Growing a business is a balancing act of striking a balance between market relevance, market opportunity and market fit. Once you’ve reached that balance one of the key objectives is to have prospective customers associate your brand with the solution to their needs.

In terms of 3^rd party credibility, I’m talking about all the various ways we as marketers can cultivate word of mouth, which is the single most effective way to develop customers and communities.

Everyone is familiar with countless examples of 3rd party credibility at work directly or indirectly, let’s take a look at some:

Link Building
Search Engines provide millions of recommendations every day, all of these referrals are hinged on the link juice that flows from one credible site to another online (otherwise known as Page Rank). Of the more than 200 ranking factors that Google uses and the countless filters that search engines apply in an effort to fight spam, back links remain one of the most significant signals that a site is worthy of appearing in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Content Marketing Strategy
Every successful site today needs to have a healthy content strategy, among the numerous techniques to create engaging content whether evergreen (timelessly relevant) or seasonal etc, one of the most common ways to create or drive brand credibility is by having your company’s experts contribute to content other authoritative sites in your niche.

Testimonials / Client List
Today’s testimonials may take shape in a number of ways, not the least of which is badges clients can sport on their sites indicating their support of your brand. Customers may also pen a short inspirational sentence or two talking about their experience with your brand and the value your product(s) or service(s) created for them.

Reviews / Case Studies
When publications that your customers trust choose to provide an in depth review of your company and it’s offerings, you’re definitely on your way to creating a strong brand. By the same token, case studies are an opportunity share an in depth look at the “before and after” results clients realized in working with you. Since case studies normally require a blessing from the client, this approach is helpful for prospective customers who may relate to the story or otherwise discover more about how your product(s) or service(s) can be used.

Brand Associations / Partnerships
Offline or on, creating close proximity of your brand with others your target market trusts is often a very good thing. In cases where you can create an offer by working together with a brand that compliments yours, not only does this save time and hopefully money for your customers, but it also creates an even more profound brand experience. Associations and partnerships can take numerous forms, however the primary goal here is to generate brand lift – awareness about your brand and your value proposition in the marketplace.

So what are the keys to growing brand recognition, trust and creating brand lift? Well it depends on your business a bit, but in essence we need to think through a strategy to apply the principles above in an engaging way without sacrificing any opportunity to create value while differentiating your business from the competition. The following matrix provides a good framework to think about how to create the credibility that grows brand equity:

Have any great examples of companies that are doing a great job of creating brand equity online today via their efforts? Share by leaving a comment.

In this post, I’ll show you how to integrate MaxCDN’s origin pull CDN product into W3TC. MaxCDN’s product remains one of the most commonly used CDNs in W3TC because it’s both affordable, simple to set up, and requires virtually no maintenance once integrated.

MaxCDN configuration steps

First, create MaxCDN account if you haven’t already. When you log in, click “Manage Zones”

Then click “Create Pull Zone”

Configure your new Pull Zone and then click “Create”

Make a note of your CDN URL, which we’ll use in a moment

We could technically integrate our CDN now, but W3TC can communicate with the MaxCDN (allowing purge requests to be sent directly from WordPress) if we set up the API connection.

Click “my settings” in the top-right corner

Click “API” in the sub-menu that appears

You’ll notice that we don’t have any API Keys configured. Click “Add Key”

Add a description if you’d like and then click “Save”

Your API ID and Key will appear here, I’ve removed my Key from the screenshot

That’s all we need to do in MaxCDN right now. In the next section, we’ll configure W3 Total Cache using the pull zone we just created.

W3 Total Cache configuration steps:

Once logged into WordPress, navigate to the W3 Total Cache by clicking on the “Performance” tab towards the bottom of your Dashboard sidebar. From the General Setting page, ensure that CDN is disabled and select “NetDNA / MaxCDN” from dropdown menu

Navigate to the CDN Settings. Enter your API ID and Key, your CDN URL, and click “Test NetDNA”

You should see “Test passed” in green if you’ve done everything correctly. Save your settings and then navigate back to the General Settings page. Enable the CDN by clicking the check box and saving your settings.

Power user tip #1: Configure a subdomain like cdn.yourdomain.com so we can get rid of long MaxCDN URL. W3 Total Cache lets you configure multiple CDN subdomains, so we’ll go ahead and configure a few.

Log back into MaxCDN and from the dashboard, click “Manage” next to the Pull Zone you created:

Then click “Settings” right above the Zone Configuration

You’re presented with an overview of your Pull Zone settings

The section we want is labeled Custom Domains. Click “Edit” and enter your desired subdomains

Click “Update” and then navigate to your DNS control panel. Create a CNAME entry for every subdomain that you entered in MaxCDN, and alias them to your MaxCDN URL

Once DNS propagates, you can update W3TC with the subdomains and replace the long CDN URL with the new, custom ones

Power user tip #2: We can further improve page loads speeds by using a completely different domain for the CDN, ensuring that the domain is cookie-free. So if your site is www.domain.com, you could set domain.net as the domain to use with your CDN. Note: this assumes that you own domain.net and have access to its DNS control panel.
That’s it! If you have any issues getting it working, drop us a line. If you’d like us to set this up for you, we’re happy to help.

When using a CDN in conjunction with HTTPS / SSL, customers often find that the CDN product they use lacks an HTTPS endpoint, or the one provided is different from the standard, non-HTTPS one.

One simple solution to this would be to force the loading of your CDN assets via HTTP like so:

This leads to one other issue, however…

Why dont I see the Blue/Green Bar?

When a page and all of its assets are served over HTTPS, modern web browsers provide a visual indicator—usually in green or blue. This is designed to provide visitors with the confidence to shop or register on your site.

When your HTTPS pages are served with “mixed content” (as it sounds, this is a situation in which HTTPS and HTTP assets are both being loaded on a single page, this indicator does not appear. This could happen for any number of reasons — all beyond the scope of this article — but there’s a simple solution for addressing this with only a few short lines of code.

Disabling CDN on HTTPS pages only

W3 Total Cache ships with documentation (Performance > FAQ) that provides instructions on disabling each of the caching types. Combined with a simple PHP function and WordPress hook, we’re able to conditionally disable the CDN for pages that utilize HTTPS.

Add the following code snippet to your theme’s functions.php file:

add_action('wp_head','nocdn_on_ssl_page');
function nocdn_on_ssl_page() {
if ($_SERVER['HTTPS'] == "on") {
define('DONOTCDN', true);
}
}

This of course assumes that you have W3 Total Cache active and that the only assets being served over HTTP are originating from your CDN (otherwise, you might need something like this). When you reload a page being served over HTTPS, you should notice that the familiar green / blue indicator appears in your address bar.

Note: we’ve found that MaxCDN‘s SSL support and easy integration with W3 Total Cache provides a solid solution for many customers.

Suspicious activity in wordpress.org plugin was noticed and a few plugins were found to be compromised. Malicious code was added to these plugins creating backdoor access to the web server. You would only be affected if you downloaded an update of the plugin today.

Once we were notified of the issue, we made sure that the current stable release (0.9.2.2) was restored to normal in addition to releasing the current development version as (0.9.2.3) allowing users to get an upgrade notification in WordPress Admin.

Needless to say, if you haven’t already upgraded, we encourage you to do so straight away via the WordPress Admin’s plugins page, it just takes a minute. If you did not upgrade today, you site should be secure, however we encourage you to update so that your site can take advantage of the additional performance optimizations included with each release.

As many of you have learned from working with us, W3TC seeks to improve the search engine ranking, conversion rates and user experience of web sites for free. We welcome you to submit a bug submission form from the support tab of the plugin to help us identify issues in new features and old features as the performance framework is used in more and more cases.

As always, thanks for your understanding and participation.

Ask yourself, what is the value of lost visitors due to a slow loading web site? There are literally page views “locked” away in those slow loading pages of your web site that can be “unlocked” with a few quick changes. Simply put, having numerous 3rd party elements in your site can ultimately be its downfall.

For example, simply adding the Facebook fan box will dramatically slow a page in many cases, slow down the browsers due to large memory usage and usually lots of additional download time making the page “not ready” until everything is downloaded. So if your goal is to optimize your site for social media and make sure that your bounce rates are low, time on site is high, page views per visit grows and Google has 1 less reason to rank your site poorly, keep reading.

So, let’s take a look at the implementations you need for your site that make sure your visitors see your content before your widgets. From an idealistic point of view the “start render time,” or when the browser actually starts to paint the page, these tips will not bring this value as close to zero as I would like, however they will definitely improve user experience. Keep in mind that there are numerous other steps to be taken or possibilities, but we’re focusing on reducing the negative impact of widgets characterized above. What follows is HTML5 code for various cases:

Digg:
After working with Digg on some their latest improvements, I’m happy to share an implementation that is much more user-centric; if you have multiple buttons per page, this is especially valuable:

<a class="DiggThisButton DiggThisButtonMedium"
        href="http://digg.com/submit?url=http://domain.com/&amp;title=Post%20Title"
        rel="nofollow external"><img src="http://widgets.digg.com/img/button/diggThisMedium.png"
        width="50" height="61" alt="" /></a>

Then, before </body> embed the following only once and multiple buttons will still work in a single page:

<script src="http://widgets.digg.com/buttons.js"></script>

This implementation allows the page to render and then draws the buttons later.

StumbleUpon:
SU, has recently updated their buttons, which is good, but what follows is not truly asynchronous and definitely not as optimal as the Digg button above because of the multiple JS embeddings per page, at least this implementation won’t block the page render. First position the button with a unique ID wherever you wish:

<div id="id"></div>

Then for each button make sure that an embedding exists above </body> so the button will be rendered in the location:

<script src="http://www.stumbleupon.com/hostedbadge.php?s=5&r=http%3A%2F%2Fdomain.com%2F&a=1&d=id"></script>

LinkedIn:
The LinkedIn button implementation is also not perfect, but a carries a smaller total payload than the StumbleUpon buttons when there are multiple buttons per page:

<script type="in/share" data-counter="top"></script>

Then at the bottom of the page a single JS embedding with power all of the buttons:

<script src="http://platform.linkedin.com/in.js"></script>
</body>

Tweetmeme:
I still recommend this service because it also generates a usable button for feeds you may syndicate, while the official twitter button still does not. The best way to use this widget is via <iframe> as iframes do not block the render of a page, too many though can still slow down a page render or cause other anomalies in some browsers. Anyway, here’s what that implementation looks like:

<iframe scrolling="no" height="61" width="50" frameborder="0"
        src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/widget.js?url=http://yoururl.com/&amp;style=normal&amp;source=yoururl&amp;service=bit.ly"></iframe>

Twitter:
The official twitter button works pretty well, it doesn’t have retweet data for everything ever shared on your site as they only started gathering that data when they launched the button (so use tweetmeme for those older stories if you can), but it does have a reliable sharing experience for users, just make sure that if you use the following implementation:

<iframe class="twitter-share-button" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"
        src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/tweet_button.html?url=http%3A%2F%domain.com%2F&amp;via=twitterhandle&amp;text=Post%20Title&amp;count=vertical"
        width="55" height="63"></iframe>

You can of course use a technique similar to LinkedIn or Digg, but the JS will actually create an <iframe> anyway, so this approach is more performance as it won’t block the page render and yields the same net result. For those using @anywhere to add hovercards and other twitter functionality to their sites, the technique that apples for Diff of LinkedIn can be applied.

ShareThis:
Among the most popular buttons available, their implementation has dramatically improved as the total payload for JavaScript has been reduced, although the script loads synchronously still unfortunately. On the positive side, the buttons are decoupled from the scripts that embed them. The instructions recommend adding the scripts to the <head>, but I recommend adding them before </body> or after <body> if you’re having any problems.

<span class="st_sharethis"></span>
<script>
        var __st_loadLate=true; // if __st_loadLate is defined then the widget will not load on domcontent ready
        stLight.options({
                publisher:'12345',
                tracking:'google',
                embeds:'true'
        });
</script>

And of course, activate the button after the content is displayed by placing the script that powers the widgets on the page as shown:

<script src="http://w.sharethis.com/button/buttons.js"></script>
</body>

Google Buzz:
Implementing the Buzz button like many others that are reasonably well done allow for a single JS embed to support multiple button instances in a single page:

<a href="http://www.google.com/buzz/post" class="google-buzz-button" title="Google Buzz"
        data-message="Here's Buzz!" data-url="http://www.google.com/buzz" data-locale="en"
        data-button-style="normal-count"></a>

Although not asynchronous the JS embed can still be placed above the </body> tag as shown:

<script src="http://www.google.com/buzz/api/button.js"></script>

Google Friend Connect (AdSense & Gadgets):
It’s critical to remember that you only need to embed the Friend Connect JS library once per page. If you’re minifying the file be sure to make sure your cache is frequently updated as the code is changed quite often and an old cache may cause anomalies on your site. The reason why this tip is notable is that this implementation supports AdSense as well as all of the other Gadgets with a single embed, so if you have multiple AdSense placements in a page, this is the way to go:

<body>
<script src="http://www.google.com/friendconnect/script/friendconnect.js"></script>

Specify where the placement will appear using a div with a unique ID:

<div id="id"></div>
<script>
google.friendconnect.container.setParentUrl('/' /* location of rpc_relay.html and canvas.html */);
google.friendconnect.container.renderAdsGadget({
        id: 'id',
        height: 90,
        site: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX','prefs':{"google_ad_client":"ca-pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
                "google_ad_host":"pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX","google_ad_slot":"XXXXXXXXXX","google_ad_format":"728x90"}
});
</script>

Then you can obviously embed numerous other placements or gadgets all powered by a single JS embedding. Unfortunately the JS embedding is not asynchronous, but at least it’s better than having lots of AdSense JS calls throughout a page or even additional calls for your gadgets.

Facebook Share / Facebook Like / Other Facebook plugins:
Use the XFBML implementation described on the various plugin pages; this implementation does interfere with page render and positioning it after the <body> tag means that each of the plugins used in a given page will load at the same time as soon as the scripts have loaded. No need for multiple scripts, which have to be downloaded repeatedly and slow down the page render etc etc.

Add support of the XFBML markup to the document:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US"
        xmlns:x2="http://www.w3.org/2002/06/xhtml2"
        xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml">
<head>

The embed itself:

<body>
<div id="fb-embed"></div>
<script>
window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({appId: 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX', status: true, cookie: true, xfbml: true}); };
(function() {
	var e = document.createElement('script'); e.async = true;
	e.src = document.location.protocol +
	'//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js';
	document.getElementById('fb-embed').appendChild(e);
	}());
</script>

Then place the Like Box itself where you desired:

<fb:like profile_id="XXXXXXXXXXXX" href="http://domain.com/" width="450"></fb:like>

Meebo Bar:
Meebo has actually taken a number of strides (with the consult of Steve Souders as well) to improve the performance of their meebo bar; still it’s something more for users to download and more JavaScript to be run in your visitor’s browser, but I can now actually recommend this for publishers looking to increase engagement and create new monetization opportunities for their site. Their implementation is fully asynchronous and has a number of optimizations compared to earlier version. The latest implementation documentation at their site is the best reference.

OpenX:
The OpenX team has promised some an asynchronous embedding code for their single page call (SPC) implementation, which basically means that multiple ads in a given page can be requested without blocking the page render and are requested at once instead of sequentially, however for the moment, this is the best implementation I can recommend. It also uses iframes to alleviate render-blocking issues as well some:

I recommend adding this 1.3K of (closure compiler optimized) code directly in the <head> of the page to power the widgets. It’s small enough that it is faster than making another HTTP transaction (DNS lookup, connect, download, execute etc) for this purpose, the original file is here:

<script>var adPositions=[];function writeAdDiv(a,b,c){document.write('<div class="banner" id="'+a+'" style="width:'+b+"px; height:"+c+"px; line-height:"+c+'px;">&nbsp;</div>');adPositions[a]=a}function OpenX_findPosX(a){var b=0;if(a.offsetParent)for(;a.offsetParent;){b+=a.offsetLeft;a=a.offsetParent}else if(a.x)b+=a.x;return b}function OpenX_findPosY(a){var b=0;if(a.offsetParent)for(;a.offsetParent;){b+=a.offsetTop;a=a.offsetParent}else if(a.y)b+=a.y;return b} function OpenX_moveAbove(a,b){var c=0;if(a.offsetHeight)c=a.offsetHeight;else if(a.clip&&a.clip.height)c=a.clip.height;else if(a.style&&a.style.pixelHeight)c=a.style.pixelHeight;if(window.XMLHttpRequest)if(!document.all){b.style.paddingTop="0px";b.style.paddingBottom="0px"}if(c>0)b.style.height=c+"px";a.style.left=OpenX_findPosX(b)+"px";a.style.top=OpenX_findPosY(b)+"px"} function OpenX_positionDivs(){for(var a in adPositions){var b=a+"-Hidden";if(document.getElementById){targetZoneDivID=document.getElementById(a);sourceZoneDivID=document.getElementById(b)}else if(document.all){targetZoneDivID=document.all[a];sourceZoneDivID=document.all[b]}else if(document.layers){targetZoneDivID=document.layers[a];sourceZoneDivID=document.layers[b]}targetZoneDivID!=null&&sourceZoneDivID!=null&&OpenX_moveAbove(sourceZoneDivID,targetZoneDivID)}}window.onresize=function(){OpenX_positionDivs()};</script>

The SPC implementation is vital in making sure that the execution and transaction times are as small as possible. So create the slot(s) in the page as follows:

<body>
<script>var OA_zones = {"728x90_Leaderboard" : 1}</script>
<script src="http://openx-server.com/spcjs.php?id=1"></script>

Then place the slots in your HTML as appropriate:

<script><!--//<![CDATA[
	writeAdDiv('button1', 728, 90);
//]]>--></script>

And finally, in the footer of the document, make the call to draw the ad in the appropriate slot:

<div id="button1-Hidden" style="position:absolute;left:-1000px;top:-1000px;">
	<script>OA_show("728x90_Leaderboard");</script>
</div>
</body>

Because of the various use cases and implementations supported I do recommend OpenX, but depending on the size and needs of your site/organization Google’s offerings are far more robust and will eventually perform better than they do now.

Google DoubleClick for Publishers (formerly Google Ad manager):
If your site is monetized with AdSense as well as various types of ad formats or networks, Google DFP is a great solution, however for now, it actually creates a negative experience for users depending on the quantity and type of ads being displayed. Instead of embedding the snippet in the <head> of the page, instead embed it after <body> and make sure note that this implementation uses the single request command to make the render more responsive:

<body>
<script src="http://partner.googleadservices.com/gampad/google_service.js"></script>
<script>GS_googleAddAdSenseService("ca-pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX");GS_googleEnableAllServices();</script>
<script>GA_googleAddSlot("ca-pub- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX ", "slot-name");</script>
<script>GA_googleUseSyncSRARendering();GA_googleFetchAds();</script>

Then place your ad slots as you normally would in your page template. I’m definitely looking forward better performing implementation for Google DFP, ads are not optional for many publishers today and ironically they are actually causing publishers to lose money.

BuySellAds:
If you monetize your site using BSA, and still have not switched to their asynchronous embed code, make sure you do, your users will appreciate seeing the content they’re after without delay.

<script>
(function(){
  var bsa = document.createElement('script');
     bsa.type = 'text/javascript';
     bsa.async = true;
     bsa.src = '//s3.buysellads.com/ac/bsa.js';
  (document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0]||document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(bsa);
})();
</script>

If you don’t already use the asynchronous snippet, make sure you do!

Google Analytics:
Google’s asynchronous tracking code has been out for some time, I recommend it for lots of reasons, like:

• More accurate stats
• Non-blocking user experience
• Simplified implementation and optimized execution
• Capture partial page views

So this is what the implementation looks like:

<script>
var _gaq = _gaq || [];
_gaq.push(
	['_setAccount', 'UA-XXXXX-X'],
	['_setDomainName', 'domain.com'],
	['_trackPageview'] );
(function() {var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true;ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js';document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0] || document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0]).appendChild(ga);})();
</script>
</head>

Woopra:
Woopra Analytics not only has a decent WordPress plugin, they also now have an asynchronous tracking code implementation (which is not yet available in the WordPress plugin at the time of this writing). Being that it’s actually asynchronous, I recommend embedding it in the <head> of the page manually if you want to capture partial page views:

<script>
(function(){
	var wsc=document.createElement('script');
	wsc.type='text/javascript';
	wsc.src=document.location.protocol+'//static.woopra.com/js/woopra.js';
	wsc.async=true;
	var ssc = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
	ssc.parentNode.insertBefore(wsc, ssc);
})();
</script>
</head>

Wrapping Up:
For those buttons, widgets, services etc not covered one of the last remaining rules of thumb (within the scope of this discussion) is to put all scripts that are not essential for functionality of the site (like navigation, but hopefully that’s not the case) above </body> so that they’re not directly interfering with page render. Remember all of the CSS and JS files that exist in <head> must be downloaded and executed before the page can start to render. Note: your mileage may vary, but it’s possible to realize asynchronous performance of some scripts by adding the attribute async to the <script> tag with the value true. Keep in mind that this make break a script so test for yourself.

There are numerous other widgets, advertising networks, statistics and analytics services available, if you don’t see a tip above for the one you use, then reach out to them and find out if they have any performance tips (like asynchronous JavaScript code). Also, don’t forget that if you are able to minify scripts to reduce HTTP transactions, which will be a huge performance win for scripts that support it.

Bonus Tips for WordPress Users:
jQuery is used in countless plugins and themes. It’s often out-of-date and every new release includes bug fixes and more importantly performance improvements. The following snippet is useful for your header.php file, it will make sure that your site is always using the latest version of jQuery without having to modify your theme. You’ll also benefit from Google’s content delivery network and using a hostname other than your domain name, meaning that the file will be pipelined (downloaded in parallel) with the other files in the <head> of the page which is faster:

<?php
wp_deregister_script('jquery');
wp_register_script('jquery', 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js');
wp_enqueue_script('jquery');
?>

Similarly, if you have extensive use of swfobject in your theme/plugins, a similar optimization can be applied thusly:

<?php
wp_deregister_script('swfobject');
wp_register_script('swfobject', 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/swfobject/2/swfobject.js');
wp_enqueue_script('swfobject');
?>

So again, until jQuery reaches version 2 or swfobject reaches version 3, you will never have to modify this code!

Have a tip I didn’t mention? Let me know in the comments!

So what did I actually want to see in terms of hardware? Let’s take a look:

1. Albeit less essential (relatively speaking) wireless charging would certainly be a welcome feature. I don’t mean that recent technology that powers devices at a distance, instead I’m referring to those pads that you put your devices on that charges them. I’d like to invest in a couple of those and leave them around the house to keep devices juiced.
2. There are some truly innovative products out there to provide much better audio without increasing weight or complexity in devices. The iPad has a seemingly tiny mono speaker, that I’m confident is going to leave me disappointed, whether giving a presentation or trying to watch some TED videos.
3. No camera? That’s a good way to keep this from being a gift for non-tech savvy relatives and being a living room fixture that actually stood a chance of replacing the use of the mobile and landline phones (now the Skype can make calls over 3G or even cumbersome TVs). No doubt that this is coming soon, but I think this was definitely a foolish sacrifice for the first generation. Likely to be able to make the battery life claims that are made without having to do too much research and development or delaying release.
4. HDMI, without better audio, higher quality video etc, how am I going to enjoy the videos etc that I happen to download or want to share on my iPad? So I can’t pop over to a friend’s house and with a single cable pour out high definition content into the flat screen TV that hangs on their wall? This is a real use case even in business today. Not even a thought of this scenario? For shame.
5. I know the “stylus” concept is a bit passé at this point, but not when it records what you’re hearing while you make your notes, which are subsequently converted from handwriting into actual documents. After all, apple called this device the iPad right? This use case takes shape in nearly every way you can imagine, and unlike other products that exist, the data is already stored in a device (or easily synced) in such a way that you can manipulate it easily.
6. The mobile landscape is changing with the proliferation of free WIFI in communities and businesses, but the roll out of 4G is also on the horizon by many service providers as well. Granted, some mobile companies are admittedly removing the bottlenecks from their 3G networks, but mobile standards must be backwards compatible, so why not give a device that cannot be upgraded more longevity?
7. Only 802.11n support? What about the new “hub-less” WIFI technology that allows wireless devices to directly discover and interface with each other at high speed? Not having forward thinking features makes me think that this device is supposed to be disposed of annually, I mean upgraded. And not the healthy upgrades like swapping out modems or memory or disk, unhealthy ones where the entire unit is tossed or sold on eBay if I somehow find the time.
8. Bluetooth 3, where is that? There are already devices with the standard and most of us gadget lovers already know that we still have a pairing and performance issues with our Bluetooth networks as it is, even with the enhanced data rate devices that are available now.
9. Video is actually key here, where is the 1080p? Even youtube.com, vimeo.com etc supports this standard now, how can this be missing today. The Simpson’s is finally widescreen after 20 years, let’s keep taking steps forward.
10. One of my use cases is using the device for travel, this includes in a car. However, I can’t use this for turn-by-turn directions without a decent speaker, so I guess I will have to look at the screen in that case? A bit dangerous. I guess this thing is going to remain in its specially designed Apple carry case anyway since there’s no active GPS. Garmin can breath a sigh of relief.
11. The battery life is impressive, but at the compromise (no doubt) of multi-tasking support. So after completing that thought, the battery life is NOT impressive. So where is multi-tasking support? Even my RIM BlackBerry 8800 could manage that even with its rubbish interface.

For completeness I should mention that the lack of Flash support is not a concern of mine, all of the largest videos sites are supporting HTML 5 as are the browsers that I love.

If having these features means that I have to spend more, I certainly will. Knowing that subsequent operating system updates with richen my productivity and allow for greater innovation in the app’s that are developed. But what I won’t do is make compromises on these points unless I can find a reason to compromise my use cases as well: presentations, travel, business tasks, conferences/seminars etc. All of these uses cases (and more) demand a device of the description I’ve made. We’ll see if Apple will ever cater to such a small sector of their market, the hardcore.

Historically, search engine companies (Google, Yahoo!, Bing etc) are among the original innovating web application developers and their success has afforded them with the resources to learn how to scale applications. In particular, Google has been working diligently (as does Yahoo) to contribute to the web developer community, increasing awareness and providing research about creating good experiences with web content. Today they’ve even released their solution to the performance issues surround Domain Name Service (DNS) and with their Google Public DNS project. DNS is the process by which your browser determines which server to query for the pages you request.

It has probably always played a role in the background in some way, but is now a talking point — the speed of a web site is instrumental in how Google determines the rank of your site in search engine result pages. While there may be numerous opinions on the topic, the fact remains that speed is vital to a positive user experience and a healthy eco-system, so those facts make any opinions quite moot. You can now find Google’s opinion on the speed of your web site in Webmaster Tools, in the site performance section (currently still a labs feature). Take a look and see how your site compares to the rest of the web.

WordPress is an extremely popular open source content management system and publishing tool. I contribute to the performance of WordPress via W3 Total Cache, which (from a bird’s eye view) accomplishes a number of goals:

• Make servers more green by reducing the resource demands in delivering dynamic content
• Reduce load time of sites, thereby providing the benefits stated above
• Allow bloggers and other WordPress plugin developers to continue to focus on producing content and easy-to-deploy functionality for WordPress without having to worry about performance penalties / implementation issues or keep an eye on their WordPress installation.

The action items to implement the largest performance wins for web applications traditionally include the following:

• Progressive render: It’s imperative that CSS and JavaScript are properly embedded into web pages to ensure that the user begins to see content displaying as quickly as possible. The term progressive render literally implies that the web site loads instantly with a water fall effect rather than showing users a white page for several seconds and drawing the entire page at once. Proper use of this technique is realized through careful placement and embedding of CSS and JavaScript in the head of the page. As well as loading JavaScript near the end of the page in addition to using pipelining techniques to overcome download limitations in some browsers.
• Reduce HTTP Transactions: This technique takes shape in 3 ways:

  HTTP Compression: the smaller the file, the faster it can be generated, sent and rendered or executed. Gzip or deflate compression is supported by modern browsers and is one of the most fundamental performance wins in web development.

  Minification: the staple technique of Yahoo.com, Google.com and Bing.com for years and instrumental in the “1 second page loads” they appear to have. Combining CSS and JavaScripts respectively, removing white space, comments, line breaks and even inserting CSS and JavaScript inline in the document, (if also compressed) ensures that the least amount of data is sent to the browser.

  Image Sprites: combining multiple images into a single file and using CSS to manipulate them on the page. Since your browser will download a larger image faster (in practice) than numerous smaller images, this is a real performance win when coupled with browser-side caching.

  These methods make sure that there are fewer “calls” to a web server to deliver a page. When it comes to performance, less is more.

• Caching: Cache everything and cache often! Words to that effect are the mantra of hard core web developers. This technique includes setting expiration time for CSS, JavaScript, and images etc that are downloaded from your site. It also includes, caching pages, database queries, RSS feeds and so forth so that your web server spends time sending content instead of generating it. Don’t forget that Content Delivery Networks are also a very important type of cache that significantly reduce the latency of content intended for a global audience.

Will it ever be enough? Doubtful. And there’s much more to it than the few items I listed. Google is already more than kicking tires on their new take on how web enabled devices should communicate. A very ambitious endeavor, but for Google who is bold enough to deploy HTML5 on their main property (Google.com), I’d have to say that they’ve got the resources to see it through. And as always it’s easy to see the wake of Steve Souders’ contributions to web application performance – no doubt a vital contributor at Google (the page speed Firefox plugin?), formerly of Yahoo fame.

The takeaway is this, on the horizon, there will be more talk about the performance of your site and that in turn will raise the bar and awareness in the open source community about how to make high performance applications, the reasons to do it and with which tools to measure those results.

However, there are some Google ranking factors that most professionals agree affect site positioning on Google SERPs. However, these are opinions, find out for yourself how these apply to projects you’re working on.

Recommended Steps to Improve Google Ranking

1. Use keywords in HTML title tags. Probably the most significant factor for a site regardless of the competitive landscape, the title tag must be consistent with content in the page for best results. The more keywords in your title, the less effective this factor, be judicious.

2. Create quality anchor text for inbound links. At one time, according to some SEO professionals, quality anchor text was an essential component of a well-ranked site. After all, this is the text the user opted to see by clicking a link on another site. Most SEOs still contend that quality anchor text is a highly significant, positive ranking factor. If not for spiders, for visitors clicking in as well. Obviously the text should be relevant to the destination page for best results; that’s where your on page optimization comes in to play.

3. Increase link popularity. Link popularity takes into account the number of inbound links present. Link authority has less relevance, though it is still a factor depending on the competitive landscape. Link popularity is based on a global count of links from all sites. However, quality links are still critical to creating site authority; authority means ranking for more phrases than you intentionally target.

4. Hang in there. The age of a site is an important positive weighting factor according to many SEO professionals. It’s certainly a reasonable assumption. Failed sites are dropped as soon as the hosting subscription ends. If a site has been around for 10 years, the owners must be dong something right, especially if link popularity is steady developed over the years. Unfortunately for site owners, there’s no way to speed up the aging process – except hanging in there.

5. Increase the popularity of internal links. These links direct visitors to helpful, related content. They’re important in providing visitors with a positive on-site experience. Search engines view on-site link popularity as a sign that visitors like what they see and want to learn more.

7. Build deep links. Deep links are relevant to the topicality of the target page or keyword. The relevance of these inbound links matters to a site’s Google ranking. However, please note point 3. The sheer number of inbound links is a factor as well. Quality deep links carry more weight and add credibility to a site.

8. Connect with sites selling to the same demographic. Create a number of links with sites within your topical community. This helps visitors further their searches – something Google likes very much.

9. Keep old links. Google looks for web stability. The older the link, the more trust it has. It indicates a happy relationship with the site owner linking in who recognizes the value of sending visitors off-site. Google watchers suggest a three to four month time window for spiders to determine that this is a well-established, long-term link that has value to visitors of both sites.

10. Use keywords in body text. Make sure that keywords receive prominent display in headlines, headers, sub-heads. It’s important that the keywords used in HTML text on page match with keywords used in the site’s meta data and title tags.

Not Recommended

1. Don’t use session IDs in URLs. It sounds like a good idea on the surface, an easy way to track customer information, but here’s the problem. Each time a spider crawls the site, a new URL with session ID is created. The spider now has two, or three or more URLs all showing duplicate content. Go back to Go, do not collect $200. Don’t confuse this with pages that may have a couple GET variables in them; avoid that when you can, but just avoid having your pages containing session IDs.

2. Choose a reputable web host. The most potent negative ranking factor is server accessibility. If your server, located in Timbuktu, is inaccessible to spiders, it’s inaccessible to visitors. Down time soon becomes down and out time.

3. Avoid duplicate content. Googlebots employ filters to detect duplicate content. Now, if you opt to post some syndicated articles, you’re providing a service to visitors. However, a bot will recognize that content (it’s already appeared on 400 sites) and you’ll see a drop in traffic rank.

4. Jettison low-quality links. Google assesses the character of your site by the company you keep so keep good company by unlinking from (1) links farms, (2) sites with absolutely no quality content and (3) otherwise low-quality sites; e.g. FFA (free for all) sites.

5. Avoid any kind of links deception. Googlebots aren’t smart, but they can detect some paid links and a variety of links scams, including generated links. If a Googlebot suspects links fraud, your site may be penalized and sent to the basement or banned altogether.

6. Avoid a log-in before visitors and bots access “the good stuff.” Log-ins can easily confuse a bot who won’t be able to access quality content hidden behind a log in. Even though users with Google toolbars will be unknowingly suggesting new URLs to be crawled as they surf about, having teasers for the content your monetizing by subscription will help your SEO.

7. Avoid using frames. Horizontal and vertical framesets frameset are commonly used by designers to present more than one page of a site on the screen at the same time. However, frames are also bot traps. They can get in but they can’t get out, making it impossible for them to index a site – at all! Tell your developer to look at using iframes if possible or absolutely necessary.

8. Avoid duplicate title/meta tags. Title/meta tags are a valuable resource for site owners to expand access points to a site. Using title tags ensures that more pages are indexed and listed in Google’s SERPs as distinct links. All good. Unfortunately, too many duplicate title tags on pages in which the content topic hasn’t changed, is redundant and a waste of the bots time. Use tag your pages uniquely and judiciously.

9. Do not keyword stuff. Even though search engines no longer give much weight to keyword tags, keyword stuffing continues. Select 20 to 30 keywords – top-tier and long-tail – and focus on them. Keep keyword density in body text at no more than 3%. The old 5% rule still led to on-site gibberish – obviously these figures vary by competitive landscape.

10. Do not let quality slip – even for a day. Spiders crawl sites with greater frequency and sophistication and index updates are common as changes to a site are implemented. During periods of construction, be sure to keep spiders out of staging areas that have yet to be completed nofollow or block with robots. These works-in-progress may cost you points in the ranking sweepstakes.

Google controls 46% of all searches. Doesn’t it make sense to give this search engine exactly what it wants and delete what it doesn’t want?

Rhetorical question.

Above and beyond the design we also worked to optimize the site’s load and render performance as well as making the server stand up the traffic demands that yoast.com generates.

Hand drawn illustrations, advanced CSS and completely unique styling make this re-design project one we’re very proud of.

This project has been showcased quite a bit on the various design galleries and received numerous mentions from around the blogosphere including:

• 10 Simple and Impressive Design Techniques
• Blog Headers: 20 Great Examples and Best Practices
• Design Spotlight: Yoast