Systems Gorilla

Value of Key Words in Google Places

Phil Snyder — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 02:23:14 +0000

In the quest to optimize visibility for one’s website, Google Places can easily be ignored. After all, Google Places is separate from your actual website and seems a bit redundant. However, for getting your website in the top ranking for your town, Google Places is invaluable.

My company, ProPack Inc, is a 3rd Party Logistics company in Blaine, WA. So I setup a Google Places account for our company and filled in all the information complete with pictures and a YouTube video. One of the thing I was unsure about was the five optional “Key Words”. I filled them in with our generic business functions like “Order Fulfillment” , “Freight Forwarding”, “Northbound Forwarding” , “Southbound Forwarding” and “Cross Docks”. I completed the Google Places account, linked it to our website and went on to other projects.

A month later after we’d relaunched our new site I was testing out different search criteria in Google. I was finding that when I searched for “Warehousing in Blaine WA” we were no where on the first page. Likely when I searched for Freight Forwarding a whole list of other businesses beat us out to the top stop. The only search we did well with was “Order Fulfillment”.

This was because I was not thorough with the choices of my key words. Northbound Forwarding, Southbound Forwarding and Cross Dock mean very little outside of our business. Plus other businesses in Blaine were advertising “Freight Forwarding Services” instead of just “Freight Forwarding”. I was working with the wrong terms.

So I changed my key words to “Warehousing Service”, “Logistics Service”, “Freight Forwarding Service”, “Order Fulfillment” and “Supply Chain”. Now we are showing up in the two one or two spot for our town in all these categories.

Your five key words in Google Places are invaluable. Choose them carefully and make sure you’re all setup. It can be a quick 30 minute way to enhance the visibility of your site online.

Error 404 – Redirect in IIS 7

Phil Snyder — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 03:34:30 +0000

The 404 – Page Not Found error is the most common encountered page error within a website. The error occurs when a url path is requested that does not exist within a site’s architecture. This could be due to an old link to a page that does not exist anymore, a bad link, or a user trying to type in the url incorrectly. However it occurs, it is essential for your site to catch the error and display and a message within the context of your site instead of showing the default full screen server message.

If users see a nice message saying “We sorry but the page you’re looking for does not exist. Please click here to return to the home page” they will be more likely to stay on your site and continue navigating. The goal is that your error page exists within your master page structure with your current header, footer and side bar.

I recently learned how to set this up in Windows Server 2008 RS’s IIS 7.

First create error pages to display the 404 and other related error messages. These pages should list the error code, description and redirect your user back to the home page. I did error pages for error codes 401, 403, 404, 405, 406, 412, 500, 401 and 502.
Log into your Windows Server 2008 RS instance and open “Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager”.
Select your website from the server/sites directory
Under IIS open the “Error Pages” icon
A list of error messages are displayed. The errors I listed in step 1 are setup with full screen server error pages by default. Double click on the 404 code.
Select the middle option, “Execute a URL on this site” and enter in the relative path to your custom error message. For mine I put “/server-errors/404-not-found.aspx”.
Click OK.
Setup the paths to your other error pages for the remaining error codes.

That’s all that needs to be done. You can test the custom pages by navigating to your site and changing a single character in one of your page names. You will be redirected to your error page.

Check this out on my new site: www.propack.com. Try entering in www.propack.com/test. You’ll be redirected to my 404 error page.

Google Analytics

Phil Snyder — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 04:38:36 +0000

Signed up for Google Analytics this past Monday to monitor traffic on our newly launched website. It’s very easy to sign up, straightforward to set up and provides a vast array of data on traffic quantity and patterns.

To sign up:

1) Start a Google account. A Gmail account will work.

2) Go to www.google.com/analytics and sign up.

3) Insert the below code within the tag of each page you’d like Google to track. In my case I had one .master page in my .Net project in which all other pages connected. Thus I only needed to put the code into my side once.

4) Your’re done.

Google appears to update its stats once per day. So you’ll need to wait until the next day to start getting information.

That’s it.

DNS Routing

Phil Snyder — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 04:28:56 +0000

After six weeks of work we launched our new website today. Or by launching I mean to say I had our ISP reroute DNS from our old site to our new internally hosted site. I was told this would take a few hours to a day or so. However, 12 hours later I was still not getting our new site up at work.

So I did some research and DNS or (Domain Name System) can take up to 72 hours to reroute. After posting on Facebook, Twitter and our blog that we’d be going live at 12:00 PM Tuesday I’m feeling a little taken back. Guess I should have done my homework before making those statements.

Live and learn. This how we get experience in the Systems Gorilla world.

Looking for Content from Others

Phil Snyder — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 04:33:35 +0000

Our new website launches tomorrow. It’s been a long but rewarding six weeks. One of the things I’ve learned is that it is exceedingly difficult to get others in my company to contribute content. Sure I’m able to get verbal feedback on the site, but to get someone to write content down and email it to me is a rare gift.

I did get a few paragraphs of info from our president this afternoon, and I have had some input from our Customer Service and Fulfillment managers. These all helped a lot. But I found myself doing 95% percent of the writing.

This is not all bad. There really needs to be some level of content so others can see what’s there and provide their feedback. And I must admit that I received more input, feedback and content than my pessimistic side expected. So it was not all that bad.

But the lesson here is that you should not completely rely on others to provide you with content for your site. If you do so you might be waiting a very long time and never actually get your project finished.

Smart Phone Sales Higher Than Personal Computer Sales

Phil Snyder — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 16:43:01 +0000

I read an interesting blog post by an old friend of mine about smartphone shipments outperforming PC shipment in the fourth quarter of last year.

http://techcraver.com/2011/02/09/finally-more-smartphones-sold-than-pcs/

The author made a good point about there not being nearly the level of innovation in PCs over the last half decade as with smartphones. To put this in perspective just think about the changes in smartphone technology form right before the iPhone came out almost four years ago until now. Then think about what’s changed with personal computers.

Each year I’m excited to see what’s new with the newest iPhone and Android operating system. Other than Windows 7, nothing’s really changed on the PC front from what I’ve seen. Add into the mix last year’s launch of the iPad and the firestorm of new tablets that followed and you have a whole lot of innovation in the non-PC arena.

PC’s are where we do our work. They are no longer cool and sexy. Bring on the smartphones and tablets.

The New Facebook Page Setup

Phil Snyder — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 03:41:19 +0000

A few days ago Facebook updated their pages functionality. Now page administrators can actually use Facebook as their pages. I have a company page that I setup a year ago and just recently took live. One of the challenges I faced was drawing attention to the page. Now I can take on the identity of the page to comment on and like other pages. This is a huge vehicle for expanding the visibility of your company page on Facebook.

To assume the identify of your page on Facebook first login, then click on “Account” and select “Use Facebook as Page”.

After you switch, Facebook will display the following message and ask if you want to take a tour:

“You can get notifications about activity on your page, see stories from the pages you like in your news feed, and interact with other pages as your page.”

Take the tour – it’s worth it.

365 Days of Blogging

Phil Snyder — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 18:04:03 +0000

It was this day a year ago that I published my first post on SystemsGorilla. Its been an interesting experience trying to update the blog each and everyday without exception. I’ve proved to myself that I could do it and I’ve learned that updating your blog everyday is not the best approach to gaining a strong reader base.

It’s all about content over quantity. I’ve focussed on quantity. But because I do this everyday I get a little shallow on content. Spending more time researching one’s blog post and ensuring that the content of the post is relevant to others is much more important than simply posting.

However, I did win in the fact that I showed that I could be consistent. So that’s at least something. But it turned this blog more into a journal instead of a source for information.

So what does this mean moving forward? Don’t know at this point. I enjoy blogging and would like to continue everyday. However, I might hold off a little and work on my content. So we might be looking more into the twice a week range.

We shall see.

The Home Page

Phil Snyder — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 19:02:43 +0000

Our new website is now complete… Or at least in the sense that the structure is in place and all the pages have some level of content.

Finished up the home page of our site today. Left it for the end mainly because I was unsure as to exactly what content it should contain. After doing some research on other fulfillment sites I got some ideas and put something rough together. It will work for now but will need to be revamped over the weekend.

The home page of any site is vitally important. It’s what people see first. It’s what Google focusses in on. If it doesn’t work then viewers are unlikely to dig deeper into other areas of your site.

Fortunately due to the way I’ve structured our site there are side bars with content on our questionnaire, tracking packages, exchange rates, border times and fuel surcharges. As well we have feeds from our Twitter and Blogs. In addition at the top we have our logo, links, menu bar and a centered picture that changes based on the section of the site. So really the only thing I needed to add to complete our home page was some content.

Its nice having the feeling that the rough draft of our site is finished. Now there is just another 100 hours or so of polishing…

Check out the temp version at http://66.243.190.183/

Validating an ASP:TextBox in C#

Phil Snyder — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 18:37:14 +0000

In finishing off my questionnaire for our new website this evening I was faced with the challenge of validating a large number of ASP:TextBox(s) which needed to contain positive integers between 1 and 100. Throughout the entire questionnaire there were around 80 of these boxes. Thus writing separate code for each instance would have been time consuming and inefficient.

So I created a private function to call for each of 80 validation checks:

private int ValidatePercentBox(TextBox txtPercentBox, string sFieldName)

{

//Declare the integer i

int i;

//If the field is blank return 0

if (txtPercentBox.Text.Trim().Length == 0)

{

i = 0;

}

//Validate that the field contains an integer

else if (!int.TryParse(txtPercentBox.Text.Trim().ToString(), out i))

{

txtPercentBox.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Orange;

btlErrorMessages.Items.Add(string.Format(@”{0} % Must be an Integer (1-100)”, sFieldName));

i = -1;

}

//Validate that the field is not negative

else if (i < 0)

{

txtPercentBox.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Orange;

btlErrorMessages.Items.Add(string.Format(@”{0} % Must be a Postive Integer (1-100)”, sFieldName));

i = -1;

}

//Validate that the field is less than 100

else if (i > 100)

{

txtPercentBox.BackColor = System.Drawing.Color.Orange;

btlErrorMessages.Items.Add(string.Format(@”{0} % Cannot be Greater Than 100 (1-100)”, sFieldName));

i = -1;

}

return i;

}

This code serves four purposes:

It checks if the field is blank and returns a “0″ value
It checks that the field contains a proper integer. i.e. “70″
It checks that the field is not negative
It checks that the field is less than or equal to 100

This function returns a correct integer “0-100″ if the field is validated and a “-1″ if the validation fails. The TextBoxes I’m validating are in groups whose total is supposed to add up to 100.

By creating this code in one function I was able to save not having to recreate it for all 80 fields; which would have taken up a considerable amount of code. While it took time to create this separate function, it saved a lot of time overall. A classic example of spending a little extra time up front to save in the long run.