1. Find a website traffic tracking tool that is able to capture “labels” that you are going to add to the destination URL of your online ad. As I’ve mentioned, I use Web-Stat. They have a free 30 day trial. You install a small paragraph of code onto every page of your website. Visit your own website and watch the Live Streaming Traffic view to see yourself. Now that you have the traffic tracking tool set up, you’re ready for the next step.

2. Find out how to “label” the destination URL – the correct syntax is extremely important. For Web-Stat, it’s adding ?source=whateveryouwanttowrite at the end of the URL that people will be taken to when they click on the ad.

3. When you submit the ad, be sure to give the ad company the full destination URL with the “label”. Let’s use this example:    http://AldebaranWebDesign.com?source=HelloThereAd

4. Once your ad is running, click on it to test it out. You should be directed to whatever URL you submitted. Then check inside your Web-Stat account, and you should see the visit with the “Referrer” displayed as whatever you put after ?source=   Here’s a screenshot of my own test to show you what this should look like inside Web-Stat. Two visitors are showing. One came from Google, the other came from clicking on the link of my “ad”:

http://AldebaranWebDesign.com?source=HelloThereAd

5. After a period of time, say a month, you can now look at all this traffic as a distinct group under “Referrers”. This allows you to compare the results of various advertisements. (Again, this is a screenshot from my own Web-Stat account as a demo – the HelloThereAd is way down at the bottom because I only clicked once). Note that the bounce rate is calculated for different referrers. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave after only visiting one page, meaning they came into your website and bounced right back off it, not finding what they were looking for. For an ad that you’re paying for, your bounce rate should be relatively low compared with random Google searches. If your paying for an ad that has a high bounce rate (over 50%) something might be wrong with the ad itself.

1. Login to your DreamHost Control Panel – you should know the email address you signed up with and the password you picked. DreamHost usually sends this info to you in an email if you’ve forgotten it.

2. On the left hand side, click on Domains and Manage Domains. It looks like this:

3. Next to the domain that you’ve registered, if it doesn’t have a hosting account, you will see this green “Add Hosting” button:

4. On the next page, select Upgrade to Full Hosting by clicking on the “upgrading to our Happy Hosting billing plan”. Yes, I know it’s a dumb name and confuses all of my clients, but it’s the right thing to click on. The image is shown below:

5. Next, look down on the page and under Hosting Plans, click Add A Plan:

6. After this, you will get a screen that asks you how long you want to purchase a hosting plan for. Most of my clients pick 1 or 2 years. Don’t worry about naming your plan. Click “Add Plan Now”.

7. Now the plan should have been added if DreamHost has your credit card information. Go back to Domains and Manage Domains…and if that green Add Hosting is still  there, click it again. This time you’ll see a big long bunch of choices. Don’t panic. Ignore them all except: check “add WWW” and  uncheck Google Apps, and click on the Fully Host This Domain button at the bottom of the first section. You may be prompted to enter a “username” this is for FTP, so just make something up and then click on Fully Host This Domain button.  And then, finally, finally, you’ll be done. And DreamHost will send you a bunch of emails.

Sorry this is so difficult for so many clients. DreamHost needs to make this so much easier. It’s gotten more complicated over time.

Solution was found here:

If Pages Return A 404 After WordPress 3.1 Upgrade

Here’s what we did:

1. disable all plugins

2. remove .htaccess file from blog folder on server

3. switch permalinks to default and then back to her setting, and then verified this recreated a brand new .htaccess file on her blog folder on server

4. verified this fixed issue (yeah!)

5. one by one, enabled plugins, and discovered that a category related plugin (that renamed a category to something else) was also causing problem so we deleted it.

6. so with all plugins enabled again, retested and it worked. Many thanks to Dre Armeda for this solution.

Using Microsoft Outlook 2003 with Your Email

Using Microsoft Outlook 2007 with Your Email

Using Outlook 2010 with Your Email

Using Microsoft Outlook Express with Your Email

GoDaddy  Product and Technical Support: (480) 505-8877

https://login.secureserver.net

Quickly Disable or Enable All WordPress Plugins via the Database

http://status.dreamhost.com/

If things are really bad, even that URL might be down, and it’s best to check Twitter.com and search for @dhstatus, you can do this here: http://search.twitter.com/

I should note that I’ve been with DreamHost since 2006, and outages like these are not a typical experience. If you have a business that can’t tolerate its website being down for several hours, you should probably not have your website hosted with a shared hosting company (and be paying way, way more than the $10/month that DreamHost charges).

For my own business and the small businesses I work with, we can tolerate some downtime occasionally, and so for us DreamHost is a great choice for inexpensive hosting. I advise my clients to first try to notify DreamHost if they have an issue, if they can’t login, check the status.dreamhost.com website to see if there is a systemic issue.

But please don’t panic. After watching the very scary news from Japan, it really puts issues like having a website being down for a few hours into perspective.

To clone a product in the ECT store:

1. Login to your store’s control panel

2. Click on Product Admin

3. Locate the product you’d like to clone.

4. Hold down the “CTRL” key (or “alt option” if you’re on a Mac) while clicking Modify.

5. Notice at the top of the page it says “You are cloning the product “Your Product Name Here”.

Use this feature to quickly make new products that are very similar to each other to save yourself time.

Clues to detecting spam:

1. The comment “when I was quite younger, i alway enjoy online chatting with friends and relatives” makes no sense on a “How To Contact DreamHost.com For Support”.

2. The author is not a person’s name, but a keyword, in this case “Electric Oven”.

3. The email address doesn’t match the URL’s domain.

4. The URL is obviously trying to get a link.

What was the objective? For SEO, you want links that have their anchor text (what you click on) to be a keyword. So in this example, they wanted the words “Electric Oven” to be the anchor text and wanted it to go to their electric oven website. In WordPress, the person’s name is the anchor text for the person’s URL – so they were trying to take advantage of this configuration.

Of course, I foiled them and clicked “Spam It” which tells Akismet, my spam plugin to report this as spam which then labels this person/ip address as a spammer, and will put similar message right into the spam bucket of other WordPress bloggers.

You’ve selected DreamHost as your hosting company and now you need to configure Outlook  to read your email from your website. Here are the necessary steps to configure Outlook. If you need to configure Outlook Express, please read this article on how to set up Outlook Express. This article has been updated for Outlook 2007.

Here we go!

1. From the top menu, select “Tools” and “Account Settings“.

2. Under E-mail Accounts, select “New“.

3. Under Choose E-mail Service, select “Microsoft Exchange, POP3, IMAP or HTTP” and click “Next“.

4.Check “Manually configure server settings or additional server types”

5. Select “Internet E-mail”

6. On the Internet E-mail Settings window, enter your information as follows:

This is an example if I was trying to set up an email address of Jill.Olkoski@euuc.org on DreamHost. You must replace my info with your own website email and domain name.

You should replace “Your Name” with your name, “Jill.Olkoski@euuc.org” with your email address, and “mail.euuc.org” with your your domain name where the euuc.org is, so it would be “mail.yourdomain.com”.

Do NOT check “Require logon using Secure Password Authentication (SPA)”.

7. Click “More Settings…”

Select the Outgoing Server tab.

Check the box next to “My outgoing server (SMTP) requires authentication” and make sure the first radio button is highlighted.

8. (Optional) Make a mental note that under “Advanced” is where you can change the port settings. Don’t make changes to this page now, but if the set up doesn’t work you may need to come back to this page.  See my troubleshooting section below.  The screen shot is set for using POP3.  If you are using IMAP instead of POP3, the Incoming server should be set to 143.

9. That’s it, you’re done. Click “OK“, “Test Account Settings” and if both pass, select “Close“, “Next” and  “Finish“. (You’re not done until you see Congratulations and hit Finish!!!)

Troubleshooting Outgoing Mail Problems: On occasion, you will be able to receive emails, but not send them. If this is the case, then you may need to contact your internet service provider (ISP) to see if they have specific settings for sending outgoing email.

For example, I had a client who used Verizon for her internet service provider, and Verizon blocks port 25, so in her case, we needed to set the outbound port to 587. I had another client who uses AdvancedCable.net, and in his case, we needed to change the Outgoing Mail Server to smtp.myacc.net.  For a Frontier client, we finally had success with setting IMAP Incoming Server set to port 143 and SMTP outgoing server  set to 587. So your solution will depend on your specific internet service provider. Note that if you use your ISP for your outgoing email server, you will need to know your ISP’s username and password.

So if you’ve followed these directions, and you can receive but not send, give your internet service provider a call and tell them you’re trying to set up Outlook email, and ask what settings for outgoing email you should set.

Ports That Have Worked Best For My Clients:
POP3 Incoming Mail Server Port 110 for Standard and Port 995 for SSL
IMAP Incoming Mail Server Port 143 for Standard and Port 995 or 993 for SSL
SMTP Outgoing Mail Server Port 587 for Standard and Port 465 for SSL

POP3 vs IMAP for Incoming Mail Server – I recently helped a client set up Outlook on her computer, and noticed that in Outlook, if you add a POP3 email account, it simply directs that incoming mail to your main Inbox that’s listed under Personal Folders. However, if you add a IMAP email account, it will create a separate Inbox with it’s own sub folders for sent, trash, etc. This is another aspect to consider if you’re using Outlook and choosing between POP3 and IMAP for your incoming mail server.

And, if the attempt at setting up Outlook has proven too frustrating, try switching to Thunderbird – so much more user friendly, and free.

This video is in Quicktime. If you  don’t have Quicktime installed, click here for a free Quicktime download for Mac or PC.

The steps are:

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Under Posts, click on Categories.
3. Enter the category name.
4. Enter the category slug.
5. Optional – Add category parent.
6. Click Add New Category.

The question was:

1. Where is the best placement of OPEN and CLOSE loop elements for a repeating table row?
- Inside the TR tags?
- outside TR tags?
2. Where is the best placement of the LOOP controls?
- Whether the controls are placed AUTOMATIC or MANUALLY they display inline at the top of the table, which is confusing to the user.

And the answer was:

ad 1.: Outside the TR tags – the loop should surround the table row

ad 2.: When placing the loop start in a position where now content HTML is allowed (like between the TABLE and TR tags) then you should set the control flag to MANUALLY and insert the little PHP code snippet for the controls (as listed in the Menu Element’s reference) elsewhere – e.g. at the beginning or end of the table cell (right after the TD or before the /TD). You might want to enclose that in a DIV and give that a nowrap via CSS so the buttons are kept in a separate line.

And I added:

Just used this tip and thought posting the code would save someone else time:
<?php $webyep_oCurrentLoop->showEditButtons(); ?>

Original Forum Article is here: LOOP – TABLE; repeat TR, controls placement

Normally my clients use DreamHost for hosting, and they usually just sign up for a regular old shared hosting plan. So far, I haven’t had anyone who has the need for more bandwidth than their regular hosting plans offer.

However I did switch my own website hosting plan over to PS around a year ago as an experiment. I was having enough downtime to bug me, perhaps getting notifications that my site was down from Web-Stat a few times a month. I also knew that how often my website went down was heavily dependent on which server I was on. I think I asked to be moved, which they did, but for some reason, I still was having downtime that bugged me.

So I switched to PS, which did indeed cut down on my downtime. It’s a bit more expensive, but since my business is web design, having a website that’s up as much as possible is important to me.

However, I also have other clients who pretty much never have downtime and they have a regular hosting plan – so I do think that it depends on who your server neighbors are and what they are doing to impact your server’s performance.

So I told my client that if he was experiencing downtime that bugged him, he could give the PS a whirl, but otherwise to stay where he was. The PS does require users to check their usage and to make adjustments, which for most of my website clients is the last thing on their minds. If you’ve moved from standard DreamHost shared hosting to PS, let me know what you think.

You embed or add a pdf document much the same way you add an image:

1. However instead of clicking on the first “Add An Image” icon, you click on the last one “Add Media”. It looks like a little dot with spikes, like a star.

2. Next, just like adding an image, you click on “Select Files” and navigate to your PDF file.

3. Change the title to something obvious like “Click Here to Download Blah”, so that folks will know what will happen when they click on the link.

4. Be sure to click “File URL” under the “Link URL” section.

5. Then click “Insert Into Post”.

Here’s a screen shot of the “Add Media” window with the important parts circled in red:

One benefit of using this mod is that it has the ability to send out emails recursively. This means that if your hosting company has a limit specifying how many emails you can send out per hour, you can set the mod to make sure it doesn’t exceed that limit. For example, if your hosting company has a 100 email per hour limit, you can set this mod to send out 9 emails every 6 minutes (90 per hour). Pretty cool feature.

You should make sure you know the rules of your hosting company so that they don’t blacklist you as a spammer. One common rule is that people can opt in or out of your newsletter, meaning you can’t just send it to whoever you want. Some hosting companies have very complicated rules, and this is one reason why many clients, even those with ECT online stores, will use a monthy fee-based service. Another reason they use these other services, is that often they have really fancy tools that make it easy to format pretty newsletters. This mod is a very basic, kinda do-it-yourself newsletter program. It does not have any bells and whistles, but it is inexpensive.

Once you’ve purchased and installed this mod, you can follow these steps to send out a newsletter to the people who have added themselves to your email list inside your ECT online store.

From the store’s admin page, click on “Home”. At the bottom of that page, you should see a line for “Mailshot” with a link that says “Admin Page”. Click on the link.

You should now be looking at the newsletter admin screen. It’s recommended that you first send your newsletter to yourself before sending it out to everyone. Follow these steps:

1. Put in an appropriate number (“6″ is recommended) in the delay box. This is a very, very, very important step. Your batch size and delay must not exceed the limit set by your hosting company.

2. Put your own email in the To: field
3. Enter Subject:
4. Click “Design View”
5. Create your message.
In the message, you must put in how to unsubscribe.
Here’s the code

http://yourdomain.com/store/cart.php?unsubscribe=##Email##

Replace yourdomain.com with YOUR domain and make sure the path to your online store is correct.

6. How to add an image from a product in your store (optional):
First you will need to know the exact URL of the image. Navigate to the product and then put your mouse over the image you want. Right click and select “View Image” and you should see just the image all alone. The image URL is now displayed in your browser. It might take the form of “https://yourdomain.com/store/prodimages/imagename.jpg”

Copy the URL. Now back in the Newsletter area, put your cursor where you want the image to go, and click on the little “Insert Image” icon that looks like a tree. Paste in the image URL.

7. Click Send email. Don’t worry, this only sends it to you, if you clicked “Test” earlier.

8. You should receive the email. Check it over for errors.

9. Now you’re ready to send out the real thing! Uncheck the “test” box.

10. Put your cursor in the To: field and click the “Insert in the To Field” little icon. It looks like a little envelope with a lightening bolt. It will put this: ##Email## in the To Field.

11. Click “Send”. Do NOT refresh your window or close it – it needs to stay just as it is until it’s finished. It may take several hours.  One of my favorite clients uses this in her store and it takes about 20 hours to send it to her huge database.

If for some reason it stops in the middle, do whatever you can to avoid refreshing the page and starting over, as it will send it to your readers all over again. If you accidentally log out, for example, open another window in your browser and log into your store.  Then in the Mailshot window, click “Pause” and then “Resume” and it will continue where it left off.

A detailed description of the Advanced Newsletter/Mailshot admin area is here:
http://www.ectmodifications.com/installs/mailshot/Mail_Interface2.html

This article is written for clients who may have just had their ECT (Ecommerce Templates) online store upgraded to a new version. One of the wonderful things about using ECT for your online store, is that they are very dedicated to continually improving their product, and come out with updates (newer versions) on a very regular basis. How do you, as an ECT store owner get the most out of your upgrade? Read on.

The ECT online store is a very complex application. There are hundreds of files, some with thousands of lines of code in them. Each time a new version is released, a subset of these files are updated.  Click here to learn how to have ECT notify you of new releases. Once your web developer has updated your store to the latest version, it will be important for you to do a review of what’s changed so that you can make the most out of your improved online store. It’s also a good idea to take this opportunity to review what ECT can offer, because there might be a wonderful feature you store already had that you weren’t aware of.

The first thing I’d recommend, is that you know what version your old store was, and what the version of the new store is. This will help you figure out what’s changed. Your web developer should give you this information. If you log into your store’s admin area, the version number appears at the top of the screen.

Once you know the old and new version numbers, it’s time to scour the ECT website to see what might have changed. Keep in mind that some changes will be bug fixes, while other changes will be new features.

Here’s a list of links inside the ECT website that I recommend visiting to look for what might be different in your new version:

http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/support/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=21
Click on every release that’s beyond your old one up to and including up to the new one.

http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/phphelp/ecommplus/parameters.asp
This is a list of parameters that can be set. Often ECT will highlight the most recent ones.

http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/phphelp/ecommplus/about.asp
This is a features list, review them.

http://www.ecommercetemplates.com/help/admin-help.asp
Look on the right hand side under “Admin help” and click on each one.

The best way to get the most out of your ECT online store, is to really spend time looking around and reading about all of the features. Most clients won’t need to utilize all of them, but there are certainly always new features with each version upgrade, so take the time to learn and discover!

I work on website redesigns, which means I often work in a temporary subdirectory. When I’m ready to launch the website, I move the files from their temporary home, into their permanent home, typically under the root of the website. But if I’ve installed WebYep on a client’s website, moving these files will break things, and since I can’t find this on WebYep’s FAQ page, I’m posting it here in the hopes of helping others.

If you’ve moved your WebYep file or changed the page name, you have broken the link between WebYep and it’s data, and it’s a simple matter to fix this. Follow these steps provided by WebYep Customer Support:

I’ve renamed my page’s file or folder – now all my data is lost!
——————————————————
Whenever you rename a page or move it to another folder, the link between the page and its WebYep data is lost, as WebYep can only identify a page by its URL (filename and path).

But you can re-link the page to its data:

Open the file webyep-system/data/documents – a text file, containing pairs of paths and document IDs. Locate the file in question and correct its file or folder name. Then WebYep will find the document’s data again.

And, if your Web Yep pages were inside a subdirectory, called for example “newsite”. You’ll need to also modify this line at the very top of all your Web Yep pages:

from this

include(“newsite/$webyep_sIncludePath/webyep.php”);

to this

include(“$webyep_sIncludePath/webyep.php”);

Easy solution – but hard to find!

I’ve had a few clients ask me this question, so I’m posting the answer here – because it wasn’t super easy to find on the internet. When you get to the end of a line and hit “return” on your keyboard – what do you want to happen? Sometimes you want a new paragraph. Sometimes you might just want a line break. This short tutorial shows you how to accomplish this. It works for WebYep and WordPress…and probably for many other text editors that might use TinyMCE or FCKEditor or others.

In HTML, there are paragraph tags: <p>I’m a paragraph</p> and there are line breaks <br />.

Paragraph tags make things look like this:

Paragraph 1

Paragraph 2

There’s a line of space between paragraphs.

But line breaks look like this:

Line break 1
Line break 2

There is no line of space.

How do you get what you want when you’re using WebYep or WordPress or some other application that uses a WYSIWYG text editor?

The answer is easy: If you want a new paragraph, simply hit “return“. If you don’t want a new paragraph and just want a line break, hit “shift return“.

Now, when I was researching this solution, I did find many folks who said you could accomplish this by changing a few lines of code in the TinyMCE initiation file. And this did work…but only on Internet Explorer. It didn’t work on Firefox. So I think the simple “shift return” solution is the best one for my clients to use.

UPDATE: For those of you on a Mac, I have found issues with Safari and this hint – but it works on Firefox for Mac, so give that a try if Safari doesn’t behave.