This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

You’ve most likely had an e-mail newsletter for your company for much longer than you’ve had a presence on social media sites. But now that you do both, the two can go hand-in-hand, with e-mail creating an opportunity to extend your presence on social media sites, and social media sites providing a way to get more e-mail subscribers.

At the moment though, most marketers aren’t connecting the dots. According to a recent study published by eMarketer, 48% of marketers include “forward to a friend” features in their e-mails, but only 13% include features that make it easy to share content on social networks. Here’s a look at how to close the gap, and why it’s so important that you do.

Why Include Social Media in Your E-mail?

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Just like a piece of Web content can “go viral” as people share it across social networks, your e-mail promotions can get a big boost by making it easy to share them.

A recent study by Marketing Sherpa concluded that simply including sharing buttons to an e-mail marketing campaign led to a “25% boost in reader interaction, and a surge in inbound traffic from social networking sites.” Moreover, huge gains were reported in traffic via social sites: 2,070% from LinkedIn, 1,680% from Twitter, and 1,351% from Facebook.

How to Do It

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Share buttons have become common on Web content, but they’re also easy to integrate into e-mails. If your e-mail consists of multiple articles, make sure each points to a page on the Web, and that your Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn share buttons are setup to share the URL of each respective article (note: you’ll want to stick to images and text links for your e-mail share buttons as opposed to JavaScript).

Beyond sharing articles though, make sure all of your e-mails include prominent links to your presence on various social sites. Calls to action in a sidebar or in the header like “Follow Us on Twitter” or “Become a Fan on Facebook” will help people connect with you on social sites and help build your audience on them.

Growth Strategies

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Once you’ve integrated social media into your e-mails, be sure you’re cross promoting. There’s no harm in reminding your Twitter followers, Facebook fans, or LinkedIn contacts that you have an e-mail newsletter. And once they signup, they’re the ones most likely to share content with their own networks on social sites.

Beyond that, create compelling content that people want to share. While a good promotion might not be as viral as a funny YouTube clip, your business’ fans will be more likely to spread the word if there’s a specific call to action. Moreover, create content that’s not necessarily a direct sell, but provides value to potential customers in the form of information that’s useful to them. Between good content and easy social media sharing options, your e-mail marketing can become a powerful weapon in growing your business.

More business resources from Mashable:

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- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
– 18 Online Productivity Tools for Your Business
– HOW TO: Choose a News Reader for Keeping Tabs on Your Industry
– HOW TO: Use a Start Page to Stay Organized
– The 10 Stages of Social Media Business Integration
– HOW TO: Measure Social Media ROI
– HOW TO: Use Social Media to Connect with Other Entrepreneurs

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, bluestocking, Pablo631, Qoqazian

Tags: business, e-mail, email, email newsletters, how to, List, Lists, MARKETING, small business, social media

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As we saw at CES 2010, IPTV is going to become real in a very big way this year. Boxee has been one of the big players in this space for quite some time and today the company is announcing a move that will offer users and content partners more options and flexibility: Boxee Payments.

Boxee plans on releasing a Payment Platform this summer so that users can make purchases with one click of the remote. This will allow content partners to offer shows, movies and channels that were previously unavailable on Boxee. Partners can price and package content however they want, whether it’s pay-per-view or subscription.

The details are still being worked out, but Boxee will charge a small fee for the transactions (the plan is to charge less than the 30% that many other app stores and content ecosystems charge). By doing this, Boxee is, in their words, “[tying] our success as a business to the success of our partners.”

Having micro-payments built into Boxee has huge implications for the platform as a whole. Right now, the only downside of a system like Boxee is that although more and more partners are signing up to offer content through the service or offer an enhanced experience, when it comes to getting movies or TV shows that are accessible through platforms like iTunes or VUDU or CinemaNow, users are out of luck. This gives Boxee as a platform the opportunity to offer those enhanced options.

I’ve long wanted to see one of my favorite streaming content services The Auteurs on Boxee, because it’s really just a beautiful fit. The Auteurs streams premium film content from partners like The Criterion Collection to users at an affordable price. With a Payment Platform, stuff like The Auteurs could be accessible on your Boxee Box or HTPC, as well as on your laptop or desktop computer.

Make no mistake, subscription content plans that are aimed at IPTVs are coming. Apple might not have hit Apple TV out of the park, but the idea of being able to buy or rent content on your TV that you can also watch on your Mac or PC (or even iPhone or iPod) is compelling. Boxee is legitimizing itself in a sense by making it clear that it wants to play in this space.

The convergence of media options is upon us, and it will be fascinating to see how content providers, content platforms and consumers respond and react to these changes.

Tags: boxee, iptv, micropyaments

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The news that The New York Times will start charging for access to its website broke over the weekend, but now it’s officially confirmed. As anticipated, one of the world’s most recognizable newspapers will be introducing a metered model, meaning they will “offer users free access to a set number of articles per month and then charge users once they exceed that number.”

The idea is to balance between free and paid, between being open and closed, and earn revenue from both advertising and charging for content. Chairman of The New York Times Company, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., said: “Our new business model is designed to provide additional support for The New York Times’ extraordinary, professional journalism. Our audiences are very loyal and we believe that our readers will pay for our award-winning digital content and services.”

The company says that more details about the metered model will be revealed over the next few months. But let’s quickly look at what it almost certainly won’t do: attract links. Anyone who links to a New York Times article will get complaints by many readers that the link doesn’t work. It’ll be much easier and future-proof to find another source and link to them.

It’s also very doubtful that it will attract new readers: Yes, some people will subscribe. But most people will simply click on NYTimes stories while they’re free, and stop clicking when they hit a paywall. The metered model (from what we know now) is not a horrible solution, but it’s not a revolutionary one, either. It’s just enough to keep NYTimes afloat.

Luckily for The New York Times, an important piece of the puzzle for the “salvation” of the newspaper industry doesn’t lie with them, but with Apple’s soon to be announced tablet. Apple figured out how to change the notion that everything on the Internet is free: Pick a piece of the online market, like music or mobile apps, create a device that makes the digital content associated with it very easy to purchase and consume, and then sell the content.

The actual price of the content is just one piece of the equation; availability is equally as important. Ask yourself two questions: Will you purchase a subscription to The New York Times on the Internet? Will you purchase a subscription to The New York Times on a tablet-device that makes subscribing a one-click affair?

That’s why for now, NYTimes’ announcement of the metered model, which should go live in 2011, doesn’t really mean much. A lot will happen between now and then, and this compromise solution sounds like it’s primarily meant to placate everyone instead of actually making money.

Tags: media, new york times, newspapers, trending

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In case you are not sure what the difference is between these two types of pages here is a quick explanation;

1. The sole purpose of a landing or sales page is to either sell a product get someone to opt in to your mailing list or preferably both of these options. This page needs to be dedicated strictly to achieving either or both of these aims and should not have anything else on it that is likely to distract your visitor from its purpose.

Although this squeeze page is part of your website it will not be embedded into the rest of the site. This sales page exists separately from your main website and its sole purpose is to achieve one or both of the options available on that page.

2. Now the main function of an article page is to add valuable and relevant content to your internet based business that will not only get your site to rank highly on the search engines such as Google but will generate targeted traffic for you and the more traffic you get to your website the more sales you are likely to make.

The beauty of content pages is that each page can be linked to all the other pages on your website and this makes it easy for your visitors to explore and become familiar with the products and services that you have on offer. Remember when linking through from page to page that you should also hyperlink the keyword phrases that describe the purpose of the target page.

If you want to get the best chance of getting maximum attention from Google then you need to keep your articles as unique as you possibly can. Something else that will increase your SEO rankings is to be sure that both your article headline and any sub-headings, as well as your closing paragraph are key-word optimised.

These two pages are the main types of pages to be found on websites, but there is also a third type of page that is extremely important and that is the homepage of your internet based business website.

Although this page should also be designed with the purpose of persuading and informing, its main function should be to keep your visitors up to date on the available content and encourage them to look further to find the information and services that will benefit them and to get them to willingly give you their name and email address.

So keeping this in mind it would be worth your while to include any links to your most recent articles or any news updates on products or services so that people can easily click through to find them. Always ensure that your opt-in form is displayed in a prominent place on your homepage, so that visitors can leave their details for you without having to search.

Finally but of great importance is to be sure that all of your content pages including your homepage are linked to your sales pages as the reason for doing all this work is so that you can get as many of your interested visitors as possible to click through to your sales pages and purchase your products.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

There are Two Different Types of Pages Required for Your Online Based Business Website

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Pulse is a simple content management system designed for small websites. It enables you to take an existing site and add content management in just five minutes. Simply define the regions or “blocks” on your website you wish to be editable and pulse takes care of the rest.

• WYSIWYG Editing
• Drag and Drop Install
• Built-in Backup
• No Database
• Image Manager
• Open Source

http://pulsecms.com/

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Present the most appropriate content for your visitor in a popup – customized and timely.

http://www.popupbooster.com/

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There are many many tutorials and plugins for the jQuery core, but not so many that focus on jQuery UI. jQuery UI has been criticized in the past for its lack of documentation and support, but times have changed. Accompanied by its content rich website, in-depth docs and, especially, support from the jQuery community as a whole, jQuery UI has become huge and has never been easier to use.
This post has been written as an introduction and reference for the amazing jQuery UI.

To quote the web site: “jQuery UI provides abstractions for low-level interaction and animation, advanced effects and high-level, themeable widgets, built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library, that you can use to build highly interactive web applications“.

What is jQuery UI?

jQuery UI is a widget and interaction library built on top of the jQuery core that allows you to animate different elements giving you impressive front-end interactions, all with relative ease.
The UI package is basically a collection of user interface-related functions that and can be broken into 3 main modules: the widgets, which contain prebuilt and customizable user interfaces; the effects, which are very simple and straightforward animations you can do to a page element (shake it, explode it, and so on); and expanded mouse interaction with page elements (for example, dragging and dropping)… and that doesn’t cover the half of it!

An Introduction to jQuery UI-Part 1

Steve Reynolds has written a fairly comprehensive introduction to jQuery UI, aimed at developers that have never used it and need something to bring you up to speed quickly.
Part 1 covers the Interaction element of the functionality, drag and drops, resizing and sorting. In part 2 he discusses with further depth the Widget elements, giving you home grown examples of usage and offering you jQuery-only alternatives.
View Part 2 Here>>>>

Intermediate JQuery: The UI project

If you found the articles above a little bit basic, then this article is for you. From IBM, they discuss in deep depth the jQuery UI package and how it aims to create a well-defined and reliable set of user interface widgets that you can reuse within your own Web applications. The article explains in detail how to install and how to use it effectively.
If you have the time, this is certainly worth a read.

Understanding jQuery UI widgets – A tutorial

"Widget" to most means a user-interface element, like a button or something more complicated like a popup date picker, but in jQuery UI terms it means a class, members of which are associated with HTML elements, things like Draggable and Sortable.

Beginners Guide to jQuery Sorting

Beginners might often steer away from trying to reorder lists by dragging and dropping, the thought of doing something like that may sound daunting. Thankfully, jQuery UI has made it relatively simple, and this tutorial shows you how.

jQuery UI Accordion Widget – Part 1

The accordion widget is another UI widget made up of a series of containers for your content, all of which are closed except for one. Therefore, most of its content is initially hidden from view. Each container has a heading element associated with it, which is used to open the container and display the content. When you click on a heading, its content is displayed. When you click on another heading, the currently visible content is hidden while the new content is shown.
This article, from jQuery Ui guru Dan Wellman, explains and shows you how to use the jQuery UI Accordion Widget.

Using Modal Window or Dialog Box in JQuery UI

Simple Draggable Element Persistence with jQuery

At some point you may need to create a draggable element within your web application. This is great functionality, however you may want or find that you need the element to stay in place after being dragged around. In this tutorial you will be show how to easily drag an element and make it stick, even after a page reload, by grabbing and storing its X and Y coordinates.

Using Multiple jQuery UI Themes on a Single Page

If you're using the jQuery UI CSS Framework to design an entire interface, you may find that one theme is not enough. This quick tutorial will highlight a new feature in the jQuery UI Download Builder which allows you to easily use multiple themes on a single page.

Using the jQuery UI Slider

In this tutorial you will learn how build a simple jQuery UI Slider, that changes the opacity of an element on the page.

Exactly How to Create a Custom jQuery Accordion

Accordions can be very useful for showing lots of different sections of data in a small amount of space. jQuery UI has a built in Accordion function, but according to the jQuery UI Build your Download, the size of the Core jQuery UI and Accordion scripts are 25kb and 16.6kb, respectively. In this tutorial, they will show you how to build a custom accordion that is more "bandwidth efficient".

Making a Google Wave History Slider

We’ve all seen the videos (and some even got access) of Google’s latest product – Wave. Maybe not as great as we’ve imagined, it still features some great UI that will surely inspire a few developers to implement some of it in their works.
In this tutorial, they will show you how to create a Google Wave-like history slider. Using it, it will enable your sites visitors to go back and forth in time to view the changes that take place within a comment thread.

Drag to Share with jQuery UI

We’ve all seen the brilliant functionality on Mashable where news stories and interesting articles can be shared to social networking sites; the functionality is driven by the images accompanying the articles; you click and hold on an image and can then drag it into a toolbar to share it. It’s both brilliant and intuitive, and in this article you will be shown how you can replicate this behavior with jQuery and jQuery UI.

Create Featured Content Slider Using jQuery UI

Showing off the best content of your website or blog in a nice intuitive way will surely catch more eyeballs. Using an auto-playing content slider is the one of techniques to show your featured content. It saves you space and makes for a better user experience, and if you add a pinch of eye candy to it, then there’s no looking back.
In this tutorial they will show you how to create a featured content slider for your website using the jQuery UI library.

Making a Content Slider with jQuery UI

In this tutorial you’'ll use the jQuery UI slider widget to create an attractive and functional content slider. You’ll have a container, which has a series of elements each containing different blocks of content. There will be too many of these elements to display at once, so you will use the slider to move the different content blocks in and out of view.

jQuery UI Tabs with Next/Previous

Tabbed areas are lovely, but when you start getting to more than 3 or 4 different tabs, they start to get a little crowded and it makes sense to provide alternative navigation for them. It makes sense to supply universally located Next/Previous buttons, so without even moving your cursor you can click through each of them.
jQuery UI makes creating tabbed areas very easy, the jQuery UI tabs does have a function that can be called to switch tabs.

jQuery tabs: Create HTML tabs using jQuery UI

Tabs are generally used to break content into multiple sections that can be swapped to save space. There are various implementations and methods for HTML Tabs available and, for this tutorial you will be using the jQuery UI library, which is quite possibly the easiest method.

Create A Tabbed Content Rotator Using jQuery

In this tutorial you are going to learn how to create a tabbed content rotator using the jQuery UI. This popular effect can be used effectively on your homepage to present customers with your products and services.

Combining Selectables And Draggables Using jQuery UI

There are two powerful and fun elements that the jQuery UI provides. When both of them work together you will be able to come up with some creative web application uses for them. The two that are covered in this tutorial are: UI Selectable and UI Draggable.

Build a simple cost estimator with jQuery UI Slider

While the author of this tutorial was in the process of building his online portfolio, he came up with the idea of having a simple cost estimator for potential clients. And in this article, he describes how he achieved it, using jQuery UI. Its very simple, definitely beginner level.

Custom 404 with jQuery and jQuery UI

This tutorial isn’t limited to only 404 error pages, you can use the animation technique illustarted in this tutorial on any page. Here’s the premise – a 404 page were the user actually sees the page breaking and cracking into bits.

jQuery UI – Getting Started with ThemeRoller

ThemeRoller is a web app that offers a fun and intuitive interface for designing and downloading custom themes for jQuery UI.
Using a simple web interface, a user can configure settings for colors, background textures, and fonts — including variations for default, hover and active states — for the component pieces of all jQuery UI widgets. The system lets users experiment, easily preview the custom settings, and quickly generate a ZIP containing everything necessary for a cohesive set of styled jQuery UI components.

Develop Your Own jQuery “ThemeRoller-Ready” Components

ThemeRoller not only allows you to style the official jQuery UI components, it also provides handy CSS hooks for designing your own ThemeRoller-Ready components. This article will introduce you to the ThemeRoller's CSS API and show you how to use it in your own projects.

The jQuery UI CSS Framework – Getting Started With Custom Themes

jQuery UI includes a robust CSS Framework designed for building custom jQuery widgets. The framework includes classes that cover a wide array of common user interface needs, and can be manipulated using jQuery UI ThemeRoller. By building your UI components using the jQuery UI CSS Framework, you will be adopting shared markup conventions and allowing for ease of code integration across the plugin community at large.
If you'd like to create a custom theme, you can either start by modifying the default ui.theme.css file and the individual stylesheets for each plugin, or create a stylesheet from scratch. In this tutorial they walk you through the process of how to create styles from scratch and how to create a custom look and feel that can't be achieved using the standard framework classes.

Styling Buttons and Toolbars with the jQuery UI CSS Framework

In this article, you are not only shown how to create and style a basic button with the jQuery UI CSS framework, they also offer some downloadable button examples, that demonstrate how to effectively incorporate the power of the CSS framework classes in a custom widget.

You might also like…

Creating a Web Development Environment using Google Chrome Extensions »
10 Online Tools and Apps to Help Optimize and Format CSS »
CSS References, Tutorials, Cheat Sheets, Conversion Tables and Short Codes »
The Blueprint CSS Framework – Tutorials, How-to Guides and Tools »
50 Essential Web Typography Tutorials, Tips, Guides and Best Practices »
50 Useful Tools and Generators for Easy CSS Development »
20+ Resources and Tutorials for Creative Forms using CSS »
24 CSS (in some cases with jQuery) Navigation and Menu Tutorials »
22 CSS Button Styling Tutorials and Techniques »
15 Amazing jQuery Image Gallery/Slideshow Plugins and Tutorials »

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SlideDeck aims to make it easier for users to digest and understand the content of a website. It was designed to replace the web’s current model of text heavy services pages, unclear product tours and confusing process diagrams with a fun, quick and beautiful way to interact with websites.

When viewing a SlideDeck, you can index the content at first glance by reviewing the vertical sliders. You can take a holistic approach with the SlideDeck by progressing through each slide in order to understand the complete concept. Or you you can jump ahead to the topic you are interested in. Each slide can contain simple HTML text and images as well as rich content such as flash, videos, screen casts and presentations.

A SlideDeck can be custom designed to blend in perfectly on your website as a header or navigation system. It can also be contained within a button, waiting to be clicked and opened in a lightbox view. Think of all the content you can express to your user in a simple, elegant and fun interface. SlideDeck adheres to web standards and is great for SEO as it is entirely indexable via search engines.

SlideDeck Lite is a limited version of the feature-rich SlideDeck Pro. It’s a great way to give SlideDeck a try and immediately improve the performance of your website. SlideDeck Pro ($299 usd each) includes all the features listed below as well as free upgrades for new functionality. Now, you can have a chance grabbing a SlideDeck Pro for Free. Simply leave a comment under this post. We will randomly select 5 lucky people and announce the winners on 27th Jan. What are you waiting for?

Sponsors

Pixmac: Stock Photos, Royalty Free Pictures and Images

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Keyword Research – You’ll need to do your keyword research. Decide what’s important and divide your content into different categories: evergreen content, primary content, secondary content, head & tail content, current events, and possibly even linkbait/social media content.

Evergreen Content – Some people call it evergreen content, some call it flagship content. Whatever you want to call it, this is the best content your website will have and should be written by your best writer. This will also probably be the most expensive content to produce, so you’ll have to do it in stages. Every time I put a piece of evergreen content up, I use  a plugin like crosslinker to automatically create internal links for specific words. Sure I could create the links manually, but crosslinker saves me time and picks up every instance in the past and any in the future. Little steps like this can reduce your maintenance.

Primary and Secondary Content – Look at your keywords and try to prioritize this content in order of importance. This will help you schedule the content production out over the next few months/years. Sometime I’ll use crosslinker for these posts but sometimes I won’t. It’s a case by case decision.

Head & Tail Content – I’m sure there’s another name for this but that’s what I call it. Let’s say I want to create an article titled “Best Family Friendly Restaurants in New York City.” In that article, chances are good that I’m going to have some editorial content to open and close the article, but the middle will have a brief description highlighting individual restaurants and links to those restaurants. But what if, instead of  linking to the individual restaurants, I linked to another internal page on my website with a more detailed review of the restaurant? If I wrote each of the individual restaurants (tail pieces) first, then writing the head would be a lot easier. Also if I gave the “head” article a social/linkbait feel it can increase the number of page views, since most social media articles tend to be hit and run type of traffic. As a result, this tactic gets me more bang for my buck.

Current Events – Having an editorial calendar is really a must IMHO. You can keep track of events that affect everyone like national holidays, but you should also include specific things to your vertical, like the Daytona 500 for your racing website. You can also branch out and look for other non traditional tie-ins (maybe a celebrity in your field is a contestant on Dancing With the Stars this year). By knowing what is coming and when, you aren’t living on the edge.

Social Media and Linkbait – While this is a lot more competitive than it was in the past, IMHO it’s still a no-brainer. It’s the most cost effective way of driving links, traffic, and sending social signals that people are visiting your website to search engines like Google. You need to work linkbait into your content creation schedule. Use situations like current events and head and tail creation wherever possible. If your industry can support it, you can create it as often as once every 1-2 weeks. At the other end of the spectrum once every 2-3 months is the longest I’d let it go. Some websites like Weburbanist go with 100% linkbait. It’s important to find the right time frame that works for you.

Schedule Content Creation – Now that you have an idea of what content you need and the order of priority,  if you need any of it on specific dates, you can start sending content out to your writers. I’ve had great results with the ProBlogger Job Board in the past. I like to send out a month’s worth of requests at a time. I also like to use a plugin like WP Status Notifier to send an email to myself or anybody else involved in the final review process (such as an editor) whenever a new post is uploaded and moved from “draft” status to “pending” status.

Scheduled Posts – If you’ve scheduled your content creation, once the article posts are ready it’s easy to schedule them in advance. This is another really important time saver and a way to cut down maintenance on your website. I use a plugin called future calendar, which puts a calendar on my post page and color codes the days that have posts scheduled. I like to keep things scheduled 2-8 weeks in advance. If you travel a lot like I do or just don’t like living on the edge this makes it much easier to sleep at night. You wont be able to do this 100% of the time as there are news/current events items that will have to be posted live/realtime, but otherwise it’s really helpful.

Dashboard Tools – I have a few plugins I use on the dashboard that help me keep and handle on things. Dashboard Scheduled Posts shows me a list of the next scheduled posts. Dashboard Pending Review shows me posts that are pending review. I’ll line up scheduled posts, pending review, and recent drafts one on top of the other on the dashboard, it gives me a quick glance of the editorial status of the website.

Comments – I’m not a big fan of comments, but other people feel they help build community. I see them as a maintenance point. The choice is up to you.

Sitemaps, Spiders and Crawling – Providing a clean and easy crawling path is one of the hallmarks of a site that is SEO friendly. The Dagon Sitemap generator automatically creates an HTML sitemap for your site and updates it every time you add a page or post (it’s all about reducing maintenance). Google XML sitemaps generates an XML sitemap and pings all of the services every time you add a post page (working towards zero maintenance again). If you want to track spiders crawling, spider tracker is helpful, but I wouldn’t leave it on all the time. Two other plugins that can help with crawling are wordpress breadcrumbs and robots meta plugin, both from Joost de Valk. If you haven’t already I highly reccomend reading his SEO for wordpress guide and subscribing to his newsletter. Both are excellent.

Errors and Links – Any site that has been around for more than few months will likely have things that moved and/or throw errors. The redirection plugin will let you set up redirects and also give you a 404 report, and set up redirections in one spot. I also use the broken link checker plugin to identify outgoing links  that don’t work anymore. I can edit the link or just remove it.

Utilities and Tools – Here are a few miscellaneous tools I use. Insights plugin lets you do searches and create links from the post page without opening a second tab. Optimize DB helps clean up your WordPress database. Photo Dropper searches flickr for creative commons photos inserts and links them quickly and easily from your edit post page. WP Email and WP Print adds email a friend and printer friendly pages utilities to your website.

Logo – One of the easiest things you can do to make your website is give it a professional logo. Patrick Winfield of 10e20 created the logo on this website, and I love it. I’ve also used Prizelogos.com in the past and been very happy with the results. If you are on a tight budget GotLogos.com is another option. They charge $25-$100 depending on your needs, but they can be a bit hit or miss though. I’d recommend trying to get a square element somehow that you can use for a favicon and social media icon. It’s all about the power of branding.

Design – Having a clean, professional-looking design can go a long way toward making your website look more authoritative and trustworthy. I’m a huge fan of using Thesis as a starting point (read the full thesis review for more info). Thesis is a framework but it also has a lot of design elements built in. Also by building up a library of hooks and thesis customizations, you can leverage your work for future projects.

Backups – Having an automated backup solution is key. My favorite plugin is wp db backup. It can be used for on demand backups or scheduled backups that get sent to an email. The other thing you’ll want to backup is your theme and uploads file. I’ve seen plugins that do both automatically but once your blog gets big or the directories get large the plugin fails, so set yourself a once a month reminder and you’re all set.

That’s my big plan for how I set up and keep a wordpress website running. If you’re running wordpress you might also want to check out How to Speed up WordPress, WordPress SEO Plugins, or some of my other wordpress posts for some more tips.

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Microsoft is deep in talks with Disney about getting ESPN content onto Xbox 360 consoles via Xbox LIVE, according to a report by The New York Times.

It makes sense. It’s an extension of the momentum Microsoft has already built up surrounding getting premium content onto its gaming console — from hooking in Netflix streaming to integrating the Zune Marketplace with the Xbox 360 for entertainment downloads.

In fact, the Xbox 360 is quickly blossoming into an all-around entertainment hub with recent social networking and Last.fm music integrations to boot. A deal with ESPN could bring live sporting events and new interactive sports games to the console for a per-subscriber fee, although sources say a final deal hasn’t yet been reached.

With almost 60% of U.S. homes now owning at least one game console, it makes sense for Microsoft (along with Sony and Nintendo) to be delivering on the multiple ways an Internet-connected box in the living room can be useful to consumers beyond simply gaming. As the race to bring Internet-streamed content into the living room continues to heat up, we’ll see a number of new partnerships and business models surrounding content on various platforms both hardware and software.

Would you welcome ESPN or other cable content on your Xbox 360 or other video game console? Would you consider paying to subscribe to à la carte TV channels on these devices?

Tags: cable, cable tv, disney, ESPN, gadgets, microsodft, tv, video games, xbox, Xbox 360, XBox live

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The C word?

You’re going to say ‘content is king‘, aren’t you? It’s true, we should be aware that if we push out poor content; we’ll reap what we sow, however The ‘C word’ for today is a different C, ‘context’.

Context could be almost anything though, surely?

I’m pleased you brought that up. Yes, most things can provide context – a photograph on it’s own can be quite subjective. If you see it on a website, the name and branding of the site itself might provide some context by defining the niche the site caters for, as would a number of other indicators you might not realise.

So why is this relevant to what I’m doing?

Another fine point! What I’m proposing is that we group together a number of things we already do and consider a few others we perhaps don’t and introduce ‘context’ as an early part of our workflow. Therefore before we even get to wire-framing & design work, we run our proposed site through the context stage.

I see this as something different to personas, which is a way of defining your audience. If we look at the different ways people might access your site, it could lead us into different ways of thinking about our site’s structure and design.

Not sure I know what you mean

For example, what if before we even get to the design phase we bring in accessibility?What about  the language we use? Are we targeting a worldwide audience or a specific country or locality?

Other examples that we could group under the ‘context’ discovery phase include:

• Audience – Who is the content for? What expectations could there be?
• Accessibility – How can we ensure everything we make is easily usable for everyone?
• Design & Layout – What do the branding, colour palette and typography say? How does this work with the content?
• Language, Localisation & Internationalisation – Is there anything about the target market that needs to be addressed?
• Meta Data – How can we use the information about our content? Who created it, where and when for example – how much of this is relevant?
• Categorisation & Tagging – Clear groupings and description of content through tagging gives visitors a clear idea of what the site is about. This can also help SEO.

Maybe there are more things we can consider at this early stage:

• Location – Does where the site visitor is based have any bearing on the content?
• Presence – If the user is available to interact via chat or if they’re present in a specific location, should they see or do anything different with the site?
• Devices – How should the device used to access you site change the experience?
• Social – If your visitors are a part of a social network, or a group you run within one, should this provide them with any different levels of interaction?
• Source – What about the location or author of the content?
• Meta Data – What meta data could help enhance the content we publish?

By holding your content up to these contexts, maybe it would enable us to look at what we’re creating and it’s purpose and open us up to new possibilities?

Example 1: Flickr

Considering contexts embedded within a photo’s meta data allows us to enhance the users experience. For example we could view a map of where the image was taken, view photos taken in the same place or nearby as well as find out the date of the photo and device used.

Example 2: The Guardian

This heading from a recent article shows a caption describing the content of the image. In fact the whole article uses meta data to frame their perspective on the piece; when was it published, on which of their sites it appeared, which reporters were involved and where were they based?  The reporters are also linked, which is a great use of meta data as navigation.

So what’s changed?

We’ve had the rise in social media tools and different ways of consuming and re-purposing content from sites. For an increasing number of sites, content or functionality is used or consumed away from the site itself, some like Dopplr actually intending not to be a destination site in itself at it’s conception.

Your articles, videos or photos can be read or viewed through an RSS reader, maybe shown on another site through an API or posted within a social network site. The community built around your site could easily be accessing your content away from the source.

Design

As our content is used and consumed away from our own sites, could design be redundant? Good design doesn’t just give us a nice looking template; good design works with and supports our content – it’s integral to the experience.

If anything, part of looking at context shows us that design will become more diverse as we attempt to use our branding or identity through different modes of access. Our website when viewed on a desktop machine compared to a mobile device doesn’t need to look identical but it can be a designed experience and allow us to provide something identifiable.

Expose yourself!

Increasingly, sites are opening themselves up; offering their data or functionality through a variety of APIs, which may filter through to smaller sites too. Most sites have some business logic or data that is really valuable. In many cases this could be more valuable shared with the community or be an asset as a subscription service.

Exposing our content and functionality allows what we produce to be used in many more ways. If you don’t use RSS yet, look at what your site or your business has and find something of value you can offer. Is there a way you can offer some of your data through common formats like XML or JSON and encourage people to use this in their own sites?

Strip away your design, layout & typography. How does your content work without any of this? Does it read well through assistive technologies like screen-readers? Does your RSS feed copy read well? The value of copy on the web is becoming clearer – this after all is the core of most sites!

Workflow

So perhaps looking at context as a stage of our workflow could open up new possibilities. For example if you’re creating local news and event style content, should people from outside the area be shown anything different to those that are within your intended readership? Does the method through which someone accesses the site affect their experience? Should someone in the vicinity of the business associated with the site see anything different to any body else?

Why does this matter?

As our content is increasingly available through so many different methods, consider what some of these contexts might mean in the future. How might your site or content work through mobile devices or ‘Augmented Reality’, where location and presence are primary?

Your site is no longer a collection of files on a server somewhere, designed for the desktop experience. It’s so much more and the way people consume our content is likely to keep changing, maybe thinking about context can help us to embrace this?

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Owl is a living, breathing library where useful knowledge, opinions and images are posted from experts the world over. These contributions create an archive of insights, advice, commentary, and everything you want to know and a few things you didn’t even know you needed to know.

Owl is a place for your expertise to live, too. Whether a profession or a past time, your passions now have a place to be published and accessed by everyone. Everyone’s mind contains knowledge about something that’s near and dear to them. Something you know more about than practically anyone else. And on Owl, there’s always room for it. Simply submit content and share what you know with others. You can even be paid for it as well.

So let your expertise find a home, and make a contribution to Owl today. To sign up and start sharing your expertise, visit SEED, AOL’s open content submission platform where content creators with expertise and knowledge to share can submit content, get published on AOL’s network of websites, and get paid for contributions.

Owl. A new source of wisdom covering everything from anvils to eggs.

http://www.owl.com/

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Meemov is an online tool that allows you to create a video.  What is great about it is that you can personalize everything,  write your own script and animate the story.

Feature :   Memoov is offering a unique set of Online Animation tools, including Character personalization,  Audio recording online, and a great timeline-based easy to use Animation method.  Their state of the art Video generation app and the YouTube synchronization service providing a whole new video creation and sharing experience.

They  are offering an open content development platform, enabling Animators and  Designers to create and upload their own Figures, Backgrounds and Objects that later  will be used in user generated videos, ensuring that new content is generated and added easily and its for Free!

Included an example of an animated video created on Memoov.

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Every Saturday morning, I will be reproducing one of Brad Colbow’s wonderful comic strips from his series The Brads. Kind of reminds me of getting up on early and watching Saturday morning cartoons as a kid! Please enjoy! Oh, and don’t forget to check Brad’s website for more great comics!

The Brads – At the Conference

Exclusive Content

To thank you for subscribing to my feed, I am including exclusive, feed-only content for you at the bottom of each post!

Current Freebie Code – 0rx655ws

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Graphic Mania main purpose is to provide free tutorials, resources and support to the community. However, we would never continue without the support of our valuable sponsors and audiences.

Your visit to our sponsors sites does not only let you explore new products and services, but also support us to continue provide more time and effort to bring to you new fresh and free resources every day. Thus, today I would like to thank  our valuable sponsors for supporting us and provide Graphic Mania friends the opportunity to check their amazing helpful products.

FlippingBook, Flash flipping book engine

FlippingBook provides an exclusive solution for publishing your documents and PDF content as Flash flipping book for desktop. Also, it gives you the capability to publish your PDF files to the web as a web Flash album. Furthermore, if you are a Flash developer, FlippingBook provides Flash component that allows you to add Flash flipping book to your Flash project with just drag and drop for Flash component.

There are many sites over the web that sell 3D models and 3D resources, but few are providing high quality content that can integrate well with your 3D project or do not generate problems when using it with different 3D tools. Dosch Design is one of the places that you can find professional high quality 3D resources such as 3D models, HDRI images, textures, movie clips, audio and illustrations.

Related topics you may like to read

• Big Thanks to Our Sponsors – November
• Graphic Mania New Look, New Fresh Content and More
• Graphic Mania Best Content Contest Ended
• Graphic Mania Best Content Contest Extended
• Graphic Mania Contest Winners are…
• Free Exclusive Tuesday Patterns
• Graphic Mania new site – Fun and Colors!!

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Here are our top picks for finding design related content and great places to share yours. If you’re just starting your design related blog or have been writing for a while and looking for great places to post your content and grow readership for your blog, definitely check out these options.

DesignNewz

Tripwire Magazine

Web Design News

Design Bump

DesignMoo

Design Float

Designrfix

Have a favorite that wasn’t included above? Leave a comment and share it with us.

No related posts.

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The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

A Marketing Genius

Bad Timing

We’re in the Money

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

If you find an exclusive RSS freebie on this feed or on the live WDD website, please use the following code to download it: E0th0K

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There will soon be another way to access Boxee though, and that is through the Boxee Box from D-Link, which was also unveiled at CES. Boxee’s Chief Product Officer took over the WebProNews mic to tell us just how this box works and demonstrate the things it can do. Watch the following clip:

It was made pretty clear through a number of products shown off at CES that the way people watch television is going to change significantly. As Boxee’s Zach Klein mentions in the above video, "the future of television content is about watching anything you want, any time you want, on demand."

You may watch your television like this already to some extent, whether you use DVR, have a computer hooked up to your TV, or already have an Internet-ready TV. Maybe you access content from your XBox or Playstation. The on-demand way of watching content on your TV is growing and will only get more sophisticated.

Boxee and the box are about the interface and ease-of use for watching the content you want to watch. As more people create apps for it, the amount of available content should only grow as well. Things are going to get really interesting for television viewers.

The Boxee Box should come out in May, and will be available for around $200.
 

Related Articles:

> Boxee Beta Makes its Appearance to the Public

> A Close Up with Sony’s New Personal Internet Viewer

> The World’s Smallest USB Drive and Portable Hard Drive

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A design is only as good as the functional usability of it. Think of it like a pretty lady or handsome guy with no brain or personality. You can only handle it for so long because they don’t offer much, which eventually leaves you bored or uninterested.

Just like the scenario above, regardless of how amazing your design looks, without any functional usage, readers will only stay for so long. Even worse they probably won’t return, which is what any website does not want. There is no getting around content as the number one factor to gain returning visitors, but there are some design and functional aspects that can be implemented into your web design to push more users to visit your site again. We will look at some of these popular practices below.

Displaying Follower Count

The Internet is just like high school: everybody wants to be part of the crowd. If you have a lot of followers via social networks and/or subscribers, then why not share it with the world. By displaying the count, visitors will be more likely to subscribe themselves because they see so many other people are doing the same. I recommend not sharing your follower count until they are at least plus 500; however, the number can vary through different niches.

You can see a great example of this here, at Inspired Magazine. Above the fold, visitors can easily see that there are over 35,000 combined followers and would be enticed to become part of the crowd.

Another example of this can also be seen at Smashing Magazine. In fact, they even designate a much bigger spot than most sites by taking up nearly ¼ of the space above the fold.

Subscription Box

Another method to increase the rate of returning visitors is to build an email list. This is usually done through a subscription box placed somewhere on the sidebar. Obviously the higher up, the more likely it is to be seen.

As seen on The Wild Investor, the subscription box is placed in the sidebar above the fold. More importantly it is styled in a different color box that stands out from the rest of the site.

More often than not, sometimes you just need to put the offer directly in front of the users face. John Chow does this through a pop-up box that is displayed to first time visitors and briefly describes what the subscriber will get and a concise form to sign up.

Subscribe to Comments

Getting readers to post comments is great, but usually visitors will leave comments and then never return. You can see where this could make it hard to build any sort of dialogue. A good method to try and fight this problem is to give your readers an option to subscribe to comments, either through RSS feed or email notification. This will not only bring them back to your site, but could also build your comments as dialogue will continue to grow.

Problogger simple adds a check box at the bottom of his comments box to subscribe using ‘Subcribe to Comments’ WordPress plugin.

Six Revisions attacks this problem by using a text link that directs you to the comments RSS feed.

Display Popular Articles

Whether your visitors come from search engines or referred from another site, odds of them subscribing or returning to your website will be based off more than one article or piece of your content. So help facilitate this process by sharing your most popular content.

Noupe does this by displaying a thumbnail and comment count of the 12 most popular articles. Not only does this show what type of articles is published on this site, but also when you see multiple articles with 100+ comments, odds of returning just jumped a whole lot more.

While a design should be pleasing to the eye, it should also be functional. What good does an amazing looking house mean if it doesn’t have a kitchen? Ultimately your design should facilitate growth, which could be hard to do without returning users. Hopefully the above examples and practices will inspire you to make some adjustments to your current or future web design.

With nearly a decade of experience in web design and owner of his own web development company, Amey Shivapurkar shares the latest webmastering trends, tools, and practices over at Webtolerant.

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• New Browser Support: Adding Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 3.0, Safari 4 and Firefox 3.5 to the current list of supported browsers;
• Rulers and Guides: Providing users more precision with rulers on the X and Y axes, as well as movable guides;
• Move and Pan: Enabling users to move to any area of a screenshot; and
• Screenshot Delay: Allowing users to pause rendering of a screenshot by up to 10 seconds for video-based content which requires time to let content load
• Save Locally: Take your browser lab session with you as a jpg
• Dreamweaver Extensions: Enhanced integration with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4

Are you finding it a useful tool as you develop on the cross browser cross platform Web?

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After Google’s decision to stop censoring content on the Chinese version of their search engine, and threat to completely halt its operations in China, official China has shown a slightly indifferent face.

They’ve issued a two-pronged response which boils down to these two points: first, if you want to do business in China, you have to abide by China’s laws. Second, China will not give up on censoring the Internet.

According to Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu, “The Chinese government administers the Internet according to law and we have explicit stipulations over what content can be spread on the Internet.” Simply put, Google’s refusal to censor content on their search engine is breaking the law, which probably won’t be tolerated.

Furthermore, director of the State Council Information Office Wang Chen explains China’s rationale for censoring the Internet. “Effective guidance of public opinion on the Internet is an important way of protecting the security of online information,” he said. Well, that really depends on how you define “security of online information”; if you want to keep a piece of information secret from the government, tough luck.

Chen also commented on hacking: “China is a country being harmed by Internet hackers and is firmly opposed to hacking attacks.” But is the Chinese government is allowed to use certain hacking methods in order to “guide the public opinion on the Internet”? Official China doesn’t say.

It’s very unlikely that China will yield on the matter of censorship, and what Google has said in that blog post on Tuesday cannot be unsaid. As it stands now, Google’s days in China might be numbered.

Tags: china, Google

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Sling Media has been producing one of the hottest gadgets of the past few years. Their humble looking set-top box, the Slingbox, when attached to your home TV, will let you view the content you record at home over the internet. Typically, one would view this content over a laptop or cell phone. Sling Media has shown off the Slingbox 700U, a model that would be sold through TV service providers.

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Nearly three-quarters (72%) of Americans say they read one at least once a week while 81 percent read a daily newspaper at least once a month. Ten percent say they never read a daily

newspaper.

One reason for the decline of the daily newspaper is the aging of its audience. Among those aged 55 and older, 64 percent say they still read a daily newspaper almost everyday. Of those aged 45-54, 44 percent read a paper almost every day as do 36 percent of those aged 35-44. Just 23 percent of those aged 18-34 say they read a newspaper almost every day while 17 percent in this age group say they never read a daily newspaper.

One potential business model newspapers have considered is charging a monthly fee to read a daily newspaper’s content online. More than three-quarters (77%) of Americans say they would not be willing to pay anything to read a newspaper’s content online. While some are willing to pay, 19 percent would only pay between $1 and $10 a month for online content and only 5 percent would pay more than $10 a month.

Related Articles:

>Newspapers Not Effectively Using Social Media

>Google News SEO Tips-Ranking In News Search

>Newsday To Charge For Online Access

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Who Needs a Professional Article Writer?

At the basic level, everyone seriously looking to make an impact on web audiences needs a dedicated article writer. Hobby writing for web content is fine for personal projects, but it doesn’t drum up a great deal of interest in the long term. It has been demonstrated again and again, the most successful websites are those that regularly produce the content their audience wants, the more frequently the better. So the need for an article writer should actually be taken as a given. The more pressing question then becomes, “Who should that writer be?”

Who Indeed?

In some cases, the answer is obvious – you. You know your material, you’re able to write confidently, and you’ve got inspiration in buckets. In this case, good, the problem is solved. Go and write that content, and perhaps pass it by a talented associate now and again for review.

However, this obviously isn’t always the case. Some site owners are good promoters and businessmen, but lack the highly developed writing skill necessary to really dig into a piece and make it shine for the audiences even once, much less week after week or day upon day. Or perhaps the owner feels comfortable writing some articles, but wants another point of view in specialized or technical pieces. In this case, the owner needs to acquire a professional writer to provide these services. The trick here lies in recognizing your strengths and limitations, and identifying exactly what the needs of your site are.

The Writer You Need

As with any hiring process, selecting a good writer requires understanding the business in question. Each site has its own unique needs, and should seek to acquire writers who meet those needs. It certainly is true that many people can write effectively on many topics, but the impact will be greatest when the writer is chosen for abilities directly relating to the job at hand.

For example, a site focusing on producing highly technical how-to manuals for home chemistry will demand a very different writer than a site focusing on topical, biting political satire. Each demands a professional who cannot only write well, but understands the topic itself and can write believably. Someone with no experience in politics will quickly be identified in the latter case, and in the former someone who flunked basic chemistry won’t be able to write more than superficial material at their best.

Obviously, the writer also must be good at writing itself – they must be able to construct effective sentences, use proper syntax, and command the language in a manner that keeps readers both interested and informed. Most importantly, they need to be able to write specifically at the level of the typical audience for the site. Masters’ degree level academic writing can be marvelous and compelling in peer reviewed journals, but would be entirely out of place on the aforementioned satirical archive.

How to Find Them

The key to getting the best writer for a website is research. Once you understand your needs as far as the writer goes, it’s time to begin looking for them. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to do so despite the overwhelming anonymity and size of the web.

First, consider your own colleagues and acquaintances. Frequently we have many associates in our field of specialty, and many of them harbor hidden talents. Consult with your co-workers and others that you know, to see if they can meet the needs at hand.

Another source of information on professional writers is the plethora of freelance writing websites. There are dozens of sites employing short-term writers on a variety of projects with skill levels ranging from high school and college level writing to highly technical productions involving text and multimedia elements. Frequently, these sites employ a ratings and review system, allowing you to look into their reputation and perhaps their prior work history.

Additionally, there is always the interview. This need not be a physical sit-down session – it can consist of posting an advertisement seeking a talented writer along with a requirement that they submit writing samples (either previously published pieces or unique work based on the site’s requirements). This will frequently result in a deluge of applicants, so owners are advised to be prepared to so some heavy reading in this case.

For good content on your website, the key is to identify the exact needs of your site, find the exact style and skill of writer you need, and then to strive to meet that need unfailingly. Have an open mind and be willing to adapt to new, good ideas, but stick with the goal and vision for your site and find the best person to fill the position you’ve created.

About The Author:
Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. Go to http://www.Brandsplat.com/ or visit our blog at: http://www.brandsplatblog.com/

Read more articles written by: Enzo F. Cesario

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Article Writer – Do You Need One?

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I was recently going through a discovery process with a Fortune 500 executive who was guiding his company’s Web site redesign, and I inquired directly about the search aspects of the project. His response: “Search is not relevant to this process.” Contrary to what he was saying, search was in fact critical to the overall process; he was just clearly unaware of his company’s campaign history and investment in the search channel. In light of this response, seemingly old and worn advice is worth another spin or two around the block, especially if it will help convey the natural search value of a legacy Web presence.

In enterprise marketing, it is not a question of whether your company’s site is going to be redesigned or not, it is simply a question of when. Most companies do some kind of major redesign or tweak every two years, and if they haven’t just relaunched, they are planning for the next one. So the “when” is most often “now,” no matter where you are in the process. The important thing to remember here is that search should be a key consideration at every stage of the process, whether it is selecting a provider, setting requirements, producing comps, coding or site deployment.

So how do you fit natural search into the process? Here are a few ideas to start:

Use site language and messaging that is consistent with the user’s perception of your product or service.
For the most part, search engines are still very literal, and truly effective semantic intelligence still lies far ahead. Position content and language that reflects the way users search, in order to rank for those terms. The path to understanding this language is through linguistic and keyword research, and also by studying and knowing your target. Language and keywords impact and guide information architecture and content strategies, among other aspects.

Read your log files (and/or review analytics reports).
If you want to know what you stand to lose in a site redesign, take a look at what you are currently gaining in terms of traffic, visibility, revenue, and conversions. Are there any particular Holy Grail terms like “travel,” “shopping,” or “banking” that may be giving you a lot of traffic? See a section of a site that is referring a ton of long-tail terms? You will likely find some areas that are worth preserving.

Ensure that RIAs are both crawlable and indexable by search engines.
Rich Internet technologies that are implemented without search engines in mind can instantly render a once-thriving natural search program into total obscurity. Flash and Ajax are key tools in the design and development toolbox, but considerations must be made for search upfront.

Avoid the creation of URL canonicalization issues.
When you change phone numbers, the phone company will leave a recorded message telling the new number to the person who called your old number. This is the effect a 301 permanent redirect has on a search engine — it applies the old URL and backlinks to the new URL; the search engine is happy, and your site is happy. A canonicalization problem occurs when 302 redirects are pointed to permanently moved pages. I have seen instances where clients have gone through four or five redesigns using 302s, and a string of six-to-eight redirects points to a single page, each with its own set of inbound links. This basically makes it difficult for engines to determine the “real URL” to show in results and apply backlinks to. How do you fix it? See the next point.

Set up a redirection plan.
In just about every redesign project, at least some content is removed, and URLs go away. Help the engines and your users by using a 301 redirect to point them to the most similar page on your site, or the site map, home page, or custom 404 page. Spend the time to map out which URLs are going away, and where they should be pointed. And don’t sit on the plan —do it on the day or evening that a site is pushed out of production.

Don’t remove content that supports coveted rankings without assessing risks first.
One mistake I see frequently is when content is removed from a site, with no replacement content to support the valuable rankings and visibility it has previously created. Before axing existing site content, determine how difficult it would be to re-attain the ranking, the ranking’s importance in terms of traffic and revenue, or if it is your CEO’s favorite pet ranking. Then create a plan for bridging new content, or leaving it alone.

Include search as both a business and technical requirement before planning has even started.
If search is not a consideration and priority early on, then it will be 10 times harder and more expensive to try to re-engineer at the end of or after the project.

Ensure that there is a voice for search within the Web site team structure.
Having a search specialist as part of the Web design team (and implementing their recommendations) will do a lot to ensure a healthy transition in the redesign and relaunch process, in addition to the potential for growth. The list above is useless without some subjective strategy behind it. Get experienced search optimization help that is fit to your company’s unique situation, needs and goals, and make it an integral part of the redesign process.

These are just a few considerations to get you started. Feel free to add your own thoughts and considerations for redesign at the Search Insider blog.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Designing Web Sites For Search Visibility

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What is Whitespace?

Even though its name seems to suggest otherwise, whitespace doesn’t actually have to be white. It gets its name from the early days of graphic design where most printing was done on white paper. Whitespace is simply the empty space between and around the elements of a design or page layout. This can include: space around graphics and images, margins and gutters, space between columns, and even the space between lines of type. Whitespace is also referred to as “negative space”.

Whitespace is made of nothing, but shouldn’t be treated that way. There are several benefits that a generous helping of whitespace can bring to a design. Simply by increasing the space between elements in a layout, a design can take on a more elegant appearance, and by injecting more whitespace into a web design’s typography, content becomes more legible.

Elegance and Sophistication

In print design, paper is a valuable resource and clients will usually want you to use every square inch of it. After all, it costs them money and they want to get their money’s worth. Similar value is placed on screen real estate in web design. They both have set dimensions and represent limited space in which a message can be presented by displaying text and graphics. This is why being generous with your whitespace will speak volumes about your brand. By using large amounts of it, you’re saying that your content is far more important than the screen real estate that it rests on, and you can afford to sacrifice that space in order to better present your message.

Luxury brands use this concept to convey an image of sophistication and elegance. Let’s take these two furniture companies for example. Pottery Barn, being the more upscale of the two, uses lots of white space between the various elements. Notice even the logo uses large amounts of whitespace between each character.

Rooms To Go, on the other hand, is a lower end furniture store and it shows in their web design. There are several factors that contribute to this, and a lack of whitespace plays a major role. With so little space between elements, I won’t even attempt to insert the little red arrows.

Notice how the list of category links is crammed up against the left border. Things like this can make a design look sloppy and unprofessional.

Lets’s take a look at two other brands that you will probably recognize. Below is a comparison of the Apple home page and the Microsoft home page. You will notice that Apple, being the epitome of elegance and sophistication, uses plenty of whitespace. While the layout of the Microsoft home page is a bit more crowded, resulting in a not-so-elegant feel. This is right in line with each company’s general brand perceptions.

Better Legibility and Usability

On a micro level, whitespace plays a major role in typography and even usability. Text that is cramped with minimal line spacing can be very difficult to read. By adding more whitespace between lines of text, content becomes easier to scan and digest.

Information Highwayman is the portfolio of D Bnonn Tennant, and it’s an excellent example of great use of whitespace within text. The large amount of spacing between lines makes the content a joy to read.

Micro whitespace not only makes text easier to read, but also helps separate blocks of content from one another. This can help a user differentiate where content starts and stops.

Analog is a single page website. So it’s important to create enough separation between the various blocks of content so that they stand out from one another. Here, the Analog team uses varying amounts to create separation and flow within the content. A larger amount of whitespace is used to separate the content blocks, then a smaller amount is used between the paragraphs within each block.

Develop an Eye for Whitespace

Like so many other aspects of design, there is no set guidelines or rules for calculating the right amount of whitespace. All designs are different so the amount you use will vary from project to project. The best way to learn is experiment and study the work of other designs that seem to be getting it right. Eventually you will develop an eye and feel for what is the right amount of whitespace.

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The website SpeedCine.com makes it easy for users all over the world to find out what movies are available online and where.

SpeedCine is basically an aggregator of legal movie sites: It helps you find free movies or movies you can rent or buy. SpeedCine tracks Netflix, iTunes, The Auteurs, Crackle.com and dozens of other services, and offers users a choice of options quickly and easily.

This video gives you an overview of what SpeedCine does:

When the site launched this fall, its focus was on the U.S. — because many of the largest services are U.S.-based. However, as founder Reid Rosefelt explained to me via e-mail, that level of specification is far from ideal. The Internet is increasingly melting barriers between countries, and the idea of keeping content segregated for certain geographical locales is becoming increasingly silly.

SpeedCine will soon work all over the world, but the first big focus in the international rollout is the UK, because they have so many different websites. iTunes-UK, Blinkbox and LOVEFiLM are just some of the UK-specific sites that are supported.

In addition, SpeedCine has deals with all six iTunes stores to handle movies and arrangements with companies like TheAuteurs — which have relationships with distributors all over the world — so that people can access content regardless of location.

We think that this site is really brilliant, not just because it is useful — because it is — but because it can really make the process of finding content, regardless of location, easier for users. In turn, maybe the industry will take notice and start taking the initiative to work out rights issues, rather than just ignoring the international community.

How do you find movies online?

Tags: Film, hulu, netflix, speedcine, theauteurs

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2010 will be the year of consolidation of internet usage via mobile devices. According to internetnews.com, which reports a Gartner analysis, mobile device sales will rise (9%) in 2010. This scenario will impose to internet companies, online newspapers, bloggers, to provide mobile versions of their websites to simplify the fruition of their contents and enlarge their audience. In this post I prepared a roundup of code snippets inspired to some mobile versions of popular websites (such as Facebook, Flickr, The New York Times, Digg, Google, …) that illustrate some HTML best practices to develop perfect websites for iPhone and mobile Devices.

Facebook Touch for iPhone

Let’s start with Facebook Touch for iPhone (touch.facebook.com). The iPhone version of Facebook is characterized by single-column structure (with fluid width) that contains three main sections: header, main content and footer.

The header section contains the top bar, which includes the notification icon, Facebook logo and search, and the menu bar that contains four links (home, profile, friends and inbox).

The main content section contains information about the current page (home, profile, wall, info…).

The footer section contains links to select language, switch to full site, logout, and copyright information. This kind of HTML structure (single-column, fluid width, three main sections: header, main content and footer) is widespread in mobile web design because it allows to organize content in a way that fits perfectly most mobile screen sizes. Here is the sample HTML code you can use to implement this layout:

<div id="header">
   <div id="topbar">...</div>
   <div id="menubar">
   <ul>
      <li><a href="home.html">Home</a></li>
      <li><a href="profile.html">Profile</a></li>
      <li><a href="friends.html">Friends</a></li>
      <li><a href="inbox.html">Inbox</a></li>
   <ul>
   </div>
</div>
<div id="content">
   <div id="page_menu">...</div>
   <div id="page">...</div>
</div>
<div id="footer">...</div>

<div id="header"> contains <div id="topbar"> (notification icon, Facebook logo and search) and <div id="menubar"> (home, profile, friends and inbox).
<div id="content"> contains <div id="page_menu" (wall, info, photos) and <div id="page"> (current page loaded, in this case the Wall of my Facebook profile).

Flickr Mobile

Flickr mobile (m.flickr.com) also implements a single-column layout that presents the same characteristics of Facebook Touch layout (one column, fluid width, three main sections: header, main content, footer).

The header section contains Flickr logo, sing-in information and the navigation bar.

The main content section contains information about the current page (in this case the Flickr home page).

The footer section contains some information about Flickr and links to switch to original site, download the iPhone app, report abuse and sign-out.

Here are some suggestions to implement a perfect navigation bar for mobile devices. I suggest you to use tab-based navigation, tabbed links with relative width and the display CSS property set to block.

Here is the typical HTML code to implement a standard navigation bar:

<div id="nav">
   <ul>
      <li><a href="/activity">Activity</a></li>
      <li><a href="/you">You</a></li>
      <li><a href="/contacts">Contacts</a></li>
      <li><a href="/more">More</a></li>
   <ul>
</div>

And here is a sample CSS code:

#nav ul li {
   float:left;
   width:25%;
   text-align:center;
   ...
}
   #nav ul li a {display:block;}

The New York Times Mobile

Now let’s take a look at the mobile version of The New York Times newspaper (mobile.nytimes.com).

The HTML structure is a little bit more complex than the previous websites but it maintains the same characteristics and sections of Facebook and Flickr layouts (one column with, fluid width, three main sections: header, main content, footer).

The header sections contains The New York Times logo, date, weather, financial information and the search field.

The main content section contains latest news. Below the main content section there are other sections organized by topic (Technology, U.S. News,…) with a list of links.

The footer section contains links to download the iPhone app, send feedback, copyright information and an user login form.

Just a note for sections below the main content section. You can use the <h2> tag for section titles and the <ul> tag for the list of links.

<h2>Technology</h2>
<ul>
      <li><a href="link_1.html">Title 1</a></li>
      <li><a href="link_2.html">Title 2</a></li>
      <li><a href="link_3.html">Title 3</a></li>
<ul>

Time

The layout of the mobile version of Time (mobile.time.com) is similar to The New York Times.

The header section contains Time logo and a button with a link to switch to standard site.

The main content section contains a list of Top Stories. Below this section there are other sections organized by topic (U.S., Quotes of the Day, Photo Essays,…). You can use the <h2> tag for section titles and the <ul> tag for the list of links.

The footer section contains links to Help, About Time, Subscribe to Time, CNN Internation, and copyright informations.

Digg

The mobile version of Digg (m.digg.com) is clean and minimalist.

The header section contains a top menu (digg logo, Topics, Login) and a navigation bar.

The main content section contains the most recent stories (digg counter and title) and pagination buttons.

The footer sections is really simple and just contains the link to the regular version of Digg.

Here is the sample HTML code you can use to implement a Digg-like layout for mobile devices:

<div id="header">
   <div id="h_menu">...</div>
   <div id="nav">...</div>
</div>
<div id="stories">
   <div class="story">...</div>
</div>
<div id="pagination">...</div>
<div id="footer">...</div>

Just for curiosity, the mobile version of Digg uses tables for the website layout! Here is the code used for the top menu:

<table>
   <tr>
      <td class="h-logo"><a href="/"><img src="/img/logo.gif"/></a></td>
      <td class="h-menu">
         <a class="settings" href="/topics">Topics</a>
         <a class="button" href="/login">Login</a>
      </td>
   </tr>
</table>

As you see, it uses the <table> tag to separate links in the top menu. Using tables for design the structure of HTML pages is not a good practice but, I have to admit, in some cases is simpler and quicker than creating floating elements.

Mixx

The HTML structure of Mixx (i.mixx.com) is similar to Digg but it’s simpler.

The header section contains Mixx logo and the navigation bar.

The main content section contains a list of stories. No footer is present.

Google Mobile

The mobile version of Google is a great balance between simplicity and perfect usability.

The header section contains the navigation bar and Google logo.

The main content section contains the search field and short messages with the latest news about Google services.

The footer section contains links to iGoogle, Settings and Help.

It’s interesting to take a look at the multi-level navigation bar present in the Google home page. When you click on the link “more” it appears a list that contains links to other Google services. The following image illustrates an example of typical HTML structure you can use to implement a multi-level navigation bar like that:

Here is a sample HTML code you can use to implement a multi-level navigation bar simply using nasted <ul> tags:

<div id="header">
   <div id="nav">
      <ul>
         <li><a href="/web">Web</li>
         <li><a href="/image">Images</li>
         <li><a href="/News">News</li>
         <li>More
            <ul>
               <li><a href="/Maps">Maps</li>
               <li><a href="/Readers">Readers</li>
               <li><a href="/Translator">Translator</li>
            </ul>
         </li>
      </ul>
   </div>
</div>

Bing Mobile

The mobile version of Bing (m.bing.com) tries to replicate the simplicity of Google mobile, but the alignment difference between some elements make the page less neat than the Google home page (the bing logo is aligned to left, navigation bar and search field are centered, location settings and “Bing for iPhone” message are aligned to left, footer links are centered).

Mashable Mobile

I want to conclude this roundup of websites with the mobile version of Mashable (mashable.com) that can be useful to take inspiration for the mobile version of your blog.

The header section contains Mashable Logo, search field and the navigation bar with links to main channels.

The main content section contains a list of most recent posts.

The footer section contains copyright information and a link to switch to standard site.

Frameworks for iPhone Developers

Here is a small list of my favorite Frameworks to develop websites for iPhone:

IUI is a User Interface Framework for Safari development on iPhone that allows you to make WebApps that look and feel like iPhone native application.

jQTouch is a jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and other forward-thinking devices.

jQuery iPhone UI is a JavaScript library for prototype iPhone interface on web pages.

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This response may help strengthen the notion that scripted content must be made accessible. Many developers incorrectly believe that inaccessible scripting is permissible so long as it degrades gracefully or a non-scripted alternative is provided. The vast majority of screen reader respondents encounter scripted content.

Assuming you’ve solved the accessibility problem just by gracefully degradation to raw HTML is fallacy. The whole issue is much more nuanced.

There’s also a handy summary of problematic items reported by this user segment, which ranked as follows:

• CAPTCHA – images presenting text used to verify that you are a human user
• The presence of inaccessible Flash content
• Links or buttons that do not make sense
• Images with missing or improper descriptions (alt text)
• Complex or difficult forms
• Lack of keyboard accessibility
• Screens or parts of screens that change unexpectedly
• Missing or improper headings
• Too many links or navigation items
• Complex data tables
• Lack of “skip to main content” or “skip navigation” links
• Inaccessible or missing search functionality

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By now you should have heard the meme that content is king; you’ve probably heard it frequently, in fact. This is because there is a remarkable amount of truth behind it. The copy, images, video and other miscellaneous content are the reason that your visitors are both going to and remaining on you site. Sites like Craigslist prove this to us time and again.

Design should be the extra layer, therefore adding to the experience that helps visitors locate wanted information, read said information, or simply accomplish a task. The very second you make the decision to place Lorem Ipsum into your mock-ups, you have done a great disservice to your design, content, website and users.

"By adding Lorem Ipsum to the design you are essentially dressing your king before you know his size."

The problems will eventually have a domino effect on your site, sometimes without your awareness.

The Obvious and Usual Suspects

What are some of the bad things that have happened because of Lorem Ipsum?

1. Lorem Ipsum has distracted clients from design mock-ups for decades, leading them to ask countless questions on why their site if filled with an unknown, foreign language.
2. It has often created confusion between the designer, developer and the copywriter or content provider.
3. It even gets pushed live sometimes without anyone noticing.

Just Another Visual Element

When you are designing with Lorem Ipsum, you diminish the importance of the copy by lowering it to the same level as any other visual element. The text simply becomes another supporting role, serving to make other aspects more aesthetic. Instead of your design enhancing the meaning of the content, your content is enhancing your design.

Here’s a sample of the dreaded Lorem Ipsum:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Integer eu enim et eros posuere consequat id in libero. Aliquam pellentesque pulvinar aliquet. Curabitur sollicitudin sagittis consequat. In lobortis semper lacus et aliquet. Morbi luctus, tellus et imperdiet iaculis, ante eros sodales leo, in rutrum odio nunc at mi. Donec ac risus eu lorem vehicula sodales lacinia tempor ipsum. Curabitur sit amet quam leo. Donec faucibus posuere libero, a tincidunt elit auctor vitae. Vestibulum sed dui at erat lobortis sagittis a nec purus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Etiam ultrices lacus ante.

Phasellus pulvinar eleifend odio id porttitor. Nulla magna libero, iaculis vel accumsan non, eleifend quis leo. Aenean molestie feugiat est a mollis. Nulla facilisi. Mauris augue justo, gravida a rhoncus sed, bibendum sit amet leo. Duis sapien ante, aliquam in imperdiet eget, tincidunt pellentesque leo. Aenean condimentum viverra lectus, sit amet dictum odio ullamcorper ut. Integer pulvinar dignissim pellentesque. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae.

Tailored to Fit?

The person writing the content then gets lead down a dangerous path; they begin to write according to what has been laid out with Lorem Ipsum in the design. They effortlessly continue for paragraphs on matters that could easily be simplified into a single sentence. Content could be added that simply doesn’t need to be there.

Putting the Right Foot Forward

In an ideal situation, you would be working with a content specialist from the very beginning. Let’s face it, this doesn’t happen nearly as much as it should. Instead, the client is writing the copy for the website and it gets handed to you just before launch.

It’s time to reverse that thinking; you should be receiving and discussing the content even before the commencement of the design. When you are hired for the job, make it known to the client that you need the copy up-front and list the reasons why.

Still having problems? Write your own copy. Seriously, do it. This way when it comes to finalizing both the copy and the interaction, the copywriter will have an understanding of the point you were trying to make.

Now stand up. Put your left hand on your Mac or PC and the right one in the air and say:

"I, [your name here] vow to never use Lorem Ipsum in my designs ever again."

In Defense of the King (Content)

Thanks everyone for your input and arguments against. You’ve brought up some great points. It really crazy to think that fake Greek text is so controversial. That said, here is my rebuttal to some of the main points that have been brought up against my article.

The Title

The title is a bit extreme and was written to grab your attention. Lorem Ipsum will not kill your site design. What it does is it takes away some of the ability to provide the best possible solution for your design problem. You can of course still create great, beautiful, awesome designs with lorem ipsum but it takes away resources to solve your problem.

Change

I realize that this would not be an easy change both for you and for your clients. I am essentially suggesting you fix something that doesn’t seem broken. Just because using Lorem Ipsum is easy and it fits smoothly into your current process doesn’t make it right.

Having Final Copy

In no way should you have nor do you need final copy. First rough drafts work. It gives the designer and idea of what needs to be communicated. Once it is in the design or in code doesn’t make it final. Your copy should be a living working document that is continually changing along with your design.

If the copy becomes distracting in the design then you are doing something wrong or they are discussing copy changes. It might be a bit annoying but you could tell them that that discussion would be best suited for another time. At worst the discussion is at least working towards the final goal of your site where questions about lorem ipsum don’t.

Lorem Ipsum as a Tool

Lorem ipsum is more of a work around than a tool. It allows for your clients to be lazy and for you to have to deal with fake text. It’s only a tool because we HAVE to use it unlike other graphical tools like grids that enhance the design.

Dealing with Clients

I clearly didn’t cover this enough, That is my fault. I’ve found that when you describe your process up-front and tell them that you need at least an early draft of the copy, most clients are okay with that. I explain to them that through this process, they will get a better overall product. If they’re not okay with that, well, I have the luxury of ditching them. I would rather spend my time looking for clients that will work with me instead of against me, wasting my time fighting for a good product.

Writing Your Own Copy

I almost removed this part before sending the article over because it has the potential to be very dangerous. I probably should have. It has been one of the ways that I have gotten around the client issue for headlines and sub-copy. I understand that we are trying to put food on the table and writing considerable amounts of body copy would be unreasonable. I also realize you are relying on your designer to know how to write, at least a very little bit, and that can be scary.

The point I tried to make is that you and your clients need to be thinking, understanding and gathering content before the design. Using Lorem Ipsum is a way to half-heartedly go about the most important part of you site.

Its been used in the print world for decades because they know exactly how many characters they can put on the page. Magazine or newspaper designers get early drafts of articles or at least a synopsis of the article before they start there work. I am suggesting you get the same.

The bottom line is design is an enhancement to your content. Nothing more. If you have an awesome design but junky content then no one will buy, use, read, or interact with it. This is the problem with a ton of Flash sites out there. If you have awesome content, users will find a way to work with the design (**Ehem** Craiglist).

For those looking for extracurricular reading:

• Adaptive Path | Death to Lorem Ipsum & Other Adventures in Content
• 37 Signals | "Getting Real" design tip: Just say no to Lorem Ipsum
• Boxes and Arrows | Representing Content and Data in Wireframes: Special Deliverable #10

What are your thought about Lorem Ipsum? Do you think as designers, we should eliminate its use, or do you think that Lorem Ipsum still has its place in our design mock-ups? Have you had any unfortunate incidents that have happened with clients because you used Lorem Ipsum? We would love to hear what you say about it, so please do leave a comment below. Thank you for reading the article and we hope that you will share your opinion with us and to the rest of the design community.

No related posts.

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The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.

These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.

So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.

Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…

The Price of Marketing

Dream a Little Dream

The Smell of Success

Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…

If you find an exclusive RSS freebie on this feed or on the live WDD website, please use the following code to download it: C7kj9r

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Ashim Chhabra of the Yahoo Search BOSS Team said in a Yahoo Groups post:

Under this agreement, Yahoo! is permitted to continue offering the BOSS web service, with search results that would integrate Yahoo! services and content with algorithmic results provided by Microsoft. As always, our intention is to provide a BOSS offering as long as it makes business and economic sense to do so. We are still examining what the BOSS offering will consist of, with some services powered by Microsoft, unique content that Yahoo! currently provides, and the potential for additional Yahoo! content in the future.

Prior to the announcement of the Yahoo!-Microsoft search agreement, we’d already shared our intention to explore a fee-based structure for BOSS. We continue to explore an appropriate fee structure or other revenue model as we work through the future of BOSS.

There you have it. It doesn’t exactly clarify the future of BOSS, but at least you have some general idea of the company’s thought process. Better than nothing right?

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by Edward Khoo

Well, a new year is upon us, it’s also the start of a new decade within the blogosphere. More and more people are building blogs, and that means there are lots of blogs competing for the same eyeballs and your blog is just one of many. Try finding accurate figures on how many blogs there are and you will know it’s impossible to find a verifiable number because bloggers and their blogs come and go. Look around. It’s certainly a disheartened moment when you see blogs with quality articles that have been abandoned by their creators.

With all of these blogs out there, and all those information available at no cost, how do you make your blog stand out? No problem, just follow these tips and your blog will blossom in this new era when you stay ahead of the rest of your competitors.

1. Target your content to a specific readership

Image: via Dat Le

Unless you want to throw all of your marketing budget and precious time on people who could care less about your blog, then you must pay attention to determine the preferred audiences to whom you would like to target. Before posting any piece, determine if it hits the sweet spot of your demographic.

2. Be original, be honest

Don’t follow the herd within your sphere of interest. Followers aren’t innovators and innovation keeps readers reading. So, don’t simply spin the same old post. Take an original slant on a common topic.

Be honest. Verify your facts and provide links to additional verification. Readers trust you to be a good reporter, instructor, mentor or inspiration so keep it honest at all times.

3. Don’t be afraid of a little controversy.

Controversy sells. You and I know that. If it is a part of your business model, be prepared to engage others with differing opinions because, guaranteed, lots of readers will disagree, and you may even encounter a few trolls and haters who frequent blogs for no other purpose than to post inflammatory garbage.

4. Post as a guest blogger

Image: via AjDreams

Don’t post to just any blog within your realm. Submit your best pieces to the prestigious blogs – the ones that already have a substantial following. For example, Hongkiat.com is considered by industry insiders to be one of the best blogs for designers, marketers and freelancers. Getting one of your posts published on a top of the line blog is a great way to drive traffic to your blog where readers can find tons of content – all your archives – just waiting for a bookmark.

Of course, getting published on a well-established blog requires insight and something new to be added to the discussion. A rehash of conventional wisdom, regardless of the field of endeavor, won’t make the cut with top tier blogs within any industry or area of interest.

5. Simplify subscriptions

Don’t hide your RSS button down the page together with your WordPress theme credit links, make them visible & clear for your reader’s eyeballs by taking the following approaches:

• Add an RSS chicklet at the top of your sidebar so visitors can easily load your posts into their RSS readers.
• Offer email subscriptions.
• Provide links to mobi feeds so readers can access new content from their cells or iPhones.
• Provide one click subscriptions using reader links to PageFlakes, Google Reader and other remote site readers. You can build a big following fast if you make it easy to find your blog again. And again, and again.

6. Social Media Marketing

The expansion of social media and the evolution of multi-generational media apps are only going to pick up steam. Social media sites have taken off, providing bloggers with an arsenal of tools based on the guerrilla-marketing axiom: Use the resources of others to your advantage.

A few years back, Twitter didn’t exist. Today, not only is it ubiquitous, it spawned a whole new level of web innovation and interactivity.

Follow the rules & open accounts at Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter. Every time you make a new post to your blog, let your readers know about it by posting to these popular sites. Update your status with interesting & latest news that fascinates your readers.

7. Create different profiles for each social media site

On LinkedIn, you want to be all about business. On Facebook, show a little of your personality – the carbon-based life form behind the blog. On Twitter, shine the spotlight on your blog. Each profile should be designed to show a different facet of you and your expertise.

8. Don’t oversell. Teach, too

If you post to social media sites all day long, flogging your latest blog post, it won’t be long before your Facebook friends hit the hide button next to your name. It can’t be all selling and no sizzle. Instead, post information on a new blog piece, but also post news from other sites that you think will benefit your readers. Know when to stop pushing for a larger readership and when to start giving away information to drive more readers to your blog.

9. Long tail keywords get you found

Image: via Wiki

If you maintain a book review blog, a broad keyword like books will keep you buried in the backwash of Google’s SERPs. Instead, narrow the focus of a search engine search through the use of terms and phrases, broadly referred to as long tail keywords.

So, instead of using “books” as a primary keyword, use a long-tail keyword like “independent book reviews” or “book reviews of current bestsellers.” Sure, not as many people will use these long tails when conducting a search but those who do will discover your blog at the top of page 1. And that’s just where you want to be.

10. Optimize your blog – Both for readers & bots

Cut the clutter of 23 affiliate banners, animated adverts and other distractions. Remember, your site should be attractive to human sensibilities.

Indeed, it’s important to look good to readers who follow you. It’s just as important to look good to search engine spiders. Conduct keyword research using tools like Google’s keyword generator that provides keywords used by actual Google users over the past 30 days. Place those keywords in headlines, sub heads and a few of them in your blog posts.

If you don’t know much about SEO, grab yourself a cup of coffee & start reading the comprehensive list of search engine ranking factor provided by Seomoz.

The pace of innovation is only going to increase in this new decade so, if you’re standing still you’re losing ground to competitor bloggers. Stay current, use all the new tools and follow all the new rules.

Your blog space is your real estate. It has value. Make the most of it.

This post is written by Edward Khoo, a tech enthusiast based in Malaysia. He blogs at EdwardKhoo.com & would love to hear from you on Twitter.

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PLR stands for Private Label Rights. Private Label Rights is simply content that has been written previously by someone else for use by others. There are many different ways you can purchase PLR. You can buy content packages in your particular niche or you can join a membership site that provides unique content on a monthly basis.

PLR products provide any online business owner the opportunity to make money with very little overhead, and the great thing is, you now have content that is targeted to driving traffic to your online business.

For example, if your website or blog dealt with “stay at home moms,” you would purchase article packs covering different topics in the “stay at home mom” world. You could use these articles to add valuable content to your website each week to keep your existing visitors happy and to draw new ones in. Additionally, you can use that same content to promote affiliate programs or products you have produced on your own.

Before you dive into using PLR, you must first understand what your rights are as a PLR buyer/owner. Private Label Rights products entitle you to rewrite any or all of the content as you see fit and put your name on the finished product. Although you did not write it, you have the right to claim it as your own.

Any reputable PLR site will provide a list of the ways that you are allowed to use or not use the content that you purchase from them. Each one is slightly different though so make sure you read and understand this important list first before moving forward and using the content.

Finding and posting great content can be extremely time consuming for anyone growing an information business online. But, in order to be successful, you must consistently provide unique content to your readers. This is what makes PLR so appealing. The fact that you are allowed to use this content for your website or blog makes it extremely valuable. The time you save can be put to use developing other more important aspects of your business.

Be aware that PLR does have a downside. There are hundreds of others privileged to use this same content. You must take care to make this material your own before using it on your site, articles or blogs. This is the only way to keep the search engine gods happy…as well as your faithful visitors.

Rewriting PLR content is not as difficult as you might imagine. Here are a few tips:

1. Use a Ghostwriter. Hiring a ghostwriter to start from scratch to create a product for you can be very expensive…particularly for the newcomer. On the other hand, hiring them for a rewrite is less costly and can produce great results. Simply ask your ghostwriter to do a paragraph by paragraph rewrite, using different words but keeping the same feel. Before you publish your articles, check them over carefully.
2. Use a software program created for this purpose. These can be helpful tools, but you must be careful that the feel of the article does not change. Furthermore, these programs sometimes substitute synonyms that turn your article into complete rubbish. Always recheck it closely before using this rewritten content.
3. New Graphics. Even if your PLR comes with graphics, it is wise to have your own graphics made and change these up. Remember, there will be others using the same PLR and using the same book cover as others will be a dead giveaway. Adding pictures and other graphics to the content will make your product stand out from the rest. Using screen print images easily demonstrates what you are trying to convey and it further engages the reader.

   There are free graphics available online as well as many sites that charge a nominal fee for use of graphics. One way or another, make sure these graphics are “royalty free.” Adding video to go along with your content will really up the value of your product.

4. Change up your own PLR product. If you enjoy writing and have the time, changing up PLR will not take nearly as long as creating something from scratch. It’s much easier to rewrite portions of an existing article…than to create an article from scratch.
5. Using relevant keywords and links that have been provided with your PLR can help you to monetize your site. Simply add the links provided, or add in your own affiliate links.

As you can see, PLR is worth its weight in gold and it is worth your time and effort to discover the many different ways of using and making this content your own. PLR is a time-saving, efficient way of providing information online. Don’t miss out on a surefire way to increase the success of your online business or blog.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Using PLR Correctly to Achieve Successful Results

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By Robert Hartland

In this article, we’ll showcase website layouts and navigation structures that really break the mold. The designers of these websites have seen dozens of clone websites out there but have sought their own way. The unusual website layouts and navigation that results can either be very successful and innovative or disorienting for visitors. You decide. When you browse the showcase, think not so much about functionality as about why you design and develop the way you do.

Unusual Layouts

Breaking industry conventions is not always easy. Still, many designers push on to find fresh ideas and ways to innovate. Have you ever driven down a street where the homes perhaps have different-colored paint on the shutters but essentially look the same? The Internet can be the same, with designers cloning the same layouts day in and day out. But it is amazing what can be accomplished by a simple shift in the placement of website elements, while keeping the website familiar and easy to use.

Unusual Layout Best Practices

There are no “standards” for designing your own unusual layouts, only guidelines to keep you on track. The style is defined by freedom from conventional standards and by placing items where visitors are not trained to find them. Here are some ways to achieve an unusual layout:

Let your content articulate the design. Try even five or more columns without aligning everything perfectly. Prioritize usability, with layout as a secondary consideration. Let things flow naturally.

Let your users view content horizontally or vertically, without making additional content hard to find. Bring an element of surprise and excitement when presenting crucial content.

Keep in mind that users tend to focus on faces. Guide them with visual imagery to help them find content. Also, make sure the layout does not disorient visitors. The experience should be new and delightful.

India 60 has a layout that seems successful for every section of the website but “Videos.” Identifying the different content on the website is easy, but no matter how large your monitor (mine is 24″), you still seem to need to scroll.

Big Kid has a series of windows and photos that wrap to your browser window, helping you navigate the content. An effective yet slightly disorienting approach.

26000 Vodka takes an abstract and innovative approach to layout. Even with the parts moving constantly, you still manage to find content and enjoy your visit.

Red Mccombs Media has several different levels of navigation on its landing page and internal pages. While the page design is pleasing to the eye, it can be confusing and frustrating if you are not sure what you are looking for.

Tiny Team has a very simple layout that replicates how folders are opened on a computer. You can easily navigate back and forth through sections after some trial and error. One feature that is lacking is direct access to a specific part on the website.

Max Haus puts its navigation and search at the bottom of the website, with all options initially hidden. Once you leave the home page, returning is nearly impossible.

Webbli World has a very creative layout. All of the main content is hidden from non-members. The unique layout of the Webbli creator and registration form, though easily lost, get your attention.

Jan Sochor has a three-column layout that adapts to each section. The website feels very natural even though it contains at least four different layouts.

Sursly has an interesting take on horizontal navigation; each page contains only a small chunk of information. While the layout as a whole may not be unusual, the dark frame containing the content is.

Gavin Castleton’s layout has a split personality but helps you quickly identify your needs. Once on the website, you are presented with obscured content against a transparent background. The navigation transitions are appropriately nauseating.

FMCS has a five-column layout that is not often seen. While plenty of content is displayed, you are never overwhelmed or confused. Content is easily findable, even if a bit hard ro read when crammed into the left column.

AntiSweden has a full-screen video layout, accompanied by a two-box navigation to the right. When you navigate to a new page, the simple navigation scheme remains.

Samsung has stylized navigation to the right that changes with the photo. The layout is easy to use, though occasionally confusing when new elements are introduced.

Love Bento groups its navigation in the lower-left with the bento box of content. While the website may appear overwhelming at first, you quickly realize understand how to find what you’re looking for.

Unusual Navigation

Developing a unique navigation scheme that does everything but conform can be a huge task, almost the Mount Everest of Web design. Not many people take on the challenge, and not many who do succeed. In this section, we cover both the victories and defeats. Unusual navigation requires a balance between innovation and practicality. If you lean too far towards innovation, the navigation can become frustrating and even unusable. The goal is to make the navigation intuitive enough for the website to be perfectly usable.

Unusual Navigation Best Practices

Unusual navigation has no set rules. Just think differently and try something that does not look, feel or function like your everyday website. And follow these guidelines:

Let your navigation float freely within the content, rather than using the typical “Z pattern” that helps users scan. Make sure the navigation is still clear and self-explanatory, even if it doesn’t sit in the usual location at the top. Make it intuitive yet simple, maybe with just a few symbols that expand into many options.

Use imagery instead of, or in addition to, text. Allow users to use the mouse buttons and click wheel as alternatives (with instructions, of course). Also allow keyboard navigation as an alternative (instructions again, please).

Finally, include arrows that visitors can use to cycle through the main sections without using the main navigation. Allow users to drag items to reveal new content, while maintaining usability and accessibility.

Lucuma displays some great art, but the initial lack of content is a bit confusing. The horizontal scrolling is also interesting, although the pages are so short that you can see multiple pages at once.

Okay Dave puts its navigation at the bottom, while the different images point to the same content.

Marc Anton Dahmen combines mouse and keyboard options for navigation. Making the keyboard interact with the images and text is definitely unique. The configuration stands out while remaining practical.

Andreas Smetana lets you use your mouse wheel or the arrows to navigate through photo thumbnails.

Snuggle Fux takes a curious approach to layout and navigation, with functional expandable windows and no main navigation to be found. If you are looking for something in the 15 most recent topics, you should be fine; otherwise you will certainly give up and move on to another website.

Cypher 13 has expandable navigation supported by photos and text. This style is interesting, functional and at times comical.

Im Design lets you use your keyboard arrows and a few other keys to navigate the on-screen portfolio items. Some of the keys are not Mac-friendly, and visitors are forced to use the mouse on several occasions.

Mandchou offers a small content area designed mainly for viewing the portfolio, complemented by thumbnails at the bottom of the viewport.

Studio Stemmler has a plain landing page. But as soon as you select a category, the interface changes and you have multiple ways to access content.

Lab for Culture has a unique and very interactive style of navigation for its case study section. After clicking through several types of navigation, the final presentation is useful and interesting.

Salinas has a great “Wow” effect when you first select a section. Upon leaving the landing page, the appeal is lost, with the slow-loading content and awkward page transitions.

Got Milk puts its navigation front and center and never budges, although the icons become text on hover.

Ian Wharton uses a combination of navigation and arrows to let you cycle through content, with the option to view full-screen. The interface changes on interior pages, with the main navigation disappearing, leaving only a “Back” button.

Eric Johansson lets you drag the slider at the bottom not only to access different pages but to discover content, too.

Johnny Slack has a fun interactive navigation style that shows all of your options up front and then gives you the option to identify an item by category. When viewing projects, you are presented with expandable images.

Yodabaz has a fresh and pleasing feel for its navigation, and you can find all the controls you would expect from a portfolio.

OFIS borrows from the periodic table of elements for its navigation. It is minimalist yet useful, and it adapts when you enter a new section.

SensiSoft has a familiar-looking information stand to help users connect with its unique style of navigation.

Thibaud not only lets you drag with your mouse but takes a page out of the Pantone color book. Designers are familiar with this and know what to expect.

When Unusual Becomes Unusable

Not all unusual designs are as intuitive as their designers would like to believe. SOme can be more of a nuisance than a convenience. MIT offer some usability guidelines for websites, which are not detailed but still useful as a quick checklist. If your website’s purpose and content are not immediately understood, you may want to rethink your design. Your content’s structure does not have to be conventional, but it should be logical. Few things are more frustrating to a user than not knowing how to navigate content.

Think of your website like a brand new vehicle. It has some things you are used to: a steering wheel, gears, a seat, etc. When you first sit in it, you immediately recognize certain items, but not others. If the gear shift has been moved from between the seats to behind the steering wheel, you might be confused at first. Not knowing how to shift detracts from the vehicle’s functionality. So, the vehicle’s controls should be clearly labeled and feel natural to use. The relocation of the gear shift is one of the more drastic advancements in the usability of automobiles in recent years and feels quite different from the “layout” of typical car.

While creativity, uniqueness and pushing boundaries always benefit the Web community as a whole, usability is far more important. Your layout and navigation must be intuitive and easy to use to be successful.

About the author

Robert Hartland is a professional designer and photographer with over seven years of experience. He owns his own clothing company Envee Apparel, a creative theme-based lifestyle t-shirt company and accepts freelance work through his portfolio web site Aether Design.

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Last year the number of new articles posted on Wikipedia dropped to 20,000 per month, one third of those that were created in 2006 and the number of edits and active editors has also declined.

Why is this happening?

One of the reasons, in my opinion, might be that Wikipedia is seen by most of us as a resource and not as a tool: I find it amazing that there are still lots of people that don’t know they can contribute with content that will be available to the whole world.

But the main reason, I think,  is that for a long time there is a war going on inside Wikipedia, a silent war that has been growing in scale and violence. Wikipedia can be a wonderful resource for fact checking but the truth is that if you are looking for some disruptive theme what you will find is a one sided view on the subject (Global Warming and The USofA education system come to mind). Over zealous editors, or just editors with a political agenda, try to the best of their ability to have information that reflects their point of view and not a balanced one. Also the chance that a new article gets deleted by an editor as been raising exponentially since 2006 and its now thought to be at a 25%, meaning that 1 in every 4 new articles gets deleted. With deletion comes frustration. With frustration comes abandonment (which is just a nice word to say “I’m not wasting my time on this!”).

The fact is that without new content, reflecting what is happening in the world around us, Wikipedia will cease to be the ultimate resource for content and will be just an archive.

Unless there is a way to bring democracy back to Wikipedia, a way to take some power out of the super-editors and the defeat of the proposal for  Global sysops, I don’t Wikipedia can be saved from itself.
What do you think? Did you ever contributed to a Wikipedia article? What is your experience? Let me know in the comments, please.

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The tabs are created from a set of well-formatted div tags & can be completely styled with CSS.

It is the new, improved version (old version) which has many features like:

• automatic slider which pauses when a tab is clicked
• can be controlled from other custom links
• the tab to be activated after initial load can be set
• speed & animation can be selected

The slider also creates SEO friendly URLs for every tab.

Special Downloads:
Ajaxed Add-To-Basket Scenarios With jQuery And PHP
Free Admin Template For Web Applications
jQuery Dynamic Drag’n Drop
ScheduledTweets

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Tags: Javascript

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In this Photoshop web design tutorial, we’re going to learn how to create a slick and minimal-looking website layout. We will use the 960 Grid System as a template to make it easy to align the design elements on the layout.

Preview

Here’s a preview of what we’ll be creating together, click the image to enlarge.

Create a new Photoshop document

1 We’ll be using the 960 Grid System (download it at http://960s/) as a starting template. Once downloaded, ppen up the file called 960_grid_12_col.psd and then hide the group called 12_col_grid.

Creating the background

2 First of all, right-click on the Background layer in the Layers Panel and then choose Layer From Background. This will unlock the Background layer so that it’s editable. I named the Background layer as bg.

3 Now select the Gradient Tool (G), set your Foreground color to #efefef and your background color to #cacaca. Select Radial Gradient as the type of gradient in the Options bar. Drag the gradient onto the canvas so that you have something similar to this:

Designing the header section

4 We’ll add a new horizontal guide at the 50px mark from the top of the document to set our top borders. This will mark the location of the layout’s header section.

5 We’ll start adding our title and slogan; select the Horizontal Type Tool (T) and type your site’s name and your slogan. Here are the font settings I used in the layout:

"YourName"

• Font family: Nilland font (get it from dafont.com)
• Font size: 33pt
• Font weight: Bold
• Anti-aliasing setting: Strong
• Color: #525252

"some awesome slogan"

• Font family: Arial
• Font size: 14pt
• Font weight: Regular
• Anti-aliasing setting: Strong
• Color: #207687

6 Align the fonts on the left top, using your guides for accurate placement.

Creating our navigation

7 Select the Horizontal Type Tool (T) and type the navigation text (home, about us, services, portfolio, and contact) using the following font settings:

• Font family: Arial
• Font size: 17pt
• Font weight: Regular
• Anti-aliasing setting: Strong
• Color: #525252

8 Use the document’s guides to align the navigation link text like the following image:

Creating the search bar

9 Now it’s time to create the search bar that’s situated on the right of the navigation links. Select Rounded Rectangle Tool (U), set the Radius option value to 5px, and then draw the rounded layer shape onto the canvas such that it has 155px width and 20px height, and located at the right of the navigation links.

10 Add an Inner Shadow layer style by double-clicking on the rounded rectangle shape layer in the Layers Panel to open up the Layer Styles dialog box. Use the following settings below for the layer style settings:

11 Let’s create the GO button now. Create a new rounded rectangle shape with the same height (20px) and Radius option value (5px), but with a width of 30px.

12 Apply a vertical (90 degrees) Linear Gradient layer style onto the Go button, with the left color stop being #2fa9c1 and the right color stop being #207687.

13 And then write any text like "search…" using the Horizontal Type Tool (T) on top of the search bar; use a white color (#ffffff).

14 Using the Custom Shape Tool (U), create a white arrow and align it to the center. I used the custom shape called Arrow 2, which comes standard in Photoshop CS versions. Look for it in the Shape option dropdown menu in the Options bar.

Our search bar should be looking like this:

15 Before we move to the next step, just make sure that everything is well-organized in our document. Here’s a screen grab of my Layers Panel as I was developing the layout:

Creating the separating lines

16 Using the Line Tool (U), Create two 1px lines on top of each other, with the following color values:

Note: There are many ways to set the colors of the line shapes. The first is by setting the Color option in the Options bar before drawing the lines. The other way, if you already drew the lines, is to use a Color Overlay layer style. I’ll let you decide how to do this.

Adding the sub-navigation

17 Type your sub-navigation text using the Horizontal Type Tool (T) using the following settings:

• Font family: Arial
• Font size: 17pt
• Font weight: Regular
• Anti-aliasing setting: Strong
• Color: #787878

18 Make sure that the separating line is centrally aligned between the main and sub-navigation. Here’s how it should look:

Creating the featured designs area

19 We’ll start creating the place where the image of a featured design would be, so we’ll select Rounded Rectangle Tool (U), and we’ll create a rectangle of 335px width and 128px height, and a Radius option set to 5px.

20 Apply a gradient Stroke layer style to it by setting the Fill Type option to Gradient. Modify the gradient colors so that it starts at #31aeca and ends at #2b9ab2.

21 Call this newly created layer photo_holder.

22 Well, let’s add an image of a featured design by going to File > Place. This will open up the Place dialog box where you can select an image to place on our canvas. Pick an image, and then press the Place button when you’re done.

23 Make sure that the layer of the image is above the photo_holder layer; if it isn’t, move it. Right-click on the image layer and choose Create Clipping Mask.

24 Modify the size of the image to fit; you can use Free Transform (Ctrl/Cmd + T). When you’re happy with the size, Make sure that your image is aligned according to the image above, flushed to the right of the layout design.

Add some content to the design

25 Let’s add some content to our design, but before we do that, we have to set our boundaries for our content. To do that, drag two horizontal guides like in the following image.

Add a title and a category

26 Use the following settings for the title and category.

Title (in my case it was "Handstand!")

• Font family: Arial
• Font size: 20pt
• Font weight: Regular
• Anti-aliasing setting: Strong
• Color: #2197b1

Category (in my case it was "Photoshop design"):

• Font family: Arial
• Font size: 17pt
• Font weight: Regular
• Anti-aliasing option: Strong
• Color: #313131

Paragraph content

27 Add your paragraph text, using the following image for reference.

28 Choose the Move Tool (V) in the Tools Panel and select our three text layers in the Layer Panel (hold down Ctrl/Cmd while clicking on them to select all of them).

29 Give them equal spacing using the Distribute top edges option.

Create the slider control

30 It’s time to create the slider control. Start by duplicating the two lines we’ve created for the navigation, and then resizing them (you can use Free Transform to do this). We’ll make the dark line darker, giving it a color value of #777575.

31 Then create a small box rectangle shape using the Rectangle Tool (15px wide and 15px high) and apply a Gradient Overlay layer style to it.

32 Before we move to the next step, we have to organize our layers. Use the following reference image to make sure the layers are in proper order.

Creating the content boxes

33 First off, we need to set our boundaries. Drag a horizontal guide and put it on the slider line. Leave a 50px gap, and then add another horizontal guide.

34 Now select the Round Rectangle Tool (U). Create a rectangle of 260px width and 170px height and a color of #d0d0d0. Call this layer bg_1.

35 Align the rectangle like the following reference image, using the Move Tool (V) to position them accurately.

36 Right-click on the bg_1 layer in the Layers Panel and choose Create Layer Mask from the contextual menu.

37 Select the Gradient Tool (G), set your foreground and background color to Black and White (press D to automatically reset the colors). With a linear gradient, drag from top to bottom until you’re satisfied with the look.

38 Now let’s create the shadow. Duplicate the bg_1 layer. Name the duplicated layer shadow. Place the layer beneath the bg_1 layer. Then apply a Color Overlay layer style with a dark gray color (#3e3e3e).

39 While having the shadow layer selected, go Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Set the Blur Radius to 5.0px.

40 Using Gradient Tool (G), adjust the layer mask until you have something like this:

41 Add some content to the box. Below, you’ll see what I ended up with.

42 Group the content layers that you created into a group called content.

43 Now we want to align it. Select the content group, hold down the Ctrl/Cmd key, and select the bg_1 layer in the Layers Panel. Choose the Move Tool (V), and click on the Align horizontal centers option and the Align vertical centers option to position them.

44 Now make two copies of this box by duplicating the layers of the original content box we just created. Align them, change the content, and don’t forget to add a horizontal guide at the bottom.

45 Let’s check back and make sure that all of our layers are organized; use the screenshot of my layers as reference.

Creating the main content area

46 Leave a 50px gap and drag a new horizontal guide. Start adding your content and align it according to the following image.

47 Let’s make it look a bit better. We’ll select Rectangular Marquee Tool (M). In the Style option, choose Fixed Size with a fixed width of 15px and a fixed height of 30px. Set your foreground color to #12197b and fill the rectangular marquee selection with the color (Press Ctrl/Cmd + Backspace to fill).

48 Using the same settings, you can add some content in the right side.

49 Drag a new horizontal guide at the bottom. Add a separating line; use the following image for reference.

50 Check back to see all your layers are organized, using the following image as reference.

Creating footer area

51 We’ll start with the footer area creation by (again) creating a new horizontal Guide. Leave a 50px gap between the guide above, and drag a new horizontal guide!

52 Select the Single Row Marquee Tool (M). Set your foreground color to white (#ffffff). Click on the canvas to create the marquee selection. Then press Ctrl/Cmd + Backspace to fill it. Call this layer 1px_upper_line.

53 Select Rectangular Marquee Tool (M) and create a rectangle of 1020px width (it spans the entire width of the canvas, and 160px height. This will be the background of the footer area. Fill it with any color. Apply a Gradient Overlay layer style to it using the following settings.

54 Duplicate the 1px_upper_line layer and move it to the bottom of the footer, call it whatever name you want, but I’ve called mine 1px_down_line. Here’s how it looks.

55 Start adding some content; use the following images for reference:

56 You can download the social media icons from deviantART – they’re called Aquaticus.Social by Junwei.

57 Align them like in the following image:

Creating the small footer

58 Drag a new horizontal guide at the bottom of the big (brown footer), leave a 50px gap, then add a new horizontal guide.

59 Then write your footer navigation text like so:

60 Write the copyright text and align it to the right, add a final horizontal guide.

Adjusting the canvas size

61 Finally, we need to leave another 50px gap between the footer navigation, copyright text and the borders in order to do that, we’ll adjust our canvas size.

Conclusion

And there we have it! We’ve created a clean and minimal layout design!

Download source file

You want a PSD copy don’t you? Here’s a ZIP archive that contains a PSD, and a JPG preview, get it now!

• slick-minimal-layout.zip (4.97MB, ZIP)

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• Create an Animated “Call to Action” Button
• Design a Minimal and Modern Portfolio Layout with Photoshop
• Related categories: Tutorials and Web Design

About the Author

Mahmoud Khaled a web and graphics designer from Egypt. He’s also a blogger and tutorial writer. At a young age of 15, he already shows skills equivalent to his much older counterparts. Send him a tweet @Mkhaled1, connect with him on Facebook, and visit his site and blog called mkhaled.com.

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Who is LukeyWes1234? A 8 year old  that has turned into a cult figure since it was adopted by the 4chan crew. His videos were hilarious, innocent and… directed by his grandma. Take a look at one of them, the infamous “Ghost Hunter”

The reason why LukeWes1234 was removed from YouTube is due to the user’s age but that doesn’t seem to get any kind of understanding from the thousands of fans and none at all from the 4chan members. Immediately after the account got suspended lots of tribute and support videos started to show on YouTube as well as messages in underground forums to get as many users as possible to setup fake accounts and upload private videos that are innocent at first but that have inserted, in the middle, adult content: 4chan is calling it “YouTube Porn day” and even if it was scheduled to happen yesterday (the 6th) its effects are only starting to become visible today due to the viral nature of the attack (Instructions on what to do and how to do it are still circulating and showing up on message boards as I write this post).

Have you spotted any of these videos? Is this what one can call modern technological terrorism? Should a underage kid be able to post content to YouTube if supervised by an adult? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

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Today on the company blog, Boxee revealed the specs for the Boxee Box and announced that the Boxee Beta is now officially open to the public.

Lots of us at Team Mashable are big fans of Boxee, the media center with a social twist. The company and its software have made some big announcements at CES this week, including the unveiling of the Boxee Box that it’s releasing in conjunction with D-Link later this spring.

I’ve been using the Boxee Beta for several weeks and it’s quite impressive. The UI overhaul is significantly better, and moving from one app or programing source to another is efficient and quick. You can download Boxee for Mac OS X, Windows or Ubuntu Linux.

Boxee Box Specs

Barb had a hands-on with the Boxee Box and its super-cool remote yesterday, but today Boxee has revealed the guts of the $200 device.

The highlights:

Powered by the Tegra 2 (T20) — a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 CPU
NVIDIA Graphicsthat can play 1080p video from locally stored content and stream HD content
Utilizes Adobe Flash 10.1, meaning HD and web content should play back smoother and require fewer resources
RF remote (so you can hide the box behind a cabinet)
802.11n

Boxee also highlights what the Boxee Box won’t feature, namely a hard drive and an IR port. IR dongles will be supported (and I assume the Boxee iPhone app will work, since it connects via Wi-Fi), but the team was unable to get both IR and RF into the device. The QWERTY keyboard aspect of the Boxee Box’s remote does make a strong case for using the packaged remote, even if you’re a universal remote junkie (like me) with a Logitech Harmony One or similar controller.

As for the hard drive, it’s not being built into the box as a way of keeping costs low. The beauty of something like the Boxee Box is that it can take content from your entire network and display it in your living room. You can connect a hard drive directly to the Boxee Box via USB if you really do want to have more localized media storage and streaming.

As a Boxee fan, I can’t wait for this device to hit shelves. What about you? What do you think of the Boxee Box? Have you tried the Boxee Beta?

Tags: boxee, boxee beta, boxee box, CES 2010

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