I came across the following joke and though it was pretty funny and communicated the concept of “Know Your Customers” really well by showing what not to do:

A disappointed salesman of Coca Cola returns from his Middle East assignment.
A friend asked, “Why weren’t you successful with the Arabs?”
The salesman explained, “When I got posted in the Middle East, I was very confident that I will makes a good sales pitch as Cola is virtually unknown there. But, I had a problem I didn’t know to speak Arabic. So, I planned to convey the message through 3 posters…

First poster, a man crawling through the hot desert sand…
Totally exhausted and panting.

Second poster, the man is drinking our Cola and

Third, our man is now totally refreshed.

Then these posters were pasted all over the place”
“That should have worked,” said the friend.
The salesman replied, “Well, not only did I not speak Arabic,
I also didn’t realise that Arabs Read from Right to Left…”

I’m a big fan of testing and one tool that I like to use is Visual Website Optimizer (VWO). It allows you to quickly and easily create variations of your pages, split the traffic to these variations and see which ones perform better.

One of the challenges we faced when using VWO on our website was that a large enough percentage of our visitors come from countries that we’re not likely to do business in. This means that any tests we run will be skewed and not truly representative of how my core audience would interact with our website. VWO allows you to segment your tests by a variety of factors but country isn’t one of them yet… so I came up with my own temporary fix until VWO offers a better way.

Integrating MaxMind with Visual Website Optimizer inside WordPress

MaxMind.com offers a service that allows you to convert an IP address into a country code. For $20 per 200,000 queries, you’re able to basically detect which country your visitor is coming from. When you purchase a license from MaxMind, they’ll provide you a license key. When in your functions.php file of your theme, you can add the following:

function what_country_is_visitor_from($license_key, $ipaddress){
  $query = "http://geoip3.maxmind.com/a?l=" . $license_key . "&i=" . $ipaddress;
  $url = parse_url($query);
  $host = $url["host"];
  $path = $url["path"] . "?" . $url["query"];
  $timeout = 1;
  $fp = fsockopen ($host, 80, $errno, $errstr, $timeout);
  if ($fp) {
    fputs ($fp, "GET $path HTTP/1.0\nHost: " . $host . "\n\n");
    while (!feof($fp)) {
      $buf .= fgets($fp, 128);
    }
    $lines = explode("\n", $buf);
    $country = $lines[count($lines)-1];
    fclose($fp);
  } else {
    # enter error handing code here
  }
  return $country;
}

function add_vwo_code_based_on_country(){ 
  $license_key = "YOUR LICENSE KEY";
  $ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];

  $country = what_country_is_visitor_from($license_key, $ip);

  $tracked_countries = array("US", "AU", "NZ", "CA", "UM", "GB");

  if ( in_array($country, $tracked_countries) && ( !(is_user_logged_in()) ) ) { add_vwo_code(); } 

}

function add_vwo_code(){ ?>

  <!-- Start Visual Website Optimizer Code -->
    Code provided by VWO
  <!-- End Visual Website Optimizer Code -->

<?php }

add_action("wp_head", "add_vwo_code_based_on_country");

In the above code, there are 3 parts you’ll need to customize and they have been highlighted in green. The first is the license key that MaxMind provides, the second is the array of countries that you’d like to test and the third is the code that VWO provides to add to your site.

Now even though I’ve shown just how to use VWO, you could replace the tracking code of other systems and achieve the same effect. Happy testing!

If your time is important to you, you know that no-show appointments with customers and potential customers is costly and frustrating. Even though we know this is a problem, it’s time consuming to consistently call to confirm an appointment. Most of the time, you end up haggling with a voice mail system and wasting a ton of time.

Recently I did a website billboard for a client of mine who was launching a new software that aims to fix this problem by automating the appointment reminder part. I was talking with Patrick, the lead developer on the project and he mention that customers are now experiencing a near-zero no-show rate. Almost everyone either shows up on time or reschedules ahead of time.

The best part of the system is that you don’t need to spend a few thousand to get started. Just visit www.appointmentreminder.org and sign up for a free 30 day trial. I’m sure you’re going to love it.

As web designers, we constantly face a challenge that I’d like to discuss here today: how can we grab the attention of visitors coming to our website when in reality, all these visitors are different, have different needs and looking for different information. What would normally be attention grabbing for one audience would cause another to yawn and reach for their blue mountain coffee. So what’s the solution?

The key to grabbing the attention of multiple audiences is to identify the top segments and address them directly so they know you are speaking with them. This is usually done using pictures that they could see themselves in and/or mentioning their job title or their core problems.

On the home page, what we typically like to do is mention the specific industry or job title of the audience and make that area clickable so that they can follow down that road of a customized marketing message.

Today I received an email from a WordPress user who was having problems making our WordPress backup plugin work with her site. Something she included in her message stood out to me immediately:

I know that my sql DB alone is larger than 8 Gb

I emailed her a few minutes later saying that our plugin doesn’t support sites that large and that the current version wouldn’t work for her.

The next email I got from her was as follows:

Shouldn’t that be disclosed in your instruction or features? You just cost me two days of frustration and LOTS of money for pricey Internet connection while traveling overseas. I am thoroughly disgusted.

Fair enough. It probably should be mentioned. Her point is valid. I understand that she was likely very frustrated at spending some time and not being able to make the plugin work for her. I’ve been there myself with many plugins and it can be an aggravating experience when you’re not able to do what you’d like to do. This, however is completely the wrong way to talk with plugin author.

Most WordPress plugin authors are providing a free software to allow you to do something new and awesome with your website. They don’t deserve abusive emails. If you have a recommendation, please, do make it heard but do so in a respectful way as if you were talking face to face with them.

Unfortunately, the above email is not the exception to the rule. There is about a 50/50 split in the type of emails I typically get as the main support person for our plugins. Half are quiet grateful and happy to get a response (which I usually like to do the same day but I’ve been exceptionally busy the last couple weeks.) I love helping these people. The other half are, as Aaron Wall from SEOBook calls them, freetards. They start their emails with things like “Why the f*** is your plugin not working for me? It’s give me a T_STATIC error” (the answer to which should be “You’re using PHP4 and you’ll need PHP5. Ask your host to upgrade you” but I don’t bother responding to those folks.

In conversations with other WP plugin authors, I’ve realized that I’m not the only one getting these types of ridiculous emails, which I why I’m writing this post. This type of behavior is truly unacceptable so I’d like to propose a set of guidelines that WordPress plugin authors can post on the support page for their plugins.

Guidelines For Requesting Support For WordPress Plugins:

• Realize that the plugin took the author some time and/or money to develop. It didn’t appear out of thin air.
• Replying to support requests isn’t the authors obligation. If they do, they are doing you a favor. Please appreciate it as they could be spending time with their family or working on projects that would make them real money or make them happy.
• Understand that they may not be available within 24-hours to reply to a support request. You are not Jack Bauer and a nuclear power plant won’t melt down if someone doesn’t do exactly what you ask them to do at this very minute.
• Write as if you were talking with them face to face. Be respectful and don’t overreact. Be nice and others will be nice to you.
• Please be as thorough in your description of the problem as possible. “The plugin doesn’t work” doesn’t provide us with enough info to help you.

I’d like your feedback on them so please leave your comments below.

A common task in business web applications is displaying tables of content in a spreadsheet style format. A nice treatment that adds a lot of usability to such tables of data is visually separating alternating rows of content.

The easiest way to do this in Rails is to use the cycle function as follows:

<%= cycle("odd", "even") %>

Here’s a more full example:

<tr class="<%= cycle("odd", "even") %>">
  Row of content
</tr>

You could easily use it with any element, such as a div or li.

For more information, please see:
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/TextHelper.html#method-i-cycle

I got curious today as to the root meaning of the word technology and I stumbled onto this interesting definition:

“technology – the practical application of knowledge;”
LearnThat.org

On December 29th 2010, WordPress released version 3.0.4. This minor update contains a critical security patch that addresses a recently discovered exploit for WordPress. Here is the official note from WordPress.org:

On December 29, 2010, WordPress 3.0.4 was released to the public. This is a critical security update for all previous WordPress versions.

Fixes XSS vulnerabilities in the KSES library: Don’t be case sensitive to attribute names. Handle padded entities when checking for bad protocols. Normalize entities before checking for bad protocols in esc_url().

It is highly recommended that you update your WordPress installation immediately.

There are a number of reasons you might want to get the current path. For example, you might chose to create a menu system that compares the current path against a list of paths that are available and use that to add the “current” class so you could indicate which page you were currently on.

This current path is located inside the request.env['REQUEST_PATH'] property. A shortcut to this property is request.path.

If you have a link or a button on a website and it’s not easy to find, it might as well not even be on the page because to the visitor, it practically doesn’t exist. Take the “YouTube Partnership Program: Welcome” page from YouTube:

It explains to me that one of my videos has become popular (a modest 3,000 views) and that I can sign up for revenue sharing. Great. I’ve always to learn more about the process that is involved. It tells me all the steps and says “Let’s get started …”. Sweet… let’s do it. Wait, how do I get started? I re-read the instructions in-case I missed something. Nop, I didn’t miss anything. Right as soon as I was about to say “forget about it” (in New York style, mind you), I saw something in the corner of my eye.  It’s a link that says “Next Page >” in the bottom right corner, right above the footer links. Let’s review where my eye was expecting it and where it was:

Why would they have it so far from where you’d expect the link? Did they just not think about it? Do they want to discourage revenue sharing?