Friday Afternoon Blurbs
Music on Websites
As if there was any doubt left... http://www.steerplanet.com/bb/index.php?topic=14399.0
Heat Wave Daughters
We went 8 for 8 on Heat Wave heifers this year, not a single steer out of 15 matings, unfreakinbelievable.
Site Down Time
Not that this site is mission critical to anybody that reads it but we might be down for a few hours over the weekend while some hardware issues are addressed. Our current hardware has been humming right along for about four years and it's time to look into swapping some of it out.
Recently Updated Site Spider Moving Again
It was down for a few days because I hand't taught the little guy to deal with some types of malformed links when looking for new sites to index, specifically...
<a href="../namereplaced/index.htm"><b><font face="Arial" size="2">nam</font></b><font face="Arial" size="2"><strong>ereplaced Show Calves</strong></font></a>
...and he just threw his virtual arms up and said he doesn't get paid enough to deal with this. HTML code such as the above is a sure fire sign somebody is using Frontpage to manage their website and not looking at the code behind it.
(The actual URL was replaced because it wasn't the fault of the person who bought the link)
- By Jeff | Comments (0)
November Forum Actvity Report
- Ranchers.net 36.71%
- Cattle-Today 31.62%
- Steerplanet 23.05%
- 5BarX 3.72%
- Advantage Cattle Services 3.32%
- Clubcalves 0.89%
- Breedersworld 0.58%
- Showsteers 0.06%
- EDJE 0.05%
The same assumption as last month was made for Ranchers.net.
- By Jeff | Comments (0)
November Cattle Site Traffic Report
- Cattle Today Sites 20.75%
- CattleNetwork.com 14.10%
- Cattle.com 11.19% (4)
- Cattlerange.com 11.06% (3)
- Beefmagazine.com 8.39%
- Drovers.com 7.85% (7)
- Showsteers.com 7.62% (6)
- Steerplanet.com 2.98% (NR)
- Clubcalves.com 2.84% (8)
- Cattlepages.com 2.69%
Nothing much changed other than the usual monthly shuffling in the 3-7 range.
As a reminder, the index is made up of data from Compete.com (40%), Quantcast.com (40%), and Google Ad Planner (20%).
- By Jeff | Comments (0)
Page Load Speed
If you don’t care about techie stuff, I’d suggest moving on to the next site you check and not wasting your time on this blog post.
One of the larger bullet points from last week’s Pubcon in Las Vegas came from Matt Cutts (the public face of Google as far as web developers are concerned) who strongly suggested that Google will begin to use page speed in its ranking algorithm next year. It’s already a factor in Adwords but he suggested using 2010 as a year to speed up sites.
While going through and checking our sites for speed I decided to see what kind of page load speeds the kind of people who visit this site are used to.
YSlow Rating
Yslow is a tool within Firebug (for Firefox) that rates pages based on how well they’re optimized for faster loading. It doesn’t take file size into consideration, just how well the data is optimized for fast loading. Things that contribute to a better rating include ensuring pages are using gzip, longer term header expiration dates, and optimized CSS.
The average Yslow rating for the 54 sites checked was 75.52 and the top 10% were at 87 or higher.
This is the only thing looked I considered that there's no excuse of developers to ignore. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to have large page sizes and thus slower load times. A person doesn't have to change their site layout at all in order to optimize it to load faster.
Page Load Time
For the purpose of the test, we used the default settings (DSL, Virginia) on Webpagetest.org. While file size for pages plays a large role in page load time, servers and other factors come into play as well.
The average page load time for the 54 sites was 6.6 seconds and the top 10% were at 1.83 seconds or less.
Page Size
This one was the shocker. While I’m admittedly a minimalist design guy myself, I would have never guessed that the average size of the 54 cattle related portals checked was a whopping 617kb. I've always considered 100kb to be pushing the limits but even the top 10% were at 79kb or less.
I went back and ran the test a few times on Clubcalves.com to make sure the data was right because their front page currently consists of 7.3 MEGABYTES of information.
Overall Rating
I took those three factors and used them to come up with an overall rating. I promise I didn’t game it for Cattle.com, it’s just a natural by-product of the fact I don’t like fluff. In fact, if you look at this page right now, there’s nothing on it that doesn’t serve some sort of purpose.
The pages that were above the average index rating of 2.04 were…
- Cattleconnections.com 11.68
- Thecattlebaron.com 6.94
- Texasshowcattle.com 4.62
- Cattle.com 4.45
- Showsteers.com 4.44
- Cattle-today.com 3.95
- Gelbvieh.org 3.66
- Chicattle.org 3.65
- Santagertrudis.com 3.54
- Advantagecattle.com 3.36
- Showtowin.com 3.14
- Showcattle.com 2.87
- Cattleco.com 2.84
- Edjecast.com 2.50
- Oklahomashowsteer.com 2.37
- Cattlemanagement.com 2.14
- Cattlepages.com 2.10
We ran the test on 54 sites from the cattle site traffic report, the ones listed are just the ones that ended up above average. (If you know your site is tracked in that report but not listed here, e-mail me at jeff@cattle.com and I’ll send you the rating/rank. It's not hard to see how your compare by running the tests yourself though.).
Does this mean I think everyone should scrap all images and go as minimalist as Cattleconnections.com? Well, yes, if I was the only person looking at cattle sites, but I am not. And while I do prefer a minimalist layout, I do realize and can appreciate the purpose behind nice designs.
However, this does mean sites should pay attention and put a little time into making their sites and their client sites load faster.
- By Jeff | Comments (4)
AT&T/Verizon Pissing Match
Irrelevant but fun to watch...
Verizon responds to AT&T's "map for that" lawsuit
- By Jeff | Comments (0)
So you want to start an online business?
[This is the first in a group of blog posts blatantly ripped inspired by various things I learned at Pubcon last week]
So you want to start an online business? Of course you do! There is a new ag site popping up every other day and pretty soon it's going to be your turn.
Bob Brisco of Internet Brands gave an excellent summary of what it takes to be successful in his keynote presentation the last day of the Pubcon conference last week. Some of the stats he brought up…
- 50 million people have attempted to start an online business in one form or another
- 96% of them failed or just gave up
- 1 in 200 of that remaining 4% make $50,000/year income
- 1 in 600 of that 4% make $250,000/year income
- 1 in 2,000 of that 4% make $1,000,000/year income
- 40% of those that do make money are still successful after five years
When I stop to think about it, I’ve started nearly as many sites that were failures as successes. Only a few of my sites are capable of standing on their own two feet without being subsidized by the others (and this is not one of them).
The most important part of his presentation was his list of ingredients required to make a site work. Honestly, I always thought it was pretty simple but that’s just because I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time with an idea and a bit of work ethic. However, his recipe for success was as clear and concise as it gets:
- Focus
- Uniqueness
- Community
- Content
- Monetization
- Passion
That last one is by far and away the most important. If knowing there was no chance of making money on a site prevents you from starting it, then you had no reason to start it anyhow. Without passion as motivation, there is little chance of success.
- By Jeff | Comments (0)
Web/Print "Boot Camps"
It's rare that you see something that seems like a genuinely fresh idea in the ag portion of the Internet but I've gotta say that the new "boot camp" service from RHD certainly seems to fit that description...
- By Jeff | Comments (0)
Monday Ramblings
Most of the lack of updates has been due to helping my dad while my grandfather was hanging on in hospice. He finally passed on Friday night, bringing a 74-year marriage to an end. I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying that the 74th year is the toughest.
Want advice on how to live 96-years? Be the kind of old German cuss that can go out in the middle of a working pen at the age of 88, get thrown the ground by a charging cow’s straight shot to the chest, get up and ask your grandson to brush you off.
Calving Ease
It’s no secret we just got done with an insanely bad drought. With the end of that drought also came the end of our light birth weights.
We had only pulled three calves over the past two years and two of those were breach calves. Last week, after having lush green grass for the last two months of gestation, we had to pull four calves in three days, all from cows.
- By Jeff | Comments (0)