A few days after my last post, a fall resulted in a broken back, a broken skull, a broken knee, and broken dreams. But 2012 is the year to set all that aside. A time to fix the health of this website, and improve the health of all my visitors.

In a new project, I am working on bringing health freedom to people, their businesses, and their networks. I will share more of that with you as that develops, but since this website is here to support everyone who is responsible for building and operating websites, let me focus on website health here today.

There is a lot of confusing information about the way to test the health of your website. Various technical experts offer different views on the importance of many aspects of page structure. Various marketeers offer different views on the importance of many aspects of search engine optimization. Various online checkers have different methods for analyzing your page health. It is very easy to lose focus. We spend more time monitoring, analyzing, and improving, but that distracts us from the important job of delivering an easy-to-navigate website to as many people as possible.

I have recently discovered the best tool to help webmasters since Google shared it’s vital Webmaster Tools. This new tool is only available to Firefox users at the moment. But then again, so am I.

Actually, that last bit is not strictly true, because I’ll work for anyone. However, I believe Firefox is the best browser for website building. Chrome is improving, and I also retain Microsoft Internet Explorer for testing. But successful webmasters are productive webmasters, so stick with whatever works for you. I use Chrome and Firefox together everyday. You are going to have to install Firefox if you want to take advantage of the tool I am about to describe. Other browsers may be covered in future releases.

Your Website Health

Before I start, I should warn that the following tool will not fix a bad site structure. If you have ignored my advice about a good website structure, then you will always be tending a sick donkey, compared to a thoroughbred race hound. I cannot blame you too much for not having a good plan, as I have not finished my articles about how to generate one on my management website. Let’s leave that one for now.

The tool you need for better website health is the aptly named SEO Doctor from the exotically named Vladimir Prelovac. Once installed as an add-on to your Firefox browser, SEO Doctor analyzes every page as it loads, giving you vital information about the health of your web pages. You get bonus points if you follow Vladimir’s advice:

SEO Doctor works really well with Search Status, in fact these may be the only two SEO extensions you will ever need in your browser.

Actually they might be the only ones you NEED, but if I ever share my own add-on list with you, they will not be the only ones you WANT.

Over the next few days, I will describe the tests that SEO Doctor performs, and explain why they are important to you. In the meantime, there is excellent help built-in, and that includes links to Vladimir’s website for a more thorough explanation. Or, if you are stuck, or need any other help, please ask in the website health forum.

In today’s page about installing WordPress, I’ve mentioned some essential tools. I’ve selected Google versions since they are free, effective, and easy to implement.

As I mentioned, these tools are so easy to use, they do not really merit step-by-step instructions, though I will do this for some of the reporting features that I use elsewhere. The tools are important, as they give you management tools (covered at Shrewdies Web Business Management), and technical development tools covered throughout this site.

Of course, you may prefer tools from other companies, and I’m always happy to discuss the comparison, or help with other tools. Just use the forum to discuss alternatives, or ask for help.

The essential tools I cover here are Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools.

Analytics gives you vital information about how traffic arrives at your site, where it comes from, and what happens to your visitors once they arrive at your site. Though much of this is for management use, technicians will find some of the information crucial for making decisions about navigation. Note that Analytics cannot be used on WordPress.com sites, which do have some free site usage statistics, but none that will help you monitor navigation paths.

Webmaster Tools gives you a wide range of information about site performance and interaction with the rest of the Internet. Though some of this is vital for management use, most of it is crucial to technicians to determine and fix weaknesses, and to make the most of your strengths.

The implementation screens for both these services are very simple, so I will not spend much time explaining them. There is plenty of flexibility about the way you enable them, and I will present what I believe is the optimum sequence.

Google Analytics

It pays to start with Analytics, as Google will use that account to verify Webmaster Tools later (though there are several other options). Once your Google account is open, you need to add a new Profile in Google Analytics, and you need to choose the option for a new domain.

Your first question, after entering your website domain address, is to choose a time zone. As all information is summarized by day (and other time intervals), you need to choose something that suits you best. This is normally your local time zone, but if your market is predominately located elsewhere, then it might help to chose that location. Ideally, you would choose the same timezone as your webserver location, but this is not critical. I find that, once in use, most of your time is spent comparing current time periods with historical positions to see if you are improving, so it doesn’t particularly matter where each day starts. If you plan to use AdSense or AdWords on the same website, then it really does help to have consistent timezones, but it will not harm you if you do not.

Note that the Country selector is a little strange – common countries are listed at the top, followed by less populous countries.

After entering your timezone, the next screen gives some code to add to your website.

The simplest way to add this to your website is to copy the code, and add it to the footer.php file in your theme (Admin – Appearance – Editor – footer.php). This has drawbacks because it means you have to repeat this edit if you change your theme, and you cannot easily use advance features without adding your own PHP or JavaScript code.

The better way is to use a WordPress Plugin to add Analytics code to your site simply by setting your profile Web Property ID, and other optional choices. I’m currently testing three plugins on various websites, and will report back on them in due course. In the meantime, you can discuss your own plugin choice or experiences in the Hosting forum.

Once your plugin options have been set, and your site starts generating traffic, and this will be monitored by Google Analytics. Remember, if you have set options not to track your own visits, you will not generate any Analytics data until you, or somebody else, visits the site without being logged in. There will be a few minutes delay between your first visit, and the Analytics screen reporting you as verified. As ever, if you have problems, please use the hosting forum.

Google Webmaster Tools

On your self-hosted WordPress.org website, enabling Google Webmaster Tools is as simple as adding the site URL, and choosing the “Link to your Google Analytics account” option. (Update: for this to work, it requires Asynchronous Analytics code in your page header. Not all plugins do this, as you will see in my forthcoming review, so probably best to choose one of the other options – I prefer uploading a file. I will do a further in-depth report on Webmaster Tools soon)

If you have a free WordPress.com site you can enable WebMaster Tools by choosing the “Add a meta tag to your site’s home page” option. This will reveal a meta tag, and you need to highlight the content part of that tag – excluding the quotes. Paste this into the Tools (Admin – Tools) box labeled “Google Webmaster Tools” and save your changes.

For both these options, you click the Verify button next, and Google will report your site as verified, though you might have to wait a few minutes.

Though neither of these tools will provide much value until you publish some pages, you will soon find the data, especially from Webmaster Tools, to be indispensable. Please discuss your experiences with these tools, and any other similar services, on the hosting forum.

There is no WordPress plugin to touch it, and the alternatives are simply too cumbersome to integrate.

For most needs, Simple:Press forum provides all that you need, but I’ve also mentioned before that it is not as simple to administer as some – but only because it has a wealth of options. And under the lid, tweaking the code is not particularly easy – again because there is so much included that it can be hard to find exactly what you want to change.

Mechanics aside, I have been trying for months to develop a simpler alternative built on posts and comments. This is not the most difficult coding challenge, but it is time-consuming, and there always seems something more important to do. Whilst doing the more important things, I noticed that Pods CMS has recently changed there forum for a completely different, simpler interface.

Looking deeper, I saw that it was based on Stack Overflow. Similar, in some ways, to Yahoo Answers, this approach means that we can focus on answering questions. This is a bit of an eye-opener for me, and I realize that promoting a forum to answer questions and share experiences and opinions is asking too much for one application.

I’ve decided to split my forum into a Question And Answer Section and a Discussion Forum. In an ideal world, these would be linked, and it would be absolutely possible to build such a beast with Pods CMS. But the time to build this from scratch means I’d rather look for something usable now, and seek better integration later.

The key here is to find something usable that is easily integrated into WordPress.

Step forward Question2Answer.

I’ve installed it on own of my sites, and I’ll report back on the details later. I’ve no intention to import questions from Simple:Press Forum, as I believe the two applications can work side by side. There will probably be a few more integration issues, but installation of Question2Answer using the WordPress user records was surprisingly easy.

Rather than repeat it here, I’ll refer you to my Question2Answer WordPress installation notes on the author’s support site.

For manual installers, it is set and forget. For automatic installers (SimpleScripts or Fantastico) it is often quite invisible.

Unless something unexpected changes, WordPress 3 adds little different to the way wp-config.php works, so it is still vital to learn a couple of tweaks.

wp-config.php is well documented internally, and the installation instructions tell you what you need to change to make sure that your WordPress installation can see the database.

But, there are two situations that commonly occur in a standard WordPress installation that are far from ideal: memory exhausted messages and excessive page and post revisions.

WordPress Memory Problems

I have mentioned memory problems with WordPress before. Though I only experienced it when upgrading with large plugins like Simple:Press Forum installed, I suspect this can also happen during normal running of some large plugins. Pods CMS has an error report, but as it looks to be a one-off, it could well be due to some other problem.

When I first experienced this problem, I used the temporary solution of de-activating large plugins during the upgrade. However, I later found the permanent solution to be an amendment to wp-config.php, as I noted on the original post, and repeat below.

Excessive WordPress Revisions

When WordPress introduced automatic saving of posts with revisions, it looked perfect for undecided people like myself. Changed a post only to realize you prefer an earlier version? No problem with WordPress, as the default installation settings give you a more or less complete revision history. But this can cause a problem if you frequently revise many posts and pages. Not only can you end up with a massive list of revisions on the edit page, but your database is becoming increasingly cluttered with copy upon copy of the same text – an absolute nightmare if you ever need to directly search or edit the database.

Many people hate the whole idea of revisions, and turn the feature off. I like to keep some recent versions, so I set the number to 3. Whichever you choose, you need to include a step in your installation routine to change the default setting by amending wp-config.php.

wp-config.php Changes

All you need to do is add the following two lines to wp-config.php. It shouldn’t matter where you put them, but for convenience I add them before the line that includes “stop editing”.
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3);

I wouldn’t normally use a beta version on a production website, but the full release will be available before that site is fully live, giving me a chance to test some new features.

Site installation continues to be simple, and I took the simplest option of using the automatic script provided by my server host. This has the nice option of changing the default admin username to something less guessable – always a good idea for improved security.

WordPress Settings

Settings are the same as version 2, so I made the usual adjustments:

General Settings

Tagline and Email. I also ticked the membership so anyone can register, but it would be better to leave this until you get the membership plugins organized (more on this soon).

Discussion Settings

Enabled threaded comments, with depth set to the maximum of 10. Set moderation to hold comment if 1 link. More on discussion settings when someone asks for it.

Privacy Settings

Always a good idea to make sure your site is visible. If you can think of a situation where you would set it to block search engines, please tell me.

Permalink Settings

Vital to select the Custom Structure and change it to /%post_id%/%postname%/ (we can discuss why this is so if you like). I usually change the category and tag base to something more site specific – there might be a slight search engine advantage, but I just think it looks better.

Other WordPress Configuration

It really should be categories and plugins next, but I could not resist investigating the new default template – Twenty Ten (surely not a tribute to Windows Ninety Five?). This seems to be a great improvement, but I have yet to find a WordPress theme that does not need a quick makeover with the editor. I think the essentials of WordPress themes needs a separate topic, so I’ll do one soon.

There also used to be essential modifications to wp-config.php. I’ll check this, and report back tomorrow.

WordPress upgrade is now so easy, there is almost nothing to it.

The new upgrade to WordPress 2.9 is typical of the inbuilt update routine. It simply updates itself, but there are a couple of points to watch out for.

WordPress Upgrade Fatal Error

First, the usual warning – backup your database and files.

It is easy to be complacent here, and assume that it never goes wrong. Frankly, it hardly ever fails, but if it does, it leaves you with no website, and no easy way of recovering it. If you are happy to run the risk of starting from scratch, then skip the backup – it’s what dummies do.
For us shrewdies, a quick backup is the first step in upgrading WordPress. The backup service from your web host admin panel will do it easily in one step (unless you have a very poor host).

Second, simply click the “Upgrade Automatically” button, and wait a few seconds. It is that easy – but what if it goes wrong?

Occasionally, you will see a message like:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2515174 bytes) in [your-wp-path]/wp-includes/http.php on line 1331

Do not panic – the “Fatal error” has not killed your website. It has stopped the WordPress upgrade, so your website is still functioning exactly as it was.

The problem is very easy to solve. Simply deactivate your plugins, upgrade WordPress, then reactivate your plugins.

If you have had any problems upgrading WordPress, please add your questions, or comments, below.

Actually, I can see immediately that perfection falls short by lacking a screenshot.

So I’ve added one.

Wordpress MU Installation

There are still no Fantastico or Simple Scripts that I am aware of to install automatically, so you have to copy the files to your server, then fill in the form shown above (with your own details, of course).

The choice of sub-domains or sub-directories defaults to the correct choice. I cannot think of a reason why you would want subdirectories, but this would make an interesting topic for discussion in the WordPress MU Installation Forum, if you think you need sub-directories.

The manual install routine is still extremely simple, but as with most things, there is a right way and a wrong way to do it. The wrong way is to leap in without planning. The right way is to follow these simple steps.

1. Prepare your web server – a clean root directory, or create a sub-directory to run WordPress MU from. The choice will be obvious from your site plan, and if you do not have one, stop now.
2. Copy the downloaded WPMU installation to your web server.
3. Prepare a database and an admin user with full privileges, and keep a browser window open with the database and username on view. Better still, copy them into your site plan.
4. In a new browser window, go to your website root or the directory you used in step 1.
5. Fill in the details on the form, using copy and paste for your database and user name.
6. Note the admin password on the confirmation screen – it’s a good idea to change it immediately to something you can remember.

Note that there is now no need to change the permissions of the root and wp-content directories, though the confirmation screen still warns you to change them back.

I’ll keep you informed of other differences between standard and multi-user versions, as I continue with the foundation, function and formatting stages.

A final note about naming. The multi-user version is now called WordPress µ – that Greek letter being pronounced mew. On this site, I tend to refer mostly to WordPress MU, as that seems to be the most common usage. WordPress Multi User, WPMU, and occasionally WordPress Multiuser are also used, and they all mean the same thing.