CREATIVE SLICE / Tucson green website design » Echo

Yahoo Hosting and WordPress

Tim Bowen — Tue, 23 May 2006 05:57:36 +0000

Stay away from Yahoo! web hosting, especially if you are looking to host a blog or will be using Permalinks.

I was turned onto Yahoo’s business hosting offerings through a “featured provider” link on the WordPress site (this has since been removed) and was very impressed with the amount of bandwidth and storage capabilities they offered for a very reasonable price. The “one-click-install” feature also seemed of interest (it usually takes 5-7 minutes to do a new WordPress install manually).

However, while working on a few sites for clients using Yahoo website hosting, these issues came up:

The one-click WordPress install adds a huge banner to the admin area (which is removable, but it’s a complicated procedure which took me about 30minutes to figure out and if done incorrectly will quickly cripple the site)
The one-click install is also incompatible with many WordPress plugins (such as certain contact forms) and makes other features (like JS Lightbox) much more complicated than they would be with any other host.
Permalinks are supported via a plug-in for the one-click install (this works reasonably well, though doesn’t play nice with plugins).
Permalinks are not supported for a manual install (the .htaccess file is blocked, keeping web site owners from implementing many useful features such as 301 redirects (very useful for SEO, especially when migrating a site into WordPress).
Technical supports responds quickly (within 3hrs) but I’ve yet to receive anything besides a form letter going over the “great” features of Yahoo hosting. So far 3 support emails have yet to even mention the question asked (I’m guessing they have an automated support feature which finds keywords in an inquiry and sends back a automated response).

Hopefully this helps website owners who may be searching for hosting. It usually feels safe to go with a large company like Yahoo for hosting, however it’s good to know the shortcomings of this choice.

I’m very disappointed that WordPress once recommended Yahoo for hosting. It’s good to see they finally revoked that recommendation for the benefit of website owners everywhere.

UPDATE 6/13/06: WordPress seems to have added Yahoo back to their list of preferred hosts. I’ve written to them about this and cannot figure out why they would recommend such a crippled service. I guess the Yahoo name looks good on the WP site?

I still have not gotten a response from Yahoo answering any of the questions I had, though, at this point I don’t think they’ll tell me anything I haven’t already figured out.

F shaped viewing patterns

Tim Bowen — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 17:38:18 +0000

An interesting study by Jakob Nielsen from useit.com came out today. It does a nice job of showing how a users eyes navigate through a website in an “F” pattern. Read the article here.

Web Stats – Mint

Tim Bowen — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 04:58:54 +0000

After recently launching the new Creative Slice website we had the opportunity to upgrade our webstats package. While AWStats was working relatively well the results were always exaggerated and we were not able to track a visitors path through the site.

So after reading multiple reviews and trying out Web CEO and ClickTracks (nice windows interface but no Apple or Linux support), we setup Google Analytics (formerly Urchin) which does a very thorough job of capturing everything one could want in a web stats package (including adwords campaign integration). However the Google Analytics interface takes some learning and results are delayed by up to 24hrs.

Then we found Mint, a simple stats package which installs directly on your server and offers incredibly detailed and easy to read results. While we will continue to keep Google Analytics to log adwords results and for the more advanced features (we especially enjoyed the site overlay feature) Mint is clearly the every day winner for Creative Slice and for our clients because of the following:

Real time reporting.
An active community of programmers developing plugins (Pepper) to add functionality.
Results are easy to quickly read, understand and act on.
Installs directly on your server (unlike Google Analytics which links to the google site via javascript every time a visitor enters your site)

Please leave a comment, we enjoy hearing your feedback and/or questions.

Everywhere Internet

Tim Bowen — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 05:47:10 +0000

The term “Everywhere Internet” in regard to accessing the internet from computers, cell phones, and PDA’s was coined by Brian Gunzenhauser on November 9th, 2005 (this name has also been used by a large internet cafe in AU for years). Brian also works with Creative Slice on many web standards projects.

We will be exploring this term over the next few months, and who knows, maybe “Everywhere Internet” will be the next “Web 2.0″ term used universally to describe how accessibility and wireless connectivity allow information (and marketing strategies) to be everywhere.

Stop Wars T-Shirt

Tim Bowen — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 05:25:47 +0000

One of our associates, Russ Rotondi, created these Stop Wars shirts a few years ago and after Natalie Portman wore one, while hosting Saturday Night Live, he’s starting to get some well deserved attention (as well as quite a few imitators).
If you are looking for the ORIGINAL (2002) Stop Wars T Shirt, conjured up during the anti-war rallies in San Francisco, please visit StopWars.com and tell him Creative Slice sent you.

- American Apparel shirts, all sweatshop free and made in the USA

- Hand screened with high quality water based inks made to last

It’s a simple message. It must be heard.