As ThesisReady has continued to grow over the past few months, more and more of my time has been dedicated to answering support requests. This means less time to develop new Thesis skins (there are several new ones in the works, by the way – create a free account to get updated about those!) and more time answering the same questions over and over.

A few months back, I created the support forum, which has been a huge help, and today I’m excited to announce that all of the ThesisReady.com skins will include support videos, covering everything from installation to setting up menus and post thumbnail images. As of right now, all the premium skins have installation videos. Over the course of the rest of the week I’ll be adding videos for the free skins as well.

If there are any topics you’d like to see covered in a screencast, let me know. This also means I’m going to try my hand at a few tutorial screencasts, so keep an eye out for that!

I’m finalizing the admistration page and alternate color schemes on a new premium skin this week. Check it out!

I just wrapped up testing all the ThesisReady skins, and everything passed without issue! If you already use of the skins, you’re good to go. If you were waiting on purchasing, now’s your chance.

One small note. Thesis and WordPress do have a minor conflict, but you can find more about that at ThesisLab.

Adam has provided me with countless hours of support and guidance. The “Print is Dead”  skin is great and the support that you get from Adam makes it that much better.  He replies quickly and makes sure I understand what is going on.  This skin and the support provided are worth their weight in gold.

Sorry for the radio silence! I’ve been hard at work on a bunch of new projects, one of which I’m announcing today! So without further delay, a few things…

1. New Premium Skin Released! – It’s called Secret Agent, and I think it’s pretty awesome. You can visit the skins page to find out more. Also, if you buy before midnight on Friday, you save 20%, and get free professional installation. That whole package usually costs $100, and during launch week you get it for $40. That’s 60% off. Hurry, before the deal is over.
2. I’ve got many more great tutorials in the works, so stay tuned for those. As always, if you have any suggestions for tutorials you would like to see, drop me a line.

Thanks!

Secret Agent from ThesisReady is the perfect Thesis skin for nearly every application you can dream up. The clean black and white color scheme is the perfect backdrop for your content, and images. Show exactly what you want to show your audience in a smart, well-though out format.

In addition, the Secret Agent skin boasts an impressive array of configuration options, all just a mouse click away. As with all the great ThesisReady premium skins, logo management is super easy, with no coding required to make a change. Same with the included social media box. Secret Agent also has a one-of-a-kind post-author info box, and lets your writers include their bio, and social media links, right from the WordPress dashboard. This is a must have for multi-writer sites, and anyone looking to build their personal brand, and connect directly with your audience.

Also included is a custom banner widget to make managing your advertising even quicker.

Now that you’ve got the inside scoop on Secret Agent, go grab your copy today. With detailed screencasts covering installation, and configuration, along with access to the support forum, you’ll have no problem getting up and running quickly, and knowing you have acccess to the help you need to make your blog a success.

Note – This is the first article in a series about using data-driven methodologies to improve your site. Want to learn more about how data collection and testing can improve your bottom line? Contact me!

I need better statistics. Now.

As any serious Thesis blogger knows – good statistics matter. A lot.

The problem is, for most people, Google Analytics provides too much data to be useful. Do you know which visitor

Clickheat Overlay of http://thesisready.com/skins.

segment is your most profitable? Least profitable? Odds are that while you have Google Analytics (or something similar) installed, you aren’t getting very much actionable intelligence from it. Knowing your monthly page views is cool, and can be fun to brag about, but it doesn’t help you get more readers. It’s a symptom of something, not the cause.

Shortly after the relaunch of ThesisReady, I got fed up with not having enough usable data available to help me improve my site. I needed something that would be able to quickly tell me what I was doing right, and what I was doing wrong.

The first thing I looked into were things called “heat maps.” There are a ton of companies offering heat map data collection as a paid service, but before I committed to anything, I needed a free alternative to test. After all, at that time I had no idea if using heat mapping software to track clicks would lead to a better experience for my website visitors.

For the record, I was dead wrong about that initial assumption.

Using ClickHeat

The free software I ended up using is called ClickHeat. Installation only took a few minutes. All you have to do is upload the ClickHeat folder to your website’s root directory, and hook the java script code it gives you into the “wp_footer” hook via the custom_functions.php file. At that point you’re up and running. Easy enough.

Once the software is installed, you can visit http://yourdomain.com/clickheat to log in and look at your data.

Understanding the Data

ClickHeat overlay of footer widget.

After a few days, depending on the amount of traffic your website gets everyday, you’ll begin to get accurate maps of where, and how often, visitors are clicking on your site.

One of the most interesting things I’ve discovered so far is that the “More Skins” widget in the footer is getting a lot more clicks than I had assumed. As you can see from the screen shot, so far today there have been quite a number of clicks. Now that I know this area of my site gets a lot of attention, I can focus future tests there to find out how best to optimize that space.

I was working on a project for a client the other day and the host they were using was fighting me at every turn, and causing all kinds of Thesis and skin problems. In order to make the ThesisReady skins as good as they can possibly be, for as many users as possible, I wanted to conduct a little research. Use the poll below to let me know which host you are currently using. If you’ve got other hosts that I haven’t included, be sure to let me know in the comments so I can add them.

Also – SUPER IMPORTANT: Please retweet this and encourage others to vote so I can get an accurate answer. Thanks!

Secret Agent Thesis Skin by ThesisReady

I’m working on a new Thesis skin this week, and I’d love some feedback. Thoughts so far? What features would you like to see included?

Thanks!

I spent a few days working on a client site this past week, and after spending a few days working through ways to increase conversions, I figured I would share one of the more interesting techniques I employed – displaying targeted content to visitors based on which site they visited from. There are a number of applications for this, one of which is showing Adsense blocks only to users who visited from a google search. To understand why this helps, you need to understand a little bit about how your visitors are thinking when they access your site.

In most cases, when someone visits your site via a Google search, they are in pursuit of very specific information. If you have what they want, their search ends and they’ll stick around to learn what they need to know. If not, the search continues on to the next site. This happens in one of two ways. 1. They hit the back button and return to the original search query. 2. They click on a link, or ad unit, that takes them to a new page which, they hope, will have the information they need. Users who aren’t in the process of a search act differently, and therefore are probably less likely to click an ad unit.

Therefore, showing ad units to all visitors, regardless of origin reduces your CTR, and over the long run, can devalue each individual ad-click on your site. That’s not a good thing.

To remedy this, we’ll improve upon the standard Thesis/Adsense integration.

function standard_adsense_function(){ if(is_single()) { ?>
<!-- Your Adsense Code Here --!>
<?php } }   

add_action('thesis_hook_after_post', 'standard_adsense_function');

The above code is how most go about integrating Adsense into the space after a post in Thesis. Using a WordPress conditional tag, it checks to see if the page being viewed is a single post, and if it is, the Adsense block is dropped in after a post. Pretty standard stuff, but it makes no distinction between users visiting via a search, or via twitter or some other site where the chance of an ad click is lower.

Let’s do it the right way now.

function better_adsense_function() {
if(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) {
$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];
if(stristr($ref, 'google')) { ?>
<!-- Your Adsense Code Here --!>
<?php }  } }  

add_action('thesis_hook_after_post', 'better_adsense_function');

The second line of the function is where the magic happens.

if(isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'])) {

This checks the http header, which includes the source of the visit. The next line

$ref = $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'];

saves the referrer string to a php variable, which we can use to run a test on in the next line

if(stristr($ref, 'google')) {

You’ll notice the second part of that check is set to “google.” If any part of the referring url contains that string, the statement is true and will output anything in that block.

Bam – easy way to improve your Adsense CTR.

Next time – displaying different blocks to different referrers. Perfect for fine tuning your calls to action.