Consider these findings from a Google study:

71% of smartphone users search because of an ad they’ve seen either online or offline; 82% of smartphone users notice mobile ads, 74% of smartphone shoppers make a purchase as a result of using their smartphones to help with shopping, and 88% of those who look for local information on their smartphones take action within a day. (Source)

Because of these findings, Google recently implemented a change in the “ads quality” ranking, as reported by AdWeek:

As of Wednesday, mobile optimization will now be included in Google’s “ads quality” ranking, which (along with pricing) determines what ads get served when. So—all other things being equal—an ad that links to a mobile-friendly website will get served alongside Google’s mobile search results before an ad that doesn’t. (Source)

Even if you do not use Adsense to drive traffic to your site, it’s obvious that the same arguments work for unpaid search results too. If your website does not work properly in mobile devices, you may be losing out on traffic. Therefore, make your website mobile-friendly. If you are using a Flash-only site, consider migrating your site to html5. If you have a website that is heavy on images and javascript effects that do not work in mobile devices, create a leaner mobile version.

If you are using WordPress to power your website, you are in luck. You can make your website mobile-friendly right NOW! The quickest way to make your WordPress site mobile-ready is to use a plugin that detects whether the user is viewing your site from a desktop or a mobile device and serve the appropriate theme depending on the result. The best plugin I have worked with so far is WPtouch. You can get the free version here.

The free version allows you to serve a mobile-optimized theme to iPhone, Android devices and a host of other smart phones, and includes customization options that should cover most WP website owner’s needs. You can customize the following options:

WPtouch Pro

But if you want more advanced options, WPtouch also has a Pro version that extends the plugin features. Some of the notable enhancements I found in the Pro version includes:

And if you want to view WPtouch Pro version in action, try viewing my site in iPad, iPhone and Android devices.

Disclosure: this post contains affiliate links.

The growing interest in blogging has also extended to pinoy professionals and companies, especially because blogging is a good way to attract audience and potential buyers. Businesses are also becoming aware that WordPress is more than a blogging tool. It can serve as a content management system for business and commercial websites, and the hosts of available plugins can easily convert a site to an online store, events portal,  online collaboration tool, media streaming site, social network… almost anything you can think of. And if you can’t find a plugin to suit your business needs, there are many savvy developers out there who can build a customized solution for you.

Without a doubt, WordPress is driving even my freelance business. These past two months, I have had several emails from people inquiring about using WordPress for a professional portfolio, to set up an online store, or to convert an old company website into a content managed system.

But despite its popularity, WordPress can be a daunting subject for those without a background in internet technology, and most people who approach me belong to this group. They are business owners, or the marketing officer in a company or solo professionals, people who are not in IT and who would rather concentrate on managing their business than agonizing over geeky stuff. But they do wish to know if only a superficial understanding of WP and its machinations, just enough to feel secure that this is the tool they need before committing themselves to it.

And so I occasionally receive emails inquiring about the more technical aspects of WordPress, from dealing with domains and web hosts, to installing  and managing WordPress, themes and plugins. To help my clients and to stop myself from repeating my answers over emails when somebody asks me a question about WP, I have decided to write a guide on setting up WP and to direct future queries to these posts.

I will break up the posts into the following topics:

1. How to choose and register a domain name;
2. How to select a web host;
3. How to install WordPress using cPanel;
4. How to manually install WordPress;
5. Where to find themes for your blog, niche-specific themes and how to install themes;
6. Essential plugins for content management, performance, SEO and security and how to install them; and
7. How to tune your WordPress site for performance and security.

As far back as 1997, Jakob Nielsen was already saying that slow web page speed turns off visitors. The main culprits then were big images from graphic-intensive websites carried across slow modems.

Fast forward to 2011, the age of broadband internet, and studies prove that users still prefer fast loading websites over slow ones (but naturally!). A snappy website makes happy web visitors and happy visitors are more likely to turn into customers. Today however, the choking points of most slow websites are server delays and overly fancy web widgets.

One of the things I remember from Nielsen’s usability articles is that web users have an attention span of no more than 10 seconds. That means, optimally, your website must load and users must be able to interact with your page within that time frame or else they click away to other sites. It seems that patience limit has decreased from 10 to 5 seconds over the years. I assume that’s the reason why Google marked 5 seconds as the sweet spot for acceptable page speed.

I’m not exactly a speed junkie like other bloggers, but I have W3TC installed on my WordPress sites, including this one, for some time now. I stumbled across this plugin while researching about ways to improve website performance and to reduce bandwidth back in the old days when I was still on shared hosting (I am now on 6 nodes of vps at vps.net yay!) Then recently, a link to CloudFlare showed up in the W3TC options panel, so I researched about this service, liked the idea behind it and signed up for that too.

So now I have a plugin and a web service that supposedly should speed up my site. But do they really? My site does seem fast but I want numbers to prove it. So last night, I decided to test my website using the page speed tester at Pingdom Tools and Google Labs.

First I had to revert my site to an un-optimized state, so I cleared all cache (plugin and CloudFlare), I deactivated Pingdom and W3TC, then ran the tests. Here are the results:

Pingdom Result

Google Labs Result

Next, I activated W3TC but instead of just accepting the default settings, I tweaked it further by specifying the css and js scripts to be minified. I also have an Amazon S3 account with CloudFront, so I added that into the CDN setting, and uploaded the files into the Amazon cloud. Then I cleared the plugin cache to make sure the tests will load from an uncached page and ran the tests again:

Pingdom Result

Google Labs Result

Finally, I re-activated CloudFlare, but stopped before making the last test. I thought it might need some time for my minified scripts and cloud files to propagate across the globe, so I decided to go to sleep and do the test in the morning.

Ten hours later, I was back online tweaking my CloudFlare setup. On top of the usual setup, I activated the minify and CDNJS settings. So now I have W3TC minification and CloudFlare minification; Cloudfront CDN and Cloudflare CDN; how they all work together without breaking my site confounds even myself, but my website loads fine so I let it be.

Running the tests one last time yields these results:

Pingdom Result

Google Labs result

My next goal is to see if I can improve the results further. Reading the suggestions from Google Labs, I think I can lighten the load some more by removing unnecessary page widgets (do I really need a Facebook Like box on the homepage?), or hosting external services in my server (e.g., replacing typekit with self-hosted webfonts and @font-face css). Will keep you posted on how that will turn out.

But recently, Facebook announced that they are going to deprecate the use of FBML in favor of iframe for Page tabs. Starting March 11, 2011, reports say you won’t be able to add static FBML apps as Page tabs. Although all existing FMBL tab and apps will continue to function, and will still be able to be edited for the immediate future, it is believed that Facebook will eventually remove FBML entirely.

So what does this mean to people who want a custom Facebook Page but are not html savvy?

I headed over to the Facebook developer area to assess the difficulty of creating a custom Page tab using the new iframe. The result of my first attempt ended with this: a Feedburner list of my latest blogs embedded right inside my own Facebook Page (view).

My verdict is that, yes, it will be quite difficult for non-web-savvy folks to deal with the new iframe compared to static FBML. Not only do you need to go thru the hassle of first connecting the developer app to your account before you can create an iframe tab; but you MUST also have a remotely hosted web page, then have to go thru several steps creating the apps settings, before you can finally add the app to your Page.

But it did hit me, one good thing about having an iframe–and probably the main reason why Facebook has decided to go down this route–is that now you can embed a remotely hosted website inside Facebook. And for many people who are not knowledgeable in html, there are already a host of online tools and services that help create a website without html know-how. And naturally, the first application to come to my mind is WordPress.

So I did another test. I created a WordPress page template that will fit inside the constrained layout of a Facebook Page and added an image (via WordPress’ built-in media uploader), a flash slideshow from flickr, javascript from feedburner, and a post tab plugin to the content. Then I created another iframe app in Facebook with the source pointing to the WordPress page I created earlier, and added the iframe app to a Facebook Page. The result is this sample demo page.

It works. And I see a lot of potential for this new way of connecting WordPress content and Facebook Pages.

The initial hurdle for many people will be the extra steps in creating the iframe app; but, if you already have a WordPress site for publishing html pages and you are not intimidated by the technical jargons while creating the Facebook apps settings, you will see it’s really not that hard to create a custom Facebook Page using the new iframe method.

Ok if you have read this far and are now wondering where the f#@!ck is the tutorial, it is not here! :-) I published the tutorial on my hubpage. Go take a look. If you can read and you are smart enough to follow step-by-step instructions, you can have your first iframe app in Facebook up in no time.

Blogging was an on-and-off thing for me, with my most productive blogging period being during my stay in Kuala Lumpur (fueled by homesickness, I guess). By the time I purchased the domain jasperespejo.com, it seemed every Tom-Dick-and-Harry was ranting about something online via personal blogs while I, on the other hand, lost interest. I decided to use my new website to feature only web projects using (then) snazzy jquery effects and my blog faded into oblivion, or rather into a backup sql file.

But sometime last year, I started toying with the idea to resurrect my blog. In the intervening years since I closed my blog, the main reason that stopped me from having one in jasperespejo.com has disappeared–the notion that a blog is a personal journal and not a professional tool.

So I remodeled my site around a new WordPress… yes WordPress, the one I rejected years back for being ugly but which I have eventually grown to love and master (including learning php) after discovering its many good points (not least the fact the people will pay me to make their WP sites)… a new WordPress platform that caught my interest, PlatformPro from Pageline, and put a blog on the frontpage.

The effect of this addition on my website has been very positive.

1. Surge in web traffic. Unlike before where I was getting only a handful of hits per day, my Google Analytics chart peaked like a sharp mountain cliff since I opened my blog and never hit 0 again.
2. Increased inquiries about my freelance services. Not all of which I can accommodate, unfortunately.
3. Sales from affiliate links (finally!). I’ve tried a few affiliate links displayed here-and-there among my social network sites but I never really made a single sale until recently. And those sales all came from my re-designed website. Now I know that the formula traffic + targeted content = sales does work and I am thinking of other ways to leverage this.

I have to thank social networks for the good outcome. The first thing I did after completing the re-design and before posting my first blog was to setup dlvr.it to forward my posts to all my social networking sites. And believe me I’ve signed up to plenty. Sometimes, I think too many for my own good.

And also, I seemed to have hit a jackpot when I blogged my reaction about a Lonely Planet article mentioning the Philippines. That post got me the most search referral from Google. Now I’m thinking I should do more stories about my travels around the PH. I’m beginning understand why a lot of people seem to want to be travel bloggers.

So now I’m stoked to blog more. One of my immediate to-do is to find the sql backup file of my old blog and rescue some of the noteworthy travel posts I made in the past and import them over to their new home.

I will also write about my freelancing job which is going into its 4th year by June 2011. A fact which surprises even myself, because when I quit my day job in a US-owned company four years ago, I had so many fears about working outside the traditional office setting and I thought I would not last a few months working from home.

And, of course, I will blog about my other interests in life: photography, keeping fit, transitioning into my 40s, personal projects. Now and then, I might try to sell some stuff via promotional posts ;-).

So here it is. My new blog-life.

A screenshot of my re-designed blog's homepage.

I blogged about re-designing my website on New Year’s eve. I resolved to finish the re-design before January is over. I also mentioned that I was using the free version of Platform from Pagelines to evaluate the features prior to buying the pro version. I liked the features of the free theme, in fact the free features were extensive and would be more than enough for any casual blogger.

However, I needed a better way to output a few important sections of my website, like the portfolio page and I thought the “boxes” feature of the pro version will do nicely. I also needed to have different columns for different pages and that feature was deactivated in the free version.

So, last weekend I went ahead and bought the PlatformPro.

It took me just a few hours to learn setting up the page and post templates via drag-and-drop. I had a little problem with sidebar plugins, in places where I wanted some plugins to show while be hidden from other pages that shared the same PlatformPro template. In the end, it was easily solved by installing a widget logic plugin.

And in just one afternoon, this was the result: a brand spanking new website layout just the way I wanted it–clean, more text, a blog homepage. What’s more, it now looks nice in other browsers, where before it looked ugly in IE especially older IE browsers.

It’s not 100% complete. I haven’t really setup the portfolio page the way I imagined it, using the boxes template. Instead, I dumped all my old works in a gallery page. I think for now I will keep it this way and just add new works to the portfolio boxes in the future.