This is an age old debate, trying to strike a balance of usability between the users with older setups and smaller screen resolutions and those with modern wide-screen (or just plain hi-res) displays.

I have followed this debate for many years and the argument seems to always cater for “what the site looks like full-screen”. I don’t know how you work, but personally I have lots of things happening on my desktop and many windows open. I cannot remember the last time I opened a browser window full-screen.

That said, if I was running in 1024 x 768 resolution then maybe I would work differently, I don’t know because I have not used that resolution in 10 years.

The thing I love about hi-res displays is they allow me to have a browser windop open, still see parts of my desktop, have email visible (albeit not the whole window), but running full-screen just feels claustrophobic to me.

That said, I am less bothered about the upper end of the scale, they don’t HAVE to run full-screen, and providing the site isn’t too narrow then I’m sure they will manage.

This leads us to the question of “how narrow do we have to go?”. I am seeing more and more sites with quite large widths. A few years back 750px used to be the norm, then 850px. Nowadays a lot of sites are over 1000px wide. Is this too wide?

There is no answer to this, hence it has been an ongoing debate for years. How wide is too wide?

The other question to bear in mind is whether the content on the right makes a difference to how wide you are willing to go. If everything to the right of the 850px mark is adverts for example, does that mean that the fact that the users on lower resolutions (the minority) can see the navigation and the main body content make it an acceptable width?

My gut feeling was crossing the 1000px mark was a little bit much, but with a little bit of investigation I have found that some of the most widely used blog templates actually cross this boundary.

Has the width-creep occurred while I have been asleep?

In my mind these themes look fine. I even opened them on my secondary monitor (1280×1024) and it looks fine. I can’t say I would want it to be any wider, but still it looks fine to me.

What do you think? How wide is too wide?

It may seem blindingly obvious to state that the Internet is not a book or a magazine. People who visit your site (or blog) are interested in gaining information, whether it be information about you, what you sell, or what you have to say. If they re-visit your site they want to see fresh content, new posts or new products. If they have seen it all before, why come back?

In general I tend to think readers of websites, or blogs even more so, have a certain attention span that needs feeding. Most people are fairly busy and don’t want to waste their time looking for something that is not there.

When I visit a site that I like I tend to bookmark it (or subscribe to it via RSS). I go back in a few days and have a look for new posts. If there are new posts I come back the next day and the day after that. On the flip-side, if I go back and the content is the same as before I tend to move on and look at other things. I will often return in a few more days and see if it has been updated, but if there is nothing new I tend not to go back for a while.

The more you go back to a site and see nothing new, the more stale the site becomes. There are so many sites out there and such enormous competition, that it is easy to move on and forget the site that was not updated.

With this in mind I liken the generation of fresh content on a website or blog to the 3-strike rule in baseball.

Strike one

A visitor usually comes back in a day or two, looking for fresh content

Strike two

Visitor comes back again a day or so later, giving the site a second chance

Strike three!

Visitor usually returns a little while later, when they remember about the site. If there is still nothing new the visitor is unlikely to return

This is not a hard and fast rule, some people may give a site more chances, some might give less. Most web site owners, bloggers in particular, are guilty of allowing lapses in posting (myself included), especially when they are busy, but it is worth keeping this lesson in mind when you start to get busy.

Your most valuable visitors are the return visitors. They obviously liked what they saw the first time they visited, that’s why they came back. Don’t let them down!

How many times have you heard the phrase “I’ll sort out a website for you, for free”?

Ok, you may not have heard it spoken to you, but most of us know someone who knows someone who is a web guru. This person knocks out websites like Willy Wonky knocked out chocolate bars, and best of all he does it for free!

It all sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Where in life can you get something for free, really? If you wanted your haircut and someone said “little Jimmy down the road can do that for you” would you take them up on it? The fact of the matter is you generally get what you pay for in life, and if something seems too good to be true, it generally is.

Why am I blogging the obvious, you may ask?

Well, I have had discussions with a few people this past few weeks and it is clear there is an aspect to this “free” website business that can turn round and bite you in the behind.

The story goes as follows…

Someone starting up a business gets offered a free website.  They see this as a great offer and so take them up on it, and low and behold in a few weeks they have a website. The website is ok (i.e. better than nothing) in their opinion, and don’t forget, it’s free! The problem comes in a few weeks or months, when the business owner realises that they need a proper website, something that reflects their business and maybe something they have control over (let’s face it, little Jimmy is busy, and you don’t want to bother him too much, as you are not paying him!).

It is clear to see what has happened here, the business owner has now lost control of their site. They don’t want to go elsewhere, as little Jimmy was kind enough to put in some hard work in the first place, it would be rude to ask someone to re-design it now, wouldn’t it?

Basically, through no fault of their own they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They want a proper site, but they don’t want to upset the person who put themselves out to design the first version of their site.

It’s all very well telling the story and pointing out the obvious (it IS obvious, right?), but what should you do if you find yourself in that situation?

There is no hard and fast rule here. I always try to advise against getting something done for free, as it ultimately (unless you are very hard faced about it) relinquishes control of your website. I mean, how angry can you get at little Jimmy when the website that you are not paying for goes offline for half a day?

I know of several individuals/organisations who are (or have been) in this situation. While it is not their fault as such, it is ultimately harming their business, as every other aspect of their business is growing, their website is lagging behind.

I guess the moral of this story is to take control of every aspect of your business, including your website. In this day and age your website is becoming more and more your shop window. People on average spend very little time on a site before making a decision whether to do business with you. Use this opportunity to make an impression and don’t worry too much about little Jimmy’s feelings, he’ll get over it!

Yes, that’s right, my constant complaining and moaning about the only thing wrong with Freshbooks has finally paid off. Freshbooks have just announced they support integration with Google Checkout!

I have just logged into my control panel and enabled it (easy to do, they provide idiot-proof instructions) and that’s about it. From now on all invoices that go out will include the Google Checkout link alongside the Paypal (spit!) link.

I am impressed that I single handedly managed to get them to do this, with no help from anyone, they must think really highly of me! Just kidding, there has been a bit of a push on their forums for some time, and in the grand scheme of things it really didn’t take them that long to implement.

Great work guys, your work is really appreciated!

I am taking my Macbook Pro in for repair today, so I spent most of last night backing up all the data (critical and non-critical) in case the system needs restoring or it has to be away for a while. It made me re-evaluate my backup strategy a bit.

I do the majority of my work on my Macbook pro (120Gb) on my home wireless network. I also have a Linux machine as a backup solution. This backs up to an external 250Gb hard drive overnight, using rsync (so as to only backup the changed files).

This solution is not great, and it is a bit cumbersome. I plan to replace this with a solution that will involve RAID-1 (two hard drives mirrored. If one fails nothing is lost).

There are a few ways to do this:

• I could add RAID 1 to the Linux machine. This is a little difficult as it is a tiny machine that sits underneith the TV and there is really not the room for a second hard drive.
• I could replace the external hard drive with a USB enclosure that uses RAID 1. This is not too expensive, but adds a second device which also needs space and power.
• I could invest in a NAS box, such as a Synology, QSNAP or Thecus.

BUT, it’s not that simple…

As I do most of my work on the Macbook the first and formost important thing for me is to backup that data, live data that I am working on at the time.

As I work on a wireless network I dont want to transfer 120Gb every time I backup. This leaves be two options:

• I could use a backup program that detects changes
• I could use OSX’s built in Time Machine

Time Machine takes hourly backups of the current dat, along with weekly and monthly backups as space allows. The problem is it only works (properly) using Apple Airport hardware. There are hacks around for getting it working on a normal NAS, but there are pitfalls as well.

I have experimented with rsync options and even those seem to interfere with the operation of the macbook while I am working. Time Machine (from what I see) is fairly seamless.

So…

That leaves one option, the Apple Airport Extreme.

Although it does not (as standard) use RAID the data is actually in two places anyway, the Macbook and the backup drive. This is a perfect solution for the Macbook backup, but what about archives?

Archives work a little differently. Data is passed from the Macbook to the Airport-attached hard drive. Once it is there it gets deleted from the Macbook.

This means that is the hard drive fails the data is lost… back to RAID!

After consideration I feel my best solution is to use the Apple Airport Extrme with a hardware RAID external hard drive. This means that the macbook live data is actually on 3 hard drives, and the archive data is on 2.

What do you guys use for your backup solution and archive data?

The importance of a blog post title is something I thought I had covered before, but looking back it seems I never posted it.  The title of a post is one of the most important aspects in terms of getting your post seen. The content of the post is actually more important in terms of the total post, but if you rely on visitors from search engines then they need to arrive at the post before they can read it, right?

There are several things that dictate how well a post is ranked by the search engines, some of the most important are:

• The title of the post
• The URL of the post
• The title PROPERTY of the post (in the browser header)
• The value of the headings
• The amount of keywords in the body

The list does go on, but for the purpose of this post I will focus on the title.

If you are anything like me you will be quite enthusiastic about your blog post. When you write it you may be brimming with ideas, full of enthusiasm and excited to post. You write your post and come up with a great (sometimes funny) title to give the post the POW! factor.

This is a very easy trap to fall into, I have done this many times myself. It is easier to illustrate through an example.

Take this post… it is basically about the title of a blog post. Instead of naming it :

How important is a blog post title?

… I could have called it:

The risks of the POW factor

Ok, that’s not necessarily the best title in the world, but what I am getting at is I could use the title to make a newspaper headline type statement, to intrigue the reader and make them want to read on. There is an argument that actually that is the right way to do it, but we need to be aware that while a reader may be enthused by that, Google may not.

Of course, the holy grail is to combine the two, but in my opinion it is more important to optimise your post to allow people to find what they are searching for, not just from google, but from your internal search engine. If someone searches for this post 6 months down the line they may search for “post title”. This post will appear on the list, whereas it may not (or be lower down the list) if I gave it a funny title.

Some of this may seem like common sense, in that case great, but like a lot of these simple aspects to web design and blogging, it’s only simple once you know about it.

As always, comments (and other angles) are always appreciated.

Well I finally did it. After a few weeks of messing around with the free account, I finally signed up for the basic paid package from Freshbooks. There are several reasons for this, which I will get to in a minute, but I wanted to write a concise review of this product, along with comparing it with it’s competitors, so here goes.

Before I get into the nitty-gritty of the features I would like to let you know about the reasons I stood up and took notice of Freshbooks, aside from the very extensive feature set.

Excellent Pre-sales

When I first setup my free account I did a test. I integrated it into the 2Checkout account I have not used in a long time, since a lot of people prefer PayPal. I have since changed my domain name, and so updated my 2Checkout account to reflect this. The problem was, in order for the integration to work I had to provide the Freshbooks url instead, meaning that I couldn’t sell from my site as well. After going round in circles for ages with 2Checkout, eventually one of the Freshbooks team contacted them on my behalf and ironed the situation out! At this point I wasn’t even a paying Freshbooks customer. Now THAT’s service!

Later in the week I was experimenting a little more, and I found that the 2checkout page that takes payment wasn’t as neat as it could be. Mainly this is due to their interface not being the best. Anyway, I posted on the forums and within an hour or so one of the Freshbooks team asked me for a screenshot. I uploaded one and he went and asked the developers. He then came back to me and said they can and will do something to improve this. Again, great service considering I had yet to sign up!

Ok… enough of that, onto the review!

First Impressions

The initial impression of Freshbooks is just how polished it is. The interface is simple and intuitive enough to be called slick, and everything everything is exactly where I would expect it to be. At first it looks almost too simple, but after a bit of playing about you see it is actually very feature rich.

Look and feel

I took the time to customise the look and feel. This consisted of uploading a logo and giving it 3 colours for the menu (the bar, the active tab, and the other tabs). Once I had done this and saved it, the interface was transformed. Even the login screen embraced the new look!

The whole process took just a minute or two. This sounds like a small thing, but I have worked with several other systems that make this sort of thing either impossible or surprisingly difficult.

Ease of use

I can’t fault the system for ease of use. They have done a fine job of selecting the features people want, and implementing them in such a way they are a joy to use. From adding clients, to invoicing is seamless. One of the great selling points for me is being able to provide an estimate, and later take the estimate and turn it into an invoice.

Feature rich

I could go on about this all day, so rather than do that I will simply list some of the features I like most:

• Recurring Invoices
• Estimates
• Automated payment reminders
• Comprehensive reports
• Outputting of data
• Online Payment (PayPal, 2checkout, Authorise.net.. and more!)
• Custom branding
• They even deliver snail mail, if you like
• Time tracking (they even have an OSX desktop widget!)

This product is really quite rich in features, and looking on the forums they are very focused on keeping the features people want and not filling it with crap that just a few people ask for. That said, there is one thing that is in the pipeline that I do very much like the idea of, and that is Google Checkout integration – some people don’t like PayPal, and Google checkout takes less % off the seller. This to me would be a great addition!

Cost

I was going to leave this til last, but it is quite important so I will talk about it now. The basic paid package is $14.95 and includes up to 25 clients and unlimited invoices. This is not bad, and for $10 more you can add another 250 clients… enough for most people, I’m sure you’ll agree. This price point is actually fairly similar to the competition, and of course the free account is great for deciding if you want to sign up for a paid account or not (the free one gives you up to 3 clients).

Comparison

The main competitor in my opinion is Blinksale. Blinksale is an invoicing system but not much else. On the face of it, it does exactly as it says on the tin, and it does it well. It has online payments (PayPal only) and email invoices.

Where the two differ mainly is Blinksale is invoice centric and Freshbooks is client centric. Allow me to explain.

If I am selling we hosting, for example. I will have a silver account. A customer signs up and in blinksale I open up the silver account and add the customer. This sets them on recurring billing and off they go. Simple!

Simple, that is until they come back the next month and say they want another account… ok, back into silver account, try to select the client… can’t… not there… WHAT? This is the crux of the problem for Blinksale, it completely misses my business model.

Freshbooks deals with it in a different way. I set up the products as items and for a new sign-up I select new recurring invoice… select the client, select the product, and away we go… same result, but a whole lot more flexible.

Where Blinksale is different though is they allow unlimited clients on the free account, but a limited number of invoices per month (3). In theory you could remain free longer on Blinksale, providing your billing is spread out throughout the year. That said, $14 is hardly breaking the bank.

Final thoughts

I don’t want this to sound like a party political broadcast for the Freshbooks party (maybe too late?) but my first impressions of this product are great. It is feature rich, easy to use, and has an enthusiastic, professional team working behind the scenes.

I will post in a month or two when it has bedded in. I’m sure there will be niggles along the way, no system is perfect, but for now I am happy.

Signup for a FREE account and try it for yourself

I just dug up the following about the delay to the 2.7 release of WordPress:

WordPress Development Team on delay of WordPress 2.7 release-

“Speaking of the final release, it will not be available on November 10th as originally scheduled.  We are two weeks behind schedule at the moment.  We need a little more time to finish the visual design, do a round of user testing against that finished design, and do a proper round of public beta testing. Our plan is to keep working as if Nov. 10 is still the release date.  However, instead of releasing the final 2.7 on the 10th, we will make a release candidate available instead.  The release candidate is intended to be a high-quality, almost-finished release that we are comfortable recommending for broad use.  After Nov. 10, the focus will be on fixing high impact bugs turned up by those of you testing the release candidate. I suspect 2.7 will be ready for final release by the end of November.  A specific date will be set as we progress through the public beta cycle and get a feel for how solid the release is.”

The buzz in the blogosphere (oh no, I can’t believe I just said “blogosphere”!) is that WordPress 2.7 is due out. This looks to be a really worthwhile update, and brings to the table some much sought after features such as threaded comments, sticky posts and a completely re-vamped menu system.

Word on the street (what street exactly, I don’t know!) is that 2.7 was due out November 10th 2008…. well that has come and gone (in the UK, at least) and no sign of it. I am not too bothered… I am sure it is coming soon, and I would rather have a stable release than a rushed one, but I feel like a kid at Christmas….!

I will be sure to do a full write-up when it finally arrives, but for now I am off to bed! I am going to leave a mince pie and a carrot by the fireplace tonight, in case the WordPress development team come’a'visitin!

Does your site look good when viewed on an iPhone, on a PDA, or ultra-portable laptop? Does it really matter? What percentage of your visitors use these platforms to browse sites?

This is a question I have been asking myself recently. With the roll-out of the 3G networks (pretty much globally) the speed of Internet browsing via mobile devices had increased to a now acceptable level. Couple this with reasonable mobile data tariffs, wi-fi hot-spots, and a plethora of gadgets to go with them, surely more and more people will be experiencing your site through a mobile device.

That said, I have not made the jump myself. Yes, I have RSS options on my sites, so mobile users could use those, but for the casual browser I don’t make any changes to suit their platform. I think this is for two reasons. Firstly it takes a lot more effort to develop a site and tailor part of it to be specific to the portable platform, and secondly the percentage of people using these platforms (certainly according to my stats) is too small to make it worthwhile.

I think blogs are possibly the ideal platform to take advantage of the mobile platforms. I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t have a WordPress theme installed that is tailored to mobile computing, and it gets served based on the header information transmitted when the page is loaded. That way the effort would be minimised, while maintaining the user experience. Good idea?

I do think times are-a-changing though, and the market is growing and growing. Sales of laptops now generously outstrips sales of desktop PC’s, and almost all phones now have some kind of browser in them. At some point it will become necessary to make the changes, but when that will be I’m just not sure.

Have you designed a mobile website? How was it received? Do people use it?