You know, I may just be eternally in love with Pawan Agrawal, the guy who runs MaxBlogPress. The guy is constantly coming out with new, amazingly cool/useful WordPress plugins. The other day I raved about his newly-launched Psychic Search plugin; you can see my ravings about it in this blog post.
Anyhow, he recently created a new plugin that’s targeted specifically towards those of us who don’t have the know-how to make our own themes & aren’t particularly well-versed in much more than just tweaking pre-coded layouts. You can actually see it in action on this site already; notice the little star icon by my url/title? That’s courtesy of installing the new MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin.
Not only does having a “favicon” brand your results in web searches (if the surfer is using a certain Firefox extension like Google Icon) and thusly draw more notice to it; it also helps attract your bookmarker’s attention. If you’re like me and have a huge, long list of bookmarks, anything with a unique (or any at all, really) icon tends to get checked more frequently than the others, solely because it immediately grabs my attention more than the plain, icon-less sites surrounding it in the bookmark menu. Maybe once more people have caught on to favicons, this will change, but it still seems like most websites neglect that aspect of their site’s design. Favicons can also show up & be effective on your RSS feeds, tabbed browsing, and even some blogs’ comment sections. So, yeah - it’s just generally an all-around good idea, especially at this point where it’s not everyone uses them, to have your sites sporting their own favicons.
The MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin allows you to pick from a batch of pre-loaded icons, or upload your own - and all you have to do is activate the plugin in your WordPress dashboard; no code insertions or anything. Definitely another hit from MaxBlogPress.
I’m on the MaxBlogPress mailing list, and a few days ago Pawan released a new plugin for WordPress that I am having way too much fun with. It’s all sneaky & snoopy, but I foresee it as being very useful, especially for my adult websites.
The plugin in question is called Psychic Search, and it essentially tracks what people search for on your website. I installed it last night and, looking at the records it’s pulling up for this website… um, I see that someone searched for… “poop”. Okay, that’s rather strange, but you get the picture.
Not only is this going to be pretty amusing for me (I’m the kind of weird person who gets a kick out of watching those live search engine feeds where you can see all the stuff random people are looking for on Google and the like), it’s also going to be a good kind of “secret weapon” for finding out what my audience wants to see. For example: I have the plugin installed on liquidLOVEonline & I noticed that my top search was for Sandee Westgate… the only problem was, I had no galleries of her for my surfers to find. So I remedied that this morning by creating a new gallery featuring the lovely Ms. Westgate.
I’m hoping that this gives me an edge, knowing what my readers are looking for and being able to deliver it so that I can hopefully maximize my conversions. Even if it doesn’t impact my sales at all, though… it’s still pretty fun to see what people are looking for!