I just read and article by Brein Posey posted on TechRepublic that talks about the 10 things IT folk need to do to avoid burnout.

I think the advice in this article can be applied to any occupation. Item number 4-Blow off some steam really got me thinking about my own hobbies and more specifically about woodcarving. Mr. Posey states that a good stress reliever is a hobby that takes total concentration to remove all thoughts about work or whatever stressor you have. This is what woodcarving does for me.

One of the great things about woodcarving is that it is portable. I am writing this posting setting in Swansboro NC, waiting on my ride to get out of the path or hurricane Irene, which is to make land fall just a few miles to the east. When I finish typing this I will pickup my little snowman project and my Flexcut Carving Jack until I am taken away. When I get to my safe location, I will still have my project to keep me busy while riding this storm out. Very few hobbies allow this type flexibility.

Back to the stress topic, after I finish a carving session, I do feel more relaxed and often times puts the events of a hard day into perspective. Now obviously woodcarving is not the only thing you need to in a stress relief program. You still need to eat right, exercise, socialize (and not with facebook), enjoy a hobby and spend time with the ones you love.

So today, have a healthy dinner with the one you love, go for a walk together, and do a little woodcarving. You will see your stress level start to decrease.

Jerry

This event is an annual event that happens every year in the month of August and is located in Bremen Indiana. Bremen is a small town located in northern Indiana and has a population of just under 5,000.

Here are the details for the WoodCarvers Summer Camp.

When:  AUGUST 17-20, 2011
Where:  Pla-Mor Campground

2162 U.S. 6 East, Bremen, IN 46506

Hours for Carving Classes: 9:00AM to 5:00 PM

For all those non-campers (like me), there are logging accommodations close by for us. To find logging and other useful information, please visit the Summer Camp Website at http://www.iwcsc.org/

I hope to see you there.

Happy Carving!
Jerry

Bounce Rate is an average of the number of total visits that only viewed one page of a website divided by the number of visits for the same given time period.

Bounce Rate = Total number of visits that only view one page / Total number of Visits.

Reasons why visitor may bounce by:

• Clicking on a link in your webpage that is for a different web site
• Closing an open window or tab in their browser
• Typing a new Uniform Resource Locator (URL)
• Clicking the “Back” button to leave the site from which they reached your site
• Session timeout (30min idle time is the norm)

What does it mean to me …

What does that mean to a website designer, developer, or owner of a website? Well the answer is that it really depends on your goals for the website.
Let’s say that your site is an informational site much like this site where people find information about specific topics, then a high bounce rate would be fairly acceptable. Why is that? Because, if a visitor finds the information needed from a landing page from a Google Search, then they would not have a need to click on another page or link in the site.
Now let’s say that your site is an e-commerce website and you have a high bounce rate. Well that is a serious problem because your site is not converting product searches into sales. There could be many reasons why conversions are not taking place and to name a few;

• Check your site for html errors. Nothing gives the shopper bad feelings about a site than broken links for product images or an SSL certificate that has expired.
• Visitors don’t understand how to add products to the shopping cart
• The product information is not displayed well or is hard to navigate
• Your landing pages have changes and links land on a poorly designed 404 page

The items above are just a small sample how a visitors experience can be translated into a high bounce rate.

1. Good Design: Design your website with easy navigation. Having a easy to understand and use menu system will allow visitors to easily navigate your website.
2. Focus your Content: Make sure that all your content is relevant to the goals of your website. Having a page or post regarding auto repair on a site that discusses clothing and style will only allow a one-page visit, thus increasing your bounce rate.
3. Enough Content: Try to have minimum 300-400 words of content on your site’s pages. Try to provide sufficient content to your site visitors. Content can be in the form of images, text or videos.
4. Limit Distraction: Avoid pop-ups, external toolbars and any features that cause distractions to your visitors. These features and also in text links will only allow your visitors to leave your site.
5. Limit External Links: Try to keep all external links off main and landing pages. If you can avoid external links on the first and landing pages that visitors use to access your website will allow them to use your navigation to find other links. Try to reduce the number of outgoing links on these pages by using them on secondary pages.
6. Internal Links: Just the opposite of external links, it is good to use internal links in your website. By using internal links your visitors can know about other content of your site without having to search for it. However a word of caution here as you should only Interlink to a related article and don’t forget that you can do this to your old articles.
7. Quality Title Headings: Each page’s title or header needs to match the content of its page. Obviously using misleading page titles will only cause your visitors to be disgruntled and leave your website, thus increasing your bounce rate.
8. Optimize 404 Pages: Many blogs have ugly 404-error page. That makes the bounce rate to bounce more. Your visitors will leave your site and look elsewhere for the information they were looking for. So optimize the error page. Provide some solutions and suggestions there.
9. Evaluate your pages: Evaluate the pages that have a lower bounce rate with the page that are higher. Seek input from visitors, friends and colleagues for comments of the difference in these pages.
10. Site Loading Speed: Increase the loading speed of your website. Make sure that your main and landing pages are streamlined and load fast so your victors do not back-click before your pages load.

For more understanding of bounce rate.

You have not heard the news? Well, Google recently accused Microsoft’s Bing of stealing its search results. Check out this video to get the scoop!

More WebProNews Videos

JAVA Logo

This week marks the beginning of my studies in JAVA.
Like my other classes in Visual Basic and Communications Writing the first week is full or reading about new concepts and the needs of our programming assignment.

So far, I have found JAVA to be problematic, as the JDK requires special settings that the installation program does not take care of.

Example: the JDK for windows requires that a CLASSPATH be set. CLASSPATH is a system environment setting that is not currently in Windows XP, so you have to add it. (Just one of those undocumented things!)

The documentation for the JDK does tell you the file locations you need to add, but it does not openly tell you that the entry of “.;” (no quotes) is required to make editors like TextPad operate without error.

The first two chapters of our book (Java – Late Objects Version by DEITEL) explains in great detail the requirements of running the JDK and what we need to know in order to complete our first programming assignment. Items such as Methods, Classes, and how to declare variables.

More postings on my new life focus (JAVA) are sure to come, but for now I must get busy with my cup of JAVA!