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SilverStripe UK Meetup: How can we help SilverStripe evolve?

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 10:48:56 +0100

On Tuesday (17th of April 2012), we organised and attended the latest UK SilverStripe meetup, which saw over 20 eager SilverStripe evangelists turn out to discuss the future of the popular open source platform.

This time around, we decided to go with a slightly different format for the event – a panel discussion, consisting of SilverStripers Aram Balakjian (SSBits and Aab Web), Josh Holloway (Better Brief), Richard Johnson (GPMD) and Will Morgan (Better Brief).

The overall intention of the event was to identify how SilverStripe can evolve moving forward and how it can become more popular with different demographics (beginner-level developers and marketing-lead users etc).

Here are the notes that I took at the event (edited by panellists Aram Balakjian and Josh Holloway):

SilverStripe is a great platform that covers a large set of use cases. While Joomla and particularly Wordpress are primarily targeted at the end user and the developer wanting click-click-done style implementation, SilverStripe is targeted at developers and agencies who are willing to get their PHP hands dirty in order to provide their clients with a truly bespoke solution.

The ease of use of the SilverStripe admin system was also commonly mentioned as a key benefit of using the CMS.

SilverStripe is a flexible platform and although does not have the module count of some of the larger systems, instead allows you to develop your own modules and functionality more easily.

Therefore SilverStripe should be promoted to developers as a great platform for their clients. SilverStripe would benefit from a lot more evangelists (turning up to the right events and generally promoting it), clearer more complete documentation and coverage online.

SilverStripe can be sold as a platform that has a really user-friendly back-end system, Drupal is too complicated for clients. SilverStripe should have the publicity and the profile too be sold to potential clients – as an agency we should be able to show why SilverStripe is the ideal platform, all documents that sell the platform should be open-source.

Because the CMS shares it’s name with SilverStripe the company, it has a slightly odd position that creates uncertainty when it comes to contributing.

Ingo is keen to push things into the community, however it’s difficult to know when SilverStripe’s developers are speaking as programmers or product managers.

People should be writing lots and lots of module to help grow the community, we’ve got to start somewhere and there’s not too much out there at the moment.

Are there any ideas for commercialising SilverStripe themes and plugins like Magento?

Having a revenue option for developers would give them more of an incentive to build the modules.

There aren’t enough developers to make a lot of modules worthwhile and generate money.

If the functionality and coding was more freely available more people would pay for modules. We need to get other developers excited about SilverStripe and then they can make things into modules.

SilverStripe are looking to change the module repository on the website – its currently ‘unusable’. There’s also no quality control, very few of the modules have extensive information and images.

There is a discussion on the SilverStripe developer forum at the moment around making a modules.silverstripe.org area and open-source it.

How much time is given to open-source development within SilverStripe? 10% is allocated to developing the platform.

SilverStripe need to relinquish more control and give that to the community – they’re not giving it enough time at the moment.

Developers are often going to GitHub rather than the module area for modules due to the lack of usability.

We want to move away from the responsibility being with SilverStripe which is currently a limitation. SilverStripe can have a way to verify modules, however the process needs to be quicker and maybe vetted by the community.

Having a rating system and adding comments would help to build the module area.

Another great feature for SilverStripe would be an auto-install and update feature. To have this feature, you would need more processes with modules to say what they’re compatible with.

How has Wordpress structured the process of updating the CMS and modules.

One of the biggest problems with SilverStripe is that there’s no revenue stream for it – it’s not like Wordpress where they make money from the .wordpress.com sites.

A tool that enables webmasters to sell their modules would be a good resource.

The incentive of revenue would also mean that the modules cost – which may prevent new developers from using SilverStripe. Why buy from SilverStripe when you can get them for free for Drupal and Joomla.

A paid version of SilverStripe would mean the best features are in the premium version – that’s the perception. People want to steer clear of paid systems or paid modules.

There’s a big dependency on SilverStripe 3.0 – as 2.4 is not very nice.

The sitetree is being pulled back into the newer version now.

SilverStripe has very small company focus – there’s around 30 people in the company and they’ve grown very quickly. SilverStripe are still working on a trial and error basis with the community – they’re still working out how the company works with the community.

SilverStripe is operate in a very strange way – they’re heavily relying on the community and people stepping up. They need some people to step up and really building SilverStripe with them.

SilverStripe lacks the structure that WP and Drupal have – people need to help develop SilverStripe in their own time. We need to use the interested people to create some structure – they’re waiting for a response.

The benefits of SilverStripe 3.0 need to be sold – it needs to be pushed on their website.

It’s hard to see what’s going to happen with SS3.0 – they’re trying to improve the UX, but they’re not necessarily going the right way.

Squiz is very similar to SilverStripe – they were originally open-source and now they’re closed source and they don’t embrace the community. They’re working on £1m+ implementations. Squiz Matrix is open source.

What would everyone like from the community?

More modules
What you put in is what you get out – people need to contribute
Developers can get a lot of credit for contributing
SilverStripe need to focus on introduction to new developers – they need to ensure that they’re helping people at the start
Documentation isn’t there at the moment
Questions are being left unanswered in the forum

SilverStripe’s learning curve does keep out ‘low-level users’ – Wordpress forums are full of amateur-level questions and some of the plugins are poorly built.

Drupal and Joomla’s code base isn’t up to the level of SilverStripe.

There should be guides for people leaving Wordpress – these people could become strong SilverStripe developers.

Developers and popularity are the building blocks of a CMS.

Awards & accreditations etc:

SilverStripe powers a host of big-name sites, such as the BBC, Debenhams Finance, NHS, Greggs, Activision, SCC, Devon County Council, Shell NZ, Talk Talk, Westfield and the NZ government.

SilverStripe needs to be sold to clients with a list of large names that use the CMS.

SilverStripe is aimed at presenting information rather than being interactive.

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Moving forward as a community, we're now looking to introduce a new SilverStripe UK community website, organise a SilverStripe hack day and generally promote the many benefits of building websites using SilverStripe.

You can find out more about the SilverStripe UK meetup event here, or you can follow the dedicated Twitter account.

You can also read Josh Holloway's blog post about the event here.

This post was written by Paul Rogers - Follow Paul on Google Plus or Twitter.

If you have anything to add to this post, please do so in the comments below - we'd love to hear your thoughts!

So you want to build a responsive website? (A few resources)

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:43:59 +0100

A lot of the work we do here at GPMD is in the area of ecommerce and, like many other agencies, our framework of choice is Magento. As I’m sure you’re aware, it’s becoming increasingly important for websites to be device agnostic, so I set myself the rather daunting task (if you've ever worked with Magento before you'll know what I mean) of creating a responsive Magento base theme; one which we could use as a starting point for our own projects, but also one that we could release to the wider community as a kind of starter, or base responsive framework/theme.

The project is now well underway (check out my Dribbble profile for some sneak peeks), but there’s still a lot to do. In the meantime I thought I’d start sharing some of my thought processes, resources I’ve found useful, and specific issues that I’ve encountering as I go along.

This first article is a list of resources that I’ve found extremely helpful in the initial stages of thinking about, and planning for the project.

Boilerplates & Grid Systems

I love things like HTML5 Boilerplate but in this case I wanted something a little more stripped back, so I settled on Gridless. I also chose to use The Semantic Grid System to help me set up my grid. In both these cases it was necessary to adapt and tweak them to suit my particular needs, but they are a great starting point.

Another reason for not using HTML5 Boilerplate is that my project Isn’t actually HTML5 (I can hear the audible gasps of horror) - trust me, there are literally hundreds and hundreds of template files in Magento making a conversion to HTML5 an enormous task and one, for which, we simply don’t have the time! I’ve stripped out the HTML5 specific stuff I have no need of and just kept helpers for media queries and CSS3.

CSS Preprocessors

While I'm on the subject of The Semantic Grid System, you should definitely be looking into using a CSS preprocessor for a project this size (The Semantic Grid System uses LESS to work out the precise percentages required for a responsive grid).

If you're not sure what a CSS preprocessor is, check out this article on Smashing Magazine: An Introduction To LESS And Comparison To SASS

Here are links to the respective websites for more info:

LESS: lesscss.org
SASS: sass-lang.com

If you're on a Mac I would recommend CodeKit for compiling your CSS from LESS or SASS. You could also consider LiveReload, which is also for Mac, but has a pre-Alpha version for Windows.

I hope the above information is helpful and of interest to those people looking to develop their skills and learn more about responsive web design.

As I said above, I hope to share other bits and pieces of insight and progress as I go along, so keep checking back here, or follow me on Twitter.

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You can follow Matt on Twitter, Dribbble and Google Plus.

2012 Mobile Internet Usage Statistics

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:12:23 +0100

Last year, I wrote an article about mobile internet usage in 2011, after attending a Google Engage event which was heavily focused on mobile marketing. Earlier this week, I attended the latest Westminster eForum event, which was titled ‘The Future of Mobile’ and shared the same focus on mobile. The half-day conference was all about mobile marketing and featured contributions from a number of excellent speakers, including David Dyson (CEO) of Three UK, Ian Carrington of Google, David Stewart from Ofcom, Jake Berry (an MP), Nicholas Blades of Telefonica O2 and Paul Morris from Vodafone.

Like the Google event, there were lots of great statistics referenced at this event, so I thought I'd write a similar blog post this time around. Here are some of the key statistics from the event:

There are more mobile phones in the UK than people
The number of smartphone searchers doubles every two months
eBay sells something via a mobile phone every two seconds
In 2010, Google became a ‘mobile-first’ company (this means they develop their sites and tools on mobiles first)
Smartphone sales overtook PC sales last year (two years earlier than expected)
In three years time, tablet sales will be bigger than PC sales
Smartphone sales will continue to grow – will be 3 times the sales of pc’s
52% of UK mobile phone users have a smartphone
28% of internet usage is from a mobile phone
19% of search queries in the travel industry are from mobiles (was 11% in 2011)
16% of search queries in retail are from mobiles (was 10% in 2011)
19% of search queries in the entertainment industry are from mobiles (was 10% in 2011)
20% of all YouTube views are from a mobile device
Mothers day 2012 – 50% of all online sales came from mobile devices
28% of people in the UK have purchased something using their phone
eBay forecasts $8 billion in mobile sales this year (one sale per second)
Average of 4 Ferraris sold on a mobile phone every month
49% of all Paddy Power bets made from mobile devices
There are 100m mobile wallet (NFC) phones currently being used in the UK
40 different NFC compatible handsets available at the moment
Orange have sold 500,000 NFC-compatible phones in France & the UK
40% of mobile searches have local intent
12% of UK population have a tablet
Tablet sales growing 378% year on year
38% of UK tablet owners spend more time on their tablet than watching TV
23% increase in search queries from tablets after Christmas day (due to them being given as presents)
11% increase in mobile searches after Christmas day
53% of people in the UK are ‘dual screening’ (using phone whilst watching TV for example)
Total of $241 billion in mobile transactions in 2011
There are regular mobile transactions with value over $5,000
Whatsapp is made up of just 20 people
86% of all adults own at least one mobile phone
Most 3g data used by a single user in February 2012 was 573GB
Total international travelling data used for the same month was 350GB

If you have anything to add to this article or would like to ask a question, please do so in the comments section below. You can also follow Paul on Twitter and Google Plus.

Tangerine - Judges Choice in the SilverStripe Theme Contest

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 10:00:00 +0000

The SS Theme Contest was an opportunity to create a default theme for SilverStripe 3.0. Contestants had to design a fully functional generic theme based on SilverStripe 3.0 alpha 2 that works for different formats such as desktop, forums, blogs and mobile.

My Approach

I’ve designed a colourful, simple, responsive theme using HTML5 Boilerplate. The HTML and CSS is easily accessible and customisable, so it's good for building on as a 'starter' theme. It is perfect for any kind of business, organisation or personal site. I've called my theme Tangerine because it's a fun word and it's the main highlight colour component in my design.

The Prize

The top five finalists were selected by public voting on Facebook, and afterwards the judges made a decision to pick an extra theme to rate as the 'Judges Choice'. Three out of the five judges independently from each other picked Tangerine out of the remaining fifteen themes. Which I'm very pleased about, so thank you SilverStripe and thank you judges!

Recommended UK Digital Marketing Conferences

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Due to the large number of digital marketing events hosted in the UK each year, deciding on which ones to attend is a difficult task! With this in mind, I wrote this article about some of the digital marketing conferences that I’ve learnt from and enjoyed over the last 12 months or so.

BrightonSEO

Where: Brighton, UK

Frequency: Bi-annual

Next event: 13th April 2012

Website: brightonseo.com

Cost: Free

About:

BrightonSEO is a bi-annual online marketing conference that brings more and more SEO’s together every year. BrightonSEO is the only free conference in this list, but the content remains just as valuable.

I’ve really enjoyed the two previous BrightonSEO events that I’ve attended and I would strongly recommend it to anyone with an interest in online marketing.

Although the tickets for the event were gone within around 30 minutes, you can still get your hands on one by signing up to one of the advanced workshop sessions taking place on the 12th of April.

Reviews:

BrightonSEO March 2011

BrightonSEO September 2011

ThinkVisibility

Where: Leeds, UK

Frequency: Bi-annual

Next event: TBC September 2012

Website: thinkvisibility.com

Cost: £288.00 (including two night at a nearby Hilton)

About:

I recently attended the 7th ThinkVisibility conference, which took place on the 3rd of March 2012 - and I really enjoyed it! The Leeds-based conference, which is held on a Saturday, featured a number of excellent presentations and two great evening events.

We paid £288.00 for one ticket and two nights in a nearby Hilton hotel, although you can purchase tickets without the hotel.

SearchLove

Where: London, UK and New York, U.S

Frequency: Annual

Next Event: TBC - Summer 2012

Website: distilled.net/events/searchlove-london/

Cost: £749.00 (SEOmoz discount available)

About:

SearchLove is an SEO event organised by Distilled, an international search marketing agency with offices in London, Seattle and New York.

I attended the first ever SearchLove event last summer and found the content to be exceptional - with notable speakers including Rand Fishkin, Tom and Will Critchlow, Richard Baxter and Patrick Altoft.

SearchLove covered a wide range of SEO-related topics and proved to be a great event for online marketers of all levels. The next event will be held in London and New York later this year.

Reviews:

My reviews of each presentation can be found here

LinkLove

Where: London, UK and Boston, U.S

Frequency: Annual

Next Event: 30th March 2012

Website: distilled.net/events/linklove-london/

Cost: £449.00 (SEOmoz discount available)

About:

LinkLove is the second SEO event organised by Distilled featured in this post, however this one is solely focused on link building. I learnt a lot from the presentations at LinkLove and it’s definitely one of the best that I’ve attended.

LinkLove is specifically designed to provide actionable content and tips that can directly improve the way that search marketers operate for link building. For me, the top tips of this conference came from Martin McDonald, Wil Reynolds and Rand Fishkin, all of which also spoke at Distilled’s SearchLove London event last year.

For me, this event was exceptional and I’d probably recommend it over any others.

Reviews:

Review of LinkLove London 2011

Conversion Conference

Where: London, UK

Frequency: Annual

Next event: 30th November - 1st December 2012

Website: conversionconference.co.uk/

Cost: £1,095 (Conference pass only)

About:

I’ve never actually attended Conversion Conference, however my colleague Mark did and he wrote an extensive blog post on each of the presentations from the two-day event (which I've read through throughly). I learnt a lot simply from reading (and proof-reading) his blog posts so I thought I’d include it.

Mark gave this conference a glowing recommendation, outlining the actionable nature of the presentations as one of the key benefits. I will hopefully attend the 2012 event, which will take place in November/December.

Reviews:

Reviews of all presentations

Meetup events:

Having talked about the conferences that I would recommend, I thought I'd mention a few great digital marketing meetup events that I've learnt from too:

OxonDigital – Oxford (free)

I first attended OxonDigital mid-way through last year, mainly because I live in Oxfordshire and I thought I’d check it out. All of the presentations at each of the events that I've attended have been really good and it also represents a great networking opportunity.

OxonDigital is held every 3-4 months.

OMN London - London (free)

The Online Marketing Networkers event, which is held on the moored HMS President boat, provides a great opportunity to meet like-minded people.

I’ve attended a number of these events and each time the content and speakers have been excellent.

Search London – London (free)

Search London is an SEO-focused meetup event that takes place in London every two months or so.

Search London has been going for quite some time now and recent speakers include Judith Lewis and Martin MacDonald.

The Distilled meetup – London and New York (free)

I've only attended one of Distilled's meetup events, but as we've all grown to expect from them, it was very good. The most recent meetup, which was held in March 2012, featured three excellent presentations from Mike Essex, Annabel Hodges and Phil Nottingham.

If there are any other conferences or meetup events that you think I've missed, please feel free to provide details in the comments below. You can also follow me on Twitter or Google Plus.

I'm also keen to attend the following conferences at some point soon as I've heard great things about them from other SEO's.

A guide to doing SEO on Magento websites

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:18:20 +0000

Magento is a hugely popular, open source ecommerce platform that powers well over 100,000 transactional websites across the world.

A number of our SEO clients have Magento websites, which has required us to deal with a host of issues over the last few years. Here are some of the key areas that I would recommend addressing:

Preventing filter pages from being indexed:

One of the most common SEO issues with Magento is dynamic filter pages being indexed by search engines. These filter pages are ultimately duplicate versions of category pages (with different products) with a dynamic query string attached to the end of the URL. We've created a Magento SEO plugin which can help eliminate this issue, but I'll talk about this in more detail later on in the post.

Here is an example from the Harvey Nichols website (one of my favourite Magento websites).

This is just an example of one page of the website - there will be thousands of URL’s like these indexed for this website.

Preventing this from happening:

When launching new websites, we prefer to assign rules to add nonidex,follow meta robots tags to pages with set parameters – this tells the main search engines to continue crawling the site but not to index the page. You should also add a nofollow attribute to links to filter pages, for added safety.

Alternative methods:

You could choose to rely solely on canonical tags (you should have these either way), which are designed to tell search engines if dynamic pages are replicas of static pages -although I’ve had issues in the past with search engines indexing the pages anyway.

Assigning rules to parameters in Google Webmaster Tools appears to have become more effective over the last few months, so this could be another option (I've not tried it on a new website recently). I did try this around 18 months ago but didn’t have much success.

Our new Magento plugin also helps to prevent dynamic pages from being indexed by allowing you to set meta robots tags for your chosen types of pages on your website – you can find out more here. We will also be adding lots of new features to this plugin (such as rel=next and prev and sitemap options).

Turning dynamic filter pages into static category pages:

Last year I turned some of the filter pages on a client’s website into static category pages. We created lots of new pages, optimised them and added content and we were delighted when we got a lot of traffic from keywords that other websites weren’t really targeting. The most important thing to remember when doing this is that it can (if done incorrectly) impact the usability of the website.

If you’re replacing existing filter pages, you can simply 301 redirect (using a rewrite rule) the previous dynamic URL’s to the new static pages.

Removing pages from the index:

If you’re working on an existing website that has dynamic pages in the index, I would personally recommend adding a noindex, follow meta robots tag and submitting removal requests in Webmaster Tools. In the past, I’ve found that once you start submitting removal requests, the search engines are quicker to remove the other pages.

Just adding meta robots tags to these pages will work, but it could take a long time before search engines take note. I’ve always had good results from adding the noindex,follow meta robots tags and manually submitting removal requests in Google Webmaster Tools. I’ve never had to do too many before other pages started to drop out.

Just as with a new website, you could choose to use the canonical tag and/or set parameters in Google Webmaster Tools, but I’ve found that noindexing the pages and submitting removal requests is more effective and quicker.

Note: I would recommend checking to see if your filter pages have generated many links, as this could make the canonical tag a more attractive option.

Preventing search pages from being indexed:

Another common SEO issue with Magento comes from search engines choosing to index search pages. In the same way as with filter pages, I would recommend using robots.txt or meta robots tags to tell search engines not to index them.

Once you’ve done this you can submit a removal request for the entire directory in Google Webmaster Tools and the pages will be gone within 24 hours.

Dealing with automatic URL rewrite rules:

If you do a ‘site:’ search in Google on a Magento website, chances are you will find category page URL’s ending with -1 or -2. This is a result of Magento’s automatic redirect feature, which prevents you from reusing the same URL, even if you’ve only changed it accidentally. If you truncate the core_url_rewrite_table then Magento will regenerate all the URL's, removing all of the -1's and -2's. If they've been indexed, you can then create a new rewrite rule to 301 redirect them to the clean version of the URLs.

This is certainly something to keep an eye on.

Using SEO-friendly URL’s:

In order to escape the ‘/index.php?xxxxx’ and have clean, SEO-friendly URL’s, simply turn on URL rewrites in the ‘search engine optimisation’ section of configuration in the back-end.

Using top-level product URL's:

You can choose whether or not to use category paths within product URLs within the 'search engine optimisation' section of the 'catalog' section in the back-end config. I would strongly recommend setting this to 'no' as using category paths for products will leave you with very long URL's and potential duplicate products if they feature in multiple categories.

Having all of your products on the top-level of your site will make them easier to read and help to keep the structure of your site clean.

Adding the canonical tag to products and categories:

I would strongly recommend setting the option of having canonical tags on product and category pages to yes. These options can be found in the 'search engine optimisation' tab of the 'catalog' section in the back-end admin area.

Addressing page load performance:

Another common issue with Magento is the speed at which pages load, mainly due to the size of the CMS files. Generally, Magento sites are pretty slow, but the speed can be improved! By addressing the usual areas (images, CSS etc), installing a caching plugin and/or digging into your code, you can make your website much faster.

A couple of our Magento clients' websites are also hosted on Amazon EC2 servers, which also helps to speed up load time (read our 'hosting Magento on the cloud' post).

You can find out more by reading this post on speeding up Magento.

Ensuring that you’re using 301 redirects:

Default Magento installations are set to use 302 redirects when forwarding an old URL to a new one. As the majority of people reading this post will know, a 302 redirect doesn’t pass value and is specifically designed for temporary page redirects.

So, unless you’re looking to temporarily forward visitors to a new page, you should be using 301 redirects as they pass 95-99% of the value from the existing page to the new one.

Setting h1 headings:

By default, a new Magento installation will set the logo as the h1 header, meaning that this will be your h1 on every page or you will have multiple h1’s.

Getting rid of unwanted login and cart pages:

It’s common for URL’s like ‘/customer/account/login/’ or ‘/enable-cookies’ to be indexed by search engines – you should either disallow any unwanted directories in robots.txt or add a noindex,follow meta robots tag.

In the past I’ve got a lot from this post from Joost De Valk, it’s the most comprehensive Magento SEO guide I've found and it's definitely worth reading.

If you have any questions about Magento SEO or feel I've missed anything, please feel free to leave a comment below. You can also follow me on Twitter or Google Plus.

You can find out more about our SEOpack extension for Magento here, or you can download and install it here on Magento Connect.

Passing the Google Analytics IQ Exam

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:00:00 +0000

My colleague Paul and I have been using Google Analytics for as long as we’ve been involved in online marketing (and, in his case, probably before) but neither of us had actually thought about testing our prowess until recently – when our colleague Mark suggested that we both take the Google Analytics IQ Exam.

But what is the Google Analytics IQ Exam, I hear you say?

Google Analytics is a revolutionary tool which has given both online marketing professionals and internal webmasters extensive insight into the performance of their website. The certification represents a proof of proficiency test set by Google themselves and is specifically tailored to test the capabilities of online marketing professionals who routinely use the tool to monitor their client’s websites and traffic. Both Paul and I use Google Analytics on a daily basis (I should point out that passing the Google Analytics IQ Exam isn’t a prerequisite for using the tool) and the revision materials helped us to better understand our requirements as SEO professionals to improve the overall performance of a client’s site.

GPMD Go Back to School!

Both Paul and I felt that we knew how to use Analytics pretty well but, as with any exam, we needed to do revision beforehand – the most useful of which was Google Analytics' own “Conversion University”, which can be found here:

http://www.google.com/intl/en/analytics/iq.html?

This resource proved particularly useful as it provided all of the information required to pass the Google Analytics exam in easily digestible videos – which vary in length from about two minutes through to about ten minutes. The Conversion University splits the training for the exam into four distinct sections – these being:

• First Steps – A basic introduction to Google Analytics e.g. installing the tracking code, differences between metric and dimensions and segmenting data.

• Interpreting Reports – How you interpret reports within Google Analytics e.g. learning about traffic sources, time metrics and content reports.

• Fundamentals – Looks at the more complex, but fundamental, elements of using Google Analytics including regex (regular expression), ecommerce tracking and the use of filters.

• In-Depth Analysis – Reveals some of the lesser known intricacies of Google Analytics such as virtual pageviews, advanced segmentation and understanding how visitors interact with the ‘search’ function of your site.

When we actually took the exam, there were certain elements which probably came up more than others and which it would be a good idea to focus on if you’re planning on taking the exam yourself – but we’ll come to those later in the post!

There are, of course, other resources out there which are useful for preparing for the Google Analytics IQ Exam but the videos from Conversion University were definitely the most advantageous and, crucially, the most relevant. Looking through forums and reading blog posts for example can reveal other people’s experiences of taking the exam and this can be beneficial in terms of preparing yourself for the types of questions that you are likely to face.

What I would say, however, and I’m sure Paul will vouch for this as well, is that you should perhaps be wary of seeking out sample tests for the Analytics exam before you take it because we found a few and, in our infinite wisdom, decided to see if we were prepared for the actual exam by taking them (not affiliated with Google in any way). The sample tests we found had little or in some cases, no bearing on the type of questions that you are likely to face in the exam and may sway you into revising stuff that isn’t relevant at all. This may just be us and how we revise but we were a lot less confident after taking these practice exams!

The Exam...

I was quite nervous before actually doing the exam, though I’m not really too sure why as I’m confident using Google Analytics and couldn’t really pin-point the cause of the butterflies! It was probably because it’s been a good few years since I’ve sat an exam (the last most likely being back when I was at the University of Leeds) and I must have forgotten that exams are stressful! Paul was a nervous wreck, needless to say.

Key Elements of the Exam:

• 90 minutes long

• 70 questions

• Minimum 80% for a pass (56 correct out of 70 questions)

• Multiple choice answers

• Can review your answers before submitting for marking

It was a tense 90 minutes but – not wishing to keep you in suspense any longer – I can reveal that both Paul and I emerged victorious, in the interest of getting myself some good karma, I thought I’d reveal some of the areas which were prevalent in the exam and which you should ensure that you are comfortable with if you’re sitting it yourself:

REGEX:

This stands for Regular Expressions and, if used correctly, enables you to get more from Google Analytics (which is, most likely, why it is prominent in the exam itself), so it is a good idea to make sure you’re up to speed with the basics of RegEx before clicking the start button on the Google Analytics IQ Exam! You should, at the very least, know the main patterns of RegEx used regularly in analytics:

Use . (dot) to match any single character

Use /(backslash) to escape the special meaning of metacharacters

Use [ ] to match one item in a character set

? Match zero or one of the previous item

+ Match one or more of the previous item

* Match zero or more of the previous item

Another area that seemed to crop up in the exam with some frequency was that of FILTERS:

Those who use Google Analytics with some regularity are likely to have set up a wide array of filters within their different profiles as it allows for a more comprehensive overview of data. It is definitely worth watching the Conversion University video on ‘Filters’ a few times before sitting the exam to make sure that you’re comfortable with how you filter data within Google Analytics and how you would create ‘custom filters’ for your different profiles.

ECOMMERCE TRACKING:

As an awful lot of transactional websites use Google Analytics to successfully track online sales, it shouldn’t be surprising that the issue of Ecommerce tracking appeared quite regularly throughout the Google Analytics IQ Exam. Again, in order to prepare yourself with the exam, you should familiarise yourself with the video within the Conversion University – paying particular attention to the placement of the ecommerce tracking code and finer points of _addTrans(), _addItem() and _trackTrans().

If you’re not familiar with ecommerce tracking within Google Analytics, the above image may seem overwhelming but the videos supplied by Google manage to explain it in such a manner that even a novice user should be able to become proficient at adding ecommerce tracking codes to their site.

The Results…

If you’ve been paying attention (I have rambled on, so I would forgive you if this isn’t the case), you will have seen that I did briefly allude to the fact that both Paul and I passed the Google Analytics IQ Exam…

….but what were our scores?

Well, that would be telling – so you’ll have to make do with this:

If you have any questions about the exam, you can leave them in the comments below. You can also follow me on Twitter and Google Plus.

London SilverStripe CMS Meetup - April 17th 2012

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:25:46 +0000

We're really excited about the next London SilverStripe Meetup in April. The topic is:

How can we gain more exposure for SilverStripe?

All developers, agencies and clients that work with the SilverStripe CMS would benefit if more people around the world knew of the CMS. This meetup will have a panel comprising of SilverStripe agency heads who will lead the discussions. We are asking everyone in the community to submit ideas, topics and questions ahead of the Meetup so that we can highlight some important issues to discuss on the night.

For example:

How could we compare SilverStripe with more popular open source CMS's?
Would developers, agencies and clients be willing to have "Powered by SilverStripe" on their websites?
What collaterial would we like to from SilverStripe HQ to help marketing the CMS?

Feel free to come along armed with some stuff you want to share with us. We'll make all of the information available after the event.

We would love to see as many people from the SilverStripe community attend. Please send your ideas, topics and questions to rich AT gpmd DOT co DOT uk.

Date: Tuesday 17th April 2012
Time: 1830 Start - Finish around 2030 / 2100
Location: Please sign-up on the meetup group...

Full details of the event can be found on Meetup.com.

Social Sharing Trends on Jewellery Websites [infographic]

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 17:19:42 +0000

We recently carried out some basic research into the websites of retailers within the UK jewellery industry. We wanted to highlight a few interesting facts about how the retailers we looked at are using digital marketing.

Please click here to view our Jewellery Websites and Social Sharing Trends Infographic →

We took a random sample of 100 jewellery retailers in order to generate unbiased results.

Only 74% of the jewellery retailers had an e-commerce website

Almost a quarter of the websites that we reviewed were not e-commerce enabled. We were surprised by this, as we’ve seen a considerable increase in the amount of offline retailers adopting e-commerce over the last 12 months.

Very few websites were optimised for mobile

Mobile is still very open within the jewellery industry, as only 8% of the retailers we looked at had a mobile-friendly website. If you subscribe to any of the main digital news and blog websites, you will have seen plenty of articles about the importance of mobile websites and mobile marketing. This has been highlighted by many as a massive area for growth in 2012/13.

Google+ hasn’t been adopted by many jewellery companies

The industry as a whole appears to be unphased by the hype surrounding Google Plus - only 10% of the retailers we looked at had created a branded profile. Google+ is looking more and more likely to have a major impact on the way we search the internet, so it's important that retailers keep an eye on it. We are actively suggesting that our clients pay close attention to Google+ and apply the same focus that they're doing with Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook and Twitter are being utilised by a larger number of jewellers in the UK

74% of the retailers we reviewed had a Facebook page and 68% had a Twitter account.

Let us know what you think of this infographic, you can comment below. If you are interested in discussing e-commerce, mobile commerce or anything else digital, please email rich@gpmd.co.uk or call 020 7183 1072.

Workshop: Content is King!

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:20:22 +0000

It's that time again! We have put together another cracking workshop for our clients and members of the public to attend in March 2012.

Content is King

Location: 14 City Road
Date: March 22nd 2012
Time: 1330 - 1700
Tickets: Early bird discount £10 (Normal £15) via Eventbrite

Now that we’re firmly into 2012 and we’ve all finally got back into the swing of things, we’re pleased to announce our latest GPMD workshop session - which will be focused on content writing/marketing.

After a great deal of internal discussion, we decided that content writing and content marketing would be a great topic for our latest session, as we think it will provide value to everyone involved with running, managing and creating websites.

Focal points for this session will include:

Why content is important online
Optimising content to improve your conversion rate
Utilising content to outline and communicate your brand proposition
Different types of content and their benefits
The role of content in search engine optimisation

We have 12 places available and they'll go fast. You can get an early bird discount if you book before March 3rd 2012. Book your place on EventBrite now.

Preparing for a website migration: A successful SEO case study

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Website migration projects (moving an existing website onto a new CMS platform) are notorious for causing short-term and long-term drops in search engine positioning and traffic, especially when you're making big changes. As someone that has been very nervous when approaching these kinds of projects in the past, I thought I would write a quick blog post / case study on a recent migration project that we worked on with one of our clients.

The challenge:

A few months ago, one of our clients purchased one of their competitor’s retail outlet and website – but just the website, the files were not included. We were then given the task of building an exact replica of the site (which was previously on a bespoke .asp system) on Magento. In normal circumstances, this migration would have been a lot easier for us, but we only had 3-4 weeks to complete the whole project - as the website would be taken down once the buy-out was completed.

In order to prevent any temporary or permanent dips in search engine positioning and traffic, we needed to keep as much of the site as similar as possible, basically trying to prevent Google from considering it a major overhaul.

The original website:

The website we were migrating was ranking fairly well for a number of highly competitive search terms, and a large proportion of it's traffic was coming from these key generic terms. The products sold on the website are highly expensive, desirable items - the average sale is worth several thousands of pounds.

The existing website was optimised fairly well and it had well over 500,000 page URL’s in total.

Restrictions we faced:

No .htaccess file (because it was a .asp system)
No access to Google Webmaster Tools or Google Analytics until after the launch/transfer of ownership
Very little time (a lot of work was carried out over the Christmas holidays)
Unable to access the files on the server
A large number of URLs were unable to be kept the same (sections that needed to be removed and dynamic query string URL’s, eg: www.example.com.asp?br1234567)
Parts of the website were very badly organised (so we needed to change the structure)

What we did:

Focused on keeping most of the existing content the same
Adopted the same URL structure where possible
Mapped 301 redirects and wrote re-write rules where changes were unavoidable (dynamic URL’s for some category pages and content pages)
Crawled the website to identify and deal with any anomalies
Kept all of the on-page optimisation the same (apart from a few minor changes)
Began building a few good, natural links to the website prior to the launch (so that links didn’t stop coming to the website)
Added rules to apply ‘noindex, follow’ meta robots tags to existing and new dynamic filter pages
Updated html and xml sitemaps

Our process:

Step 1: Started monitoring the website (rankings, traffic, 404’s etc)
Step 2: Planned URL mapping (redirects for affected pages of the website and actions for all new pages)
Step 3: Started building links to the existing website
Step 4: Started coding the new version of the site
Step 5: Created re-write rules and redirects
Step 6: Launched stage version of the new website
Step 7: Started building category pages (on stage site)
Step 8: Re-built blog and added blog articles (maintaining same URL structure where possible)
Step 9: Started importing product and category page content (to stage site)
Step 10: Checked that all optimisation was the same (where possible) across the website
Step 11: Customised the checkout (stage version)
Step 12: Comprehensive bug checking and testing
Step 13: Launched the new website
Step 14: Constant checking and monitoring (gained access to Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools at this point)

The results:

Based on previous experience and the amount of changes, I was anticipating a slight dip in traffic and rankings after the website was relaunched – which I was wrong about. Although a couple of the main keywords fluctuated slightly, we were seeing that pages that we were building links to were ranking much higher than before, meaning they were also generating more traffic.

Around two weeks later, terms that the website was not ranking in the top 50 for previously were now sitting in the top 5 and some of their biggest terms that were already in the top 5 had moved up into the top 2.

Now, a few months on, we’ve seen a significant improvement in both traffic and rankings - with the website now ranking between 1-3 for the vast majority of their target terms.

Our client was really pleased with how the project went and we’re looking forward to helping the website develop more in the coming months.

image credit*

If you would like to find out more about this project or the SEO and web development services we provide, please call us on 020 7183 1072 or fill out our contact form.

If you have any questions about website migrations, please feel free to leave them as comments below. You can also follow Paul on Twitter or Google Plus.

Finding and Choosing an EPOS Provider

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:30:00 +0000

Running an ecommerce shop requires you to manage your inventory, which can become more complex and time-consuming if you have multiple physical shops and/or distribution centres. Enter EPOS (Electronic Point of Sale) system... Most popular e-commerce platforms, such as Magento, have built-in stock inventory funtionality which is sufficient if you are only dispatching products from one location and don't have a massive catalogue of products. If this isn't the case, you'll need something a little more enterprise level, like an EPOS system.

The first Windows-compatible electronic point of sale (EPOS) system was launched in 1992 by Bob Henry and Martin Goodwin and it was called IT Retail. Since then, we've seen lots of new systems introduced to the market, with different models offering a host of new features including advanced user interfaces, real-time stock information, integration with lots of different web-based software programmes and lots more.

We work with a number of online retailers and I'm frequently asked “Who are good EPOS companies for us to work with?”. This is a difficult question to answer as, unless you’ve worked with a provider and implemented their solution, you don’t really have good grounds on which to base a recommendation. I’ve written this post to provide guidance for retailers on what to look for in an EPOS provider, whilst also possibly giving advice to EPOS providers so that they can interact with retailers more efficiently.

Selecting an EPOS provider

Top things to look for in an EPOS provider:

High and consistent operating speed (speak with their existing clients)
Reliability (speak with their existing clients)
Ease of use
Remote support
Functionality you need now and maybe in the future
API documentation - this is essential for your website developers

As with selecting any company as a provider you should address these points too:

Have I met their team? Not just the sales person or owner.
How has their company grown in the past 10 years?
What level of support do they offer and what processes do they have in place?

Selecting a new EPOS provider is a big deal and can be very costly. You need to be confident that the new provider is right for you and your business. It helps to have someone independent or slightly distanced from your business to check them out too. Ask your web developers to speak with their tech people and definitely call as many of their current clients to see what their experience has been like.

List of EPOS providers in the UK

Here’s a short list that we have compiled based on some basic research and previous projects.

We are planning to conduct several blog interviews with different EPOS suppliers this year, once we've published them we'll add links from here.

If you want to discuss EPOS integration or website development please get in touch with Rich on 020 7183 1072 (follow on Google+ or Twitter @iamtotallyrich).

Sunrise - A free responsive HTML5 theme for SilverStripe CMS

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 17:08:26 +0000

We were delighted to be voted third overall by the SilverStripe judges. Congratualtions to Sveta here at GPMD, who's 'Tangerine' theme was also voted 'Judges Choice' out of the non-finalists. And a big well done to Sara Tušar, who's theme 'Simple' came in first place. Click here for full details on all the finalists.

If any of you follow me on Twitter you’ll have noticed me going on recently about a theme contest for SilverStripe CMS. Here at GPMD we love SilverStripe and use it as the platform for many of our projects, so when we heard about the contest we thought we’d like to give something back.

View a live demo or get stuck in and download the theme below:

Live demo | Download Sunrise SilverStripe theme v1.0.0

Our Considerations

When discussing what we wanted to achieve there were a few considerations we felt were important. The theme should be:

Beautiful (naturally)
Exclusive - you won’t see this theme anywhere else, it’s exclusive to SilverStripe
Neutral - suitable for any kind of business, organisation or personal website
Compatible - works with SilverStripe version 2.4 and the soon to be released version 3
Current - uses HTML5 and CSS3 (degrades gracefully on older browsers)
Accessible - clean and semantic code
Non-dependent - uses minimal Javascript
Responsive - looks good no matter what device it’s being viewed on

We also took into account the fact that a default SilverStripe install doesn’t include any data or widgets, so it had to look good with little or no content.

Our Solution

I’ve worked with many different themes on various platforms and the ones I’ve enjoyed using the most are those that aren’t overly styled and are easy to customise - I’m a front-end developer and I don’t want the way a theme is set up to get in my way of being creative with it.

Therefore, my primary goal was to create a beautiful bare-bones theme that could be used as is, or built upon and expanded quickly by developers.

Rather than try and re-invent the wheel I used the superb HTML5 Boilerplate as my base template and the excellent 320andup HTML5 Boilerplate Extension to bring in the responsive ‘stuff’. 320andup works on the basis of 'mobile first', so it prevents mobile devices from downloading desktop assets by using a ‘mobile’ stylesheet as its starting point.

Then into the mix I integrated the default SilverStripe template features (three level menu, sidebar support, breadcrumbs etc.), added a touch of sexy css (using LESS) and bingo, one fully responsive, gorgeous SilverStripe theme!

As an added extra I included styling for the simple blog module because I know a lot of people will want to use that.

Just gimme the good stuff already!

If you’ve read this far I assume you’re still interested in downloading the theme. Simply click the big button below and off you go, take it and make it your own.

Live demo | Download Sunrise SilverStripe theme v1.0.0

Feedback and Support

This is just the start for Sunrise, so I’m sure issues will arise as people use it. Please feel free to leave your feedback in the comments section below and we’ll do our best to implement updates and fixes in future releases.

You can also submit support questions, although as it’s a free theme the time we’re able to dedicate to support will be limited. However, we are planning on producing more themes in the future and will therefore be setting up a dedicated support forum at some point, so watch this space...

The theme is free and covered by exactly the same BSD license as SilverStripe.

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You can follow Matt on Twitter, Dribbble and Google Plus.

Interview with Ingo Schommer of SilverStripe

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:04:01 +0000

I was introduced to Ingo Schommer at the UK SilverStripe meetup event in November 2011, and I recently got back in touch with him to ask if he would mind taking part in an interview for the GPMD blog - which he kindly agreed to.

Here are the questions that we asked Ingo and his answers.

Please can you provide a brief introduction to SilverStripe and tell us a bit more about yourself.

SilverStripe is an open source content management system, which excites professional web development teams with it's technical abilities, but also content authors with its ease of use.

I'm a core developer for SilverStripe, which means I get to collaborate with smart people all over the world, which is a very humbling experience.

Currently based in Germany, I work on exciting stuff like the CMS interface, but also the less visible bits like improving search results on silverstripe.org, nagging people about coding standards and keeping the builds passing.

What is your favourite SilverStripe website and why?

Being a developer first and foremost, I tend to be impressed by websites which achieve complex business goals through SilverStripe, such as geographically mapping large amounts of data or providing a personalised experience for thousands of customers. It’s often difficult to see the technical effort "under the hood" though, so it’s hard to pick out a favourite.

On the community side, I admire Aram's work on ssbits.com - it’s been a fresh breeze to the spirit of sharing in SilverStripe, with it's "site of the month" feature and numerous helpful tutorials.

SilverStripe has grown significantly since moving to open source in 2006 - what do think the main reasons for this success are?

Web professionals have to be pragmatists, otherwise you'd go insane over browser support and the inconsistent development stack. But they also want to be proud of their work. I think we just hit a sweet spot between providing a framework architecture to build clean solutions, while still keeping in mind the practical problems of developing medium-sized websites and apps.

In 2011, SilverStripe introduced a number of new features and released the first version of v3.0 - do you have any big plans for 2012?

Our SilverStripe 3.0 release (which is currently in alpha stage) will be continued and consolidated, combined with a greater focus on user experience.

SilverStripe has loyal supporters around the globe - how will you grow the SilverStripe community in the coming months/years?

I feel that the SilverStripe 3.0 release brings a lot of motivation and inspiration to the core team as well as the wider community. Everybody loved Felipe's design concepts and is dying to see them in action. I see this as a chance to involve more community members in activities typically undertaken only by a handful of dedicated individuals. This includes exciting stuff like creating new core features, but also necessary work to keep the overall system healthy, like reviewing patches and being active on our bug tracker.

We'll use our visibility and community reach to ignite and support these activities, but in the end it’s up to everybody who wants to see SilverStripe flourish to step up (see silverstripe.org/contribute to find out how you can help).

Version 3.0 is due out this year and is a major overhaul with many improvements - what are your favourite changes?

As a long-time tinkerer in the CMS interface, I'm thrilled that we’ve got the opportunity to start more or less from scratch on the technical layer. SilverStripe 3.0 uses modern libraries and approaches, and generally provides more opportunities for deeper customisation.

On the framework side, I'm particularly fond of the new ways to query and express data, using a fluent PHP API rather than raw SQL queries.

Looking past version 3.0, where do you see SilverStripe going in 2013 and beyond?

I think we'll see more competition from content management systems with solid framework underpinnings, given the proliferation of exciting framework solutions in the PHP space, combined with the ease of developing front-ends with modern web techniques.

On a more abstract level, the types of content managed with our product will expand, and won't neatly fit into the "nested pages on a website" concept.

We need to listen closely to both customers and developers to stay relevant in this market, and ensure we're solving the right problems on both functionality and framework architecture.

It's a big challenge, and only realistic with a wide community providing feedback and help.

---

Once again, we'd like to thank Ingo for taking the time to do this interview - you can follow him on Twitter or read his recent articles on the SilverStripe 3.0 interface and how SilverStripe is maturing on the SilverStripe website.

You can follow Paul on Twitter and Google Plus.

Suspiciously High Bounce Rates - A Tale of 'Top Sites'

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:00:00 +0000

A few days ago one of our clients, Andrew Fraser of Winterson Pearls, informed us that he was getting extremely high bounce rates on one specific browser (Safari). He'd actually ended up doing most of the leg work in diagnosing the problem himself, by pointing out a blog post that referred to this issue - after reading through I was interested to find out if this problem still persisted and in what other browsers.

The Problem:

For those of you who haven't read the original article, I will give a brief summary of the issue:

User is using Safari (or Opera as we will find out)
User vists the site regularly enough for it to appear in their 'Top Sites' section
Every time user opens a new tab 'Top Sites' is displayed
In displaying the 'Top Sites' thumbnail, Safari makes a full request to the webpage, increasing bounce rate if using site analytics **

** The user has to hang around on the 'Top Sites' tab for a few seconds before the request is made.

This isn't limited to an increase in bounce rate either, as when the offending browsers are making full requests to web pages in the 'Top Sites' tab they request all assets and all javascript regardless... So if you are really concerned keep reading!

The Research:

I decided to use the method described in the original blog post, it was simple and I already had Charles installed. It was as easy as running Charles and watching the requests when loading the 'Top Sites' section.

The list that follows is of all the browsers I tested that have 'Top Sites', I decided to stick with mainly modern browsers as I didn't have the time to test all possible versions:

Safari 4+
Chrome 15+
Opera 10+
IE9

Safari 4+

Safari was easy enough to test, open a new tab and wait about 5 seconds until all the top sites start refreshing. I only tested 5.1 as the original blog post is on 4, I have a feeling they have added the time delay since. You will find that ONLY the get request to the page itself will have an added header.

X-Purpose = preview

This is currently the ONLY way to detect a request made by the 'Top Sites' section.

Chrome 15+

Chrome doesn't conform in the same way as the other browsers in that Google have obviously realised this is an issue and have such implemented a nice feature that avoids the problem altogether.

Chrome will generate a thumbnail image when you genuinely visit the website, so when in the 'Top Sites' section it makes a request to an internal url (chrome://thumb/[TOP SITE URL]) which is harmless. You can test this yourself by removing the 'Top Sites' file located in:

Windows:
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\

Mac OS X:
~/library/application\ support/google/chrome/default/

*nix:
~/.config/google-chrome/default/

Once removed, restart chrome and you should find your 'Top Sites' have no thumbnails. Visit one of the top sites and return back and you will see it now has a thumbnail :).

I don't believe this has always been the case, a few searches revealed that with a few previous versions it acted in the same way as Safari (being webkit and all) and would request the whole page using the same 'X-Purpose: preview' header. Well, at least it conformed in the same way to keep our fix consistent!

Opera 10+

Opera, like safari acted exactly the same way. Open a new tab, wait a few seconds and each top site thumbnail will start refreshing with the same header and making the same full request!

IE9

IE9 bypasses this all together by not displaying a thumbnail at all... Well, at least it's not causing any extra headaches like some other versions I know!

Firefox

Firefox by default doesn't have a 'Top Sites' feature and so doesn't cause this problem... But whilst googling around, I did find references to a header that may crop up so I included it in my fix like any cautious dev would. The header relates to the prefetch feature many browsers now implement:

X-Moz = prefetch

Note 'prefetch' NOT 'prefetech' as a certain drupal post mentions and consequently many other places.

The Fix:

The idea is to catch the custom headers being sent and do something appropriate with them, you could either remove analytics tracking from your page when the headers are set, or take it one step further and have a custom page that will be displayed in the users 'Top Sites' section (think creatively). So here it is:

Apache .htaccess

SetEnvIf X-Moz prefetch GA-Ignore=true
SetEnvIf X-Purpose preview GA-Ignore=true

This will set another header called 'GA-Ignore' to true if its a request from mozilla prefetch or 'Top Sites'.

Php

// Check request headers for our flag
if( isset($_SERVER['GA-Ignore']) && $_SERVER['GA-Ignore']) ){
    // Don't load analytics here
}

You could also load a different page (via rewrites) if it is a 'Top Sites' / prefetch request.

RewriteCond %{ENV:GA-Ignore} true
RewriteRule .* /top-sites.html [L,R=301]

We will be releasing our new SEOPack module for Magento later this week which will include a fix for this problem along with other SEO based enhancements.

A big thank you to Andrew for rasing this issue.

Interview with Harvest's Naama Bloom

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:53:11 +0000

Over the years, we’ve tried and tested a huge selection of project management tools with the intention of improving the way we work. Some of these tools didn't meet our expectations, but some have made a big difference to our company and our clients. Harvest, an integrated time tracking and billing software package, certainly falls under the latter.

We first started using Harvest in 2008 and have become a more efficient agency as a result. After discussing the impact that Harvest has had on GPMD with a colleague, I got in touch with Naama from Harvest and asked if she could spare some time to do an interview for our blog, which she kindly agreed to.

Please can you provide some information on Harvest and your background within the company.

Harvest is a web-based time tracking software company. We were founded in 2006 by Danny Wen and Shawn Liu, who were running a small web design and development firm at the time. They were frustrated by the time tracking options available so they decided to build a solution that is simple to use, utilises intuitive design, and focuses on doing one thing really well (time tracking).

I was introduced to Danny in the spring of 2011, and joined the team a few months later as Head of Marketing. I’m responsible for helping the company grow it’s user base and advocating for the space.

How has Harvest evolved as a product since it was first introduced in 2006?

Harvest has evolved significantly. We are constantly releasing product improvements; in fact, we released code 876 times in 2011. Over time, the design has changed, and many of the features have become more sophisticated. In the early days, it was not uncommon for Danny and Shawn to meet with their customers to get detailed feedback and feature requests. We continue to meet with our customers regularly to gather feedback. As well, we have developed internal systems to track and manage specific requests.

Which features have proved to be the most popular with new and existing customers?

The answer to this really varies based on the type of user. Obviously project managers and operations folk heavily rely on the reports. We’ve heard some pretty amazing stories about how our reports are used to set rates, track project revenues and manage budgets.

Software developers really seem to like the different ways to track time. They use our web app, our desktop widgets, iPhone and Android apps, and many teams use Co-op, a group communication tool by Harvest that has seamless time tracking integration.

Has your target market changed since you first launched Harvest?

I wouldn’t say that it’s changed, more that we’ve refined it. When Danny and Shawn built Harvest they were specifically thinking about their business, which was a web design agency. That said, we’ve always believed that Harvest is a great tool for any consulting businesses that bill for their time. What we’ve been thinking about more recently is: who are the kinds of companies that gravitate to Harvest? They are the ones who use technology to solve problems and are comfortable with the cloud. They also value good design, and know that it makes their teams happy to use a well-designed product.

How successful have your iPhone and Android apps been for you?

Harvest wants to make time tracking as easy as possible for our users, and that means that we need to provide tools for when they are on the go, as well as at their desks. To that end, our mobile apps have been very successful, and are one more way that we can deliver great service.

What are the main drivers of new business for Harvest?

Our business has grown organically, because we’re fortunate to have some fantastic customers who have spread the word. We have recently begun to increase our advertising and marketing efforts, to supplement that growth.

Are there any new features that you are looking to release in the not so distant future?

We are really excited about the release of the Harvest Mac App in February. We launched a private Beta and got some very helpful feedback from our customers. The Mac App will allow users to literally track time in 3 seconds. It’s incredible. We’ve all been using it in the office and love it. People can sign up to be notified as soon as it launches at http://www.getHarvest.com/mac.

We'd like to thank Naama and Harvest for taking the time to do this interview, if you'd like more information on Harvest, visit their website now.

You can follow Harvest and Naama on Twitter.

You can also follow Paul on Twitter and Google Plus.

Design Inspiration - Where can I get some please?

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:52:25 +0000

So, you’ve gone through your briefing and discovery stage, created mood-boards and wire-frames, and now you’re at the stage where you actually need to knuckle down and design something. If you’re like me, you’re probably familiar with the feeling of looking at that blank ‘page’ and thinking “where on earth do I start?”

Hopefully, you’ve already got a reasonably good idea of the overall style that you’re going to be creating (if not, then you’re probably not ready to start designing), but you just need a little nudge in the right direction.

Well never fear, help is at hand. I’m definitely an advocate for taking inspiration from all around you - books, magazines, billboards, music videos and so on - but there are also a wealth of online resources available to you and I want to share some of my favourites.

Dribbble: www.dribbble.com

Dribbble is a ‘show-and-tell’ site for designers to share small snapshots of what they’re working on and ask for feedback. As an invite-only site (you can browse as a guest) the standard is very high. The snapshots are small, so you won’t see whole sites featured here, but you will find a multitude of fantastic user-interface elements.

If you’re a fan of sexy app icons this is the site for you - prepare to be wowed!

Designpiration: www.designspiration.net

For pure design-related gorgeousness look no further than designspiration. designspiration features a huge and diverse selection of high quality, user-submitted images, featuring branding, typography, prints, brochures, photography... It simply oozes coolness.

Siteinspire: www.siteinspire.com/showcase/all

siteinspire is a great website design showcase. You can browse through the sites in the directory by ‘style’, ‘type’ and ‘theme’, so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for.

Design Blogs:

A lot of design blogs have an inspiration section, much of it grouped into themed round-ups, such as “Beautiful Ecommerce Websites”, “Outstanding Minimalist Website Designs” and so on. This can really help speed up your research process - these sites have already done a lot of the hard work for you. Some of my favourites that consistently feature fantastic content are:

Vandelay Design

Smashing Magazine

On these sites you can usually subscribe to email updates, keeping you informed when new articles have been posted.

Twitter

Last, but by no means least, is Twitter.

I’ve found it one of the best resources for inspiration by following other designers and web agencies - we designers seem to like sharing cool stuff we’ve found, so I always make a point of checking my time-line on a regular basis, and if I come across a fantastic piece of design I’ll tweet about it.

It’s also worth noting that many of the sites mentioned above have Twitter accounts, so they’re worth following to keep up-to-date with what’s popular on their particular network.

As a great start why not follow GPMD - twitter.com/gpmd

I hope you enjoyed my inspiration round-up and have got something out of it. Look out for more design related articles in the near future.

Backing up your NAS with Dropbox - Non Native

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:57:25 +0000

So, we had a problem in the office the other day... We bought a new Synology DS1511+ (x86 - Intel Atom) to replace our old *nix NAS, which had dropboxd running on it. I thought I would have a crack at getting dropboxd compiled on the DS1511+, after all it was an x86 architecture and it had ipkg to install make utils... But to no avail.

The problem is that the version of GLIBC that comes with DSM 3.2 is 2.3.6 and the version of GLIBC that dropboxd wants is 2.4.*... Damn. I also tried a precompiled binary, but that was a whole other can of worms, again it boiled down to features that are present in GLIBC 2.4 but not 2.3. Unfortunately, I don't possess the skills for cross-compiling nor have I the time, if anyone else fancies the challenge go ahead and let me know how you get on!

So the alternatives were to send back the shiny new NAS OR find another way. We chose the latter. In this blog post I will document an alternative to native dropboxd for NAS backup... Yes we could use S3 backup, but that's already baked into DSM and no fun ;) plus we wanted dropbox specifically.

Goal:

Have the NAS and dropbox synced together. We will use the spare computer to mount shares from the NAS and use its architecture to run the dropbox client.

Requirements:

NAS
Spare computer (*nix/Mac)... We will use Mac OS X 10.6+ for the rest of this tutorial (with hints for *nix).
Native Dropbox client for OS of spare computer
Dropbox account
Network connection between the NAS and spare machine

Step 1 - Pre Setup

If you haven't done so already, enable network shares for the relevant folders on your NAS that you want sync'd and add a user than can read/write them. If your using a Mac enable AFP shares or SMB (samba) and if your using *nix go for NFS or SMB. In the case of Synology it is as simple as using the web interface.

Step 2 - Setup

Setup a folder on your spare computer that will hold the dropbox folder. You can use the default location but in our case we didn't want users using the mounted locations.

$ sudo mkdir /share

// Change owner ship of /share folder so we can write to it
$ sudo chown -R <local username>:wheel /share

Step 3 - Install Dropbox

Now it's time to install your dropbox and point it towards / share (Advanced setup). It will create a folder called 'Dropbox' inside share and will probably try and start syncing... At this point pause the sync.

Step 4 - Mounting

Now we are going to use automount to mount our folders from the NAS. If you're using *nix you can use your fstab for this part (google for 'mounting smb/nfs shares with fstab').

$ sudo vi /etc/auto_master

You'll see something along the lines of this:

#
# Automounter master map
#
+auto_master	# Use directory service
/net			-hosts		-nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid
/home		auto_home	-nobrowse,hidefromfinder
/Network/Servers	-fstab
/-			-static

Add the following line to the bottom:

/share/Dropbox          auto_dropbox

This tells the automount service that you want to use a sub-mount map to define your mounts, and that sub-mount map is relative to '/share/Dropbox'. Your full 'auto_master' file should look like this:

#
# Automounter master map
#
+auto_master	# Use directory service
/net			-hosts		-nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid
/home		auto_home	-nobrowse,hidefromfinder
/Network/Servers	-fstab
/-			-static
/share/Dropbox     auto_dropbox

Now save and exit. Run the next command to create the 'auto_dropbox' sub-map and edit it

$ sudo vi /etc/auto_dropbox

Now you will want to fill this file with the directories you want from your NAS, here is an example based from our own

[foldername]    -fstype=[sharefstype]    [sharetype]://[username]:[password]@[NAS hostname / IP]/[foldername shared on NAS]
clients             -fstype=afp    afp://auser:arealpassword@green.local/clients

If you wanted to use SMB you can replace '-fstype=afp' with '-fstype=smbfs' and use 'smb://' instead of 'afp://'. Also note that [foldername] is relative to '/share/Dropbox'.

Now just run the following commands to re-mount:

$ sudo automount -vc

Step 5 - Finishing Up

That's about it. Now your shares are mounted you can resume the dropbox sync and it will happily plod along backing up your NAS.

Conclusion

While not as graceful / efficient as having dropboxd running directly on the NAS, this is definitely a viable solution and it works. This will be especially helpful for anyone with an ARM based NAS as dropbox I believe said they won't be supporting it anytime soon.

If you're having problems with this, please leave your comments below and we will do our best to help you.

Getting and scaling Magento in the cloud

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:11:38 +0000

I was recently asked to research getting Magento into the cloud and making it scalable for one of our clients. This decision came about as we believe performance is a large factor in conversion, coupled with server reliability and server uptime. You may ask "Why don't you host your own servers?" well we do... But they don't scale on demand and they are certainly prone to hardware faults where the response time is probably a couple of hours, not minutes. It has become obvious that the cloud has many advantages over a rack full of servers in one data centre. I'm not writing this post to convert you to the cloud so lets get on...

Overview

What's to follow is a set of instructions on how I went about getting Magento on the cloud in a scalable configuration, that's not to say it's the 'correct' way, but it works. The following are the tools I used:

Magento 1.6.1.0 Community Edition (should work with 1.5.0.0+)
Amazon AWS (EC2, ELB, RDS, S3/Cloudfront)
OnePica Image CDN plugin
Scalr (Open source cloud management platform)
NFSv3 (you can use v4)
s3cmd

Scalr isn't required, but it does provide some handy features like managing a DNS record for each server instance or allowing you to execute scripts across multiple servers. I'm also certain you could translate these instructions to other cloud systems as none of them depend on any particular AWS feature. Here is what we are trying to achieve (pardon the icons, they were the best I could find):

The image above depicts:

(ELB) Load balancer, balancing our web servers
(S3) CDN which will host our cached media files and skin (skin/) files (you could use cloudfront)
(EC2)x2 Public facing web servers which will contain our Magento code base (I put 2x so you can see how the load balancer and web server scaling will work)
(EC2) Admin web server which will be a seperated administration-only server
(EBS) Persistant storage mounted on the admin server containing our media filesÂ (media/) shared out via NFS
(RDS) Database server which speaks for itself

Admin Server (EC2)

Overview

Our admin box will serve as the central code base that all web servers will sync from, and also where our media files will be served from. You may be thinking "Well that's the central point of failure" and to an extent you're correct, but what we can do is ensure regular backups as well as using scalr to mange the box (server goes down, new server goes up).

Scalr Setup

Create yourself a new farm, call it whatever you like. Go to the roles and create yourself a new application server with apache (I used Ubuntu 10.04 app-apache64-ubuntu-ebs), add any scaling options you would like but make sure minimum instances is 1 (as it's a required server). No need for load balancing on this server, but I would suggest you add an elastic IP if you use a payment gateway like SagePay (as they only allow communications from certain IP's). When using scalr images they are all bundled with EBS volumes, if you're using your own AMI make sure you add a persistent volume now.

Save the farm and get it started, within a minute or two scalr should register that there isn't a server running and will pop us our admin box. Once it's up and running, ssh yourself in (click the icon next to the server), you should now be root.

Please go through the magento requirements, as there are a few things you are going to need... Ones that I can remember are:

php5
php5-cli
php5-mysql
php5-mcrypt
php5-gd
php5-curl

Make sure you restart apache after installing new modules.

Apache

The first thing we need to do if you're using one of the scalr application server images is to make sure AllowOverride is set to all on /var/www by doing the following:

$ vi /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
# Change line[11] "AllowOverride None" to "AllowOverride All"

This will allow .htaccess files to work (required for magento). Next make sure to clear out your /var/www folder:

$ rm -rf /var/www/*

From here you can use your own method to pull in your code base (or a fresh version of Magento 1.6.1.0) to /var/www... For example:

# This method would require you to download your private key
# for the farm you have created. Tools > SSH Keys...
$ rsync -av -i /path/to/private/key.pem /path/to/local/magento-source/ \
root@<external admin ip>:/var/www/

Next we will need to create an RDS / database instance to use for magento.

Now you will need to modify your Magento local.xml settings to reflect the new database location and settings:

$ vi /var/www/app/etc/local.xml

If you're installing from fresh, go ahead and run the installer and come back once you're done. Don't forget to:

$ chmod -R a+rw /var/www/media/ /var/www/var/

You should now have a working Magento install running from the RDS / Database instance, good work.

OnePica Image CDN

This plugin is great, it will cache your product media files to S3 / Cloudfront and various other sources. We are going to use S3 in this post, so go ahead and install the plugin from magento connect... You may need to chown your /var/www so that the user www-data (apache2) can write to /var/www:

$ chown -R www-data: /var/www

Create yourself a new S3 bucket and get your Access Key ID and Secret Access Key at the ready. Now log back into the admin server and go to System > Configuration > Catalog > Image CDN. if it's not there, you've done something wrong (try logging out of the admin and back in again and clearing the cache). Use the following settings:

-- General Settings
Current Adapter: Amazon S3/Cloudfront
File Result Cahce: In Database
Defaults for everything else

--Amazon S3/Cloudfront
Access Key ID: [access key]
Secret Access Key: [secret key]
Bucket: [bucket you just created]
Base URL: http://s3-[zone].amazonaws.com/[bucket]
Secure Base URL: https://s3-[zone].amazonaws.com/[bucket]

Save the settings and clear the cache, now try out a category page... Right click one of the product images and inspect the url, it should be from amazon s3. Congratulations, you have completed the first part of the CDN.

Skin CDN

Now we are going to place the skin files onto s3 and point Magento that way. I used the s3cmd sync tool to get the skin files up on s3, you can install it like this:

# Import S3tools signing key
$ wget -O- -q http://s3tools.org/repo/deb-all/stable/s3tools.key | sudo apt-key add -

# Add the repo to sources.list
$ sudo wget -O/etc/apt/sources.list.d/s3tools.list http://s3tools.org/repo/deb-all/stable/s3tools.list

# Refresh package cache and install the newest s3cmd
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install s3cmd

# You'll want to configure it
$ s3cmd --configure

Now lets get our skin into s3 using the bucket you used before:

# -P = Make public
$ s3cmd sync -P /var/www/skin s3://[bucket]/

Great, now we should have a folder called skin/ in the root of our bucket with all our skin files.

Go back to the magento admin System > Configuration > Web now this bit is important, make sure you switch to 'Default Store View' as there is a slight gotcha with CDN'ing your skin files, if you try and upload images via Magento admin it won't work because the image uploader is flash and it would require a cross-domain policy file, which we don't want to do, so you circumvent it by only setting the default store configuration to use skin CDN:

-- Unsecure
Base Skin URL: http://s3-[zone].amazonaws.com/[bucket]/skin/
-- Secure
Base Skin URL: https://s3-[zone].amazonaws.com/[bucket]/skin/

Save the settings, clear the cache and go check where the css files are coming from, it should be s3. Done!

NFS Server

Next you will want to install NFS:

# Install nfs
$ sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server

# Lets add our network share in
$ vi /etc/exports

# /etc/exports: the access control list for filesystems which may be exported
#               to NFS clients.  See exports(5).
#
# Example for NFSv2 and NFSv3:
# /srv/homes       hostname1(rw,sync,no_subtree_check) hostname2(ro,sync,no_subtree_check)
#
# Example for NFSv4:
# /srv/nfs4        gss/krb5i(rw,sync,fsid=0,crossmnt,no_subtree_check)
# /srv/nfs4/homes  gss/krb5i(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

/var/www/media         *(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)

$ /etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server restart

You may be thinking "* WTF?!", but with amazon all EC2 instances are locked down, conveniently scalr will modify the default security group to allow any connection between servers in this group (all servers will be added to default), so it looks wide open but it's not. Any of your servers that do connect over NFS will be communicating in plain text (granted it will be internal ip's) if this is an issue for you, feel free to setup kerberos.

Up until this point we have been doing everything on the Admin box.

Its now time to create and configure our web servers. I'd suggest creating an image of the admin box now and giving it some sane name like "Admin" so we have nice dns entries in scalr.

Admin URL

So you should now have a fully working web server and admin server. There are a few configuration settings we will need to change to allow for seperate admin domains and web page domains (note this is for 1.6.1.0, there is a fix for < 1.6.1.0... ask me in the comments). This configuration assumes your load balancer is up and running.

Navigate over to the admin external hostname or ip and log into the admin area. Go to System > Configuration > General > Web and set the following settings:

-- Url Options
Auto-redirect to Base URL: Yes
-- Unsecure
Base URL: http://[load balancer]
-- Secure
Base URL: https://[load balancer]

Save settings, now head over to System > Configuration > Advanced > Admin:

-- Admin Base URL
Use Custom Admin URL: 
Custom Admin URL: http://[external admin hostname]

Save settings. Now clear the cache on both web server and admin server via ssh. You should now find you can only get to the admin area of the admin box and the whole site on the load balancer.

This is the end of the tutorial and I apologise for making you jump around.

One more time for the conclusion.

RDS / Database

This step is fairly straight forward, pop a new MySQL RDS instance (default engine is fine). You could use one of scalr's MySQL ami's and have it auto scale them but thats not within the scope of this post.

If you are using a pre-existing database you can use some of these commands to get you going:

# Export your DB from a box running MySQLd
$ mysqldump -u [username] -p [magento db name] -h [host / ip] > [magento db name].sql

# Connect to RDS / Database instance and create a database to import into
$ echo "create database [database name];" | mysql -h [database host / ip] -u [database instance username] -p

# Import database dump into RDS / Database instance
$ cat [magento db name].sql | \
mysql -h [database instance hostname] -u [database instance uname] -p [database name]

Once your done you can continue with your admin server configuration.

Web Server (EC2)

Overview

Our web servers will be our public facing servers that will be load balanced and fairly minimal, the guts to these servers will be coming from the admin box with a little help of a start up script.

Scalr Setup

Edit the farm you created for the admin role and add a new role, use the same image as you used before (I used Ubuntu 10.04 app-apache64-ubuntu-ebs).

Scaling Options

Mine are 1 - 5 instances, 5min waits, 15minute load average over: 5 and under: 1.5. Make sure to add yourself a load balancer, your health check target can be 'HTTP:80/' and for the most reliability check all 'Availability Zones'.

Now add your listeners, mine are (note if your going to add SSL, upload your certificate to Tools > AWS > IAM > Certificates > Add New):

Protocol	Load Balancer Port	Instance Port	SSL Certificate
HTTP	80	80
HTTPS	443	80	arn:aws:iam:xxxx

Placement and Type

I set my 'Availability Zone' to distribute equally.

I left all the other settings as default. No need for elastic ips or extra EBS.

Now make sure you install all the same modules as before for PHP otherwise you'll have an unhappy Magento.

Apache

This process is the same as the admin role apache setup here. You won't need to grab your code base though.

NFS Client

Now we are going to install the client ready for use but not configure it as we will have our startup script do all the hard work. Note that if you try and use fstab it may get nuked by scalr when it creates images of the server. Go ahead and install nfs-common:

$ sudo apt-get install nfs-common

Now lets try mounting the admin media share before we go on:

# Create folder to mount to
$ mkdir /var/www/media

# Mount
$ mount -t nfs -o proto=tcp,port=2049 [admin internal ip or hostname]:/var/www/media

# Provided that worked
$ umount /var/www/media

Great we have a working media share!

Startup Script

This is the fun part of the web servers, auto mounting and auto loading the code base. The script below is a modified version of the one I wrote, it won't work without modifications. Things to note are:

I created a ssh key on the admin box for a user called ubuntu which I then copied to the web server instance.
I also created a user on the web server box who chowns /var/www/* called replicant.
I setup postfix and installed mail-utils to allow email alerts

This script will try to ping the admin box and if successful mount the nfs share and copy the Magento code base across. You can run it multiple times.

#!/bin/bash
ADMIN=[internal admin hostname]
LOGFILE=/var/log/webserver.log
MEDIA=/var/www/media
DEVEMAIL=admin@email.com
ROOT_UID=0
# File to check the existance of
MEDIA_TEST=`mount|grep $MEDIA|awk '{print $3'}`

if [ "$UID" -ne "$ROOT_UID" ]; then
	echo "`date`: Not running as Root" | mail -s "Not Root!" $DEVEMAIL
	echo "`date`: Not running as Root" >> $LOGFILE
	exit
fi

echo "`date`: Web server started" >> $LOGFILE

# Check if admin box is alive
ping -c 1 $ADMIN &> /dev/null

if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
	# Try again just incase
	sleep 60
	ping -c 1 $ADMIN &> /dev/null

	if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
		echo "`date`: ping failed, $ADMIN host is down!" | mail -s "$ADMIN host is down!" $DEVEMAIL
		echo "`date`: Ping failed $ADMIN is down, exitting." >> $LOGFILE
		exit
	fi
fi

if [ ! -e  "$MEDIA"]; then
	echo "`date`: No media folder to mount too" | mail -s "Missing media folder!" $DEVEMAIL
	echo "`date`: No media folder to mount too" >> $LOGFILE
	exit
fi

# Mount media over NFS
if [ "X$MEDIA_TEST" = "X" ]; then # Check if already mounted
	mount -t nfs -o proto=tcp,port=2049 $ADMIN:$MEDIA $MEDIA &> /tmp/mount-media

	if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
		echo "`date`: Error mounting media from $ADMIN check /tmp/mount-media" | mail -s "Media failed to mount!" $DEVEMAIL
		echo "`date`: Error mounting media from $ADMIN check /tmp/mount-media" >> $LOGFILE
		exit
	fi
fi

# Remove known hosts so no rsync/ssh error about DNS spoofing
sudo -u replicant rm /home/replicant/.ssh/known_hosts
sudo -u replicant touch /home/replicant/.ssh/known_hosts

# Get code up to date
sudo -u replicant rsync -av -e "ssh -o 'StrictHostKeyChecking no' -i /home/replicant/.ssh/id_rsa" --exclude 'media/' --exclude 'var/' --exclude '.svn' root@$ADMIN:/var/www/ /var/www/ &> /tmp/rsync

if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
	echo "`date`: Error rsync'ing code base from $ADMIN check /tmp/rsync" | mail -s "Rsync error!" $DEVEMAIL
	echo "`date`: Error rsync'ing code base from $ADMIN check /tmp/rsync" >> $LOGFILE
	echo "root@$ADMIN:/var/www /var/www" >> $LOGFILE
	exit
fi

rm -rf /var/www/var/cache/*
rm -rf /var/www/var/session/*

chmod -R a+rw /var/www/shop/var/

echo "`date`: Startup script successful!" >> $LOGFILE

With your startup script in place, you should be almost ready with your web server. Execute your script and try browsing to the ip address, you should find a working version of Magento (or it may redirect you to the admin box). Your now ready to make an image of the server and modify the scalr farm to execute your script on HostUp.

ELB / Load Balancer

This is fairly simple with ELB, unless you start using SSL in which case it gets a little more complicated (but remains doable). I will assume you do want SSL and the solution I am going to explain will use it up until the load balancer. You could use backend authentication but that is not within the scope of this post. If you're not using ELB find out what http header is set for SSL, this will be important.

You'll want to set the load balancers stickiness to Application Based on both HTTP and HTTPS and use the cookie name of: PHPSESSID.

SSL

SSL was the last hurdle I had to tackle and it was painful, but lucky enough for you I have the answers here... Hopefully you have followed all the steps above and configured everything with SSL in mind, now it's time to get your hands dirty.

Scalr Setup

Your going to need to add in your virtual host that will accomodate for SSL, if your using scalr its pretty simple... Websites > Apache Virtual Hosts create yourself a new host and tick the 'SSL' check box. Upload your certificates and point this VH at your admin server. Your certificate locations will be as follows:

Certificate = /etc/aws/keys/ssl/https.crt
Private Key = /etc/aws/keys/ssl/https.key
Certificate Chain = /etc/aws/keys/ssl/https-ca.crt

When you hit save, the VH will be uploaded to your running web server instances and enabled... Whoop! If you're thinking "Why the admin box?", that's because we are having the load balancer forward HTTPS to HTTP on the web servers so we only need the certificates on the LB and Admin Box.

Magento

Thanks to Magento's yoyo feature set, we can't just use the Offloader Header setting as that would be too easy... Instead you're going to have to create a rewrite rule and this is where you need to know the http header that your load balancer uses to signify HTTPS being on.

Add this to your .htaccess on the admin box:

$ vi /var/www/.htaccess

############################################
## you can put here your magento root folder
## path relative to web root

    #RewriteBase /magento/
    RewriteBase /

    RewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Forwarded-Proto} https
    RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTPS:on]

This condition takes the forwarded header from the load balancer (in this case ELB's X-Forwarded-Proto which is either 'http' or 'https') and sets HTTPS 'on' if it equates to 'https'. This is due to how magento decides whether a url should be secure or not, in some places it supports the 'Offleader Header' and in some places (I'm looking at you Zend framework) it checks the HTTPS environment header... Great... But atleast we have a fix!

Now head into the admin backend and set System > Configuration > General > Web > Offloader Header to 'HTTPS'. Done!

You can now set your urls and you should be all finished

Conclusion

If you're still with me, well done! That was a lot of information. You should end up with a scaleable Magento system, what I will end this post with is a few points you can research yourself:

SSL is only up to the ELB Load balancer in this tutorial, if you require encryption from the ELB to the web servers you will have to look into backend authentication.
The NFS share is also unencrypted unless you use something like Kerberos. I personally don't think it's necessary as the only things being shared are the public media files anyway.
The Admin box is your single point of failure. While the web servers will manage for a while on cache (about 2 minutes) you have to consider the possiblity of the admin box going down and having something in place to handle it like scalr.
Persistence on the admin box whilst using scalr isn't TRUE persistence. Scalr treats EBS volumes as disposable. While not a huge issue if you backup your admin box (s3sync can help there), it does become a problem if it goes down... see point above.
This is a big undertaking and isn't cheap. Serving ~100,000 uniques / ~500,000 page views per month this will rack up a bill of around $700 - 900

I am sure there are 100 other ways of doing some of the stuff here so let me know if you have any better solutions :).

If you would like to find out more about the Magento services we offer, visit our Magento development page or call us on 020 7183 1072.

CMS Review - Strengths and weakness of Wordpress, SilverStripe and Joomla

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:02:05 +0000

A few days before New Years Eve, I came up with a number of resolutions that I would be adopting, with the majority of them related to my sugar intake and exercise levels. However, I also decided upon a few work-related resolutions, one of which was to write about topics outside of my comfort area of SEO, in particular link building - so I decided to do a two-part review of a few popular content management systems.

There are countless content management systems (CMS) out there today, some free, some paid, some open-source, some built for bespoke projects, I could go on but I’d be here all day.

Part one of this blog post will be focused on three different CMS platforms, outlining the strengths and weaknesses of using each – the systems are:

Part two of this article will be focused on Magento, osCommerce and Shopify.

SilverStripe CMS:

SilverStripe are headquartered in Wellington, New Zealand and they released version one of their content management system, which is built on the sapphire framework, in September 2006.

SilverStripe is an open-source platform that is often used due to its development versatility and user-friendly back-end admin interface.

Key Advantages of using SilverStripe:

The software is free
Open-source code base
Active developer community
There are additional themes available (free and paid)
Extensive support available
Ajax site tree
Easy to customise and integrate with software and other platforms
Good for SEO
Quick to install
Version control

Key disadvantages of using SilverStripe:

Fairly small following, meaning less information is available online
Not as many modules available as similar platforms like Wordpress or Joomla
Lack of documentation (because it’s still pretty new)
Shortage of stock themes

Examples of SilverStripe websites:

SilverStripe Conclusion:

SilverStripe is a really nice, easy to use content management system with a really big future ahead of it. SilverStripe is getting more popular by the day and they’re due to release version 3 in the next couple of months, which is promising a number of great new features and an updated user interface.

German-based company, PixelTricks are also actively working on a new ecommerce module, which showed a lot of promise when it was released in Beta form last year.

For me, there are a lot more strengths than weaknesses – I would recommend SilverStripe.

Best for:

More advanced non-ecommerce sites
Aesthetics-focused sites
Highly customised websites
Advanced developers

Wordpress:

Wordpress is most famous for being the world’s biggest blogging platform, but in reality, it’s so much more than that! First released in 2003 as a piece of code designed to aid typography, Wordpress has enjoyed unbelievable levels of popularity – as of August 2011 it is believed that Wordpress powers well over 20% of all new websites globally!

The undeniable appeal of Wordpress owes greatly to the astonishing amount of themes and plugins that are available to download, currently over 1,450 and just under 18,000 respectively.

I personally am a huge fan of Wordpress, with the ease of access to the code and the simplicity behind what would usually be complex programming changes representing my reasoning – however I have also witnessed one of the main disadvantages first-hand.

Key advantages of using Wordpress:

Nearly 1,500 themes available + more premium options
Nearly 20,000 plugins/modules available + more premium options
It’s free
Used by millions of people and websites world-wide
World’s biggest blogging platform
Quick and simple to integrate with other software packages
Search engines love Wordpress
Easy to integrate with social networking profiles
Manage multiple websites in one dashboard
Open-source platform
Built-in code editor within the admin area
Quick and easy to install
Simple PHP framework
Huge development following
Very easy to customise
E-commerce modules available and constantly being developed

Key disadvantages of using Wordpress:

Hackers love Wordpress (If you don’t know what you’re doing and don’t keep up to date with updates, you could be leaving your website susceptible to hackers)
Lots of updates
Some plugins and themes are unsecure (I’ve heard lots of stories about unsecure plugins that have lead to websites being hacked)
Could be outgrown (there are more suitable platforms for larger projects and ecommerce sites)

Wordpress Conclusion:

To be honest, there are very few disadvantages of using Wordpress, it felt a bit like I was clutching at straws. Wordpress is an immensely powerful CMS that really is ideal for users of any experience level. The one thing that I would recommend watching out for though is the Wordpress security – I failed to update an installation on Wordpress last year and was hit by a pretty fatal hack.

All in all, great platform – I love it and I use it!

Best for:

Blogging
Any non-ecommerce project
Users of any level

Joomla:

I thought I would throw a CMS that I haven'y had much experience with into the mix here, as although I’ve played around with it, I’m not overly familiar with Joomla as a CMS.

Joomla is a PHP-based content management system that, much like Wordpress, has a huge selection of extensions and themes readily available for users. Following their launch in 2005, Joomla won the Packt open-source CMS award in 2006, 2007 and 2011, previous winners include Wordpress and Drupal.

Key advantages of using Joomla:

Open-source CMS
It’s free (although there’s also a paid version)
Simplistic user-friendly admin interface
Multiple users can edit a site at the same time
Support for multi-language sites
Huge development following
Lots of templates available
Huge range of extensions/modules
Joomla release regular upgrades
Highly customisable
Can be good for SEO (if developed correctly)
Lots of support available
Lots of readily-integrated features (such as polls and user control)
Appropriate for larger, more complex websites

Key disadvantages of using Joomla:

Harder to learn than Wordpress
Changes can often require development support
Requires work to make it SEO-friendly
Slower-loading and more expensive hosting (due to excess javascript and CSS)
Wordpress has more plugins (and more free plugins)
Wordpress is better for blogging

Joomla Conclusion:

Joomla is a very powerful system with lots of great extensions and a really easy to use admin system.

These advantages and disadvantages are based on my limited experience and the views of a few of my colleagues, but I would say that whilst it may be more appropriate for larger websites, Wordpress is a better option for beginners and small sites.

Best for:

Larger websites
Multi-language websites
Experienced developers

Overall conclusion:

To conclude, I think that all three of these content management systems are different and have their own benefits. SilverStripe has the fluency and intuitive admin system, Wordpress has the range of modules and simplicity and Joomla’s versatility and out of the box quality is a big plus.

I also think that SilverStripe is more suited to larger non-ecommerce websites, due to its versatility, user-friendly back-end and added customisability. Joomla is also suited to larger websites because of it’s multi-user editing functionality, but it’s slower to load and will cost more to host with bigger sites.

I still think Wordpress is the best option for blogging, beginners and small websites. It is also the easiest to get used to and the most time-efficient for small websites.

----------------------

This is part one of two posts, the second one will be focused on Ecommerce platforms and will look at Magento, Shopify and osCommerce.

There are many other content management systems that I could have talked about (such as Drupal), if there are any that you think should have been included or any additional points that you think I've missed, please feel free to add them in the comments. You can also visit our CMS design or Ecommerce development pages to find out more about the services we offer in these areas.

You can also follow Paul on Twitter and Google Plus.

blog

SilverStripe UK Meetup: How can we help SilverStripe evolve?

So you want to build a responsive website? (A few resources)

Recommended reading

Boilerplates & Grid Systems

CSS Preprocessors

2012 Mobile Internet Usage Statistics

Tangerine - Judges Choice in the SilverStripe Theme Contest

My Approach

The Prize

Recommended UK Digital Marketing Conferences

BrightonSEO

ThinkVisibility

SearchLove

LinkLove

Conversion Conference

Meetup events:

OxonDigital – Oxford (free)

OMN London - London (free)

Search London – London (free)

The Distilled meetup – London and New York (free)

A guide to doing SEO on Magento websites

Preventing filter pages from being indexed:

Preventing this from happening:

Alternative methods:

Turning dynamic filter pages into static category pages:

Removing pages from the index:

Preventing search pages from being indexed:

Dealing with automatic URL rewrite rules:

Using SEO-friendly URL’s:

Using top-level product URL's:

Adding the canonical tag to products and categories:

Addressing page load performance:

Ensuring that you’re using 301 redirects:

Setting h1 headings:

Getting rid of unwanted login and cart pages:

Passing the Google Analytics IQ Exam

London SilverStripe CMS Meetup - April 17th 2012

How can we gain more exposure for SilverStripe?

Social Sharing Trends on Jewellery Websites [infographic]

Only 74% of the jewellery retailers had an e-commerce website

Very few websites were optimised for mobile

Google+ hasn’t been adopted by many jewellery companies

Facebook and Twitter are being utilised by a larger number of jewellers in the UK

Workshop: Content is King!

Content is King

Preparing for a website migration: A successful SEO case study

The challenge:

The original website:

Restrictions we faced:

What we did:

Our process:

The results:

Finding and Choosing an EPOS Provider

Selecting an EPOS provider

List of EPOS providers in the UK

Sunrise - A free responsive HTML5 theme for SilverStripe CMS

Our Considerations

Our Solution

Just gimme the good stuff already!

Feedback and Support

Interview with Ingo Schommer of SilverStripe

Please can you provide a brief introduction to SilverStripe and tell us a bit more about yourself.

What is your favourite SilverStripe website and why?

SilverStripe has grown significantly since moving to open source in 2006 - what do think the main reasons for this success are?

In 2011, SilverStripe introduced a number of new features and released the first version of v3.0 - do you have any big plans for 2012?

SilverStripe has loyal supporters around the globe - how will you grow the SilverStripe community in the coming months/years?

Version 3.0 is due out this year and is a major overhaul with many improvements - what are your favourite changes?

Looking past version 3.0, where do you see SilverStripe going in 2013 and beyond?

Suspiciously High Bounce Rates - A Tale of 'Top Sites'

The Problem:

The Research:

Safari 4+

Chrome 15+

Opera 10+

IE9

Firefox

The Fix:

Apache .htaccess

Php