Posted on 11.05.13 | Astralweb | Leave a Comment

Check Load Speed of Webpage

In order to analyze how fast your website or specific webpage loads, you will want to use an analysis tool. We like using gtmetrix.com especially because it shows the specifics of load time and helps us find bottlenecks and issues with our site.

Step 1: Go to Gtmetrix.com

Step 2: Check Website/Webpage

Enter into text box your specific webpage and click on “Go”

Step 3: Look into Data

Take a look at the “Breakdown” and “Recommendations”

Especially look into tabs

– pagespeed
– yslow
– timeline
– history

Video Transcription:

Hey everybody. creating another site speed tip video and just wanted to talk about how do i and webmasters, site owners figure out how fast is there website loading. one tool that we use a lot is gtmetrix.com. it’s not our site, just a simple tool. i think they do a really great job at diagnosing each part of how the site loads. so all you have to do is go to gtmetrix.com, insert your domain name. let’s insert ours for example and click on go. it’ll fetch the page and then figure out what’s taking time and give you some information about how long is it loading, what are the specific parts and what can you improve. so you can take those guidelines and improve the site in general. so once i did this i put our website right here and it gave us a page speed grade of a 96% and y slow page grade of b. and it tells us that the entire website with css and javascript loaded in 2.7 seconds. the total page size size including all external pages, html, javascript and css and there were 47 different files including php and css. so this is how long the website took to load, 2.7 seconds. and you know maybe this is sufficient for you or not but if you go down here, there are 4 tabs and it’ll tell you what you’re scoring in each of the things, and of course try to improve the ones that you have bad grades. one example of speeding up website load is instead of having separtae images you can combine some of them in css sprites and have multiple in one so the browser fetches less images. the next tab is yslow, and on and on. so you can see all of these improvements to do and the other thing i really like looking at is the timeline and that shows you how long ever single file took to do fetch and not just how to fetch but also each component of dns, server wait and transfer. so you can see the php file, the index file, took .1 seconds and on and on. and you can figure out if you have 404’s or specific very large files or take a long time to download. hope you enjoyed this. thanks!

Posted on 11.04.13 | Astralweb | Leave a Comment

Installing Sample Data on Magento Community Edition

In this article we’ll show you how to install sample data for the Magento Community Edition. This sample data is mainly used for learning about Magento and setting up data so you can test your developed themes and functionality.

* please note that importing sample data is done BEFORE you install Magento.

Let’s begin:

Step 1: Download Community Edition:

Go to magentocommerce.com/download and download sample data
* sample data version number is okay to be lower than you magento version

Step 2: Create a MySQL Database

Go to your hosting account and create a mysql database (note your login info for later)

Step 3: Unzip Sample Data Files on Server and Import

After you unzip your files, you will want to:

a. import .sql file via phpmyadmin (to database)

b. import media folder into /media (magento main folder /media)

* you will need to first extract magento files on server (see step 4 below)

Step 4: Magento Installing

(see video from other tutorial)

(see tutorial on how to install magento ce)

quick steps:
– download magento community edition
– upload to server and unzip
– copy “media” folder to magento main directory (see above step 3)
– go to url and fill out info on each screen

* Troubleshooting – if product images do not appear, go to media/ folder and rename .htaccess file (temporarily do so)

Let us know if you have any questions regarding this topic. Thanks for reading!!!

Posted on 11.01.13 | Astralweb | Leave a Comment

Track Email Campaign with Analytics URL Builder

You will always want to evaluate each and every campaign that you run and separate data based on your efforts and different avenues in order to reach conclusions.

Email campaigns are no different. We tyipcally use Analytics URL Paramaters via the Analytics URL Builder Tool to tag our email efforts.

Step 1: Visit Google Analytics URL Builder

Go to https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?hl=en

Step 2: Enter Info into Form

– Enter Landing Page
– Enter campaign Source
– Enter Medium
– Enter Term
– Enter Content
– Enter Name

Analytics URL Builder Form

Step 3: Copy URL

Copy URL from below form

Copy URL from Form

Step 4: Paste into Email Marketing Campaign as Link

Paste your URL Builder link into your email

Paste Link

Step 5: Test Link and Send out

Step 6: Evaluate Data in Google Analytics

Video Transcription:

Hey everybody. It’s Ori from Astral Web. Just wanted to talk about something that has come up lately with our clients. The issue is tracking email marketing campaigns, newsletters, email reachouts. When you send out emails to your customers, clients, whomever it is, you want to track that your specific emails are getting clicks to your website so you actually know your campaign is doing good. Aside from open rates, you want to know that they’re coming to your website and converted. And if you’re going to include a simple links such as www.example.com, you won’t see where it came from, which newsletter if came from, if it was a direct visit from a yahoo mail, etc. So what you want to do is track what you are doing. Go to google analytics url builder and all you have to do is fill out all fields with asterisk and associate it in your email campaign. You’ll be able to track a lot of information and it’ll give you so much more. I
ll so you how to use it quickly. Type in website url the url. Now the source for email newsletter can be newsletter1. and the medium would be email and campaign terms and content is more for ppc and adwords. Now let’s go to name, emailweekend. And all you do is click on submit and you copy this url and paste it in your email link, not just www.domain.com. On last thing before you move forward is to test url’s in email because some sites do not handle this correctly as they process php for example in a different way. You don’t want your web pages to break. Always test. Hope you enjoyed this video. Thanks!

Posted on 10.31.13 | Astralweb | Leave a Comment

Install Magento Community Edition (Quick Guide)

Here’s a straight-forward step by step guide on how to Install Magento Community Edition 1.7.0.2

We are always happy to answer any questions you may have. Let’s begin!

Install Magento on Server

Step 1: Download Magento Community Edition

Go to magentocommerce.com and download full release of community edition.

Step 2: Upload Magento to Server

Use your favorite FTP client to upload the files to your server. You’ll have to unzip it in order to save time.

Step 3: Setup MYSQL Database

Go to your hosting database section and add a new database. Don’t forget to write down your login information.
* username, password, database name, hostname

Step 4: Start Installing from browser

Go to your browser and visit the url of server you have placed magento on.

You will arrive to a setup screen. Fill out all information and don’t forget your username and password.

Step 5: Login to Site and Test Site Live

You’re awesome! You made it!!!

SEE OUR VIDEO

Video Transcription:

Community edition 1.7.0.2. just gonna start pretty simple. first thing we wanna do is got magentocommerce dot com. and go to download the actual files
you go to download community edition and we’re gonna go and download the 1.7.0.2 zip file. ok. click on download.
I’m gonna actually pause it because i’ve already downloaded it and we wanna speed up this video a little bit so people dont get bored.
the next step we wanna do is use our favorite FTP client, right now I’m using WS FTP, there’s some free ones.
but just go ahead upload zip to your server. right now I ve actually uploaded it. this is the file we just downloaded.
What I wanna do is actually do one more thing to save a little time which is instead of just unzipping the magento files on your computer
and uploading all of them it’s much much easier & a lot quicker to keep the zip file on your server and upload very simple unzip file in PHP
to unzip it and save a ton of time. probably about half an hour on my internet connection because there are so many magento files.
very simple, system unzip and file name. im gonna run the file name , we are gonna go to the browser. and unzip.
it will take a little time depending on the server you have. so this server currently is a shared server with godaddy. it’s pretty slow
but it will do the job for the installation. and we go over a few things. probably it will take 30 seconds or so , after we unzip, we just check it
and we go to the next step which is actually creating a database. so i’m actually gonna do the database right now and we will check it later to save some time.

right now, i’m in godaddy hosting and just gonna select my hosting account just gonna select my hosting account and going to the bottom of the page to open my new mySQL
database. click on it and click on Add and I’m gonna actually do this. friendly name : magento community edition test. and database name : i’ve just created new one
ive already created the file which im keeping all the information. username and password and I’m gonna click on OK.

Ok you wanna obviously keep all this information in file so you can use it later on. so databases are being set up and it’s gonna take little time
lets go back, looks like everything was unzipped. you see there are a lot of files a lot of outputs, im gonna go refresh the server and i do see that
it opened inside Magento folder everything you need. cool. so now you wanna go back and get the information from the database and start the installation. it’s very very simple.

so lets go back. it’s still pending set up, we are gonna wait a few more seconds , just one more thing , it’s pending. what i wanna mention is this
installation is just for installing on the server. we didn’t install any test data which is gonna be another video we are gonna create.
looks like it finished, oh actually it didn’t. we are gonna wait a little while. while we wait, what we gonna do is go to the installation,
start the next step. so the folder that we did was slash magento and this is our first screen for the installation wizard. so lets start and do what we can
until the database finish installing. 1st step. localization for me English. La is good. US dollar currency and the database information. so, lets go back
and get the info here try to refresh it and see. they are still pending setup. lets put whatever we can. go to godaddy specifically their database
and username is were the same for shared hosting. im gonna put that. password. and we need to wait for the local host causein the shared hosting is not on the
local host and it use completely different URL. OK. and in the meantime this is our base URL and it’s fine, for default we keep everything the same.
obviously later on you wanna include an SSL, and everything default is gonna be fine. just for quick installation. ok so all we need is the host name.

obviously the godaddy hosting is a little slow. ok, we got it. what i wanna do is get the details of hosting right here and put it in my file as well
, and go here, hostname, and next step. ok so now it’s just installing the database , putting all the info we need, it should take few more seconds and we are
gonna be able to get to the last step which is just to confirm if the website look good, cool, pretty basic stuff.

this is admin account, and we are almost finished. name, email, username, etc. and I’m gonna save this. for the encryption key we can let the system
create its own but we do need to save it. im gonna click on continue and im gonna save encryption key right here and just click on go to front-end.
and the website is live that’s it everything works. we did quick installation. im gonna follow up with some more videos and also details
, screenshots, texts, more info on all the steps. hope you liked it. talk to you later. bye.

Posted on 10.29.13 | Astralweb | Leave a Comment

Installing WordPress (quick guide)

Here’s a straight-forward step by step guide on how to Install WordPress 3.6/3.7

We are always happy to answer any questions you may have. Let’s begin!

Install WordPress on Server

Step 1: Download WordPress

Go to wordpress.org and click on download to get the latest wordpress files.

Step 2: Upload WordPress to Server

Use your favorite FTP client to upload the files to your server. If you have downloaded a compress file, you’ll have to unzip it.

Step 3: Setup MYSQL Database

Go to your hosting database section and add a new database. Don’t forget to write down your login information.
* username, password, database name, hostname