When was the last time you checked to make sure that your shopping cart works correctly? How about the links on your web site? Or your contact me form? A couple months ago, I had poked around my blog and discovered that my Feedburner feature wasn’t working properly. While this discovery wasn’t earth-shattering, it was still something that needed to be fixed. But what if it had been the subscription link to my newsletter? How many subscriptions would I have missed in between the time it actually broke and the time I discover that it was broken? What about your web site? Is your shopping cart working? Your “email me” link? Your contact me form?

Don’t count on the visitors to your site to let you know if something is not working right. The majority of visitors will just leave the site without notifying you that’s something’s wrong. Perhaps your web host did a routine upgrade that disables something on your site. Or you made a change to your site or added a page that somehow messes something up. It may be months before you stumble on the fact that people can’t buy anything from your web site…which is really not good.

So every so often, as part of your regular maintenance, you should check your site over and test everything. This includes:

• Your images- Make sure all of your images appear like they’re supposed to. Replace any broken images that are stored on your web site and remove broken images that are linked from outside web sites.
• Your links and navigation- make sure that your links goes to where they’re supposed to go…this also means any mailto links as well. Remove or correct any incorrect links.
• All your online forms- send yourself a message through your online form and see if it works
• Your newsletter- Try subscribing and unsubscribing to your own newsletter to make sure that this works properly…send a copy of your newsletter to yourself and see what your customers see…make sure that your mailing list program sends you a copy of your newsletter from now on so that you get your newsletter everytime you send one
• Your shopping cart- If your shopping cart has a test mode, go through the ordering process and see if you can complete an order…or at the very least, make sure that you can add or substract things from your shopping cart. And don’t forget to take your shopping cart out of test mode once you’re finished testing!
• Any kind of multimedia- If you have Flash, audio, or video on your site, be sure to check these too…make sure that the files load up like they should…make sure they like they play like they should and watch out for error messages.
• Error messages- Keep an eye out for any error messages that may pop up as you navigate through your web site. Take note of what the error message says, what page the error occurs, and what steps you took before the error appeared.
• The speed of your site- Take note of the speed of your web site. Is it taking a long time to load up? Are there certain pages that seem to just hang and never completely load? If your site seems to be slow, there can be a number of different reasons why. The most common culprit is usually the size of your images. Make sure that your images are properly formatted and sized. Another common culprit is inefficient HTML code or poorly installed programs and databases. If the slowness seems to affect your whole web site, consider checking with your web host to see if there is a problem on their end that may be slowing up your site.

Most of us who blog probably start out in similar ways. Perhaps we get a free blog at Blogger or LiveJournal and after a while we’ll decide to move on to something more customizable like Moveable Type or Wordpress. While it’s easy to start off with the out of the box features…you may eventually get the bug and want to start adding some of the nifty features that you see in the other blogs…or perhaps have a snazzy custom layout. But whenever you decide to dig deeper and supercharge your blog…here are a couple of tips (some of them learned the hard way during the redesign of this blog) that may help you out.

Know what you’re trying to accomplish- Take some time to plan out your upgrade before you begin. Have an idea of what theme you want to use, what new features you want to install before digging into the upgrade. One thing that delayed me a little bit was that I kept finding so many cool plugins and I want to try them all while I was in the middle of the redesign. I started making more progress once I narrowed down the features I wanted my blog to have.

Have a realistic timeframe- When I decided to do the upgrade I was hoping to get my whole thing done over a weekend. Well…we can all hope, can’t we? If you’re planning to tie the redesign of your blog to a specific event that has a deadline, perhaps your one or two year anniversary is coming up and you want to celebrate it with a new look, or you’re planning a big promotion that’s going to send people to your blog…be sure to give yourself plenty of time to get it done. Despite our best intentions, things happen, we screw something up during the upgrade and have to fix it…real life intrudes and we have to take care of something personal or business related…or sometimes we just vastly underestimate the time it will take to get the job done. Whatever you estimate it will take for your upgrade, double, maybe even triple that estimate. If you overestimate the time, the worst that can happen is that you finish early.

Back that thing up- Before you even touch anything on your blog, back it up. Back up your database, your themes, any plugins that you may have installed…everthing. The last thing you want is to make one wrong move or install a bad piece of software and lose months or even years worth of posts.

Work on a copy of your blog- When I was doing my upgrade, not only did I make back ups but I created a duplicate of my blog including the database and the theme on my server and made my upgrades on that copy. This was useful in several ways. One, you can make your changes without worrying that you’re going to blow up your current blog. If you’re using a copy of your actual database, you can see what your blog will look let in it’s new theme with real posts. One thing I found when I was doing this was that some of the pictures I have in some of my past blog posts were too big for my new theme. I made sure to resize those pictures before I launched my new blog.

Keep backing that thing up- If you are installing more than one plugin for your site, be sure to back up your database before installing each one. A lot of plugins makes changes to your database and if that particular plugin destroys something on your blog, you’ll have a fresh copy to go back to. The same thing is true if you’re customizing a pre-made theme. Before you start making changes, be sure to have a fresh copy on hand just in case you ruin the theme beyond all recognition.

After you launch your new blog keep a copy of your old blog for awhile- This is useful just in case there are some things that you had in your old blog that you forgot to activate in your new blog. Once I launched my new blog I found that my Feedburner feed was still pointing to my old blog after I did some poking around the old copy. I probably wouldn’t have caught that mistake if I had overwritten the old blog.

Launch your upgrade during off peak hours- My blog statistics showed me that the majority of my readers are from the U.S., so I switched the out the old blog for the new one at about 1:30 in the morning. That way if I messed up the switch it wouldn’t effect my readers too much. If you don’t want to do your switch in the middle of the night, prepare a page that says that you’re upgrading your blog and you should be back up shortly. Make this your index page so that will be the page that people will land on when they arrive at your blog. Once you’ve made the switch and tested out your new blog, remove the page and open up your new masterpiece!

If you can, monitor your 404 hits after you’re done- There’s a great plugin for Wordpress called 404 Notifier that notifies you every time someone hits your 404 page…otherwise known as the Oops! page because it’s the one that people get when they arrive at a page that’s no longer there. Although you should test your blog to make sure that all of your posts are still there, this plugin is good for catching those you miss.

If you have a tip I may have missed, leave a comment!

A few weeks ago I decided to switch my personal email account from .Mac to Gmail. This would be about the third or fourth time since 1997 I’ve switched my personal email address. The first time I switched my email address was a huge pain in the butt. I had subscribed to a lot of newsletters and when I changed my email address, I lost about half of my subscriptions and missed a number of emails from friends and family. With each switch, I’ve gotten a lot better about going about it in an organized manner. If you need to change emails sometime in the future, learn from my mistakes by following these tips:

1. Start the switching process early- If you expect your old email address to be deactivated at some point in time; it’s best to start the process of switching addresses early. Try to start the process a minimum of two weeks before you expect your email address to be deactivated. This will give you enough time to completely transition from your old email to your new email without missing any important messages. Two weeks is the bare minimum, one month is ideal. Either way, the earlier you start, the better.
2. Make a list of where you need to change your address- If you’ve had your email address for any length of time, you’ve probably given it out to any number of people and web sites. This includes:
   • Email lists
   • Online accounts (for online banking, bill paying services, etc
   • Membership profiles (forums, message boards, directories)
   • Web site
   • Business cards
   • Resumes

   Any place that you’ve provided an email address needs to be changed. Make of list of these places and once you’re fairly certain that you have everything listed, start the process of switching addresses at each site. Once you start making these changes, you’ll begin to get confirmation emails from these newsletters web sites, and accounts. Create a folder in your email client and store a copy of these emails. From now on you should start saving a copy of confirmation emails every time you join a new mailing list or open a new online account. Why? If you ever need to change your email address again, you’ll have a ready made list of everything you need to change along with the email addresses and web addresses you’ll need to contact to make the changes.

3. Use your new address for any new contacts- Once you’ve gotten your new email address set up, start using it for any new mailing list subscriptions or membership profiles you sign up for from now on. If someone asks you for your email address, be sure to give out the new one instead of the old one. Don’t continue to use the old address out of habit thinking that you can make the switch when you deactivate your old email. One, you may forget to make the switch when the time comes, and two, whoever you tell may forget update your email when you decide to make the switch. In the end it’s just easier to start using your new address as soon as possible so that you’ll have less to change in the future.
4. Don’t forget your address book and stored emails- If you are switching from one web based email service to another (for example from Hotmail to Gmail); you’ll also need to remember to transfer your address book and any stored emails to your new service. If you’re using a desktop based email program like Outlook, Eudora, or Apple Mail, you won’t have to worry about this step as your emails and address books are generally stored on your computer. You will, however, need to create a new account
5. Announce your new email address to your contacts- Once your new email address is up and running, send out an email to all of the people you have in your address book and tell them that you have a new email address and ask for everyone to update their address books. Use your new email address to send out this message so that it will be easy for people to add your new address to their address books. It’s also a good idea to send this message again a week or two later. Some people may forget to update your address or they may have missed your first email. A second email will give them an extra little reminder if they have forgotten.
6. Monitor your old email address- If you can, keep your old email address activated for some length of time and monitor the emails coming in. No matter how thorough think you’ve been it’s possible that there a mailing list you’ve forgotten about, an old forum account you’ve missed, or a friend who’ve still hadn’t gotten the memo about your new address. By keeping your old account open, you’ll be able to catch whoever or whatever that may slipped through the cracks. If you wish, you can keep your old email address open indefinitely and use it as a “throwaway” or a spam address. You can use this email when you’re signing up for contests, temporary mailing lists, or other things that you don’t plan on keeping up with that may attract a lot of spam.

Have any tips that I may have missed? Post a comment and tell me about it!

Well, it’s the start of a new year, which brings us to a common change that we all need to remember to make on our web sites. If you have a copyright date on your web site (which you really should), remember to change the date from ? 2006 Your Name to ? 2007 Your Name.

How important is this? Well, legally having an updated copyright date can only help if someone is stealing content off of your web site. On a more practical level, it gives visitors to your web site the impression that you keep your site fresh and up to date. I mean, how impressed are you when you visit a site with a copyright date as recent as 2001?

So now that you’ve cleared away the confetti and champagne, scoot over to your site and get that date current. And if you don’t have a copyright date on your site, resolve to make that the first change of the New Year.

Happy New Year all!