CMS Superhero!

This is nothing to sneeze at: the famous ticker in the Stats section over at Wordpress.com counting how many sites are using the blogging platform has just surpassed the 50 MILLION mark (preferably said in a Dr. Evil tone).   We’re responsible for a over a couple thousand of those, so who knows where they’d be without us?!

Seriously though, we’re really excited about the milestone for a very simple reason:  we adore Wordpress.

Simply put, Wordpress has become a truly remarkable CMS.  Here are 3 good reasons why:

1. Simplicity: Compared to Joomla, Drupal, and the like, Wordpress is extremely easy to use.  Anytime we have a client that is unsure of which platform to use and is unfamiliar with Content Management Systems, we guide them straight to Wordpress because it’s the only one of the lot that can be picked up within an hour by a complete newbie.  (Special mention should go out to Tumblr, which is actually even easier than Wordpress, but far far more restrictive.)

2. Versatility: Compared to other CMS’s, Wordpress has (by far) the largest collection of developers contributing to it’s development as well as experts that can setup and modify Wordpress sites as needed.  As a result it’s got the most plugins (for everything from SEO to Payment Processing), the best support forums, and the widest variety of  developers able to modify and fix issues.

3. Popularity: You can’t argue with the numbers.  50 million sites is a LOT.  According to Pingdom.com, as of December 2010 there were 255 million websites on the internet. For a single, open-source platform to account for 20% of ALL websites out there is simply astounding – especially considering it’s only been around since 2003.

So a big shout out to Wordpress creator Matt Mullenweg for launching what is quickly becoming the most important Content Management System the web has ever seen.

Thanks SuperMatt!!

In fact, we like the ideas so much we’re going to be recommending them to the rest of our SEO-focused clients going forward.

Gab’s article couldn’t have come at a better time as we’re gearing up to offer a special SEO optimized package as an ordering option. Stay tuned for that.

In case you missed it, you can read Gab’s article here.

With so much choice out there, how do you find the right slicing company for your needs?  Here are PSD To HTML Recommendations to help you along the way:

1. Price Matters.

Why pay more?

When it comes to services, in general you get what you pay for.  If you see a company offering PSD To HTML for $10 per homepage and go for it, don’t be surprised when it comes back looking like it was auto-generated.  In general, coding a PSD homepage into XHTML takes anywhere from 4 to 8 hours of a coder’s work (sometimes more).  As a result, it’s safe to assume that if you’re going to have an actual human being (that is not a slave) coding your work, you’re going to have to pay anywhere from $40 to $300 to get the work done.  Anything lower or higher than that and you’re very likely getting ripped off one way or another.

Of course, even within those price points there’s a wide range of value, which brings me to my next point:

2. Watch Out For Hidden fees.

Are jQuery effects included in the price?  How about Cufon implementation?  Will they also install the files on your server or do they charge extra for that?  Pay close attention to all the little details that may balloon the price a lot more than expected.  The vast majority of service providers out there will sell an extremely basic markup package at extremely low rates just to get the customer in the door, only to suck them dry later.

We’re proud to say we offer all of the above and a whole lot more at our standard rate.  There are never any hidden fees because customers deserve to know what they’re getting into before committing.  Make sure the service provider you go with is upfront with you about their fees.  You do not want to get stuck in a project with a company that keeps adding fees before delivering the work.

3.  Demand Solid Post-Delivery Support.

There’s nothing worse than having your client ask you to change the order of a navigation bar menu, asking your coding provider to get it done, knowing it should take 2 minutes of their time, and realizing several days later that they never got back to you because they didn’t consider it important enough.

Intelligent service providers recognize the value each client brings in terms of repeat business, even if there are occasional post-delivery support nightmares that arise.  To us, post-delivery support is just as important (if not more) as getting a brand new client’s unpaid order out. Make sure the provider you choose feels the same.

Hope this helps!  Of course, you can always order PSD To HTML with us

Not sure what happened here.  Could it be that they didn’t get proper HTML coding done?  Hmmmm…

Here’s to hoping they get it fixed up nice and quick.

With that in mind, here is the first of an on-going series covering things you’ll want to know before hiring a company (or freelancer) to convert your design to HTML.

The Money-Back Guarantee

Most service providers will offer and advertise a “100% Full Money-Back Guarantee”. In fact, if they don’t, you should probably run the other way! What they don’t tell you is that the money-back guarantee is only good so long as no coded files have been delivered to you. Once you receive your actual files, the guarantee is gone.

There is a very simple reason for this: how can the service provider know for sure that you’re not just saying that you’re unsatisfied in order to get your money back, but then using their code behind their backs? In order to avoid this, ethical coders will be very diligent about only providing hosted previews of the work until you’ve given the green light to send the files over, indicating that you’re completely satisfied with the work.

Want to know if a service provider is being honest with you on this? Ask them the following questions:

Q: Do you offer a full money-back guarantee?
A: No – run away!!
A: Yes – next question…

Q: Is the offer good no matter what? Even after the files have been delivered?
A: Yes – run away!! They would not be in business long if they truly did this.
A: No. Once the files are delivered we simply can’t offer the guarantee anymore. However, we send you previews until you are satisfied and always wait for you to give the green light before sending over any files. – proceed with confidence.  They’re being honest and upfront with you.  Bonus points if they assure you that they guarantee post-delivery support until you are fully satisfied.

Does it suck that it sometimes takes a trick question to get to the bottom of whether an HTML coding service is honest or not?  Sure it does, but we all know it’s a jungle online.

If you’re shopping around for a quality HTML / CSS service provider, hope this information helps you make the right decision.

Of course, if you’d like to convert your designs with us, you can rest assured you won’t be disappointed

At the end of May, Google released a list of the 1000 most visited websites and the number of pageviews during April 2010 as measured by DoubleClick’s Ad Planner here. In case you’re wondering how site traffic for this list is measured, you can read the following information posted by Google: here, here, here, here, and here.

The raw data can be dowloaded by logging into Ad Planner and accessing the Lists tab. You can also download the complete list from the link at the bottom of the post. Also included in our file is some additional anlysis I have done, including the % of total pageviews attributable to each website, the ratio of pageviews/unique visitors (to measure how many pages the average visitor accesses) and summaries of the data by the category Google assigned to the website and by TLD.

Some observations about the data:

Observations are from the analysis is done in the excel file available at the bottom of the post. If you don’t want to read through everything, #1-4 and particularly #3 are the most important.

1. The stats exclude Google sites such as Google.com and Youtube.com

2. The stats also appear to exclude adult sites, although one site, game2.com.cn, is categorized as Porn. Not only is it a large Chinese site located at a .cn (and we all know about the Chinese censors), but, at a minimum its images do not appear to be pornographic. As I don’t speak chinese I cannot comment on the content.   Quite a few of the Alexa top 1000 sites are adult in nature, so this is obviously quite the doughnut hole for those interested in the websites with the most traffic, regardless of content.

3. Much was made in the news and blogosphere when the data was released about how Facebook not only led in terms of unique visitors, but also that it had more than 8 times the pageviews of runner-up Yahoo!. What I have not seen mentioned is that Facebook accounts for 44.6% of the pageviews of the DoubleClick Ad Planner Top 1000 Sites for April 2010! By itself Facebook accounts for nearly as many pageviews as the other 999 websites combined!  In fact, Facebook has more pageviews than the next 135 sites ranked by most pageviews and more pageviews than the next 315 sites ranked by unique visitors.

4. Social Networks appear to clearly be the websites people spend the most time on.  The top 7 sites in terms of Page Views-to-Unique Visitors are all Social Networks.  In fact, the top 3 (tuenti.com, kontakte.ru, and facebook.com respectively) have ratios of greater than 1000:1!  That is more than double the top website from any other category and more than 10 times the average of 88.3 (1,276,611,000/14,465,800,000). As a category, the 34 Social Network sites had a Page Views:Unique Visitors ratio of 659:1. People really seem to be enthralled with their Social Networks, so don’t ever let anybody tell you that Social Networks are not an important way to get your message out!

5. In terms of total pageviews, the number 4 position is held by a Russian Social Network, kontakte.ru (although it was “only” 81^st overall by unique visitors). One word: Who?!  Never heard of ‘em!

6. In terms of pageviews, positions 4-7 are non-English websites. Therefore, 4 out of the top 7, 6/13, and 9/18 of the top sites are non-English sites. This does not even account for the fact that 2 of the “English” sites (Facebook and Hi5) are actually multilingual and effectively used in other languages.

7. In terms of tlds .com dominates and accounts for 67.4% of the entries on the list and 81% of the pageviews. However, excluding facebook.com, .com’s % of pageviews falls to 65%. In fact, facebook.com accounts for more than half (55%) the pageviews of the .com sites on the list.

8. The top 10 tlds on the list ranked by 3 different metrics:

- .ne.jp is a surprisingly (to me) popular extension – 10 sites (11^th), 9^th in terms of unique visitors, 16^th in terms of page views.
- .ru has the second most page views by tld
- For all the highly ranked sites with chinese extensions, they appear to have relatively few page views

9. It is interesting to note that even when considering the largest global audiences, cctlds make up 24.1% of the sites and 15.8% of the page views. While .com may be “king” and hold a significant advantage over the other gtlds (global top level domains), cctlds hold a very important part of the traffic. It will be interesting to see if the proportion changes as time goes on.

10. Government websites: According to the list, 7 of the top 1000 websites are .gov websites (6 are US websites and have a .gov tld and 1 is a UK website with a .gov.uk tld). Also according to the list, advertising is available on ca.gov (the California state government website), although I do not see where (this makes me somewhat question the reliability of the data).

That’s it for me. If anybody else decides to take a look, please post anything interesting you find in the comments.

Notes about the data:

a) Items in red were included by me.

b) Although I included a column with % of unique visitors, this is a bit of a misnomer. A single person may be a unique visitor at multiple sites, so this number does not represent the % of people observed that visit the site. Reach is the metric meant to measure the % of Internet users that access the site. The column I included was just meant to make it easy to eyeball numbers.

This isn’t going to be your typical corporate blog, with nothing but announcements of how we’re great and moving forward.  Sure, there will be some of that (after all, we are great and moving forward all the time), but the majority of our entries will look to add value to our readers.

Some of the topics we’ll be regularly revisiting include:

• XHTML and CSS coding tricks, tips, and best practices.
• Web Design tricks, tips, and trends.
• General points of interest to internet professionals.

And of course, how great we are and how we’re always improving in the interest of completing our mission:

To provide web designers around the globe with pixel-perfect XHTML and CSS markup as quickly as possible, leaving them more time and money to focus on better design.

See you soon!