“Fantastic job on the e-letter!!!! As usual…. Do you know how much we appreciate you and your crew? You just don’t know!”

–World Kite Museum & Hall of Fame

Thanks, Kay & Sharon.  YOU have no idea how motivated we are by praise! D

You may have noticed we took a break from the blog.  Partially, I’ll tell the truth, we’ve just plain been busier than a cattle dog at round-up.  But also because we wanted to see what would happen if we just QUIT.

We use our own site a fair amount to test what we think we know about the search engines.  Having recently reached placement we felt pretty good about, we confirmed for ourselves that our current process for achieving and holding rank was solid.  So what would happen if the only thing we changed was to simply stop tending our blog?  After all, it happens to our clients; they do everything right, get a solid site designed and built, push on the flywheel of promotion until the machine is whizzing along…and then something happens.  Crisis.  Emergency.  Busy season.  Staff changes.  So what happens if you just STOP?

A lot!

The first thing we noticed was a steep drop-off of our Facebook fan activity. You social networkers are a fickle bunch!   We expected that; social networking is about building relationships.  Without our giving you meaningful substance, It isn’t surprising you forgot about us.  Businesses should be forgotten if they stop giving you something you want and/or need.  We responded by posting directly to our Facebook page and those stats went back up, but not as high as when our blog is also pushing posts to our wall.  You effectively told us you want our meatier content as well as our more amusing observations and anecdotes when it comes to Facebook.

But what about our website stats? We had a drop in return visitors; there wasn’t anything new for folks to read so they stopped coming to look for it.  We had a slight drop in new visitors; I would expect that to continue to decline if we don’t start posting again since new visitors largely come to us from sharing of our posts by our customers and fans/friends.  The ‘stickiness’, or amount of time people spend on our site per visit, actually increased.  Were you looking for something interesting to read, since there wasn’t that something new?

The most important thing we learned is that our most engaged customers noticed we were gone–and told us so.    While I could make a pithy statement about you being the people we write for, I’ll refrain from stroking your ego while saying exactly that.  You ARE who we write for because you most align with our mission and core values.  By being engaged, you’re more fun to work with, you get more results from our joint efforts, and you make more profit for both your company and ours. We write for you because you put our words to work and we both reap the rewards.

To those of you who missed us: Thank You!

To those of you who didn’t: Why not?  Are you ready to up your engagement level and let us help you improve return on investment (I’m just sayin’…grin)?  Or maybe there are topics you’d be more interested in having us write about?  If so, we’d love to hear from you.

Keleigh

Here at beachdog.com we did a complete overhaul of the Long Beach Visitors Bureau website, funbeach.com. We migrated over 150  static table-based html pages into Wordpress. We were able to leverage Wordpress to present custom data information and make the site more interactive. Overall, we were thrilled with how it turned out.

Due to the high traffic of the site one of our goals from the start was to maintain performance while we took advantage of what Wordpress has to offer (No more requests to tweak content — Yes!). To do this we used a technique called caching. Caching is needed because any dynamic data-driven (Wordpress included) has more complexity and therefore a greater server footprint than a simple static site.

For example, let’s look a simplified view at what happens when you want to see the home page in a Wordpress site.

1. It all starts when a web page (e.g. beachdog.com) is requested using a browser.
2. The request gets managed by a series of PHP files. (code)
3. The PHP files are evaluated by the PHP Interpreter.
4. Eventually, a request to the database is made to get the unformatted content of the page.
5. Database responds with the requested information.
6. The database information is formatted according to the theme of your site.
7. The pretty formatted result is returned to the browser.

The bottom line is that takes a little bit of time and consumes server resources to do this. The critical part to take away is this happens everytime a page is requested. On high traffic sites this can be problematic.

Caching simply works by storing the result of a particular request (e.g. show me the homepage) and then using it for future requests (e.g when the next person requests the home page). So, the previously mentioned song and dance only happens once. Periodically, we clear our saved results to ensure we have the most recent content.

As far as implementing caching in Wordpress, we don’t have enough nice things to say about the W3 Total Cache plugin. It makes setting this up a relative  breeze.

–Ethan

Perhaps Long Beach, Washington’s most infamous landmark, the chainsaw carved “Mermaid” (aka Merman) was once located downtown and now lives a mile or so north at the Mermaid Motel.  Keith’s photo of this hunka hunka burnin’ love will soon be featured in a book on Washington curiosities.  We’ll tell you more when it comes out (the book, that is).