Occasionally you come across something that is just too much of a joy to keep to yourself. In this case I do have to admit to prior knowledge of what was coming in that I assisted in a small way on the technical side of the site but the content all comes from the mind of it’s author. The genius behind this site, and I use that word deliberately, is a friend of mine (another vested interest) Tim Leighton-Boyce, and the subject is Google Analytics.

Analytics is one of those things we all pay lip service to, but how many of really understand the full bounty that is on offer and how to get to it, let alone use it? One of the very few is Tim, and he has a knack for explaining it clearly. I dive in to my various analytics accounts on a regular basis, but getting down to the real nitty gritty is always something of a trial, or at least it was until a couple of days ago.

Tim describes himself as a Customer Experience Evangelist and who better to guide us through the minefield of Analytics, after all we all want to make our Customer’s experience so good that they buy from us.  He has now launched his blog, CXFocus, onto the sea that is the internet. I had the privilege of reading his first post a bit ahead of everyone else and it has already saved me hours or futile argument because I could actually prove my point with facts and figures. I have a much greater understanding of advanced filters and how I can track various parameters on my sites, and extrapolating Tim’s words led me to the creation of some fairly complex custom reports which are actually useful to me and my clients, not to mention our customers.

There isn’t a lot there yet, but every word is a gem worth treasuring. I would wholeheartedly recommend that you dash over to CXFocus and click on that magic RSS button to drop it into your Reader – it will be worth every moment you spend on it.  Speaking for myself, I can’t wait for the next post as I know it will not only make my life easier but almost certainly add to my income from satisfied customers.

Google Analytics – Clearing the Mist is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

Google Analytics – Clearing the Mist is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

Johnson Boxes are one of those things that everyone refers to and assumes that everyone knows all about them and how to do them – but in my experience they don’t. Following the ‘clean page’ option last week which most people spotted as a potential sales/squeeze page it seems logical to follow it up with a bit about Johnson Boxes.

For anyone who doesn’t know, they are those colored boxes with a solid or broken line around them that emphasis some text, usually a benefit of the product, or the sales price – anything you want to draw attention to. They are a proven method of increasing conversions. So how do you make them?

First of all you need the bit of code to go in your custom_css.php that specifies the style and type of your box, then you ned to put something in your page text that calls up that box.

A simple version is given here – you can elaborate on it as you please but this will give you a basic box

/*--Johnson-Box--*/
div#johnson-box{
display: center;
background: #YOUR-COLOR-CHOICE-HERE;
border: YOUR-BORDER-WIDTH-HEREpx solid #YOUR-COLOR-CHOICE-HERE;
width: YOUR-WIDTH-HEREpx;
height:YOUR-HEIGHT-HEREpx;
text-align: center;
}
/*--End Johnson-Box*/

This will give you a centered box with centered text and a solid line round it. The solid line doesn’t want to be much more than 4px and often less. If you want a broken border just replace ’solid’ with ‘dashed’. If you want a fluid height for your box, just miss out the height line.

To use the box place the following in your page text (using the html editor, not the visual one in WP)

<div id="johnson-box">
YOUR TEXT AND IMAGES HERE
</div>

This is what I used to generate the box below though the more usual color for the border is #cc0000

/*--Johnson-Box--*/
div#johnson-box{
display: block;
background: #f3edfc;
border: 4px dashed #cc99ff;
width: 600px;
height:60px;
text-align: center;
}
/*--End Johnson-Box*/

and this is what I put in my page:-

<div id="johnson-box">
This is a Johnson Box
</div>

If you want more than one style of Johnson Box then just give each set up a different div name.

You can also use an inline style but I find the CSS version easier when I am setting up templates but for the sake of completeness here is the code, which you would use in the html editor.

<div style="display: center; background: #YOUR-COLOR-CHOICE-HERE; border: 1px solid #YOUR-COLOR-CHOICE-HERE; width: YOUR-WIDTH-HEREpx; height:YOUR-HEIGHT-HEREpx; text-align: center;">
YOUR TEXT AND IMAGES HERE
</div>


This may be a bit basic for some of you but I hope it is useful to someone out there.

Johnson Boxes and How To Make Them is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

Johnson Boxes and How To Make Them is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

I am truly, madly, deeply in love with Thesis – it is the best wordpress theme, bar none.  It is worth every single penny I paid for it.  I would pay a lot more.  It is probably the most valuable single investment I have ever made for my business. One of the joys is how easy it is to make it look unlike itself.  I needed a simple, clean page for a client, with nothing on it, so we could do much as we pleased via the wordpress backend and with all the SEO functionality that Thesis brings plus everything else.  All we wanted was a content container with a fine border.

CSS is not one of my great strengths but I decided I had to tackle this small problem and come up with something usable.  This is the result of my work, I hope you find it as useful as I have.  My thanks to the members of the diythemes forums whose collective wisdom helped me to achieve this.

I have labelled each bit of the code so you can see what it does, and make your own changes as required for colors and so on.

This will produce a clean, blank page, with no header,navigation, sidebars or footer.  h1, h2 and h3 have been styled to be larger and in a specific color, and links will be highlighted with a colored background on hover, but these elements can be left out if you so desire.  Equally the container size and borders can be changed.  The ‘comments closed’ has also been removed.  If you want to make changes it should be fairly simple to see what you need to take out.

/*---[Styling For Clean Page]---*/

.cleanpage #header { padding: 0; border-bottom: 0em; }
.cleanpage #header #logo { display: none; }
.cleanpage #header #tagline { display: none; }
.cleanpage .menu { display: none; border: none; }
.cleanpage #content { margin: 0 auto; float: none; }
.cleanpage #sidebars { display: none; border: none; }
.cleanpage #tabs {display:none;}
.cleanpage #content_box { background:none; }
.cleanpage .comments_closed { display: none; }
.cleanpage #footer { padding-bottom: 0; border-top: 0em; }

/*—[Coloured Background for hover on links]—*/
.cleanpage a { color: #YOUR-COLOUR-IN-HERE; }
.cleanpage a:hover { color: ; background: #YOUR-COLOUR-IN-HERE; }

/*—[End Coloured Background for hover on links]—*/

/*—[Headers h1,h2,h3 Formatting]—*/

.cleanpage #content h3 { font-size:18pt; font-weight:bold; color: #YOUR-COLOUR-IN-HERE}
.cleanpage #content h2 { font-size:24pt; font-weight:bold; color: #YOUR-COLOUR-IN-HERE}
.cleanpage #content h1 { font-size:30pt; text-align:center; font-weight:bold; color: #YOUR-COLOUR-IN-HERE}

/*—[End Headers h1,h2 Formatting]—*/

/*—[Container]—*/

.cleanpage #container { width:YOUR-WIDTH-IN-HEREpx; margin-top: 1em; border: 0.2em solid #YOUR-COLOUR-IN-HERE; }

/*—[End Container]—*/

/*—[End Styling For Clean Page]—*/

To use it, simply make the adjustments in terms of colour etc in the code given to suit the feel of your site and paste into the custom_css file. When creating the page itself just add ‘cleanpage’ in the css class box on the page.

You can see the actual sample page here Thesis Clean Page

It may not be the most elegant of code – I am no whizz kid there, but it demonstrates yet again how versatile the fabulous Thesis Theme is. If you don’t have it, do yourself a favour and get it – it’s money well spent.

Thesis Clean Page Option is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

Thesis Clean Page Option is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

There’s been a lot of redecorating going on in my life at the moment – the living room and the blog.  The living room is nearer finished than the blog and the latest thing completed gave me pause for thought.

I spent yesterday making (altering to be exact) the curtains for the living room, because they need to be exactly the right length to sit on the windowsill and are ivory (yellow according to @winebuff, but he’s colour challenged!) I took a great deal of care over them.  They were finally finished mid-evening and duly hung, and even if I say so myself, bar a little tweaking of the header tapes, they look pretty good.

You may wonder where I am going with this, but bear with me.  We had already put up blinds so there was no need for curtains from a privacy, or even a warmth point of view but they look nice, and they do give a little extra privacy and warmth.  I was reminded of the phrase ‘dressing a window’ which is how we always used to refer to hanging curtains.

It made me think, and when I think it almost invariably turns to something web based.  When we ‘decorate’ our websites we put all the essentials in place to make the Search Engines happy.  We contemplate keywords and their density.  We ponder over descriptions and tags.  The time spent debating the merits of ‘follow’ and ‘no follow’ is endless.  Robots.txt and .htaccess and checked and double checked to please the spiders, delicious food is laid before them. In other word, we put up the blinds – they do the job very well indeed.

But what about the users, how often do we put as much effort into putting up the curtains and dressing the windows?  It strikes me as I wander the web that the answer to that is ‘Not very much’.  I’m not talking about single action squeeze pages that are aimed to get you to do just one thing, I am talking about those money sites, or the big sites that you spend blood, sweat and tears tuning for the search engines.  How easy are they for your users to navigate?  How clear are they?  How well do they fulfil the needs of the average user?

We forget that we are not the average user, we know how to tease out the information we want from a site.  Imagine that your site is the very first website your visitor has ever seen, would they be able to get around it?  Would they be able to find what they need easily? Does it look inviting?  Put your blinds up but make your curtains pretty and dress your window well, after all – search engine spiders don’t have wallets, users do.

Who Is Your Website For? is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

Who Is Your Website For? is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

A friend said to me the other day, when discussing some new geekery “We are toolsmiths” and he was quite right.  I love new shiny toys and tools. We were discussing Google Wave* at the time  but the tool I want to bring to your attention today is Dropbox – a fantastic tool for anyone working on more than one machine or in more than one location..  It’s not new by any means but it surprises me how many people are not using it.

So what is Dropbox? basically an online storage bucket which you can sync with any number of computers (Mac or PC) or access online.  Simply drag a file to your Dropbox folder  (or upload if you’re not at your own machine) and as if by magic a short while later it appears in your folder in all the other places you have set up.  You can then access your file, do whatever you want, save it and it updates everywhere else.  It saves lugging machines around to clients half the time as you can access the files you want via the web interface

It is simple, easy to use and functional.  The web interface is basic because it doesn’t need anything else.  A quick download and you are set up and ready to roll.  Items stored in your public folder have a URL which you can share with anyone you choose making it handy to distribute big files such as photo albums.  You can set up a ’shared’ folder and issue invites for group projects and multiuser files.  Again, everyone’s files will be synchronised and updated.  It does exactly what it says – drop a file in the box and it’s available to anyone you want to have access.

Price – free for up to 2g, there are premium plans which run at around $10 a month for 50g.   You can click here to find out more – Dropbox

In the interests of full disclosure that is an affiliate link, you won’t pay any more or less but I will get some extra storage for free if you use it, and if you do – my thanks.  I’m not providing a non-affiliate link because I have quite strong feelings on that subject as anyone who has read an older post here will know, you can find it here  – Cut the C***, It’s OK To Make Money

On an entirely separate note, the redecoration here is coming along, still not quite finished but we are getting there, hopefully by the time of my next post everything will be in place.

* I do have some Google Wave invites left if anyone would like one , just put a note in the comments.

Delicious Dropbox is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

Delicious Dropbox is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

I am in something of a philosophical mood today.  It’s been an up and down week largely due to the cold weather which I loathe, but three things have happened today which brought home to me how much small things matter and gave me the added bonus of inspiration.

The first thing that happened was the arrival of the new carpet, small thing in the global scheme but a big thing for us.  We have been without a carpet for nearly two weeks whilst decorating our living room and in this weather a concrete floor is cold, especially when you have no curtains because you can’t put those up until the carpet is down.  It is also the fulfilment of a long held dream, a ‘grown up’ living room.  Everything is cream with flashes of my beloved pink, and warm woods.  Totally impractical if you have kids, or dogs but something I have always longed for – the fish have been told not to splash and my dearly beloved,   @winebuff to the twitterati, firmly instructed not to spill any of his red wine.  Not an earth shattering event, but one that gave me great happiness.

The second and third things occurred because it is Friday.  Each week my good friend Ron Rink posts a thoughtful and often inspirational story on our group forum.  I look forward to these as he nearly always manages to pick something that strikes a chord and he did it again today.  The story was titled ‘I wish you Enough’ and I am sure most of us have heard the stories which surround the age old wish.  As I read it, I thought to myself how much more than enough I have in my life.  As most of you know, we have had our ups and downs in the last few years but we have come through and we have enough and to spare.  I am grateful.

Then comes the icing on the cake, the cherry on top, whatever you want to call it.  I don’t often post a #followfriday on Twitter, it is something that can get overdone.  When I do post one, it is because I firmly believe that the person adds something of real value to the conversation.  Today, having read @KennyGoodman’s latest blog post I sent out a #followfriday tweet because I really do think he is worth listening to.  Within a very short space of time I had a direct message from Kenny to say thank you.  It absolutely made my day that he had taken the time out to send that message.

A small thing maybe, but the amount of pleasure it gave me made me realise how important small things are.  I got as much pleasure from that as I did from the big thing in my life today, the new carpet.  The big things come along once in a while but the small things are what add up to give us ‘Enough’ in our lives, and we should take joy in them.  It will make life a great deal happier.  Ron’s story opened my eyes to that at a very opportune moment.

Thank you to the guys who braved the weather to fit the carpet, thank you to Ron for the story, thank you to Kenny for his response and thank you to @thebookgarden who kindly recommended me as one of her #FollowFriday nominees.  My wish for them and for you all is ‘enough’

PS – just in case you don’t know the ‘Enough’ wish – here it is

I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright.
I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more.
I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive.
I wish you enough pain so that the smallest joys in life appear much bigger.
I wish you enough gain to satisfy your wanting.
I wish you enough loss to appreciate all that you possess.
I wish you enough “Hello’s” to get you through the final “Goodbye.”

A Small Thing is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

A Small Thing is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

I haven’t posted anything to my blog for a long time.  There are many reasons, none of which I am going to go into because it would take to long and rapidly become a plaintive self-justifying wail.  It’s just the way it was.

However, times are changing, I have plans and this blog is a part of them.  We are going to have a bit of a redesign, but nothing too dramatic.   It won’t be fancy, you come here to read what I say not marvel at my lack of graphics skills.  It will be a bit of testbed for ideas and experiments.

I’m still a Grumpy Old Woman and I still rant from time to time, I’m still an Online Marketer who builds websites for myself and for anyone else who pays me enough,  I’m still a Net Wanderer, and in my wanderings I find all kinds of things, some of which I want to talk about so, in the immortal words of whoever it was – I’m back!

I’m Back! is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

I’m Back! is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

I’ve just got back from the West Midlands MeetUp in Evesham, tired but happy as they say.   It was a great afternoon and well worth the effort of organising it.

We were a select band with a widely differing range of experience, and all kinds of different skill sets but it made for a harmonious whole and demonstrated the benefits of having these get togethers.  I had met some of the guys before at the Manchester MeetUp in August last year and it was an absolute pleasure to see them again, as well as meeting some new friends and bringing online acquaintance into the real world.  The range of topics discussed was huge, everything from deep philosophical debates on the transfer of  the market place from the High Street to online, the pros and cons of wordpress, linking strategies, the intricacies of Google Analytics to ‘are the chips good’ – they were.

The five hours of continuous chatter was useful for everyone and we will definitely be repeating the experience with a discussion theme for the meetings as everyone felt this would be useful.  I’d like to think some good relationships were forged today.  There was a brief moment of silence for photos but that only served to emphasised just how much chat there was….

I’ll be posting details of the next one in due course – and all are welcome – it will be worth the trip…

Left to Right – Tim, Lisa, Chris, Elaine hiding behind Chris, Sandy, Annette, Me, Enzo, Walter

West Midlands MeetUp is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

West Midlands MeetUp is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

I’ve been threatening to do this for a while and have finally got it sorted!  For anyone who has been to one of the MeetUps held all over the globe, you will know how beneficial they are – and fun too. I have happy memories of the Manchester MeetUp that launched the Thirty Day Challenge last year, not to mention the lunch that preceded it!

However, I digress…

The Date:- Saturday 21st February

The Time:- 12 noon onwards

The Place:- The Amber Bar, Evesham, Worcestershire -  google map here

Easy access via train (direct line from London, Oxford)  plenty of car parking within five minutes walk.  The Amber Bar does reasonable food at reasonable prices.

Previous meetups have been for Immediate Edgers or Thrity Day Challenge participants  and I suspect most people who come  will have been involved in one or other, but anyone interested in Internet marketing is welcome…

Please leave a comment if you are thinking of coming so we have some idea of numbers.

Hope to see on the 21st…

West Midlands Meetup is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

West Midlands Meetup is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

It’s a well known fact that I have unbounded admiration for Seth Godin, what you probably don’t know is that I have spent the last few weeks and months becoming increasingly vitriolic in my tirades against the Numpties who preach doom, gloom and despondency in the various media – I am becoming the woman who shouts at the TV…  it gets embarrassing after a while.

The reason I shout at the TV, in particular the BBC Breakfast TV programme’s Business Reports is that they see everything from it’s absolute worst possible perspective, they give huge credence and publicity to negative news and skate past anything good with a muttered aside.  Then they return, with huge gusto, to full throated baying of doom laden forecasts.  OK, I accept that things are not good, you would have to be blind to say that they are.  But it is not all bad, there are ways forward and there are ways out.  What you have to do is take action, not just cry into your Beer.

A brief video interview with Seth Godin was published on Mashable yesterday, it should be required watching for everyone in business, especially for those of us who have a bit of courage rather than being of the ‘cry into your Beer’ variety.    In case you missed it, it’s here.  I suggest that you also take a trip to his blog and look at some of the recent posts – expecially you guys at the BBC, perhaps then you can do something positive towards moving us forward rather than just digging a deeper hole for everyone to fall into.

Turning The Tables is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings

Turning The Tables is a post from: flaminglacer's mutterings