Anne Heap’s Cake Toppers Techniques Class

Back in January we had an opportunity to fly down to Denver and have Anne participate in a taping for her new online cake decorating class with Craftsy.com. Craftsy has taken the cake decorating world by storm ( at least in the online space) by putting together an wide array of talented cake instructors from around the world.

Craftsy offers a pretty slick online video learning platform and does a brilliant job marketing themselves. They are by far one of the best company’s I’ve seen in this space – they taken advantage of nearly every marketing channel in the online space and really maximize its potential. From email marketing, to google adwords, youtube, and facebook, they have quickly built up a strong fanbase. You can read more about the company in this WSJ profile.

Anne partnered with Craftsy to create a great online learning course on how to make gumpaste cake toppers. I won’t rehash the class here, but I encourage you to check out this page which talks more about the class in greater detail. The class is doing great with over 3000 students already enrolled and the reviews have been really positive. Anne is also available to answer questions and has already answered over 100 questions from students.

It’s been a while since I launched a new website, and it’s amazing how fast technology has been changing over the past several years. I originally started experimenting in the web arena back in 1997 when it was standard to use the “table tag” for all your layout purposes. As the shift moved to DIV tags with floats in the CSS world, I longed for what I perceived was the simplicity of using tables to layout web pages.

Fast forward to 2012, and everything changed with my introduction to the Twitter Bootstrap framework and the Grid System concept in CSS. I wish I had found this framework earlier because it is absolutely brilliant!! For an admittingly mediocre programmer, this framework makes the web accessible again and REALLY speeds up web development. And the GRID concept is absolutely wonderful! I now have the logic of columns and rows like I had in my old “table” days but with the power and flexibility of CSS. On top of that I now have access to an extensive library of components to quickly and easily iterate upon. Big thanks to Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton who are the original developers and visionaries behind this framework.

So with the introduction to Twitter Bootstrap, I was able to use the framework in combination with WordPress and Rachel Baker’s BootstrapWP to help launch Pink Cake Box University to the world. Pink Cake Box University is an extension of Pink Cake Box with a focus on education in the cake, cookie and cupcake world. The education component of the site is centered around Anne’s new cake decorating DVDs and also includes cookie and cupcake decorating classes and various tutorials and recipes.

The other great feature of the Bootstrap framework is the built-in responsive design component. It’s almost a no-brainer. You include the responsive design CSS stylesheet and the CSS takes care of a large majority of the work. Perhaps the hardest part for me was getting the menu to collapse appropriately for mobile devices.

For the classes section of the site, we used the Event Management plugin. This is a fantastic plugin. We’ve been using it for years and are happy to see that Marcus Sykes and team have continued to enhance the plugin tremendously. It’s now well integrated into wordpress and leverages custom post types and taxonomy for event management. We purchased the Pro version to enabled payments through paypal and some further customization options. The only issue we’ve had so far is that the booking forms do not play nice with Twitter Bootstrap responsive design approach. I haven’t done a deep dive yet, but it appears the forms have some hard coded widths in the CSS code which causes trouble on the responsive side of things.

The other interesting part of the project was integrating with Amazon.com for managing the purchase and fulfillment of Anne’s DVDs. I use the word integration loosely here because at this point we are simply just linking from Pink Cake Box University to our DVD listings at Amazon. What’s interesting though is the ability to leverage Amazon’s fulfillment capabilities for distributing the DVDs to customers. That’s probably the most attractive aspect of the service. We simply send them the DVDs and they manage the order and fulfillment process. With its fulfillment services, your listing can qualify for Amazon Prime and free shipping.

The downside of using Amazon is the lack of promotional capabilities. The Amazon platform has great promotional capabilities, but for some reason they restrict promotions on books and dvds. I do not know why, but it is certainly disappointing. In the end however, Amazon provided a fairly straightforward setup process and allowed us to get to market in time for the Christmas rush. Going forward, we may look at other e-commerce options, but for now Amazon is serving its purpose.

That’s all for now. For those interested, we are running a great little contest to win one of Anne’s new cake decorating DVDs. The DVDs focus on the basics of stacking, squaring-off, fondanting, and paneling round and square cakes. You can enter here.

Jeff Ente from Who’s Blogging What, wrote a post on Mashable about the new Facebook Fan Pages iframe capabilities. He was completely on mark – this is a SIGNIFICANT enhancement that has HUGE potential for marketing on Facebook.

One of the things I spoke about in Social Media Marketing for Dummies was the power of syndication within the digital space. Syndication enables small businesses to re-purpose content across multiple channels to engage users in a consistent manner without have to create entirely new content. We use WordPress as our hub for syndicating information out to various channels.

For Pink Cake Box, we have employed this strategy across many of our channels and with the introduction of iFrames for facebook fan pages we took advantage of this on our facebook fan page.

We created a facebook application that pulls content from our wordpress site and repurposes that content in a format that fits within the confines of facebooks design parameters. The page allows users to interact by leveraging our search feature and displays our most recent cakes and most popular cakes.

This enables us to create a dynamic and fresh facebook page that is automatically updated whenever our wordpress site is updated.

This is just the first step and as Jeff states, there are further opportunities to personalize the experience for facebook users. I’m very excited about this new feature and look forward to seeing more innovations in this space.

Pink Cake Box is holding another contest. This year, we are asking you to vote for your favorite cake for 2010. Your vote will automatically enter you for a chance to win a $100 gift certificate.

And, for every twenty votes we receive, we’ll donate $1 to Icing Smiles, a non-profit organization that provides custom celebration cakes and other treats to families impacted by critical illness of a child.

Our goal is 10,000 votes and a $500 donation to Icing Smiles!

As Pink Cake Box has grown over the years, we’ve had to focus more time on optimizing site performance. In aggregate, we receive over 1/2 million unique visitors a month with over 2 million pageviews per month. We’ve also taken the non-traditional approach of allowing other sites to link directly to our images. In combination, all this traffic was putting a strain on our web server and was causing performance issues and web site crashes.

In conversations with our web hosting provider they claimed our traffic was in the top .01% of sites they host and the implementation of our web server was not optimized to handle such a load. They suggested we take a look at NGINX which is a lighter and faster web server as compared to Apache. (Check out this web server comparison they did)

We decided to take a different route and ended up implementing three options which appeared to have helped:

1) Optimized Xcache values
2) Implemented a content delivery netowork for static assets using Amazon Cloudfront
3) Optimized wordpress plugins/queries

Here are some details for others who may be having similar issues:

Optimizing xCache

Our web hosting provider offers Xcache for caching php pages, but the default values were not doing the job. After reading through this excellent xcache post from Chris Meisinger, I started testing a variety of different values for the slot and cache sizes (xcache.size & xcache.slots) and finally settled on optimal sizes that worked best with our site.

I used apache benchmark tool to help test different configuration options:

ab -n 1000 -c 20 http://blog.pinkcakebox.com

Implementing Amazon Cloudfront

Setting up Amazon cloudfront was a breeze. Dreamhost holds your hand through the process and the only work I really had to do was update our wordpress database and any HTML files to point to our new images.pinkcakebox.com.

We noticed a TREMENDOUS performance boost from this approach and it also helped ease the burden on Apache.

Note there are plenty of plugins to help ease the process of integrating Amazon Cloudfront/S3 with WordPress. I personally did not try any of them.

Optimized wordpress plugins/queries

Last but not least I spent time tuning some of my existing plugins and identified some troublesome bottlenecks in third-party plugins. I used this excellent plugin from Frank Bültge which lists all your wordpress queries with timings.

As a result of this exercise I was able to tune my search tags plugin as documented here.

The other bottleneck I had was with Version 3.2.4.2 of SexyBookmarks. It was adding 5 seconds of load time to my main blog page. I did NOT investigate if these performance issues were specific to the plugin itself or perhaps a conflict the Sexy Boomarks plugin and another plugin on the site.

All I know is that as soon as I disabled the plugin my wordpress load time decreased by 5 seconds. The folks at shareaholic.com do a great job maintaining this plugin so I’m more apt to believe it was some issue specific with our wordpress site (which is highly customized so I wouldn’t be surprised).

Social Media Marketing All-in-One for Dummies is finally shipping! In it you’ll find a case study on Pink Cake Box along with some additional material I helped provide for their social sharing chapter and social media strategy chapters. Thanks to Jan Zimmerman and Diane Martin from Watermelon Mountain Web Marketing for the opportunity to contribute to this book.

Here’s an excerpt from the case study:

Pink Cake Box, at PinkCakeBox.com, bakes spectacular cakes, cupcakes, and cookies for special occasions such as weddings, bar and bat mitzvahs, birthdays, baby showers, and bridal showers. Its cakes have been featured in Modern Bride, People, Elegant Bride, The Knot, a Martha Stewart TV special, and two of TLC’s Ultimate Cake-Off competitions. It recently won one of them with their Legoland Birthday cake. Pink Cake Box typically delivers within 100 miles of its Denville, New Jersey, storefront, but ships cookies nationally.

Loïc Mahé brought to my attention a performance issue with the search tags plugin (it’s not noticeable in wordpress implementations with a small number of tags, but is much more noticeable for folks with 1000+ tags).

So I took a look at the queries I wrote for searching tags and realized they were incredibly inefficient.So I rewrote them and performance has greatly improved.

The positive here is that search on Pink Cake Box is now noticeable faster. For example a search across Wedding Cakes is not greatly improved…

Thanks Loïc!

Download the latest version of the plugin here

So a few weeks ago we released a facebook book application called Pink Cake Box Guiltless Treats for sending cakes to your facebook friends. We’ve since expanded the application to integrate with wordpress search.

Our facebook app now has access to over 1200+ cakes and is automatically updated whenever we post new cakes. I’m proud to say that I believe this is the largest library of cakes available via any facebook application.

So I want to talk a little bit about how we integrated the wordpress search function. There are a few ways to do this, and the two options I considered were:

1. Integrate directly to wordpress default search using the ?s parameter
2. Create a custom search query

Ultimately I choose option 2 so I could create a search results template file in my wordpress theme that was separate from our default search results template. The new search results template file (which is pictured below) was customized to fit the look and feel of the facebook application:

So here are the steps I took to integrate wordpress search with my facebook application:

Step 1) Created a new search results template file that took in a GET parameter as a search term. The search results template uses the GET parameter as input into a custom query to search tags and the post content. Finally it returns the results and formats to match the look and feel of the facebook application.

Here’s the section of code that takes the GET Parameter and runs the custom search query:

These results are returned and looped through to produce the search results output. I use the meta data tags embedded in our posts to pull the appropriate cake thumbnail. This query also restricts itself to only searching categories related to cookies, cakes and cupcakes and not other general categories that do not have cake related photos.

Step 2) Once the wordpress template was all setup, I modified our Facebook canvas page to add a search box which posts to the new search results template page:

Here’s a photo of how it looks:

Step 3) The last piece of integration is ensuring the new search results template can interface back with the facebook application once the user has chosen the cake they want to send to their friends. So there is one more post from the search results template back to the facebook application page that handles the next step of allowing the user to choose the friend they want to send the cake too:

Here is the overall workflow for further clarity:

I’m happy to introduce my newest project – a facebook application for sending cakes/cupcakes to your facebook friends.

What’s cool about this application is the tight integration with wordpress that enabled me to to expand it to almost our entire portfolio of online cakes. I was able to tie the facebook API with the wordpress API which allowed me to tap into the existing cakes posted in our online cake galleries. The application is setup so that it can pull based on any wordpress tag or category. So anytime a new cake is posted it automatically shows up in the facebook application.

This application illustrates the power and advantage of the structured wordpress environment and its ability to re-purpose content across multiple channels.

Here is a screenshot of the application landing page for sweet 16 cakes:

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like when a friend receives one of our cakes:

Also, the application helps drive traffic and links to our site since each time you send a cake via facebook it includes a link back to the wordpress blog post about the cake. This approach aligns with advice from Matt Cutts who has always talked about providing “useful services” to help attract high quality links and traffic.

I’m very excited about an interview I did with interview with Jan Zimmerman (author of Web Marketing for Dummies) for her new upcoming book Social Marketing for Dummies.

In the book, Jan will spotlight some of the things Pink Cake Box has done as it relates to Social Media. I put a lot of effort ensuring I provided some insightful and actionable advice for small business owners – I hope everyone enjoys it!