One of my favorite games as a child was to discover buried treasure. Of course, you needed a gang of like-minded ‘mates a couple of spades… and a treasure map! Before you knew knew it, we’d dug up half the garden and half the lovely old lady nextdoor’s garden too. The time we got really lucky, we dug up a couple of worms, and kept them to go “fishing” the next day.
Flash back to reality… now that we are all grown up, the romance of the treasure hunt remains entrenched in our hearts. So what better way to pay tribute to our childhood memories than by creating a treasure map of our own?

So we at bizFlats did just that, we created a map with all our properties on it so you can quickly find an apartment in your favorite area of Barcelona. It’s still in beta, so if you see anything strange happenning, be assured we’ll work to sort it out. Have a look at the map below

The new bizFlats Map View

Pinpoint your exact requirements

You can add and remove the apartments in any area of Barcelona. Likewise, you can add and remove the types of apartments most suitable to your requirements. Then click on a property’s icon on the map itself to get the vital statistics and a picture in the nifty little bubble.

Atop the map you can see a list of apartments too, which is especially useful when you seek out multiple apartments for a big group, all in one location.

Toggle to your heart’s content

Now you can see your chosen apartments either on a list – the traditional way – or on the map. When you include the dates of arrival and departure you’ll get the prices too. So just click the tabs at the top and toggle back and forth as much as you like. Soon, we’ll add a synchronization so if you make a change to the list, you’ll update the map and vice versa.

The treasure of a lovely stay in Barcelona is right here waiting for you to find it.

Do you have suggestions on how to make the map tool even better? Is there a particularly useful tool you have found on another website that you’d like to share? Tell us in the comments below

Finally, I mustered up the courage and took the time to write my first post. Do read, enjoy, comment, curse to your heart’s desire. If I like the experience, maybe I’ll write even more … you have been warned!

Ever wanted your website to be more profitable?

Nowadays, websites for hobbyists, are well, just for fun; everything else is serious business, so undoubtedly turning a profit is first and foremost. How can you know if you’re not leaving money on the table? One sure way is to tweak your website to get more revenue from each visitor. Making simple changes can lead to large increase in conversion rates and profits.

Google’s Website Optimizer (GWO) probably needs no introduction by now, but let’s say that it’s a tool which allows you to test changes to your website scientifically in a controlled environment, before fully committing them, thus saving you from the painful mistakes of just following a gut feeling. I know from firsthand experience that can hurt, bad.

I won’t go into the gory details of how GWO works or how to set up experiments since google’s documentation covers that pretty well. However, I will say that if you can use just one tool to make better profits from your website, GWO is definitely the one. Heck, even optimization guru Bryan Eisenberg says he’d take it to a desert island!

Joomla + GWO = $$?

No doubt you answered yes, so please continue reading.

Joomla is a brilliant CMS, but it’s never been easy to set up GWO experiments with it (I won’t even mention an infamous extension that would bring your site down when it misbehaved). Nonetheless, ever since Barrie North’s seminal article on using Google Website Optimizer in Joomla, legions of us began to use GWO, and our websites just keep getting better.

Ah, but we have a problem!

You’re all fired up and ready to test, test, test your website all the way to stardom and riches. You copy & paste all the codes, create your page variations, check it all out and launch the experiment. All confident, you go about your routine and come back a few hours later…. and nothing, zip, nada. GWO is not recording any visits to your site. What went wrong?

You check your page’s source code where the tracking code appears

 Joomla version 
if(typeof(_gat)!='object')document.write('<sc'+'ript src="/http'+

but that ain’t what it’s supposed to be – this is

 GWO original 
if(typeof(_gat)!='object')document.write('<sc'+'ript src="http'+

notice the extra “/” inserted by joomla.

You go into a frenzy and start looking up the answers

• You could turn off SEF, but you worked too hard for your search engine rankings to do that.
• You could alternatively patch the SEF plugin file, which is quite techie and might lead to other problems

The Solution is Here

Frustrated from having GWO experiments fail on me, I decided to take action. The solution was so surprisingly simple, that I couldn’t believe no one had published it before. I sure spent quite a while searching online just to make sure, but as I suspected, I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Here goes (drum roll)…

Take the GWO tracking code and look for this snippet

if(typeof(_gat)!='object')document.write('<sc'+'ript src="http'+

then modify it on both the experiment and conversion joomla pages to

if(typeof(_gat)!='object')document.write('<sc'+'ript src="'+'http'+

That is a single quote, plus sign, single quote. This avoids joomla’s SEF inserting the “/” character in front of the “http”, thus rendering the tracking script invalid and foiling your experiment. It works equally well for A/B and multivariate experiments. We’ve tried it in several browsers and the javascript works just fine. Maybe Google will change their script code to everyone’s benefit, but in the meantime…

Three characters. Short, sweet. Anyone can do it. So indulge, optimize to your heart’s content!

What’s your experience with GWO and joomla ? Do you have great tips? Do share them in the comments.

Epilogue

You might be thinking to yourself  “What is an article about Google Website Optimizer and Joomla doing on a blog about the coolest places in Barcelona?” Honestly, I thought the same thing myself. It’s the way we at bizFlats are giving something back to the community we have learned so much from.