Mac SEO Blog

Many websites today have social media buttons pinned to the side of the page so that they are always clickable as you scroll up and down the screen.

This is a great feature for your website and is easy to do with EverWeb 1.8. To achieve the effect need to use the new ‘Fixed Position’ feature in the Metrics Inspector. ‘Fixed Position’ lets you lock the position of an object on its x-axis. This means that as you scroll up and down your page (i.e. along the y-axis), the object remains fixed in place.

Just follow the simple steps below to easily have social media buttons on the vertical and always visible.

1. First add  the social media buttons that you want to your page, e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Email, Google Plus etc. Using the ‘Insert > Button menu to add buttons to your page or use drag and drop your buttons from the Widget Inspector on to your page. When placing buttons line them up vertically close to the left or right hand edge of the page.
2. When you add each button, make sure that you tick the box ‘Fixed Position’ on the Metrics Inspector. This will lock your button in place on the horizontal x-axis (see screenshot below.)
   

   To fix the social media button in place, first select it, then checkmark the box ‘Fixed Position’ in the Metrics Inspector, as shown in the example above.

3. Remember to make sure that your Social Media buttons are properly aligned and distributed.
   Select all of the buttons that you have placed on the page. Next use the ’Arrange > Align Objects > Left’ menu so the buttons appear flush to the left, and use ‘Arrange > Distribute Objects > Vertically’ to evenly space the buttons.
4. If you are adding buttons to a Master Page, you may need to use ‘Always on Top’. Objects on Master Pages lie underneath those on your normal web page. If you find your buttons are not visible use ‘Always on Top’ so that they appear above all other objects on your page.
5. The last  step is to use Preview to see how your design looks and to test out your ‘Sticky’ buttons before publishing (see screenshots below.) Always remember to test your buttons. Once you have published your website, don’t forget to test each button to make sure that your links work properly!

Use Preview to see how your ‘Sticky’ buttons work.

As you scroll up and down your web page, the social media buttons remain in place as the page content slides under the buttons.

What is Referral Spam?

Referral spam is a technique used by spammers to make it seem like you are getting a lot of visitors from their website which entices you to visit their site. This gets more visits to the spammers website.

Although technically harmless to your website, the biggest issue is that referral spam appears in your analytics software, such as Google Analytics, and misrepresents the data in there. It will appear as if you are getting more traffic than you actually are and your conversion rates will be significantly lower.

You can see if you are getting referral spam by doing the following;

1. Log into your Google Analytics account
2. Go to your website Acquisition->All Traffic->Referrals
3. You can usually identify referral spam because it will come from a domain that either has nothing to do with your website content, or implies it is related to seo, traffic monetization etc… Referral spam is usually 100% new users, 0% conversion and a very high bounce rate

Referral Spam Example List

Can Referral Spam be Stopped?

There are a couple things you can do to help slow down referral spam. However, because these spammers use many different domains and techniques, it does require some maintenance.

You also cannot remove any previous referral spam from your Google Analytics, you can only make sure that in the future you do not see them.

Also, there are so many different domains that spammers may use. In fact there are thousands of domains that may appear in your Google Analytics.

The technique suggested here requires a list of domains so that Google, or your website, know to either not count the traffic as real traffic, or completely block them from accessing your server.

How to Stop Referral Spam

You can stop referral spam by creating a Google Analytics filter which will make sure that when you check your stats in the future, these spam websites won’t appear in any Google Analytics reports. Unfortunately you won’t be able to remove them from previous reports with this filter. To do that, you’ll have to create a Segment which we’ll have to do another blog post for in the future.

To set up a filter to stop the referral spam, follow the steps;

1. Log into Google Analytics
2. Go to your Reports page for your website
3. Click the Admin tab at the top of your browser
4. On the next screen select ‘All Filters’
5. Then press the ‘New Filter’ button
6. 
7. On the next screen you will actually set up your filter. Here are the settings to use;
   1. Filter Name: Referral Spam
   2. Filter Type: Custom
   3. Exclude: Selected
   4. Filter Field: Campaign Source
   5. Filter Pattern: A list of domains separated by a | character. Do not include http:// or www. They are only domain names. The list will keep changing as you notice more referral spam from new domains. Here is what I have set up in this screenshot which you can copy and paste into this field;4webmasters.org|trafficmonetize.org|guardlink.org|best-seo-offer.com|howtostopreferralspam.eu|free-social-buttons.com|100dollars-seo.com|webmonetizer.net|erot.co|floating-share-buttons.com
      

      Set up your referral filter as shown

       

8. Lastly select all ‘Available Views’ and press the ‘Add’ button to add them to the ‘Selected Views’ list.
   

   Apply all your filters to your views

    

9. Now click Save

Starting in 24 hours, your new reports will stop showing the domains you have entered in the above steps.

Blocking the Domains from Accessing your Website

You can actually block the domains from even accessing your website if you have the knowledge to create a .htaccess file. If you use your own web hosting provider you can create a .htaccess file as described here,

For EverWeb + Hosting customers will be adding this feature automatically for you in an upcoming release. Stay tuned for our announcement.

I hope this post was useful and if you have any questions, be sure to post in the comments below.

We have just released an update to EverWeb. This new version (1.8.1) contains several fixes for many widgets which previously displayed a ‘file not found’ error message after publishing on OS X 10.7 and 10.8. We have also included an updated PDF user manual, which can be found under the Help menu. Download the new update from within the application by going to EverWeb > Check For Update, or by visiting EverWeb’s downloads page.

Other fixes include a fix for certain widgets not being displayed properly when previewed, and a fix for the video widget. There are also new localizations for Japanese, Spanish, Italian, and German.

The full list of changes can be seen below.

Just a reminder that if you were experiencing issues publishing with 1.8, please use the Publish Entire Site option from the File menu.

CHANGES
– Fixed a bug in 1.8 where image sliders, video, audio, and many third party widgets would display file not found errors when published on OS X 10.7 and 10.8
– Fixed a problem with background stretch images on Master pages not drawing properly
– Should fix a problem where some widgets would not properly display their preview within EverWeb and only display a green ‘updating’ icon
– An updated PDF user manual (under the Help menu)
– A fix for the video widget no working (make sure to make a small change to any page that uses the video widget so that it will be republished OR republish your entire site)
– A fix for some changes not publishing, specifically the navigation bar when adding new/deleting/renaming pages that are included in the navigation bar
– It includes debugging information for the crash some users are getting when publishing. If you continue to get a crash when publishing with this version, please make sure to copy and paste the crash report to us so that we can take a look at it.
– Checking for unused assets and checking for which page is using an asset works for custom code in the header and footer fields now
– No longer uses fancy quotes in header/footer fields
– ‘Check for Update’ will download the right version for 10.6 users now
– Imported new localizations: Japanese, Spanish, Italian, German

The speed of your website is a top priority for us and an important indicator of the quality of your site. We know that visitors hate slow loading website and that search engines can penalize your website for being slow.

EverWeb already includes lots of features to help make websites load quickly, but we’re always working on more.

In EverWeb 1.8 we made a number of changes to make sure you website loads faster for you visitors;

1. We only include jQuery when required by a widget you may be using

2. We provide an option when importing PSDs, TIFFs and PDFs to convert them automatically to a web format, significantly reducing the file size and the time it takes a them to load in your browser

3. We have an all new option to automatically optimize PNG files on export so they have a smaller size but the same image quality

4. We only include the styles and typefaces actually used with Google Font so they load faster

Along with the above, we have already implemented significant optimizations for the next version of EverWeb. In fact, the new features coming in version 1.9 have already reduced the EverWeb website by 35% in file size and made it load significantly faster.

Did you know we have thousands of users participating in the EverWeb discussion forums? If you’re having a problem with EverWeb or just want to talk with like minded people, come join us on the EverWeb discussion forum.

The EverWeb discussion forum has a wealth of questions and answers to help you with virtually all your issues. There’s also some really smart people in there that can help you work through an issue you may be having.

EverWeb developers are also around to help you with issues as well. Sometimes we even post beta updates so you can see what’s coming in updated releases of EverWeb and help shape it’s future.

So come join us on the forums, we’re looking forward to meeting you!

Some other helpful resources;

The EverWeb Video Tutorials

The EverWeb SEO Video Course

The EverWeb Facebook Group

In EverWeb 1.8 we introduced Auto Save and Automatic Backups.

Auto save is enabled by default and will make sure your project is always saved each time you make any change to your site.

Automatic backups will automatically backup your project file to a location of your choice at set intervals. This means you can go back to a previous version if you make a mistake or always ensure you have a backup incase something happens to your original project file.

Set you auto save and backup preferences

First, go to EverWeb->Preferences in your menu bar in the top left hand corner of your screen. Then select the ‘Backup’ tab. From here you can enable/disable the auto saving feature as well as customize the backup behaviour.

By default EverWeb will backup your files to you Library folder within the EverWeb directory. This folder is hidden from you on current versions of OS X. You can change this to any location you want. We recommend saving it to a dropbox folder. This will ensure that your project backups get published to the cloud so that even if you have a hard drive failure, you can always recover your project.

From the Preferences dialog you can also select the number of backups to keep and the frequency of backing up. EverWeb will remove the oldest backups automatically once they ‘Number of backups to keep’ number is reached. Storing more backups requires more space of course.

Restoring from backups

If you ever need to restore your project from a backup you can do so from the File menu->Projects Window dialog.

Once the dialog is opened, select the little arrows to the right of the project you want to restore and select ‘Restore from backup’.

Select your EverWeb project file backup

Once you do that you will get a new dialog showing all the backups you currently have. You can double click the backup you want to restore and EverWeb will automatically open it and replace the current working copy of your project with the backup.

Your current working copy of your project will be moved to the trash folder on OS X. In a worst case scenario, you can open your trash folder to recover your previous, working copy project file.

Restore a project from your backups

What if I delete my Project file?

When you delete your project file EverWeb will also remove your backups. If you delete you project file from within EverWeb, it will be moved to your trash folder. If you need to recover it, and assuming you have not yet emptied your trash folder, you can find it in your trash folder.

Aside from all the great new features in EverWeb you may have missed, we made some improvements to existing features to make working with websites much easier. Here are just a few you may or may not have noticed;

1. Previewing and Publishing is much faster

We’ve enhanced the speed of publishing and previewing your website. You’ll notice that as long as you aren’t changing a master page, or making a change that would effect the navigation bar, these features will be significantly faster.

2. Better font support in the Navigation menu

You will now find that light, hairline, medium and semibold fonts will now work properly in the navigation bar. Hairline fonts are now supported in textboxes too!

3. Caching issues on preview

You may have been affected by the caching issues of the preview feature where some font styling would not work right in your browser. We’ve made sure that when previewing locally, a cache file is not stored by your browser so you shouldn’t see this issue anymore.

4. Reduced dependencies on jQuery

We have reduced the dependencies on jQuery so that you website can load faster and not depend on external libraries unless absolutely necessary. In addition, we’ve added better code for included jQuery so your websites shouldn’t display problems in countries that may block it from Google’s servers.

We hope you like the above additions. There is so much more in this release and we invite you to download it and check it our for yourself (it’s free to try!)

With the release of EverWeb 1.8 we included a lot of new features. I know some may get lost in the release notes so I want to outline three great new features we’ve included.

1. Support for Social Media Images and Favicons.

The Social Media image is what you see when you post your page to sites like Facebook. You can select any image to be the ‘Social Media’ image for each page on your site. If this is not specified then Facebook and other sites will use the first image on your page, or non at all.

To se the Social Media Image go to the Inspector->Page Settings. You’ll see the Social Media Image under the ‘Page Details’ section.

The Favicon is set on a per site bases and appears in the path bar in your web browser. It should be a small, 16 by 16 image but EverWeb will resize and convert an image you select. To set the Favicon go to the File menu and select ‘Edit Publishing Settings’. Scroll down until you see the Favicon button and select your image.

Sometimes you need to clear you browser cache to properly see your Favicon.

2. New stretch and stretch to fill background image settings

If you go to Page Settings->Browser Background you will see new Image fill options for ‘Stretch’ and ‘Stretch To Fill’. These options will stretch an image across the entire browser background and resize it as the browser window is resized.

The new Templates that come free with EverWeb 1.8 (Go to EverWeb menu->Check for New Templates) will show these new features.

Combined with the new Full Width and Fixed Positioned options for shapes, you can really make some really modern and cool designs

3. New option in Arrange Menu -> Always On Top

This option places the object over all other objects even if it is from a Master template. If you have multiple objects with this option set, the order comes from the bring to front, send to back etc… options under the Arrange menu. This is useful for having a navigation bar on a master page always on top on the child pages, especially when using the all new Fixed position option.

BONUS: Check out the new options in the Image Slider. You can now set a caption and a specific URL for each slide. That means you can redirect users to a specific page from each slide.

Pro Tip: Change the font styling of the captions by using the ‘Fonts’ button in the toolbar when the Image Slider is selected. It’s really easy to add nice styling to the Image Slider.

EverWeb 1.8 is officially here, and it’s our biggest release yet!

We’ve got a long list of new features detailed below. What we’re really thrilled about is the new design flexibility with full width shapes, fixed position shapes and new background image stretch options. These let you add a lot of new design techniques to your website and we’ll be posting new videos about them in the coming weeks.

We’ve got some new, free templates which help show off these features. Just go to the EverWeb menu in the top left corner and select ‘Check for new Templates’. EverWeb will automatically download these new templates and you can access them from the ‘Add Page’ and ‘Add Directory’ buttons in the bottom toolbar.

Remember, that EverWeb 1.8 comes in two versions, one for 10.6 and one for 10.7 and later. This is to make sure newer versions of EverWeb can take advantage of new Yosemite & El Capitan features.

Download EverWeb 1.8 from our EverWeb Download Page.

Tell us what you think of the new release in the comments section below.

Show Off Your Site
We want to see the amazing website(s) you have created using EverWeb. Head on over to the EverWeb Facebook page and post your website with the hashtag #everweb. We’re giving away a $100 iTunes gift card to the to the best “Designed with EverWeb” website as voted by the community. Please see our forums for more details.

Changes in EverWeb 1.8
Auto Save and Automatic Backup
All new auto save and backup features makes sure that your project data is never lost. You can automatically backup your project files to free dropbox.com accounts or any other third party location. In the rare case that you need to go back to an earlier version, you can restore your backups right from within EverWeb.

Asset Organization
Asset organization and management has been greatly improved in version 1.8. First comes multiple selection within the assets list allowing you to drag multiple files to your project or delete multiple files with one click. EverWeb 1.8 even includes a feature to quickly find and delete any unused assets which can help reduce clutter and project size. You can also locate the specific pages that are using any of your assets so you always know how your assets are being used on your website.

EverWeb 1.8 also brings extended Asset details to quickly show you image resolution, dimension, file size and date added. This makes it easy to locate images that are too large to comfortably use on a website. Using this information, you can also sort by the above criteria or have a fully customizable sort order. Use the all new search bar to filter and find any asset by name.

Paypal eCommerce
The entire paypal widget has been revamped with all new features to allow for mutliple priced products so you can include a drop down menu with extended options and prices for each product added. A new quantity field so you can sell multiple products at once, better localization by selecting your default store country and currency, more control over shipping costs and behavior, as well as interface improvements and the ability to specify a page after a successful or cancelled order.

New Shape Options
New fixed position and full width objects let you create dynamic sized objects based on the browser window size and that follow the scroll bar as a visitor scrolls your website.

Image Gallery
The improved image gallery offers better compability with mobile devices and the ability to select multiple images at once from the ‘Choose…’ button.

Image Slider
The image slider comes with support for captions per slide and the ability to link anywhere from each slide as well. New transparency options help your image slider blend into your website and the image slider has the ability to select multiple images at once from the ‘Choose…’ button.

Other
– New stretch and stretch to fill background image settings under Page Settings->Browser Background
– Support for Social media image to be used for Facebook and Google+ Shares. You can find it under Inspector->Page Settings
– Support for Favicon. You can find it under Publish Settings Screen under the Footer code field.
– jQuery only included when it needs to be
– Mouse down/over and retina images no longer require jQuery
– Built in PNG Image optimizer for optimizing PNG images with NO data loss. You can enable it in the Preferences but keep in mind publishing will take longer with this option
– Use Color Profiles option now applies to PNG images as well as JPEGs
– Navigation bars properly support light, medium, semibold etc… typefaces
– Support for hairline fonts
– Improved support for Google Fonts by including only the necessary typefaces. This results in better compatibility of fonts and faster loading of pages
– Option to auto convert PSD, Tiff and PDF images to web formats when dragging them onto EverWeb. This significantly reduces the file size of images and should always be used.
– New option in Arrange Menu -> Always On Top places the object over all other objects even if it is from a Master template. If you have multiple objects with this option set, the order comes from the bring to front, send to back etc… options. This is useful for having a navigation button on a master page always on top on the child pages

Bug Fixes
– Fixed some memory related issues with larger images
– Should fix some crashes when pasting lots of text
– Fixed an error with templates not loading all the images in some cases such as the Algonquin theme
– When using the add directory button it would add a page instead of a directory if templates had not yet been loaded
– fixed an issue with checking for updates if you have renamed the EverWeb application
– No cache code when previewing site to help make sure you see what your site actually looks like in preview mode
– You can now enter more than 2 digits in the fields for the navigation menu
– Navigation menus that wrap to a second line with drop downs now appear above any navigation links below it
– Adding external files with invalid characters in their names, will properly strip them
– Shadow Angle Knob uses retina graphics
– Fixed crashes on OS X 10.10.3 Public Beta
– Fixed problem with disabling ‘Fix position on scroll’ still allowing objects to be moved freely. If this continues to show the same issue, delete the object and re-add it. Old objects may still suffer from this issue.
– Setting the ‘Fixed position on scroll’ option no longer displaces the object
– Fixed a crash when using undo for any Shape Fill options
– Adjusting the browser background images properly redraws the image on the page background immediately
– Image previews in the Inspector now scale properly (for example for browser backgrounds or shape image fills)
– Fixed a crash with using Google Fonts
– Fixed Header tag widget and text color issue
– Full width items always exported propelry with a width of 100%
– Fixed an issue where pages were marked as red and needing to be published when closing and re-opening a project
– Fixed a few issues with the Paypal Widget’s product options
– Renaming directories and pages in directories works again when opening and closing projects
– Fixed a few stability issues and issue with the contact form to ensure free email addresses used as the contact form sender still work.
– Fixed issues with full width objects so they work properly when resizing browser windows with a horizontal scrollbar
– Fixed some crashing issues
– Fixed older widgets that use jQuery

We are getting closer and closer to officially releasing version 1.8 of EverWeb.  If you have not yet heard, we have added many great new features that is taking EverWeb to a whole other level. Some of the updates include:

• Auto save and automatic backup
• Asset organization
• Enhanced e-Commerce with a more powerful PayPal widget
• Full width shape features
• Updates to Image Gallery widget
• Updates to Image Slider widget

These are just a few of the many great updates that will be included in EverWeb 1.8.

Below is an introductory video that will illustrate some of the new features in EverWeb, and what how these changes will allow you to create a better and more modern website.

If you are too excited to wait for the official release of version 1.8, you can head over to the EverWeb forums and download a copy of the latest beta release of EverWeb 1.8. Also, if you would like to learn more about the changes that have been done in 1.8, you can read this post on the EverWeb forums.