Building a Lean, Mean, Quick, Web Machine!

Building a website can be a time consuming process. If you use the wrong kind of assets in building your site, it will become a exercise in patience and anger management. Here is a few simple tips to keep that site light on its feet, easy to build, troubleshoot, and maintain.


Small pages = Fast pages

The art of building a site that loads quickly and is quick to transition is a tricky one. no matter a persons connection speed there is always content to download. How frustrating is it when you go to a page you want to view only to have to wait sometimes, what seems like forever, for content to load. We have all been there. (modem era anyone?) Do your viewers a favor, keep those pages small no more than a couple hundred kb. (yes you can still have images and content and keep it that small)

WordPress for Websites & the 7 plugins you will need.

WordPress has become a increasingly popular method to create a website due to its ease of use, fantastic and helpful developer community, and the sheer number of high-quality free modules and plug-ins that can add fantastic features and security to your website. Here is list of the seven I recommend everyone start with.  

Akismet Spam Protection
Akismet is a spam filter plugin for comments. It is automatically installed with WordPress, so you simply need to go to your WP-Admin Dashboard and click on Plugins, find Akismet in the list and click Activate. A message will appear asking for your WordPress.com API key, simply click the link and create a WordPress.com account and then copy and paste the key back into your Dashboard.
 
Quick Cache
When a page is accessed on your site, WordPress performs some database lookups and executes a bunch of code. Ordinarily this isn’t a problem, however if you happen to have a lot of traffic all at once, this can slow your site right down. Quick Cache is a plugin that caches your pages periodically to dramatically reduce the load on the WordPress server. You can find the plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quick-cache/
Once installed, click on Plugins in the Dashboard and click Activate. You then need to click on Options in the dashboard menu and find WP-Cache in the menu. This leads you to a page where you can enable the caching. Don’t enable just yet, because it’s best to do this after you install your theme and have everything working, otherwise you can sometimes have trouble testing changes.
Note that to get WP-Cache working you may need to create some directories for it to write to. The plugin will give you details of what to do.

Where Are My Web Stats?

Web stats are an easy way to track your Region site and see if your hard work is getting you the traffic you want. If your Region’s website is hosted with a provider like Go Daddy or Yahoo, you might already have site statics on your site (or available for activation). If you don’t know where to find your site statistics, you can contact your hosting provider and they will show you how to access it.

If you don’t have access to site statistics through your provider, you can use Google Analytics. All you need is a Google account to get started. Once you set up your account, they’ll give you a code that you paste into the header section of your website. You’ll have to place the code on every page you want to track. It takes about 24 hours for statistics to start showing up in your account after you install the code.

Google Analytics is a comprehensive and free tracking solution. You can view visits, unique visits, browser types, what country the visitor is from, how long they spend on your site and much more. By installing analytics, you can see which pages are your most popular and which ones you should spruce up or make easier to find. It can show you what topics people are interested in and what keywords people are using to search for your Region.

You can learn more about how to add Google Analytics to your website here.

If you have any questions about how analytics or stats work, ask away in the comments!