Web Strategy Blog

SQL required to move a Wordpress Site to a new domain

Iain — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:51:50 +0000

To move a wordpress site from one domain to another, you need to execute the following SQL scripts on the database:
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'http://www.old-domain.com', 'http://www.new-domain.com') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';

UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://www.old-domain.com','http://www.new-domain.com');

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://www.old-domain.com', 'http://www.new-domain.com');

This works as of Wordpress 2.8.

Web Marketing - A Brief Glossary

Iain — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 12:34:24 +0000

There are increasingly a range of acronyms being thrown around in web marketing that sometimes slip out when interacting with clients. Here’s a brief overview of some of the more common e-marketing acronyms to ease the conversation.

SEM
Search Engine Marketing
SEM is a broad term covering the range of activities you might engage in to improve the extent to which you generate revenue via search engines
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation
SEO focuses on the organic listings as opposed to sponsored listings, or PPC. The position of your site in the listings for a given search term is determined by a wide range of factors, each contributing to the search engine’s algorithm. They can be broadly divided, however, into two groups:
- Content Relevancy: The greater the extent to which the content of a page matches the search term in question, the better it will rank (subject to the engine’s spam protection measures).
- Trust relevancy The greater the extent to which a page is connected (by hyperlinks) to sites also well connected to other sites relevant to the search term, the better it will rank, based on it being a trusted resource.
PPC
Pay Per Click
Many search engines present two listings when the user makes a search - the main, organic search results, and the sponsored listings. To achieve a sponsored listing, you must agree to pay a certain amount to the search engine every time someone clicks on your listing. Your bid compared to that of your competitors determines your position in the listing - bid prices can range from a few pence for less competitive phrases to several pounds for very competitive phrases. Most often however clicks will cost less than £0.50.
SMO / SMM
Social Media Optimisation / Social Media Marketing
More recently, a new area has opened up in web marketing with the arrival of social networking and in particular social news websites, such as Digg, Reddit, and a host of others. These sites allow you to submit content to their ‘Upcoming’ listing, presented initially in reverse date/time order. As time passes, if your site receives votes, it maintains it’s high position and may reach the ‘popular’ listing. This is encouraging marketers to be creative and generate interesting content, as the potential returns of getting ‘dugg’ are substantial in the short and long term.

UK Google Market Share 2008

Iain — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:31:55 +0000

Following our post last year on Google UK’s market share in 2007, here are some figures providing an indication of Google’s Market share in the UK in 2008. Hitwise are providing the numbers again, and in a relatively short sampling period during March 2008, they found Google to be holding a market share 87.5%, 10 percentage points greater than the same figures for 2007. They found 73.7% to be using google.co.uk, and 13.8% google.com. Clearly Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask among others have therefore lost ground to their primary competitor.

Particularly interesting in the same report was the statistics regarding the proportion of users opting to use Google’s ‘Pages from the UK’ search option. The report confirms intuition by showing only 13.6% of searchers to make use of this facility. This will help you decide the relative value of a .co.uk TLD vs. a .com or alternative (a google.co.uk search for ‘Pages from the UK’ will only return pages with a .co.uk TLD).

For more details, click through hitwise.

MooTools’ Garbage Collection and IE’s ‘Stop this script running?’ error

Iain — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 08:39:18 +0000

I wrote a post before the weekend about some performance issues with MooTools, DHTML and AJAX, but having found the solution to a related problem this morning, I wanted to post a followup.

I’ve been working with a large, dynamically generated and AJAX populated table that features sorting, filtering and row highlighting, and was finding that my table took a long time to render, and was also very slow to close - that is, when I tried to close the window or refresh the page, there would be a delay when the browser would first hang for a few seconds. IE often (but not always) popped up the error/prompt Stop this script running?, and Firefox less often threw it’s Unresponsive Script warning.

I’d heard of MooTools’ garbage collection functions that reduced memory leakage, and figured that these were probably responsible. I then found Kevin Smith’s write up of his similar experience, and came to understand the problem. MooTools’ garbage collection takes time to clean up any element that has been extended. My table was executing the following code, effectively extending every table row in the table, resulting in some 500+ extended elements.

// MooTools Code
Element.extend({
…
getChildren: function(){
return $$(this.childNodes);
},
…
});
…
// My Code
this.tablerows = this.body.getChildren();

When it came to cleanup, this javascript processing took longer than IE’s configured script timeout, and thus prompted the warning.

To avoid this cleanup overhead, you’ll have to avoid extending the elements with MooTools’ extensive set of functions and instead extend the specific elements in question with the specific functions required.

MooTools, AJAX, DHTML and Performance

Iain — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:13:11 +0000

I first delved into javascript frameworks with Prototype, but I quickly realised that the Prototype+Script.aculo.us combination, even in Protocoluous or Protopackt form, was never going to work - it was just too slow.

I moved to MooTools, and for a while was pretty happy - load times were quicker, effects smoother.

But having recently tried to build sorting and filtering functionality into an HTML table of 200+ rows, I’ve been forced to take a closer look at how different browsers execute javascript, and at where the bottlenecks are. Here I’m going to promote a few best practices, largely via Julien LeComte at Yahoo.

Inserting new Elements

Working with the DOM in MooTools is a breeze - code like the following is a pleasure to write and to read:

var div = new Element(’div’, {id:’example’}).addClass(’example’).setHTML(’Example Content’).injectAfer(’previousElementID’);

However it’s worth noting that the Element class uses ‘document.createElement’, which is much more expensive than the alternative, albeit less readible innerHTML. Further, inject() and adopt() functions use appendChild() and are also thus very expensive. An it certainly feels like this effect is magnified when working with tables.

Changing Existing Elements

Working with with DOM can cause performance issues, but if the DOM element in question is not visible (display:none), or if the DOM element is ‘off-DOM’, you’ll acheive a performance gain.

Retrieving Values from the DOM

Retreiving values from the DOM is much more expensive than referencing a local variable:

// bad code
children.each(function(child) {
if (child.getText() == otherElement.getText()) alert(’slow’);
});

// good code
var text = otherElement.getText();
children.each(function(child) {
if (child.getText() == text) alert(’fast’);
});

Attaching Event Handlers

Attaching events is also very slow. To tackle this, instead of looping through multiple elements attaching events, attach the event handler to the parent, and within the handler detect which element has been clicked:

// bad code
children.each(function(child) {
child.addEvent(’mousedown’, function () {
alert(child.getText());
}
});

// good code
parent.addEvent(’mousedown’, function (e) {
var child = new Event(e).target;
alert(child.getText());
}

By applying these ideas, I was able to cut the processing time of loading a table by more than 70%, and hopefully you can benefit too.

How to choose an eCommerce Solution for engagement and conversion

Iain — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:35:42 +0000

There are a real plethora of eCommerce solutions out there now, making it difficult to isolate which solution is best for you. Some solutions are free and open-source, some licensed or bought off the shelf, and others custom-built - each has it’s advantages and disadvantages. This post is an outline of what your decision-making process with your IT consultant should look like.

Will you be marketing your products to the search engines? If so, you need, at a minimum, a solution with 301 Redirect Management, keyword-rich URLs, and management facilities for title and meta-tags. This will rule out a sleuth of options.
What is your estimated annual turnover, average transaction value, and average unit price? Payment gateways (i.e. PayPal, Google Checkout, Protx, ChronoPay, etc.) differ in their charges, and you should choose to minimise your costs.

(more…)

Troubleshooting your FORMSOF & INFLECTIONAL searches not working, SQL Server 2005

Iain — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:08:26 +0000

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t get different results, using SQL Server 2005, for a simple Full-Text Search query and a Full-Text Search query using the FORMSOF and INFLECTIONAL keywords.

What I stumbled across eventually was that when creating and configuring my SQL Full-Text Indexes, I had left the language parameter as the default selection. When I changed this to English, voila!, my FORMSOF (INFLECTIONAL, @query) queries started to produces fantastic search results!

Also, an example query showing how to parameterize the the search term, and how to rank your results:

@query varchar (100)

SET @query = ‘FORMSOF (INFLECTIONAL, ‘ + @query + ‘)’

SELECT FT.rank, P.id, P.title
FROM Products P
INNER JOIN CONTAINSTABLE (Products, *, @query) AS FT ON P.id = FT.[key]

If you’ve any questions, I’ll do my best to help. Also, if you’re just starting with Full-Text, check out my posts on installing Full-Text Search on SQL Server 2005 and how to setup and configure SQL Server 2005 Express Full-Text Search the easy way.

SQL Server 2005 Express Full-Text Search Setup Tutorial

Iain — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:59:34 +0000

I recently had to setup a search facility on a website driven by SQL Server 2005 Express. My natural choice was SQL Server’s Full-Text Search feature, but setup was not entirely intuitive, and the web was full of misinformation. I’ve put together a tutorial to save you time.

If you’re not sure if your have Full-Text installed, read my post on installing SQL Server 2005 Express Full-Text Search.

Once, Full-Text is installed, you need to create your index:

CREATE FULLTEXT CATALOG MyFullTextCatalog

Managing your index is then actually very simple:

Browse to the tables of your database, right click and select ‘Design’
In the main window, right click and select ‘Fulltext Index…’
If you see the message, ‘You need to define one or more full-text compatible indexes on the table to create a full-text index’ and the ‘Add’ button is greyed out, it’s because you don’t have a column the database can use to uniquely identify each row. Make sure you have a primary key, and if you’ve no success, start your troubleshooting with this video - it discusses unique indexes about 1/3 of the way through.
Otherwise, click ‘Add’, and you have a new index.
To configure the columns in the index, click the ‘…’ button next to ‘Columns’
For each column, select the column, and select the appropriate language
To understand why the language parameter is important, see my post on use of the FORMSOF and INFLECTIONAL keywords in SQL Full-Text Search

It’s that easy! Any questions, let me know and I’ll do my best to help.

Communicating the ROI of Web Design with Web Forms

Iain — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 17:36:04 +0000

It is often hard for those needing a website to justify the costs of design. Design is often viewed as a ‘talent’ before a learned skill, and as something that we either have or we don’t, and it naturally follows that if you ‘have it’ should be able to produce it without greart expensive.

Luke Wroblewski gave an excellent presentation at the An Event Apart 2007 conference (Chicago) that helps communicate the complexity and process of design, and the value a strong design can contribute.

Luke’s presentation focuses on the web form, which is any interface that accepts user input - common examples are login/registration, enquiry, and eCommerce checkout forms. It’s clear that many businesses depend upon their customers completing these forms to generate, maintaining and convert leads, and logically follows that the quicker and easier a form is to complete, the more likely those customers will do so.

Luke presents three simple variants of webform design to demonstrate the potential impact on revenue the design of the form can have. Each form input field has a label that tells the customer what information to put in that field. Luke’s variations placed the label above the field, and to the left of the field, either left-aligned or right-aligned. His referenced studies found that customers completing forms with right-aligned labels surprisingly did so twice as quickly as those with left-aligned labels, but that quicker still were those customers completing forms with top-aligned labels.

Clearly, big differences can be made to conversion rates by assessing the quality of your web form. Luke’s presentation is available on his blog, and goes on to discuss the consideration of required/optional fields, primary/secondary actions, contextual grouping and progressive disclosure, tabbing, the path to completion, inline validation and assistance, and feedback mechanisms.

He also provides excellent example of both good and bad web forms in a very accessible presentation that will ensure you know what to expect when commissioning the design of a web form.

SQL Server 2005 Express with the Full-Text option greyed out

Iain — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 11:01:26 +0000

I’ve just been struggling to enable full-text search on my installation of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, and so want to share the solution.

If, like me, the ‘Use full-text indexing’ checkbox was greyed out under Database > Properties > Files, you first need to test whether Full-Text Indexing is installed or not. To do this, execute the query.

use [dbname]
select fulltextserviceproperty(’isfulltextinstalled’)

If this returns 0, you need to install Full-Text Search.

Firstly, did you install SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Advanced Series? Only the Advanced Series contains full-text. If not, you may need to reinstall.

However if so, then you just need to change the installation to include Full-Text Indexing. But if you originally installed from a download from the above link (most of you) then you’ll find that when you try to modify the installation via Control Panel > Applications / Programs, Windows prompts you for the installation file ’sqlrun_sql.msi’. This is because the download unpacked the installation files to a temporary folder which can no longer be found.

To resolve this issue, you need to download the file again from the link above, move it to a folder, and unzip (I used WinRAR). Then point Windows to the sqlrun_sql.msi file (under /setup, wherever you unzipped the download) when it prompts you for the installation file.

For additional info, see here.

For additional support setting up Full-Text Search once installed, watch this video on the topic from Micosoft, BUT I think you’ll find my new tutorial on seting up Full-Text Search in SQL Server 2005 Express much quicker and more intuitive to be honest..