It was a lot of fun to track Google Analytics last year. Since I started writing this blog in mid 2008, traffic to my one-page site has been increasing.

Have a look at the visitors graph:

Can you tell when this blog was launched?

It’s interesting to see the different implications each post had. For instance, one of the first about uppercasing the first letter of a MySQL result value, has brought 313 visitors to this site (through almost as many search phrases) while the one about a Euro conversion rate feed brought none.

As a side note: close to 63% of these visitors used FireFox.

Besides that, bounce rate is at an extremely high 75%. While this is normal since the only thing this site has to offer is that once specific piece of information someone was looking for, it should be fairly easy to have visitors browse through more than one page.

If time was on my side and I would be short on work, that would probably be a fun challenge!

It’s great to use these experiences in other projects though.

You’ve probably always wanted to have a real office to separate your private life from your professional activities.

So yes, you read that right! Besides the fact that it is not actually free, it is all true. Well, it’s also almost for free. Certainly if you look at what you get in return:

• Funny colleagues.
• A magnificent view.
• And of course… Rautemusik!

Don’t hesitate: get your office space in Hasselt (Dutch) while it is still available.

Since the PHP build version became so important with Zend Framework, I made a list of some (on the Belgian market) prominent hosting companies and the PHP version they offer on their shared hosting.

It does not pretend to be a complete list, but rather an alphabetical list of hosting providers I bump or bumped in to once in a while. The PHP version listed is mentioned on their site or, if not on their site, retrieved through their support.

(*) they offered to install any version required.

As you can see, Combell is worst for PHP developers. There currently is also no way to get any higher version with them. It is a sad thing.

Besides them, only Weble mentions (luckily a proper) full version number on their site. Although customers that tend to find the complete PHP version number important are probably a (growing) minority, it can make a sale.

Also, I’m surprised by the cheapest one, One. It’s the only “big” one that offers a recent version.

Please, don’t hesitate to add any others to the list.

I try to enforce Zend Framework for every new project started. If not in the requirements section of my quote, it is not that hard to convince a client of its advantages.

Tell a client how Zend Framework

• improves stability,
• lowers development time

and in particular

• makes them less dependent on you as other ZF developers can pick up projects you started a lot easier.

Now, please don’t start to think about job security. Just don’t.

But, Zend Framework has a fairly high PHP version requirement. Since version 1.7 Zend has quietly changed the requirements to PHP 5.2.4. In respect of a client’s (shared) hosting, this can be the most difficult part.
This was probably a logical thing to do since the requirements mentioned PHP 5.1.4 until ZF 1.6.2 and pre-5.2.4 versions miss some great features and contain nasty bugs (in reality some ZF components didn’t even run on PHP 5.1.4).

In Belgium however, it is difficult to find a hosting company that supports PHP 5.2.4.

For many self-employed/companies the fiscal year also ends at the end of December and the ones that aren’t near bankruptcy always want to create some extra costs to lower their profit. Some forced shopping (for business related stuff, of course) can be both entertaining and useful.

Who knows. Maybe you’ll save the economy!

I like these:

• Advertising in general, Google Adwords (or similar) in particular. On the PPC advertisement programs (like Adwords), you can increase the funds in your account and use them when they are needed.
• Gifts for your customers. Coupons are nice because they can also be used when needed.
• Training: push yourself to take an exam next year and pick a date now!

And the obvious:

• Hardware (ask your accountant what urgently needs replacement - who else knows best). Don’t forget to recycle the replaced parts!
• Software licenses.
• Pension plans.
• And books of course. One I’m currently reading and highly recommend:
  Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash - highly recommended (although I didn’t finish it yet)
• A Nabaztag.

If you don’t over-spend foolishly, you’ll have the same “problem” next year.

Other tips? Let me know and I’ll add them to the list.

If you live in Belgium, you may get a “private” call once in a while (and no, I do not mean calls from your mistress). I have no idea if it exists in other countries, but these calls appear on your phone with an unknown or hidden phone number.

Some people probably have a solid reason to hide their number and I will respect their choice. But if a business has requested their phone company to hide their number, I am clueless.

Why on earth would they do that?

I have no intention to ever pick up the phone when I receive a “private” call. Never.

If, for some obscure reason, you have such a hidden number and you cannot change it before you start calling, it may be a good idea to leave a voicemail message.

There are some companies (especially in the recruitment sector) that do not get why this may be a smart thing to do. If you are the owner or decision-maker of such a company, I have one small request: please, do everyone a favor and get another job.

You can use Google Analytics in 2 main ways: as a bloated Webalizer or as a list of possible improvements for the site in question (or both of course).

If you just start using it the second way, the number one improvement suggestion that has always been in front of your nose is the list of Top Landing Pages (which you’ll find under “Content” in the menu) and their bounce rate. Keep it sorted by “Entrances” and the only thing you then have to do is pick the page with the highest bounce rate in the top 10. Now fix that page (as clearly something is wrong).

Make sure people that hit that page find ways to lengthen their visit to other parts of the site. Clearly visitors to that page aren’t noticing your navigation or other links.

You can use this knowledge to direct them to the content that you want them to see or to the content that they are looking for. To get a hint of the latter, click on the page in question in your report and click on the “Entrance Keywords” under “Landing Page Optimization”. The list of search keywords used to reach that page, for instance, could set you off in the right direction.

Of course you can continue with other high bounce rate-pages but it may be a good idea to monitor if your changes had any effect first.

The more data available, the more relevant the Top Landing Pages report is. But even if your site only attracts a few visitors per day, just stretch the time span your report covers to have a larger data sample.

Hopefully this helps to improve retention bit by bit.

I came across this while searching for a good currency conversion feed or web-service for Clickini earlier this year.

It’s probably useful in your project too:
http://www.ecb.europa.eu/stats/eurofxref/eurofxref-daily.xml

The European Central Bank updates it once a day (hence, daily) at 14:15 CET (currently GMT +1).

Besides this, they also provide a history since 1999 and various other formats (PDF, CSV and iPhone). Who knows what you can use that for.

Any alternatives?

Finally. May this be the beginning of common sense.

If Guy Kawasaki (yes, the one from the motorcycles) states:

Focus on function, not form. Mea culpa: I love good form. MacBooks, Audis, Graf skates, and Breitling watches.

maybe others will follow and finally wake up.

Read the rest of his post about bootstrapping here.

I always assumed installing Adobe Acrobat was by far the best way to print a Word or Excel document to PDF.

While Acrobat has indeed its advantages, certainly over web-based services like Doc2PDF online, it does have a moderate price tag if you use it only for this purpose.

Because I recently experienced hyperlinks would not be converted properly when printing a Word document as PDF with Acrobat, I decided to look for a dedicated “print to PDF” Office plug-in.

I was surprised: apparently Microsoft initially intended to have a “save as PDF” feature available in Office 2007 by default (a big step for them!). Of course Adobe wasn’t happy with that and forced them to remove it immediately.

Luckily Microsoft has made it freely available as an Office 2007 add-on.

This made me happy as hyperlinks are now properly converted.