Google adverts and many others set cookies in your browser that allow them to track you across the web. Google (as an example), uses this information to display adverts that it thinks you are more likely to click on, based on the kind of sites you’ve visited in the past. Here’s how the world’s 3rd biggest search engine Yahoo! describe it:
“To make our ads more relevant and useful for you, we make educated guesses about your interests based on your activity on Yahoo!’s sites and services.”
Quite apart from the privacy concerns this raises, it can make SEO (search engine optimisation) of your website harder to do. If you are checking keywords in search engines, how do you know if you are seeing the same results as an ordinary user who’s never heard of you before?
Fortunately you can opt out of these networks (well most of them).
Because the default behaviour is opt-IN, these methods set a cookie that tells the advertiser to stop tracking. If you clear all your cookies, this preference it lost and you will have to revisit these pages again to opt-out again.
Location information is also commonly being captured by search engines so it’s important to clear this as well when you are doing research on your website’s search engine ranking. Google call it location-based customization.
2020Media can help
SEO Panel
Use the links above to check your browser’s current settings – if you use more than one browser you will need to use each in turn.
2020Media are beta-testing a new free service to all customers – SEO Panel. This is a complete open source seo control panel for managing search engine optimization of your websites and works independently of your browser settings. If you’d like to be in the trial, let us know.
Customers can update their communication preferences with 2020Media by logging in to the customer portal, clicking My Profile and editing the Bulletins tab.
2020Media takes privacy matters extremely seriously. We have a privacy statement on our website. This describes the policy that is in place to protect your personal information.
When changes are requested to your services, website or email, expect us to be robust in challenging the person making the request to prove they are authorised to do so, especially when the change requested could affect the availability of that service. 2020Media prides itself on being “small enough to care, large enough to cope”; so our staff attempt to speak to each and every contact during the service. This helps improve security as well as emphasises that we are not just a faceless supplier – we’re trusted partners in your internet presence.
The Telegraph were hosting this month’s London WordPress meetup at their headquarters in Victoria.
Talk 1:
BuddyPress core developer Paul Gibbs talked about how the Telegraph uses WordPress.
Talk 2:
WordPress and Web Accessibility: Why it’s Important
Graham Armfield talked about accessibility. The presentation covered some issues that disabled and elderly users experience with websites, then discussed steps that we all can take to improve accessibility – and why it makes business sense.
How the Telegraph uses WordPress.
The Telegraph media group have two websites running WordPress. There is Telegraph Blogs, which is where 40 or so journalists have their own blogs; and MyTelegraph which is where the public have their say.
Telegraph Blogs
Telegraph blogsuses WordPress multisite install to host a blog for each of the journalists. In turn these are split into several headings such as News, Sport, Culture, so that an editor can manage the content for each section. For speed, they use memcached and Akamai content delivery. The Akamai network in particular helps with spikes in traffic when a particular topic gets a lot of traffic in a short space of time. The themes are fairly static, but new plugins are added regularly and comprise a mix of off-the-shelf contributed WordPress plugins, and in-house plugins that have been built to meet a specific need for Telegraph Blogs. All undergo thorough manual and automated testing for security and scalability and are usually tweaked in some way. Some of the plugins used include: yoast breadcrumbs, WordPress SEO, Widget Logic.
MyTelegraph
MyTelegraph is probably the largest BuddyPress installation in the UK, with over 90,000 users. It’s no surprise then that Paul is a lead developer of BuddyPress. The MyTelegraph is a mix of groups and personal member blogs. The groups section includes categories such as Politics, Travel, Book Club and Football and uses the power of niche communities to maintain focus and engagement with members. Community managers guide the site and help new users find their feet. Groups are a feature of BuddyPress. Users can also create their own blogs, which is deployed with WordPress Multisite. The sitewide tags plugin allows their posts to appear on the MyTelegraph home page. Other plugin used include yoast breadcrumbs, blackbird pie (a twitter integrator), WP report posts, BuddyPress group blog, and of course BuddyPress itself.
You can listed to Paul’s talk on our podcast – the audio quality isn’t great as no-one told Paul to use the mic until 30 seconds before he finished!
WordPress and Web Accessibility
52% of people who meet the legal definition of having a disablilty prefer not to describe themselves as disabled. There are around 10 million people in the UK with some kind of impairment – if your website doesn’t address basic accessibility then you could be losing money and clicks.
Graham used Tesco as an example – a redesign of their website to improve accessibility cost £35,000, but after the relaunch, the website turnover was up £1.6million.
Accessibility – why it matters
Graham Armfield
Graham’s interesting and informative talk covered what WordPress does well and not so well when it comes to helping the disabled access your content. Screen readers are commonly used by those with a visual impairment (they convert the text to speech). The other common accessibility method is tab – instead of using a mouse, users will hit the tab key to move around a web page.
With these two tools in mind, Graham demonstrated how some WordPress generated sites could be severely lacking in usability if you looked at them without a mouse or only a screen reader. Some drop-down menus weren’t showing up when hitting tab, meaning those sections of the website would be totally inaccessible. Screen readers can give misleading information due to over-use of the title tag (which is extensive in WordPress).
Image Alt Tag. Read out by screen readers to make it descriptive
For decorative images leave blank
Background images are usually ignored by screen readers so don’t bother.
If image is a link, describe the destination
Links. “Read More” is no use to a blind person. Make the link text mean something
If the link opens a new window, say so in the title attribute. It’s confusing for screen readers otherwise.
There’s no need to repeat the same text in the title tag as on the hyperlink – screen readers will read out the same thing twice
Headings. Often used as a navigational shortcut. As per good design practice, break up your content using heading tags.
Lists. Lists like this one should be coded using appropriate html (the UL, LI tags) – the screen reader will tell the user they are in a list and how many items it has etc.
Video. Avoid auto start, Add captions using tools like subtitle-horse.com
Do you need help with a WordPress website? Why not talk to 2020Media – we have oodles of enthusiasm, buckets of knowledge and tons of techies who are eager to help!
2020Media was proud to sponsor this year’s Joomla! conference Sept 24-25th 2011.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB8LyRosHzE
Joomla!Day events are a great opportunity for the community to come together and share learning, find out about the latest developments, meet the people behind the extensions which they use, and network with others who are involved in this area of website design.
With 175 delegates from around the world, Joomla!Day UK 2011 brought together people from all walks of life with every possible level of experience with Joomla! – from complete beginners who had never installed the popular open source content management system, through to developers who have been part of the team since the project began, and everything in between.
Microsoft kindly provided their offices, allowing the event exclusive use of their amazing facilities including a 200+ seat auditorium and 15 breakout rooms, as well as excellent hostesses who ensured that everybody was registered quickly and found their way to the right rooms during the event.
Videos of the sessions are being edited and will be appearing on the Joomla!Day UK 2011 website and YouTube channel, along with slides from all speakers.
Ryan Ozimek, the President of Open Source Matters (OSM), gave the keynote on the first day.
Ryan reminded the conference that the future for Joomla goes well beyond the CMS. The CMS has been an amazing piece of software, built by the community and extended by the community, but has been focused mostly on Web publishing. Ryan said “When I visit universities and talk to young people, they’re not that interested in building the next commenting system or blogging platform. They want to use Joomla to build the next Twitter or Facebook.”
2020Media is a proud supporter of the Joomla! project from events like Joomla!Day, Usergroups, the Extension Directory and providing top-class hosting facilities here in the UK.
3 interesting talks encouraged members of the London WordPress Meetup group to fill the venue to capacity on Thursday evening.
BuddyPress
Paul Gibbs
Core developer Paul Gibbs talked us through the new release of BuddyPress, the social network “out of the box” plugin for WordPress. BuddyPress 1.5 is an almost complete recoding of the plugin, taking advantage of the new features in WordPress 3 and above. It includes a new theme with a fresher look (as many users never attempted to create their own), more complete documentation so that developers and designers can take and extend the core plugin code, and the ability to embed media from sites such as YouTube directly in your site.
WordPress E-Commerce
Jeff Ghazally
Jeff Ghazally, one of the developers of the WordPress e-commerce plugin called WP e-commerce spoke about the new version of this plugin, and demo-ed setting up a online music store for digital music downloads in under 5 minutes. Although the core plugin is free, most users need to purchase a plugin add-on to give them the functionality they require. Add-ons range from $10-$195. Community plugins add more specific tasks. WP-ecommerce downloads total over 1.3 million to date, making it one of the all-time most popular plugins.
Better WordPress Search
Shakur Shidane talks about SOLR search
Developer Shakur Shidane gave us an overview of using Apache SOLR project to add a full featured search to WordPress sites. Search in WordPress is pretty simply – for example it can’t recognise the similarity between “smile” and “smiling”. The SOLR project includes and much more. Although not suitable for most small WordPress users on shared hosting, due to the technology requirements, Shakur’s talk showed us the WordPress can be used for the biggest of sites when required.
Hosting for WordPress
The talks this week at WordPress London showed us just how powerful WordPress can be. From a fully featured social network for your specific group, to extensive e-commerce ability, to high powered search, WordPress is ready for heavy lifting.
If you have a WordPress project coming up that may need specialist support, why not get in touch with us? 2020Media offers specialist hosting support for WordPress for all sizes of website. With ‘no-click’ WordPress install, experienced and friendly technical help and free support, the team at 2020Media are waiting to hear from you.
News, tips and reviews from one of Britain's leading web hosting companies
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