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My #2 Pet Hate of Poor WebSite Design – Blog Navigation

December 23, 2010/by Matthew Ogborne

Following on from early article on My #1 Pet Hate of Poor WebSite Design this one gets #2 place as it drives just as bonkers as the first one.

Can you see it yet?

The owners of this blog know the issue, they have tried to combat it.

Spotted it yet?

Blog Navigation

Yep, its the home link in the top left.

Firstly lets not diss this company, their rankings were quite high for the project I am working on, although not what I was looking for, my searches landed me in their blog. This is absolutely fantastic, this company has been leveraging the use of a company blog and just so happens they also have recently released their own iPhone app. Nice.

But what gets my goat is the navigation at the top, because the blog (wordpress) is not themed in-line with their main website, see main website and their blog so when I manually hacked the URL to remove the ‘blog.’ I was a little shocked to see their main website was nothing like their blog. But a common theme is not even my point here, just being able to readily navigate is.

The blog looks like Thesis (edit: doh, it says it in the footer), which is an extremely powerful template, so they have forked out +£100 for the theme, but completely (well mostly) failed to remember that browsing readers assume that the top left is the ‘reset button’.

Now this ‘reset button’ on this blog needs two uses, one to get the blog home and one to get to the website home. So….. Label them!

Almost

If you look closely at the image above or on their blog, you will notice that they are at least aware they have an issue transferring the browser back to their main site, they’ve added some text and a link to the right, but sadly, this is not where people look for navigation and the big fat ‘reset-get-me-back-home-again’ button.

Sooooo close, yet sooooo far.

Please stamp this in your head now

I’ll leave you with this godly statement, please carry it with you always:

Customers are idiots
Do not make an idiot to try to think
Its dangerous

Dealing with WordPress Spam Comments – Two Viable Solutions

November 26, 2010/by Matthew Ogborne

Ignoring Askami from the conversion which will capture almost all comment spam, you may feel that there is little you can do to stop the wades of WordPress spam comments from being left.

Yes, you could add a captua to the comments box, there are several wordpress plugins that do this, but me being a geek prefer more server based options, here are two of my favourites both with the same effect.

.htaccess Redirects

This is the simpler of the two, I have used this for years for keeping banned players out our community websites, in the example below, I replacing it the site with google.com, but it could readily be any site you want, http://yougotrickrolled.com/ is always a good one, I’ll leave the destination to your own selection.

If your hosting provider (or you have enabled htaccess in your Apache config, on by default), then this is a simple, but effective way of redirecting spammers:

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^188\.143\.232\.39$
RewriteRule .* http://www.google.com [R,L]

This adds a RewriteCond for the IP address and then using RewriteRule sends them to your chosen destination. Most amusing.

http.conf Edits

This is favoured when working in a development environment to keep a site only to specific IP addresses, but it easily works in reverse to keep out entire subnets. After a unfortunate experience with an Indian development company I needed to block four subnets, this worked wonderfully well.


order deny,allow
deny from 125.111.67.240
deny from 122.169

This works by selectively denying either specific IP addresses like in the first line or entire subnets.

If working in a development environment and say your IP was ‘125.111.67.240’ then you could deny everyone else and allow yourself through using:


order deny,allow
deny from All
allow from 125.111.67.240

Enjoy.

10CMS Presentation – Where ‘Apps’ Are Going, Maybe…

November 13, 2010/by Matthew Ogborne

This presentation is not the clearest ever made, personally I think the camera on site was probably putting two presenters, John Williams & Rory Dennis off somewhat. However that aside I really think these chaps have something, even through its blatantly clear they’re not actually sure themselves what it is and how its to be deployed.

If you jump to around 11:30 in the video below, you’ll see their product that has enabled the embedding of a ‘hot spot’ and then the ability to take the user to the item or category page. There were other poorly described examples of flash based ‘hot spots’ (although I thought this was a simple to-do in flash anyway).

But getting to the good bit is where John Williams at 12:50 points out the forthcoming issues with ‘apps’ and their deployment. Where the question is raised about deplying such applications to multiple interfaces in multiple products , from the ipad & iPhone to the Galaxy and new BlackBerry.

How the ‘browser’ is likely to become the ‘application’ platform, not the phone itself. By using such an application to then ‘translate’ into the different platforms, without having work about the minute details for each. At first it sounds it might get rather ‘bloated’, but if it increases the time-to-market for multiple platforms, it has to be a good thing.

Pre-Season Email Marketing 10 Point Checklist

November 10, 2010/by Matthew Ogborne

I’d have loved to have claimed this as my own, but thats rather naughty. Check this very useful guide out from Silverpop here.

The key point here is really do not wait to very last moment to turn on your email marketing campaign on, start it immediately!

The 10 points in their checklist are:

Make subscribing as appealing and easy as riding a sled down a hill.
Manage expectations with a holidaythemed welcome program that’s warmer
than a cup of mulled wine.
Make informed frequency/cadence decisions that won’t freeze out overwhelmed shoppers.
Get customer data together, check integrations and apply list hygiene—in other words, make your list and check it twice
Test message templates and optimise so they’re prettier than a Christmas card.
Create cart-abandonment and browse campaigns that provide quick reminders to distracted shoppers.
Give recipients the gift of choice—offer an unsubscribe preference centre.
Fine-tune your social-sharing initiatives— ‘tis the season to spread holiday cheer, after all.
Optimise transactional emails to offer value beyond generic bah-humbug receipts.
Create a post-purchase email strategy that keeps the holiday spirit going strong through 2011.

So when was the last time you contacted your customers and marketed your USP’s to them?

Don’t even know where to start? No time to even make a start? Know full well its on the to-do listing and it just never gets done?

Easy, contact me at the top of this page, we’ll have a chat and I’ll point you in the right direction (or push, or just plain do it for you) .

Part 3 : SuperDryStore eBay Shop – The Not-So Good Points

November 10, 2010/by Matthew Ogborne

Carrying on from where I left off in Part 2 : SuperDryStore eBay Shop – The Good Points, time to get into the not-so-good points. These are in no order of importance I hasten to add, they all need consideration though:

SuperDry – eBay Outlet?

If this is the fastest moving account of eBay’s and thier token ‘we’ll-put-a-SuperDryStore-item-on-daily-deal-at-least-every-other-day’ account (I kid you not, look at the RSS feed for the daily deals, should be called ‘SuperDryStore Deals’). My point being, SAY you’re an eBay outlet.

Referring back to the models back in Part 2 put your best assets forwards and being an eBay Outlet is a damn good asset. Add the eBay Outlet logo, announce it clearly.

This one scores 10/10 on the no-brainer score chart. Always put your ‘Unique Selling Points’ (USP’s) forwards in the best possible light as possible.

So… Nice landing page, WTF happened to the rest of it?

For those not converse with leet-gaming-speak, WTF stands for ‘What the F***’ and in this case is makes the point perfectly.

Homepage: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/The-Superdry-Store
WTF Happened to the Design????: http://stores.ebay.co.uk/The-Superdry-Store_Mens-Superdry-Bags/_i.html?_fsub=309702719&_sid=401545409&_trksid=p4634.c0.m322

See my point now?

This isn’t just a one of those crap 1/2 done sites that Frooition have been making [a ‘pretty’ home page and a ‘shop header’ and then failing to theme the rest of the site, example here] its an utter annihilation of the homepage and then some.

Where has the left menu gone?
Where is the search box?
WTF has happened to the three USP’s?
Where is ANY sign of ANY branding?
I’m lost. Who was this again? I’m leaving.

On a serious not, this is not a joke. DO NOT MAKE THESE SILLY MISTAKES (wow I have resorted to using caps lock), but hey, this is seriously poor form by all parties.

If you have a brand or even just a little logo and a colour theme, then carry this theme consistently from your eBay shop home page, to your search & category pages, content pages, into emails, into your website, into… everything, its your brand.

Learn By (much better) Examples

Here are two examples, one where they have paid for a shop design and one where they have at least got a common brand going on.


http://stores.ebay.co.uk/outdoorvalue/	http://stores.ebay.co.uk/Rochford-Tyres

Looking at OutDoorValue’s eBay shop, the branding is clear and carried to all parts of their business. eBay shop, listing template, shop pages, search pages and most importantly their website.

Rochford Tyres while not the most ascetically pleasing, has got most boxes ticked, their brand appearance is ‘remember-able’ and is common across their eBay activities, although their website is of a differing name http://www.alloywheels.com/

The point being, if you have a a ‘brand’ use it everywhere.

Singular ‘Front of House’ Model

After ‘dissing’ Missguided.co.uk a few day s back in this post about a silly design flaw, what they do very well is have an extremely ‘fit model’ for the majority of their artwork (see here for an example, stunning eh?). They have diversified since and introduced more models over time, but the point is that a ‘common face approach works’. If you can afford a model, use one!

Dead Categories

Out of the 18 categories they have in the left menu of their site, they have four that contain no products, thats a 22% chance a browsing buyer is going to go to a dead page, nice.

The biggest tip here is to use the eBay categories menu bar and refrain from using hard coded category menus. The eBay category bar updates automatically depending on your item counts, while not instant (insert private joke about eBay saying the eBay shop updates instantly and it took 24 hours with a massive UK retailer *coff* Tesco’s *coff*, oh how that made me giggle) it does update eventually with no manual coding.

Clothing = Clear Returns Policy

The #1 concern for the people I have spoken to when it comes to clothing is “I need to feel reassured that I can return it if it doesn’t fit or if I plain don’t like it“. SuperDryStore fail on this and get a 1/10.

The ‘tiny’ returns page link is along the top and should really be featured in the main description or header somewhere. Even if you have a poor returns process, 90% is appearance and 10% is doing.

The returns page is cluttered, cut to the point, spelling out in simple terms, make some bullet points about it. Lets have a suggested version of this page, cutting out the waffle:

7 Days from Receipt Returns, No Quibble Returns Policy

We gladly accept returns

Refunds processed in less than 5 working days

Sorry, you cannot return to one of our stores

If for any reason you are not 100% satisfied with your amazing purchase from the SuperDryStore, just let us know by using the eBay Resolution Centre. If you’re not sure, see eBay’s help page here or of course you may contact us directly here.

See that’s a lot nicer than the ‘stuff’ they got cluttered on their returns page and gets the point clearly and efficiently across. Although if this is yours I’d suggest you add a little more content around this after it and especially include your address.

Last eBay Shop Gripe, ‘The Picker’

If you’re going to pay for one of these item pickers for your home page, make sure the organise it in alphabetical order. Joe-Public-Customers are idiots, don’t try and make them think, they’re just not capable if it. Its your sole job not to let them think.

Its Your Store, Use It

Only you are responsible for your own store, even if you just add a logo or tidy up your returns pages, its a bonus. As I said above, its ‘our’ job to make sure ‘Joe-Public-Customer’ does not have to think and making him panic by loosing ‘branding’ for what is a very easily solved issue is going to you loose you customers.

Click here to view part 4 of this series

Why I’m feeling Rather Smug – 65% Website Speed Increase

November 8, 2010/by Matthew Ogborne

I can’t remember the exact facts this, although I am sure Google will easily spill the beans on them, but for something like for a 100ms speed lag in page load times, you loose a 1% conversion on a website (believe this was a Amazon quote).

The point is simple, slow sites suck (and cost viewers) and fast sites rule.

This has been amplified by Google now taking page load speeds into account when ranking websites, see here an idol of mine, Matt Cutt’s blog post on this and also in the Google Webmasters Blog, I strongly suggest you read both of these articles before continuing here.

So why am I feeling smug?

I went from a whopping +7 seconds page load time, to a mere 2.5 seconds. Yup thats a 65% increase in speed. I was most impressed and the beautiful thing is, I could get more out of this as well!

Lets look at the tests before and after, to drool at the results in all their glory.

Before Optimising

Website Speed Starting at 7 Seconds

The full report can be seen here: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/101105_AQ18/

After Optimising

Here are two links, just to show there is a decrease http://www.webpagetest.org/result/101105_AQ28/ & http://www.webpagetest.org/result/101105_AQ2Z/

What Do I do?

Well, I ditched the wp-cache plugin and chose something a little ‘meater’, W3 Total Cache. I chose this plugin because of the excellent reviews from industry guru’s and because I am intending to add a true CDN (Content Delivery Network) shortly (rather than using a cheat subdomain).

But this was only half the story, when looking at the details the testing site gave, it was horrifying to spot that the wp-polls plugin was adding a massive 2 second lag on one of the tests, so that really had to go, adding in several other tweaks, setting in the cdn on a subdomain, totalled a heafty page speed saving.

The biggest bonus of all, I can still improve, even after just 20 minutes of work, the images used are not optimised fully and I am sure I could squeeze a 0.5 second saving at least from focusing on them, let alone minimising css usage, code and so on… But to save time, I’m only going to focus on the new images I add and do my best to not compromise quality over the page-load speed influence.

The Question is…

How badly does your e-commerce site or blog lag? Have you even checked? How many customers are you loosing because of this? And… what are you going to do about it?

Dan Wilson: What are your nuggets of eBay selling advice?

November 6, 2010/by Matthew Ogborne

Online Business Forum eBay

An interesting question came up in the LinkedIn ‘The Online Business Forum powered by eBay‘ group by Dan Wilson and I think I am only one probably prepared to spill anything of any substance (I might be wrong by the time this is released), here is the question in full:

What are your nuggets of eBay selling advice?

I was asked last week for some advice regarding online selling by a journalist. The hack in question wanted little known tips for an article he was writing. Needless to say, I had a view. Here’s what I said:

Don’t sweat the small stuff.
Dealing with trouble customers and problems takes time and time is money. Sometimes quibbling over a few pounds is just not time or money efficiently spent. And when it comes to customers, there really are just some people who can never be satisfied, so save your energy and don’t try. Refund and move on. Finance this by making sure you build up a notional fund for such situations. The size of that will depend on what you sell online, but a small levy on everything you sell soon adds up because most customers really are lovely.

Are you getting the best deal on fees?
On eBay, there are several ways of getting better, lower fees. The first is an eBay Shop. Just by paying a subscription, you can get preferential treatment on the fees for BINs in particular and that can significantly lower your outlay if you want to expand the inventory you have available in the marketplace. And don’t forget PayPal. The merchant rate offers lower PayPal fees if you’re taking a lot of money through the system. But you do have to ask!

What’s your best little nugget of online selling advice? Or is it too good to be shared?

After writing what was a hefty reply, I decided it would be worth beefing it out and including it here for all to see. I’ll keep to my two points I could go on a blogging-bender quite easily.

Point 1: Do not devote 100% of your business to eBay

Hey Look Amazon!

Its a mistake I made a long time ago and will not let clients make the same one. If eBay is taking up more than 40% of your over-all business turnover then you have a *critical business issue* and need to diversify your marketplaces, FAST.

I’ve said for a very long time that I am sure that sure that eBay does what it can to cause maximum impact to sellers to keep them ‘entertained’ with the eBay marketplace. The entire selling process could be a lot simpler and dare I say it less ‘unique’ to each buyer. eBay selling can-and-will hog your time, you need to be wise to this and look for ‘tools’ to aid you to diversify into other channels.

I’ll come back to viable actions for this point later in this post.

Point 2: My other tip is risk Aversion.

The point here is to not rely solely upon a single eBay ID. This could mean breaking ‘eBay policy’ to some, but I see each eBay ID as a ‘business’ in its own right and if done well it acts like one too.

To list on eBay has never been so cheap for pretty much ALL eBay sites, yes ALL sites, not just the eBay UK site. By spreading the risk of selling on eBay into two or more (20 plus is not unheard of now) eBay ID’s that have specific persona’s and product cross overs can be done from well managed backend systems.

Once you have created your inventory in a backend management tool (Channel Advisor ‘loosely’ fills this spot, eSellerPro is suggested [yes I used to work there, hell there is not one part that I didn’t influence. blah blah blah its ace]). The point is that to prepare the data for a second eBay ID is a fraction of the work, to prepare it for many eBay IDs (including on multiple sites) is again ‘a fraction’ of the initial work.

By spreading your inventory groups over more than one eBay ID, loosens the reliance upon a single point of income which in my eyes is a bad thing. It also allows you to focus each business (eBay ID) on to its core role. This does need to be done well and its a whole topic for another day on how to do it well (if I ever decide to divulge this info publicly, actually I doubt it).

Expanding Upon These Points – Real Life Tips

Now here some real life tips you can action really easily if you have the right tools.

Here is a no brainier, did you know that the vast majority of the eBay US categories are exactly the same as the eBay UK ones? That means porting your eBay UK data to a eBay US eBay ID is really quite easy, especially now that both sites are using custom item specifics for almost all categories? The same goes for nearly all the other sites too, they all have a common base, just with a few tweaks here and there.

Settle for the ‘Other Category’ if you have too, if its a decision between actually getting listed and getting the categories right, screw the cats, get the items on. You can sort out the re-categorisation (not mess as I first typed) later.

Also remember that America is massive, buyers are used to orders taking over 10 days to arrive for non expedited services and guess how long it normally takes for a UK parcel to arrive in the US? Yep you got it, about 10 days!

The second is a set of two questions:

Do students really cost that much?
Does outsourcing your language translation requirements sound really that scary?

Now leading on… eBay Germany [DE] is bigger than eBay UK and they will pay by PayPal (used to be a big issue, as those Germans love bank transfers). Yes thats right eBay Germany is BIGGER than the UK, let that sink in for a moment.

* let the dust roll by *

Sunk in? Here’s an idea for you, use Google Translate on your top 10 products, now search on eBay.de for them, making an excel spreadsheet as you go, then use xe.com to get the latest rate, the numbers work? If you have a Terapeak account, pay the extra and research the foreign eBay sites, I guarantee you, you’ll start feeling sick.

I Need Help Now!

I’d love to, but cannot commit to anything before the new year due to prior commitments. My content creation team is working literally 24/7 currently and its time I start looking at a VA (Virtual Assistant) again. Hey at least I’m admitting my flaws! Are You?

Anyway, its the reason why I have published this in front of the other posts that were due to be released, at least I can help you go in the right direction.

Oh Come on… You got to be Serious Right?

November 5, 2010/by Matthew Ogborne

Checking the spam box earlier, I notice a mail from Internet Retailing and a webinair entitled ‘The 5 Best Techniques for Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts with Email and Social Media‘. Here is the opening line:

Have you measured your shopping cart or web form abandonment rate recently?
Recovering abandoned shopping carts and web forms is a lucrative business. On average 70 percent of shopping carts and 62 percent of web forms are abandoned before completion.

Have you seen the form they want you to fill out? Seriously, how can you suggest that your company is an ‘expert’ at tackling cart abandonment when the ‘tool’ you’re using does think there is a world out side of the USA.

Recovering Abandoned Shopping Carts Form

I wonder what the abandonment rate is for this form & how much ‘crap’ data people enter into it? There was two comment boxes, neither particularly clear, you can bet I left a comment.

I’m hoping their content will be a lot better than their first impressions….

Fulfilment By Amazon Webinar: First steps to get started

November 3, 2010/by Matthew Ogborne

Just received this in the email queue, defintely worth looking at for anyone whom is considering using FBA:

We are pleased to invite you to this webinar where we will present best practices and tips to get started with Fulfilment by Amazon, including:

– How to select the most suitable items in your inventory to convert to FBA
– How to send your first shipment, avoiding the most common errors
– How to check the health of your FBA inventory to make sure you made the right decisions

This webinar should be useful for:

– sellers who registered for FBA but who are not sure how to get started
– existing FBA sellers who want to make sure they use all the correct techniques and practices to manage their FBA business

Title: Fulfilment By Amazon: First steps to get started
Date: Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Time: 13:00 PM – 14:00 PM UK time

Registration Link:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/79572300

Part 2: Using the Split Keyword to Break up Your Data

November 3, 2010/by Matthew Ogborne

This article is a continuation of a previous article called Part 1: Comma Separated Keyword/Tag Blocks in Your eBay Listings? if you’ve not read this article then nip back and read through it, as we’ll need to know the original steps to where we are now.

So we left off with me saying that we should not process further keywords unless we have qualified the custom field so that we actually have something worth continuing with. We did this by using this keyword setup:

{{IFNOT/[[CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours]]// do something }}

So if the value of ‘Other Colours’ is not blank we should ‘do something’; Well lets look at the ‘something’. This is where it really gets good:

{{Split/Value To Split/Spilt Character(s)/ __SplitValue__ }}

Scary? Na, lets pop some values in here and we’ll talk it back in plain English on what the ‘Split’ keyword is going to do for us:

{{Split/{{CustomFields:Variations:Other Colour}}/, / __SplitValue__}}

Keeping this simple, lets assume we have ‘Blue,Red’ in our custom field for ‘Other Colours’ and that you know that the and are HTML tags and make text bold. So here it is:

Foreach ‘Split’ of the value of ‘Other Colours’ we are going to make __SplitValue__

Easy eh? Lets no use this with the two values ‘Blue,Red’ in our custom field for ‘Other Colours’, it would make the following:

BlueRed

Wow, are you getting the power of this keyword yet? I hope so, lets keep going and beef this out into something more usable. As the complexity of the keyword is going now grow rapidly, I’m going to be using syntax highlighting on the code so its easier for you to read:

{{IFNOT/[[CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours]]//

	

	{{Split/{{CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours}}/, / 
		Find more items in __SplitValue__
		 , 
	}}.

}}

So this would make the following:

Find more items in Blue, Find more items in Red.

A quick note on the URL I used, I just simply went to eBay, picked the nearest store, in the search box on the left I entered ‘Blue’, but crucially ticked the box called ‘in titles & descriptions’ and chopped of the _SID=NNNNNN off the end, if you’re unsure, leave a comment on this post. I chose the ‘in titles & descriptions’ option, as I very much doubt any of you are spamming the titles with all the colour variations and for the super smart ones out there, instead of searching for just ‘Blue’, you would be prefixing these style colours with something like ‘sBlue’ so that the colour matching using this technique is absolute in its results (not clouded by junk results on ‘blue’).

Next Steps

Taking this further, lets assume you have made some colour swatches in images that are 50×50 pixels (we could do some further IF statements to use HTML colour codes, but thats way out for the purpose of example) and also you have entered your sizes into the ‘sizes’ custom field we first discussed, this could make something like:

{{IFNOT/[[CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours]]//

This item is available in other colours, pick you colour:

{{Split/{{CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours}}/, / }}

	
}}
{{IFNOT/[[CustomFields:Variations:Sizes]]//

This item is available in other sizes, pick you size:

{{Split/{{CustomFields:Variations:Sizes}}/, / }}

}}

Summary

Thats quite a chunk of code to take in, but in simple terms for each colour it’ll bring in a swatch image of that colour and link it, then do similar task for image that are named ‘size-3.png’ etc… Neat eh?

Now some might say, ‘well eBay do variations now, I don’t need size or colours in the listing…’, thats right they do, but this example can easily be expanded upon for other values, like years of manufacturer if you’re selling roof racks, or perhaps this item is part of a range that is not being listed as multi level variations just single variations. You’re only limited here by your imagination the application of your data.

The point is with some thought and the right application of the tools & data at your disposal, you can actually have a targeted exit strategy to your eBay listings.

PS: For the XHTML junkies out there ‘border=”0″‘ is not valid, you’d want to use a CSS style or something :)

Part 1: Comma Separated Keyword/Tag Blocks in Your eBay Listings?

November 2, 2010/by Matthew Ogborne

Clearing out my old files earlier and I came across some old keywords I used on numerous occasions. Instead of just detailing one, I’m actually going to join a few together here to make a example anyone using eSellerpro could use with a little thought.

Lets Make a Real-Life Example

Lets assume that you have two customfields the first with ‘Other Colours’ and another with ‘Sizes’, both in the custom fields group called ‘Variations’. These are two very common fields for anyone who deals with variation products, they could of course be ‘Languages’ for say DVD’s or ‘Years’ for of applicable models and so on…

So lets get right in and cover the first keyword, which is lets get value of the first field out so we can use it:

{{CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours}}

This keyword is in the format of ‘CustomFields:GroupName:FieldName‘. CustomFields calls the Custom Fields, GroupName is vitally important because it was found that the keyword only pulls in the values of the customfields from previous customfield calls, so if the value we were looking for was in a different group, then it would not be resolved; And finally the FieldName which is the internal name of the custom field (as opposed tot he display name which can be different).

So using the keyword ‘{{CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours}}‘ we can pull out the values in the ‘Other Colours’, for the sake of this example these other colours are ‘blue,green,red’. Noticing they are separated by commas, this is extremely important, as we’ll be using the ‘comma’ to spilt them up shortly.

Wait!! Lets Error Check

Now before we go any further, we need to error check ourselves. What do I mean by this? I do not think its a good idea to show or process any further code if there are not any ‘other colours’ to be showing to the viewer, we do this using another keyword.

There is two variations of this new keyword, IF and IFNOT. Both of these allow to check to see if a condition is true (there is another for IF/ELSE and IFNOT/ELSE but thats not required for this example, plus you could just alternate the IF/IFNOT to capture the alternative if its a 1:1 check, anyway back on topic…). These keywords are in the format of:

{{IF/Value being Checked/Value to Check Against/Output if True}}
{{IFNOT/Value being Checked/Value to Check Against/Output if True}}

Looks scary right? Naa its easy, lets do a real example. Lets pretend we have an colour blue in our custom field ‘Other Colours’ and IF we find blue, lets bring in an image that is the colour blue (for the smart ones, you can see where we could go with this):

{{IF/[[CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours]]/Blue/ <img src=”some-blue-image.png” />}}

Now you’ll notice the use of [[ & ]] and not {{ & }}, this is for a very good reason, image the custom field value contained ‘Blue/Red/Green’, this would break the earlier format of {{IF/Value being Checked/Value to Check Against/Output if True}} and a good practice is to always use the ‘square’ brackets and also do your best to avoid forward slashes ‘/’ in you data.

So if the value of the ‘Other Colours’ was ‘Blue’ then we would have had an blue image appear and if there was not, ‘nothing’ would have been output from this statement.

That brings us very nicely onto ‘nothing’, going back to previously mentioning its not a good idea to show or process code when there is no need, we need to check to make sure the ‘Other Colours’ actually has something in it, so we can continue, we do this by using this keyword set up:

{{IFNOT/[[CustomFields:Variations:Other Colours]]// do something }}

This says in plain English: IF the value of Other Colours is NOT blank (thats what the // is ) then do something.

End of Part 1

This feels a good place to stop, I’ll cover off the next stage of this little session in my next post. I hope I have at least got your creative juices flowing, I know what I’m thinking, perhaps we could have a set of colour images and those images being linked, so that customers could pick their alternative colours or sizes using a user friendly block to your eBay listings or may be a ‘year picker’. Hey the options are endless!

View part 2 here: Using the Split Keyword to Break up Your Data

Yoast WordPress Breadcrumbs Plugin

October 19, 2010/by Matthew Ogborne

Taking the advice from yesterdays post ‘Google SEO Starter Guide Updated’ on adding a breadcrumb to the sites theme, I remembered seeing a plugin from Yoast.com a few days back.

Installation was done in seconds, almost like every other WordPress plugin, unfortunately the auto insert option did not work, however within a few pastes in the files page.php, search.php and single.php it was in and working.

If you’re an avid blogger and the theme you are using does not come with breadcrumbs by default, this plugin was sooo easily added, even at code editor level, its worth adding and as a bonus its free.

Yoast.com also has a collection of other plugins for WordPress, you can see them here.