Why 2011 Was A Complete Failure (And A Complete Success) | Van SEO Design

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Why 2011 Was A Complete Failure (And A Complete Success) Posted: 29 Dec 2011 05:30 AM PST As I usually do with the last post of the year, today I want to look back at some of the goals I set for my business in 2011 and how well I did or didn’t do in accomplishing them. Unlike previous years I didn’t complete any of the goals I had set. I made progress on some, but none of them could be checked off as finished. Hence the complete failure part of the post title. However the only true failure is a failure to learn and not completing my goals taught me a few important lessons. Hence the complete success part of the post title comes in. If you missed the post where I set my 2011 goals here’s a reminder of what they were. You can read that post if you’re interested in the details. Redesign this site Develop a wordpress theme framework for myself Continue improving my small business forum Write an ebook And here are a few older posts where I looked back over the year’s goals in case you want to chart my progress over the years. The Year That Was: Looking Back At 2010 Do You Have Goals For Your Business? Part I Looking Back At 2008 And Ahead To 2009 – Part I Looking Ahead In 2008 What I Did and Didn’t Accomplish in 2011 When I set these goals I hinted I might be biting off more than I could chew. I was more right than I realized. While I didn’t expect to complete every goal listed, I did expect to complete at least one. Redesign this Site This site is in need of being reworked and deserves a complete redesign. It was my primary goal for the year and the only one I’m mad at myself for not finishing. I’ll spare you all the details, but let you know the year went something like this. Planned and wireframed the new site. Got busy with client work. Got busy being lazy. Developed a single page template from one of the wireframes. Back to lazy. More client work. A few weeks to close out the year working the template into a WordPress theme. In the end though, the redesign isn’t finished and I have nothing to show. This site looks just as it did a year ago. I don’t want to leave the impression that I’ve done nothing since January. I’ve actually created to different designs and have an html template coded for one, which I’ve taken over to WordPress and begun turning into a theme. Develop a WordPress Theme Framework At the end of the redesign process I would have a completed theme. It was my plan to abstract a few things out of the theme and turn it into a rudimentary framework I could use for other sites. I’ve never hidden the desire to enter the WordPress theme market in some fashion. In time the rudimentary framework could be fleshed out and matured to the point where it could form the backbone of a WordPress specific blog and site. Obviously the redesign never reached that point and so again there’s nothing to show as complete. Continue Improving the Small Business Forum I admit to setting this goal a bit on the vague side. I could easily tell you about a few things I did and call it complete to my satisfaction, but I was hoping to do more than I did and so will consider this goal as unfinished like the others. Most of the improvements I made to the forum were the usual upgrades to vBulletin. This year that meant a switch to vBulletin’s full publishing suite. Along the way I added some modules to help me run the place. The vB publishing suite helps turn the software into more of a CMS, where members could post to their own blogs or be included as authors in something of a site wide blog. I’ve set this up to some degree behind the scenes, but it’s not quite ready and there isn’t any content ready to go. Quite honestly vBulletin doesn’t make much easy. I’d prefer to move the whole site to a WordPress/bbPress/BuddyPress set up, but think bbPress hasn’t matured yet to match vBulletin on the forum side. In any event while I did make improvements to the forum, I didn’t make all the improvements I wanted to make. Write an eBook In truth I never expected to get to an ebook, though held out hope i might have some time at year’s end. I didn’t. Other than some random thoughts and notes I can’t say I accomplished anything with this goal, though again I never really expected I would. What the Year Taught Me There’s a success part of this story I promise, though the success is more along the moral victory lines as opposed to a true victory. The only failure is a failure to learn and my lack of results this year led me to some realizations. It’s easy to blame my lack of results on a lack of time, but that’s not the truth. There’s always enough time, but there’s only so much you can do within that time. It’s about setting priorities and not wasting the time you have. The year hammered home 3 main lessons for me. I need to improve my time and task management skills I should pay less attention to perfectionism I can’t do everything alone With the first it’s clear to me I don’t make the best use of my time. I used to be better about it, but have slipped. More focus on getting things done in the available time is a worthy goal. Where perfectionism is concerned it’s hard for me not to be a perfectionist when working on something for myself. Perfection is something to work towards, however there’s no reason it can’t be strived for in iteration. Get something done quicker and work to make it better. With the last I realize there are more things I’d like to do than I can reasonably do on my own. I’d like to grow my network of people to work with and see if any are interested in helping me get a project going. The lessons learned will come into play more when I talk about my goals for next year. Summary While it’s true I didn’t accomplish any of my 2011 goals, I did come away from the year with a better understanding of why I didn’t accomplish them and a hopefully new motivation to improve things. Next week I’ll share my goals for the coming year We’ll see if I get more done in 2012. It’s easy to say I will, though the proof will come a year from now when I’m writing next year’s version of a look back. How was your 2011? Were you able to achieve your goals for the year? Regardless of how 2011 was for you, it’s almost 2012. Happy New Year everyone. Enjoy the holiday weekend and see you again in the new year.

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My Holiday Traffic Blues | Van SEO Design

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My Holiday Traffic Blues Posted: 27 Dec 2011 05:30 AM PST Back in February I reported about a drop in traffic to this site between mid December 2010 and mid January 2011. You might remember that traffic here dropped 20% and that I decided my best course of action was to be patient and wait out the holidays. Earlier this week when checking stats I noticed a similar drop had recently started. When I compared dates to last year, it was clearly happening again at the same time. I thought it would be interesting to compare the start of what I assume will be this year’s drop with what did happen last year and to speculate on why it might happen during the holiday season. I’ll revisit this look at the stats in a couple of months when the hopefully subsequent return of traffic occurs. The Numbers In the image above the blue line is search traffic to this site from November 19 – December 19 of this year. The orange line is from October 15 – November 14, also of this year. I made sure the two lines begin and end on the same day of the week, Saturday to Monday to better compare the numbers. You can see how consistent search traffic is when we compare day of the week to day of the week. The gap seen on the left of the image is Thanksgiving weekend for this year. Other than those few days everything aligns almost eerily well until the last few days. Starting on the 16th of December search traffic seems to be dropping off. Below is a similar image showing last year’s numbers. It should look familiar with the Thanksgiving gap on the left and the traffic drop on the right. Last year’s drop started on the 14th of the month. The two graphs are too similar not to think there’s something going on more than coincidence. What possible causes could there be for this annual drop in search traffic? The graphs for total traffic (above and below) also show less traffic for the later month, but neither is as consistent as the search graphs alone. Neither referral and direct traffic show such a direct correlation. The traffic loss is mainly coming from long tail keywords as total keywords sending traffic dropped about 15% between months. Taking a look at the top landing page on the site the numbers, month over month, are nearly identical (13,548 – 13,465, a 0.62% difference). Probable Cause There are a several reasons I can think of to help explain what’s going on. Traffic naturally falls on holidays as you can see with the Thanksgiving numbers. It also falls on the 4th of July, Labor Day, etc. The drop off here clearly starts before Christmas, but it’s probably safe to say many people are already in holiday mode and will be for a few weeks. With the idea of holiday mode already starting, here are a few possibilities for what’s going on. My blog posting is weaker — Traffic here always spikes on days i post and trails off over the days that follow. I’ve noticed the better the headline, the more traffic visits the post and the more the post then gets spread across social sites. The increased sharing might lead to increased search traffic for a time, perhaps something to do with a freshness ranking boost. Like many people I’m slowly drifting into holiday mode and perhaps my posting isn’t quite as good for a few weeks. This would more easily explain losses in referral and direct traffic, but it’s conceivable search traffic would fall off too. People are searching less for information and more for product — Search traffic here is mainly people looking for information. You’d expect more product searches this time of year and since this site doesn’t have products for sale there should be less search traffic. Does more product searches also mean less informational searches? Perhaps. It also makes sense the week leading up to Christmas would see the most product searches. It’s possible this alone would account for the decreased traffic here. Google (and SE’s in general) are tweaking results to favor products pages — For a few weeks on either side of Christmas this could make sense for them to do, while people are in the buying mode. Is it possible that it’s not just more product based searches, but also more product based results to some queries that would be considered informational at other times of he year? I tried looking for some kind of proof as I think this the most interesting of the possible causes. I couldn’t find anything though to indicate search engines might be showing different results this time of year. I tried searching to see if others had suggested this might be happening without much luck. The two posts below allude to the possibility, though also without proof. Christmas boost to the Google coffers? Google boosts ‘product search’ for holidays People in gift buying mode are paying more attention to ads — It’s also possible that during the holidays ads are capturing attention a little more than they might at other times of the year. Maybe it’s not so much that search engines are showing different results, but that people are noticing different results or ads because they are more often in buying mode. I think the most probable explanation is still as simple as people are going into holiday mode. From there everything else follows. My own holiday mode attitude probably leads to post titles not being as traffic attracting and it seems reasonable that some are focusing in more on products for a few weeks than information. The possibility that SEs tweak algorithms is very interesting, though I can’t find any proof so it is 100% speculation. It would make sense for them to do, especially as it’s last minute shopper time. I wonder though if the holidays alone are enough to explain everything would the graphs be so consistent? Wouldn’t the change in search traffic be a little less consistent? Summary I should have expected to see the drop in search traffic this week, but I had completely forgotten about it. As soon as I checked Analytics, though I knew what was going on. Just as it did last year, traffic was about to show a holiday slump. The drop appears to have started exactly as it did last year and it’ll be interesting to check back in a couple of months to see if that pattern continues. I’m hoping it does since the end result was an overall increase in traffic that lasted all year. I’ll let you know what happens sometime in February. If for some reason I forget, please remind me and I’ll grab the stats. How about you? Does your site gain or lose traffic this time of year? My guess is your answer will depend on whether or not your site is informational in nature or if it sells products.

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iCan't Internet

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iTunes: Unknown Error 3194, and how to deal with it Posted: 27 Dec 2011 12:27 AM PST Have you seen it before, the iTunes error 3194? You try to update your iPhone or iPad, you are looking forward to seeing all the new nifty features of the new version of the software, or what’s... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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iCan't Internet

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The Ultimate Cell Broadband Comparison so you can get Best Offers at Budget friendly Price Posted: 22 Dec 2011 11:57 PM PST Consumers have more control over the services they receive and the amounts they pay than ever before, thanks to the availability of online price comparison tools. This information is useful if you... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

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How To Avoid Imitation When Being Inspired | Van SEO Design

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How To Avoid Imitation When Being Inspired Posted: 22 Dec 2011 05:30 AM PST A couple of weeks ago via Scrivs, I came across this post by Jessica Hische on inspiration vs imitation. Why I wasn’t already subscribed to Jessica’s blog is another story, but the subject of the post struck me because I’ve been dealing with the exact issue. The post comes at a time when I’m designing a site I feel might be imitating it’s inspirational sources a little more than it should. My Story I’m working on a site redesign and one of the major problems I’m trying to solve is a structural one that provides flexibility for future content. I came up with a graphical solution I thought would work, and while refining it a bit, began seeking out sites with similar flexible structures to see how they technically achieved their solution. As I was seeking this technical inspiration I was still tweaking the graphic solution and eventually realized that without intention my design might have started to imitate a little more than having been inspired. I don’t think anyone would look at my design and see it as an imitation. As it stands now it’s not an imitation at all. It’s more a case of I know where the site is heading. What I’m setting up allows the possibility for imitation. It’s only a possibility and may never been seen by anyone else as copy or imitation, though I can see it and it makes me think I need to do one of the following. Rethink the existing design and make changes to further separate it from what inspired it. Rethink the design problem and find another solution. Rethink whether the problem is worth solving or if the idea leading to it is better dropped There’s no pressing deadline on this project so I’m still deciding which of the above is the best approach. I’m playing around a little with all three options while I make up my mind. Erik Spiekermann – Putting Back the Face into Typeface from Gestalten on Vimeo. How Inspiration Becomes Imitation While there are certainly some designers who wholeheartedly rip off others, I think more often designers are genuinely trying to draw inspiration from another site and unintentionally take a little too much from it. At the same time some design solutions end up being so simple and obvious that they’re used to the point where they come close to becoming a standard. For example would anyone accuse you of copying from another design if your design is divided into header, footer, main content, and sidebar? In the video above Erik Spierkemann talks about designing a typeface that’s been inspired by another. After looking at the inspiration, drawing it, sketching over it, and studying it for a time he moves on to do something else and comes back later to draw it from memory. It will inevitably be different, because memory only works so well. The typeface he ends up drawing will naturally be influenced by that other, but it won’t be a copy. The looking, thinking, and studying all find their way into his typeface. At the same time since he’s not actively looking at it while designing his, he inevitably ends up with something different that’s a combination of the one typeface and all the others that have inspired him over the years. Erik, of course, has been designing long enough to have developed his own style and to have culled many different inspirations. A less experienced designer may not have done either and so a single new source of inspiration may dominant their new design too much. One other potential issue is clients. Not that clients force you to imitate of course, but I’m sure you’ve had clients approach you asking for your site to look like another they see. It’s a natural request. They want their site to look like site x and in order to satisfy their request you veer a little too much toward imitation. I’ll get back to this point in a bit. How To Avoid Imitation Jessica’s post offered some thoughts on how to avoid imitating the work of another designer. diversify look to history train your eye in general I think the first might be the most important here. The more diverse your inspirations, not just on one project, but over the entire lifespan of your career, the less any one source of inspiration dominates what you create. Both of her next two points are similar. We can look to history in order to find more diverse sources to draw from. The more sources we draw from the more we’re training out eyes. With more inspirational fodder we have more examples of what works and what doesn’t. In the spirit of diversifying, we should look beyond websites to draw inspiration. We can look to: print design package design art architecture nature anything you see around you We can also seek diversity within web design alone. If you’re designing a site for a local real estate agent draw inspiration from a photographer’s website or better yet a photograph. The further away from the specifics of your project you grab inspiration, the better. I typically stay away from pulling inspiration from websites when designing because I don’t want to unintentionally take too much. Still it’s hard not to be inspired by sites I like and I know some of what inspires me inevitably finds its way into my work. See my story above for a recent example. Another point Jessica made is that not everything you design needs to end up online. We all need to practice to improve our craft and one way we learn to do something new is to copy others. It’s a tradition passed down through all the arts. That doesn’t mean every time we copy another to learn it should end up live on a site. Remember Picasso’s quote “good artists borrow, great artists steal” Imitate to learn, but don’t publicly share that imitated work. That’s borrowing. Instead imitate so deeply that the techniques become your own. They become a part of you mixing with everything else. Above I mentioned clients wanting their site to look like another. If you dig a little and ask why a client likes a particular site you’ll find it’s often just one aspect of they design they want. It might be the layout or the color scheme or the feelings evoked in a single image. Once you gain that understanding you can draw inspiration from just that aspect while going in a different direction with the rest. Even if you find you took a little too much of that one aspect you usually haven’t taken too much from the total design. Summary It can be hard not to imitate at times even when we have no intention of it. It doesn’t take a lot for an inspiration to inspire us a little too much and we find ourselves creating at best a derivative work and at worst a copy of the original. The best way to avoid copying is to diversify your sources of inspiration as much as possible in order to not have any one source make up too much of the inspiration. In conjunction with a variety of sources you want to practice your craft as often as possible, with the knowledge that much of your practice is for you and you alone. If you do find your work is a little too close to the work of another you have to be honest with yourself and work to make it less so. It’s ok to be inspired, but not to take too much of the work of another.

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