Leverage the power of Social Media for your business! This comprehensive social media package will give you the edge like industry pro’s have when trying to get the most from social marketing.
Al Romano“ Quick tips to optimize Google Adwords copy on a per term basis. ”
Google Adwords: SEM Tips & Tricks
Everyone wants to have a successful online marketing campaign so it’s no surprise that Google, and search engines in general can play a big part of your sucess or failure. To be successful in Search Engine Marketing (SEM) you need to have a strong grasp of what your potential customers are trying to achieve. Advertisements that are relevant to the customers search queries will bring higher click-through rates (CTRs), better quality scores on Google and lowers costs per click (CPC); all leading to more sales and wider margins in the end. Your customer’s buying process, and it’s understanding, are critical to a successful SEM plan of attack (P.O.A). This is different than a normal marketing techniques on other mediums like radio, television and print which although still focus (hopefully) on your customers buying process and understanding it’s more of a best guess by professionals. With the internet you are starting with direct input from the customer themselves which should sound like a marketing team’s dream.
When a customer goes to search their are indicators from what they are searching. The …
Single Keyword/Phrase Optimization Tips
People fail to realize that search engine optimization is a process. Optimizing for a single keyword and/or phrase is simple on the scale of SEO tasks, but as with all processes it still takes time to achieve visible results.
Facebook’s Share Link Photo
Learn how to force Facebook to display the thumbnail you want for your blog post.
Don’t worry, theirs a library for that!
Every now and again, actually more like quite often than not, developers rely on what has now become an essential part of the developer toolkit: libraries. They enable developers to have more freedom to code, and focus on proper coding which 8/10 times will just work, –and this is a good thing!
But, I have thought about all of this library usage and am curious if we as developers are starting to rely too heavily on its usage in our coding practice. I’m not saying to stop using libraries all together, that would be madness, but at the very least before you decide to include one in your coding project make sure you’re familiar with it, what it does, how it benefits the project and the language it uses.
Less Confusion during debugging
I know one thing all developers loath is when something you thought was reliable breaks down, like a new plug-in for your CMS or a core library function; either way both require you to do something about it to rectify the situation.
A good library provides a …
JS Hint
This nifty webapp is a scripting godsend! Personally, I do a lot of work with JavaScript and when it comes time to subcontract work out if I need to manage a workload or a project’s timeline I need to be able to trust in whom I’ve picked to help and in their ability and logical markup. Obviously I would be doing a screening, but I know what happends deep into projects, many hours and lines of code from the starting point. Those perfect semantics you handed in at the interview time arn’t looking as pretty now, and rather then make sure I just drop what they give through my own personal “vaildator”. Enter: JSHint.
“JSHint is a community-driven tool to detect errors and potential problems in JavaScript code and to enforce your team’s coding conventions. It is very flexible so you can easily adjust it to your particular coding guidelines and the environment you expect your code to execute in.”
JSHint is an open-source project that is supported and maintained by the JavaScript developer community. The source code …
Extending your CMS
Extending the CMS
The majority of content management systems have increasing extendability, meaning you can enhance the original functionality already native to the system even further to match your online solution. This is usually achieved through the use of three concepts: plugins, modules and API’s. What they mean and do slightly vary from system to system but overall:
Plug-ins
Can be used to add all kinds of functionality to a CMS, from post to twitter plugins, to content creation kits the possibilities are endless to the amount of them you can download and install into your CMS’s.
Modules
Usually extend the core functionality of the CMS to help achieve a specific goal but not required for all projects. For Example, site-wide searching, forums or e-commerce functionality could be separated into individual modules which could be installed as required. Usually CMS providers use this approach and offer first-party modules that integrate perfectly into the system. Third-party modules are also an option as well usually.
API’s (Application Programming Interfaces)
Enable you to access the data of a service you require to create …
The CMS Uber Guide: Hosted
Lots of hosted CMS options, let’s break it down
A Hosted CMS is totally owned and operated by the provider of that CMS. This is benefitial in numerious ways depending on your point of view. You don’t have to worry about setups, maintenance and updates to the system: everything is done for you. A hosted CMS also scales upwards very well, being able to handle most traffic spikes, and all for a single, little, or no cost. The downside can be limited flexablity in how you’re able to deploy/customize the CMS and not all are free.
Squarespace
This CMS is quite well designed and has a great user interface. It’s easy to get started, simple to use and updates almost automatically. The custom templates are easy to put your own content into and their are tonnes of extra options to add functionality to your site like photo galleries, forms, maps, forums all by inserting them into defined blocks. If you know CSS you can fully customize themes or make your own using the provided controls for editing. The only …
HTC Touch Pro2; XAndroid is here!
Sticking with Windows Mobile 6.1 finally pays off. After upgrading to the HTC Touch Pro 2 from Blackberry Pearl 8130 from Telus Mobility 4 months ago I was starting to feel something I thought I never would; Iphone envy. There I said it. I would never pay and get an Iphone, but I had to admit I wanted one for a moment.
Thankfully, I’m a logical guy and know that it’s not the HTC Touch Pro2, it’s by HTC and is a wonderful piece of hardware. A fantastic phone with thought out architecture and a freakin’ sweet keyboard. No matter how awesome touchscreen technology is, I NEED my keyboard. So really, my problem is with Windows Mobile 6.1. For some reason Telus has not spoken about any future updates for the Touch Pro2 so I took it upon myself like many others to find something more. And here it is:
Their are various builds of Google’s Android platform on various HTC, Samsung, Nokia Smartphones. Until now, however, each of the Android flavours have been shady and unreliable at best. What …
Windows Live Writer, essential for every blogger!
Personally I’m not a fan of having to open my browser every time I want to post something onto my blog. In fact it’s because of this reason that their are so little posts on here! Well, that and the fact that I’ve been extremely busy.
While waiting for my MMORPG to finish its scheduled server maintenance (no, not World of Warcraft) I stumbled upon this helpful program in my start menu. Windows Live Writer, why have I never seen you before??
With a couple of clicks I was already setup and ready to start posting into Blogger. I have to say painless setups are always nice. Especially coming from Microsoft. I enjoy the interface as well, easy to understand; nothing anyone can’t pick up if you’ve used Microsoft Word; and who the hell hasn’t used Word, I mean seriously.
I also like that I can easily insert content with the click of a side button! It organizes posts and all your blogs if you have more than 1.
My favourite aspect is the Preview tab, allowing you …