerce store, and when I was directed to Paypal the amount to pay was $0.00 USD. As this is an Australian site, dealing in Australian currency (AUD) only, there were 2 problems. The zero order amount, and the fact that it was in USD.

The various stages of google

Nick — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 00:48:54 -0500

I mis-typed a Google URL today and ended up seeing Google's 404 page which looks like it hasn't be updated since the 90's. Check it out here.

This prompted me to see what google was like in the early years by taking a trip back through the wayback machine. The wayback machine, if you don't know, makes an archive of websites and stores them on their server. All you need to do is search for a domain, you will be able to see all the archives it has. I don't know how many sites are currently archived, but I think most sites over 6 months old are.

Here are some highlights from google's archives.Â

The Name

10^100 (a gigantic number) is a googol, but we liked the spelling "Google" better. We picked the name "Google" because our goal is to make huge quantities of information available to everyone. And it sounds cool and has only six letters.

Also, this page has some logos that go back when they called themselves BackRub.

Anyway, checkout the archive of google pages.

Adding Drupal.org search to firefox

Nick — Mon, 15 May 2006 17:54:35 -0500

I am currently building a lot of Drupal powered sites, something that I will go into more detail a bit later on when I have some time. But because of this I find myself searching Drupal.org more than I search Google, and it was getting annoying and time consuming to type in Drupal.org, then type my search from there, when I am used to using the Quicksearch form in Firefox.

For this reason I had a bit of a look around and found that someone (LouCypher) had already created one and hosted it on MozDev.org.There is even one for DrupalDocs there as well.