Web Design Tips and Information

“The Google Analytics tracking code has not been detected on your website’s home page. For Analytics to function, you or your web administrator must add the code to each page of your website.”

Are you trying to install Google Analytics and getting this error?

I am the owner of a web design firm and routinely add google analytics to my clients sites.  As of recently, the “Check Status” link appears to be broken.  For whatever reason Google is reporting that the tracking code is not installed properly when it actually is.

Our advice is to verify you have installed the code correctly by using the “View Source” functionality in your browser. If you see the Google code before the </body> tag it is installed correctly.

Check your Google Analytics account 1-2 days after you install the code and you will start to see the traffic data and the tracking status will change to a green checkmark.  This means your tracking code is installed properly.

If you don’t notice any change after 48 hours you should double check that the tracking code is installed properly.  If you are still having trouble and you think the code is installed properly contact a reputable web design firm to double check your work.

I hope this helps and you don’t waste as much time as I initially did when I discovered this problem.  Hopefully google will get their act together and fix this soon.  I can’t believe this problem has been happening for over a month without being fixed.

If you’re having trouble with mysql crashing when starting WAMP read on….

This problem happened to me recently and I had a really hard time figuring it out.    Eventually, after some troubleshooting I determined the problem was caused by having two different version of mysql installed.  Apparently, this was caused by installing wamp over an old version.

To determine if this is the problem open Windows Explorer and navigate over to the mysql directory c:\wamp\bin\mysql. Under this directory you should only have one MySQL directory, for example mysql5.1.32. If you have more than one directory MySQL is probably crashing because WAMP is loading the wrong MySQL version. So, the best way to fix this is to completely remove your c:\wamp directory and reinstall WAMP. Don’t forget to backup your c:\wamp\www directory first!

Hope this helps!

If you are using paypal to implement a shopping cart and are getting this error please read on…..

You are probably trying to create shopping cart buttons for items that have weight specified in ounces.

You realized that paypal weights are specified in pounds so you specified a fraction i.e. .0625

When you try to add an item to your shopping cart you get the following error:

A weight value must be an integer greater than or equal to one

This error is quite misleading!  Paypal is very fussy about the format of decimals.

To specify one ounce you must specify the weight as follows

0.06

It’s important that you have the zero before the decimal point and no more than two digits after the decimal point.

Here is a table you might find useful for ounce->pound paypal conversions

1 oz = 0.06

2 oz = 0.13

3 oz = 0.19

4 oz = 0.25

5 oz = 0.31

6 oz = 0.38

7 oz = 0.44

8 oz = 0.5

9 oz = 0.56

10 oz = 0.63

11 oz = 0.69

12 oz = 0.75

13 oz = 0.81

14 oz = 0.88

15 oz = 0.94

Be sure to type the numbers in EXACTLY as they are above.

Hope this helps all those struggling with this error message.

If you don’t understand what page rank is be sure to read the article “What is Page Rank?”.

If you want your site to rank higher in the search results for a given set of keywords you may need to improve your page rank. If you have a page rank of zero it won’t be too hard to get your page rank up to 1 or 2. Increasing your page rank will greatly improve how the search engines prioritize your site’s pages in the search results for a given keyword phrase.

Before we attempt to improve our page rank, it’s important to understand how Google determines your page rank. The actual algorithm is not disclosed by google (for a detailed explanation of the page rank algorithm try this page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) but research has shown that Google uses the following factors:

1. The number of “important” web pages linking back to your site. The definition of an “important page” is a page with a high page rank.
2. Page titles that include keywords

So, to improve your page rank you need to optimize your page titles and get quality back links to your landing pages.

Studies have also shown that google assigns a higher page rank to pages where backlinks include keyword rich anchor text that is relevant to the content on the page. For example, Professional Web Site Designers links back to a web design company that provides professional web site designs. When the googlebot crawls this site it will associate the keywords Professional Web Site Designers with this Web Design Companies web site.

So, the quickest way to improve your page rank is to get links on high quality web sites back to your web pages. There are several techniques you can use to do this including link exchanges, posting on forums, posting in blogs and getting listed in high quality web directories. The most important thing is to make sure you don’t SPAM the search engines. Don’t do anything to try to fool the search engines. They are not as stupid as you think. If it was easy to optimize your site every site would be optimized and if you’re not careful you can get your web site removed from the index or delegated to the supplemental index.

Google page rank is a numeric value from 1-10 that Google assigns to every web page. This value is indicative of how important Google thinks a web page is to potential web surfers. A values of 10 is the best possible ranking and zero is the worst. To determine a web pages page rank you can use the Google toolbar which works with Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Page rank is one of the determining factors in how well your page ranks in search results. Besides performing search engine optimization, it is also important to improve your page rank in order for your website to display on the first page of the search results for key words related to your business.

Optimize your Page Titles

Optimizing your page titles is probably the single most important thing you can do to optimize your site for search engines.

What is a Page Title?

A page title is the text that displays at the top of the window when you navigate to a web page. It is also the text used when you save a book mark. Most important of all, it is the text a Search Engine uses to determine what type of content you have on your web page.

The page title is defined by HTML in the page source between the tags in the section of the web page. To see your page title in the source code of your web page right click with your mouse in your web browser and select the “View Source” option.

To optimize your page titles, make sure you use keywords related to your business in your page titles. We see too many websites out there that use the same title on every page. This is a big mistake and is usually the result of a web design company that doesn’t have the expertise to optimize a site for search engines or doesn’t care. There are too many web design companies out there that put out an inferior product. It is the uneducated customer who pays the price.

To edit your page titles you will have to edit a copy of your web page and upload the new page to your web hosting provider. You can do this using FTP or your web hosting control panel. If this all sounds like greek to you then you should contact a reputable web design company to help you with this all-important task.