Responsible Responsive Images brings out some points worth pondering.
WordPress has added image gallery support. Here’s how to make it work. Can’t wait to find a reason to try it out.
Category: blogging
Guest post: Ten Ways to Generate Better Site Content
Content Management is a relatively new term in the web world. It’s a concept that has taken on particular importance as the marketing paradigm continues to transition to the digital world.
Before, your website was a static entity, a virtual sign post pointing to your brick and mortar business. Today, your website should be considered your virtual office. Your customers should be able to find out everything they want to know about you from your website, including a deep inference about why it is you are doing what you do. What makes you good at it? Why should they trust you? These concepts and more are conveyed by the content on your website.
Your website content says things about you and your business.
Are you attentive to your customers?
Do you participate in community conversations?
Do you enjoy what you do?
What do your customers think about you?
All of these questions are answered by content on your site, and if you’re not putting thought and energy towards continually growing this information, customers will notice. When customers notice, search engines notice. Your website content should tell potential customers, either directly or indirectly, why they should work with you instead of the other guy.
Here are 10 tips for generating useful content for your website:
1. Prioritize Writing
Make writing a priority for you and your staff. You hired them because they are good at what they do. Expect them to deliver solid content that backs that up. If you do, you’ll benefit from their experience and help develop their talents even further.
2. Don’t Pass the Buck
Make the website somebody’s responsibility. If it’s not somebody’s job, it won’t get done. The buck will be passed until the buck stops coming back to you – okay cheesy metaphor – but you get the picture: without assigning ownership, good things get dropped.
3. Focus on Your Passion
Write about what you like. You’re in your field for a reason. You have a passion for what you do. Share it.
4. Frequency Trumps Overanalysis
Make small but frequent posts. Short and interesting is more valuable than long and dry. In addition, the search engines like it when they see more frequent posts while maintaining good quality.
5. Task Out Writing
Don’t take on all the writing by yourself. It can be tough to create solid, shareable blog posts and content. Instead, share the load. Give others an opportunity to flex their voice by offering guest spots in your news feed.
6. News Rules the Feeds
Write about things that are happening right now. Are you having a work related event? Share it with the web. Take pictures when you do things. Post about the story behind the picture. It makes for a much more interesting website or blog.
7. Get Social
At one time, one-way communication worked for businesses. Those days are gone. It’s time to integrate with social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Let your audience engage with you and you’ll earn back dividends of trust…and business.
8. Link Your Stories
Link associated stories together on your site. They don’t call it the ‘web’ for kicks. Integrating an internal linking strategy into your content generation plan brings your site together as a whole. It also helps with search engine rankings.
9. Share Your Sources
Though a professional journalist may keep their sources secret, you don’t have to. Share the industry-related sources that you find interesting or insightful about your field. If you find it interesting, others will too.
10. Publish Case Studies
If you’re good at what you do, no doubt some of your customers can vouch for you. Share those success stories. Writing about specific cases benefits both the vendor and the client. It makes for great marketing material too.
All of these items can take you to greater content management heights. The search engines will love you, your audience will appreciate it, and your business will grow. Better content management helps everyone!
About the author: Kimberly Clark is a senior web designer at VIA Studio. You can read more helpful tips at the VIA Studio Blog.
A Bloggers Guide to HTML5
Are you someone like me who thinks HTML is the most interesting topic on the planet?
No?
Not surprising, really. Most people have other things to think about.
But even those among us – you! – who would rather think about other things have probably noticed a lot of headlines and blog posts that talk about HTML5. Maybe you’ve wondered if HTML5 is something important enough for you to start thinking about. Maybe you’ve noticed that WordPress themes are coming out in HTML5, such as these from WPMU, and you’ve thought about whether you should switch to a new theme on your blog. Maybe you’re worried that your current blog/web site will be out of date if you don’t make a move to HTML5.
This post is for the wonderers, the worriers, and those who are only marginally interested in HTML. I’ll do a little ‘splainin’ that may help you learn enough to make some decisions.
Fact One: HTML5 is still HTML
If you know a little about HTML already, everything you know is still good and still works. HTML5 is an evolutionary growth step, it’s not a completely new invention. HTML5 is backwards compatible. It works with whatever version of HTML or XHTML you already have on your web page. Here’s the kicker – you can take an existing web page and change it to HTML5 with just a few keystrokes.
Change the DOCTYPE to HTML5 and you’re suddenly using HTML5. For example, your existing DOCTYPE (it’s the first thing in the code on your page) might look something like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd”>
If you replace that with the DOCTYPE for HTML5, your web page would still work. It would still look the same. Backwards compatible, remember? What’s the new DOCTYPE?
<!DOCTYPE html>
That all there is to it. Several other things are much simpler in HTML5, like links to scripts and stylesheets. Nice, eh?
Fact Two: Choose Your Own Syntax
What if you’ve been using XHTML – with all those forward slashes at the ends of tags like <br />? In HTML5, you can still use that type of syntax if you want it. Or you can do the plain old <br> minus the XHTML required forward slash. You can write HTML the way you like best. For example, you can capitalize tags if you want to, like this:
<IMG SRC=”myimage.jpg”>
You can use quotation marks or not. So you could do this:
<img src=myimage.jpg>
HTML5 can deal with all of it. Nothing will get broken and not work.
Fact Three: New HTML Elements
There are some new elements. Some are meant to make things more semantic. Most HTML tags are self-describing. This semantic self-description among HTML elements is a very good thing. You document makes more sense to both humans and machines if the correct tags are used to mark up the content as whatever it is semantically meant to be – for example a list or a heading.
Bloggers might really be interested in the new <article> element. Think of an article as a single unit, something you could pick up and move around. Like a blog post. Each post on your blog could be an <article> in HTML5. Inside that article there could be the new <header> element with the post title, and the new <footer> element with info like the author’s name, or permalinks, or comment links.
We’re used to thinking of pages only having one header and one footer, but in HTML5 other elements can have headers and footers when they make sense – and there’s an tag for that.
Fact Four: New Form Types
You might have noticed this implemented on your phone already, though most browsers aren’t doing it yet. There are some new input types for forms, for example email, website, and phone. When you use one of those types in a form field, you get a keyboard to match. For example, if you were asked to enter an email address in a form field that was type=”email” the keyboard shown might include an @ and a period. Other new form elements may help make it easier to pick a date or select from a range of numbers.
More? Yes, There’s More
There’s more. There’s always more. For example there are new <audio> and <video> elements, but using them is still a pain. There are lots of other new tags and form types I didn’t mention. And there are related technologies that make HTML5 look really cool, like CSS3.
While I didn’t tell you everything, I hope I did tell you enough to help you decide if you want to learn more, and to not be frightened if you want to use a blog theme or template that’s written in HTML5.
Useful links: Google+ on WordPress, HTML5, YouTube SEO, Responsive Design
Three Ways To Display Your Latest Google+ Updates On WordPress from wpmods.
searching for signal gives us: The Most Important Parts of HTML5, or Why audio and video are Boring, or The New Web Platform, or an Introduction to HTML5. Yes, all that.
YouTube Tips: Blown Away by Phyllis Khare tells you some tips that will improve SEO (and accessibility) for your YouTube videos.
Beginner’s Guide to Responsive Web Design from Think Vitamin is a good resource/reference for getting people started with responsive design.
How To Automatically Create A WordPress Post from Your Tweets
We’re in a time where Twitter and Facebook have taken over the world. It’s pretty safe to say that almost every active Internet user has an account on one or the other or even both. Not a day goes by where I don’t see Twitter mentioned on a TV show (especially reality shows) or a commercial.
Twitter is the new way to find out what’s going on in the world and many people even use it much like a blog. They share interesting links that they’ve found, post inspiring quotes, talk about TV shows, give their opinions about breaking news and celebrity scandals, and much more. With all of this posting, why not create blog posts from your tweets and share with your readers? It only make sense since that’s where the real content is being posted.
Well that’s why the WordPress plugin Twitter Tools was created. It not only allows you to display in the sidebar of your blog and automatically post new blog posts to Twitter, but it also lets you create a blog post from your tweets. Let’s take a look at how this works.
Getting Started
After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll need to update the Twitter Tools settings in your blog dashboard. The first step here is registering your blog as a Twitter app. This is done by filling out a fairly simple registration form.
After completing your registration, you’ll need to copy and paste 4 things into the Twitter Tools settings: consumer key, consumer secret, access token, and access token secret. Finally, click on “Connect to Twitter” button in WordPress.
If all goes well, you should be taken to a new set of options with the message, “Yay! We connected with Twitter” at the top of the page.
Create Individual Posts
This next page of settings that you see is where set up WordPress to create a new blog post for each of your tweets. You’ll want to skip down to where it says, “create a blog post from each of your tweets” and select “yes.”
Next you’ll need to enter the category for your blog posts. If you don’t already have a category that you want to use, you can create one and then come back and select it from the drop down menu.
Next you can enter tags to be automatically attached to each of your blog posts. If you have multiple authors on your blog, you can select the author’s name that you want attached to each of the blog posts. Lastly, you can choose whether or not to include @replies. It’s probably a good idea to leave this to “no” since @replies are more personal and less important.
You can see an actual blog post below. This will of course look different depending on your theme, but you get the general idea.
Create a Digest
In addition to creating a new blog post from each of your tweets, you can also choose to create a daily or weekly digest for your tweets. So instead of having an individual blog post for each of your tweets, this will put all of your tweets for the day or week into a single post.
If you tweet a lot, this is definitely your best option. It will create less posts on your blog (and RSS feed) and I’m sure your subscribers would much rather read 1 post a day or week dedicated to your tweets, rather than 20+ a day to 100+ a week.
Lastly, you can setup a title for your digest and choose the order of your tweets.
Additional Options
The Twitter Tools WordPress plugin also comes with 3 other plugins: bit.ly URLs, exclude category, and hashtags. These are all deactivated by default. These can be used to enhance Twitter Tools and are mainly for those who are creating tweets from blog posts. So if you decide to automatically post new blog posts to Twitter with Twitter Tools, be sure to check out these additional options as well.
This guest post was kindly sent and written by Lior Levin who is an advisor to a psd to css company that does psd conversions. Lior also works with the main security faculty in Tel Aviv University.
A Tale of Jazz, Food, and the Freedom to Blog
Back when I lived in Austin, the live music capital of the world, I was doing some freelance web design. I made a number of sites for musicians. Among them was Mady Kaye, a jazz vocalist.
The Jazz
Mady has a solo career with 3 CDs under her own name. She’s part of a group called The Austin Carolers who wander Austin like minstrels during the Christmas holidays and sing carols. Mady is part of a trio called The Beat Divas, three fantastic singers who love to sing jazz and pop tunes, write original music, and cook.
Several months ago I told Mady I wanted to stop doing the maintenance on her web site, and asked her if she’d be willing to take over doing it herself if I switched her into a blog platform and taught her how to use WordPress. She said yes, and after a few tutoring sessions, she was running the blog like a pro.
The Food
One of the things The Beat Divas have been doing for years is teaching cooking classes at Austin’s Central Market cooking school. But they don’t just teach, they sing while they cook. They write their own songs about food and cooking. The Divas have 2 CDs, one of which is called “Dishin’ with the Divas: Songs of Food, Love & Mayhem.” Here’s one of the songs:
Here’s their first video, several years old and a clear demonstration of how much fun they have cooking and singing.
As you can see, the jazz and the food are whisked together a bit.
The Freedom
Since taking over the site herself, Mady and her various musical endeavors have really shown a burst of creativity. She’s always been creative, don’t misunderstand. But the Internet, social media, Facebook, YouTube, and a blog are types of creativity she’s never explored before. She used to say to me, “I’m a musician, I don’t want to know all that web stuff.” She learned, and she learned magnificently.
Give a woman a blog and just stand back and watch what happens, is what I say. She sings, she cooks, she blogs. It’s inspiring.
Hell, they are even selling Beat Divas aprons now.
Google+ makes a lot of ripples
Google+ has been more popular as a topic of discussion this week than cute cat tricks. And that’s saying a lot. Most people are writing enthusiastic blog posts about how much they like Google+. See Bloggers React to Google Plus. A few folks are trying to point out the good and the bad.
And, of course, there has been a lot of talk about what this means to Facebook: Facebook Announces Video Calling, Why Mark Zuckerberg’s First Public Response to Google+ is the Right One, and many more.
I’m drawn to the parts of the story that are getting less attention right now. EXCLUSIVE: Google To Retire Blogger & Picasa Brands in Google+ Push being one. Blogger will be rebranded Google Blogs and Picasa will be rebranded Google Photos, according to Mashable. This brings Google’s blogging and the photo sharing services under Google+ social media control.
Mashable also reports that Google To Retire Private Google+ Profiles On July 31. Or as The Register puts it, Google: Go public on Profiles or we’ll delete you.
This prompted Shelley Powers to tweet:
This is so unsurprising of Google http://t.co/prG1Ogc – make your profiles public or they’ll get deleted. And why expose a person’s gender?
Shelley Powers
shelleypowers
The initial reaction of many bloggers was that they like Google+ Circles because it allowed more privacy choices than Facebook. But having your Google profile made public whether you want it that way or not isn’t in keeping with that early reaction. Granted, most people have a public profile already, but some do not.
Shelley’s comment about gender was interesting too. We had a bit of back and forth about that on Twitter. @epersonae joined in to say that “other” was an option on gender in a Google Profile.
@shelleypowers @vdebolt @Oakwright went & checked; yes, “other” is an option. (wish it were free-form box like on @mefi!)
Elaine Nelson
epersonae
The gender issue may not interest you, but I’ve been thinking about it for a while: Have you thought about the gender choices on web forms? The mere fact that all-powerful Google includes ‘other’ as a gender option could have far-reaching implications in the world outside Google.
Developers are busy responding to Google+ with browser add-ons. Google has changed the Google bar. Google+ apps may proliferate the way Twitter apps have.
The point I’m trying to make is that something as significant as Google+ carries with it many ripple effects. Right now, people just want to get an invitation so they can try it out. But what will it mean in 6 months or a year? That’s what I’m wondering.