WordPress sorts pages alphabetically, unless you change the order in the Attributes pane.  If you need to set the page order, the temptation is to go throuh and set them up to be 1,2,3,4… and so on.

The problem is that if you want to change the order, you now have to go back and change the order number of all the pages that follow the page you are moving.  Say you want a new page to be # 3.  Now you need to change 3 to 4, 4 to 5 etc.

Avoid this by following a line numbering trick from BASIC programming.  Set your initial page order 10, 20, 30, 40… and so on.  If you need to put a page in between 20 and 30, select 25 as its order number.  Always select a number more or less  halfway between so you can slip a page in between those as well.

If you anticipate adding many pages, choose a wider range, such as 10, 50, 100, 150…

A general note to anyone new to developing a web presence – there is no “easy” way to develop an effective web presence or web marketing plan. You can certainly do it inexpensively, but somebody has to do the hard, heavy lifting of generating content and building awareness using one of dozens of methods.

The old adage “Fast, Cheap, Right…Pick Two” applies. You can quickly generate traffic with AdWords, and compared to search engine optimization (SEO) efforts it is fast, but it is not necessarily cheap, and to maintain the traffic you have to keep spending. SEO is really cheap when you consider its long-term cost per click, but it can take a long time to come to fruition.

Business owners need to talk carefully about their options, goals and budgets. Web marketing is a very powerful tool, but it’s hard work no matter how you do it.

In my work as a webmaster for a health related franchise we have been aggressively capturing web usage statistics. Ideally we could associate increased sales growth with web traffic, but the websites in question are not e-commerce sites and most do not have a downloadable coupon to connect a web visitor with a visitor to the brick and mortar store.

Last week in preparation for a meeting I and my team cobbled together some comparative stats based on the amount of web traffic over a span of time and store sales over the same span.

From Google Analytics, we extracted the traffic statistics that were specifically tied the franchise location web page (the store number is in the URL). Each store of our nearly 600 continental U.S. retail stores has their very own website unique to their store. With a little effort we were able to isolate traffic unique to each location, excluding traffic that was going to more general information posted to the site.

We took the 100 sites with the most and the least traffic. Then we grabbed up two years worth of store sales data and ground both through a spreadsheet. We compared the sales of the top 100 to the bottom 100 along with an average of the entire system.

Frankly I was shocked at the results. I expected to see a noticeable difference, but not double-digits. The top stores outperformed the system average by nearly 22%, and the bottom 100 by over 25%.

We have to do more analysis as I am confident we cannot take credit for this difference, but it is clear that for these a solid web presence is a corollary with above average sales performance. My guess is that these stores conduct regular and effective local marketing, and their web traffic indicates that people are using the web to learn more.

For more information, contact me at tim.mcnabb@gmail.com