How to Add the Facebook Send Button to Your Website or WordPress.org Blog Or Even Your Facebook Page
Taking the Guesswork Out of Design
Creativity breathes life into successful websites. However, creative ideas and solutions can sometimes seem like guesswork—and guessing is risky business. So what can designers do to show clients they’re using a solid strategy and have the best intentions? The following exercises are a great way to start discussing and documenting aspects of design to help clients shed their fear of creativity and encourage them to join the design process. Set clear goals#section1 Some people feel they know why a website should exist, but struggle to create direct and measurable goals. A modified acceptance criteria exercise is the simplest and most effective tool I’ve found for setting clear and powerful goals. Example request: We’re redesigning our website because we need more traffic and an updated look, and want to become more respected in our industry. Example goal template: We want to __________ because ____________ so that ___________. Example goals: Organize the pages#section2 Example result:
Empire Avenue
FTC's New Rules for Bloggers: A Quick Guide - PCWorld
As of December 1, the Federal Trade Commission is going to require bloggers, and prominent tweeters and Facebook types to disclose any paid endorsements to their followers, online friends and readers. These new rules have the potential to change everyone's online habits. Here's what you need to know: Blogs A rare trend among some bloggers is to receive a small fee in exchange for reviewing a particular product or writing a blog post about it. The strange thing about this new rule is that, in my experience, many bloggers already disclose when they are being paid for reviews. But let's say you are working an endorsement into your blog for shampoo and you end up talking about your experience with that shampoo. Bottom Line: If you receive gifts, money or any other type of compensation from a product manufacturer or service provider you have to disclose it. Social Networking Now this is where things really get interesting. That sounds reasonable enough, but what about the rest of us? The FTC
A Link Building Blueprint: The Foundation
Over the next several months, I plan to use my column here at Link Week to lay out a link building blueprint you can use as a guide in your linking efforts. We’ll start with foundational tactics and some of the side opportunities they offer, and keep going into the more detailed “advanced” techniques toward the end. If you follow the blueprint and implement what we cover, by the end of the series you should have a nice collection of links. Before I start, let’s take a quick look at what happened last week with Google’s algorithm tweak, how it may affect your linking and why now more than ever it’s a good idea to use a wide variety of link building tactics. Google Pushes Back Recently there’s been a ”spate of stories“ on Google’s search quality by bloggers in a wide variety of industries, including the search marketing community. “even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content“. (Collectively referred to as Associations) Both Yahoo!
10 Things to Do Before Launching Your Blog | Small Business News, Tips, Advice - Small Business Trends
There are lots of posts and articles about why adopting a blog for your small business is a good idea — how it’s good for customer retention, lead generation, and serves as an effective way to build links and rankings in the search engines. But if you’re a small business owner, the thought of launching that blog may be a bit intimidating. Where do you start? How much content should you have stored up? What do you do the first few days after your launch? If I were launching a new blog today (and I often am), here’s a short checklist for where I’d start. Set Up Study: Study the other bloggers in your niche, learn about the hot topics in your community, figure out where your customers are hanging out, identify who the leaders are, and read up on some of your favorite writers and the people whose voices you’d like to emulate. Start building buzz: From the moment you decide you’ll be starting a blog, you want to work on creating buzz around it. Content Decide: Ads or No Ads? Promotion
HOW TO: Transfer Your Blog From WordPress.com to WordPress.org
The Web Development Series is supported by Rackspace, the better way to do hosting. Learn more about Rackspace's hosting solutions here. WordPress.com is a great platform for users who want to easily create a free website or blog. Premium themes are now available for WordPress.com, but the nature of the system still limits what plugins can be used and how deeply customized a design and overall site structure can be. For that reason, it is natural that some WordPress.com users will want to take the leap to the self-hosted WordPress.org software. Transitioning from WordPress.com to WordPress.org may seem daunting — especially for users who have lots of content and multimedia already hosted on WordPress.com. Moving From WordPress.com to WordPress.org Note: This process covers moving from an existing WordPress.com blog to an existing WordPress.org installation. Using Plugins to Re-create WordPress.com Features After the Move Your Tips Have you ever migrated from WordPress.com to WordPress.org?
How To Start A Blog When You Have Absolutely No Audience
So you have this great business idea, your mom likes it, your friends like it, and hey, a subset of people you don’t know even like it. You’ve spread word about it through your network—and their networks—and have received a positive response. You’ve even conducted some market research and held focus groups. In other words, you’ve validated your idea. From there, you’ve even taken the steps to put together a rag-tag founding team and a minimal viable product. Now what? At this point, as you work on your finalizing product and business strategy, you should be putting together a communications and marketing strategy that aligns with your overall goals. With today’s myriad of digital tools, resources, and communities, it’s easier than ever to find a target audience who wants what you’re providing… whether or not they know it yet. One of the most sustainable ways to build and connect with this audience is through content, especially an owned blog. Step 1. Write that problem down. Step 2. Step 3.
Move From Tumblr to WordPress
Commercial WordPress theme shop WooThemes launched Thursday a new exporter that makes it easy for Tumblr users to transfer their blog content and media to a self-hosted WordPress.org website. Thanks to the new Post Formats feature in WordPress 3.1, it's easier than ever to create a Tumblr-like experience in WordPress. That means post types such as images, links or quotes can be styled and organized in the way that makes Tumblr such a popular tool for bloggers and businesses. Tumblr is a great service, but downtime issues can be a cause for concern — especially for users who rely on the service to power multiple parts of their website or blog. It's true that Tumblr offers a good backup utility for Mac users, but migrating that content to another blog platform — like WordPress — takes a lot more work. Tumblr2WP.com is a new free service that will quickly generate an XML file that contains all of your Tumblr posts, post types and other important meta data. Getting Set Up Configuring Images
