Chris K Designs

You may have heard of them before, but do you know what they do? Or why you might want one? The world of WordPress plugins can be quite a confusing and cluttered space. One realm of plugins, however, should not be foreign to you, especially if your site get’s quite a few hits, ends up on Digg, or get’s into the Reddit realm. These plugins are ‘caching’ pulgins. Not sure what caching is?

a cache … is a component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster.
-via Wikipedia.org

Essentially, ‘cache’ is a holding place for data that’s requested a lot. How can this make your WordPress site faster you might ask? Well, every time a visitor lands on your website that’s using WordPress, quite a bit is happening on the backend. A typical theme will request things like your site’s Title, Tagline, Browser Title, and other items that will hardly change. Each one of these requests comes from your database. Every time WordPress has to go to your database, that is a bottle neck. We would like as few things as possible to come from the database. What a caching plugin will do is find the pages that are being requested most often, and store them as a static file on the server, reducing the load on the server to 1 page, plus the images needed, instead of making those requests from the database. Continue reading “WordPress 101: Caching plugin-ins” »

In the current web-traffic economy, it’s widely believed that the number of links back to your site, the better your ‘Google Juice’.

Just as your mom always told you, “The crowd you hang out with gives a first impression.” Having your links on sites that are seen as using “BlackHat SEO Methods” may hurt your ranking. Keep that in mind while building links…so how do you maintain your internet rep? I’m curious to see how you all build your back links.

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Ever wonder why the ads that Google AdSense decides to show for your blog post or site content doesn’t quite match up with what you were aiming for? Well it’s not surprise that the answer is simple, the ads are selected by a computer. Yeah, no duh right? The problem with computers doing all the work is, they don’t have the ability to distinguish context, importance, or even content as a whole. They can only look at the words you type and compare with a database that it has waiting with hundreds of possible ads. What does this mean for you? I’m glad you asked.

Analogies are like your history professor…

…They can get long winded and boring. Getting relevant ads from any automated ad provider service starts with your writing style. Do you sculpt your posts or pages with heavy analogies? If you do, you might be your own worst enemy. The analogy, while very useful in getting a human to understand your context, is essentially a site crawler’s nightmare. It has no clue that your post is about your actual topic and instead notices a large amount of time spent on the topic that is your analogy. If you are going to try and use analogies to get your point across, do it quickly and concisely.
Continue reading “AdSense, WordPress, and You” »

The 404 – File Not Found error. Its the darkest corner of your website that you probably don’t encounter too often, but do you know how often others are getting them on your site? Odds are, you don’t. One way to increase visitors (and more importantly keep visitors) is to avoid the 404 error, or embrace it by planning for it. Part of development is to always test the ‘negative case’. The case in which you know your code will fail. The same holds true in URLS. What happens if someone goes to a page or URL that doesn’t exist on your site? Go ahead, try it…I’ll wait. – There, that wasn’t so hard was it? What did you find? For most of you using WordPress, it’ll be a standard 404 page that your theme is using. Not too bad, but how many people are actually seeing this, usually content-less, page? Let’s find out.

Continue reading “The 411 on 404s” »

I have a confession to make, I’m a Google Chrome addict. *Phew* Ok, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Ever since Google Chrome moved out of beta for the Mac, I’ve given it a fair shot as my primary browser. The change from Firefox to Chrome wasn’t easy to start, but I slowly found Chrome to be must faster and more stable. The one thing I was missing…were my Extensions. Well, now that Chrome is out of beta, Google has enabled extensions for the Mac version. If you are a blogger there are plenty of great plugins to help your writing and moderating, but here are a few that I’m finding helpful.

Continue reading “3 Chrome Extensions for WordPress Blogging” »