December 2009, I looked back through the analytics of several busy content sites I help manage and saw a serious traffic drop-off. It’s no fun being the bearer of bad news and the news was pretty bad. Most sites were seeing close to a 40% decrease in overall traffic starting on the first week of December. It was ugly.
A little internet research, typically the cure for any random issue you can’t seem to explain on your own, did not do much to allay our fears that something – something terrible – was happening. There were a few anecdotal reports of traffic drops but I could not find anything that allayed our fear. We crossed our fingers, took some time off, and hoped for the best.
Turns out that the significant down-turn cleared itself up by the first non-holiday week in January. Here are the visitor graphs to illustrate:
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8 months ago, I was able to make the switch to being a completely virtual worker. This is something I did with great excitement, partially because of the position that let me make this shift but also because it’s something I’ve wanted for a long time. I imagined a one “day on, one day off” schedule: I would spend one day completely unkempt, partially disrobed, and eating anything I found in the kitchen and the next I would make sure I had at least pants on and surf from coffee shop to coffee shop sipping espresso and checking my email on a patio. It sounded glorious.
But, like always, reality stepped in fairly quickly and reminded me that the days between showers are unpleasant, coffee shops are expensive, and working from home has some subtle pitfalls that make it much less of a paradise than one might expect. Since my month (or two) of adjustment, I’ve learned what makes me a happy, successful, home-based cog and what can turn me into a grumpy, malnourished, pain in the ass. Some of it is attitude but a good portion comes from the right tools for the job.
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I am not ashamed to admit that I consult yelp.com for everything ranging from places to get good gelato to dentists to help me when I’ve found too many good gelato joints. I also use Google Local to find other service providers and to compile my own reviews. On top of that, I can’t buy anything, in real life or online, without checking Newegg or Amazon reviews. I’m a social review junkie and for good reason: I’m rarely disappointed with purchases as of late.
The whole review landscape has changed for the better lately. What used to be just lazy one-liners have turned into a type of creative outlet for people with something to say about the things they consume. The more I research the more I find people taking their own time to really give back to people they’ll never meet. Also, with the proliferation of Twitter and Facebook connect, reviews have gone social. Reviews have gone from an anonymous thumbs-up to a network-wide recommendation.
It’s easy to forget that this valuable information comes from real people taking their own precious time to construct helpful and sometimes very creative reviews to help others avoid pitfalls and find the best [insert anything here] available. There are people out there with nothing better to do, that’s true, but so many reviews (mine included) come from a strong desire to give back to a community that caused the discovery of something great. It’s more about community than ego, more about making sure this system stays healthy than just quenching boredom.
So I’m here to remind you in the nicest way possible to get out there and write reviews about the stores and products you can’t live without and the ones you want to annihilate.
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Increasing the page load speed of your website has been proven to increase conversion rates (reduce the number of people who get fed up and leave), increase site usage (time on site and pages per visit), and reduce the chance you’ll be taken down by a sudden spike in traffic. WordPress in particular is fairly resource heavy right out of the box so speeding up everything else is a critical piece of running a site on this platform.
But I’m not going to talk about increasing WordPress speed, I want to show you how to improve you page load speed by cutting down on the number of external scripts you’re loading on a particular page. We’re going to do this by hard-coding share buttons into your theme.
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Cliff notes: Art deadline is January 14th (see below). Join us for the exhibition on Saturday, Jan 16th, at Voz Alta Art Gallery, 1754 National Ave, San Diego, CA 92113.
In the summer of 2008 I was given the opportunity to learn from a very talented and enlightened individual, Daniel Hopkins aka Pose2. Pose is a graffiti artist with decades of experience in his craft and since taking his class, he has remained my teacher, became a good friend, got on with Josh Can Help as a client, and soon to become immortalized on my wall.
Pose travels around the world taking on projects, teaching people, and spreading knowledge. He also does amazing things for global communities like beautification projects and teaching kids how to express themselves artistically. This time, however, he’s taking on a very important issue in a way that only he can.
I’ll let him explain this inspiration:
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If you take a good look around, you’ll probably find it’s completely overwhelming to try to get a handle on what we’re capable of doing these days. Between amazing web applications, unprecedented communication options, and practically incomprehensible medical technology advances, we’re living in a time of incredible ideas that have come to fruition. After recovering from awe at the vast technological landscape that surrounds us, some of us have a decidedly self-defeating thought creep into our mind:
Why can’t I come up with an idea like that?
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