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What “engagement” means to The Guardian’s Meg Pickard « RJI. 7 Fantastic Free Social Media Tools for Teachers. The possibilities for social media tools in the classroom are vast. In the hands of the right teacher, they can be used to engage students in creative ways, encourage collaboration and inspire discussion among even soft-spoken students. But we've already made our case for why teachers should consider using social media in their classrooms. What about the how? Even when people say they want to incorporate social media, they don't always know the best ways to do so. It's especially daunting when those efforts can affect the education of your students. To help, we've collected seven of the the best classroom tools for incorporating social media into your lesson plans. EDU 2.0 is a lot like online course management systems Blackboard and Moodle, but with a couple of distinct advantages.

The founder of software company The Mind Electric, who has roots in education, self-funded the development of EDU 2.0 in what the site describes as a "labor of love. " 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. TechBasedTraining. Use the 80-20 Rule to Increase Your Website’s Effectiveness. By Oleg Mokhov Want to increase your website’s conversion rate? Want more subscribers, opt-ins, members, customers?

How about doing less work while you’re at it? Too good to be true? It’s possible if you apply the 80-20 rule: focus on the 20% that will bring you 80% of the results. By doing an 80-20 optimization of your website — whittling your pages down to the 20% of things that produces 80% of the results — you’ll not only have a simpler site that’ll convert better, but you’ll have less work in developing and managing it since there’ll be fewer elements to think about.

Okay, so the above claim about less work was only partly true — you’ll have to do a bit more work upfront, but the benefit is less work and more rewards afterwards. 80-20 Whut? The 80-20 rule is another term for the Pareto principle. So what the heck is this 80-20 rule? Business management thinker Joseph M. The 80-20 rule is also a common rule of thumb in business, i.e. 80% of your sales come from 20% of your clients. Back? How To Create An Editorial Calendar to Publish Blogs, Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter, and Email Newsletters | Reach Customers Online | Connect with Low-Cost Tools and Know-How. How To Create An Editorial Calendar to Publish Blogs, Facebook Fan Pages, Twitter, and Email Newsletters This article is an exhaustive overview of how to design, create, and use an editorial calendar with links to additional articles, templates, and more. It brings you up to date on how best to create an editorial calendar and process to manage online and offline publications, including content published in email newsletters and social media sites Twitter and Facebook.

This article strives to provide a comprehensive overview of all possible resources online compared to other articles which may be publication-specific or focus on one viewpoint of how to create an editorial calendar. When this article was first published in 2003, most online publishers had never seen an editorial calendar unless they came from a publishing background. Today it is far more common to find bloggers who understand editorial calendars, how they work, and their benefits. The Editorial Process. Blogging For Web Designers: Editorial Calendars and Style Guides - Smashing Magazine. Advertisement A few years ago, you might not have pointed out during a meeting with a potential client that you maintained a blog. Over time, though, blogs have evolved from the being a personal hobby to a serious work tool.

In fact, today, web designers are supposed to know much more than just how to design and build websites. Customer’s expectations have increased, and unless you are in position to choose your favourite clients, meeting these expectations requires hard work. Hence, it’s important to keep learning about the variety of design-related fields every single day — be it marketing, psychology, business, copywriting, publishing or blogging.

This article doesn’t cover “traditional” web design discipline as we know it, but goes a bit beyond it, exploring various writing, blogging and online publishing strategies. Apart from that, we present some useful writing style guides that may help you educate your clients on their copy for their upcoming project. Image credit1 Drawbacks. Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging - ProBlogger. Free WordPress Plugins – What are Your Favourites? How to Use Emotional Copywriting to Kick-Start Your Sales. 5 Tools I Am Willing to Pay for [And Recommend] to Improve My Blogs. How to Write Your Most Popular Blog Post.

Wouldn’t you like your next blog post to become your most popular post ever? If you’re trying to build a big audience, that’s something you should always be shooting for. Keep striving to outdo yourself with each post, and you’ll maintain a level of quality that will keep readers coming back. Just how do you go about writing your most popular post ever? Think back to your best posts. There’s a formula that has helped me consistently create my most popular posts. Here are the 5 steps to write your most popular post: Research posts that have done well for other blogs. Which step do you think is most important? What do you think is the most important step in writing your most popular blog post ever? If you liked this post, I would really appreciate a tweet! Photo by [Filhi][bahthi] photography ( with great hopes )

What to Do Before & After Changing Your WordPress Theme | Blog W. Design*Sponge » Blog Archive » biz ladies: get a website in a we. Today we’re fortunate to be sharing what has to be one of my favorite biz ladies post we’ve ever run. amanda from the stylish copywriter and Better Than Chocolate Web Design is sharing her complete primer for building a website in only one weekend using wordpress. amanda will be breaking down the process step by step and, as a user and huge fan of wordpress, i’m really excited to see all of this information written out so clearly and simply for everyone to use. it’s rare that someone sits down and shares all of this detailed information so freely, so i’m incredibly thankful and grateful for amanda taking the time to do this. this is a MUST READ if you’re considering opening a shop/site/blog and need to get started without spending a lot of money. in the article amanda will cover: CLICK HERE for the full post and to start setting up your website after the jump!

Get a website in a weekend – with WordPress! Web designers are expensive. But take heart! Meet your new best friend: WordPress! 1. How to Stay Safe on Public Wi-Fi Networks. Exclusive First Look: SU.PR – Stumble Upon’s New Traffic Builder. I’m so excited about SU.PR, it’s hard to contain. For the last few weeks, the brilliant team at StumbleUpon and I have collaborated on the creation of a new product designed to do one thing: get you more traffic in less time.

It might just become the hub of your social media empire… Prior to SU.PR (pronounced “super”), I had to use ping.fm for updating Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn at the same time, bit.ly for basic analytics like click-through, scattered tools for viewing retweets, and nothing allowed me to schedule tweets well. It was all a serious pain in the ass. SU.PR fixes all of this and adds much more. . – Submit my content to StumbleUpon’s 7.9 million users with each post – Have my best content showcased in a right-hand sidebar for each page I link to (here’s an example) – Get suggestions for optimal posting times: get more traffic per post – Schedule as many tweets or posts as I want, for any time – See my click-throughs in real-time The result of it all? Related and Recommended. Saving Bandwidth and Improving Site Speed Using CSS Sprites. As a site owner, possibly the worst experience that you could serve upon your visitors is a frustrating wait whilst the clock spins and the page loads.

In most cases, most of your potential customers would have pressed the back button in their browser and headed off somewhere else; this inevitably means a loss of potential business. Site speed is predicted to become one of Google’s next ranking factors, although as per normal, the company tends to keep the nitty-gritty close to its chest. In a presentation in Las Vegas, when pressed on the subject of site speed integration into the Google search ranking algorithm, Matt Cutts, member of the Search Quality group at Google and a highly-regarded person in the SEO community, described this as one of his "what to expect in 2010" bullet points. He went on to explain that the company wanted search to be "real fast, as if you are flipping through a magazine. " What are CSS Sprites? Building a Basic CSS Image Background Sprite References. A Guide to Premium WordPress Themes. The premium theme market has really exploded in the past few years. There are now many of premium themes sites (i.e.

WooThemes) for WordPress alone, and that’s not even counting the hundreds of authors who publish themes on marketplaces like Themeforest or Mojo Themes. With so many options out there, it can be hard for buyers to know which theme to buy, so here are a few key elements to pay attention to when shopping around. Although this article applies mainly to WordPress themes, most of the advice here can be applied to any theme out there. Whether you’re a designer looking to put up a blog or portfolio, a developer looking for a quick way to get a client’s WordPress site up, or a WordPress theme developer wanting to know how to make your theme more attractive to theme buyers, this guide should help you see what makes a premium WordPress theme great.

Popularity Design The second most obvious criteria on which to judge a theme is its appearance. Make Sure the Text is Readable Features Price.