Goals in Google Analytics are intended as a generalization of transactions: actions you wish to think of in terms of conversion rate, and which you are specifically looking to increase (you could potentially use them for the opposite, but that’s a different blog post).

What are goals and why should I have them?

Having an action tracked as a goal adds basically two things onto the standard event or pageview tracking: first, GA will automatically calculate the conversion rate for you, and second, you can view goal conversions as part of other reports, making it easy to see what audience traits and acquisition channels convert at higher rates and therefore are perhaps more worth aiming your marketing dollars and website optimization towards.

GA gives you 20 goals, and unless you have a full-time analyst or the equivalent, that should be plenty – in fact it should leave room to grow on. If you want to include a ton of micro-goals, though, you can set up additional views to contain them. Do that as early as possible; even if cloned from an existing view a new view will only contain data beginning at its creation. If you are lucky enough to be working from a clean slate or have the freedom to kill off existing goals, you can take advantage of the organization of goal sets. Those allow you to view up to 5 goals together within most Acquisition and Audience reports, which can be a convenience.

Note that you are limited to 4 kinds of goals: time on site, number of pages viewed, specific page reached, and event occurrence. You can use regular expressions to make goals that are reached via multiple events or multiple destinations, but you can’t combine across goal types or create goals that require more than one event or pageview to occur in order to be counted. The primary limitation imposed by this is that sequences of actions cannot be tracked as goals. GA lets you define a funnel for a destination goal and mark steps in the funnel as “required,” but “required” in that context is “FYI you can’t get skip this and get through,” rather than “only count this as a goal completion if the person visited this page.” Same destination + different funnels = goals that track identical activity. Sometimes the solution is to change the way you are tracking your goals, and sometimes it is to abandon that activity as a goal and look at it using a different tool such as segmentation (about which more another time).

Choosing goals

Concrete advice for what goals to set in Google Analytics is hard to come by, which is understandable, since the details of your site matter a lot. I’ve gathered some options that ought to apply to a broad swath of sites, though.

General Site Engagement

Time on site *
Number of pages viewed *
Social share of page (via on-site share tools only) **
Print page (if you have a pretty-print button)
Save page (if your site allows internal bookmarking)

* The duration and page depth goals lend themselves to tiering; I’m thinking especially of a content-heavy site aimed at selling a lower-volume/higher-cost product or service such as insurance. There may be one point that correlates well with people who are interested but possibly in an early stage of shopping, and a higher threshold that correlates to people who are interested and closer to purchasing.

** The social tracking found in the Acquisition > Social > Plugins report cannot be used for goals, unfortunately, so having that nice reporting and a social share goal together requires duplicating your tracking in Events. Also, although there’s nothing in this list that this specifically applies to, if you want to use clickthroughs on internal promotions for goals, they must also be tracked separately as events. Those reports both seem to be in early stages in many ways, so hopefully they will eventually be options in goal setup.

De-Anonymizing

Create site account
Sign up for email list
Request catalog
Initiate online chat
Submit contact form
Review product/content
Comment on blog post
Log in to account

Content Marketing for offline goods/services

[see also De-Anonymizing]
Submit inquiry form
Use store locator page/function
Subscribe to blog (via on-site functionality)
Register for course/e-course/webinar
Download free materials/coupons
Request gated materials/coupons
Watch videos (begin playing and/or watch till end)
Other actions promoted by marketing campaigns (enter contest; answer survey)

Ecommerce *

View product page
Take “more information” actions (view alternate photos, associated videos or informational documents, nutritional info/size chart/technical specs, etc)
Request notification for out of stock/forthcoming product
Add product to wishlist
Add product to cart
Add second (third, etc.) product to cart **
Act on upsell or cross-sell prompt
Initiate checkout
Additional checkout benchmarks as appropriate
Complete purchase

* Why would you want to duplicate ecommerce tracking outside Enhanced Ecommerce? To combine EEc tracking with non-EEc tracking, or to see particular actions in a different way than EEc allows (e.g. add to cart outside the context of Product Performance or Product List Performance).

** Your add to cart events would need to be distinguishable based on the number of items already in the cart, but if your margin on multiple-item orders is significantly better than on single-item orders this may be worth tracking.

Note that if out of stock notifications, product adds to cart, and product adds to wishlist are all tracked as events, you can combine two or three of them into a single “expression of product interest” goal. How’s that for macro-level?

Last thoughts

There may be more than 20 goals listed above that are relevant to your website, and they may still not cover everything you need to be tracking. The list is just a starting point.

To figure out what your goals should be, the first question to ask is, “what actions can a visitor take on my site?” Then, “what pages do I especially want a visitor to reach on my site?” To thin the list down, ask “Does this action/destination contribute directly to my business’s success? Would I spend money to try to make this happen more?” “Success” could mean financial success or hearts and minds; it is the directness that you want to worry about more (though – speaking from experience – it doesn’t much matter to win hearts and minds if you don’t have enough capital to continue to exist).

Expect to take a couple of sessions to choose and organize your goals, and remember that although you can’t delete goals once you’ve created them, you can completely repurpose them so they bear no resemblance to their previous state (one advantage to that: you can edit the names of your goals with impunity if you decide they aren’t clear). There will be future posts here about using the information GA gives you about goals in various contexts.

Dart board by TeroVesalainen via Pixabay.

The post Goals goals goals appeared first on rweber.net.

Just a little bit of special syntax for describing patterns can greatly increase the flexibility of your filters in Google Analytics. This post is to give you that bit.

What are we working with?

In Google Analytics you can filter using what I’ll call the basic filtration box, that input box with the magnifying glass button above the table of data, and the advanced filtration area which opens if you click the “advanced” link next to the basic filtration box.

I’ll assume in this post that we’re looking at my craft blog’s analytics, specifically the Behavior > Site Content > All Pages report, with the default primary dimension of Page.

The basic filtration box will give you generic pattern-matching: typing “crochet” will give you all URLs that have “crochet” anywhere from the beginning to the end. In the advanced area you can further specify that the URL begin with, exactly match, or end with your search string. In both locations you can use regular expressions.

Regular expressions are a way to describe a pattern to be matched. In full generality the language is extensive and can express very complex patterns. We don’t need the full language (and GA doesn’t support all parts of it anyway), but a little RegExp goes a long way toward easily filtering to the data you’re interested in.

Your first batch of syntax

Regular expressions work by having a collection of reserved characters, symbols that hold special meaning in the RegExp context.

The most useful in GA is | (pipe), found above the return key along with backslash. It means “or.” For example, I did a series about embroidery on crochet where the introductory post’s slug is embroider-crochet and the later posts’ slugs begin embroidery-crochet. I can capture both together with
embroider-crochet|embroidery-crochet

Portions of a regular expression can be enclosed in parentheses. This does nothing by itself, but can be combined with other operations. Enclosing an “or” expression in parentheses lets you make it part of a longer expression. This lets me shorten my previous filter, such as to
(embroidery|embroider)-crochet

Since regular expressions are their own singular option in the advanced filters, you have to use RegExp symbols to get “begins with,” “ends with,” and “exactly matches” filters (unless otherwise specified RegExps match like “contains”). Preceding your expression with ^ means “begins with” and following your expression with $ means “ends with.” Using both gives you “exactly matches.”

For example, if I filtered by /embroidery, I would get both posts in the embroidery category (they begin with /embroidery) and the posts in the “embroidery on crochet” series (which contain /embroidery but begin /crochet). To limit myself to posts in the embroidery category I can filter with ^/embroidery. If for some reason I wanted to filter to just the main blog page, which shows up as /, I could filter with ^/$.

Summary

exp1|exp2 : matches strings matching exp1 or exp2
^exp1 : matches strings beginning with a match to exp1
exp1$ : matches strings ending with a match to exp1
(exp1) : allows exp1 to be part of a longer pattern

Special characters versus ordinary characters

What if you need to use a reserved character literally? Very few reserved characters would ever appear in a URL, but they could in page titles and elsewhere.

There is a straightforward means to get your regular expression to interpret a character as the ordinary version and not the special RegExp version: precede it with a backslash. This is called escaping the character. For example, \( and \) get you literal parentheses.

Characters that need to be escaped are: \ ^ $ . | ? * + ( ) [ {

I have a Related Posts plugin on the craft blog that adds query parameters to its links. If I put /?related into the filtration box, it wouldn’t give me what I was expecting. The ? needs to be escaped: /\?related.

Cautionary notes

In the basic filtration box, you always need to escape reserved characters since it assumes you’ve typed a regular expression by default (though GA is smart enough to interpret a lone or leading ?, say, as a literal character – meaning in our last example filtering on ?related without the / would work just fine).

In the advanced filtration area, the match type drop-down must be set to “Matching RegExp” for the filter to be interpreted as a regular expression. In that case you must escape special characters, but in any other case the backslash will be interpreted literally and break your filter.

A second batch of syntax

What’s above may meet all of your needs. However, you may find situations in which you can’t quite get where you need to be with pipe, parens, caret and dollar sign, or where filters based on those are cumbersome.

The wildcard

A period in a regular expression will match any single character. For example, /page/./ will match /page/2/ but not /page/10/. /page/../ will match /page/10/ but not /page/2/, unless it happened to actually be /page/2//. Since I know my data doesn’t include any URLs with double slashes, I can see ultra-deep dives into content by filtering on /page/../ to get only pages 10 and up.

Repeats

Instead of typing some large number of periods to match a longer string that varies, we can use characters that indicate repetition. This also allows us to match when the varying string does not always have the same length.

Repetition is indicated by one of three “suffix” characters: question mark, asterisk, or plus sign. They mean, respectively, 0 or 1 repeat, 0 or more repeats, 1 or more repeats. For an example:
A.? matches A, AB, A5; does not match ABC, AB12
A.* matches A, AB, A5, ABC, AB12
A.+ matches AB, A5, ABC, AB12; does not match A
(the lists of strings matched or not matched is representative, not comprehensive)

Going back to the page number example, I’d like to look at engagement with pages 2 and later of all category archives. I know the URL structure will be /category/[category-name]/page/[number]/, and that the part from “page” on doesn’t exist on the first page.

Basically I need /category/ and /page/ with something in between, so here is my RegExp:
/category/.+/page/
.* could be used interchangeably with .+ here, because there won’t be a match to category//page.

All three modifiers – ?, +, and * – can be used on any character, not just the period. This lets us simplify our “embroidery on crochet” filter even further. The only different between embroidery-crochet and embroider-crochet is the y, so embroidery?-crochet will match both. It will not match embroiders-crochet, though either embroider.?-crochet or embroider(y|s)?-crochet would match all three.

Summary

. : matches any single character
? : indicates the part of the pattern preceding it can occur 0 or 1 times
* : indicates the part of the pattern preceding it can occur 0 or more times
+ : indicates the part of the pattern preceding it can occur 1 or more times

One little side note

All of my regular expressions so far have matched the case of the URLs I was trying to filter down to. By default, though, Google Analytics makes matches in a case-insensitive manner, meaning “thread” would match “Thread” and “THREAD” as well as the all-lowercase version. This generally is a helpful simplification but if capitalization is meaningful for your site, be aware you can’t filter for it simply by capitalizing in your RegExp.

The full reference list

Characters that need to be escaped (preceded with a backslash) to be interpreted literally:
\ ^ $ . | ? * + ( ) [ {

Coffee photo by miheco on Flickr.

The post Google Analytics: Simple RegExp for Advanced Filtration appeared first on rweber.net.

This is the sixth and final part of my Introduction to WordPress series. The full thing:

1. Logging in and getting around
2. Creating and editing posts and pages
3. More aspects of posts and pages
4. Inserting images into posts and pages
5. Comments and your account
6. Widgets (sidebar content) – you are here

Widgets (sidebar content)

Depending on your theme, various locations of your site will be “widgetized.” The sidebar is the most common location, followed by the footer, but there may be others. The content of those locations consists of a collection of widgets, which are chosen and edited under Appearance → Widgets.

On the left side you’ll find your widget options. Many will come from WordPress itself, shown below, and others may be added by your plugins and even your theme. On the right will be all of your widgetized areas; some may need a click on their title to open the box in which you actually put widgets.

Widgets can be added in two ways: drag the widget into the location you want it (this also works to rearrange widgets within locations), or click on the widget you want and select the location from the list that appears. The second one can be easier if you have a lot of widget options and your locations have scrolled off-screen by the time you get to the widget you want.

Once the widget is in place click its title bar to open up the settings and content editing box. That box also has the option to delete the widget if you’ve changed your mind. Make sure to click save after editing.

More on widgets from iThemes:

Most of the built-in widgets are self-explanatory, but here’s a tip for Text widgets: you can put anything into your sidebar that you could put into a post (except for shortcodes) using a Text widget. They have to be written in HTML, though. The easiest way to put images into your sidebar (and formatted text, if you aren’t comfortable with HTML) is to create a new post, add an image via the “Add Media” button, and with the Text editor tab selected, copy the HTML code WordPress generates for you. Paste that text into the widget and delete the post draft. If you find parts of your content are running together despite being separated by blank lines in the widget, check the box underneath the content that says “Automatically add paragraphs.” That should help.

There’s one last location available in the Widget screen: Inactive Widgets. This is at the bottom of the left side and you can drag widgets here to hold them (with their content and settings) for later.

The post Intro to WP 6: Widgets appeared first on rweber.net.

The fifth part of the Introduction to WordPress series covers two topics: comment management and account-related activities such as changing your password. These are together because there’s less to say about them, not because they go together thematically. The whole series:

1. Logging in and getting around
2. Creating and editing posts and pages
3. More aspects of posts and pages
4. Inserting images into posts and pages
5. Comments and your account – you are here
6. Widgets (sidebar content)

Managing comments

Comments live on their own admin page, but their settings are under Settings → Discussion. There you can choose whether comments are allowed or not by default on new posts (you can change this on a post by post basis), set your desired level of moderation (I like to approve posts by new commenters but then let their comments be approved automatically), paginate comments if you get enough to be necessary, limit the duration post-publication that comments are allowed, forbid use of certain words or phrases, and choose the kind of avatars your site uses – those little graphics by commenters’ names.

For comments themselves you have three options: approve, mark as spam, and trash. You can also reply to comments from the Comments page. Having a spam filter plugin is highly recommended; the two I’ve used most often are Akismet and WP-SpamShield. Hopefully your developed already set one of those up for you.

iThemes has a video about managing comments:

Your account options

Your user profile page is accessible from your name at the right-hand side of the Toolbar, or from Users → Your Profile in the admin sidebar. You can select an admin area color scheme (though on the front end the Toolbar will still be black), hide the Toolbar on the front end to get a better sense of what your site looks like to visitors, and change your account information, including your password. There’s not much to say about this page but it’s important to have a secure password, and to change it whenever there’s any chance it’s been compromised – you get a virus, your site is hacked, you have to make a software update that fixes a big security risk.

The post Intro to WP 5: Comments and Your Account appeared first on rweber.net.

Images are a topic we could spend a lot of time on, but I’m just going to cover the basics. The videos and links included go into more detail on certain topics. As usual, the whole Introduction to WordPress series:

1. Logging in and getting around
2. Creating and editing posts and pages
3. More aspects of posts and pages
4. Inserting images into posts and pages – you are here
5. Comments and your account
6. Widgets (sidebar content)

Inserting images into posts and pages

WordPress has a nice automatic way to manage images. All of the images and other files you’ve ever uploaded into your site via WordPress will be in the Media Library, available to be used again later if you’d like. You can upload them either from Media → Add New or from the Add Media button above the editing box for any post or page; the latter allows you to choose previously uploaded images as well.

Clicking Add Media brings up a large box overlaying your editing screen. After you upload or when you select an image from the library, the right side of the box will give you options for the image and how it appears, shown below. The first four options are Title, Caption, Alt Text, and Description; they stay with the image from use to use (though they can be altered at any time). The alt text is perhaps the most important – it appears within the HTML image tag and appears if the image somehow can’t; it is also used by screen readers and search engines as a description of the image. The rule of thumb is that if the image is wrapped in a link, the alt text should describe the destination of the link. If the image conveys information, the alt tex should repeat that information. If the image is purely decorative, however, feel free to leave the alt text blank.

The Caption is optional but will display with the image in your post or page if it is filled in. The Title and Description are used in the Attachment Page; Attachments, of which images are one kind, are actually in the same class as Posts and Pages, and so each has an individual page devoted to it. For more on the first four options, collectively called metadata, see Morten Rand-Hendriksen’s post Harnessing the Power of WordPress Image Metadata.

After those four options there are three more, which only affect this particular use of the image: Alignment, Link To, and Size. Alignment is the left-right positioning of the image. Left, Center, and Right are fairly self-explanatory; for Left and Right the text will flow into the empty space next to the image, if there is enough of it. None is like Left but without text flowing into the space. Link To is for images that should be clickable. A logo for an event you’re planning could have a Custom Link to the event page; if you’ve gotten into writing good descriptions you could link to the Attachment Page; purely decorative images or those already shown at their largest size could have no link; or you could link directly to the largest size of the image. That last is often required for lightboxing to work.

A word on image sizes: when you upload, WP will generate a bunch of smaller size options for the image, which you can then use in your posts and pages (along with the full-size one). This lets you put images into smaller spaces without forcing visitors to load a file that is way bigger than necessary. You choose which size to insert with the last option in the image insertion window.

If you decide to change the size or link, I find it quickest to delete the inserted image and reinsert it. If you want to change the alignment, it’s quick to go into the Text editor and change among alignnone, alignleft, aligncenter, and alignright.

iThemes has two relevant videos here, the first about inserting images and the second about the Media Library:

And as a final note, remember to make sure you have the rights to use any images you want to put on your site. The easiest way to do that with images you didn’t create yourself is by drawing from a stock of freely licensed photos. The sites I use for that purpose most often are Pixabay and Wikimedia Commons (the former you can use with abandon; the latter generally require attribution), and you can find a huge number of additional options on my Pinterest board Color & Images.

The post Intro to WP 4: Inserting Images appeared first on rweber.net.

Part 3 of Introduction to WordPress discusses additional settings and bits of information associated with posts and pages: excerpts, comments, featured images, and (for posts) categories and tags. The full series:

1. Logging in and getting around
2. Creating and editing posts and pages
3. More aspects of posts and pages – you are here
4. Inserting images into posts and pages
5. Comments and your account
6. Widgets (sidebar content)

More aspects of posts and pages

What about all those other boxes on the page? While title, content, and publication are vital, the rest of the options are important too. What you see will depend a bit on your theme and on whether you are editing a post or a page.

Both posts and pages will have Excerpt and Discussion below the main content box (even if you have to go to Screen Options to get them to appear), shown self-referentially in the screenshot below. Discussion is where you can change whether the post or page allows comments. The relevance of Excerpt will depend on your theme. WordPress generates an automatic excerpt by cutting your content off after a certain number of words; the automatic excerpt strips all formatting and other HTML such as links. You can create a custom Excerpt to be used instead, if the excerpt is used at all. The manual excerpt can include HTML and be longer; you may also wish to create one if the beginning of your actual content is not a good blurb for the content as a whole.

At the bottom of the right column, again true for both posts and pages, there will be a box to set the Featured Image. This is the primary image you want associated with your content; however, whether and how it is displayed is up to your theme. Many themes insert it at the top of the content somehow.

For pages that’s about it. You can read about Page Attributes under the Help tab at the top right of the screen, but they aren’t crucial.

Posts, however, get categorized and tagged. These are both ways to label your content so it can be found more easily and so search engines get the sense of the main ideas of it; more below. Your theme may also support Post Formats, which display the post differently to suit different content.

Categories are intended to be more high-level and non-overlapping – like a table of contents. They can be nested like sections within a chapter, as well. Tags are smaller-scale and can cross category boundaries; they are more like entries in an index, though that is a poorer analogy than the table of contents/category one. The idea is that a given post is in one category but can have multiple tags. You can read more about WordPress categories and tags on Socialbrite.

iThemes has a video about categories and tags:

The post Intro to WP 3: More About Posts and Pages appeared first on rweber.net.

In Part 2 of Introduction to WordPress we start talking about the main activity of most website owners: creating and editing content in the blog and elsewhere. The full series:

1. Logging in and getting around
2. Creating and editing posts and pages – you are here
3. More aspects of posts and pages
4. Inserting images into posts and pages
5. Comments and your account
6. Widgets (sidebar content)

Creating and editing posts and pages

One of the user-friendly aspects of WordPress is that different kinds of content are (mostly) edited in the same way. If you click “Add New” from the Posts dropdown or the Pages dropdown, the screens you get will be quite similar. The main portion of the screen will have a title entry box followed by a content entry box; the right sidebar will begin with a Publish box.

We’ll begin with those three pieces. First, an iThemes video about creating posts:

The title (starred in the screenshot below) will show at the top of the page or post and be part of the name in your browser history when you visit the page or post. Right below it will be the permalink, the address you can use to visit the post or page directly. You can edit the permalink manually with the Edit button next to it, or visit a preview of what you’re writing by clicking the permalink itself (conveniently the preview opens in a new tab).

[Note: this screenshot does not show a permalink editing box because the page shown is set as the home page of the site, so its address must be the main address of the site.]

Below that is the main content box, also starred. It has a lot going on along the top (circled). There will be an Add Media button on the left (possibly others depending on what plugins you have) and your choice of Visual or Text on the right. Below that will be formatting buttons, different for Visual and for Text. The “Add Media” button is how you insert images; more on that later.

Visual is the Microsoft-Word-esque editor: your formatting shows to you. If you make something bold you’ll see it bold. Text is the HTML editor: if you make something bold you’ll see it with HTML “strong” tags around it. Just to note: Visual won’t always show your formatting exactly as it will show on the front end – your theme has to have told it to do so. However, it should be close enough to see what you’re doing unless your theme does very unusual things.

I won’t exhaustively cover the buttons across the top of the main content box; if you hover your mouse pointer over them a little tooltip will pop up and tell you the name of the button. However, a few are worth mentioning: the last two buttons insert a “more…” break, limiting the amount of your post that shows in the blog archive page, and show or hide a second row of buttons. In that second row, the middle two buttons are “paste as text” and “erase formatting.” If you paste formatted test in, for instance from an RTF file or a Word document, WordPress will do its best to replicate the formatting. If you don’t want it, you can click “paste as text” before pasting and get only content, no formatting. If some formatting doesn’t translate correctly or you decide to take formatting in a completely different direction, highlight the text and click “erase formatting” to clear it back to plain old content.

Now, an iThemes video about adding links:

They have one about formatting generally, but it won’t embed, so you’ll have to watch it on Vimeo: WordPress post formatting video from iThemes.

From the Publish box in the upper right (shown below for a draft and in the screenshot above for a published page), in addition to actually publishing the post or page, you can save your post or page as a draft to work on later, edit its privacy settings, preview it, and schedule it to publish at a later time. That last happens by clicking the “Edit” link at the end of the “Publish immediately” line. That will open up a spot to put in a date and time for publication. If you put in a future time you should see the “Publish” button change to “Schedule” after you click OK. Once a post or page is published that button will become “Update.” To get back to a post or page’s editing screen, you can find it in the list of all posts or pages and click the title or the “edit” link that pops up below the title; or while viewing the post/page or a preview thereof, click the edit link that appears in the left half of the Toolbar or at the bottom of the post or page content.

Finally, there is an iThemes video about scheduling posts for later publication:

The post Intro to WP 2: Creating and Editing Posts and Pages appeared first on rweber.net.

Did you have a WordPress site set up for you? Are you now in charge of keeping it up to date? I have a series for you. Over this week and next we’ll cover the basics of using WordPress, including short videos from iThemes. All of the videos plus other information are in my Pinterest board WordPress Tutorials and Tips, and if you are starting a site you may also be interested in my boards So You Want To Get A Website and WordPress Plugins We Use. Pinterest can be a little harder to sift through, so this series puts the videos in order and adds more context and my own tips.

The plan:
1. Logging in and getting around – you are here
2. Creating and editing posts and pages
3. More aspects of posts and pages
4. Inserting images into posts and pages
5. Comments and your account
6. Widgets (sidebar content)

Logging in and getting around

The login page of your site is at your-site-address/wp-login.php, and once you are logged in you’ll be at your-site-address/wp-admin/. That is where all the action happens. In fact, you can use the wp-admin address directly; it will sidetrack you to the login page if you are not logged in.

A little vocabulary: The front end of your site is the part visitors see; the back end is the part that makes the front end happen. You’ll make changes to your site from the admin area. The first page you reach in the WordPress admin area is called the Dashboard (screenshot below), and you’ll sometimes see the entire admin area referred to as such (though properly it is just that one page). At the top of the screen when you are logged in you’ll see the Toolbar, which is basically a menu bar.

One general principle: in the WordPress admin there are a lot of drop-down and pop-out submenus. In every case, clicking the item that has the submenu is the same as clicking the first entry of the submenu. For instance, clicking “Posts” is the same as clicking “All Posts”.

The Toolbar has some convenient quick links. Your site name, on the left, will take you between the front and back end of the site. Your user name, on the right, drops down a menu that includes “Log Out”. The following is a screenshot of the left half of the Toolbar from a page on the front end of the site.

Admin pages consist of a collection of content boxes called panels. Panels with titles can be collapsed and expanded by clicking on the title bar; there’s a little arrow on the right that changes direction accordingly. Panels as a whole can be shown or hidden from the Screen Options box, which you’ll find at the top right of the page, just under the Toolbar. Not every page has Screen Options, but you’ll always find a Help box in the top right, which will give you page-specific extra information.

Videos from iThemes: first about the WordPress Dashboard, second about the Toolbar.

The post Intro to WP 1: Logging In and Getting Around appeared first on rweber.net.

There are any number of options for email subscriptions to the entirety of your main WordPress blog, including Jetpack. If you want to allow subscriptions to individual blog categories or to custom post types (CPTs), however, the options drop off radically. Here are three possibilities I’ve tracked down.

1. Arigato Pro + Intelligence Module

This is a newsletter plugin that allows email subscriptions via daily or weekly digests (this part requires the Intelligence Module add-on; the whole bundle costs $87 for a lifetime license and a year of support and updates).

Flexibility: You can limit the posts in the digests to specific categories, but it does not do custom post types. [The developers are very responsive, though, and might be amenable to adding CPTs as an option.]

Advantages: There are no limitations on number of subscribers or emails sent (except those imposed by your web host). Your list is local and doesn’t require another online account. You have control over your mailing lists and the design of the emails, which come from your site. If you want to sell subscriptions to certain kind of lists there is a free extension that connects to WooCommerce. If you have multiple lists and lots of people, it is cheaper than most external services (including even the lowest cost plan on MailChimp, below), even if you re-up every year for more support and updates. Your signup form can include checkboxes to allow people to subscribe to multiple categories/lists at once.

Disadvantages: Blog subscriptions are in digest form and sent once a day at most. Setup is fairly complicated. No custom post types at this time.

2. MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the many newsletter services out there, and not the only one to offer RSS to Email (Mad Mimi and AWeber do as well; Constant Contact does not seem to). However, it is the only major player with a free tier: up to 12,000 emails per month spread over up to 2,000 subscribers.

Flexibility: Since WordPress automatically produces individual RSS feeds for not only the main blog but also every taxonomy and post type, this can be used for any type of email subscription.

Advantages: You have control over your mailing lists and the design of the emails, which come from the email address of your choice. If you want to combine with another form of newsletter you can do so in the same account. Your signup form can include checkboxes to allow people to subscribe to multiple categories/CPTs at once (you’d want to have one “list” in MailChimp-speak and “groups” for categories – a “group title” like “Categories to Subscribe To” with “groups” underneath for each category; the nomenclature is a little confusing). A Google search implies MailChimp is the most popular option for RSS to Email and there are tutorials accordingly.

Disadvantages: Your subscriber list is not local and you have an additional online account to deal with. Setup is fairly complicated. If you go over the free tier the price goes up pretty fast.

3. Feedburner

Feedburner is a Google service that’s been around for a long time, and you will read that it ought to be kicking the bucket any day now. Those rumors have been around since 2012, however, and it is still here and even fully integrated with Blogspot.

Flexibility: As with MailChimp, anything with an RSS feed can be used.

Advantages: There are a surprising number of services, styling options, and statistics associated with this free service, and you can look at your subscriber list and download them as CSV. You don’t need to add any plugins to your site, just a form Google provides the code for.

Disadvantages: Email comes from a Google address (though with the blog’s name) and at a delay of nearly 24 hours (regardless of time of posting). Your subscriber list is not local. Multiple category/CPT subscriptions require multiple signups. Google is known for yanking services with little notice.

Where’s the Feed?

A few notes on setting up Feedburner and MailChimp: WordPress feed addresses follow a pattern. In each address below, anything starting with “your” is to be substituted with your specific information; the rest should be left as-is.
Categories:
http://www.your-site.com/category/your-category-slug/feed
Custom post types:
http://www.your-site.com/feed/?post_type=your-cpt-slug
You can even do “per-category” custom post type subscriptions (quoted under the assumption that the “category” would be a custom taxonomy) with
http://www.your-site.com/feed/?post_type=your-cpt-slug&your-custom-taxonomy-slug=your-taxonomy-term-slug
Actually if your taxonomies are specific to post types you could go with just
http://www.your-site.com/feed/?your-custom-taxonomy-slug=your-taxonomy-term-slug
Make sure under Settings → Reading you have “Full Text” or “Summary” selected as desired for articles in the feed.

You can read more about feeds in the WordPress Codex.

The post Flexible Email Subscriptions in WordPress appeared first on rweber.net.

A while ago I wrote a post on the Aquilino Arts blog that occurs to me would be of interest here.

As a small business website owner, you may be wondering what you can do to improve your online security — within the context of your current setup. Here are ways to keep people out of your accounts in the first place and limit the damage they can do if they gain access.

It covers approaches to limit access and limit impact.

Source: Online Security for the Small Business Owner – Aquilino Arts

The post Online Security for the Small Business Owner – Aquilino Arts appeared first on rweber.net.