ACreative-Vancouver Web Design, SEO Vancouver, Internet Marketing Vancouver

Edit Your Images in Minutes

admin — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:54:08 +0000

One of the advantages of having a Content Management System website like Joomla is being able to update it yourself without paying me extra. One of the most popular updates is photos. But here is a trick – your image has to be certain size in order to look good. Some people use various editing software and some have no idea how to do it. If you are one of them you can use www.picnik.com .

The process is very self-explanatory:

1. Go to www.picnik.com . No registration required

2. Upload an image from your computer, Picasa web albums, Facebook, Flickr or Photobucket

3. Use advanced controls to fine-tune your results: crop, resize, and rotate in real-time

4. Use tons of special effects, from artsy to fun

5. Save your image

My next post will cover how to find out the required size of the image and how to upload it to your website.

If you have any questions feel free to email hello@acreative.ca or call 778.991.3593.

ACreative is Vancouver web design and marketing company specializing in Web Design and SEO.

How to Exclude Your Own Traffic from Google Analytics Reports

admin — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 17:47:36 +0000

Note: This article is for the latest version of the tracking code. If you are using the older version, please read the following article.
To determine which tracking code you are using, please see Which version of the tracking code am I using?

If you want to exclude internal traffic from appearing in your reports, you can filter out a specific IP address or a range of IP addresses. You can also use cookies to filter out visits from particular users. We’ll explain how below.
To exclude by IP address:

Click Filter Manager from the Analytics Settings page
Enter a Filter Name for this filter
From the Filter Type drop-down list, select Exclude all traffic from an IP address
The IP address field will auto-populate with an example IP address. Enter the correct value. Remember to use regular expressions when entering any IP address. For example, if the IP address to filter is:

176.168.1.1
then the IP address value will be:
176\.168\.1\.1

You may also enter a range of IP addresses. For example:
Range: 176.168.1.1-25 and 10.0.0.1-14
IP address value : ^176\.168\.1\.([1-9]|1[0-9]|2[0-5])$|^10\.0\.0\.([1-9]|1[0-4])$

Select the profiles to which this filter should be applied in the Available Website Profiles box
Click Add to move the selected profiles into the Selected Website Profiles list
Click Finish to save this filter, or Cancel to return to the previous page

To exclude traffic by Cookie Content

Note: This is an advanced alternative to the previous method.

To exclude traffic from dynamic IP addresses, you can use a JavaScript function to set a cookie on your internal computers. You’ll then be able to filter all visitors with this cookies from appearing on your Analytics reports.

How to exclude traffic by cookie:

1. Create a new page on your domain, containing the following code:

(Please note that this code is in addition to the Google Analytics tracking code that you have on every page of your website.)

2. In order to set the cookie, visit your newly created page from all computers that you would like to exclude from your reports.

3. Create an Exclude filter to remove data from visitors with this cookie. Follow these instructionshttp://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55494
to create a filter with the following settings:

Filter Type: Custom filter > Exclude
Filter Field: User Defined
Filter Pattern: test_value
Case Sensitive: No

If you have any difficulties installing Google Analytics feel free to email hello@acreative.ca or call 778.991.3593.

ACreative is Vancouver web design and marketing company specializing in web design and SEO.

How to Install Google Analytics in Joomla

admin — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:31:12 +0000

If currently you are not using Google Analytics you are not tracking the traffic on your website. It is very simple to install it on your website and today we will show you how:

Go to https://www.google.com/analytics/settings/home and login. You will need to have Google account and if you don’t Create One
If you are automatically taken to a new version click on Make Old Version Default
Click Add Website Profile and follow the steps
Type your domain name, country and time zone and press Continue
You will be taken to the Tracking Code page. Now the process of adding Tracking code varies for different Joomla versions.
Add Tracking Code

If you are using Joomla 1.5:

Log in to your website admin panel with username and password www.yoursite.com/administrator/
On top of the screen select Extensions>Template Manager
Click on Default Template Name
Click on Edit HTML
Scroll down all the way to the bottom and find tag

You should paste the code just before this tag
Go back to Google Analytics Tracking Code page and select HTML code (located under 2. Paste this code on your site)

Go back to your Joomla Admin Page and paste the code just before tag

Click Save and Google Analytics is installed on your Joomla website.

If you are using Joomla 1.7:

Log in to your website admin panel with username and password www.yoursite.com/administrator/
On top of the screen select Extensions>Template Manager
Click on Default Template Name
In the template menu click on Features
Scroll down to the bottom and you should see Google Analytics
Go back to Google Analytics Tracking Code page and select UA Code on top of the page. It is called Web Property ID and starts with UA-xxxxxxx-x
Go back to your Joomla Admin Panel click Enable ON and paste your code under UA Code
Click Save and Google Analytics is installed on your Joomla website.

If you have any difficulties installing Google Analytics feel free to email hello@acreative.ca or call 778.991.3593.

ACreative is Vancouver web design and marketing company specializing in web design and SEO.

How to Optimize Your Joomla Website

admin — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 18:12:48 +0000

Hi guys! Today we are going to discuss an important part of web design world – how to optimize your website for search engines. In other words how to make sure users can find you online and your web site is generating business and bringing money in the bank.

An important part of any search engine optimization (SEO) is your website’s title, description and keywords. Although Google claims that their web page crawlers do not crawl web pages by keywords due to a lot of spam in the past years, you still want to make sure you have the right keywords for many other different reasons.

So, as ACreative’s client your website is designed on Joomla 1.5, Joomla 1.6 or Joomla 1.7. There are very slight differences in the Admin panel but not many. We are going to take Joomla 1.7 as anexample. Joomla 1.7 has a Global Configuration area:

Login into your Admin panel with your Username and Password
Go to Top admin panel and click on Site
Then click on Global Configuration

There you will find 4 tabs with the following options:

1. Site – here you can change all basic site settings such as site description, keywords, meta data and SEO options. You can also put your site offline and set the offline message from here.

2. System – while most of the settings in the system tab are rather advanced, you should definitely pay attention to two of them:

Cache Settings

Set it to On – Progressive Caching if you’d like maximum caching and fastest Joomla.

Set it to On – Conservative if you’d like to disable modules caching.

In any case there is cache time in minutes. During this time changes may not appear because cached copies will be served to the viewers. The image below demonstrates how Cache option looks in Joomla 1.5

Session Settings

This is the timeframe during which you will stay logged in your Joomla even if you are inactive. Increase it if you are annoyed by being logged out too often from your web site.

3. Server – most of the settings here should be automatically configured during the installation. You might want to change the Location Settings if you are in a different time zone though. This will help you when the published date of your articles is incorrect or when you receive Joomla notifications with invalid date.

4. Permissions – By default you should change nothing in the Permissions for a standard site. These functions are rather meant for sites with complex structure and multiple user levels.

If you have any difficulties optimizing your website feel free to email hello@acreative.ca or call 778.991.3593.

ACreative is Vancouver web design and marketing company specializing in web design and SEO.