I use LesterChan’s Download Manager plugin, and it’s great. Good interface, simple purpose. 

I recently found out that after upgrading a client’s site to WP 2.5, WP-DownloadManager was no longer working.  I followed the documentation on the plugin website, including resetting the permalink structure, but nothing worked.

For some reason the re-write wasn’t working properly: all the downloads were giving 404 errors.  I couldn’t figure it out, so I dove into the code.  I found the part of the plugin that rewrites the download links, and found the problem.

Here’s the fix I found hack:

The plugin uses a function on line 271 of downloadmanager.php that may not be working because of WP 2.5: download_file_url.

Here’s the original code:

### Function: Download URL
function download_file_url($file_id) {
$file_id = intval($file_id);
if(get_option(’permalink_structure’)) {
$download_file_url = get_option(’siteurl’).’/download/’.$file_id.’/';
} else {
$download_file_url = get_option(’siteurl’).’?dl_id=’.$file_id;
}
return $download_file_url;
}


I highlighted the part of the code that was causing me issues, and removed that if/else.

Updated code:

function download_file_url($file_id) {
$file_id = intval($file_id);
/* if(get_option(’permalink_structure’)) {
$download_file_url = get_option(’siteurl’).’/download/’.$file_id.’/';
} else {
$download_file_url = get_option(’siteurl’).’?dl_id=’.$file_id;
} */

$download_file_url = get_option('siteurl').'?dl_id='.$file_id;
return $download_file_url;
}

In summary

This may or may not have been a WordPress upgrade issue, but it did solve my problem, and I didn’t need to delve any further into the root cause.

Please post any comments or corrections below.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that one of my first clients in Lakewood, Colorado is now ranked top 5 for their primary keyword/key phrases:

SEO results for New Choices Plus

At the time of writing this article, here is their ranking in Google:

• Denver lavage: 3
• Denver colon hydrotherapy: 1
• Denver colon cleanse: 4
• Denver colon: 3

It’s pretty cool that even before I was “doing SEO” that KWD websites perform well in search.  It got me to thinking of some pretty fun domain names!

↑ A little sneak peek of my new web design

“You need to finish your web site“

My website has been in a transitional state for almost a year. Thankfully, in spite of that, Katz Web Design has been thriving. I’ve been so busy that I’ve not had reasonable time to focus on my business’ site.

I met with a client last week who said “Zack, are you a person who takes constructive criticism well?”  I thought ‘I hope so in this business!,’ and told her that I was.  She said “I had a hard time trusting you, since your website isn’t up — even though you’re a strong referral from Dana. Now that we’ve met, I’m completely comfortable. You really need to finish your website.“ 

I’ve finally landed on the design.

After months of playing with white-on-black designs that were more in line with what I think is cool, rather than what my audience wants to see. I’ve scrapped tons of designs, and finally realized that simplicity and light design is key.

I’ve started working on creating the site, and it’s moving along quickly.  I’ve landed on a June 6 launch date. Until then, I updated the KWD site with testimonials and recent projects.

I’ve been working with the WordPress platform for a little while now, and I’ve been a regular blogger since January (though I had been promoting blogging for years earlier, and had my first blog in 2000 [yes, I'm a bit insecure about my blogging creds]).  I’ve created many sites with blogging capabilities, some of them based on Blogger.com integration, and others WordPress.

I’ve explained the benefits of blogging many times to my clients, made nagging phone calls reminding them to blog — all to little avail.  I even wrote an article about the importance of blogging to help explain myself. But still, the blogs remain silent.

What I tell my clients about the benefits of blogging

If my clients already know what a blog is, then I can dive into why it’s so important (other than people KNOW that it’s important).  I tell them the following:

Blogging is a great way to reach people who may not be searching for what you want them to be searching for. Let’s say you have a service for “healing touch,” but it’s not “therapeutic touch.”  With a normal website, you would not be able to rank well for the other key phrase. If you write an article on the differences between therapeutic touch and healing touch, you then will be able to rank for both phrases, even if your business only focuses on one service.

The more you write about what you know, the larger your online sphere of influence grows. By writing consistenly about topics important to you, you’re able to rank better in Google and other search engines, build a community of people who follow what you write, and become an authority on your topic.

There’s no other marketing medium like blogging where all you need to invest is your time, and you’ll get direct benefits. Fliers, radio, tv, newspaper, business chambers — they all take money.  Blogging is free to set up, and free to use.  You will get out of it what you put into it.

That’s the jist of what I tell people about blogging.  They generally get very excited, get a blog, and post a few times. One month later, cobwebs form on their admin login form.

Maybe try a professional blogging service?

One thing I’ve considered is writing the articles myself.  I’m no copywriting expert (I’m a Denver web designer), but I do know my clients’ business well.  If they don’t have the time or commitment to write their own articles, they should find someone to do it for them. There are many professional blog writing services out there, maybe I should start recommending them?

Does anyone have any experience using a professional blog writing service?

Load time matters

Imagine waiting 18 seconds for a page to load (on a high-speed connection) — not just the home page, but any inside page of a website.  Pretty frustrating, right?  Having bad load times makes a huge difference to your customers.  I helped a new client reduce page load time from 19 seconds to 3 seconds.

A case study for load time

I am the new webmaster for a website, and it was having some issues: it was taking far too long to load the page.

I looked at the code, and identified many issues with performance, including placement of Javascript files, linking to a CSS file that didn’t exist, and including Amazon link enhancer code that only was needed for one page of the site, but had been included on every page.

Just over one hour later, I was able to reduce the load time considerably:

Is your website loading slowly?

I can recommend changes to your site. Let me know if you need help. Also, you can learn more about how to improve your load speed from Yahoo!

I just finished meeting with a client who told me that she had met with multiple other designers, and that I was the only one who provided any ideas for marketing her website. It’s pretty unbelievable.

She has a new product that is not yet launched — very under wraps — and wants to spread the word once the product goes live. Other web designers only discussed her website. I talked about a web presence.

It’s hard for me to imagine doing what I do in Katz Web Design and NOT knowing about Squidoo or Flickr and finding ways to integrate a community of users into your website.  If people want exposure, they know they need a website.  But that’s not all.  They need to be properly situated online, and that means SEO.

My wife and I are now back from our 1 week vacation.  We stayed at home, and were able to:

• Paint!
  • The living room
  • My office
  • The kitchen
• Buy!
  • A corner TV stand
  • A SolaTube (which has made our living room 300% more pleasant)
  • A new desk for my office
  • Gallons of paint (see “Paint!” above )
• Plumb
  • Our secondary sewer line collapsed. Ouch.

So, as you can see, it was quite the vacation.  It’s good to be back doing web design!

Sometimes my thoughts have a yiddish accent…

And sometimes, I do something about my thoughts — like go on vacation until May 5th.

So, the Webs, I’ll be not online.  Hope the Internet’s there when I get back

I normally don’t work with ASP; I use PHP for my coding. Recently, I had to create a style.css.asp file, and I needed to find how to set a far-futures header in ASP. 

Here’s what I found in 5 minutes :
<%
Response.ContentType = “text/css”
Response.ExpiresAbsolute=#May 05,2031 05:30:30#
%>
I normally write code in PHP, where I have a standard piece of code I use to gzip my style.css.php files, set a far futures expire date, and declare them CSS, instead of PHP:
<?php
header(”Content-type: text/css”);
header(’ExpiresDefault “access plus 10 years”‘);
if (substr_count($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING'], ‘gzip’)) ob_start(”ob_gzhandler”); else ob_start();
?>
This is kind of a note-to-self, but hopefully it helps you out! Anyone have better code they’d like to share?

Today at the Westside Business Builders meeting, Todd Colchin of Colchin Automotive & Diesel gave Katz Web Design a testimonial:

Our website is just barely up — and we’ve not done anything with it yet — and yesterday, we got two new customers who came into our shop who found us by our website! They were both 18-25 years old.

Having a website is vital, especially if you want to appeal to younger customer base.

I am designing and creating a real estate website with WordPress, and I’m going to be writing a few articles that detail how it’s done.  This article will get you started — please leave feedback with any questions or topic requests for the next installment.

A little background — why use WordPress?

I’m working with a Denver company on a real estate website. Their goal is to showcase their listings in an easy-to-update CMS.

I’ve worked with Open-Realty, and — to say it bluntly — it’s a huge pain in the ass.  When you scratch the surface of OR, you begin to realize how cobbled together it is. Customizing the code to work as it should requires a steep learning curve.  The templates are relatively simple to work with, but the administration section is horrible.  The Open Realty user experience is just awful. 

WordPress is my CMS of choice currently, and it’s so easy to develop for that I recommend it to many of my clients.

Starting off in WordPress real estate websites

So the obvious first step is this: real estate websites have a LOT of information on them.

Real Estate websites have this basic content:

(Alphabetized, none-the-less!)

• Address
• Basement type
• Basement finished %
• Bathrooms
• 1/2 Bathrooms
• Bedrooms
• Brochure (PDF)
• Car Storage Type
• # of Car Storage
• City
• Construction Type
• County
• Country
• Latitude
• Longitude
• Lot Size
• MLS #
• Neighborhood Name & Website
• HOA Fees
• HOA Includes
• Price
• Roofing Materials
• Schools
  • High School Name & Website
  • Middle School Name & Website
  • Elementary School Name & Website
• Status of Listing (Sold/Under Construction/Pending/Active)
• Square Feet
• Taxes
• Utilities (Avg.)
• Year Built
• Zip Code

It would be tough to ask your client to create Custom Fields manually for each listing for each one of those items. 

FreshPost to the rescque — easy real estate Custom Fields

FreshPost is essentially a WordPress plugin that allows you to define custom sets of Custom Fields to be included in a post.

By using FreshPost, it’s simple to create an administration template for creating a new listing.  Just set up the fields above, and then use FreshPost’s super-simple code (ex: echo get('zip code'); to insert that information into your template.

Planning your Real Estate website in WordPress

Once you’ve got the capabilities provided by FreshPost, a WordPress real estate website is more realistic, and less daunting.

The next phase is planning. Realty websites are an interesting challenge because users are going to be interested in finding a listing many different ways — and your client will want to be SEO friendly for searches about the neighborhoods they work in.

Structuring the website: flexibility is key

It’s important that the website will be able to handle listings in different counties, zip codes, cities, and potentially states. As such, create a category structure that mirrors real life.

For example, let’s have the following sample listings:

1. In Denver, Colorado’s Cherry Creek neighborhood - Zip code: 80023
2. In Littleton, Colorado (a suburb of Denver, CO) - Zip code: 80211 
3. In Albuquerque, NM’s Sandia Heights neighborhood - Zip code: 87101

Categories

• USA
  • Colorado
    • Denver
      • Cherry Creek
    • Littleton
  • New Mexico
    • Albuquerque
      • Sandia Heights
• ZIP Codes
  • 80023
  • 80211
  • 87101

There are many ways of setting up the categories; you could have a Neighborhoods parent, rather than having the city as the parent.  The point is that once you set up categories, you can properly sort the listings.

Once basic capabilities are set up…

Now that you can have tons of Custom Fields with FreshPost, and have set up hierarchal category structure, you’re able to set up a basic Real Estate website.

Some possible next steps:

• Use the Category Description to create SEO-friendly Neighborhood and City pages
• Download and install a plugin that lets you search Custom Fields, allowing users to actually search all your listing data
• Further optimize your site for search — write articles for each of your neighborhoods and have the articles displayed above your Multiple Listings [archives] view; write about events, local restaurants, etc. to build up a large amount of relevant information.
  • On a Single listing page, you could dynamically add those articles about the neighborhood

So, as you can see, using WordPress as a Real Estate CMS makes a lot of sense, and has fewer barriers than you might expect.

As my project continues, I will write another article detailing the process of creating the WordPress real estate website. 

Please let me know if you have questions or requests!

If you’re having trouble making WordPress work for your RE website, please let me know in the comments — I’ll try to answer your questions.

What topics do you want the next WordPress Real Estate article to cover?

It was my first career day at a high school (since being in high school), and it was fine.  I remembered that high schoolers are just kids and nowhere near adults yet.

There were some kids that had already started designing their own websites, one knew Ruby on Rails, one was very interested in design.

I’m glad I represented KWD there; it’s important that high schoolers know that you can make it in web design — or any business — if you work hard enough. 

There’s a problem with technology: it’s not human.  Technology often can’t express when there are problems, especially when it doesn’t know problems exist. There’s a gap between the consumer and the product that can often only be bridged by a middle-man repair shop.

Creating products that communicate their problems effectively is one of the next major steps in user-friendliness.

Nowadays you have Bluetooth, WiFi, email, IM, SMS, and endless other ways of wirelessly connecting and communicating. The chips are small, inexpensive, and easy to integrate; there are WiFi memory cards for cameras that fit on a postage-stamp size product.

So why can’t my car send me an email?

Instead of having to guess when my car actually needs an oil change, brakes changed, etc., why can’t my car tell me myself?

My wife and I were talking over the weekend about cars, and how annoying and discouraging it is when your car needs repairs.  Sometimes, the only way you know your car needs work is when the mechanic breaks the news: your car needs work done. 

How to tell your car is in trouble:

• You have a sticker on your windshield that gives you a hint when your next oil change is due — but that sticker might fade, peel, or be replaced.
• Your car might have a computer that knows exactly what’s wrong, but won’t tell you unless it’s hooked up to a special diagnostic machine.
• You may hear, feel, or smell something is wrong with your car and take it in
• A mechanic, who may or may not properly identify and diagnose problems

My car’s name is Boomer.

People already anthropomorphize their cars: we give them names, recognize them as cute/strong/fast/smart. Cars are more than a tool; they often mirror their owner’s personality. 

Since cars already provoke an emotional response, I want to propose something: have my car tell me what’s wrong.  I’d rather hear that my car needs a repair from my car.

I would like to get an email from my car like this:

Dear Zack,

It’s been around 4,500 miles since my last oil change, and I’ve been doing really well — even though the oil people tell you to change oil every 3,000 miles.  But recently, I’ve noticed I’m not feeling as good while accelerating, and I think it’s because I need new oil.

Could you please change my oil?  Here are a few nearby places:

• Option 1 - 1.3 miles away
• Option 2 - 1.5 miles away 
• Option 3 - 2.1 miles away ( I found a coupon online for 30% off!)

I’ll let you know if anything changes, but I will definitely need my oil changed within 1 week. 

Thanks!

Boomer, your VW Passat Wagon

How about getting a text message from your DVD player?

What other technology would you like to hear from? What obstacles are there to better communication by our products?

A man called yesterday wanting to have his Denver IT Services website optimized.  He had called multiple search engine optimization specialists in Denver, and each one had given him the same proposal: spend thousands of dollars per month, and take a long time.

Check out what the SEO companies said

He had been told the following by multiple companies:

In order to get your website ranked well, it will take 6 months to a year, and will cost $1,000.00 per month.

- Random Denver SEO companies

That means he will have paid $6,000 to $12,000 to have his site ranked well in search engines. I was taken aback; spending that much money each month on SEO is ridiculous for many reasons, but here are a few:

Steps to take before spending too much on SEO

1. If you’re a small company spending thousands of dollars a month, spend it on online advertising!
   • With AdWords and other online advertising, you can create targeted landing pages that meet the specific needs of the keyword-targeted audience
   • You know exactly where your money is going
   • You get guaranteed placement if you’re willing to pay for it
2. First things first: try some simple SEO upgrades in the code 
   • Did any other company notice all the other pages have the same badly crafted Title tag–the most important for SEO?
   • Basic changes can improve your rank dramatically, instantly, and simple structural updates will make the content you have count for more
   • Set up a general XML site map
3. After you’ve improved the code base, then you track the results, reassess your position, then move to the next steps
   • Setting up a blog for the Long Tail
   • Make sure you’re in all the local search engine results
   • Getting a presence in the social websites
   • Consider writing guest articles/press releases
   • Set up a Squidoo lens and a Facebook page

These SEO solutions probably would not cost $1,000, let alone $1,000 a month. 

SEO also depends on your competition

There’s an article on SEO Book that attempts to answer how long it will take to rank well. Their conclusion? The same as mine: it depends.

If the search results are uncompetitive (use SEO for Firefox to survey the competitive landscape) you might be able to rank in a month even if your site is brand new.

I use two programs to check how tough the competition is: SEO for Firefox and SEO SpyGlass. If your search competition is standing still / not established / not optimized, then moving up will be a piece of cake. If your field is crowded with many well maintained and optimized sites, then it will be harder to move up quickly, and it will take a longer time.

Make sure the SEO companies explain what their plan is, and why

Having heard what other SEO companies were proposing, it was shocking. $1,000 a month for building links using a software program?  If you are paying for SEO, it’s worth your money to have quality relationships built — not spammed links.

I propose solid steps to improving rank, and recommend consistent, focused SEO. I believe having a plan that starts from the ground gets better results for less money.  I hope other companies do as well.