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3D rendering, design, media, and technology news.
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Redesigning LunarLog.

As of today, Lunarlog has been redesigned and I think it’s a minimalist design that I’m finally comfortable with – one that won’t be changing in the foreseeable future. It’s meant to coincide with my new coding and rendering/illustration additions to my main website, LunarStudio. Below, I’ll discuss some of my previous issues that are now resolved, as well as talking about some of the newer and more interesting features.

There were a few problems with my previous site that I needed to address:

  1. WordPress updates. It seemed as if there was a new WP update every month, and every other time they released a new security fix, some of the code or design would break. As a result, I would be forced to go hunt down the problem and try to correct it. Anyone that runs a WP site knows what I’m talking about. Proper maintenance can be a full-time job in of itself. By trying to keep it simple, it’s hopefully one less thing to worry about.
  2. The old design was ugly. It started off on a good note, but my changing things around introduced more of a design mess over time. Add to that other real-life obligations, and I was finding less time to make corrections. If the design is simple, one can focus more on the topics at-hand than trying to be flashy. I spent more time avoiding looking at the previous site, because each time I visited it, I saw things that needed to be changed. Hopefully this will lead to more time spent writing now.
  3. I think a website’s design needs to reflect a person’s skills to a degree. If you’re going to call yourself a designer, then I think that it’s only right that the design of other things you create needs to reflect your attention to detail. No one in their right mind is going to hire a messy painter and I think this was the case with the previous design. While I wasn’t “messy” per se, it looked terrible to me. Some people might lack the programming skills and that is a valid excuse, but at that point they should spend the time seek out a design template, a website that creates websites (Wix is one service that comes to mind), or find someone that knows what they are doing.
  4. Simplicity in design for usability. A clean design appeals to people’s senses better. It makes things easier to read, and also tends to load faster. People need to find content without adding strain.

Here are some of the underlying changes:

  1. Various plugins were removed. They either caused issues over time, or became unnecessary. For example, the rel=”nofollow” attribute (originally introduced by Google) is no longer taken into account. Not only does removing some of these extensions/plugins improve speed and performance, but it can also lead to higher search engine rankings now that Google factors website loading speed into their algorithms.
  2. Updated to some HTML5 standards. While HTML5 is still undergoing some changes, the markup is meant to bring the various methods together, and to make the code easier to read and navigate for both the search engines and the coders/programmers. I strongly speculate that this results in higher search engine ranking. I highly doubt that this website validates (I don’t want to check lol), but that’s pretty much going to be the case with any new language or markup.
  3. A plugin for Google +, Twitter Followers, and Facebook Likes was introduced so people can denote topics and articles of interest to Social Networking sites. The search engines are now factoring these items of popularity as an additional method of measuring interest, usefulness, and relevancy.
  4. New fonts are now available for the web versus the traditional eight or 10 (I forget.) It’s every web designer’s wildest dream. Here’s a list of over 247 font families from Google! I’m using two of them here.
  5. A relatively new and cutting-edge feature was implemented just last month by Google called Google Authorship. You can insert HTML5 Rich Snippets (rel=”author”) into your websites, both dynamic (such as blogs) and static (such as my other website LunarStudio) that connects your websites to your Social Networking profile – in particular Google Plus and LunarStudio. That in of itself isn’t a new concept, but what’s really cool about this new feature is that you’ll start to notice people’s profile pictures right next to search engine results over the next few months. So, let’s say someone searches for “Architectural Renderings” in Google and I’m in the Top 10 (the last I checked, LunarStudio was #1 out of close to a million results *wink*), my profile picture helps make my website become even more noticeable. This in turn should lead to increased business. The only problem is that these attributes are so new, that there are no extensions/plugins to enable this so it has to be entered by hand. To add to the mess, people are giving conflicting methods as to how-to implement it. On top of that, Google hasn’t simplified the process (although they’re trying) and keeps changing things. It’s a guessing game as to when the results should take effect. People who arrive early to the game might reap the benefits of higher search engine visibility, although it shouldn’t factor into higher SERPs at the present time. I’m personally excited about this because it’s so new, that’s there’s only a small handful of people writing about this technique presently. It’s fun to figure out new things.

If anyone is interested in some of these methods, please let me know. I’m going to be busy over the next few weeks, but I’ll try to respond to the best of my ability.

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3D rendering, design, media, and technology news.
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The Responsibilities of Social Networks and Search Engines

I’ve spent the last two weeks redoing some of my websites, and a lot of that time was spent thinking about how we as a society receive our information. While some of these tools such as Google and Facebook are innovative and help solve a lot of issues, these companies have the power to shape our worldviews rapidly, for better or worse. In many ways, they are taking the place of our traditional news cycles. There’s an inherent danger of manipulation if left-unchecked – and they have been manipulating the information we receive. Also, money talks to a lot of people and these companies have no shortage of cash.

This video was brought to my attention. While it’s nothing new to some of us (I’m involved with the field), I think it’s a topic most people don’t give much thought. I couldn’t have phrased it better and thought I’d throw it out there:

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The First Photograph of a Human Article Traffic

I was wondering what the traffic would be like to the previous article regarding the Colorized Boulevard du Temple by Daguerre but waited until midnight 12 am, EST to check the stats. I thought it would generate some interest, but it came as a bit of a shock:

First Photograph of a Human Site Stats

First Photograph of a Human Site Stats

Links were coming in from NPR, The Atlantic, and Gizmodo. The good news is this website still works under full-load. The bad news might be the bill lol…

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LunarStudio Website and Gallery Updates 2010

I’d like to announce that I’ve made some major updates to the LunarStudio Architectural Renderings website recently. While the overall layout of LunarStudio has remained the same, there are a lot of new images as well other things which changed  “underneath the hood.” Most importantly, I finally found the time to add close to 50 new images to the website and have applied some minor color tweaks and adjustments to most of the existing architectural renderings that were previously there. This whole process took several days to complete.

For existing clients, this should come as fantastic news. I don’t think most of them realize what this means. I often joke that I should create their renderings for free, and charge to post their images to my website. Due to the high amount of traffic that flows through the LunarStudio website, this is free advertising and also helps boost their own website rankings as well. In hiring LunarStudio, you’re essentially more than quadrupling your visibility to the rest of the world. I often laugh when clients haggle over several hundred dollars because that same expenditure may come back to them a hundred times over.

Updating LunarStudio has always been tricky. Since LunarStudio ranks highly for a couple of thousand search terms in all three major search engines, changing the slightest word or even adding content can push search rankings up and down drastically that could result in lost revenue. Something which seems fairly straight-forward such as adding a single image needs to be carefully examined prior to being uploaded, then the accompanying text needs to be massaged in order to “try” to achieve optimal results. Multiply this by several hundred images, and you have a big potential mess on your hands – especially if you screw up a single character. For this reason, I’ve forced myself to keep the overall design and layout of LunarStudio the same over the years. I’ve avoided adding additional text. As much as I am tempted to redesign the look and feel for something “fresher”, I often have to remind myself that I’m playing with dynamite. Besides, as much as LunarStudio has been imitated over the years (one of the first non-Flash websites to be perfectly centered on-screen), I still think it holds a lot of character.

For an example of the current sites out on the Internet copying LunarStudio, check out the following link: www.copyscape.com. Keep in mind, this changes every month (sometimes more) but there’s always someone out there…

I often think people take the “search engine” itself for granted. It’s often viewed as a seamless and organic process: type in what you’re looking for and out pops the results. However, I’ve read studies on search engine usage and the average person doesn’t look past the first 10 items that turn up on an average search. That means if you don’t place within the top 10 of any search engine result, there’s a good chance that your website will not be seen or even noticed. From a marketing perspective, that’s an absolute disaster. If you create a website, you should have every interest in wanting it to achieve high-rankings as that can help others as well as bring in additional revenue. If you don’t, then you will be stuck with the traditional method of “word-of-mouth” and having to resort to other campaigns to drive interest to your work.

There are a number of things which happen “behind the curtains” of search engine results. The engines vary slightly as the major companies have various patents and copyrights on their code and complex mathematical formulas. On top of the code differences, a company such as Google has been known to modify their search engine algorithm close to a thousand times in a single year! Each time they make these changes, your website can jump up and down the ranks. They often keep these methods secret because they don’t want people intentionally spamming their search results and providing irrelevant information. For the sake of this article, I will not go into the topic of search engines and optimization simply because I could probably write a whole book on the topic. It can be a fun game to play, but you have to have time as well as patience.

For those interested, here is a list of items that were changed as of 10/25/10:

  1. All thumbnails (several hundred) were manually changed from biege to full color.
  2. Thumbnail hovers were all brightened with an overlay of white set to 50% opacity. I could have used a JavaScript, but again this would probably have an impact on rankings.
  3. Canonical rules enforced versus head tags. Some pages were splitting rank by having trailing slashes and non-trailing slashes after their URLs. Depending on what happens over the course of the next week, I may keep this.
  4. Close to 50 new images and 100 thumbnails were added to various categories. This is most of my work over the course of the year, however there are still a number of items which cannot be posted per contractual obligations, quality (sometimes I’m given limited time and resources), and others which are still in progress.
  5. The majority of images were slightly readjusted concerning color balance, exposure, and saturation.
  6. Keywords and titles added to all of the new image sections.
  7. Copyrights were updated.
  8. Updated manual sitemap.
  9. Updated Google and Yahoo! sitemaps.

This is on my “to-do” list:

  1. I may implement MaxCDN (Content Delivery Network) to help boost search engine rankings and also speed up the delivery of images to the viewer.
  2. As a result of adding a CDN, that may impact the sitemaps mentioned above.
  3. As a result of adding a CDN, that may also create a bigger mess by turning up Page 404s – file not found errors which would all have to be manually redirected. When you’re talking several thousands of links, this can be a very tedious process.*
  4. Add additional images.

All of this being said, please let me know if you have any comments or questions regarding the updated website. In particular, I’m interested in comments regarding quality, speed, and usability. I’d really appreciate your feedback.

For more information, please visit: www.lunarstudio.com

*If anyone has any tips regarding implementing the CDN and avoiding the 404’s and redirects, please let me know!

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MightyFunk Design News

I decided late last week to revise a website that I had lying around for some time and more or less finished it today. Years ago, I had created LunarLog to be the LunarStudio blog. Instead of blogging on-topic, I found myself over time writing miscellaneous pieces and posts. I decided that I needed a new blog, MightyFunk to handle some of my more off-color topics. But with main architectural rendering business running the show, I didn’t have much time to jump from work to blog to blog. MightyFunk was mostly just standing still without any new content. Keeping in touch with my friends via Facebook in some ways put the proverbial “final nail in the coffin.”

This complete website revision will hopefully bring new life to an older stagnant blog without completely alienating my previous audience. I’m really excited because MightyFunk now serves design-related news excerpts from some of the best design-related websites and blogs I could find on the Internet. I wanted my own comprehensive place instead of a RSS reader that I could go visit, and quickly skim the headlines for new, interesting design-related articles. I felt that sharing my own personal list (which numbers close to a hundred) would be beneficial to the entire community.

My new aggregator is working  much better than expected. I kept the overall website design simple because I wanted it to be primarily a news source for readers, and didn’t want flashy graphics and backgrounds to interrupt their reading. Instead, the articles would do most of the talking for them.

I think it’s a win-win situation for all the websites involved. A common misconception is that Google penalizes websites for duplicate content from a spam perspective. It actually doesn’t. In fact, having these excerpts on MightyFunk lead back to the original author websites helps promote their work, adds a significant amount of backlinks which can improve search engine rankings, increases their readership, and can also lead to increased revenue (if that’s part of their goal.)

From a technological perspective, the website is very plain. All the text and images are pulled from RSS feeds which can be found throughout the web. The images themselves are off-loaded onto a Content Delivery Network (CDN) so that traffic spikes will not impact the original author websites. Plus the CDN (I’m currently using MaxCDN) also works to help spread the loads throughout the country which ends up speeding up the website which Google has hinted at improving search engine results.

My main concern right now is to prevent duplicate feeds coming into MightyFunk. I’ve set up some macros and cron jobs to help eliminate these duplicate posts, but a few always manage to still get through. While I’m not (nor anyone else) is going to get penalized for these duplicate excerpts, it still remains somewhat unsightly from a readership perspective. I think I have it currently set up to remove duplicate feeds every 1/2 hour and it will need to be tweaked more over time. On the other hand, it would be even better if someone could come up with a plugin which would filter out duplicates even before they went to post. If I was capable of writing such a thing, I would.

Last but not least, I hope that posting 50 excerpts per page is a reasonable figure for most people. Because the list is fairly large, I didn’t want people to have to jump from page to page constantly. Most of us are on decent Internet connections. I’m privileged with a 50 mb/s stream here so the load time is minimal, which makes my testing page load-time more difficult for others.

If you have any comments or advice regarding the new MightyFunk Design News website, I’d be happy to hear from you. As always, links back are always greatly appreciated.

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3D rendering, design, media, and technology news.
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Outsourcing Website Design – Part 1

Introduction

Anyone that knows me knows that I’m not a big fan of outsourcing to imbalanced economies. I think it takes away high-tech jobs when the playing field isn’t level – and with the new “global” economy, the balance is far from being fair. I feel that there needs to be some throttling to the drain versus letting the flood gates wide open. But seeing that it is the way that it is, I decided to put my money where my mouth is.

For your information, this test is conducted on my own project and coming out of my own pocket. I am not taking any of my client’s work and sending it overseas. The risk and burden is completely on me.

For a few years now, I’ve considered taking my main website, LunarStudio and have it converted over to a WordPress site. LunarStudio actually predates most blogging/content management systems. It’s one of the first sites that was perfectly centered without the use of Flash – I know it was an unusual design at the time because I had to design it myself with no code to reference. Over the years, it has climbed high up on the search engine rankings and the format has been copied repeatedly. I’ve been hesitant to redesign the site because it is ranked so highly. In theory, the new WordPress site would like identical to the way it currently looks. I’d benefit from the WordPress conversion due to easier access to additional plugins such as metrics, forms, etc. The biggest benefit would be in my ability to update the website with newer work. As of now, it’s a labor-intensive manual process of resizing my images to several sizes, creating two separate thumbnails, watermarking, copying code, pasting, entering keywords, linking to other images, saving, then uploading. To be frank, it’s a royal pain in the ass. I would rather be able to just simply upload and not have to think about it.

The Scenario

Now, I could code the new template myself, but it would probably take a few days in order to do things right. There’s a lot of things which happen “under the hood” since it is mostly gallery and little text. This would have to be preserved. Also, I’m not too familiar with WordPress galleries and how that whole structure works. I’m sure I could figure it out, but that would take some additional time.

A few days ago, I started looking online for any easy suggestions as to how to convert a site over to WordPress as well as some pre-existing galleries for reference. At the top of the results were some links from a website called freelancer.com. I saw that another person had asked if anyone could perform a conversion for him, and I noted that the rates were extremely low. People were bidding in the $50-$200 range.One “freelancer” had over 150 10-star ratings and was willing to do this guy’s work for $75. I couldn’t help but think, “glad I’m not in website design…” The fact is that no one in the United States can compete with rates that low for a few days worth of work.

I couldn’t help but think, “well I can waste three days of my time or make it somebody else’s problem.” I’ve had a rather busy month of work and simply needed a break.

Now, I don’t feel bad about giving somebody that job overseas. The last I checked, the average salary pre-global economic meltdown in India was $3.50/hour US. Multiply that by eight hours and that gives you $28/day or $84 for three days. Keep in mind that a loaf of bread over there probably costs 15 cents compared to $2.50 here. In some other countries, $100 is more than some people make in entire month. My point is that money is relative to the cost of living depending on where you live. They may be doing pretty well for themselves all things considered.

So I signed up for freelancer.com and decided to give it a test. I added $150 to the account and posted the job. It read:

Description

Hi. I need parts of my static website, www.lunarstudio.com converted over to a WordPress template. I know WordPress fairly well, but I do not have the time to do this myself.

The pages which needed to become a template are the following:
https://www.lunarstudio.com/information/clients.html
https://www.lunarstudio.com/portfolio/architectural-renderings-commercial-interior.html
https://www.lunarstudio.com/information/about-us.html

You can probably use Flexi Pages Widget (unless you have a better suggestion) for the left-side Navbar, even a basic online template creator for the overall page structure, and a gallery plugin for the gallery page. Lightbox Plus is to be used for the lightbox.

I’d like it to be simple to use, clean, and retain all of my underlying SEO structure. I should be able to easily reuse these pages and insert my own information later. SEO is important!

Thank you and good luck bidding!

-Charles

Enter The Freelancer – 1st Day

I immediately received a reply from an individual in Pakistan regarding my project. He had close to 65 10-star ratings and the reviews were nothing short of stellar. I figured, “what could possibly go wrong, especially for that kind of money?” I confirmed him and he added me to messenger.

Within the first few minutes of us connecting, I was barraged with a two hour question and answer session.

I told him in the very beginning that it was fairly simple – “take website. Make website WordPress.”

But for whatever reason, that simple concept seemed to get lost in translation.I wondered why he even took the job as I thought I was pretty clear in the job description.

Questions aside, I was anxious to get moving along on this. I set up a dummy website with a WordPress install that he could work on. I gave him author status, an email address, and FTP access.

On top of all that, he suddenly insisted on having access to the database which made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Now, if you know WordPress, there’s absolutely no reason why you need access to the database unless you are coding a plugin by hand. I wasn’t asking him to do that. I figured, “well, maybe he knows something that I don’t.”

So while I’m setting up all his access rights, he keeps on writing – asking me if I had things set up for him yet. Now he’s starting to get on my nerves.

Then he asks, “can you send me the money now?”

I replied, “what?!?”

“This is our first time working – I want to make sure you will pay.”

“Okay, let me check. Okay, I have it. I’m going to bed now. Talk to you tomorrow – I look forward to working with you.”

For $140 and considering that he had all those ratings, I didn’t want to sit there and argue with him. He already killed enough time, so I looked into freelancer.com a little closer and noticed that there was an escrow option.

I asked, “are you fine with me putting it into escrow?”

“Yes, that’s fine. Did you send me that information?”

“Yes I sent the access information to your email.”

And he hops offline.

Exit The Freelancer – 2nd Day

On the second day, I wake up, pour myself a cup of coffee, and hop on my computer to check emails. My computer automatically logs me on to messenger.

My new Pakistani friend starts to write immediately.

“Charles, I misquoted you. This is a lot more work than I expected.”

“If you can, perhaps you can put more money in my account. Of course this is not a requirement.”

A sinking feeling starts to come about.

I answer with silence and now I’m starting to get a little peeved.

A few minutes later he writes again, “I need access to your main lunarstudio website.”

Now I’m beginning to realize this guy is simply incompetent. I write back, “what?!? Why the heck do you need that? Just open up a browser, right-click and save as. No, you’re not getting access to my main website. No one does.”

“Okay okay okay.”

A couple of minutes later, he writes – “Okay – check your wordpress website. I have completed a page.”

I’m thinking, well he’s fast. I hop onto the blog which I set up for him to work on and it’s the default WordPress installation theme. The only thing he changed was to stick one of my pictures into the body. So I’m starting to think, well it’s probably a browser cache issue. So I start cleaning out my cache but nothing is changing. So I write him:

“It doesn’t look anything like my website!”

“Oh Charles, you told me not to worry about design.”

“I said, the design has already been created by me – all you needed to do is copy it…”

So I hop back on Freelancer.com and now I’m dead set on canceling this moron. I notice that the money I put into escrow has disappeared. Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out how and where the cancel button is.

He writes, “are you there?”

“Yeah – I’m here. I’m trying to figure out how to cancel you.”

“Okay okay okay. That is fine.”

“Where the hell is my money by the way? You took it out?!?”

“Yes but I can refund you right away. It’s done.”

On to Round Two

Fortunately, he did manage to refund me. While I haven’t posted all of our chat, I think he got the hint that I wasn’t going to play games with him. If he didn’t, I was going to trash his reviews. So the money is back in the account and I figured I’d give it another shot – this time I was going to carefully look through people’s portfolios and wait a few days before selecting someone.

Judging by my first day’s experience, working with this guy has been nothing short of a nightmare. Sure, he speaks some english. I can’t imagine working with someone that knows half as much. I don’t how much of it was actually miscommunication, how much of it was stupidity, and how much of it was him trying to scam. Asking for access to my database – that still has me puzzled. I did lock him into one container but as soon as I canceled, I removed all of his permissions. Was he trying to hijack my website to hold it ransom or did he simply get in over his head? I just don’t see how this guy could have 65 10-star ratings.

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Website Traffic

I’ve taken some screenshots of various logs and statistics regarding this website that I thought might be of some interest. Keep in mind that I switched hosts roughly a week ago in-between “real” work and toying around with a new setup. I haven’t really focused any energy into really promoting my websites – my philosophy is that if they rank great, then fantastic. If they don’t, then I have other things to do. Either way, monitoring traffic is still is a fun thing to do. I get a kick out of seeing if certain terms can rank in Google.

With this website, I’ve come across some interesting and unusual results:

Search engine rankings

Search Engine Rankings for Lunarlog

The screenshot above makes me LOL.

If I put a space between “Lunar” and “Log”, I rank #6 on an average Google search. Then again, I haven’t really tried to push this site.

“I don’t want iGoogle as my homepage.” LOL. I hate to say it but if you are typing that into Google, then you have some serious problems. Nowhere on my site do I even say that. So it’s completely mind-boggling how my article on setting up iGoogle as a homepage even pulls this phrase off the Internet.

“Transferring servers.” This is completely unexpected. In the course of humanity, how many people have typed in “Transferring servers” into a search engine? While it’s not “Tiger Woods” or “Miley Cyrus”, probably a lot. The more generic a term or a phrase is, the harder it is to get up there.

“Setting up an eStore.” Another generic technical phrase. Of course, I wanted this one to rank higher but I didn’t think it would climb to this point. It’ll probably go higher.

Overall Website Traffic

Overall Website Traffic

I’ve masked out a few of my websites. I still haven’t listed other ones. But you can get a brief glimpse into some of my sites (the Knol article shouldn’t be included.)

HDRSource took a slight tumble as I had some issues moving it over to the new server.

LunarStudio has always been high.

The thing to note is Lunarlog’s Visit percentage change. 317.50%. I’ll take it. It’s just going to continue to climb. I’ve posted a couple of links to my articles, but mainly the new server move combined with setup as well as occasionally turning out new articles is what caused this month’s spike.

Analytics Dashboard for Lunarlog

Analytics Dashboard

I know that’s not a whole heck of a lot of visits, but for two days and not having tried – again, I’ll take it. You don’t know if there’s only one person coming to your website, or several hundred. Of course, popular websites can range in the hundreds of thousands.

New visitors are pretty good. I’m more shocked by the returning visitors as the number over half. That means that they’re finding something on this website useful which is good to know.

The average visitor stays 3 minutes. Which means that they’re actually reading something. Wow. Thank you? Now only if you people would start leaving comments!

Average Time on Website

Average Time on Website

Another screenshot of the average time a viewer stays on this site. A few minutes is about the average length of an article so that sounds about right. What I find awesome is that the average viewer is now staying almost 2/3rds longer than the previous month.

International visits by country.

International Visits

This map is showing the amount of visitors by country based on their IP Address. It pretty much follows the “developed” world. Of course, english is my main language so I would expect traffic to be higher within the US. Plus I’m based in the United States.

Website Browser Usage

Website Browser Usage

Traffic from across two days. Most people are using Firefox. The rest of the browsers needs to be considered. The mobile apps such as Android-based phones – well they got cut-off here. I think there was one visitor from it. For now it’s not even worth putting efforts into designing this site to accommodate the more obscure browsers.

MaxCDN Data Transfer

MaxCDN Data Transfer

This graph shows the amount of data getting transferred from MaxCDN cloud servers for Lunarlog since it was implemented on this site within the past week. Basically, MaxCDN is hosting some of my content (mainly images and scripts) across the United States and in some foreign countries to help speed up my websites. I expect it to increase as it starts ranking higher.

MaxCDN City Data Transfers

MaxCDN City Data Transfers

This is a graph showing MaxCDN data transfers from their servers located in various cities. Their data center/servers in New York are getting hit the hardest. This NY server center also feeds the rest of New England.

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Setting up a WordPress Blog Part II

Previously, I had written an article on setting up a WordPress blog. Since then, I have learned a bunch of new tricks and plugins as I’ve gotten to know WordPress a bit better and I wanted to let the readers here know about these changes.

A New Website Host

Recently, I migrated all of my websites from Total Choice Hosting over to a new host at Mediatemple which caused me to rethink my prior WordPress setups. I also purchased a few more websites that I had started to work on. Prior to this post, I had recommended Total Choice Hosting as an easy setup. I still think TCH is still perfect for someone that only hosts one website and is looking to save some money. But if your site is relatively heavy or complicated, then you’ll probably get what you pay for. Please note that I’m not receiving any payment or kickbacks for recommending anything in this article – this is purely based on my own personal preferences and experiences.

There’s quite a few benefits of this migration to Mediatemple:

  1. Speed #1. Gzip compression is supported by their servers. Gzip can increase a website’s load time by 80%.
  2. Speed #2. Their servers are set up for grid computing which means faster processing and better handling of website traffic spikes.
  3. Speed #3. Faster speeds means greater reader retention.
  4. Speed #4. Google has been hinting that they may start looking at speeds as a factor into better rankings with their search services. However, no one outside of Google is 100% sure whether or not they’re currently implementing ranking based upon speed. They usually don’t release specific details for warranted fear of people taking advantage of the system.
  5. Speed #5. I’m fairly certain Mediatemple has newer equipment which probably means more memory and better processors.
  6. Storage. They give you 100 gigabytes worth of storage space which is perfect for hosting my eStore files over at HDRSource.
  7. No reselling. Total Choice Host is a “reseller.” Basically, they look around the country for other hosting companies. They are more or less middlemen. This is just one more layer you have to go through in order to get some questions answered, or if you do encounter issues with your server and need things to get fixed (as I had once.) As a result, they are also often slower to update their technologies (gzip support is one that they are lacking.)
  8. Support. 24/7 telephone tech support in case something goes wrong. They also have one of the best knowledge bases in the industry.
  9. Cost. It’s cheaper for me to host my eight plus websites under one $20 package versus paying $9 separately. You can host up to 100 websites. All of my bills are also consolidated this way.
  10. Consolidated. All of my websites are now under one login and administration panel versus having to manage eight separately.

The negatives to this website hosting transfer:

  1. Slight hiccups when it came to migrating my WordPress databases. This is to be expected and varies on a case-by-case basis depending on which host you are transferring from/to as well as the complexity of your websites. I had some issues regarding image upload paths once everything was transferred. I went manually through my database and had to reset some paths. Now it should all be working again.
  2. Getting used to a new system/administration panel after all of these years. It was a little awkward for a day or two, but I quickly got over that.
  3. I noticed some important emails were getting bounced to spam and have had to keep my eye out to keep that from happening.
  4. Slight intermittent email downtime. That’s the one thing I will say about TCH that was great. In all of the years hosting with them, I probably can count the email outages on 3 fingers. I have faith however that Mediatemple will sort this out as they are a relatively new company.
  5. I miss my website log analysis tracker AWStats. I think you can install it if you wish, but I didn’t have the time to tinker with it. Mediatemple by default currently uses Urchin, which was recently bought out by Google. Google is incorporating Urchin into Google Analytics. Some say Google Analytics is better than Urchin. I personally think it’s great, but the one downfall is that it currently doesn’t track real-time visitor statistics and only appears to update once a day.

I think if you have more than one website and are not looking for a completely dedicated website host, than a host such as MT is the way to go. It’s not perfect, but it’s much faster and the interface is easier to use. If you do decide to go with them, please feel free to drop my name as I could always use a discount (and no, I’m not getting paid to say any of this lol.)

Installing WordPress

If you’re looking to start fresh, then this is fairly straight-forward as they provide a one click install. You just basically create a new name and click a button then wait while the process finishes.

Most of my installations were transfers. I could simply add the domain on MT and copy all of my files over to the new MT folder via FTP. I also had to back up the database from TCH using phpMyAdmin and import it into the MT phpMyAdmin. After that, I needed to update my wp-config.php user name, database name, and password to the new locations. Once WordPress was installed, I manually went through the database file (using Textpad) re-exported from MT to check and fix some URL/file paths. From there, I proceeded to load fresh copies of the plugins I had used.

If you have any troubles or questions regarding a WordPress website transfer, a simple Google search for “WordPress transfer to new domain” or “WordPress database transfer phpmyadmin” will pull up a lot of results and tutorials.

WordPress Themes – Look and Feel

I’m fairly confident you can use WordPress to set up any type of look and feel. It doesn’t even have to look like a blog nor does it even have to contain one. The reason I’m starting to use them is because it’s fast and there’s a lot of free plugins which are available that save a tremendous amount of time and add functionality (such as contact forms, galleries, online stores, search engine optimizations, etc.) If I do want to add a blog later on, then I can do this with relative ease. It’s also easier than having to manually edit code or create something from scratch.

There’s literally thousands of free WordPress themes available on the Internet. All you have to do is to log into your WP admin and go to the themes section. There’s also a lot more available beyond the WordPress site. A search for “WordPress themes” will pull up pages upon pages of documents for you to choose  from.

If none of those themes you find seem to satisfy, there’s even free online “WordPress theme generators” which can take you most of the way there to your final design. I just happened to be checking out a free trial of a paid version yesterday called Artisteer, and I was fairly surprised at how much it would let you do without having to code. I was expecting the worst but came away thinking the opposite. There’s probably even better ones out there, but I really didn’t have the time to look any further.

If that still doesn’t work, you can always just cobble the code together yourself. I often try to find something approximating the overall look and feel that I’m going for – two columns, one column, side navigation bar, etc and then go in and modify the code to obtain what I want. Most of it is generally CSS parameters.

Last but not least, you can always make it another person’s problem. Find a freelancer online and pay them to mock up a site for you.

WordPress Plugins

WordPress by itself is a very powerful blog/CMS (content management system), but it’s bare-bones and not too attractive when it’s a fresh installation. While it has everything you’ll need to get up and running, there are things you will want to add to extend its usefulness and functionality. A note of caution is to use the minimal amount of plugins as necessary. A lot of plugins are coded incorrectly and can result in slower performance, memory leaks, and even break other plugins as well as your layout. If you’re not using them, then delete them.

To install them, it’s pretty easy. All you do is venture to your WordPress Administration screen and go to the plugins section. Click ‘Add New’ and search for the plugins below. Install and activate.

Below, I will post a list of plugins that I’m currently using on a WordPress 2.9 installation. Some of the plugins from my previous article on “Setting up a WordPress Blog” have been discontinued or changed:

Design Related:

  1. Lightbox Plus: A lightbox is a method of displaying your pictures, movies, and images. You’ve probably seen it in action before. When you click a picture, it enlarges into a popup window and the background may fade out. I’ve tried just about every lightbox plugin – both manually and even within WordPress, and so far Lightbox Plus is my favorite. It works right out of the box and doesn’t seem to break things. It also provides you with a bunch of ready-made designs of which you can always tweak too.
  2. Page Links To:  If you have navbars and menus at the top of your site with submenus, this allows you create a dummy page (and hence another submenu item linking elsewhere.) This is pretty hard to explain but I’ll try here: I had one user clicking the submenu’s but not the main buttons and he couldn’t figure out the main button was also a separate page… Basically, this is an ineptitude checker.
  3. Pro Player: There’s many ways to embed videos into a WordPress site. This plugin provides an easy way to embed videos into your posts from sites such as Vimeo or Youtube. If all I wanted to post was Youtube videos, I’d probably go with TubePress instead. However, Tubepress requires a little bit of shortcode.
  4. WP Typography: Believe it or not (it’s hard to admit), most of us use incorrect grammar and punctuation. WP Typography helps correct common mistakes such as em dashes versus en dashes, quote marks, ellipses, math symbols, widows, etc.
  5. WPTouch iPhone Theme: If you have a smartphone or an iPhone, than this plugin automatically shrinks your website down to something perfectly readable for an iPhone. It definitely makes surfing this website much easier on the eyes.

Security Related:

  1. Secure WordPress: This plugin helps to help fix holes. It also removes information which really isn’t anyone’s business such as which version of WordPress you are running.
  2. PHPSecInfo: This isn’t a WordPress plugin. Instead you install it manually into your root site directory and browse to the link. It will tell you which php holes exist. This requires a bit of advanced knowledge to tweak these settings. Most people probably do not need to even bother with this.
  3. CHMOD 755 and 644: This isn’t a WordPress plugin. I just thought I’d mention it here since I’m on the topic of WordPress security. All folders should be set to 755 on permissions (via FTP) and 644 on individual files for security purposes. There’s probably a plugin which performs this function.

Social Bookmarking:

  1. Cute Profiles: On the side of my blog, you’ll see a few buttons that take you to my Facebook page, etc. If anyone is interested in following me, they can always click those items. By adding these options, you may increase your readership. Plus it’s kind of cool. Of course, you don’t have to use this as you could also provide links in your blogroll as well as widgets for many of these Social Networking websites.
  2. Sociable: This provides little buttons below each of my posts. These buttons allow readers to select an article they like and post a link back to it on other websites such as Buzzfeed, Facebook, Technorati, etc. I use Sociable on most of my blog websites, but unfortunately the layout broke on this particular website when it was used with my translation feature. I’m not quite sure why the break happened, but I did spend time trying to figure out the cause as well as digging through code. I ended up using Sexy Bookmarks instead.
  3. FD Feedburner Plugin: This redirects all of your RSS (really simple syndicate) headlines and sends them to Google’s Feedburner. Google’s Feedburner site provides a handy gateway and options to redistribute your RSS articles in a standardized format to those who use RSS feeds. If you have a homepage set to iGoogle, MSN, or Yahoo – most of those articles that appear are nothing other than RSS feeds/headlines that are appearing. Some people prefer to view daily headlines through RSS feeders as opposed to having to manually comb through websites which may (or may not) be of interest to them. More information on Feedburner setup can be found here.
  4. Sexy Bookmarks: a XHTML compliant social bookmarking set which allows users to select articles they like and post to other websites or email. I’m currently using this over Sociable on this website.
  5. WP to Twitter: I had set up a Twitter account specifically for my websites Lunarlog and Lunarstudio. Basically, whenever I post to this website, WP to Twitter takes the post link, shortens it, and automatically sends it to my Twitter account. It’s hidden on the back-end, but it is there. I could install another plugin which pulls information down to this website for display, but quite frankly, my Twitter account isn’t all that interesting. There’s a lot of these Twitter integration plugins available – I haven’t had time to experiment with all of them. Suggestions are welcome.

Spam Related:

  1. Askimet: Ships with WordPress. Enable and signup unless you really like getting spammed.
  2. WP SpamFree: Another antispam plugin which appears to have blocked over 70 comment spams since I enabled it last week. It includes a contact form as well. I just hope it’s not blocking valid users… I can’t seem to check.

Speed Related:

  1. Autoptimize: This optimizes your website by concatenating your HTML, JavaScript, and CSS into one nice, tidy bundle. It works in most instances, but occasionally breaks other plugins and even your layout. I’d save this plugin for last as once you install it, you’re going to want to test your site out to see if anything went wrong. For this blog, it kept breaking my translation flags so I turned it off. Instead, I am currently using WP Minify.
  2. Cache Images: Everyone should be using this if possible. It basically tells a reader’s browser to store to temporarily store an image (such as a logo used throughout a site) on their hard drive. This way, their browser doesn’t have to download an image every single time they move to a new page. It makes things seem faster and reduces the load on your server saving both bandwidth and processing. The nice thing is that in-case you do get hammered from a popular site linking back to you, you’ll be better prepared to handle a huge spike in traffic.
  3. OSSDL CDN off-linker: A CDN stands for Content Delivery Network. A CDN redistributes your files around the world and caches them. That way if someone else on the opposite side of the world goes to your website, instead of having to sit there and wait for information to download, their request will hit a server that is closer to them and the pages will load much faster. CDNs generally cost extra, but if you want your website to be fast – then this is something you should use. At the moment, I am using MaxCDN with my websites. They are currently running a promotional deal at $10 signup for a 1 TB of information transfer. OSSDL CDN off-linker simply allows you to connect to your CDN and formats all of your images and scripts to be fetched from CDNs such as MaxCDN. I was using W3TC (W3 Total Cache) but it was breaking some of my plugins (Proplayer killed my RSS feeds and eStore.)
  4. Use Google Libraries: A lot of plugins use code that comes from other sites (for example, many lightboxes use libraries from Google.) But why keep all of those libraries local when you can take advantage of the latest and greatest directly from Google itself? Google runs on a CDN as well. This ensures that these libraries are pulled from there instead of your website, and it will reduce the load times for your viewers.
  5. WP Optimize: This helps clean up your database. Over time, you install plugins, remove them, write articles, save drafts, delete things – all of this adds holes to your database. On a very busy website, you may have a lot of holes which ends up slowing down your website. WP Optimize is basically a “disk defragmenter” for your database – it removes these holes which can slow down your site and puts everything back together again.
  6. WP Minify: This plugin concatenates JavaScript and CSS files much like Autoptimize does and helps speed up your website. Basically it puts all your scripts together in one neat bundle, and strips out unnecessary comments and white space. Where Autoptimize broke my Transposh Translation flags, WP Minify didn’t. So as much as I liked Autoptimize, I’m using this for now.
  7. W3 Total Cache: This is a new-comer to the whole scene and has some of the highest rankings on the WordPress plugin site. It sets out to do a lot of things mentioned above (Autoptimize, WP Minify, Cache Images, and OSSDL CDN off-linker) but it can be somewhat confusing to novices. And although it has close to 5 stars from over 150 users currently, I found that it broke some plugins that I used. In particular, I couldn’t get it to work with my WordPress eStore plugin – the cart widget wouldn’t refresh properly. Secondly, it completely killed my RSS feed (which is pretty bad) when I had ProPlayer installed (a huge bug.) Frederick Townes is the author of W3TC and CTO of Mashable – I’m fairly positive that he is looking into these issues right now after I had mentioned it. Temporarily, I’m using several of the plugins mentioned above to help compensate for W3TC.

Functionality Related:

  1. Contact Form 7: Provides a contact form on your blog/website. Instead of having to provide an email which people could reach me at, now they can send me emails via the built-in form. Not only is it convenient, but it also serves as a spam bot check. You have your choice of choosing questions and answers or CAPTCHA for security. You can also add functions such as allowing attachments, etc. I know this type of form is very useful. Over on my website www.lunarstudio.com, I have a php contact form that I hand-coded many years ago. I also provide an email address. Guess what – most people tend to use the form instead of sending me emails. It’s probably a 9 to 1 ratio. I absolutely love this plugin. You can see it in action here.
  2. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator: This automatically creates a handy sitemap on your website. Instead of having users click on categories, tags, and next buttons – all your articles appear on one page that’s easier to follow. I also speculate this helps search engines figure out and spider your site more easily. You can see it being used as a page here.
  3. Evermore: This adds a “read more” link to each abbreviated post. I used to use a more in-depth plugin called Post Teaser, but I think it has been causing some slowdowns recently.
  4. Post Teaser: Same functionality as Evermore mentioned directly above, but adds a little more information such as reading time, word count, etc. I have it temporarily disabled because I think it was slowing down my sites.
  5. Google Ajax Translation: This is a translation plugin for your posts and comments. It’s very handy. Unfortunately, it leaks PageRank (although you can hack the code if you desire.) Secondly, it was breaking with some of my optimization scripts. Instead, I’m using Transposh Translation Filter for now.
  6. Gurken Subscribe to Comments: This is perhaps one of the lamest things WordPress doesn’t provide by default. If someone comments on your article, you might want to provide them with an option to subscribe to the thread. That way if anyone replies to them, they will get notified via email.
  7. Highlight Author Comments: This plugin allows you (an author) to easily stand out from the rest of the people commenting by allowing you to easily adjust your comment colors. Some themes may have this function built-in. Many do not.
  8. OpenID: This allows users with an OpenID account to have it automatically sync up whenever they comment.
  9. Simple Tags: This helps you tag each of your pages and posts more easily than the one provided by WordPress. It gives you far greater options. Tags are basically keywords (or important words) found throughout your site. Often, you will see tags appear on the sidebars of blogs – sometimes they are referred to as “cloud tags.” They get indexed as well, and helps both users and search engines to navigate commonly used phrases and topics. I was using WP Cumulus which is really nice to look at, but I think it just adds to the processing on people with slower connections and computers. Disabled for now.
  10. Transposh Translation Filter: These are the flag icons on my sidebar which helps foreign users translate my website into the preferred language of their choice. It should also help get your site seen internationally. I was using Google Ajax Translation mentioned above but stopped because of incompatibilities.
  11. WP Cumulus: A pretty method of tagging topics. I have it disabled due to processing loads and I am currently using Simple Tags instead.

Summary

This is my setup currently. While you could go with a basic install, I find that the WordPress plugins mentioned above improve, visibility, speed and functionality. Upon installing the plugins I mentioned above, you may want to activate them one by one and test to see if they break any of your other plugins or themes. You’ll want to clear the cache in your browsers – with Firefox, you can simply hold shift+refresh. With IE, you can do that within your tools\options menu.

As always, I’m open to better suggestions from the community. If you have any comments, please feel free to leave them here. I hope you find this article useful.

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WordPress eStore Versus Shopp Review and Comparison

I’m writing this article in order to help customers, designers, and programmers make a decision regarding WordPress Online Store solutions. Here are my findings. Of course I am more than willing to hear your comments below, but I hope that my experience and opinion helps make you formulate a more informed decision before wasting your money on something you may or may not use.

I have an online store over HDRSource in which I sell HDR images for use with fellow 3D artists. I use a plugin called WP eStore to handle all of my transactions. Basically, you click an “Add to Cart” button, it adds the product to a cart, then takes you to Paypal where you finish the transaction. From there, you are provided with an encrypted download link which expires in X amount of days which you can specify. The system is fairly simple and that was exactly what I was looking for.

My circumstance is unusual in the fact that my downloads are fairly large – ranging in several gigabytes for some of my files. While the downloads haven’t been without their issues (there are going to be people with time-outs on slower connections with files that big), the eStore plugin has been fairly straight-forward in its setup and ease of use. The documentation supporting eStore is also fairly well thought-out.

Recently, I decided to switch hosts for all of my websites in part to provide a better experience with the download process. I signed up for the Mediatemple Grid Service which allows an incredible 100 gigs of storage space – this would be enough to host my content locally versus going through a third party such as Mediafire or hosting services. This would make the download experience more seamless, and plus I wouldn’t have to pay extra charges for using their storage space. When switching hosts, a variety of issues may come up – especially when transferring blogs which are dynamic and database-driven by nature over to a new host. Simply put, things can go wrong, especially when it comes to live online stores. These problems are to be expected.

With eStore, I ran into a minor hiccup in which my store downloads would download, but would lock you out of the website after canceling a transfer. I informed the plugin author of this issue as well as Mediatemple, and also began the bug hunt on my own. It was very difficult to tell what was going wrong. The system worked fine with my previous host, but fell apart on the new one. Was it something I did wrong, a limitation of the host, or something getting pulled incorrectly by the plugin itself? It was an issue that I would spend several days working on.

To complicate matters, HDRSource was mentioned in 3D world magazine. Some free libraries came out on DVD so my website was getting hammered by traffic from all around the world. I really needed to get this issue resolved immediately. The timing couldn’t have been any worse.

After several days of on and off experimentation, hours of midnight telephone tech support with my new host, and a flurry of emails flying back and forth between the eStore plugin developer and I, I decided to give WordPress Shopp a try. Here is my review and comparison between the two online store plugins. Keep in mind that this is for my setup and your needs may vary:

Comparison:

WordPress eStore Advantages:

  1. Cost: $34.95 (this was $20 when I purchased it this past summer.)
  2. Easy to install.
  3. Easy to use.
  4. Perfect for making simple purchases through Paypal or 2Checkout.
  5. Provides a return URL which takes you back to your website after a purchase is made.
  6. Flexible.
  7. Great shopping cart widget to show your purchases.
  8. New features being constantly added.
  9. Relatively new forum, but fairly useful.
  10. A strong focus on security by the author.
  11. Responsive tech support.
  12. Overall simplicity.
  13. Flexibility.
  14. Allows for free variations of your digital assets upon purchase.
  15. Return check-out page for Paypal standard.
  16. Multiple support videos.

WordPress eStore Disadvantages:

  1. I don’t believe eStore currently allows for sales to take place within your site. That involves a lot of work regardless with advanced accounts, additional charges, and SSL.
  2. This is purely cosmetic but the plugin website (in my opinion) isn’t as attractive, but in this case looks are completely deceiving. Everything is customizable.

WordPress eStore Support:

  1. The plugin author has been very accommodating and knowledgeable. To be honest, I’ve never experienced this level of tech support any where. He has literally “bent over backwards” to help me find solutions to my unusual circumstances. He has spent hours, if not days trying to help me out. The support is bar none. Keep in mind, he also has a separate day job.
  2. On several occasions, he has offered unsolicited refunds to which I refused because I could see that he was trying very hard to work on things.

WordPress Shopp Advantages:

  1. Restrict downloads to IP and maximum tries. However, I think eStore should have no problem implementing this.
  2. Easy to install but it installs too much and even broke my template by automatically inserting three unwanted pages.
  3. Shopp MCE button in the WP editor for production insertion/drop-down list shortcode. Again, I think eStore could implement this – right now there’s a little manual code copying but it’s really a no-brainer.
  4. The shipping options seem a little-bit more in-depth. I don’t ship physical products, so I really cannot comment. It was just an observation.
  5. More options for payment systems including the ability to embed credit card processing within your website without having to leave it. Again, there is a catch because this involves a lot of setup work of obtaining different processing accounts, additional charges, and SSL (Secure Socket Layer.)
  6. Prettier author website (but in this case, I found that looks are really deceiving.)

WordPress Shopp Disadvantages:

  1. Lack of simplicity. On the outset, you’d think by looking at their website that this would be “professional” and easy-to-use. Installing it is easy, but getting it to run is a different issue. You find yourself going through pages upon pages to figure out how to customize your site only to find out that you have to have some coding skills (editing php and CSS pages.)
  2. Cost: $55. $20 more than eStore.
  3. Insertion of three random pages upon install that will break your layout.
  4. No initial mention as to whether or not it encrypts digital download links (which I found out through having to purchase this.)
  5. Digital downloads only allow one product download per purchase. If you decided to provide a free alternative version of your product, you can’t. If you decided to provide multiple parts to a download to ease downloading, you can’t. They say they support resuming, but this is a major oversight on their behalf. Nowhere is this mentioned on their website. I had to wait a day only to find out it was unsupported.
  6. Their shopping cart widgets are beyond confusing. They offer 3 or 4 (I forget) different shopping cart widgets. In my tests, I added a product. Nowhere was a removal button. The widget only mentions price and not the product name when you add a product. It also wants to take you to a separate cart page on your website versus eStore which will take you directly to Paypal for checkout. Not only are you forced by default to be taken to a separate cart page, but then after you make a purchase, you get tossed onto another page full of marketing gimmicks for your site – you may find this useful, but I’m of the opinion that unless you want it there, don’t add this by default.
  7. Insertion of extra code and text into each product. All I wanted was a simple “buy now” or “add to cart” button below each one of my items or posts but no – didn’t happen. Instead, it inserted the product name (again although I had already written this), a description (already written), and a price (already written.) I’m certain you can “hack” the code” so that it doesn’t display these elements, but for someone that wants something simple, you shouldn’t have to. These items should be a checkbox disabled by default under the plugin’s settings. On top of this, it ran it’s own CSS styles which was one more thing I would have to tinker with. It also threw out a huge horizontal rule that I couldn’t ignore. For someone looking for something simple, this was overkill and quite frankly a “pain in the butt.”

WordPress Shopp Support:

  1. In digging through their confusing forum and documentation, I noticed that there were a fair amount of posts which went unanswered. There were also several dead links I came across. Almost everything I wanted to do needed to be hacked, and that would be possibly be broken anyways on their next update. For something simple like removing the titles it inserted, I shouldn’t have to spend several hours trying to figure that out. All I want is simple.
  2. I waited a day before receiving a reply. Time was critical for my installation.
  3. I asked for a refund and stated a couple of my reasons which I thought were quite reasonable and that perhaps they would make an exception to their policy (which admittedly I didn’t read in my hurry.) Here was their reply:

Dave,

Greetings Charles,

Please keep in mind that while Shopp does not support the handling of multiple files for download upon purchase, Shopp does handle resuming downloads.  This means if a customer/client cannot finish a download right at that moment or is disconnected, they can come back and start where they left off.

Concerning the performance of Paypal Standard, it is stated that this version of checkout is a “remote” payment service.  To have a seamless payment processing experience PayPal Pro or another provider would be necessary.  Please see our documentation on PayPal Standard.

As far as a refund, due to our sales policy a refund cannot be available.  For more information, please see our sales policy.  https://shopplugin.net/sales-policy/

I encourage you to take the time to browse our community forums for any information that may assist you in your use of Shopp, as well as stay informed as to what’s coming in future Shopp releases.

Best Regards,

Dave

I asked one more time in an email and mentioned that I was going to write a review of their product. This is his second reply:

Dave,

Charles,

With the access of a demo versions of Shopp, sales documentation, feature documentation, as well as sales policy, it is not possible to issue a refund for this scenario.  I’m sorry you don’t feel Shopp is the e-commerce solution you are looking for but we sincerely appreciate your feedback.

Regards,

Dave

Now, while I completely understand that they are trying to prevent piracy, you’d think that they might make an exception to this rule when someone states valid reasons for why they felt the product did not live up to their expectations. On several occasions, the author of eStore offered to give me a refund when I encountered a few issues – and I didn’t even ask for that. In my opinion, that clearly demonstrates that the author of eStore really cares for the product he is delivering. I couldn’t ask for more. It’s really miles above the cold replies I am getting from Shopp.

Conclusion:

The author of eStore ended up fixing my download problem yesterday. Everything was restored and in better working order than before.

If you’re looking for simple, than eStore is the way to go – it’s highly customizable, lighter in weight (from a code perspective), and less intrusive. Unless you absolutely need more payment options and credit card processing within your website (without having to leave it), than go with Shopp or another alternative. Keep in mind that built-in credit card processing is complicated, and quite frankly not worth the time. Paypal has become the defacto standard in credit card processing so it really doesn’t matter that when you make a purchase that you are taken to a Paypal page for final purchase.

Frankly, I am a very satisfied eStore customer and will continue to support the author’s efforts. I felt that he has helped me so much, that the least I could do is write this article discussing the differences between the two WordPress plugins.

p.s. I just noticed that Shopp left behind some code after deactivation as I was about to publish this article lol. I’m also out $55…

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Websites Transferred

I just wanted to make note that I transferred this website, LunarStudio, and another blog over to MediaTemple over the course of the last two days. There’s been a significant increase in performance and speed – I think over 300% in the case of LunarStudio. It’s a bit of a nail-biting experience when it comes to transferring databases, but thankfully MediaTemple was there with their excellent phone support to help walk me through some of their systems.

I did encounter one issue with Lunarlog’s database import and the relatively new phenomenal plugin called W3 Total Cache as it keeps spitting out errors and wants to point to a now defunct directory on the old server. I’m hoping in time that Frederick Townes, the CTO of Mashable and W3TC author can help me pinpoint where this incorrect query is getting pulled from. He seems very helpful (and obviously knowledgeable.) Keep in mind, this is no fault of w3TC but rather the import/export of my older database. In the meantime, I’ve managed to get around W3TC by enabling a few other WP plugins in its place.

I’ll be sure write more about speeding up your website and WordPress when I have more time later.

P.S. – Please let me know if you encounter any issues with this site due to the move (or otherwise.) Thanks!

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