Eli the Computer Guy

Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

Does Google count Twitter links towards Page Rank?  Does using Google Analytics help your site’s rankings?  These types of questions are asked countless times everyday.  Trying to read the Google documentation can lead to eye strain and complete confusion.  Now I have found a great resource that tells you exactly what Google wants from your website.

Google Webmaster Central Channel on YouTube offers HOURS of 1-3 minute question answer videos.  The presenter, Matt Curtis, is very easy to watch and understand.  Just about every question I have ever had about how Google does Page Rank is answered in a clear and concise way.

If you care about SEO you NEED to watch these videos.  Check them out at http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp

Over at EverymanIT.com we ask that visitors become members to the site in order to watch our video classes.  Everything is free, but we just want to be able to tell how many of our visitors are really interested in our site, and how many are just passing through.

To this affect our opening line on the Home page said “Try our Classes for FREE!!!”  in big, bold H1 font.  At the end of the page we had the standard line of “FREE Membership Available”.  It’s a little cheesy, but I figured the two sentences made the point. Apparently I was wrong…

I received a comment from a visitor that was very interested in our site, but was worried that she would somehow have to pay something and she doesn’t have the money for it.  As an older person she read the “Try our Classes for FREE” to mean that it was some type of trial and that she would have to hand over some money at some point. Knowing all of the scams out there on the Web I can see where she is coming from. 

I sent her off an email and modified the line to “Watch our Classes for FREE!!!”.  The question I wonder though is how many visitors were turned off of the site due to that simple wording issue.

This just goes to show that you should try to get a wide range of people to view your site and tell you what they think you are saying.  Although you may know the average 20-40 year old would understand what you are saying the 50+ crowd may not. This may become a real factor if like us you find out that your demographics are skewing to a much older group of people then you originally expected.

There are a lot of options available to web administrators looking to stream video content to their sites.  Options range from free hosted solutions like YouTube to running your own server and using a piece of software like Adobe Flash Media Server.

We were looking for a solution that would provide a number of features:

1. Our classes run up to 90 minutes so we needed a solution that did not limit the length of single videos.
2. We needed to ensure that we kept the copyright of the material we create.
3. The solution needs to reliable.
4. The solution should be simple enough that the job of maintenance and repair can be handed off to a contractor.
5. Due to the size and bandwidth requirements for streaming our videos we needed a solution that did not cost too much for storage and usage. (Our classes run in size from 500MB to 2.5GB and we plan to have hundreds)
6. We wanted dynamic bandwidth control, or bit rate switching, so that viewers are provided with video quality that corresponds to the speed of their Internet connection.

Flash Video

Our first decision was to encode and display our videos using Flash Video.  The reason for this is that it is the most common used type of web video encoding used.  Almost everyone who surfs the web has Flash installed and therefore we do not have to worry about visitors having to download and install software.  We briefly looked at QuickTime, but although we lose the iPod/ iPhone users by using Flash we feel that we would lose more regular PC/Laptop viewers by using QuickTime.

YouTube

We decided against YouTube due to their restriction to 10 minute videos and the hazy questions surrounding copyright if we are the ones to post our own videos to the site.

Pay For Content Hosting Services

There are numerous high quality Content Hosting companies that provide top notch service.  The issue is that most of the services max at 100GB size limits for their services.  We are looking at hosting Terabytes worth of video within the next year.  The overall cost for hosting this much video became exhorbenant when using a Hosting Service.

Free Pseudo streaming Software

Pseudo streaming scripts or servers such as Xmoov or Lighttpd allow for most of the capabilities that we need.  You can do dynamic bit rate switching and the software allows viewers to skip to any point in a video so long as the video has been encoded with key frames.

The issue is that pseudo streaming still pushes content at the same rate that progressive downloads do.  Since our servers are hosted at a Server Farm and we pay for our connection speed this massive uploading of video to our viewers could dramatically impact what we pay per month for our data connections (Currently $100 per 1 Mbps)

Red5

We looked at Red5 an Open Source true Streaming Video Server.  It seems very promising and we may switch over to it in the future.  Our concern is that there are enough bugs in the software that using it for a production site seems risky.  Especially considering we have a very low budget for maintenance and troubleshooting.  Frankly if something quirky happened there is too much of a risk that our entire site would be disabled indefinitely.

Wowza

Wowza seems to be a very robust competitor for Adobe Flash Media Server. Unfortunately our beta testing of the software did not provide faith imbuing results.  We were excited to use Wowza because it is available for far more operating systems then Adobe Flash Media Server.  Sadly once we installed Wowza we ran into a number of issues get it to run properly.  To be blunt the documentation was less the “wowza”.  This software may be robust, enterprise level software, but without in depth documentation it’s worthless to us.  (And it costs approx. $1000 per server licensing)

So We Decided on Adobe Flash Media Server 3.5

Adobe Flash Media Server was a snap to install on a Windows Server 200 Web Edition box.  Within an hour of the install everything was running like a top. It’s incredibly simple to install and maintain.  We also like it frankly because it is an Adobe product.  We use Adobe Creative Suites to develop our content and as IT professionals we know that software companies have a nasty habit of implementing updates that wreak havoc on competing systems.  Whether it’s right or wrong is not the argument. The question is whether a “security” update will disable something that a competitor such as Wowza needs in order to stream video.

Additionally by using Adobe FMS we provide a small amount of future proofing for the offerings that we may decide to offer our visitors.  Right now we only provide streaming video, but in the future we may decide to provide robust Flash based applications and Adobe Flash media Server seems best positioned to ensure that we can do that without having to reinvent our infrastructure.

The license per server is $1000, with an additional $350 for the Windows Server Web Edition license.  This cost is offset by the fact that just about any professional technician can troubleshoot the system. 

Also since this is a Per Server license, and Windows Server Web Edition can support up to 64GB of RAM  we know that it will be a long time before we have to worry about buying more licenses (1U Servers can now support up to 10TB of Storage, 2 6 Core Xeon Processors, and far more then 64GB of RAM)

Final Thoughts…

Depending on what you plan to do with your video content there are numerous viable solutions.  These are the reasons we went with the Flash Media Server, but your requirements may be met with free or very low cost solutions.

There’s a whole lot of hoopla when it comes to what Web advertisers see about the people that respond to their ads.  Just to dispel a myth the fact is most Web advertisers don’t care much about you as a person.  They care very much about you as a demographic.  There’s no profit in knowing what one person will do, but there are millions on the line to understand what masses of people will do.

Below is a snippet of what I receive from Facebook about the people that respond to my ads.  Please note that this is very useful information, but it’s not exactly something that says much about any one person.

It’s official.  Google cares about how fast your website loads.  There is now even a tab in Google Webmaster Tools to show you the speed your website loads and the history of speed changes.

Speed can be effected by the capabilities of the server that hosts the site, and the bandwidth of the hosting provider.  It can also be significantly effected by how the website is actually coded.  Many simple changes can bring about significant speed improvements.

Google has created a tool called Page Speed that analyzes how your website loads and then gives you suggestions on how to improve your coding. 

It’s a good little tool, but realistically you should only play with this if you are really interested in web programming.  The suggestions it will give you are things like “Minify CSS”, and, “Combine External Java Script”.

You can take a look at it at http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/index.html

P.S.

Make sure to also download the Firebug Plugin to make Page Speed work.  I missed that step and couldn’t figure out why Page Speed wasn’t working.