Bargains That Better Your Site
Low Cost – Big Impact
A few useful tools
Last month we mentioned the importance of keeping your underlying software upgraded. Today, let’s look at a few very useful – and low-to-no cost – tools that can deliver big improvements to your site from the site owner’s point of view.
The first is Google Analytics. If you don’t have this on your site’s pages already, you are missing out on a tool that will analyze your site traffic, report on how people find you, which pages are most viewed, etc. Watching the reports can help you improve your site, perhaps bringing the pages most viewed closer to the top of the hierarchy, or changing your keywords to include what folks actually search with. The tool itself is free. You need only sign up for it. It will give you code that needs to be included on the pages you want to track.
If you are running a WordPress site, you should know about Akismet. Another free tool, this one is meant to stop spam comments on non-commercial blogs. They also offer several for-fee options for using it on commercial blogs. You need only sign up for it, follow some instructions to get your API key, and then place the code in your WordPress site as directed. Comment spam will dry up after you install Akismet, leaving you free to spend your time in more productive ways than managing spam comments.
Another tool aimed at stopping site abuse is recaptcha. This tool protects web form submissions. It displays that box of the distorted letters and numbers that you type to prove you are a human, not a bot, and therefore able to submit a form on a web site. Again, you need only sign up for an account and follow instructions to place this tool on your web form page.
In any of these cases, if you would rather have HTN take the process from the point that you sign up for your account through the point of installing the code appropriately on your site, just let us know. Each takes less than an hour to do. Email support@hens-teeth.net or call us (866-HENS-NET).
Linux VPS Bargains
Prices for Linux VPS have been cut in half.
Should you consider taking advantage of this? Absolutely yes, if you are currently on any of the older VPS plans or even a Signature Pro. Even factoring in the labor cost to move your site to the new machine, the cost savings are significant well within the first year.
For instance, if you are on a VPS 1000 at $105/month or a VPS Server A for $75/month, you can move to a Linux VPS Starter for $29/month or a Linux VPS Basic for $49/month (if you require more than one IP address).
Take advantage of the sale to get yourself on a Linux VPS that can be made PCI compliant.
Call us (866-HENS-NET) or email us (support@hens-teeth.net) to discuss your needs and to schedule your migration to a Linux VPS.
Customer Site News
We usually mention sites that have design work done by HTN. We also do custom programming, and this month we would like to feature some sites that have used our custom programming to solve interesting problems.
Munseys.com is an e-book source extraordinaire. The programming we did for this site involved integrating the site with the LibraryThing.com API so that data about the books found on munseys.com could be enriched by data drawn from the LibraryThing storehouse of bibliographic detail. This behind-the-scenes data population lets munseys deliver a high quality description and search, sharing data about the books instead of having to recreate it all locally.
Another site that continues to bring us interesting problems to solve is StageSpot.com. One of our most recent efforts for them is an editing tool, meant for staff who update product information in PDG Commerce frequently. Since only staff can actually see and use this tool, you can’t see it on their site. We are very pleased with this product editor tool. It is so configurable and easy to use – and so much more efficient for bulk edits than driving through the PDG Commerce administrative interface - that we will be generalizing it so that we can offer it to any PDG Commerce site. Look for more news on that development soon.