It’s going to be a bit quiet around here for a few days as I’m off to Wales for the Bank holiday.
But before I go, I would like to say a big thank you to everyone who has shown interest in my first free Wordpress theme called Tumbled. It was downloaded over 40 times in the first day, and as many again after I released the update yesterday evening. Amazing!
Right, the camper van is loaded up, so it is time to hit the road… now where is that nice sunny weather we were supposed to be having today?
This is my first Wordpress theme I have made publicly available, and it’s not something I have had sitting around for ages either – I started it yesterday afternoon with the soul intention of making it purely for public release.
So here goes, I would like to introduce you to Tumbled, a single column, no nonsense theme loosely based on the popular Block style on Tumblr.
Yep, that’s right, you can now have that Tumblr look on your Wordpress blog.
I must warn that Tumbled is still a Beta, but rest assured I have tested it in Safari and Firefox on the Mac, and Internet Explore 6 and 7 plus Firefox on the PC. Everything seems to work fine, although there is a slight discrepancy with the navigation in IE 6 – there always something wrong in IE 6 though isn’t there!
NOTE: A problem was found where Smiley Faces inherited the default image styling! It is recommended that everybody downloads the latest version to avoid the visual unpleasantness – sorry about that!
Designing and editing websites and blogs can be much easier with the right tools. Here is a list of my top 5 website building tools:
Smultron: A free text editor for the Mac which is both easy to use and powerful. It is designed to not confuse newcomers nor disappoint advanced user. I have been using Smultron for well over a year, and it has become my default text editor of choice for .txt, .html to .php
Website: Smultron by Peter Borg. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4.9 Tiger or later
Price: Free!
CSSEdit: This little application is quick, clean and offers superb CSS styling of absolutely any web page. It is the fastest, easiest CSS editing application I have used, and find using anything else a real pain in the …
Website: MacRabbit. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.
Price: $29.95.
Adobe Photoshop: Possible slightly over the top, in price terms, for most web-designers, and can be a bit daunting to use for the first time. But I’ve been using Photoshop for fifteen years now and know it like the back of my hand – so I never start a new design project or website without mocking it up in Photoshop first. It is always running on my Mac and allows me to edit any image instantly.
Website: Adobe. Requirements: PS CS3 Mac OS X v.10.4.8 or higher.
Price: from $649.
Transmit 3: If you design your site locally like I do, then you need a way to get it from your desktop to your server! For pure simplicity I have used Transmit for years now, as it does just that. It is the FTP app of choice for a lot of Mac user, allowing perfect Synchronisation between Your Stuff and Theirs (local and server).
Website: Panic. Requirements: Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher.
Price: $29.95.
Parallels: If you build it you really (really) should make sure it works in every browser! I must confess I am slightly cynical on the whole browser testing thing because I use Safari for most of my browsing these days, and generally it seems to work with 99.9% of every website I visit. Firefox does come a close second, and I do use it for writing and editing posts on my Wordpress sites as this is one thing that Safari doesn’t like (sigh!).
After yesterdays stats overdose, I’m back on track – well I’m only checking stats every two hours and feel I can get myself back to only checking them twice a day again by the end of the week… I hope!
Anyway, just tweaked a few things here on Davinian:
OK, not a bad few hours this morning – especially as I’m a little hung-over!
I seem to be obsessively checking my website stats all the time at the moment!
I normally check them first thing in the morning as part of my, what has happened while I’ve been sleeping routine (more on my daily routine soon), and then I usually check them again before I go to bed. This way I can get a good feel of the effects I am having on new and returning traffic to my sites form using different types of advert campaign’s and social networking tools/websites (i.e Bla.st, Twitter, StumbleUpon etc.,)
But as the volume of new (unique) visitors goes up, which is great, I have been finding I spend more and more of my time analysing my stats than writing new content, which is not so great – detrimental to the cause in fact!
I guess a way around this is to try and find the information I want in a more efficient way. Currently I tend to find my built in hosted AwStats cross referenced with Googles Analytics gives me the most accurate figures, but this can be time consuming. So I’m wondering if there is a better way or an additional traffic monitoring service that is quicker and more accurate? Thus saving me time!
So, does anybody have any suggestions? What do yo use for site traffic monitoring? And how many hours a day do you spend checking your stats?