Wacdesigns | Technology, Web 2.0 and Life

Why is my bounce rate so high ?

Definition: A bounce occurs when a person leaves your website after reaching your entry page. The above cases can be considered equally as bounces from your website.

1) Visitor enters your site and press back immediately (before or even after the page has loaded)

2) Visitor waits for the page to load stays on this page for some time and then press back or navigate on another site. ( In this case the visitor might have found the information and then chose to navigate elsewhere to either find some supplementary information. Or it could be that he/she might not have found it but just read some pieces to see what is there, a third case could be the persons did not like the: website, content or colors on the site and went away.)

Therefore there seems to be considerable number of aspects to take into consideration to get a more precise question about “Why is my bounce rate so high ?”. There isn’t any straight forward answer to this question, but there are many questions that can lead to possible solutions:

When you ask your questions about bounce rate here are the different questions that might come to your mind.

Why is my bounce rate so high ?

User Interface
Is my layout/presentation/design attractive to visitors ?
Does my pages load slowly ?
Do my page have appropriate ads ? Are these ads non-aggressive towards the user ?
Is your page browser friendly ? (Can be views at any resolution with any browser the same way)

Content

Does  the user find what they are looking for ? ( High bounce rate and high time on site visits)
Is there enough information to show to the user ? Do I display enough or too much ?
From keywords analysis are the entry keyword valid for the content that the entry page ?

These are few questions, and there are much more that can come across when you want to decrease the bounce rate of your website. Personally I think that depending on your audience your bounce rate will always vary. There will be always accidental clicks (people make mistakes).

As mentioned on Bounce Rate article on Wikipedia: Taking the example of news site, which have all their information on the first page itself. People might just scan the page and then exit to another website. News website might just be off having 80% bounce rate with a satisfied visitor who was able to have what he came for. From this point of view: Informative website will most likely have high bounce rate compared to E-Commerce one’s for example where you must navigate on several page to be able to perform a checkout.

A word of conclusion:

Source Wikipedia:
Google.com analytics specialist Avinash Kaushik has stated:

“It is really hard to get a bounce rate under 20%, anything over 35% is cause for concern, 50% (above) is worrying.”

References and useful links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Rate

http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=81986

http://newsletter.blizzardinternet.com/how-high-is-your-bounce-rate/2006/02/09/

It’s been not nearly a year since I last used Windows Live Writer, there seems to have been a lot of enhancement and changes compared to the first version that i have tried up. Today, I’ll be giving a try to the beta version (Build 14.0.5025.904). The setup was quiet easy and straight forward, warning me that I must enable XML-RPC on my blog before I can continue.

The first thing I installed is the S3 Object plug-in, to be able to upload images directly to my Amazon S3 account and use them on this post.

This image comes from my S3 bucket.

There are many feature such as the Insert Map: Let’s try it out and point out Mauritius for example

Where i live.

Nice. I have also created a Marker (Push Pin). Which does not seem to appear, When you create a map on Windows Live Messenger, it’s not the actual map that appears but an image with a link to the actual map…

Some other comment: There is to a problem, when there are connection cuts. The application just hangs during an operation. It was the case for my first post. Hope that is will be happen.

Conclusion a very nice and elaborated tool for blogging. I’ll will be trying it for a fews days and will send some feedback on this post. Or create a new one if need be.

My previous article to Windows Live Writer can be found here

If you are wondering what are the choices you have to make share and backup your files, you might easily be able to find hundreds of alternative on the web today. Each one with their different features and technologies.

I came across 2 free tools that i use for my backup and file sharing:

MozyHome Remote Backup

MozyHome is a small application that runs on background and backups any folder that you configure it to. It will encrypt and then upload your files to your 2 GB free space. You have several tools to enable you to them restore any lost files. Nice for uploading document, project files. You have also the paid version with unlimited space.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a new tool, that just got public last week. It’s similar to Mozybackup with 2 GB free space and the posibility of backup your files. With some extra features such as file sharing and automatic sync. Personally I use it to share files only. Since your files need to be in the DropDox folder (Similar concept and LiveMSN sharing folder) to be able to share.

It also allows sharing of files and give you a nice public URL that you can easily send to the person you want to share your files with. The only lacking features i might see here, is that you can’t share an entire folder with files inside. i.e When you want to share several photos you can’t directly get a link to the folder. You must share it with someone that already has Dropbox. A feature that would enable a link to a zip version of an entire folder could be nice.

The problem today, is that we have a great asp.net website but search engines are indexing the http://greataspnetwebsite.com instead of http://www.greataspnetwebsite.com, this is commonly seen on the web and there are several ways to archive a good result for making the non-www to www domain. This redirection should be a 301 Permanently Moved, otherwise you will might lose your search engine indexed page or become duplicate content for your non-www and www domain. Here are easy steps how to archive a quick and clean Permanent Redirection using IIS.

Consider the case where we already have a website in IIS called: greataspnetwebsite.com

• Go to IIS Manager
• Create a new website that point to the same directory as your existing one
• Select the newly created website, open the properties box
• In the option button “When connecting to this resource the content should come from” should be change to “A redirection to a URL“
• Specify the URL http://www.greataspnetwebsite.com
• Select the check box that says “A permanent redirection for this resource.”

Today, I’ll talk a bit about how ASP.NET handles HTML rendering of controls such as <asp:HyperLink> and <asp:Label>.  If you have developed using ASP.NET you must have noticed that when an <asp:Hyperlink> or <asp:Label> is rendered you will find something like that:

<html>

<a id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_rptShoppingCart_ctl00_lnkGotoCheckout" href="#" class="someCss">delete</a>

</html>

From an ASP.NET point of view, this is fine, since all object rendered should be identified uniquely on the client side. But many a time these are useless, since these hyperlinks are not used to trigger any server side events. Thus the id attributes just takes up a lot of space on your HTML and Page Size when you have many links like that. If you don’t want to have those, here is a solution I came up with, you can create custom server controls that inherits from the control that you want to remove the id attribute tag from.

Here is sample of the code that i used to remove the id attribute from the Hyperlink Control, without basically removing all the features provided by the Hyperlink control such as being able to handle Resource files for globalization.

[ToolboxData("<{0}:HyperLinkEx runat=server></{0}:HyperLinkEx>")]
public class HyperLinkEx: System.Web.UI.WebControls.HyperLink
{
private string rel;

/// <summary>
/// Gets or sets the rel.
/// </summary>
/// <value>The rel.</value>
public string Rel
{
get { return rel; }
set { rel = value; }
}

/// <summary>
/// Renders the control to the specified HTML writer.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="writer">The <see cref="T:System.Web.UI.HtmlTextWriter"></see> object that receives the control content.</param>
protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer)
{
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

sb.Append("<a");

if (this.NavigateUrl.StartsWith("~"))
this.NavigateUrl = ResolveClientUrl(this.NavigateUrl);
sb.Append(" href=\"" + this.NavigateUrl + "\"");

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(rel)) sb.Append(" rel=\"" + rel + "\"");
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.CssClass)) sb.Append(" class=\"" + this.CssClass + "\"");
if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.Target)) sb.Append(" target=\"" + this.Target + "\"");
if (this.Attributes["onclick"] != null) sb.Append(" onclick=\"" + this.Attributes["onclick"] + "\"");

sb.Append(">");

if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(this.ImageUrl)) //Some image were found
{
if (this.ImageUrl.StartsWith("~"))
this.ImageUrl = ResolveClientUrl(this.ImageUrl);
sb.Append("<img src=\"" + this.ImageUrl + "\" alt=\"" + this.Text + "\" title=\"" + this.Text + "\" border=\"0\" />");
}
else
{
sb.Append(this.Text);
}

sb.Append("</a>");
writer.Write(sb.ToString());
}

}

In this source code, i have overridden the render method of the control and outputted a cleaner HTML anchor with no Id attributes. I have also added support for ImageURL attribute of the hyperlink server control, thus maintaining the most of the asp:Hyperlink features.

I have also created a tiny library with some controls: <asp:HyperLink>, <asp:Label>, <asp:Image> which i think are the controls that need not have the id attribute in every scenario.

You can find it for download under GNU Public Licence here.

While searching for some open source software today, i just bumbed onto a “new”: Streamed and clearer version of sourceforge.net website. It’s quiet nice i may say, when u enter the page, u don’t have a lot of stuff, like the normal one.

It’s a Google like home page i may say, not many actions, but the essentials that are needed is visible. Let’s say is more web 2.0

The bright orange is a bit too flashy and takes up too much of the screen i may think. It could have been a bit smaller.

For those who don’t what sourceforge.net is about here is a part of the description from wikipedia:

SourceForge.net is a source code repository and acts as a centralized location for software developers to control and manage open source software development. SourceForge.net is operated by Sourceforge, Inc. (formerly VA Software) and runs a version of the SourceForge software, forked from the last open-source version available. A large number of open source projects are hosted on the site (it had reached 178,832 projects and 1,861,990 registered users^[2] as of 2008, although it does contain many dormant or single-user projects).

SourceForge.net has offered free access to hosting and tools for developers of free software / open source software for several years, and has become well-known within such development communities for these services.

SourceForge.net competes with other providers such as RubyForge, Tigris.org, BountySource, BerliOS, JavaForge and GNU Savannah.

Read more about sourceforge here.

Yahoo has just opened his search engine to us developer folks, we can now mindle and medle about to improve our search result on our own website. The codename for this open API is BOSS (Build your Own Search Service). As describe in zdnet article: is this a way for Yahoo to try to get some market shares in the search industry on GOOG.

Here is an extract from Yahoo! Search BOSS YDN

BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is Yahoo!’s open search web services platform. The goal of BOSS is simple: to foster innovation in the search industry. Developers, start-ups, and large Internet companies can use BOSS to build and launch web-scale search products that utilize the entire Yahoo! Search index. BOSS gives you access to Yahoo!’s investments in crawling and indexing, ranking and relevancy algorithms, and powerful infrastructure. By combining your unique assets and ideas with our search technology assets, BOSS is a platform for the next generation of search innovation, serving hundreds of millions of users across the Web.

I’ll try to experiment a bit on it, to see if i can get to integrate the search on this blog for a small…

Here we are, the day that many developers, specially Flash developer has been waiting for… their application can now be crawled and indexed by Google and Yahoo search engine this was officially announced by adobe on tuesday: “to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.”

They have been working together with Google and Yahoo for a way to give access to all the information that can be found in Flash application that have been hanging around the web for the some times now.

So what does that mean, in the Web world: Flash developers that have strived to create faboulous flash websites and application, that could only be reached via direct linking, will now be seen in Google and Yahoo search result, WOW this means millions of Flash application links will make their appearance in the day to day searching on GOOG.

From my point of view this is something really good. But what will happen to AJAX application with fancy effects ? will they not be replaced by Flash which is now INDEXABLE natively by the web crawler. From what i know from the internal working of flash, their are series of events that are triggered to be able to navigate in an application, so when the crawler will index it, will it be by pages or by scene… What will be the effect of this changes on the Web 2.0 era ?

i’ll make some research to see how it will be working and maybe post back something here. If anyone has extra information or reaction to this post, do not hesitate to post a comment.

Here is an article from ZDNET:

It’s a big day for rich Internet applications. Why? You can now find these newfangled Web applications a lot easier. Google, Yahoo and Adobe have teamed to make Flash file format content easier to find….

Read more

You need to archive your IIS Log often so as not to get your log folder full with HTTP Logs.

I have been searching for some quick implemented solutions for performing this IIS Log archiving task and found some quiet nice discussions and article about it. Here are the links to the different post and forums that talk about a solution to solve this issue:

http://blogs.thesitedoctor.co.uk/tim/2007/02/10/Automatically+Delete+Old+IIS+Log+Files.aspx

http://www.iislogs.com/ (Tool to automate maintenance of IIS Log)

http://forums.webhostautomation.com/showthread.php?t=5053

http://forums.iis.net/p/1022450/1388469.aspx

On my side i need something with a bit more functionality so, i modified some of the scripts that i could find on the different article related above and came up with a solution that can.

• Compress each log file found in your websites folder
• FTP the compressed files on a foreign server ( Keeping historic of your IIS log ) Uses Chillkat Free FTP ActiveX
• Delete them from your disk afterward

You can launch this process everyday and there will be no log that is older than a specified number of days on your server.

Requirement for this solution to work:

• Chillkatsoft FTP.1 ActiveX
• gzip archiver

You can download the script here.

See the entire script in the full post.

Read more »

This Saturday i attended the first BarCamp in Mauritius, which was a great initiative from the organizers(Pierre Bernard). Even though some of the persons that should be attending did not come, it was really great and everyone that attended the session was really satisfied by the level of discussion and presentations that took place.

The first presentation was on Ubuntu Linux release performed by Malcolm(hobbyist bater bis). He detailed several aspect of the OS as it is becoming more and more popular for it’s ease of use and growing community support. And the possibilities for anyone to have access to a free operating system that enables any user to perform basic PC operating. With slides showing Firefox 3.0 installed by default on the latest version and Open Office with is a pretty good free alternative to Microsoft Office.

Then came the intervention of Vincent(bloggeur solidaire humorist), on how to install, manage and optimize a new WordPress installation. His presentation started with the installation of the WordPress zip file in a virtual directory that is used by his Apache server on a local machine. He created a new database using phpMyAdmin and then finalized the installation explaining the purpose of a good prefix for your WP Tables, which is by default “WP_”. After the installing we shown how to use plugins and widgets to enhance your WP Experience and you pages presentation. There was also a small debate on SEO Optimization on WP and how to enable permalinks or clean links to be better reference by search engine. It was a good introduction to WP and how i can be use to perform day to day blogging on the web.

OpenID Mauritius, this conference was performed by our Organizer Pierre Bernard, who will be the representative of OpenID in Mauritius.  He discussed on the advantages of using OpenID compared to have multiple authentication information for each website you are using. OpenID will be keeping all your authentication in one and only one location so that you need to remember only one password the one of your OpenID account and you should be able to have access to any of your favorite websites. You can find a list of comprehensive sites that are using OpenID here.

There was several other small brainstorming and discussing mainly on the use of the different video streaming technology used for making web conference on the web. SEO: the good, the bad and how it the mystification about how it actually works. There were also some discussion about a possible creating of some Linux Ubuntu user group to show people that there are other OS out their that can suit their needs too without the hassle of having to pay a license.

Hoping that you enjoyed this little resume about the first BarCamp that was held in Mauritius. We are hoping of doing another one in August to celebrate the anniversary of BarCamp. As soon as i can hold of the photos i’ll update this post.

Update: 23.06.2008

You can also have access to the minutes of the BarCamp available in french on Bernard’s Blog with video’s and photos