Google Webmaster Tools now reports 1.4 second load time across all pages for Windshield Guru. This includes many of our database intensive pages accessed via the backend – where we still include Google Analytics tags to track employee site usage. The chart can be seen below.

It’s difficult to draw correlations to organic traffic due to the penguin update that is plaguing the seo industry, however organic search has climbed 5.5% over the last thirty days compared to the previous thirty. Additionally our bounce rate has dropped slightly, time on site has jumped by 3% and pages per visit is up as well.

It’s actually fairly easy to make your newsletter signup form run through facebook. This snippet (basically lifted verbatim from fb docs) shows you how to solicit full name and email address. Facebook then checks to see if the user is logged in and if so automatically backfills in the data for the form. If the user isn’t logged in to facebook the default text inputs are shown. (see demo here (safe to use – doesn’t store any data)

On submit you can tell facebook where to send the resulting data. In this class we are pointing things at web-op.com/fblogin.php.

You can view it in action here

Web-Op has joined forces with Classy Closets to form a new company Countertops.com. We will be providing sales for custom counter tops nation wide. It’s a great domain, great product and perfect partners. www.countertops.com

We recently moved Windshield Guru to Amazon Web Services to help us scale up to meet the demands of both visitors and our customer service department. While we’ve seen gains in page load time from the switch, we really weren’t squeezing every ounce of performance we could from Amazon’s scalable infrastructure. Our server architecture consisted of a large mysql DB instance an apache instance serving the front end and an instance we used for development of new functionality. Our worst metric across a ton of webpagetest.org tests was time to first byte. As apache had to read a file, interpret php, then query the database, the logical first step to increase performance was to serve our content up via a reverse caching proxy. There are a few ways to setup a reverse proxy for caching but the two most obvious are nginx and varnish. We’ve played with both pieces of software and settled on Varnish.

Varnish works by loading up your static content into memory – effectively eliminating any disk i/o constraints (which are common on AWS – especially on EBS backed instances). As no disk seek is necessary – the only function varnish does is checks to see if the content requested is in the cache (in RAM) and serve it to the end user. Working from memory is much faster than reading from a disk.

[Jack notes...] Be aware that there are often assets you don’t want cached on your site. On Windshield Guru, visitors are presented with a map of nearby shops, looked up from their IP address. Obviously, this doesn’t help when they show a cached map of Washington state and you’re in Phoenix. What we chose to do is isolate these assets as iframes, and then serve them up from a seperate subdirectory with a less liberal caching policy, so every user gets them fresh. Other alternatives include drawing the info in client side with AJAX calls from a script not tied to the main caching rules.

The Results

Time to first byte dropped from 0.665 seconds to 0.029 seconds – a 2200% reduction. Overall page load time dropped from 2.547 seconds load time on first visit to 1.393 seconds – a 46% decrease!

2.547s Load Time via Apache

1.393s Load Time via Varnish

We can’t wait for this one to kick off. Web-Op is getting into the escrow services business. We purchased the domain www.escrowit.com. It’s not live yet but we’ve started the design process and have hired some great writers to help get some content started for the site. Keep an eye this one.

www.businesslians123.com is a site we have started that we offer loans to small businesses. We will be giving loans between the amounts of $1,500.00 and $150,000.00 to qualified businesses. Most of these loans are offered to companies w existing merchant accounts that we we can lean. During this rough economy we are expecting to loan small businesses millions of needed dollars to update and expand their companies. Go to the site and check it out.

www.osteodoctors.com is a new project that we have partnered in to help Osteo Arthritis patients find the newest in treatment and therapy for this crippling disease. We are excited to offer this site to the Internet public. We have high hopes and faith in our partnership and that it will be able to connect thousands of suffering arthritis patients with the most modern treatments.

Two scriptlets lifted from Jack – the first will randomly forward each visit to a split test variant if there is a “gclid” variable occurring in the URL query string. (e.g. http://www.domain.com/?gclid=2234823958729385 ). This is the standard way Google passes visitors to a site via adwords.

This second little scriptlet first checks for the existence of a cookie variable “BTDT”. If it doesnt find BTDT in any cookie contents it sets the cookie, checks to see if the visitor arrived from adwords and then forwards the visitor to a random split test variant. If its not an adwords visitor it does nothing. If it does find a cookie it does nothing.

Our Chinese partners love Mexican food. When they come to Arizona we always take them to eat the best in the world. This is Richard Lu and I in front of Carolinas Mexican Restaurant. If you haven’t been there, make plans to go. We’ll take you….

Blood pressure monitors with the L-arginine Plus logo on them have arrived from our China manufacturer. These monitors will be used as promotional pieces for the amazing L-arginine Plus product. We should have the promotion ready before weeks end.