Streak is advertised as a CRM but can be used for multiple purposes. It’s a very easy to use and configurable application. One of the key advantages is it’s integrated with Gmail so once you install the application, it’s actually in your inbox. This goes along my line the application should get out of the way and Streak certainly does. It resides where all of us spend a lot of our time every day – email.

Streak is depending on Gmail (Google Apps is fine) and you need to install a Chrome extension in order for the magic to work and it to appear in your Gmail interface. Once it does you need to approve it integrating with your account. Once you log in to your email you’ll get a prompt where you can create new pipelines. Pipelines are basically pre-configured flows for various tasks you want to do in Streak. Some examples are Sales/CRM, Hiring, Journalism, Product Development, Bug Tracking, etc. Once you get the hang of it you can easily create your own pipelines or modify existing ones based on your preferences and how your process looks like.

Creating and sending templates is really a breeze with Streak and it’s easy to send them all within the same interface. One of the things I found missing was it’s not yet integrated to the calendar so due dates are awkward as they are not added to your calendar. I emailed the support and asked about this and that is coming in a future release.

Overall, the whole idea is great and I’m looking forward to future releases of Streak as it has so much potential and the concept of having everything within Gmail is just killer and I’ll continue to follow Streak development. Streak is still in beta and free so why don’t you try it out for your self. Let me know if you like it.

The post Streak for Task Management appeared first on Emir Musabasic.

Anyway, in the end we decided for Trello as a way for us to track what we’re working on and to follow the progress. I wanted to write a little bit more about the different apps we tested as an attempt to make a series out of it. Hopefully the reviews can help you once you need to decide what you’re going to use for task management. The first one I’m going to cover is Trello.

As in the first article, my thinking is for the applications to be useful and for us to actually use them they should

• get out of the way, easy and quick to use (less than 10 minutes a day)
• be visual and intuitive so anyone can pick it up easily and just drag and drop
• be flexible, we need to be able to have different milestones based on the tasks. We want to have writing collaboration between authors within the tool as well as product development and support

Trello fits all the above requirements and you can’t beat the price as it’s free. It’s built around the concept of boards (projects), cards (tasks) and lists (milestones). You can create as many boards as you want depending on how you want to set up your workflow. It’s also possible to set as many lists as you need and this can be different for each board. Once you’ve configured everything it’s extremely easy to create tasks and move them between lists. Trello is a breeze to use also for teams as it’s easy to add new members and assign cards (my favorite task). :)

Besides the obvious lists as milestones, each card can have check lists which are basically sub tasks. You’re able to put due dates as well as attachments (integrated with Google Drive and Dropbox). Color coding is also possible and this can be useful (green, yellow and red) if we want to be able to quickly detect issues.

One of the things working really well is how easy it’s to use Trello for personal stuff as well. Once you register you can create organizations. In the organization you can register as many users as you want. Once you create a board you can either make it private (yours), public (visible by anyone) or assign it to an organization (visible for users registered under the organization). When you login you see both personal tasks and organization tasks so it’s very easy to manage everything within one single interface.

I also found a great extension for Chrome which lists cards assigned to you across all Trello boards. I use it all the time so I don’t need to go to the website all the time. You can find more about the extension here.

Trello is not perfect and I miss Google Apps integration and especially Google calendar integration. I think this is in development though. One of the cool things is you can follow Trello development. It’s of course in Trello. :) One other thing I’m missing is time tracking. I really hope the developers will add this soon as I see it in ideas so it’s not in development yet.

Trello is really easy to use so our goal to quickly be able to manage the tasks and following individual as well as whole team progress was accomplished. I spend about ten minutes a day and have a great overview of how everything is going. Overall, I think Trello  is an excellent application and would highly recommend it.

The post Trello for Task Management appeared first on Emir Musabasic.

Photo credit mat_walker

I consider myself to be fairly organized but overall struggle keeping up with all of the things that need to be taken care of and with the unfortunate fact of having only 24 hours in a day. Also, although hard to confess, lately I have been the biggest bottleneck for most of the projects I’m involved in. I’ve tried various task management applications to handle and prioritize tasks but struggled. I feel like the goal of these applications should be to make my life easier and the overall entry of tasks, management and team collaboration should be easy, quick and simply get out of the way so you can do real work. I’ve tried various apps and some, I really wanted to like but just didn’t use in the end as they didn’t get out of the way and were consuming more time than I wanted to devote to task management.

As an important project is about to start, and one of the challenges being the team is spread out on three continents I took upon myself the quest for the perfect collaboration and task management solution. The ultimate goal I wanted to achieve was to not use the application for more than 10 minutes a day. Initially, I want us to work on delivery and no distractions at all to occur but still we should still be able to follow the progress. I didn’t expect much and was initially thinking about using Basecamp, a project management app, developed by 37 Signals (famous for their blog and books). The other alternative, I was considering is to make something using Google Docs as we are using Google apps anyway. I could make a spreadsheet with some fancy colors and I could probably make it work. I  also did some research and found Asana, a new app (at least for me). Their UVP is task management for teams. While looking into Asana, I found an interesting topic on Quora comparing Asana to Trello. Trello, built by Joel Spolsky’s team, also seemed to be liked and was getting great reviews.

So it came down to four choices, and I’ll try to highlight what my criteria was:

• Get out of the way, easy and quick to use (less than 10 minutes a day)
• Visual and intuitive so anyone can pick it up easily and just drag and drop
• Flexible, we need to be able to have different milestones based on the tasks. We want to have writing collaboration between authors within the tool as well as product development and support

In the end, I decided for Trello. I thought it was by far the most “get out of the way” app. It’s built around the concept of boards (projects) and cards (tasks). The collaboration is built into the application. I create a board with lists (idea, to do, doing, done) within the board and then other members can participate and change  the structure until we reach the optimal project scheme and it can be different for each project. You can add attachments and it’s integrated with Google Drive so we can easily attach documents to cards as well as comments. You can have organization as well as personal tasks so it can be used for other things, not only for business.

Another thing, I have to point out with Trello is it’s free. Although this wasn’t one of our requested features I’m pointing it out so you can go and check it out risk free. I really feel like Trello can help anyone get organized and with a price tag of free there is nothing stopping you to at least give it a try.

The post Task management Apps for Better Productivity? appeared first on Emir Musabasic.

Search Engine Rankings

WordPress Search Engine Optimization also known as SEO, term used in this article from now, on is an important part of each website strategy as a website can have different purposes, be it for e-commerce, branding or whatever else, but it’s not worth anything without visitors. WordPress search engine optimization is no different than any other SEO so the same rules apply. Visitors come directly and by that we mean they click on a link in an email sent from a friend or enter your website address directly in the browser (they heard or seen your website URL somewhere) but a large number of visitors will hopefully get to your website through search engines by looking for keywords that are relevant for the topic of your website. Search engines crawl the web for new content constantly and based on highly complex algorithms try to provide most relevant results for the searched keyword.

Any website should try to be as SEO optimized as possible because visitors coming from search engines are highly interested in the provided results so you get highly targeted visits and SEO is free so if you have quality content you’ll do well but (there is always a but…) you need to be focused and pick your topics. Most of the topics are extremely competitive as there are so many websites competing for search engine rankings. There are some things to take into account here when doing your SEO strategy planning. Don’t try to compete on “broad” keywords, by that I mean it’s going to be extremely hard to compete for keyword “digital camera”, instead try to narrow it down to for example “underwater digital camera” and focus on the relevant, more narrow keywords that aren’t as competitive and hard to obtain.

There are several reasons why websites have high search engine rankings – quality content, up to date content, history (they have been around for a long time) and the most important thing they have working for them are links from other sources. Links from popular and relevant sites covering digital photography have more weight than links coming from a website covering gardening. Also the popular websites have staff writing relevant content and it can be very hard to compete for a small website although if you provide extremely original and unique content you’ll find your audience.

WordPress as a content management system provides great SEO capabilities so WordPress search engine optimization can be done right without too much hassle and I’ll outline some of the things you should setup to get the most out of WP.

Structure

Structure is not really a WordPress topic as it applies to any website but WordPress makes it easy to do it right. Post categories and tags make it easy to organize topics based on topics that are relevant for SEO purposes as well. Custom post types and custom taxonomies make it extremely easy to create content for other things except for blog posts and should be used extensively.

Permalinks

Out of the box WordPress provides us the option to use pretty permalinks and should be used as it enables us to create URLs relevant to the topic we’re covering. Look into the URL of this tutorial and you’ll see it’s http//www.emke.net/wordpress-sarch-engine-optimization/ because I selected the option of using “Post name” for my permalink structure (Post name option is a new feature since WP v3.3).

www or not

Always stick to either http://www.emke.net or http://emke.net for your base URL. Choose one and stick with it so your page rank doesn’t get diluted across the two options as for search engines these are two different sites. I use a plugin called Redirection for this purpose and always use www.

WordPress SEO plugin

Install WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast as it’s a great addon to WordPress and has great features to help you while you’re writing your post so you can target on your focus keywords, edit meta descriptions and help you make your content more optimized for search engines.

SEO friendly images plugin

I also use a plugin, called SEO Friendly Images, which basically adds alt and title attributes to all your images to make more relevant to the keywords you’re targeting.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps are like maps for search engines and enabling them is just one click when you’re using WordPress SEO plugin mentioned above. Make it easy for search engines to find you quality content.

Breadcrumbs

Always try to use breadcrumbs when you have a complex structure to make it easy to get back to home and to the topics you want to highlight and make SEO friendly.

Speed

The faster your site loads the better it is and that’s why optimizing your WordPress website is extremely important if you want to rank well.

Offsite SEO

All of the aspects I’ve written about here have been addressing onsite WordPress search engine optimization techniques – things you do to optimize your website to make it easy for search engines to crawl your website. The other aspect is Offsite SEO and that’s the other part of SEO where you need to get links from other websites. Links are by far the most important thing when it comes to SEO and go outside of scope of WordPress but I do plan on covering this at some later point.

Conclusion

While SEO seems like a lot of work it’s definitely worth it if you get it right and search engine traffic is obviously, as we earlier mentioned extremely targeted and visitors coming from search engines are usually genuinely interested in the topics they were searching for. As long as you provide quality and unique content to your visitors and keep at it (it’ll not come over night) SEO is in my opinion the best strategy to get visitors over time. WordPress, as a tool, can be configured to make your content well optimized for search engines but if you don’t have quality content there is no use so focus on quality content.

Do you think this article was helpful? Any tips of your own? Let me know in the comments.

The post WordPress Search Engine Optimization appeared first on Emir Musabasic.

As this is a bootstrapped project, the goal is to spend as little as possible in the beginning but have the potential to scale as the site grows. That’s where cloud computing gets into the game. It lets anyone without a huge investments in hardware infrastructure upfront build scaleable web applications and as the popularity hopefully grows you just add additional resources. If it doesn’t turn out as you planned, you switch it off without loosing money as you’re basically renting resources from the huge pool of resources Amazon is offering on a time basis.

Amazon Web Services

I’ve set everything up WordPress and with AWS which is basically pay only for what you use service with potential to adding additional hardware resources (also called nodes) for additional performance once the site hopefully takes off. The beauty is you pay only for hardware based on time used which is usually measured in hours. It’s important to note while AWS is a service where you can easily deploy additional or remove certain resources you still need to know your way around server stuff and proper architecture while setting up the environments your web application will be using. I’ve written an article about web hosting requirements for WordPress previously if you’re interested. I’ll describe the services I’m using for my WordPress AWS environment in little bit more details below.

WordPress server

Setting up the environment for WordPress was fairly simple and all I had to install on an Ubuntu OS was basically PHP, outgoing email and Nginx as the web server, database is on an RDS instance and storage is on S3 for WP-uploads and I also store theme and other stuff in S3 buckets which is then displayed through Amazon Cloudfront. I won’t go into how to setup PHP and Nginx as this is not the scope of this article.

Database server

RDS is a basically a MYSQL database instance where the dynamic content will reside. I’ll start with a simple small instance and can grow as the traffic goes up in the future.

Storage/Backup

Resources and static content used by the web application are stored on Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), a highly durable storage infrastructure designed for mission-critical and primary data storage. From S3 buckets I create I have set up Amazon Cloudfront which is a content delivery network for faster loading of S3 content. I also use S3 for backup in case something goes wrong.

Putting it all together

As previously noted, the goal is to start small, with the possibility to grow in the future and I’m basically starting with an EC2 instance, RDS instance for MySQL, S3 for storage and Amazon Cloudfront (CDN or content delivery network) for displaying S3 content. I also use Amazon Route 53 for DNS stuff which is a reliable service. With all of this I am basically able to get quite a sophisticated setup for about $150 per month. If the site takes of I am able to increase resources and even add a load balancer and for some resource intensive processes I plan on assigning EC2 instance for specific processes only which in the end enables me to take the load of presentation layer which are web servers. When it comes to backups I made specific S3 buckets in different regions/data centers.

Conclusion

Setting up WordPress on AWS is a great idea if you want to be able to scale and be prepared for the future and while I do agree this is overkill for most websites I’ve had a lot of fun playing with AWS and server configuration. I have so many ideas and am basically setup in a way I don’t foresee problems a lot of startups experience not being able to handle growth as I’m already setup in the right order. I just need to to add additional resources and services Amazon provides already as the site grows. Load balancers and Autoscaling are services Amazon provides which I plan on adding and I also plan on using Varnish once I grow and add additional EC2 instances for faster displaying as well as having separate EC2 instances for specific resource intensive tasks. I’m still playing around with my AWS setup and if you have any ideas or suggestions I’m all ears. Let me know in the comments below.

The post WordPress AWS Environment appeared first on Emir Musabasic.

Photo credit – m thierry

Getting your WordPress website hacked is one of the worst things that can happen to any website publisher. WordPress is a secure and robust platform but as with any tool there are things you can do to help keep your WordPress installation secure over time.

Upgrade on a regular basis

The scary truth is that, although it’s extremely easy to upgrade to new versions, most of the users don’t do this and this is by far the reason most of the websites get compromised. The same applies to plugins, try always to run the latest versions and don’t install plugins if you aren’t sure what they do and check their ratings/forums. As WordPress is now an extremely popular platform, there are people out there just looking for security related holes so they can attack and bring your website down.

Additional security

WordPress comes with lots of settings that should be turned on during the installation for additional security so lets start with a simple to do list anyone can do. Many potential vulnerabilities can be avoided with good security habits.

Username and Password

Change the default “admin” password to something else. Use a strong password in order to avoid potential attacks. There are many online password generators you can use and can be found on Google.

wp-config location

Move the wp-config.php in the directory above your WordPress install. This is especially useful when you install in your public_html or www directory as moving wp-config.php file makes the file inaccessible to visitors.

wp-config file

On lines 49-56 add unique keys and salts with the help of WordPress.org secret-key service. It’ll automatically create them for you  so just paste the lines to your wo-config file.

WordPress database table prefix should be changed to something else than wp_. Try again with the automatic password generators above.

File Permissions

On computer file systems, different files and directories have permissions that specify who and what can read, write, modify and access them. This is important because WordPress may need access to write to files in your wp-content directory to enable certain functions.

A tip from WordPress.org is all files should be owned by your user account, and should be writable by you. Any file that needs write access from WordPress should be group-owned by the user account used by the web server.

There are many additional things that can be done such as using SSL or adding server-side password protection for accessing wp-admin, limiting access to certain files, etc. but they require a little bit more work and knowledge so I’m not going to go into them in this post.

These are just some of the things you can do in order to secure WordPress. You can always do more but doing the above things will make your WordPress install more secure than most WordPress websites out there.

The post Secure WordPress How-To appeared first on Emir Musabasic.

Most of the WordPress projects I work on start with a client contacting me with a brief (sometimes not so brief) description of what they would like done. This information is automatically fed into my custom system in the way that a lead is generated. I then review the specs and decide if I think I’m a good fit for the project and if I can fit it into my schedule I organize a call where I try to collect additional information. This is also where the potential client is able to ask questions and the goal is to clear all unknowns (there should be no black boxes once the project is agreed). The call usually takes 30-60 minutes.

After the call statement of work, a quote and a project plan containing dates for project start, delivery milestones and when it’s expected to be completed. This is mostly agreed over email and once an agreement is made a project is  (project is basically a contract) which contains:

• Statement or work- what is the extent of services delivered and what is the outcome

• Requirement - contractor but also client

• Project plan - agenda of the project which includes start date, milestone dates and date of the final delivery

• Terms and conditions - payment terms, terms of use of deliverables

After the project is in the system it should be common you get some access to the system where you’re able to automatically look at all the contract parts as described above. If that is satisfactory you should approve and the the contractor can start working on your project. Once the project is accepted the contract is considered to be signed. The contract is valid once the advance payment which is usually 50 % of the initial quote is paid. Once the payment is received I start working on the project and the goal is to follow the milestones in the project plan. The client is able to track the progress because I either have deliveries to the client in form of documents, or a certain part of the website is finished for user to review/test it. The process is transparent and the client is able to follow milestones once logged in the delivery system.

Once, I’m done, I’ll put up a link of the finished project on my server where you’re able to review if everything is according to the agreed and accepted statement of work. This testing period usually lasts for about five days and there is a tracking system where you’re able to report issues/bugs. During this period the clients usually publish pages/posts or (if that’s part of the agreed scope) I’ll migrate it for the client from their existing website and once we clear out the issues and the remaining amount has been paid I migrate the website to the hosting environment of choice.

The post Successful Project Delivery appeared first on Emir Musabasic.

Genesis Theme Framework

I work with Genesis theme framework as it provides hooks and filters for just about anything regarding the appearance which makes it possible to control and make a WordPress child theme from just about any design out there. I can easily reuse code and customizations I’ve built on other projects so my services also become more efficient. Using Genesis framework I can quickly and easily build a theme for any WordPress website.

Genesis framework provides hooks and filters for just about anything regarding the appearance which makes it possible to control and make a WordPress theme from just about any design out there. As I can easily reuse code and customizations I’ve built on other projects the result is quicker turnaround. Here are some benefits of the Genesis framework:

• Genesis is search engine optimized: Clean, optimized code is important for achieving the best rankings possible.

• Genesis is secure: Security expert and core WordPress developer Mark Jaquith was hires to make sure the framework is secured.

• Genesis is easy to customize: Hooks and filters are provided to customize just about everything concerning the appearance.

Starter theme called _s

Recently I’ve started to play with _s starter theme. This is a theme that’s developed by the Automattic theme team and is a starter theme for all themes they develop. It’s a great theme and if you’re interested in reading more on the _s, click here for an introduction by the theme team them selves.

The choice is yours on how you want to organize your work but if you work with Genesis, _s or any other WordPress theme frameworks you’ll save a lot of time not to mention hassle when upgrading and your child themes are safe.

The post WordPress Theme Frameworks appeared first on Emir Musabasic.

“WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it (more than most commercial platforms). It also means it’s free to use for anything from a very simple personal website to a Fortune 500 web site without paying anyone a license fee.

WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001 so it’s a mature and stable product. Focus is on user experience and web standards and during the time WordPress evolved into a tool different from anything else out there. WordPress is now one of the most commonly used tools for web publishing.”

Reason why I use WordPress is:

• stable and mature platform (roots go back to 2001)
• open source so thousands of programmers working on the code making it better
• widely used by small to large organizations
• Code is poetry – efficient, lightweight code

Using WordPress I can build almost any kind of website and having used it so much I’m quick and efficient which results in websites produced in days and I can focus on the most important thing – content.

To read more about WordPress head on to WordPress.org.

The post What is WordPress? appeared first on Emir Musabasic.

This also meany if you have a website with multiple static pages the site will usually load faster as there is nothing to process in the background. So while PHP and MySQL help us to have a dynamic website they also put a burden on the server performance and while for a small website this will not be a problem the more popular the website the more dynamic requests it’ll receive and need to process. The server needs to have sufficient hardware power to be able to process this of course and once we have sufficient hardware power we can additionally optimize the server with some additional software tools to quickly process the requests which will end up in a optimized WordPress hosting environment.

Why is speed important?

It’s a well known fact users leave a website if it loads slowly. You don’t want to make a great website with quality content and when someone comes to visit they wait for long periods for your great content to load and hit the back button in the process to go to another website. Also page loading times are very important for search engines and having a slow loading website will have a negative impact on your search engine rankings.

Once we’ve cleared out why speed is important and the factors important for this to be realized lets go into the hosting environment I would recommend.

DNS

If you host your DNS on external servers this will reduce the load on your primary web server. It’s a simple change, but it will offload some traffic and CPU load so use an external DNS provider.

HTTP Server

HTTP Server is a program  that provides HTTP services which responds to incoming tcp connections and provides a service to the caller. HTTP Server optimized for WordPress should be a secure, efficient and extensible server app with emphasis on high performance so it should be able to handle a number of requests in the most efficient manner.

Three popular HTTP servers:
- Apache – the first and probably the most popular open source HTTP server
- LiteSpeed – commercial high-performance, high-scalability web server
- Nginx – a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server and reverse proxy

Nginx is a web server I would recommend as it’s proven to handle millions of requests and a lot faster than Apache.

Alternative PHP Cache

Alternative PHP Cache is a free, open source (PHP license) framework that optimizes PHP intermediate code and caches data and compiled code from the PHP bytecode compiler in shared memory. Install APC so you can do object, database and output caching with the help of W3 Total Cache (covered later).

There are alternatives here such as using Varnish but I haven’t really looked into this as of yet.

MySQL optimization

I will not go into how to optimize MySQL as that’s an article on its own but this is something that’s pretty important.

Content Delivery Network

A content delivery network or content distribution network (CDN) is a system of computers containing copies of data placed at various nodes of a network. Use a CDN to serve web objects (text, graphics, URLs and scripts), downloadable objects (media files, software, documents), applications, etc. It is a network of distibuted computers on multiple locations sharing your set of data from the computer the closest to the location the request is coming from so it’s faster for the visitor.

W3 Total Cache

W3TC is the best and by far the most extensive WordPress optimization and caching plugin which you configure to utilize the tools described mentioned in this article.

Conclusion

For busy websites this is something that’ll hopefully come in handy. For an e-commerce site having slow loading times will result in lost sales and this is something that should be addressed with proper hosting environment and of course hosting provider. Take a look at the presentation provided by Mark Jaquith (WP core lead developer) on how to scale WP environments.

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