It amazes me how bad some online shops still are. I’m sorry to start out on a negative note, but there are still a large number of resellers out there that don’t see the link between how their website looks and feels, and how many products they sell. Whats the the point in getting 5000 hits if 4998 of them are wasted because users don’t trust you? When I visit a web shop I immediately form an impression of the company based on their website. It helps me decide whether I think it’s safe to order a product from them or not. When I visit a site that looks like it’s been whipped up in FrontPage I lose confidence and immediately move on (this is measured as your site’s ‘bounce’ rate). Maybe it’s unfair but it’s a bit like eating out, if the restaurant looks rough and ready from the outside, I’m going to try the Italian down the road.

To highlight my point I’ve decided to go a bit old skool; I’ve been looking for a ‘real’ chess set (that doesn’t beep or flash) for the coffee table so I thought I’d try and buy one online.

As luck would have it chess resellers are a brilliant example (I’m sorry chaps). You know when you are trying to find something and all you keep getting are sites that look like they’ve been put together by an Eastern European gang just to steal your credit card details? Welcome to the world of online chess shops. That was until I [finally] found a chess shop that seems to have bothered with good web design; Regency Chess based in Bath. A shining example to behold perhaps?…..well yes, pretty much actually. They look like they’ve put a lot of effort into their site, they were quick when it came to delivery and they were really friendly when I spoke to them on the phone. When I’m impulse buying, I want (no need!) whatever it is I’ve ordered…yesterday.

I ordered a chess set from them at 11am on Thursday and….. alleluia…. it arrived at 10:15 the next morning. I’m no chess geek but the set they sent me looks really nice. It’s a 14” folding chess set with weighted pieces, the board is made from a chunky hardwood (I think it is Sheesham Wood) and it actually feels like it’s worth the £90 I paid for it. Yes, I could have bought something cheaper but some chess sets can cost hundreds, even thousands, and this feels like a good balance. It could easily pass for something twice as expensive. I got emails to tell me my order had shipped, communication was great and everything was properly packed.

I don’t often recommend or plug websites, not that many impress me, but I have to say I had such a good experience I felt compelled to use them as an example of a how specialist web stores should be. Take a look at their site, and then perform a search on google and look at some of their competitors sites. You’ll see what I mean. They’ve obviously spent a lot of time developing their site, making it easy to use without spending an absolute fortune.

Anyway that’s my geekout for today, Staunton Chess sets equal Regency Chess. Search Engine Optimisation PLUS good design equals better sales.

There seems to be a big debate about the use of the rel=”nofollow” tag when linking to other websites. I’m no SEO expert – so I’m in no position to comment! but in this post I will tell you how I added a checkbox to wordpress admin that allows me to make new sidebar (blogroll) links nofollow links. In my case I opted to use nofollow for linking to a few big websites. I haven’t used nofollow for linking to smaller sites that need the juice.

What is the rel=”nofollow” tag?
Simply put the rel=”nofollow” tag can be used when linking to other web sites to tell google and other search engines not to follow that link as part of their crawl. Thats the oversimplified explanation anyway, the reality is that it tells google not to add any weight to that page’s pagerank / ranking because of your link to that site, which it might otherwise do.

How I added rel=”nofollow” to selected sidebar (blogroll) links
If I want to create a link on my sidebar I usually go to ‘write’ and then ‘links’ from with WP Admin. At the bottom of this page there is a subtitle – “Link Relationship (XFN)” and beneath it is a text entry field with the tantalising word ‘rel’ (hmmm I want rel=”nofollow”)…… Unfortunately WP 2.5 won’t let me type anything here. I have to tick a checkbox beneath the text field for anything to appear in it. I guess I need a tickbox called ‘nofollow’. How do I add that?

To do this I downloaded and edited the ‘edit-link-form.php’ file from the \wp-admin folder on my webserver. I inserted the following line of code:

<tr>
  <th scope="row"> <?php _e('following') ?> </th>
  <td>
     <label for="follow">
     <input class="valinp" type="checkbox" name="follow" value="nofollow"
id="nofollow" <?php xfn_check('follow', 'nofollow'); ?> />
     <?php _e('nofollow') ?></label>
  </td>
</tr> 

this was inserted just above

<th scope="row"> <?php _e('identity') ?> </th>

which was on line 174 in my file. Now I have a tick box at the bottom of the write, links page and if I tick it, it makes the link a nofollow link!
** If you try this make sure you take a back up of edit-link-form.php first **

Since moving from blogger to wordpress I have been spending a lot of time working on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), so that my blog ranks highly. SEO can take a lot of time and I’m still in the early stages, but something I have discovered is that google has been indexing my archive pages.

The problem with this is that google sees these archive pages as duplicate content. For example http://www.thinkjim.com/2005/09/ contains a post about a microsoft windows training course, but this post is also a web page in its own right (http://www.thinkjim.com/2005/09/m2276-implementing-a-microsoft-
windows-server-2003-network-infrastructure.html). This counts as duplicate content and can effect your google pagerank.

To get around this i’ve learnt that you need to stop google indexing the archive pages and this can be achieved by adding a line of code to the header.php file – this forms part of your wordpress theme.

<?php if(is_archive()){ ?><meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow"><?php } ?>

If you put the line of code above into your header.php file it will tell google (and other search engines) not to index any pages that are archive pages, but the search engine will look inside archive pages for links to other pages (i.e. posts). If it finds a link it will follow it and index the linked page.