From the monthly archives:

February 2010

CRM Made Easy with HighRise

by Cord Blomquist on February 28, 2010 · View Comments

If you’re looking for a Customer Relations Management (CRM) solution, I strongly recommend HighRise by 37Signals, the CRM solution we use at ReadyMadeWeb. There are a lot of other CRM solutions on the market, so why choose this one? It really comes down to four reasons: simplicity, web accessibility, price, and extensibility.

Simpler is Better

Simplicity is really what software should be all about, but that’s rarely the case. Too often people choose the most feature-heavy software title because they believe more features equals better software. Its understandable why this happens—you want to get the most for your money. But software isn’t just about the number of features, it’s about usability, and a big factor in usability is cutting away unnecessary features in order to make the software intuitive and friendly—you shouldn’t have to force yourself to use a tool that’s supposed to make your working life easier.

Usability is where HighRise excels. Not only does its focus on the core tasks of CRM software keep it from being a cluttered mess of buttons, it helps keep you focused on the core elements of your business, namely the people you interact with, the conversations you have with them, and the tasks you need to complete to get paid.

Brief Aside: This isn’t software for people who can’t tear themselves away from Gantt Charts or Event Chain Diagrams. But really, unless you’re constructing the Three Gorges Damn do you really need to be diagramming things all day?

So let’s walk through the features that make up this elegant simplicity. One of my favorite features and perhaps the most mind-blowingly simple and obvious thing that HighRise does is track your contacts in a way that is nearly effortless. Capturing a conversation is as easy as blind carbon copying (BCC) or forwarding emails to your HighRise account. Each account is given a unique, numbered email address which will capture your emails and either add them to existing contact records or create new contacts when needed. For added security, HighRise will ask you to authorize which addresses can send email to this address, so if your address were to become publicly known, your account would become filled with spam contact records.

HighRise also contains much of the same sort of contact management you would imagine from a simple CRM. It allows you to create contacts, associate them with a company, look-up everyone you know at that company, and enter notes from conversations. A powerful tagging feature also exists which works much like the tagging function within Gmail. You can look-up everyone with the same tag or set of tags, creating an endless number of possible associations between records that you can tailor to fit your organization’s needs.

HighRise also enables you to create reminders that can be sent via email or text message, so you’ll never forget an estimate that needs to be sent, a phone-call to the printers, or a upcoming meeting. You can also manage leads and assign tasks to other members of your team, keeping everyone coordinated.

The Advantage of Web-Based Software

I’ve talked about this before on ReadyMadeWeb, but it’s worth reviewing why web-based software is so great. By locating your applications on the web, you’re ensuring that your data is centralized and organized, rather than tucked away in disorganized folders, spread across multiple computers. By centralizing and organizing your data using web-base software, you’re also making that data accessible to everyone on your team at all times. That applies to more than just location, it also applies to platform—PC, Mac, and even Linux machines can access your web-based applications and data. Any computer or smart phone with a web browser will work.

Web-based software also frees you from managing IT infrastructure. You’re not an expert in security, backup, rolling out office-wide software updates, or keeping track of software installations on dozens of machines—but thanks to companies like 37Signals you don’t have to be. Even if you already have an IT staff, you’re better off placing your data in the hands of a company that specializes in managing data and building software. This will free up your IT staff to work where their comparative advantage really lies, in helping your staff work with technology. Let them do what they do best and outsource the rest.

That’s the real power of web-based software, it saves your organization the time and worry of managing your own IT infrastructure. Why are you buying, setting-up, and maintaining costly servers? Why are you having planning sessions about upgrading to the latest version of your expensive software package? Stop wasting your time.

Price

HighRise is incredibly cheap when compared to the competition. ReadyMadeWeb uses the free version of HighRise, which limits us to two users, 250 contacts, and no file storage. You can easily try out HighRise using this free plan. If you like what you see, you can choose plans ranging from $24 to $149 per month. The highest priced plan has no user limit, 75GB of online storage, and will support up to 50,000 contacts—this is incredibly cheap by industry standards, totaling only $1788 per year.

The Virtuous Cycle of Easy, Cheap & Open

Software is extensible when it’s easy for other developers to make additions to that software’s functionality, but what motivates developers to create add-ons for software?

The biggest barriers to adoption of software is price and learning curve, so the cheaper and easier the software, the more people are likely to use it. A large user base is attractive to other developers—they’d rather write software for 100,000 users than 1,000 users. If a popular platform is open to add-ons—that is, if it provides developers with a way to access a user’s data when the user grants them permission—then developers will make their products compatible with that cheap and easy software. This attracts more developers. And so on, and so on, creating a virtuous cycle.

That’s why HighRise will effortlessly move data into bulk email systems like MailChimp and SendLoop or connect to your help-desk solution like HelpSpot or Zendesk. It also connects to accounting solutions like Pulse, YouCalc, and EasyInsight. Check out the full list of HighRise add-ons.

These easy integrations just don’t happen with proprietary software hosted on your own servers because they fail to become part of the virtuous cycle of easy, cheap, and open software.

Conclusion

If you’re serious about your business or non-profit and if you can get beyond the idea that more features, buttons, boxes, and bobbles make software better, then HighRise can be a very powerful tool that will save you time, money, and countless headaches.

For a quick tour of HighRise, check out this video:

Note: Some organizations are so big and so complex that they need more features—it’s rare, but it happens. If that’s the case with your organization, ReadyMadeWeb recommends choosing SalesForce. Though it has a much higher price point than HighRise—from $65 to $250 per user per month—it still has all the benefits of web-based software including a cheaper overall cost than an in-house, proprietary software solution.

My Live Video Production Setup

by Cord Blomquist on February 26, 2010 · View Comments

As I’ve covered in previous posts, BoinxTV can free you from the tedium of video post production by enabling simple live-to-disk or live-to-streaming video production. Live production turns your Mac into a sort of TV studio in a box, allowing you to switch between cameras and other video sources, create overlays, and mix audio sources on the fly. I’ve been recording live successfully for about 2 months, so I thought I’d share this diagram of my setup for recording live events for the Mercatus Center.

There are three main video feeds coming into my Mac. One is from a Sony HVRZ1U, a pro-level camcorder that captures beautiful video. This is a great camera for any range of applications, but is a much higher quality tool than is needed for this kind of web video production.

The overkill of the Sony is demonstrated by my second video source, an iSight camera from an old Mac desktop. This is a great secondary camera as it’s light, easy to setup thanks to a tripod adapter I got from Steve Vigneau (a really cool guy who will sell you one for $20), and its FireWire connection works seamlessly with BoinxTV.

Finally, the third source of video is the Epiphan VGA2USB, an ingenious little box that turns a VGA signal into a USB webcam signal. I use this to capture PowerPoint/Keynote presentations, web pages, or whatever else a presenter might be showing to an audience. This is a real time saver as it eliminates the need to import graphics or slides into BoinxTV before a presentation. It also eliminates the possibility of your slide order ever being different from the presenter’s, as you’re synced up completely to their machine.

The VGA2USB can also be used to grab the video output for your MacBook Pro (you’ll need a DVI to VGA converter or Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter) and allow it to be captured by a second computer. That second computer can then stream this “webcam” input to services like UStream, LiveStream, or Stickam. Though I’ve shown how one computer can both capture and stream video using CamTwist, using the VGA2USB with a second computer can be a much better solution, especially when you’re capturing/streaming very high resolution video, which may overwhelm a single machine.

If you’re planning to use two FireWire video sources, you’ll need to add a second FireWire bus to your Mac. MacBook Pros only ship with one FireWire bus—the hardware device that controls the devices plugged in to any FireWire port—and streaming FireWire video sources require a dedicated bus. Thankfully you can add a second bus easily using the ExpressCard slot. I’m using a $70 card made by Sonnet and it’s proven to be a solid little piece of hardware. There are many other FireWire ExpressCards on the market, but the price difference is rather trivial and not worth the sacrifice in hardware quality.

You’ll also notice the FireWire to Cat5e converter boxes that allow me to placed my secondary camera up to 60 meters away from my MacBook Pro—the maximum transmission distance for a FireWire connection is only around 15 feet. These nifty little gadgets are produced by Newnex can be picked up for around $300 from NTC Distributing. Placing cameras far apart is key for creating professional-looking two-camera setups that allow you to readjust one camera while another camera remains stationary and captures the event.

Including the educational license for BoinTV at $249, this entire package can still easily total over $1000—and that’s excluding cameras and sound equipment. However, when you look at the alternatives like NewTek’s TriCaster, a minimum investment of just under $4000 dollars, it’s clear that BoinxTV is a great deal.

A Great Twitter Unitasker: ManageTwitter

by Cord Blomquist on February 25, 2010 · View Comments

ManageTwitter does one thing and it does it well: it allows you to unfollow the people who haven’t followed you back. This is really useful if you’ve been following a ton of a people you’re just overwhelmed with tweets. This tool allows you to cut the volume of your tweets and engage only with the people who are engaged with you.

To use ManageTwitter, just visit their website and click “Start.” You’ll then be prompted to “Connect to Twitter” where you’ll authorize ManageTwitter to connect to your account and begin the clean up operations.

As ManageTwitter looks through your followers/following lists and determines who is on both, it’ll tell you what it’s doing, such as “pondering the meaning of life,” or “readying HackerNews,” or even “looking at lolcats.” You gotta love it when web developers have a sense of humor.

Once your list of non-follower followings is produced, you’ll be given the option to unfollow them 100 at a time. You can spare some tweeples from the cold, harsh unfollow by manually unselecting them or by using the “Deselect Verified” and “Deselect Popular” tools, which should ensure that you spare your favorite tech journalists and social media gurus.

After that, you’re done. Enjoy a much lighter, and happier Twitter experience.

Open-Source Success Story: BankruptingAmerica.org

by Cord Blomquist on February 23, 2010 · View Comments

Part 2 of 2 in the series Open-Source Success Stories

Brands like the NFL, Dow Jones’s All Things D, Time, and CNN have turned to WordPress, the incredibly popular open-source content management system, to build out their web presence. WordPress is famous for the power and ease of customization its brought the world of blogging, but as sites like Time.com demonstrate, the platform can be used for much more.

Non-profit leaders are paying attention to these big-name brands and realizing that if big brand budgets are turning to free, open-source software it must be for reasons other than price.

When Clay Broga of Public Notice, a recently formed non-profit, needed a solution for a new web project, he followed suit and chose WordPress. The result is BankruptingAmerica.org, a visually striking site that delivers news about the state of the American economy and federal fiscal policy.

In an email to ReadyMadeWeb, Broga explained that his focus on delivering news drove his decision to choose WordPress:

So much of our model depends on our ability to hit the news cycle with timely and relevant content. We had heard too many horror stories of organizations completely dependent on outside firms to make even the simplest updates to websites built on firms’ custom, proprietary platforms.

Like our last case study, Richard Lorenc and Nikki Sullivan’s FriedmanFacts.com, Broga was also influenced by the incredibly quick deployment time for WordPress sites:

It took about a month to do the site [...] groups with proprietary platforms estimated much longer schedules.

We needed a platform that would enable us to throw up the nuts and bolts and throw on the bells and whistles over time without drastic revamps.

Those bells and whistles came in the form of WordPress’s library of plugins—the optional add-ons that make WordPress so customizable. Broga outlined how building first and adding on later allowed Public Notice to not only introduce features faster, but also to ensure that they were choosing the right features:

An incremental approach is important. The faster we can get real-world feedback, the more we can deliver products based on what our audience wants.

But Broga stressed that choosing WordPress wasn’t just about short-term deployment concerns, open-source software also met his long-term goals for the site:

We may work with multiple web companies over time for various project and components. This is only possible if everyone speaks the same language.

Broga is spot-on about this unique advantage of open-source systems. According to Water & Stone’s 2009 Open-Source CMS report (download the full PDF), WordPress is not only the most downloaded CMS package on the web with over 400,000 downloads weekly, it also boasts one of the largest developer communities in world. There are literally thousands of WordPress developers listed on freelance listing like Elance and Guru.

This means that non-profits like Public Notice will never be locked-in to a relationship with a vendor. As Broga alluded to in the quote above, too many small businesses and non-profits make the mistake of choosing a proprietary CMS only to find themselves stuck with a vendor that under-performs and fails to meet deadlines.

Quick (and cheap) deployment, easy changes and additions, and the ability to use any one of the thousands of developers available are just a few of the reasons why your non-profit should consider using WordPress as well.

If you have any questions about WordPress implementation or development, please send us an email at info@readymadeweb.com.

Plugin Monday: Easily illustrate all your blog posts

by Jerry Brito on February 22, 2010 · View Comments

photo credit: drew…

Ever wonder how we manage to have a beautiful image illustrate every one of our posts on this site? Well, the secret is an incredibly handy WordPress plugin called Photo Dropper. It lets you easily search for, and insert into your posts, Creative Commons licensed images from Flickr.

Using the plugin is simple. When you want to insert a photo, you click the Photo Dropper button that is added to the “Upload/Insert” menu at the top of the new entry page in WordPress.

This brings up a search dialog where you can enter in keywords for to search for photos. Type some in and you’ll get back lots of interesting photos and graphics from which to choose. Click on one and it will automatically be inserted into your post.

The beauty of this plugin isn’t just that it makes it easy to find photos, but that it also makes it easy to respect copyright. In the plugin’s preferences you can choose the type of license to which you want search results limited–commercial or noncommercial. That way you know you’ll be using photos legally and ethically. Photo Dropper also takes out all the pain of giving credit to the image’s author because it automatically inserts the correct attribution and link back to Flickr. And as a bonus: Flickr hosts the image, reducing the stress on your server.

Here’s a bonus tip for those of using the Thesis WordPress theme: follow these instructions to edit your custom.css file so that when you use Photo Dropper, the images are nicely formatted and aligned left or right as you see fit.

Making Sense of Web Traffic Numbers

by Cord Blomquist on February 20, 2010 · View Comments

photo credit: Mykl Roventine

Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal recently covered the business of web traffic measurement and how the data gathered by services like Compete, Quantcast, comScore, Omniture, and Google Ad Planner differs wildly. I’d like to shed a little light on why measurements from these big-name firms can differ so wildly and how you can still make sense of the world of online advertising even if the numbers are less than solid.

First, a little background. Measuring web traffic is a notoriously difficult tasks, so much so that no accepted standard of measurement exists. Instead, measurement firms compete for the business of publishers, each claiming to have more accurate data than the others. But as Bialik points out in his piece in the WSJ, these numbers differ wildly.

To demonstrate just how wildly these measurements can differ, I plugged a few data points into Compete, Quantcast, and Ad Planner, services that make their traffic data readily available. Here are the US monthly uniques for NYTimes.com, WSJ.com, and Wired.com on these three services, rounded to nearest one hundred thousand visitors:

	Compete	Quantcast	Ad Planner
NYTimes.com	17.1M	12.6M	18 M
WSJ.com	10.9M	4.8M	6.7 M
Wired.com	5.5M	1.9M	2.9 M

It’s plain to see that these numbers differ wildly, but it’s also crucial to notice that these numbers don’t just differ in absolute terms, but also in comparative terms. By that I mean that according to Compete, WSJ.com receive about 60% of the visitors that NYTimes.com does, while Quantcast’s measurements show that WSJ.com receives only 38% of the NYTimes.com’s uniques—so it’s hard for advertisers to tell how large an audience a publisher has, even comparatively.

What causes these discrepancies? It all has to do with the nuts and bolts of how the measurement of traffic is performed by each service. Some of the measuring services are utilizing cookies—files saved on a user’s machine that the site will later reference to note repeat visits. But using cookies can be troublesome because users can delete them daily, weekly, or monthly depending on how they’ve configured their browsers, leading to very unreliable data. If cookie deletion rates were consistent across audiences, perhaps this wouldn’t matter, but it’s likely that readers of Wired.com—a tech savvy bunch—may be more aware of their browser’s cookies and other settings than others, skewing Wired.com’s traffic measures.

Still other services using javascript—code that contacts the measurement service’s servers to log a pageview—but javascript is often placed at a bottom of a page’s source code, causing it to run only after the rest of the page has been loaded into the browser. For users who are quick to move on to the next page, javascript may never see the light of day. Again, tech savvy come into play here as they may manually disable javascript, making them impossible to count.

Servers logs confuse this issue even futher. Slate’s Paul Boutin wrote a great piece on this topic in 2006 which Bialik links to at the end of his WSJ piece. Boutin compares 3rd-party measurement to Slate’s server logs and explains the huge discrepancies in those numbers.

All of this paints a pretty clear picture of an industry that really can’t measure itself in any reliable way. But my reaction to this is a big “So what?” Even if a precise number were available to advertisers, they would still have to engage in a process of trial and error to determine which sites provided the greatest return on investment. Some advertisers may experience a larger ROI from sites with relatively small audiences, while others may get better results from the sites that consistently post larger numbers. Either way, the notion that any measurement of audience size or demographics can be an accurate predictor of advertising effectiveness is ludicrous. The real measure of success comes from linking advertising dollars spent to sales, a problem that exists in every field of advertising.

So, if you’re venturing into the world of paid advertising for your business or non-profits, use 3rd party measurements as a way to narrow down your options, not as the final word on where to put your advertising dollar. Using unique landing pages or referral codes to help track the sources of new visitors or sales will be a much stronger indicator of where to concentrate your cash than any number that comScore or any other service can provide.

HT: Thanks to Adam Thierer, my co-blogger at TechLiberation.com, for pointing out Bialik’s piece.

Google Apps Updates

by Cord Blomquist on February 20, 2010 · View Comments

December 5, 2006: Name that search engine

photo credit: Matt McGee

Google announced a few great updates to Google Apps suite this week, which means those of us using Google Apps (like ReadyMadeWeb) are getting free upgrades at no additional cost (we pay nothing to use Google Apps) and without any additional setup—this is the beauty of web-based software.

So what are the new changes? These aren’t major fixes, but among the updates are two very small issues that had been an annoyance in Google Apps.

First, Google addressed the paranoia of many users who haven’t liked the conspicuous lack of a save button on many documents. The auto-save function built into Google Docs is supposed to free us from worrying about hitting the save button every few minutes, a worry forged through years of using buggy and crash-prone software like many of the early versions of Microsoft Word or MS Works. So, just to be nice and prove that they’re listening to our paranoid need for a button, the folks at Google have added one. Now users can click the button manually between Google’s frequent auto-saves, to satisfy their compulsion.

Google also added a core functionality that really needed to be part of Apps from day one—a clipboard. This clipboard will allow copy/paste functionality to work entirely within Google Docs, rather than using your computer’s built-in copy/paste functionality. This might seem redundant until you consider the problem of preserving format consistency when using a Mac or PC’s built-in clipboard. Copying document data from a web-based application, to a desktop clipboard, and back into a web-based app can cause some serious formatting shenanigans. Columns don’t stay aligned, highlights and fonts aren’t preserved, and the code behind the data becomes a garbled mess. The new built-in clipboard solves these issues by keeping everything within Docs.

Despite these seemingly basic features having just come online, Google reports that even more companies and universities are flocking to its online offering:

With 3,500 employees, Lincoln Property Company is one of the largest property management firms in the United States. Recently, Lincoln Property made the decision to switch to Google Apps from their complex and costly Novell Groupwise email infrastructure. Not only will they save an estimated $200,000 per year, they’ll finally be able to equip every single employee with email, instant messaging and calendars — not just the 950 desk-based workers who previously had email access.

The Google Apps train keeps rolling in the education space as well. Seven million students around the world are now using Google Apps at school! DePauw University, Yale University, Davenport University and the College of William and Mary are just a handful of the most recent schools to switch to Google Apps.

Large corporations and Universities can afford the best that money can buy, yet they’re realizing that buying boxes of software that must be installed on thousands of machines and then updated and re-updated no longer makes sense, especially when web-based alternatives like Google Docs are also more secure and allow users to access their documents anywhere on any computer with a Internet connection.

To read more about the most recent updates to Google Apps, check out the entry on the official Google Blog.

Give Your PHP Code Even More Speed with eAccelerator

by Cord Blomquist on February 17, 2010 · View Comments

photo credit: Zach Dischner

Many of today’s best open-source CMS systems are written with PHP, an incredibly popular and powerful scripting language. PHP’s power lies in its ability to dynamically generate pages, eliminating the need to code pages by hand in HTML. However, that same dynamism is one of the chief disadvantages of PHP because of the processor power needed to generate pages on the fly. Thankfully, that disadvantage can be easily mitigated by using caching programs like eAccelerator.

So what’s eAccelerator? Here’s the official description from eAccelerator.net:

eAccelerator is a free open-source PHP accelerator & optimizer. It increases the performance of PHP scripts by caching them in their compiled state, so that the overhead of compiling is almost completely eliminated. It also optimizes scripts to speed up their execution. eAccelerator typically reduces server load and increases the speed of your PHP code by 1-10 times.

I’ve found the 1-10 times speed increase to be a conservative estimate as many PHP sites will gain even more speed—even more reason to install this awesome software package.

Below I’ve outlined the process which I followed to install eAccelerator on a Media Temple dedicated virtual (dv) server version 3.5 running CentOS 5 and Plesk Control Panel version 8.6. Your setup my differ substantially, so please read through the documentation on the eAccelerator website and consult your hosting provider before proceeding.

Media Temple customers should visit their servers admin menu within the Media Temple Account Center in order to install the developer tools on your server as several of the software packages included in the developer tools will be needed for this installation, including “make” and “gcc.” This process will take a few minutes, so go grab a cup of coffee.

To begin the actual install process, login to your server via SSH using Terminal if you’re using a Mac or an SSH client like Putty if you’re using a PC. Here’s a quick guide to linux command-line commands if you need a reference.

Once you’re logged, drop back to the root directory:

cd /

Next, you’ll need to create a directory for eAccelerator, and then navigate into that directory:

mkdir /ea/

cd /ea/

Download and unzip the installer:

wget http://bart.eaccelerator.net/source/0.9.5.3/eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.tar.bz2

bzip2 -d eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.tar.bz2

tar xvf eaccelerator-0.9.5.3.tar

Set your current directory to the unzipped file:

cd eaccelerator-0.9.5.3

When you have only one php install (check your server settings), it’s safe to run these commands in the source directory. This next series of commands will configure and install eAccelerator:

phpize

./configure

make

make test

make install

After compilation, there should be a “eaccelerator.so” file in the modules subdirectory of the eAccelerator source directory. Check to make sure this is present.

Next, copy the eaccelerator.ini file into the /etc/php.d/ directory:

cd /

cp /ea/eaccelerator-0.9.5.3/eaccelerator.ini /etc/php.d/eaccelerator.ini

Edit eaccelerator.ini using the text editor:

vi /etc/php.d/eaccelerator.ini

Now change this uncommented line:

zend_extension=”/usr/lib/php4/eaccelerator.so”

To this :

zend_extension=”/usr/lib/php/modules/eaccelerator.so”

Now, restart Apache:

service httpd restart

To Verify that this installation worked, first check out PHP:

php -v

You should see these lines somewhere in the mix:

Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2008 Zend Technologies

with eAccelerator v0.9.5.3, Copyright (c) 2004-2006 eAccelerator, by eAccelerator

Finally, you can create a php file, and drop this line into it:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

When you load this php file in your browser you should see the configuration information from your installing of PHP and eAccelerator will have added its own block of information. It will show the configuration, but also the amount of allocated memory, cached scripts and so on. When this says that eaccelerator is enabled and any number of scripts are cached, eAccelerator is working.

If you have any questions about eAccelerator or anything else we’ve covered on ReadyMadeWeb, please leave a comment or email us at info@readymadeweb.com.

Plugin Monday, er, Tuesday: Get the Speed You Need with WP Super Cache

by Cord Blomquist on February 16, 2010 · View Comments

photo credit: tequilamike

Note: Presidents’ Day festivities delayed Plugin Monday. We hope you can make-do with this rare Tuesday edition of our weekly WordPress plugin feature.

In the spirit of the recent Daytona 500, this week we’ll be covering a plugin that will make your site speedier, WP Super Cache.

Unlike other plugins that put more load on your server’s process and slow down your site’s load time, WP Super Cache make your site faster by creating static HTML files from the PHP scripts that run WordPress. Those HTML files will be served in place of your dynamic WordPress pages, saving your server an incredible amount of strain.

This plugin is especially useful for WordPress users running WP on underpowered servers or users experiencing heavy traffic flow. This means that running WP Super Cache can save you cash by allowing you run WordPress on an inexpensive server without feeling all the lag that can often come with cheaper hosting services.

WP Super Cache is cleverly designed so as not to interfere with the functionality of your site in any way. Dynamic pages will still be served to users who are logged into your site, users who have left a comment (so they can see them), and users who are viewing a password-protected post or page, so there’s no need to worry about WP Super Cache affecting the experience of your users. If anything, user experience will be improved dramatically as your site will be faster and more responsive.

If you decide to move forward with installing WP Super Cache, it is important to note that installation involves some small edits to your site’s wp-config.php file as well as the .htaccess file. These edits aren’t very extensive, but errors in the code of these files can cause your site to have serious errors or be disabled entirely, so be sure to make backups of these files before you begin the installation process.

To Install the plugin, follow the detailed instructions on the plugin’s page at wordpress.org. Once you have the basics of the plugin up and running, I’d recommend leaving all the defaults in place with the exception of enabling Super Cache Compression. Though this compression feature can cause problems with some server setups, chances are that your server will deal with this option just fine and compression will make your site just that much faster.

No matter how you configure WP Super Cache, it’s a good idea to browse through several pages on your site, make a few test comments, and visit any password protected pages in order to test the caching functionality. Be sure to do this both while logged into your site and while logged out.

After your installation is complete, get to work promoting your site on Digg, as you’ll be able to absorb the traffic of a Digg front page link without a problem.

If you have any questions about installing WP Super Cache, please leave a comment or send an email to info@readymadeweb.com and we’ll get back to you and the rest of our readers with an answer.

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