A Google Webmaster Help thread has discussion about a potential duplicate content issues between HTML and PDF documents. In this case, the content found on the HTML is the same as on the PDFs. Be it an automated “print as PDF” feature or manual download of the content in PDF format.
How does Google handle the duplicate nature of such content available on the web?
JohnMu at Google chimed in saying that in most cases, they will use the HTML file. He does recommend that in these cases, you block the PDFs from being crawled and indexed. But ultimately, he said, that is your call. Google will likely just want to keep the HTML version in their index.
John said:
If you have the same content in PDF as in HTML pages, in most cases we’ll probably show the HTML versions above (or in place of) the PDF versions. If this is a problem for your specific situation, I’d consider using the robots.txt or x-robots-tag to prevent the PDF files from getting indexed. I imagine for most sites this is not really a problem, so I wouldn’t suggest blocking indexing of PDF files without confirming that it’s really necessary.
The only situation where I would consider doing something in advance is when the CMS automatically creates PDF-copies of normal HTML pages. Generally speaking, this shouldn’t cause any problems, but those PDF versions are likely not compelling enough to merit getting indexed separately (and crawling them will possibly put a load on your server that you could avoid). Ultimately, it’s up to you to determine which content you wish to have crawled and indexed — if you feel that PDF-copies of your content are compelling enough for users who search for your content, feel free to make them available.
A Google Webmaster Help thread has discussion about a potential duplicate content issues between HTML and PDF documents. In this case, the content found on the HTML is the same as on the PDFs. Be it an automated “print as PDF” feature or manual download of the content in PDF format.
How does Google handle the duplicate nature of such content available on the web?
JohnMu at Google chimed in saying that in most cases, they will use the HTML file. He does recommend that in these cases, you block the PDFs from being crawled and indexed. But ultimately, he said, that is your call. Google will likely just want to keep the HTML version in their index.
John said:
If you have the same content in PDF as in HTML pages, in most cases we’ll probably show the HTML versions above (or in place of) the PDF versions. If this is a problem for your specific situation, I’d consider using the robots.txt or x-robots-tag to prevent the PDF files from getting indexed. I imagine for most sites this is not really a problem, so I wouldn’t suggest blocking indexing of PDF files without confirming that it’s really necessary.
The only situation where I would consider doing something in advance is when the CMS automatically creates PDF-copies of normal HTML pages. Generally speaking, this shouldn’t cause any problems, but those PDF versions are likely not compelling enough to merit getting indexed separately (and crawling them will possibly put a load on your server that you could avoid). Ultimately, it’s up to you to determine which content you wish to have crawled and indexed — if you feel that PDF-copies of your content are compelling enough for users who search for your content, feel free to make them available.
Back in July, “Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers” presented 8 basic techniques for adding popular features to the front end of a WordPress-powered website. The premise was that WordPress has become an elegant, lightweight content management solution that offers the fundamentals out of the box, atop a modular core that offers incredible potential in the hands of a capable developer.
WordPress does not try to be an “everything to everyone” CMS right out of the box. Many systems do an average job incorporating 99% of what the potential CMS market might need, even if the last 15-20% is used only by a fraction of the market and adds considerably to the system’s overall “heft” (or bloat). At the other end of the spectrum are completely custom solutions that are finely tailored to exact needs, at the cost of reinventing wheels like polished content editing with media management and version control.
That previous “Power Tips” entry scratched the surface, covering a handful of API calls mixed in with some simple PHP code and configuration tips intended to help beginner WordPress template developers kick their game up a notch. This article takes power tips to the next level, expanding on some of the topics in the first article, and introducing more advanced techniques and methods for customizing not only the front end, but the content management (or back end) experience.
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/> Back in July, “
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/02/power-tips-for-wordpress-template-developers/">Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers” presented 8 basic techniques for adding popular features to the front end of a WordPress-powered website. The premise was that
href="http://www.wordpress.org">WordPress has become an elegant, lightweight content management solution that offers the fundamentals out of the box, atop a modular core that offers incredible potential in the hands of a capable developer.
WordPress does not try to be an “everything to everyone” CMS right out of the box. Many systems do an average job incorporating 99% of what the potential CMS market might need, even if the last 15-20% is used only by a fraction of the market and adds considerably to the system’s overall “heft” (or bloat). At the other end of the spectrum are completely custom solutions that are finely tailored to exact needs, at the cost of reinventing wheels like polished content editing with media management and version control.
The self-proclaimed WordPress “code poets” have, alternatively, focused on doing an A+ job with the “fat middle”: the 80-85% of features that almost everyone needs, and coupling those with a first rate framework and API that enables capable developers to add in almost any niche or “long tail” feature. In fact, the core WordPress framework is so capable that a handful of
title="WordPress frameworks" href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/27/wordpress-theme-development-frameworks/">“intermediary” frameworks that sit on top of it have already emerged.
That previous “Power Tips” entry scratched the surface, covering a handful of API calls mixed in with some simple PHP code and configuration tips intended to help beginner WordPress template developers kick their game up a notch. This article takes power tips to the next level, expanding on some of the topics in the first article, and introducing more advanced techniques and methods for customizing not only the front end, but the content management (or back end) experience.
You may be interested in the following related posts:
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/02/power-tips-for-wordpress-template-developers/">Power Tips for WordPress Template Developers
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/13/10-custom-fields-hacks-for-wordpress/">Custom Field Hacks for WordPress
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/11/25/2009/03/04/15-useful-twitter-plugins-and-hacks-for-wordpress/">15 Useful Twitter Hacks and Plugins For WordPress
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/11/25/2009/05/18/100-amazing-free-wordpress-themes-for-2009/">100 Amazing Free WordPress Themes For 2009
Multiple Column Content Techniques
The average blog or website has a single, clearly defined block of space for a given page’s or post’s unique content. But there are plenty of creative websites that don’t conform to this simple notion of “one unique block” per page. A creative online portfolio layout might feature a screenshot and project description in a left column, and a list of technologies used in a right column. Both the left and right column are unique to each portfolio page.
Here’s a screenshot from an in-development website project, built on WordPress. The “projects” area features portfolio-like layouts of green building projects throughout the state. In addition to a specially designed gallery visualization, note that the individual project profile has two distinct columns.
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19110" src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/rigbc-2-column.jpg" alt="Rigbc-2-column in Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers" width="500" height="478" />
A more commonplace layout might feature an obvious, primary block of page content, but also feature a sidebar element that is unique to the current page: maybe a quote from a customer about a specific product or service. The
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/02/power-tips-for-wordpress-template-developers/">“Power Tips” article offered a method to associate sidebar elements with multiple pages using custom fields and page IDs (tip #6). That approach isn’t very effective or efficient for designs with a 1:1 relationship between sidebars and pages (where each page has a unique sidebar element).
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/02/power-tips-for-wordpress-template-developers/">
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19111" src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/sidebars.jpg" alt="Sidebars in Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers" width="500" height="206" />
Yes, the developer could
href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mce-table-buttons/">add table buttons to the WordPress editor, and let content authors fend for themselves: a solution prone to problematic layouts and bad output relied upon far too often. Here are a few simple options that keep layout in the hands of the template developer while making content management easier and problem-free.
Short, simple, and HTML free? No worries.
Before we delve into solutions that assume a need for HTML formatting in this second content block, let’s review a more basic solution. If the second column does not need to be formatted – or maybe should not be formatted by the editor for design reasons – then a simple custom field will do the trick. In the case of a simple sidebar element, like a customer quote, this may be just the trick.
There are already
href="http://www.kriesi.at/archives/how-to-use-wordpress-custom-fields">great tutorials and
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/13/10-custom-fields-hacks-for-wordpress/">useful custom fields hacks that walk through the WordPress custom fields feature, so if you are not familiar with the basic idea behind custom fields, start there. Let’s go ahead and create a custom field named “sidebar_content” (also known as the “key”), and put some simple content in there. Just to shake things up, let’s assume we do need a very basic HTML feature for our content authors, who know nothing about HTML: line and paragraph breaks. Let’s also assume that we want to format this sidebar content on the front end with some of the basic automatic niceties we get when we output post content, like curly quotation marks.
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19114" src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/sidebar-custom-field.gif" alt="Sidebar-custom-field in Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers" width="500" height="236" />
Here’s how we can output this in any template file, using the
href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/the_content">“the_content” filter to apply the WordPress content filter to our custom field. That filter converts single line breaks to break tags, double line breaks to paragraphing tags, and even transforms simple quotation marks to curly quotes!
Of course, we can make this even more intuitive for the content authors by creating a new meta field box for sidebar content instead of relying on the generic “custom fields” box… which will be covered later in this article!
Using the More Tag for… More
The WordPress editor has a button “more tag” button that is primarily intended to separate “above the fold” content from “below the fold” content. If you are not already familiar with the “more” divider,
title="WordPress more divider" href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Customizing_the_Read_More">read up on that first.
If the pages or posts that need a two column layouts also rely on traditional more separation, this tip will most likely not be effective, unless one of the columns is also the intended “above the fold” content. However, most instances where a two column layout is desirable don’t overlap with a traditional above / below the fold need. It is fairly rare, for instance, for pages (vs. posts) to actually make any use of the more tag. So let’s start taking advantage of that feature!
The basic idea is that content above the more divider will represent one block of HTML content, while content below the divider will represent a second block (be it a sidebar element or column).
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19133" src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/sidebar-using-more-tag.gif" alt="Sidebar-using-more-tag in Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers" width="500" height="286" />
Here is how to retrieve content above and below the more divider as separate blocks of HTML content in the corresponding page template file.
The global “more” variable lets WordPress know whether or not the content is being rendered in an “above the fold” (or “teaser”) only view. By passing an empty string to
href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_content">“the_content”, we prevent a “read more” link from showing up below the HTML content. And, for column two, we pass a second parameter to “the_content” – true – which instructs WordPress to output the content without the teaser.
If the intent is to output the second block of content outside of the loop in another template element, such as a sidebar, this approach is a bit trickier. One option would be to store the second block of content in a uniquely named variable, declare it as a global variable in the sidebar, and – if there is any content inside the variable – output a new block. An alternative could involve checking which page template is in use with the
href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags#Is_a_Page_Template">“is_page_template” function, and, if the two column template is in use, calling “the_content” with the second parameter set to true, as in the example above.
The Plug-in Solution: Adding a Second HTML Content Block to the Editor
The ideal solution, of course, might be a second HTML editor field on the WordPress page or post editor. Unfortunately, no such plug-in existed… until recently! While writing this article, we decided it was time such a solution did exist, and so the author of this article is happy to present a free, open source plug-in that combines some savvy understanding of how TinyMCE works (hint: it’s as simple as a class name) with the custom meta box tutorial covered later in this article, and a little bit of extra customization and polish thrown into the mix.
href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/secondary-html-content/">Secondary HTML Content adds a second HTML editor to pages, posts, or both (customizable with a simple settings panel). You can output the content in a sidebar with an included widget, or integrate it more tightly with the template by using “the_content_2″ and “get_the_content_2″ functions.
href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/secondary-html-content/">
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19137" src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/secondary-html.jpg" alt="Secondary-html in Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers" width="480" height="529" />
Associating Pages with Post Content: Reloaded
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/02/power-tips-for-wordpress-template-developers/">“Power Tips” covered the basic foundation for associating different WordPress pages with different post categories. The basic premise was that many sites require, effectively, different post “feeds” on different pages. For instance, there may be a company blog, but there may also be an independent news feed.
This continuation offers specific tips that extend the core concept introduced in part 1, making it easier to have multiple page / category associations, preventing entrance into the “real” category archive, and ensuring that individual post views retain a visual and architectural association with their parent “category page” layout.
Be sure to
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/02/power-tips-for-wordpress-template-developers/">read part 1 before proceeding.
A Review of the Basics & the Two Fundamental Approaches
At the heart of the category / page association (covered in part one) was:
A matching of the “page slug” with the “category slug.”
Using “
href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts">query_posts” and the category parameter to exclude standalone page categories from the primary feed
Using a dedicated page template with “query_posts” and the “category name” parameter to create a page featuring a feed for a single category.
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19139" src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/wp-cat-config.gif" alt="Wp-cat-config in Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers" width="500" height="333" />
Before delving into the tips that extend those ideas, it is important to make a distinction between two common but fundamentally different use cases for page / category association. The more typical use case, which the first part was tailored to, is a website that has a primary feed, like a blog, but also has one or two distinct feeds, most often for a formal news or press feed.
The second use case is a bit more esoteric: there is no primary feed. The site has many pages, and many (but not all) of those top level pages are individual feeds of posts. The example, at the end of this power tip,
href="http://www.m62.net">m62.net, is one such use case. Another common use case might be – again – a portfolio centric website.
Let’s say we want to create “Joe’s Portfolio”, and Joe wants to feature 4 distinct areas of expertise. Each area of expertise should be a top level page, say, joes-portfolio.com/web-design, joes-portfolio.com/graphic-design, etc. Joe wants to have a little write-up about each service area at the top of the page, followed by a feed of case studies. Why a feed instead of sub-pages? Maybe Joe wants prospects to be able to subscribe to an RSS feed for each area of expertise; maybe he wants to easily cross-tag case studies based on industry; maybe he plans to update frequently and doesn’t want a huge page sitemap or wants visitors to page through a date-organized collection of case studies. There are many reasons to use posts instead of pages.
The following tips provide solutions for both use cases.
Automatically Determining the Page / Category Association
Part one suggested that a unique page template be created for any page associated with a category. That page template would then query for posts using a hardcoded category name or category ID. If there are only one or two standalone “category pages”, this is an efficient and effective solution.
However, if there are many page / category associations, as in use case #2 (no primary feed), the process of manually creating page templates for each association is tedious to build and maintain, and not realistic if content editors who don’t program need to be able to create more page / category associations on demand.
An alternative would be to
href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages#Creating_Your_Own_Page_Templates">create a generic page template, let’s say “template-category-connector.php”, that is assigned to all pages associated with a category, and automatically determines the right category to query.
The following code performs the matching and executes the post query. The magic happens by taking advantage of our matching page and category slugs. Once again, if the website does not use permalinks, an alternative approach will be required (one permalink-free alternative could involve a custom field with the associated category ID).
That’s all there is to it… just proceed on with the
href="http://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop"> post loop to output the applicable category’s posts. Note that the template should probably check for an actual return value from line 1, and output a graceful error in the event there is no match.
Handling Entry into the “Real” Category Archive
Now that there is a dedicated page layout that handles the category feed, we will want to be make certain that the visitor doesn’t land on WordPress’ default category “archive” view. For instance, when using permalinks with the default “category base” value, the archive view for a category with a top level category assigned a “web-design” slug would be: mysiteurl.com/category/web-design. However, the intent is for visitors to view this category at our top level page: mysiteurl.com/web-design.
By combining the WordPress category template file with some smart redirects, we can prevent entry into the default category archive. Out of the box, the
href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy#Category_display">WordPress template system allows developers to create global category archive templates as well as templates for individual category archives.
If we are in use case #1 – a site with a traditional blogfeed and a standalone news feed on a “press releases” page – we will want to use the latter solution. Let’s say, as in part one, the category ID for “press releases” is 5. We create a template file in our theme folder named category-5.php. Under use case #2 (no primary feed), we will want to redirect all category archive traffic, in which case we need to work with the category.php template file.
A few lines of code in either template file will redirect visitors to the right place. We’ll also pass
href="http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E301.html">HTTP error / redirect code “301″ – which will tell search engines to permanently redirect their link to the right location. Note that this particular code assumes we are using a permalink configuration. Line 2 can be modified to accomodate that situation.
In effect, that code removes the category base (”/category” by default) from the overall relative URL, and
href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_redirect">safely redirects the visitor to the page with the matching slug. Of course, if the site falls under use case #1 (one or two stand alone feeds), the line three could dropped into a specific category template (i.e. category-5.php) with a hardcoded absolute URL for the redirect destitation.
Hiding Standalone Categories from the Category List & Primary Site Feed
In the first use case (only isolating one or two categories from a primary feed), it may be necessary to prevent isolated categories or the posts within those categories from appearing in some common theme elements that would traditionally include them.
Consider the example from part one: a site with a traditional blog and a standalone press release feed. Assume the owners of the site want the RSS feed for the blog to be persistently available throughout the site (typically manifesting itself as an RSS icon in the browser location bar), but don’t want the press release items included in that primary feed. By default, the WordPress primary feed is available at “/feed”, and includes all published posts, regardless of category or any other post property.
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/feed">
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19147" src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/smashingmag-feed.gif" alt="Smashingmag-feed in Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers" width="500" height="212" />
To exclude categories from the primary RSS feed, we need to
href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_filter">filter the WordPress function that retrieves the posts. Let’s again assume that the category ID for Press Releases is 5. The following code should be placed in the template’s
href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development#Theme_Functions_File">“functions.php” file.
add_filter('pre_get_posts','exclude_press');
function exclude_press($query) {
if($query->is_feed && !$query->is_category) $query->set('cat','-5');
}
To summarize, we use the “pre_get_posts” filter to modify the post query before it executes. Within a new filter – named “exclude_press” – a conditional confirms that the post query is for a feed, and that the query is not for an individual category. If the check pans out, the query is modified to exclude category 5 before execution.
The notion of globally filtering the post query may have broader implications depending on the site’s unique requirements. With some smart conditional checking, the filter could be extended to prevent the category from appearing anywhere except within the category or isolated post view. But be careful when extending the filter, and be sure to consider all possible views, including administrative views!
The category list is another frequently used site element that isolated categories should, in most cases, be excluded from. If the template
href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_categories">calls the category list in only one or two places by code (as opposed to using the categories widget),
href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_categories#Include_or_Exclude_Categories">excluding categories from the list is straight forward.
wp_list_categories('exclude=5');
However, if the categories widget is in use, or the category list is used throughout the template, an alternative approach is required. Enter the “list_terms_exclusions” filter. Again, the following code should be placed in the “functions.php” template file.
add_filter('list_terms_exclusions', 'filter_press');
function filter_press($exclusions) {
$exclusions .= " AND t.term_id != 5 ";
return $exclusions;
}
The return value of a “terms exclusions” filter is tacked onto the “where” clause in the SQL query that retrieves the terms. Without digging too deep here, the reason for discussing “terms” as opposed to, say, “categories” is because WordPress abstracts a variety of different taxonomies (link categories, post categories, tags, custom taxonomies, etc) into a unified database model that handles all taxonomies. Calls to “get categories”, “get tags”, and so forth, are all referring back to general “terms” behind the scenes. Ever wonder why category, tag, and other IDs tend to jump around? They are all being added to the same table. Assuming a fairly clean install, try adding a new post category, and note the ID. Then add a tag, and note its ID… one greater than the new post category.
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19149" src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/term-taxonomies.gif" alt="Term-taxonomies in Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers" width="482" height="166" />
Retaining the Page Layout for Post Views within a Category Page
One of the most common challenges to tackle with page / category association is retaining a sense that the visitor is still within the “category page” hierarchy – and not a global feed hierarchy – when a visitor is reading an individual post. Part one hinted at this challenge under “The devil is in the details,” and started to suggest a path that incorporated using the “in_category” function. We will explain how to use “in_category” within templates, as well as how to trick functions that reference the original query object into thinking that they are “within” the category page.
Let’s start with case #1, and building on the example in the first article, assume we only need to contend with one isolated feed, “Press Releases” (category ID 5).
Say the theme has a sidebar template that lists post categories when rendering the blog part of the site, and when rendering a standalone page, shows a page list instead. Here’s an extremely simplified version of what that might look inside the sidebar template file.
if (is_page())
{
wp_list_pages();
}
else
{
wp_list_categories();
}
Of course, there may be alternative widget sets for pages or posts, and there is likely to be more than just one element in the sidebar. But the concept should hold. Now going back to the example, the theme should render posts in category 5 (Press Releases) as if the visitor were on a page (not the blog). Leveraging the “in_category” check, the code above would now like the following:
Note that if there are multiple categories whose posts should resemble page output, the “in_category” function should be passed an array of IDs, like so:
in_category(array(5,7));
The need for a “in category” check is probably moot in case #2 (multiple page/category associations, without a primary feed): the template is probably structured to output the same elements on pages and posts from the get go. In other words, everything is handled as if it is a page since there is no primary feed. However, the following tip – that dynamically looks up the faux parent page ID (the page associated with the category) – is necessary for the next part of this tip. Just amend the code to check if “faux_parent_page” has a valid value: if it does, then the post is inside an isolated category associated with a page.
Once again, this approach to dynamically seeking the faux parent page (the category page) depends on taking advantage of the matching permalink structure between post categories and pages that is at the heart of this association. If the site is unable to use permalinks, a more complex alternative look up of the faux parent page will be necessary.
Now that we have the ID of the category’s associated page, we can trick “black box” theme elements that determine page or post properties on their own (by referencing the post query) into thinking they are actually working with the category page.
The most common use case is page navigation. Whether its breadcrumbs, a top level page menu that should retain “current” (on) states, or a side navigation menu that should display the current section, there are many “black box” navigation functions that need to be tricked into rendering themselves as if on the category page.
Let’s use a simple top level page list, which should maintain proper “current_page”, “current_page_parent” (and so on) classes when on a post under a category page. Here’s what that simple function might look like before our changes:
wp_list_pages('depth=1');
Of course, posts do not normally have parent pages, so there will be no “current” classes assigned to that output when reading a post. Here is how to trick that function into thinking it is rendering the navigation for the “parent” category page.
//retrieve faux parent page dynamically… can skip and hard code in case 1
foreach(get_the_category() as $category) {
$faux_parent_path = '/'.get_category_parents($category, FALSE, '/', TRUE);
}
$faux_parent_page = get_page_by_path($faux_parent_path)->ID;
//reset the post query as if on the faux parent page
query_posts('page_id='.$faux_parent_page);
//execute our "faked out" function
wp_list_pages('depth=1');
//reset the query back to the initial state
wp_reset_query();
If there are multiple elements that need be “tricked,” a best practice would be to put the “faux parent page” retriever at the top of the template, and declare it a global in any template files that need it. This would avoid repeated look ups of the faux parent page.
An Example: Seeing it All Put Together
A great example of a WordPress-powered CMS that pushes use case #2 to its limits can be seen at the home of m62 visual communications, at
href="http://www.m62.net/">http://www.m62.net.
href="http://www.m62.net/powerpoint-templates/pharmaceutical-templates/">
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19151" src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/m62-pharm.gif" alt="M62-pharm in Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers" width="500" height="392" />
All of the navigation items across the top (Presentation Theory, PowerPoint Slides, etc) are pages associated with post categories. The sub-navigation on the right contains sub-pages that are also associated with sub-categories. For example, in the screenshot above (
href="http://www.m62.net/powerpoint-templates/pharmaceutical-templates/">available here), the visitor is on the “Pharmaceutical Templates” page (faux category), which is a child of the “PowerPoint Templates” page (also a faux category). The content starting with “Download free” (below the page title) is the content from the “Pharmaceutical Templates” page. The posts below the “Next Steps” bar, titled “Latest in Pharmaceutical Templates”, are the posts inside that category. The applicable related category is automatically discovered by the WordPress template, populating the category name “Latest in X” and recent posts. Now let’s look at one of the posts inside that category.
href="http://www.m62.net/powerpoint-templates/pharmaceutical-templates/atoms-template/">
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-19152" src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/cdn_smash/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/m62-post.gif" alt="M62-post in Advanced Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers" width="500" height="371" />
Using the tips outlined above, the individual post retains the feel of being within the “Pharmaceutical Templates” page, right down to the breadcrumb navigation and “current” states in the navigation.
But not only does m62.net use category / page associations for most top and second level navigation items, it actually extends the concept to tags. The 5 “tabs” on the top right actually represent post tags, and each has a “tag page.”
Stay tuned!
The second part of the post will be published here, on Smashing Magazine, in two weeks. Hence, you may want to
href="http://rss1.smashingmagazine.com/feed/">subscribe to our RSS-feed and
href="http://twitter.com/smashingmag">follow us on Twitter. Any ideas or suggestions? Comment on this article!
The need to update websites faster to keep content fresh has been ever growing. Ever since the first business owner wanted their Web designer to update their website faster, content management systems have played an important role on the Web. Why does this matter to you? How do you know if your company is ready?
In this article, we will look at how to tell if your organization needs a content management system. We will also give you information on the abilities of content management systems to help you better understand what they can do. While content management systems may seem complex, their entire purpose is to streamline your workflow and make your life easier.
A content management system allows you to create, manage, store and edit massive amounts of content without any HTML programming skill. Because you are able to edit your content from any computer with an Internet connection, you no longer have to rely on third-party developers or companies to keep your website up to date. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Every company would like to reduce costs and increase productivity.
The need to update websites faster to keep content fresh has been ever growing. Ever since the first business owner wanted their Web designer to update their website faster, content management systems have played an important role on the Web. Why does this matter to you? How do you know if your company is ready?
In this article, we will look at how to tell if your organization needs a content management system. We will also give you information on the abilities of content management systems to help you better understand what they can do. While content management systems may seem complex, their entire purpose is to streamline your workflow and make your life easier.
A content management system allows you to create, manage, store and edit massive amounts of content without any HTML programming skill. Because you are able to edit your content from any computer with an Internet connection, you no longer have to rely on third-party developers or companies to keep your website up to date. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Every company would like to reduce costs and increase productivity.
Also consider our previous articles:
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/05/10-things-to-consider-when-choosing-the-perfect-cms/" rel="bookmark" title="10 Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS">10 Things To Consider When Choosing The Perfect CMS
/>Goes over what features to look for when choosing a content management system.
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/02/10/10-harsh-truths-about-corporate-websites/">10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites
/>Explains the mistakes we all make when running our websites. The nature of those mistakes varies depending on the size of your company. As your organization grows, the mistakes change. This post addresses common mistakes of large organizations.
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/category/toolbox/">Developers Toolbox
/>Offers tools and resources to help you achieve your goals at a more hands-on level.
1. What Is A Content Management System?
If you have never heard the term before, a content management system (CMS) is a Web-based solution that makes it easy for a company to manage website updates internally. For many companies, updating a website is not something to look forward to because it can be a lengthy and, over time, expensive process. Most companies search for easier means of accomplishing their goals. The solution that many large and small companies have found is a CMS. The easy-to-use application allows your company to control its online identity with little to no knowledge of Web design.
Do I Need a Content Management System?
While you know your business better than anyone else, if you answer Yes to any of the following questions, your company would likely benefit from using a CMS-based website.
Does your company update its website content frequently?
Does your website contain over 10 pages?
Do you constantly outsource simple website updates to third parties?
Although building your website with a CMS may not save you money up front, if you need to be able to manage your own content in a timely manner, you will certainly be cutting costs in future. You will increase your organization’s speed while reducing its effort. With a CMS accessible from any computer with an Internet connection, you will speed up the process of approving, publishing, and updating.
class="showcase">
href="http://www.taylordigital.com/Services">
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/CMS-edit.jpg" alt="Knowing When you Need a CMS" width="460" height="180" border="0" />
/>Some CMS’ have in-page buttons to speed up the process of editing content, while preventing users from accessing the admin interface.
Because a CMS has built-in organizational features, content is easier to find and nearly impossible to lose (unless you delete it by accident). You no longer have to spend a lot of time on simple tasks or duplicating your efforts. All of your content is created, managed, published and edited from a single location with very simple, easy-to-use tools. Because using these tools requires very little training, you can start managing your content almost immediately.
If you have identified your business goals and recognized that your website will play a role in them, you should begin the process of implementing your own CMS. There is no set list of requirements for a content management system because each organization has unique needs. Keep your requirements to a minimum, but be sure to allow for the future growth and demands of your company. Enlisting the help of a
href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=0uE&ei=h9RxSpaTB4SQsgPu26HlCA&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=taylor+digital+web+design&spell=1">Web design and development company to assess your needs is a good idea.
2. Essentials Of A CMS
Three key elements that every CMS has, one way or another, are templates, content and meta data. Understanding how these three elements interact with the other CMS features is important: the template is the graphic wrapper of your website; without the actual content, you would have no need for a website; and the often over-looked meta data helps with search engine optimization.
class="showcase">
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/10/30/color-paper-a-free-wordpress-theme/">
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/CMS-Templates.jpg" alt="Content Management System Template" width="500" height="250" border="0">
/>An example of a CMS theme that has the same look and feel on every page.
Templates control how your content looks on the page and are extremely helpful when you have to produce a lot of pages (10+). The template is a graphic wrapper that usually looks the same on every page of the website, regardless of the content. It makes your website’s look and feel consistent. When you want to change the template (say, the color or an image), you have to make the change only once and it will be reflected on every page of your website. Popular CMS’ such as
href="http://wordpress.com/">WordPress and
href="http://expressionengine.com/">ExpressionEngine have many free or premium templates available online that can reduce the cost of and help you customize your system.
class="showcase">
href="http://www.taylordigital.com">
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/CMS-Content.jpg" alt="WYSIWYG Text Editor" width="500" height="250" border="0" />
/>This is the typical layout of a WYSIWYG editor, which has features that are standard in word processors today, such as bolding, italicizing and justifying paragraphs.
Content is created, managed and edited independent of all other CMS elements. Content could be anything from the text on your “About” page to the photo on your company press release. All content is normally managed through a WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get) that has integrated photo uploading tools. This helps you create new pages on your website, manage and edit existing pages and assign pages to multiple areas without having to copy them.
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href="http://www.facebook.com/pages/Envee-Apparel-Fans/46733856618?ref=ts">
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/CMS-MetaData.jpg" alt="Facebook Pulling meta data" width="500" height="232" border="0" />
/>Facebook does an excellent job of pulling an external page’s title and description meta data when you post a link to it on a fan page or wall.
Meta data plays a key part in search engine optimization (SEO). The great thing about a CMS is that it makes it nearly impossible for you to forget to add this information, thus helping your website’s search and index ranking on search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Meta data contains such information as category, author, publishing date, title, brief description and keywords.
One great use of meta data is for automatically adding a title and description to links posted on social media websites such as Facebook. This not only saves you from having to retype this information but keeps your content relevant as well. This information can also be pulled by search engines and any other website where your website is listed, so make sure to put some thought into writing it.
3. CMS Features And Functions
Content management systems come with many standard features to help you create, manage and edit your content. In addition to standard features, additional features can be added to the flexible system framework. These additional features are often referred to as add-on modules or plug-ins. Because a CMS is very flexible, you can use it for a simple website with little content or expand the features to support a complex website with a lot of content. Here is a nice list of
href="http://websites.usandv.com/who-is-using-drupal">high-profile companies that use a CMS for their websites, which will give you a good idea of how far you can expand these systems.
Standard Features
These features are what make your content management system so extensive and highly flexible. They allow you to publish, edit and organize content and manage members, and they contain a variety of built-in security features.
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href="http://blog.enveeapparel.com/">
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/CMS-Publishing.jpg" alt="Content Management System Publishing" width="497" height="229" border="0" />
/>With these straightforward tools, you can see how easy creating and managing your content is.
Publishing is made easy with the in-depth features of a CMS. Without any knowledge of HTML programming, users can create, manage and schedule content with ease. These powerful tools help free up time within an organization by streamlining the whole process. A user can create content, set the category (i.e. the section in which it will be published) and then set it as a draft for later review.
Once the content is reviewed, it can be scheduled to be published, say, seven days from then. Once you have reached that step, the rest of the process is automated. You can write and complete a week’s worth of articles ahead of time and take a vacation without having to worry about publishing new content, because it will publish itself (if you have done your part).
Typography often causes headaches for writers, especially if the writers are not HTML savvy, but the task is made easier with built-in text editors. With most CMS’, your text can be automatically formatted to produce XHTML-valid typography. This saves you the hassle of hand-coding every piece of content and leaves the “fun” bits to the system itself. If you paste disallowed characters, such as curly quotes, bullets or accents, from text editors like Microsoft Word, they will automatically be converted into an HTML-valid equivalent.
Another great feature that many CMS’ include is automatic linking. This feature saves you from having to manually link URLs that you add to your content. All of these features are useful because they make your workflow more efficient when you create a lot of content. And if you prefer to enter your own HTML code every time because you don’t trust the automated process, you have that option as well.
Organization is a key part of maintaining a website. With a CMS, all of the content is stored in one place, only once, and is accessible from any location with an Internet connection. Content can be saved in a number of states, such as draft, published and archived. So you can keep unfinished and finished content in separate places, with different attributes. This is especially handy if you like to write content ahead of time and want to be able to easily find it when it comes time to publish.
Draft: this is work in progress and is not visible to the public.
Published: content that is visible to the public.
Archived: previously published content that is tucked away in a safe place, away from the main navigation. Typically used with blogs.
Member management helps you control all aspects of your website’s users. As an administrator, you have full control over how many people can access your website and how much control they have themselves. This can be extremely useful for a large company, where many people (author, editor, publisher, etc.) are responsible for creating and maintaining content. You control how many hands are in the cookie jar at each stage of the creation process.
Administrator: has complete control over all users and access to all of the website’s administration features.
Editor: can publish and mange their own content as well as other people’s content, etc.
Author: can publish and manage their own content.
Contributor: can write and manage their own content but cannot publish it.
Subscriber: can read content, view and write comments, receive newsletters and so on, without being able to edit anything.
Build-in security measures give you one less thing to worry about. You no longer have to worry about session management, robots trying multiple passwords to hack your account or losing data when processing forms. Almost every CMS has different session management configurations, so you can set the preferences that fit your security needs.
With the built-in “multiple password denial” feature, you can make sure that multiple users cannot access your system simultaneously with the same log-in credentials. In addition, you can automatically lock out users after several incorrect password attempts and allow forms to be submitted only once. This helps prevent loss of data and attempts to hack your system via password.
Additional Features
You can integrate add-on modules, or plug-ins, into your CMS to add value, improve accessibility and increase functionality. With the right combination of features, you can create a website that fits your business plan and helps your company achieve its goals. While the number of additional features that you can add is endless, we will focus on the major ones here.
class="showcase">
href="http://www.gomediazine.com/">
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/CMS-Company-Blog.jpg" alt="Integrated Company Blog" width="500" height="250" border="0" />
/>GoMediazine is a great example of blog integration.
Company blog functionality helps keep your website fresh and can be a very useful marketing tool. While CMS’ have evolved into complete website solutions, they were originally intended to manage blogs. Most blogs were used as personal diaries or breaking news outlets. Adapted to business use, they can be very useful for letting customers and clients know about what’s new and exciting with your company. If you sell products, you can announce new items or sales. Some businesses, such as
href="http://www.gomediazine.com/">GoMedia, use their blog purely as a community-building tool to publish educational information.
class="showcase">
href="http://electrorack.com/">
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/CMS-ecommerce.jpg" alt="Integrated e-Commerce" width="500" height="250" border="0"/>
/>The Electrorack website is a great example of seamless e-commerce integration.
E-commerce integration makes the user experience on your website a very comfortable one. Being able to sell products and services from within your website would be ideal for any business. Some companies, including
href="http://electrorack.com/">Electrorack, have seamlessly integrated their e-commerce solution into their CMS. The user doesn’t even notice that they are jumping from one platform to another because the look and feel are so consistent.
class="showcase">
href="http://www.designbyhumans.com/forums" >
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/CMS-Disciussion-Forum.jpg" alt="Integrated Discussion Forum" width="500" height="250" border="0"/>
/>The DesignByHumans website has a great integrated user-based community.
Discussion forums are a complete community-building solution that helps your website’s visitors exchange ideas. Users can create topics, offer feedback on existing topics and interact with other users. How you use a discussion forum depends entirely on your needs.
href="http://www.designbyhumans.com">Design by Humans uses its forum to post company news and to let their artists and customers interact for free.
class="showcase">
href="http://thememorymuseum.com/">
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/CMS-Photo-Gallery.jpg" alt="Integrated Photo Gallery" width="500" height="250" />
/>This website has a photo gallery set up on its system for album postings.
Photo galleries are used by millions of people around the world. Online photo sharing is becoming this era’s scrapbooking. With the increase in social media use, people can easily send everyone they know a link to their latest photo gallery.
href="http://thememorymuseum.com/">The Memory Museum can display photos easily through the customized gallery on its photography blog. Businesses can use this feature to showcase recent events or feature products. By organizing and displaying photos from within your CMS, you can have all of your content in one location.
class="showcase">
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/CMS-Video-Managemen.jpg" alt="Video Management Integration" width="500" height="250" id="Image6" />
/>National Geographic has an intuitive integrated video management system to help users view their video content through the Web.
Video management helps you organize, edit and distribute video content. You no longer have to upload videos to YouTube or Vimeo and then manage them separately. You can manage your video content just as you manage your website’s pages. You can upload almost any kind of video and then share your albums and videos on your website and on social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and Digg.
CMS’ vary in the video management features they offer. But most let you upload multiple files at once (in batch) and automatically create thumbnails. Once videos are in the system, you can track viewer behavior as well as feature content based on popularity.
href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/video/player">National Geographic integrates videos into its articles and offers them separately for others to embed on their own websites.
class="showcase">
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/CMS-Multi-Language.jpg" alt="Multi-Language Support" width="500" height="382"/>
/>Apple offers extensive multi-language support and uses multiple URL extensions to differentiate content.
Multi-language support lets you offer content in multiple countries within a single CMS, allowing visitors to choose their preferred language. While most small companies do not need this feature, it can be helpful. The support features may not actually translate content (and if they do, they won’t do an accurate job), but they do let you feature content in multiple languages, which is extremely useful for corporate websites that operate globally. Because
href="http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/">Apple operates in many countries, it offers its website in many languages.
class="showcase">
href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/thedesigncubicle/ioNz?format=xml">
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/RSS-Feed.jpg" alt="RSS Feed" width="500" height="250" border="0" />
/>RSS feeds typically show excerpts of content and images (if any), as shown above.
RSS feeds are a really simple way to syndicate the content on your website. With the explosion of RSS readers, which constantly check a user’s favorite websites for new content, RSS feeds have become essential. It does not matter whether you update your website daily or monthly, your readers will be sure never to miss an update. Millions of websites publish RSS feeds on a regular basis, and yours should not be an exception. With people’s attention spans shrinking along with their free time, letting users choose the content they want to read through an RSS feed is helpful.
class="showcase">
href="http://www.tvguide.com/FAP/Newsletter.aspx">
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/CMS-Newsletter.jpg" alt="Newsletter Management" width="498" height="250" border="0"/>
/>A newsletter can be a great way to reach out to users who are interested in your content, especially if yours is designed as well as TV Guide Daily Scoop’s.
Newsletters/mailing lists are an extremely helpful feature, especially if you have a lot of users or want to expand your base. Many mainstream users still do not use an RSS reader, and some of them may prefer to receive your content in their inbox rather than by visiting your website every few days. You can integrate newsletters into your system and set the feature’s functionality. Usually, you will be able to manage subscriptions, create a template, compose the newsletter in a WYSIWYG editor, manage your archive and track open/click results.
class="showcase">
href="https://www.google.com/analytics/">
src="http://media.smashingmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/images/content-management-systems/Google-analytics.jpg" alt="Video Management Integration" width="500" height="250" border="0" />
/>Google Analytics shows detailed information on your website’s visitors, at no charge.
Statistics/tracking is an essential feature for any website. To effectively run and market a website, you need to know as much as possible about your visitors. Analyzing whatever data is available prepares you to achieve company goals, focuses your marketing initiatives and converts visitors into regular users. You will have information on how many people visit your website, where they live, what content they view and much more.
href="http://www.google.com/analytics/features.html">Google Analytics is one of the most widely adopted analytics programs that are available for CMS’. Its popularity is partly due to the immense amount of information it provides about your visitors for free.
Where Can I Find A Content Management System?
You know the size of your organization and how much you can spend on a CMS. These factors are good indicators of where to start your search. Actually finding one can be a daunting task, but if you have a clear idea of what you are looking for, you can quickly weed out the options that don’t fit your needs. Finding a solution that helps your business achieve its goals is important. Many businesses, large and small, use all kinds of different CMS’ to manage their content. Start your journey by using the resources listed below.
Further Resources
Check out the following related articles and resources:
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/29/45-incredibly-useful-web-design-checklists-and-questionnaires/" >45 Incredibly Useful Web Design Checklists and Questionnaires
/>You are much less likely to overlook important aspects of your website if you follow this checklist, which covers content, usability, accessibility, standards and more.
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/07/15-essential-checks-before-launching-your-website/">15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website
/>Lists some important things to check before taking your website public.
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2007/08/10/10-designers-checkpoints-to-be-aware-of/">10 Designer’s Checkpoints To Be Aware Of
/>A list of things every designer should know about their website.
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Content_Management_Systems">List of Content Management Systems
/>A list of notable content management systems that can be used to organize and facilitate collaborative content creation. Many of them are built on top of other content management frameworks.
href="http://www.cmsmatrix.org/">Compare Multiple CMS Solutions (technical)
/>This is a community service for anyone looking for a means to manage website content.
Many useful resources on how to design and develop for these CMS’, including many free templates:
href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/16/how-to-improve-your-branding-with-your-content/">How To Improve Your Branding With Your Content
/>Branding experts speak the truth when they say that a winning brand communicates why you are your prospect’s only solution. If you can’t achieve that, at least convey why you are your prospect’s best solution.
During Part 1 of the Blindfolded SEO Audit, we started learning how to use Xenu and Excel to begin our SEO audit and focused on the foundational element, URLs.
Now let’s move on to the most important signal a site’s pages can send to the search engines, the all powerful title tag. Like URL constructs, sites [...]
During Part 1 of the Blindfolded SEO Audit, we started learning how to use Xenu and Excel to begin our SEO audit and focused on the foundational element, URLs.
Now let’s move on to the most important signal a site’s pages can send to the search engines, the all powerful title tag. Like URL constructs, sites often have nearly as many constructs for title tags. Three things that a quick scan of our data will tell us:
General constructs and patterns used
Title tag duplication
General sense of optimization quality (potentially)
Branding (or lack of) always jumps out quickly, of which we have a number of different examples:
three quarter sleeve sweater | Coldwater Creek
Apparel at Coldwater Creek
Coldwater Creek misses clothing.
Coldwater Creek
What about duplication? I expect to find some levels, especially on an ecommerce site or any site that features a pagination system. Most CMS or ecommerce systems don’t provide a way, or at least an easy way, to modify the title tags (or headings and body copy) of individual paginated pages like GravityStream can. However, I also want to see beyond the pagination to identify duplication across URLs/pages that really should be unique. In this case, these pages are cannibalizing and missing an opportunity to target additional phrases.
Best way to do that in this case is to sort by the title, rather than the URL, and then filter out those with a “page=” in them to clear out all the pagination and make reviewing easier (the specific sorting will vary depending on a site’s constructs).
I quickly find some examples of title duplication.
Not to mention the store locations, which appear to not have titles at all. Of course I would still want to verify this against the actual site, but Xenu has quickly jump started the audit process by pointing to areas of concern. It may not find the needle in the haystack, but it does move the hay from the field to the stack to begin, and sometimes cuts the stack down into manageable bales.
Some of the title tags above are okay and maybe are the most optimal … only keyword research combined with site analytics will reveal that. What we do know though is that duplicating the same title across different 4 pages means at least 3 of them are not optimal and we’ve created keyword cannibalization. Just based on the URLs, I can also tell that there are probably better, more targeted titles that could be used.
Whether a site’s title tags are manually or programmatically optimized doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that the title tag is the strongest and easiest signal that a site owner has control over. This is the juiciest, ripest, most important low hanging fruit opportunity that many sites continue to miss.
A couple more interesting bits of information we can get from Xenu that also probably go mostly unnoticed, are the Level, Links Out and Links In columns. Level may not be exact, but we can get a quick idea of how deep, based on click and crawl path, content is. While purely site related, the links information can give us a quick view as to internal linking strength, identifying which pages or sections may undervalued or serving as internal hubs.
Hopefully this proved an interesting exercise. While I wouldn’t recommend doing a real SEO site audit blindfolded, I definitely recommend reviewing your site in new and different ways and removing some of the visual cues (and clutter) to see how the bots view some of the site’s most important signals. Remember that Xenu doesn’t provide the answers, but at least helps to identify areas that may be problematic and helps to better make sense of the foundation of a site … especially if that site consists of hundreds of thousands or millions of URLs.
This is also a great training tool and a way to further hone your skill set. I’ll liken it to Luke Skywalker’s blindfolded lightsaber training … one must move beyond seeing to feeling. May the SEO be with you.
Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Web Analytics yesterday as announced in the following blog post.
This product was formerly known as IndexTools, a company Yahoo! acquired a year and a half ago. It’s not just IndexTools with a new logo though, there is new additional functionality and upgraded functionality as noted with the “New Feature” tag on [...]
This product was formerly known as IndexTools, a company Yahoo! acquired a year and a half ago. It’s not just IndexTools with a new logo though, there is new additional functionality and upgraded functionality as noted with the “New Feature” tag on the features page. Some of those new features include Visitor Demographic Reports, Visitor Behavioral Reports, and Advanced Data visualization.
Yahoo! Web Analytics is not open yet to everyone though, it’s available and free for search and display advertisers currently working with Yahoo!. In my opinion, and the opinion of others less biased such as CMS Watch, it’s a better enterprise product than Google Analytics.