I just ran into this problem today; thought I should post the solution in case anybody else finds themselves in the same boat.

I moved a WordPress blog from one server to another which was running lighttpd with a blanket 301 redirect to from www to non-www URLs. When I fired up a browser to test it, I got the dreaded “this website is responding in a way that will never resolve” message. A quick look at the lighttpd logs confirmed that I was bouncing from www.example.com to example.com then back to www.example.com.

I expected the first redirect but not the second, and checking in my lighttpd conf showed no rule that could possibly be triggering it. Thinking maybe I had left a redirection plugin running, I logged on the blog (by temporarily disabling the redirect rules) and checked, but couldn’t find anything.

Turns out that WordPress itself is capable of generating 301 redirects according to the “Blog URL” field in the General settings page. If the URL is set to http://www.example.com and a request comes in for http://example.com/some/page, then WordPress will automatically respond with a 301 redirect to http://www.example.com/some/page (which in my case, would get caught by my lighttpd rule and bounced back to the original request URL, and so on).

Moral of the story: make sure that your WordPress URL settings and any manual redirection you are carrying out are in agreement as to what the ‘correct’ URL should be!

Welcome readers! This is a long-ish post with lots of images, so it might take a minute to load.

One thing that we hear all the time about selling products online is the importance of great product photos. However, it’s not enough just to take good photos – as online sellers we have to pick the images that will catch the eye of buyers. Picking the image that shows off your product best is a tricky business – take a look at all these requests in the Etsy forums! Trouble is, simply asking people what photo they like best is a very unscientific way to go about it – we will usually only get a small number of responses, and people may like or dislike an image for reasons that have nothing to do with how well it sells your product.

Fortunately, there’s a technique that we can use to pick between two photos by actually measuring which one people like best. The technique is called “split testing” or “A/B testing” and how it works is very simple. Imagine you have a blog post which contains a picture of your latest product which your visitors can click on to buy it, and you have two good photos, A and B. Every time a visitor views the post, you pick A or B at random and show them that photo. Then you measure the number of people that click on each photo (we call this the “conversion rate”). The photo that gets more people to click on it is the winner!

Even though it’s very simple, this technique is very powerful, because it actually measures the difference in performance between the two photos. Big online sellers use this approach all the time. Have you ever looked at a product page on Amazon.com, for instance, and noticed that it displays a different picture from one day to the next? That’s because they are A/B testing different images to see which one sells more.

Now unfortunately we can’t use A/B testing on our Etsy shops, because we can’t directly change the code of the Etsy web pages. However, if you have a blog or website of your own (for example, a WordPress or Blogger blog), you can use A/B testing, even if you send your visitors to Etsy to actually buy your product. I’ve made a new tool that makes A/B testing your images easy, and in the rest of this post I’ll show you how to use it by setting up a test, using an example product from Max and Molly Designs. The new tool is hosted at lazzia.com; you don’t need to create an account, and you can run 3 image tests for free (and pay only $1 per test after that).

The example I’m going to use is this screen-printed T-shirt. You can see that there are two main photos – one of the T-shirt being worn by a model, and one of it hanging up:

Let’s say we want to make a blog post featuring this item, with a nice big picture of the product, but we don’t know in advance which photo will generate the most interest. We’ll use my new tool, to set up an image test using these two photos. Once we’ve found the best image, we can not only use it on a blog, but also make it the first image in the Etsy listing, include it in email newsletters, etc.

First, we’ll go to lazzia.com and log on.

Lazzia.com allows you to log in using your existing account from Google, Yahoo, WordPress, or Blogger, so you don’t need to create a new account. I use Gmail, so I’m going to log in with my Google account.

Once I’ve logged in, I click “Start a test”

Now to fill in the form. There are only three bits of information I need – the addresses of the two images, and the address that I want the user to go to when they click the photo. To find out the addresses of the two images, I’ll browse to the Etsy listing page. The best way to get the location of an image is different depending on which web browser you are using, so take a look at this page for instructions for your browser. In this case, the two image addresses are

http://ny-image1.etsy.com/il_570xN.167632981.jpg

and

http://ny-image2.etsy.com/il_570xN.167632982.jpg

The destination address is also easy to find; I can just copy it from the address bar of my browser:

It is

http://www.etsy.com/listing/54281811/greyhound-adoption-screenprinted-cotton

Armed with this information, I can pick a name for the test and fill in the form:

When I click the “Start the test!” button, I’m taken to a new page that gives me the code to put in my blog post where I want the image to appear.

I can now go to my blog, create a new post, and copy and paste the code where I want the image. Be sure to use HTML mode when you do this step. Here’s what it looks like when I create the post on a test WordPress blog:

Now when my visitors view the post, half of them will see this:

And half of them will see this:

Try it for yourself – here is a link to the test blog post. Over the next few days, lazzia.com will count how many people view each picture, and how many click on it to go to the shop. When I log on to lazzia.com again after a few days, I can click on “Results” to see how many views and clicks the two photos have got between them:

And then I can click on the name of the test to see the information I am really interested in – which photo got the highest percentage of clicks?

The result tells me that the photo of the model wearing the T-shirt got a higher click-through rate than the one of it hanging up, so I know that I should use that photo to promote the item.

Once the test has finished, lazzia.com will stop showing the photos randomly and instead will show the winning photo (the one with the highest click-through rate) to all visitors, so you can safely leave the code in place. Don’t forget to set the wining photo as the first one on your Etsy listing though!

If you’d like to give A/B testing a try, head over to lazzia.com and get started. If you’d like to know more, check out the frequently asked questions or read about how it works. If you need help, or if I’ve failed to explain anything clearly, drop me an email – martin@whalesharkwebsites.com. And if any Etsy sellers would like to experiment with using lazzia.com on a larger scale, let me know and I can add some free credits to your account.

I’ve had to keep quiet about this while judging was taking place, but now that it’s all over I can reveal my entry for the Etsy Handmade Code contest – Etsy Vintage Timeline. It’s a very simple app that grabs listings from the Vintage category using a keyword search and arranges them by decade in a sideways-scrolling list, showing you how designs and styles have changed over the last 100 years. It’s easier to see than explain, so I’ll just link to my favourite example: cameras.

For a long time, I’ve been interested in how conventions arise organically in large online communities like Etsy. Once such convention is that sellers tend to tag their vintage items with the year or decade in which they were made. What’s so interesting about this is that it’s not documented anywhere – you won’t find any mention of it in the API specification – but it’s consistent enough that you can write an app to take advantage of it.

I’m also interested in user interfaces right now – like most programmers, I am often guilty, when writing a program,  of concentrating too much on the back-end code and not giving enough thought to how the user will interact with it. So I’m quite pleased that I managed to keep the interface for this app very simple (just one input box!) and hopefully quite intuitive (just drag the timeline from side to side).

You can see the results, along with links to the other entries, by clicking here.

One of the suggestions that comes up a lot in the Etsy forums is for a gift registry / wishlist. I’ve had an idea for such a tool at the back of my mind for a while, so recently I decided to dust off some old code and get round to building one. So, without further ado, here’s a link to My Etsy Wishlist. It’s very basic & simple right now – you can register, add items based on their listing ID, and share your list with your friends and family in the hope that they’ll buy you something on it Go and play with it and let me know what you think.

I have had a few questions about how to use My Etsy Wishlist, so I’ve made a quick post to show you how easy it is!

My Etsy Wishlist is very simple to use – the first thing you see when you log in is a form that lets you add new items (click the picture to see it larger):

To add a new item, the only thing you need to fill in is the listing ID. You can find this on the right-hand side of the listing page:

Copy and paste this number into the form, then add a comment (if you like) and some tags (if you like). You don’t need to enter a comment or tags; they’re completely optional. Then click “Add it!”.

Once you’ve added some items, you can send your friends a link so they can see your wishlist. You’ll find the link near the top of the page – just copy and paste it into an email. You could even put the link on your website so that all your readers can see your wish list!

If you have any questions or suggestions, just leave a comment in this post.

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, one of the most compelling reasons for owning your own website is being able to gather information about your visitors. If you’re selling products online, (using Etsy , for instance), then it’s even more important, since your visitors are your customers!

One of the best free analytics tool is Google Analytics – take a look at this recent post for more details.  Here are 5 questions that online sellers should be asking, and instructions on how to answer them using Google Analytics. I’ll illustrate each question with real data from this website – click each picture to see it bigger.

1. Where are my visitors from?

To see this, click “Visitors” then “Map overlay”.

Hopefully, the reason why this is important for online business is obvious – these are the people you’re trying to sell to, so make sure that they can buy from you! Do you offer shipping to the countries where most of your visitors come from? If not then you might be missing out on customers. Even if you’re not selling physical goods, but offering downloads or services, it’s still important to ensure that people can buy in their currency.  Looking at my data, I can see that my second-biggest set of visitors comes from Australia, so if I was running an online shop I would want to make sure that I offered shipping to Australia, and if possible listed my prices in Australian dollars as well as American dollars.

2. What are my visitors looking for?

To see this, click on “Traffic Sources”, then on “Keywords”.

Google Analytics divides your traffic up into “Direct”, “Referring Sites”, and “Search”. All traffic is important, but search traffic is by far the most important of the three. That’s because visitors are more likely to take action – which includes buying stuff! – when they are searching for something, rather than just browsing around. If you get search traffic for a particular keyword, then it tells you two things – firstly, that people are looking for it; secondly, that they have chosen to click on a search result for your website. In short it’s telling you, “write more articles about this keyword!” Also (and this is the only SEO tip I’m going to mention in this post), make sure your post titles include these keywords.

In my case, the top search keywords are for my Etsy seller tools (my treasury generator tool and my WordPress Etsy Feedback Plugin), so it’s telling me to keep building tools that the Etsy community finds useful.

3. Who is sending traffic my way?

To see this, click on “Traffic Sources”, then on “Referring sites”.

This page will let you know who is linking to you. If you’re getting a lot of traffic from a particular website, then it’s a good idea to go and check out what they are saying! If there’s a link from a page that’s relevant to your business, then leave a comment – this type of engagement with the community is important when blogging. Most of my referrals come from Etsy.com, unsurprisingly, and most of those are from the forums (you can click the name of a referring website to see a list of pages on that site that are linking to you).

4. Where do my visitors go?

To see this, click on “Content”, then “Event Tracking”, then “Categories”, then “Outbound traffic”.

You’ll see a list of web addresses like this.

It’s important to keep an eye on where your visitors go, especially if you’re selling your products on a different website. For example, if you have a blog, but sell your items on Etsy, then you want to make sure that as many of your visitors as possible go to your Etsy shop when they leave your blog. This page will let you check that. If you want to see which actual pages your visitors go to, then just click the name of  a website in this view. If your shop is not the top result, then you need to work on making sure that more of your hard-earned blog traffic ends up in your shop.

5. What’s the first thing that people see when they visit my website?

To see this, click on “Content”, then “Top landing pages”.

You might think that the “front page” of your website is the home page, but depending on how your visitors find you, they might never see the home page at all! This view shows you which pages your visitors see first, so make sure that these pages give a good first impression. If you have a particular blog post or article that is high up on this list, then you might consider adding a welcome message to new readers at the top of it. In my case, the first page that most people see is my Treasury HTML code generator tool, so I should probably tidy up the design a bit!

I hope you’ve found this article helpful – please let me know in a comment if something’s not clear. If you already have a WordPress website and you want to get started with Google Analytics, then take a look at this tutorial.  If you don’t have a website but you’d like to set one up and start taking advantage of visitor tracking, then check out this tutorial on setting up a WordPress website and blog from scratch.

This article will go through the steps needed to add Google Analytics to a WordPress website. Google Analytics gives you loads of statistics about the visitors to your website – where they’re from, how they get here, and what they read. Whatever your goals for your website – whether you want to promote a business, write tutorials, share your poetry, or whatever – you need a tool like GA to help you achieve them.

This article is written for someone with no previous experience, and I’ve included lots of screen shots to make it as clear as possible. The only assumption is that you have a working WordPress installation. If you haven’t done that yet, then follow this tutorial on setting up WordPress from scratch first. If you’re visiting from Etsy, you might prefer this version which is specifically written for Etsy sellers.

There are two steps to setting up GA for WordPress. First you have to set up a Google Analytics account. Then, you have to add the plugin to WordPress.

1. Sign up for a Google Analytics account

Browse to www.google.com/analytics and click “Sign up now”.

If you already have a Google account that you use for Gmail etc. then just log in here; otherwise click “Create an account now” and sign up for an account

Once you’ve logged in, click here to go back to the analytics front page and click the “Access Analytics” button.

Then, on the next page, click the “Sign up” button.

Fill in the URL of your website, and click “Continue”.

Fill in your name and pick a country, then click “Continue”.

On the next page, click the “Yes” checkbox and then click “Create new account”.

On the next page, leave all the settings as they are and click “Save and Finish”.

You’ll now see the overview page, with a row in a table for the site that you added.

2. Install and configure the Google Analyticator plugin in WordPress

Now we have our Google Analytics account set up, we need to add the tracking code to our WordPress website. Luckily, there’s a plugin that makes this easy. Log in to your dashboard and click “Add new” under the “Plugins” tab.

Now type “google analyticator” into the search box and click the search button.

From the list of results, find the one called “Google Analyticator” and click “Install now” to install the plugin.

When the plugin has installed, click “Activate Plugin”.

From the plugins page, find the Google Analyticator section and click “Settings”.

You’ll be taken to the settings page, which will tell you that Google Analytics is currently disabled. Click on the “Authenticate with Google” link.

You may have to log in to Google again at this point. When you get to the account page, click “Grant access”.

You’ll be taken back to your settings page. The final thing to do is change the drop-down box at the top to “Enabled”, and change the “Select an Account” drop-down box to the name of your site. When you’re done, it should look like this:

Leave all the other settings as they are, scroll down to the bottom, and click the “Save Changes” button.

You’ll see the settings page telling you that the changes have been saved.

To test that you’ve done everything correctly, go to your dashboard and scroll down – you should see a new panel called “Google Analytics Summary”.

Now all you have to do is wait! It will take a few days for Google Analytics to start collecting data. You can keep an eye on the summary panel and soon it will start showing some data. You can get much more information, however, by logging on to the Google Analytics website and clicking “view report” next to the name of your site.

If you’re not familiar with Google Analytics, take a look at this post for five questions you should be asking using Google Analytics.