About Cyber X Designs

A customer of Cyber X Design’s asked us to write a brief explanation of SEO, Google Analytics and Google Web Master Tools.  If you are wondering about SEO or some of the tools that might be deployed in its pursuit keep reading!

There is a practice called SEO.  SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.  SEO is a process in which the content and architecture of your web site is optimized to enhance the search engine placement of the site for specific keywords.  It includes tactics like: gathering inbound links from other sites, crafting anchor text, purchasing keyword advertising, creating supporting micro sites, blogging, Tweeting, crafting alt text for images and creating valuable content.  It is as much art as it is science and to be good at it requires near constant research to stay abreast of the latest changes in the major search engines.  A good SEO will be able to help identify the traffic you should be seeking, work with you to develop a plan to reach those viewers and work with you to implement required actions.  He will also help you develop metrics and milestones to measure your progress.

SEOs and web masters will employ many tools to build and optimize your site.  Two of those tools might be from Google and you should be aware of them: Google Analytics and Google Web Master Tools.  They are used to measure aspects of the effectiveness of your web site.  They are useful in helping you understand:

• How Google and other search engines see your web site.
• How people find your site.
• What pages are they viewing.
• What pages are then entering and exiting on.
• Where they might be located.
• Who is linking to you.
• What pages are you linking too.
• If your meta tags are well formed and useful.
• And more.

Google Analytics is a traffic analysis application that is hosted by Google.  For it to work, a small amount of JavaScript code is placed on each page of the web site.  That code sends some information back to Google’s servers each time a person or machine visits your web site, as long as JavaScript is enabled.  Google aggregates this incoming data and then creates reports based on their proprietary algorithms.  You can access these reports through a web browser and use them to shape your online strategy to target and grow traffic to your web site.  Google Analytics includes tools to create trackable conversion goals and can integrate with your AdWords keyword advertising campaigns.  If you want to know more you can take a tour of Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is just one of many traffic data gathering and analysis programs available on the web.  For example, we provide the same types of tools in our web hosting package, it is called Awstats.  We analyze the logs created by the web server to create reports that help you to perform the same kind of analysis and traffic targeting.

It should be noted that each traffic analysis program uses a different formula to calculate your traffic and there can be material differences between the stated results.  For instance, on one of our sites Google reports less then half as much traffic as Awstats for the same site.  You should always compare results month-to-month or period-to-period using the same program if you are tracking performance.  You may also want to try to determine which is more accurate and useful to your particular business.

It is also import to realize that when you sign-up for an account with a third-party vendor, like Google, for traffic analysis, you are handing them important proprietary data about your website and your traffic.  You need to make a calculation of whether the risk of turning over that data is worth the reward of using their traffic analysis program.  For many small businesses it is worth it.  However, if you are in a very competitive market, you want to invest in a stand alone product to protect your competitive data.

Google Web Master Tools is used to analyze how the Google search engine sees your web site.  Web Master Tools provides reports on: how the crawler sees your site, what errors the crawler detected on your site, keywords, inbound links, internal links and sitemap.  It is a good tool to determine: if your Meta tags and title tags have been properly crafted, if there are broken links on your site, which is linking to you, and what keywords you rank for.  Google Web Master Tools also lets you configure which should be the correct domain for your site and some other items.  If you want to learn more you can take a tour of Google Web Master tools.

Google Web Master Tools is useful to web masters who want to maintain a site that is search engine friendly and error free in the search engine’s opinion.  It is not the panacea for web masters, it is just another tool in the box when crafting and tuning web sites.  There are products from other companies, such as SEOBook.com, that provide web site analysis and ranking analysis.  When selecting a tool or a vendor make sure that it is from a reputable and verifiable company.  You will be giving valuable information about your business to them.

If you have invested in a web site and want to make sure it remains an asset, we suggest that you require your web designer or SEO provide your organization access to tools like these and then you use them.  They will give you valuable insight into the completeness of the web site, how well that web site is performing and how the web site can be enhanced to grow your traffic, sales and bottom line.

We hope this brief explanation gives you a little more insight into the tools that are available to help you maximize the effectiveness of your web site.  Cyber X Designs includes SEO basics in its web site packages.  SEO basics include these two tools from Google as well as some of the other tactics mentioned.  If you are looking to go beyond the basics, the Cyber X Designs’ team includes SEO researchers and managers that can help you maximize the profit potential of your competitive web site.

If you are wondering why your web site isn’t performing and driving business, call us at 201-558-7929 and ask for Hans Kaspersetz.  He will review your web site and author a proposal for how it can be improved based on your business goals!

The “language” spoken by computers is comprised of only ones and zeroes. Mainly because that is the easiest representation of information to transmit and store. Comparing a state of on or off is much easier (faster, more reliable) than comparing the difference between seven and eight out of a possible ten. There are almost limitless ways to store binary information, as a hole in a punch card, as a flipped ion on a piece of magnetic tape, as a charged (on) transistor, etc.

There is some cutting edge research into using photons instead of electrons in processors, allowing the use of different wavelengths to represent multiple states or values, but this is all rocket car kind of stuff, and in the end, being able to use more than 2 states doesn’t really give you much of an advantage.

The first question then, is how would you use a zero and a one to represent any number? The most naive guess would be to store the number 10, one would simply line up 10 of these “bits” of information, and turn on one for one, two for two, etc. The problem quickly arises that big numbers require many bits (these single pieces of on/off information).

Fortunately there is a more efficient way: representing the numbers in a binary (or base-2) number system. The number system that all humans use, base-10 (or decimal), is like water to fish, and most people have never considered why they stop counting at 9, and add a one in front to go on. We do this because we happen to have ten fingers, but numbers can be represented by counting in any base, all you need are enough symbols to represent them.

For example, a base-8 (octal) number system would start with 0, 1, 2… just like base-10 (decimal), and go on all the way to 7. Then, instead of 8, the 1 gets added to the front and the “ones” column is set to zero: 6, 7, 10, 11… …16, 17, 20… and so on. So ‘10′ would be the symbols used to represent the same number we use for 8, ‘11′ for 9, etc.

We could also use number systems larger than 10, we just need more characters to represent the numbers beyond 9. For example, if we wanted to count in a base-16 (hexadecimal) number system, we could use the letters A through F to represent the numbers 10 through 15. Then we would count like 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F, 10, 11… etc.

As you can see, the ability to count (& therefore do math) is independent of the number system we use, so a number system of ones and zeros can be used to do anything a base-10 (decimal) system can. To count in a binary, or base-2, system, simply sift the one over to the left and set the value back to zero for every number after ‘1′. So we would have 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110… etc. As you can see, numbers quickly grow in size, but it is still more efficient than a one bit for every one system, especially with larger numbers. For example, 42 in binary is represented as 101010, which is much better than 42 1’s.

As a matter of nomenclature, because strings of binary numbers can become so long and hard to read and interpret (only for humans, machines don’t have that problem), it is often convenient to use alternate number systems to talk about numbers represented in only ones and zeroes. While translations between binary (base-2) to decimal (base-10) systems can be confusing (100 is 4, 1000 is 8, etc.), number systems that are based on multiples of 2 (and 2 alone) can transform from and to binary quite naturally. For instance, in a base-4 system, each digit 0,1,2,3 corresponds to a pair of binary digits, i.e. 1 = 1, 10 = 2, 11 = 3, 100 = 10, etc. Thus, a binary number can be written in base-4 as a kind of shorthand. Of course, you really aren’t gaining much with a base-4 system.

On the other hand, if you use hexidecimal (base-16), each digit corresponds to a 4 digit binary number, giving you a way to write binary numbers that require 25% the space. This is simply a convenience factor for talking about large binary numbers, human brains have a habit of reducing large numbers of 1′ s and 0’s to just a lot of noise, and by translating them this way into a hexidecimal representation, it becomes easier for us to notice differences between numbers.

For traditional and technical reasons (having to do with early hardware limitations, not any philosophical reason), 8 bits of information are grouped together into what is called a byte. This is the smallest operational unit in computing, as the processor reads and acts upon information a byte at a time rather than on each individual bit. Since a byte is 8 bits, a byte of information can be represented by two hexidecimal digits. So, rather than having to think of a pice of data as a really long string of ones and zeros, it is often better to imagine it spit up into these bytes, and write them in base-16, thus AE 52 F9 64 is much more “readable” than 10101110010100101111100101100100.

Since all these number systems share the same symbols, it can be confusing to identify which you are looking at, is 100 one hundred, four, or two hundred and fifty six? To then end, it is common practice to precede binary numbers with the characters 0b (zero b) and hexadecimal numbers with the characters 0x (zero x). Octals (base-8) are also represented by a 0c (zero c). So the same number would be indicated by 42, 0c52, 0×2A, or 0b101010.

One of the great features of this method of representing numeric data is that it is universal. Because it is as efficient as possible, the number 42 is represented as 00101010 (or 2A) on a Windows machine, a Macintosh, good old ENIAC, or boxes in China, the moon, or wherever.

This was the topic John Andrews was discussing when he referred to CXD’s New Jersey website. He seems to think that we did a pretty good job with our copy. Thanks John! We worked pretty hard on it and had a lot of laughs writing it. Allie and Grant were primarily responsible for it. They seem to have the best sense of humor about these things. We tried to draw on our personal experiences growing up and living in New Jersey. I grew up in Weehawken, Grant Hansen grew up in Ridgefield Park, and Allie Gaddy is a transplant from Charlotte.

We designed three or four run of the mill website design company websites for ourselves. Each time feeling frustrated and bored. We heard the song on our website and that sparked a flame in Allie’s creative head. So we found a theme. Many many many revisions later, we developed that theme into the content and design you see today. And it was a lot of fun! It was a lot of work to not build a typical web site design company website like this company. The example company talks about making an impact and establishing an identity, but their website looks like 100’s of other web design company websites. The only thing memorable about it is there isn’t anything particularly memorable.

It seems there is a lack of courage in the design world. We dealt with the fear that our Pharma clients might not like the design. We over came that fear because we are confident in the relationships we have built and the referrals we get from our clients. There would be far fewer spammy websites from web design companies and companies in general if they had the courage to develop something fresh and engaging. Maybe, something provocative that gets people talking.

I understand some clients will not go for it. They have an idea of what they want and that is what we will execute. But when we are our own client, we can not settle and go spammy to earn a good placement in the SERPS. We wanted to take the high road and it has worked wonderfully for us. I have heard some of our clients have spent an entire afternoon reading the site and laughing out loud. We have all had a Jersey hairdo.

Cyber X Designs, our New Jersey based web design firm,  is fanatical about securing its client’s code base. And for this task we love SVN. SVN is a version management system. We use it to control the source code for our projects. For lay people, it is a database of every change that was made to any file saved in the version management system. Using SVN we can review the history of changes to a file, see who changed it and restore old versions. One of our favorite pharma clients is located in Florham Park and they have no less then three of their projects managed in SVN.

There is no worse feeling then having lost a bunch of work because of a hard drive crash or a fat finger. So yesterday while migrating a repository for one of our New York based clients we discovered that trying to export a large repository over a Samba share to a Windows storage solution was a no go.

The error we received was: svnadmin: Can’t write to stream: File too large. We were running the following command: svnadmin dump /foo/bar/ > /mnt/storage/backups. Our SVN version is 1.4.4 and our version of Apache is 2.0.59. Our exported repo is about 4GB. It seems the export was failing around 2GB.

Our first suspicion was that we had the wrong APR or there was no large file support in our version of APR. So we recompiled Apache and Subversion a handful of times. Each time no success. Finally, it dawned on us to try and export the repo to the local file system. That worked. So the final resolution is that we are exporting the repo locally and then compressing and copying the dumpfile to the storage solution using a bash script.

We searched for a solution to this problem all day yesterday and never happened across the fact that there might be a problem when exporting a large repo over Samba. Hopefully, you will find this post in your search and it will save you some time.

Cyber X Designs (find us in Google under New Jersey Web Design) chooses to build websites and web applications using open source applications because they are extensible and provide an excellent foundation. A great example is Robin Rolfe Resource’s website which was developed using Joomla, Flash, PHP and MySQL. Robin Rolfe Resource (RRR) is in Fort Lee, NJ, we love our New Jersey customers!

We developed a handful of custom Joomla! modules to control things like the flash navigation (yes, Cyber X Designs provides custom Flash design services). The custom flash module directs flash to load the appropriate background art and display the correct navigation based on where you are in the site. We choose this approach so that the flash would be very light weight and fast loading, yet their could be a single navigation swf file for the entire site. This made development and management of the Flash much more efficient. The mixing of Flash and Joomla provides an excellent user experience for both the site maintainers and their customers. There are other custom modules on the RRR site but we can’t really talk about them as they are proprietary to Cyber X Design’s customers.

Since we launched our now-famous “New Jersey Web Site” at CyberXDesigns.com, we have received positive praise for our New Jersey theme. Along with the praise come questions, especially questions about the New Jersey trivia and the New Jersey scenes on the web site.

One popular topic is the New Jersey Flash animations on Cyber X Designs. There are several New Jersey images represented in the Flash image, and you’ll need to revisit the site to see them all. They are classic New Jersey images, but exactly what are they? Where are they? One is a New Jersey high-rise construction site, which could be Jersey City, New Jersey, or Atlantic City near the expanding boardwalk. Or, could it be a revitalized Asbury Park skyline? On closer look, you may notice those towers are actually smoke stacks, which grow natively in New Jersey, up to 21 stories high! So, where are those new smoke stacks anyway?

Another image our Flash developer incorporated is more obvious - the beautiful brownstone town homes of Hoboken, New Jersey. We cropped that Flash animation closely because we didn’t want to include the cars parked right up against the brownstone stoops. Of course our web designer included a Flash image of the Trump Taj Majal, because, well, it is so typically New Jersey, right? I mean, an Arabian Palace painted bright red, blue, and gold with neon. Where else but New Jersey?

And of course, what New Jersey web site design would not include an image of the (over) crowded beaches of the Jersey Shore? Thousands of people, beach umbrellas, and an old-fashioned wooden life boat. Classic New Jersey (with a conspicuous absence of $7 wrist bands). But where exactly is that? Point Pleasant? Avon-by-the-Sea? Wildwood? Belmar? Ocean City? Or, again, Atlantic City in front of the boardwalk?

We love New Jersey, and we like to show it.

Cyber X Designs was awarded a 2006 Global Awards Finalist Certificate for Healthcare Communications, by the Global Awards. Cyber X Designs of Denville, New Jersey ( a web hosting provider, web design and web application development company) designs and develops websites and interactive media for pharmaceutical marketing campaigns. With past successes for ALTANA, Nycomed, Wyeth (interactive email campaigns), Abbott Laboratories (interactive development of sales training system), Common Health, Ketchum PR, Boomcom Communications and Pace, among others appreciating confidentiality, Cyber X Designs helped advance the GAPP Survey website on asthma treatment practices.The Global Award recognizes excellence in Healthcare Communications, Video, Audio, and Interactive Media:

The Global Awards are recognized as the only awards dedicated to excellence in healthcare communications on an international basis. The Globals have achieved the status of the world’s most coveted honor in this field. By broadening the focus beyond advertising alone, the mission of The Global Awards is to lift the perception of creativity above clever headlines and smart design, and to explore the feelings and emotions transmitted between a message’s creator and its recipient. The intellectual and emotional achievement of communication transcends the barriers of distance, language and culture. The Global Awards honor this profound connection.

According to the finalist list and award winners, Cyber X Designs is the only New Jersey Web Design Firm to achieve this status in Healthcare Communications.

We’ve developed another CMS (content management system) for another important New Jersey website!

Joomla is a PHP based Open Source content management system, formerly known as Mambo and now advanced several generations from the old Mambo CMS. The Property Owners Association of New Jersey (poanj.com) wanted a CMS to help them manage their web site content. Since PHP/MySQL on the Open Source LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) is our primary technology, we’ve developed quite a depth of expertise in Joomla! here in our Denville, NJ offices. Our Denville team has launched Joomla projects for Robin Rolfe Resources, ALTANA, and Nycomed, among others.

New Jersey is a biotech state (one of the Top 5 Biotech markets) and home to many pharmaceutical companies. It’s no surprise that Cyber X Designs develops pharmaceutical websites and interactive media for pharmaceutical clients. Wyeth Fibercon and Abbot Labs Ultane, for example. Also the anesthetic drug marketing work on an innovative tablet PC, the interactive field sales training tools, interactive multimedia projects… innovative applications of web technologies.

It has come to our attention that some people are still experiencing trouble with FreeBSD 5.3 and DST. We dealt with a little trouble ourselves. We developed and maintain some very time sensitive web applications for our clients. Two examples of our work come to mind: the reservation system we developed for Bering Air and the medication reminder software for OnCellRx. In both cases the time stamps and the delivery of messages need to happen at the right time and the DST change could have really caused problems. The OS, PHP, MySQL and the NTP server all need to play nicely together and they didn’t.

In our case the NTP server we rely on at Columbia didn’t get patched properly and at the time of the publishing of this post it is still 1 hour off. That should remind everyone, be aware of who you are relying on. Even reputable institutions make mistakes.

We also had a little trouble with our FreeBSD 5.3 installations. So a New Jersey web development firm went looking for a fix and wanted to tell you about it. You need to patch the zoneinfo file on your server. Our server displayed the wrong time when we used the date command and to get the server to show the right time we had to put it in the wrong time zone. So we applied this FreeBSD DST patch found here: http://security.freebsd.org/advisories/FreeBSD-EN-07:04.zoneinfo.asc.

The patch says it was only tested against 6.1 but it worked nicely on our 5.3 machine.