Posts Tagged ‘website’

Christian Mattix

How-To: Use Wget to Automate the Karamasoft UltimateSearch Indexing Process for Your Website

Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 by Christian Mattix

Almost every modern website has a “search my site” module of some sort added to it. In this How-To I’m going to explain how to set up Karamasoft UltimateSearch to automatically rebuild its index on a repeating scheduled basis in a Microsoft Windows hosted environment.

First, you will need to obtain the UltimateSearch software from the Karamasoft site, found at: http://www.karamasoft.com/UltimateSearch/Features.aspx. Follow the directions provided to get the tool installed into your particular hosting environment. For this How-To I’m going to assume that you have a website www.example.com that you have the tool installed in. The process for starting the indexing process is as simple as accessing a particular webpage on your site and passing it a particular operation code in the query string. To start the full indexing process for our example site you would navigate to:

http://www.example.com/UltimateSearchInclude/Admin/UltimateSearch.admin.aspx?cmd=IndexFull

We want to be able to call this process via a script, so we will need something lightweight and easily used from within a scripting language. A perfect tool for this is the Open Source GNU Wget utility. From the GNU Wget site:

GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc.

Download and install the GNU Wget utility. The Windows port can be downloaded from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/wget.htm. Download the setup program, follow the setup wizard, and install the utility to your server. After the installation process has completed, add the directory that you installed wget.exe into to the PATH environment variable.

Once you have UltimateSearch and Wget installed on your server you are now ready to set up the indexing job. In order to have the site be indexed based on a schedule, the admin link needs to be visited on a scheduled basis. In order to do this, we are going to use the Wget utility that we just downloaded in a batch file. That batch file will then be called as a scheduled task by Windows.

The batch file that I created is named USearchIndexTask.bat. In it is the following:

@echo off
wget -O - http://www.example.com/UltimateSearchInclude/Admin/UltimageSearch.admin.aspx?cmd=IndexIncremental > nul 2> nul

I have saved this file in c:\Program Files\Force5\USearchIndexTask.bat. You can save it where-ever it makes the most sense in your hosting environment.

Once the batch file is saved, then you need to create a scheduled task to run the batch file. In our environment I used Windows Task Scheduler to create the task. Use that tool to create a task to run the USearchIndexTask.bat file. Choose a frequency that makes sense for your environment, based on the quantity of changes for the site. If there are very few changes made on a daily bases, then having it run once a day at midnight is an appropriate setting.

Manually run the scheduled task to verify that it completed successfully, and then go get lunch. You are done!

To see more bright ideas from the Left and Right brains of Force5, check out the rest of our blog as well as our work!

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Force 5

I Need a New Website – Now What Do I Do?

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 by Force 5

You finally decide your company needs a new website, but you have no idea who to call. You check the yellow pages, Google web design, ask friends and family, and you’re still overwhelmed with all the choices. Who do you call when your brother-in-laws sisters boyfriend will do the job for $500. “We Are Web Sites”, the best web shop on the internet, will build your site for $2,000 and, “The Interactive Agency” down the street wants ten times that amount for a website and an integrated marketing campaign.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an online expert who knows all the new technology or you know about this “World Wide Web thingy” that’s kind of cool, picking a company to build your website can be a daunting task. In the following article I will explain some of the key differences between a web shop and an interactive agency and what you should expect from both.

Your Brother-in-Laws Sisters Boyfriend

Don’t do it! No really; don’t do this. After months of stress and frustration (because the basketball game with his buddies was more important than working on your site) you will end up with a website that looks like, well, you paid $500 to your brother-in-laws sisters boyfriend to build. Remember your website is the face of your company to millions of online people. Is this the image you want to portray?

The Web Shop

There are several different types of web shops. There is the design centric shop, the technology centric shop and the canned – just add your own copy and pictures and have an online presence today – type of shop. With the design centric shop your site will look great. It will portray exactly what the designer thinks of your company. With the technology centric shop your site will have all the bells and whistles whether you use them or not, and with the canned shop you will be forced to form your site around their cookie cutter solution.

No matter which of the three “web shop” solutions you choose there are several constants you can be sure of. Your business needs, determining who your consumer is and what they are looking for, search engine optimization, and your overall marketing plan will not be considered. Now, I’m not saying these are bad designers and programmers. They are probably great at what they do. What I am saying is that they either don’t have the time, desire, or knowledge to create the true online tool your business and your customers deserve.

The Interactive Agency

The interactive agency approaches websites as an extension of your entire marketing plan. They focus on your brand, and integrating your digital marketing campaigns into your overall marketing plan. The starting point for any interactive agency is learning who you are, learning your competition and, understanding your consumer. The second step is information design. Interactive agencies take what they learned in the first step and organize it in a way that creates straight forward navigation, and presents information on your website to best meet your consumer’s needs. This is the heart of a consumer centric website. For a detailed look at consumer centric websites watch for my next blog. Step three consists of the actual site design and build. Interactive agencies utilize a team of highly skilled designers and programmers to create your website. The design team creates an aesthetic, yet simple to use, look and feel focused on keeping the consumer engaged. The programming team takes into account consumer usability, accessibility and, search engine optimization. When complete your website will pass all validation testing, and will be well guarded against common hacking practices.

The job of the interactive agency doesn’t end with completion of your website. Your Website is only the beginning, the creation of what should become the backbone of your entire marketing plan. Now it’s time to look at, among other things, social media, pay per click campaigns, banner ads, email campaigns, product specific micro sites, personalized URL’s (PURLS) and, integration of digital marketing into traditional marketing efforts. The interactive agency is never far away. As your strategic partner they will routinely review, test and recommend upgrades to ensure it remains up to date, relative in search engine results and, in compliance with the latest best practice recommendations.

So now you understand that yes, anyone can build a website but to get the most out of your marketing efforts an interactive agency is the best solution. To find out how your business could benefit from using a full service interactive agency call Force 5 today at 574-234-2060 for send us an email at info@discoverforce5.com to schedule your discovery meeting.

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Force 5

Understanding Website Traffic

Monday, April 20th, 2009 by Force 5

As a website owner it’s important to understand website analytics. How many people are going to your website? Are they reading what you have to say? Are they buying your products? There is only one way to know. Good site analytics. The problem is there are so many statistics available sorting through these numbers can be a daunting task. Below, I’ve provided some basic analytic information to help you decipher this numerical nightmare.

Unique Visitor:
A unique visitor is a visitor coming from a single IP address. Basically, if I visit your site today I’m counted as 1 unique visitor. If I return to your site 10 more times from the same IP address I’m still counted as 1 unique visitor.

Visitor:
A visitor is the total number of people who visit your website. If I visit your website 10 times today I’m counted as 10 visitors. Remember, if I make those 10 visits from the same IP address I’m only counted as 1 unique visitor.

Bounce Rate:
Bounce Rate is the percentage of visits where the user enters and exits at the same page of your site without visiting any other pages. So, if I were to visit your home page, look around for a minute, then leave without going to any other pages my visit would be counted as a bounce.

Time on Site:
Time on site is the average amount of time a visitor spends on each page of your website. If your average time on site is 3:11 this means that your site visitors spend an average of three minutes and eleven seconds viewing each page of your site.

Page Views:
Page views are the number of times a particular page is requested from the website server and displayed in the end users browser. If you have a high number of visitors, and a low page view count this means you have a lot of people going to your site but they are not finding it useful. A low page view count usually goes hand in hand with a high bounce rate.

 Hits:
For a long time everyone talked about website hits. Basically, this is a meaningless statistic. Hits count every single item on your webpage that loads; HTML pages, images, links, headers etc. Hits might be important to your site developer to assist with reducing page load times but it means nothing to you as far as site traffic.

Traffic Sources:
Another important stat to keep track of is your traffic sources. This tells you where your visitors are coming from.

The three main traffic sources are:

  1. Search Engines
    This represents the percentage of overall visitors that reached your site via a search engine such as Google or Yahoo.
  2. Referring Sites
    This represents the percentage of overall visitors that reached your site from a direct link on another website.
  3. Direct Traffic
    This represents the percentage of overall visitors that reached your site by typing your unique URL (domain name) into their web browser.

It’s important to know your traffic sources.  This is where your site visitors are coming from. If your Search Engine percentage is high then visitors are finding your site on the first page of Google or Yahoo results. If your referring sites percentage is high then you have a good number of external links to relative websites. Finally, if your direct traffic percentages are high then you have a memorable domain name. Visitors know who you are and how to find your webpage without searching for it.

Improving your website traffic takes a solid understanding of your visitors. Using analytics is your first step in gaining that understanding. If you want to keep the traffic coming, monitor your site statistics on a regular basis, and learn what those numbers are trying to you.

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