I am sure that most of you have already heard that the new version of Wordpress has been made available today. Now I am not usually one to scramble about when a new version of anything comes along (unless of course it fixes some major security issues, or program flaws), but I have made an exception for WP 2.7, and I think that you should as well – you will not (I guarantee) be disappointed by what you will see!
As always, do a full backup, both DB and files, before upgrading!
A came across a really great blog today, called 43folders.
While cruising around reading the articles, I came across one about what I will call, the art of photography. Every photoblogger out there needs to read this article and make sure they carry their camera.
In my last post, I talked about my concerns regarding the high bounce rate on my photoblog. In this post, I want to talk about some of the things I have learnt while researching why my bounce rate is so high.
Make sure that you’re calculating your bounce rate correctly
While reading about bounce rates, I came to the realization that I wasn’t calculating my my website’s bounce rate correctly. Since this is a photoblog most of my return visitors would only look at a single page and therefore be considering a bounced visit (Remember, Google Analytics defines a bounced visitor as any visitor who views only one page.) So I needed a way to segment my traffic and only look at new visitors. Luckily, for me Google Analytics makes that easy. Here’s my new graph showing the bounce rate for new visitors only.
So it’s a slightly better result than before, but you can clearly see that I still have a bounce rate around 66% which means that I still have some work to do.
Search Engines may not deliver the highest “quality” of traffic to a photoblog
After looking at the “true” bounce rate of my photoblog, I decided that it was important to identify all the sources of traffic that my site is receiving and which sites are sending “high quality” traffic. I quickly realized that while the majority of the traffic is coming from Google (namely, Google Images) most of it is not what I would consider to be “high quality” traffic.
My definition of “high quality” traffic would be a visit with at least two pageviews.
I need to generate better traffic to my site
My goal has always been to sell limited edition prints via my photoblog, and while there are tons of other things that still need to be done in order to reach that goal, I am a strong believer in the value of high quality traffic and how it’s vitally important to the overall success of my photoblog. As it stands right now, the organic search traffic that I receive is unfocused at best and needs to be dramatically redefined if I have any chance at meeting my goals. So I have pulled up the trusty spreadsheet tool and turned to Google’s Keyword tool and will be spending a fair amount of my time researching keywords. I will let you know how it goes.
So I was spending some time in Google Analytics today, and I noticed just how out of control my photoblog’s bounce rate is getting. Google Analytics defines a “bounce” as a user who only visits a single page on your site. So looking at my bounce rate for November that means that three out of 4 visitors to my site view only a single page…which normally wouldn’t be much to worry about, but if you’re trying to sell images via your site, you’d like that number to be a little lower.
Now looking at a single month’s data could potentially be misleading, so I looked at a few months and my site’s bounce rate is getting worse!
What’s your photoblogs bounce rate?
I am going to come up with some strategies to decrease my bounce rates and will post my progress here.
I know that this is old-news by now, but I wanted to let everyone know that Wordpress has published a new version 2.6.5 which does contain one security fix. From what I have read the security threat doesn’t seem to be high, but if you’re running your photoblog on wordpress you should think about upgrading, just in case!
If you’re not subscribed to the Wordpress Development RSS feed, I would suggest that you add it to your list of feeds!
Over the last while, I’ve noticed that quite a few folks are ending up here while looking for information on backing up their Pixelpost blog. So I figured that I would create a quick write-up on a couple of different methods of backing up your pixelpost blog.
The first thing to remember is that backing up your pixelpost blog is a two-step process, first we need to backup the DB, and then we need to backup our templates, images, etc.
You call that a sensor? This is a sensor!
Man, I remember way back in the day when I was still shooting in film, I always had my eye on a modular system from Sinar, I think it was the M system (super old post). Basically, if I remember correctly it was a modular view-camera which had the ability to use digital backs. Big money, but we all have to have dreams right?
Today, I stumbled across a new system by RED camera, and I have just added a new toy to my wish list. Make sure you check out RED camera’s Scarlet/EPIC system.
The page is slightly strange – just keep scrolling, it get’s better I promise 
You often hear in the media about “getting your money to work for you”. It occurred to me the other day, that we should be saying the same thing as photobloggers about our photography. Most, if not all, of us take a ton of images in a yearly basis; our latest Featured photographer is currently on a 1200 day streak (over 3 years!).
