The rise of Wordpress for ?Non-Blogs?

And by non-blogs I mean portfolios, magazines, communities - essentially anything that doesn’t tend to come under the banner of a blog. You get the idea. I aim to showcase some of my favourite Wordpress powered sites that don’t follow the traditional layout. And following that, I’ll explore why these sites have deviated from the mean.

Straight to the juice…

I wouldn’t want to keep you waiting for some examples, would I?

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Jen Gordon’s portfolio oozes character and flair. Her Wordpress install powers the portfolio, page hierarchy and her blog.

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ComplementaryDuo mixes portfolio and blog effortlessly.

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Darren Hoyt shows off his brilliant design talent. Definitely not ‘just another Wordpress blog.’ (more…)

il sito web ideale, secondo fibonacci (in versione wordpress)


Non mi ero mai accorto che Information Architects offrisse una versione del "sito web ideale", basata sulla sezione aurea di Fibonacci, in versione tema per Wordpress. Gratuita. Insomma si potrebbe provare per qualcuno dei ns esperimenti/siti o che...

Outsource SEO to India

Businesses that are active on the world wide web, no matter how great or small, are beginning to realize the necessity of search engine optimization. As with almost all things Internet related, however, their are a number of considerations to be made which can affect the level of success they achieve. One of the biggest areas of concern is how to go about finding the best solution for optimizing a web presence.

The most prominent reason for SEO services outsourcing to India is to gain expertise, experience and expensive analytical equipment which are not available in-house. You can save great money which allows you to provide your product/services at a cheaper price and increase your sales and productivity. SEO services outsourcing allows the company to focus on greater value adding activities while its support services are assumed by an outsider provider. This has enable organization to accelerate its grown and success through expanded investment in those promotion areas which offer greatest competitive advantage. This helps the companies to become more profitable and thus leads to better service levels than internal departments provide.

Whether you need to implement traditional or fully integrated,mulltichannel SEO strategies, outsourcing solutions deliver the proven, scalable and secure infrastructure you need – from order and information management to billing, web site promotion and hosting, customer service, affiliate marketing, website marketing, online internet marketing. This helps to build a customized solution designed to meet the specific needs of your online business. This further ensures that it remains dynamic and flexible enough to respond to an evolving marketplace.

Thus SEO outsourcing to India can be termed as a management tool for managing and accomplishing the search engine targets of a company. This helps the company to think for more long term targets for organization in a more flexible way and create long lasting relationships with the clients. Company can concentrate on more strategic matters as the technical SEO issue becomes the responsibility of an outsourcing firm.

Web promotions outsourcing company often need to keep skills, certifications and efforts up to date in order to stay competitive. This effort can become as asset and resource for their clients. Management of technical staff and projects becomes the responsibility of the outsourcing firm, so your company can concentrate on its own business.

Thus in the era of communication and fast developments outsourcing SEO is highly recommended. Tasks are designed to cheaper destinations by trannsational corporations at lower cost thus reducing the manufacturing and production costs. SEO services outsourcing assisted with internet and leased lines has earned tremendous popularity across the world and most companies have started adopting these processes in order to maximize profits.

For small businesses and individuals, there are a number of free resources on the web that, with minimal consulting and a lot of time invested, can help produce effective results. SEO isn't rocket science after all, but one has to be marginally adept at understanding the principles behind it in order to properly optimize even the smallest and simplest of sites. SEO free resources, depending on the source, are generally good primers for the small business owner, though consulting should come into play after the initial optimization effort is underway. Free resources are free for a reason.

The reason is that they seldom offer the finite details necessary to rank well for competitive terms, which makes consulting services a bargain for the small business owner as they put the last pieces of the optimization puzzle into place. This is, at least in theory, how many small business owners achieve decent rankings for their site. The reality, though, is that few have the time to perform the work necessary to rank well. From keyword research, content, Meta tags and back link development to reporting and adjustment of multiple parameters, SEO is a time consuming endeavor. For this reason, most small business owners hire firms to perform their optimization as putting someone on the payroll full time isn't an expenditure that falls within their budget.

For mid-sized companies all the way up to large corporations, there are two options: hire someone in-house or contract with an SEO firm. Companies tend to lean toward hiring in-house SEO's for two main reasons. The first is the reduced cost of services and the second is that they gain the false sense of having better control over their optimization efforts. The first reason is valid, as many SEO firms are really SEM firms in disguise, and want to treat optimization as though it should be a perpetual, ongoing investment like PPC. They want to contract businesses for extended lengths of time with outlandish penalties for opting out early. They also tend to charge exorbitant monthly or bi-weekly fees that might lead some clients to guess if they are paying an expensive Manhattan or downtown L.A. mortgage. Not all SEO firms operate this way, however, and finding one to suit your needs and budget can be accomplished with a little searching.

As for companies having the false sense of better control over their optimization efforts, this is simply a holdout from the traditional business model that doesn’t stand up to the information age we live in. Hiring an SEO in-house because you feel that having him or her at arms length is an advantage is akin to setting up a kitchen in your office so that you can have more access to food preparation than ordering takeout can provide. The problems is that , like large scale food preparation, SEO requires a team effort. A souse chef is not a baker any more than an SEO guru is a content writer, developer, programmer, designer or submission specialist.

This is why competent firms will always be able to provide far better service than an in-house individual. Staying on top of changes to search engine algorithms, setting and adjusting Meta tags, designing search engine friendly navigation, writing well optimized content and building back links through multiple means is simply not possible for one individual working 9 to 5, or 24 hours a day for that matter.

SEO India : Search Engine Optimization Guide

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your web pages and getting links into your site in order to achieve the highest search engine rankings possible for your keywords/phrases.

With the recent Jagger update settling, many people find their sites no longer have the high rankings they had for so long enjoyed prior to the latest Google update.

So, the sites that lost these rankings are scrambling to find some answers as to why their site dropped. While it's my business to know the intricacies of how this particular update impacted the search algorithm, there are some common ground starting points that if you apply these to all of your sites, you should be able to survive any update intact.

  • Proper naming structure
  • Name your page titles with your keywords if possible
  • Always have a sitemap
  • Always include a robots.txt file
  • If you must use a re-direct, be sure it's server side, not with a meta refresh tag
  • Don't use hidden text
  • Make sure your keyword phrase is included in your H1 tags
  • Don't optimize for more than 2 keywords per page
  • Use text links where possible
  • In any product image, be sure to use the alt tag
  • Use hyphens, not underscores when you name a page file
  • Make sure your site has an error handling page
  • Create a Google Sitemap and submit it to them (This is in addition to a typical sitemap)
  • Offload all your js and css code
  • Don't forget about meta tags

Search Engine Optimization is speclialized technology working behind Search Engine Marketing. SEO Optimization deals mostly with organic/natural search engine rankings

so much pending…

I have a lot of work to do and so many things are uncertain now.

I am going to volunteer at a books-for-prisoners program tonight. This is a group which receives requests for books by post from incarcerated persons and then gathers in a room twice a week to try to meet the demand.

Last night I went to the community action board (CAB) meeting for the Seattle HIV trials unit. I originally took an interest in them a few years ago but I could not participate in their trial because I was doing so many other studies at the time. Now that I am interested in participating I do not have time, because it requires a stay in Seattle of a few years. Since I returned from India I saw an ad for them recruiting a recruiter and I applied for the job. At the interview I got news of other HIV-education community activities and am trying to get involved. I talked to Ian Maki, the chair, about joining their group last night and I followed up today with a written email request. I want to get in before a three day conference next week, because becoming a CAB member is the best way I have of qualifying for an invitation to the event.

I had been talking with Nandan for some time about founding a non-profit organization in Benares. The primary suggest I had was for an AIDS information center. I do not know exactly what he thinks about this. He is reserved sometimes and other times I think that he simply does not have opinions at all. In any case, he will go along with it. I have already begun web work on it. I am also almost done with the work I intend to do on the business website which I am making for us. There are things which I do not like about the css template which I am using - in particular, I would like for all information which would ever be repeated on multiple pages to be included in the css - but I have been slack and just copied unfit templates and changed content. I hate the prospects of streamlining my sloppy work later especially when I know that my misunderstanding about the mechanics of css must be trivial, but at this time I do not know how to do what I know can be done.

I am going to be curating an art show of approximately six sculptures for a native American lady named Melody who I met at the research job in Bellevue which I left about a month ago. I like the pictures she showed me of her work but I have not seen it live. I am anticipating about five hours of work prep and about ten paid hours of event monitoring for her. I wish I would have gotten involved sooner because I do not like to have deadlines so close - the show is in two weeks.

A guy from work gave me a copy of a space movie that he made. His name is Dean Keasey and the movie is Planeta Deliria. Visually the movie is excellent background filler and I really appreciate the mood it sets. I have a lot of questions about the video editing because I do not know anyone else who has put so much effort into such a thing.

A few weeks ago when I went to Olympia and stayed at Chez Cascadia I met a woman who worked for the Indian Association of Western Washington (IAWW). I talked to her about getting information about the distribution of AIDS information in segregated tribal communities. I thought that I might be able to find a precedent which could relate to my wanting to distribute AIDS information in India. She suggested spiral.org, which is a site put together by Drexel University. I have checked neither the site nor the university. The woman's name was V. Lee Scharf, mesa(underscore)solutions at msn.com.

I have an appointment with Sarah Carr at the National Institute of Health tomorrow. I sent a complaint about the review board in that medical study which scarred me, and she is going to listen to me or something. I have an interview written and I will be surprised if she makes it to the end because it is thorough. The review board is still short with me. They really must be clueless from their freshness. The researcher is new and the review board is new, and both of them are likely considering all the money they make to be pure profit with no complaints. It seems likely to me that they either have no contingency plan to deal with complaints or that their plan is to ignore or cut short all questioning. I am not sure I want to drop names at this time but I have records online elsewhere.

Lee won his disability hearing October 25th plus he should be getting close to the availability date for his public housing. In the meantime we left Mike and Natalie's house to make room for their winter guests and are living with Larry and Joe, who Lee has known his entire life. They own a farm in Kent but the bus to Seattle is direct and it really is not more time consuming to commute from here than from Bellevue.

I need about $250 to set up some websites for the next couple of years. I am planning on getting hosting from site5 and I would like to learn a little about using ruby on rails if I can. I have not even begun to research the feasibility of that. I hope to have the money paid and the websites completed before December.

I also need to take the GRE general exam and maybe the chemistry exam before December. I have been studying for both.

Tomorrow is Halloween and I do not have a costume. I need something.

I am going to be late for the books meeting. I have to go now.

Away With IE 6! Unless You Love Picasso

If you like Picasso, then you already love the way the IE6 renders most web pages.   If not, please read on.

I recently read an articulate summarization about IE6. Hard to say more than this -- Kudos to the gthing.

Stick with the fox.

3 Recommendations for Clients

What are the three recommendations I have for clients who wish to get the most value in their online investment?

1. Choose your partner very very carefully.
2. Invest in Strategy
3. Combine Offline with Online

Choosing an Internet Marketing & Web Development Partner
This needs to be a long post all on its own... but to summarize, while category experience can be very comforting, that should not be the number one consideration (number 3 perhaps). Instead, I'd focus on the company's creative energy, their reputation, and their process. Within that process, I'd rate the company that front-loads their projects with discovery and planning the highest.

An Internet Marketing Strategy is Essential
There are too many marketing plans out there with bullet points for "Rebuild website" and "Spend more on pay per click", and there aren't enough companies investing in the strategies that tie the online initiatives to measurable business elements. The Website, blog, social media, ppc, seo, etc are all elements that need to work in concert and all be tied by the same goals. One thing I love today is Google Analytics and the tools that allow marketers to trace the performance of campaigns through funnels that land on a conversion (hopefully). Each campaign can be tagged and tracked for performance. The controls for managing the display, spend, keywords and the ad creative itself are at our finger tips to control. Not surprisingly, this requires more time to manage.

Now this is another topic also for later, but I must just set the seed... one challenge we have is in helping clients to see that this is a new advertising model and so is the payment structure. Our goal in managing a ppc campaign for example is to reduce the spend. To that it takes more management time on our part. One a % of spend payment structure, you quickly understand how that fails the client.

Forgive my stream of consciousness style, and to try to regain the topic again, let me conclude that all of these pieces interrelate. The website is only one element of an internet marketing strategy.

Combine Offline with Online
Taking the last point to its logical next step, online doesn't live in a vacuum. Offline is important. It serves as an important vehicle to drive visitors online (snicker snicker). Of course it serves other purposes (which you can only try to measure as effectively as online), but really where is the conversion taking place today? Where do you spend the least for that conversion today? Point made.

Netintekijän Firefox-lisäosat

firefox.pngFirefox on hyvä selain, mutta erityisen hyvä se on netintekijöille kuten site buildereille, ohjelmoijille ja web designereille. Tämä ei kuitenkaan johdu Firefoxin itsensä ominaisuuksista, vaan siitä, että Firefoxille saa useita käteviä plugineja eli lisäosia. Esittelen tässä parhaat, joihin itse olen törmännyt. Linkit vievät lisäosien lataussivuille.

Web Developer
Web Developer oli ensimmäinen Firefoxille tehty koodarin apuväline, johon tutustuin. Sen paras puoli on monipuolisuus. Toimintoja käytetään hiiren oikean napin valikon kautta. Mukana on mm. välimuistiin, evästeisiin, lähdekoodeihin (XHTML, CSS, JS), lomakkeisiin ja kuviin liittyviä toimintoja. Eräs kätevä toiminto on myös selainikkunan koonmuutos haluttuun resoluutioon. Tätä tarvitaan, kun testataan sivuston toimivuus eri resoluutioilla (Windowsin vastaava toiminto on turhan hidas).

Firebug
Firebug keskittyy lähdekoodeihin, DOM:iin sekä Ajaxiin. Firebug avaa selainikkunan alareunaan upotetun ikkunan, jonka voi avata myös popupiin. Firebugia käytetään joko Inspect- tai Edit-tilassa. Inspect-tilassa Firebug näyttää aina sen kohdan lähdekoodia, joka liittyy hiiren osoittamaan sivun kohtaan. Lähdekoodi näytetään kätevästi tagihierarkiana sekä "tagipolkuna". Käytössä on myös JS-konsoli, jossa näkyvät varoitukset, virheet ja XMLHttpRequestit. Edit-tilassa voi muokata lähdekoodeja reaaliajassa. Eniten Firebugista hyötyvät Ajax-kehittäjät.

HTML Validator
HTML Validator lisää selainikkunan alapalkkiin pienen ikonin, joka kertoo yhdellä vilkaisulla, onko sivun lähdekoodit kunnossa vai ei. Vaihtoehdot ovat "oikein", "varoituksia" ja "virheitä". Ikonia kaksoisklikkaamalla aukeaa Firefoxin tuttu lähdekoodinäkymä, jossa HTML Validator näyttää korostettuna virheelliset kohdat sekä luettelon ja syyt virheistä. Lähdekoodin validoinnissa käytetään käyttäjän valinnan mukaan joko W3C:n spesifikaatioita tai hiukan monipuolisempaa HTML Tidyä. Lisäksi HTML Validatorista löytyy automaattinen lähdekoodin siistimistoiminto (lähdekoodinäkymän ylävalikossa). HTML Validator kuuluu jokaisen nettikoodarin perustyökaluihin.

ColorZilla Color Picker
Kyseessä on nimensä mukaisesti kätevä pieni lisäosa, jolla voi napata selainikkunasta haluamansa värin. Selaimen alapalkissa on pieni värinäyttö, josta hiiren vasemmalla napilla pääsee valitsemaan väriä. Kun värin on valinnut, sen heksa- tai RGB-arvot voi kopioida klikkaamalla värinäyttöä hiiren oikealla napilla. Mukana on myös laajempi värikartta-popup, jossa voi säätää valitsemaansa väriä. Värivalinnan lisäksi ColorZillasta löytyy (X)HTML-tagien ääriviivojen esitys sekä "tagipolku". Tämä auttaa etenkin CSS-bugien selvittelyssä, jos jokin tagi näkyykin erilailla kuin CSS:llä oli tarkoitus määritellä. Vastaava toiminto löytyy myös Firebugista, mutta ColorZillassa se on nopeammin käytettävissä.

Live PageRank
Live PageRank näyttää avoinna olevan sivun Googlen PageRankin selainikkunan alapalkissa. Tätä ei varsinaisesti tarvita sivustojen toteutusvaiheessa - muuta kuin muistuttamaan, että hakukoneoptimointi täytyy aina huomioida. Sen sijaan tästä on hyötyä silloin, jos asiakas kysyy: "Miksi sivuni ei näy ensimmäisenä Googlessa?" Live PageRank kertoo nopeasti, onko Google vielä edes listannut sivustoa hakuindeksiinsä. Tämän blogin PageRank on näköjään 4.

6 Reasons Why You Need a Website


Do you have your own website? Yes, great then you know some of the benefits it brings you. No, Then let me show you some reasons why you need a website.

If you don't have a website, then you might not realize all the great things it can do for you. Maybe you think that because your business is too small – or maybe you don't even have a business there wouldn't be any point! Perhaps you think it'd be a lot of work for little reward. Or maybe you spent a lot of money for a site back during the dot-com 'boom' days, only to get nothing but trouble out of it and shut it down a year later.

Whatever your situation is, though, you need a website, and I'm here to tell you why.

1. People Will Look for You Online.

Sooner or later, someone's going to type your name or business into a search engine. What do you want them to find? Nothing, or worse yet, your competition. These are people who want to find you. They are looking for what you are selling, and if you don't have a website then you're letting them down – they expect to find you online. For many people, you might as well not exist if you can't be found with a search engine. Not having a website is like not bothering to get listed in the phone book. Can you run your business without a phone? In this "Information Age" we live in being online is vital.

 

 

 

2. Websites Cost Next to Nothing.

Up until a few years ago it cost a lot to run a website – but those days are long gone. There are literally thousands of places that can host your website. There are free hosting companies that give away space in exchange for putting banner advertising (of which you have no control) on your site. Unless you are just putting up a personal website I advise you to stay away from the free hosting companies. Your ISP may give you hosting space. Again this should be reserved for personal websites not for business.

A great low cost company that I use for my web hosting is Micfo Web hosting: Take a look at their great hosting plans. You can even try them for 30 days for FREE. Really, it's never been cheaper for you to have a website than it is today.

3. Websites are Great Advertising.

Whatever you're advertising – services, products or just yourself – a website is a great way to do it. Every other kind of advertising going costs a premium, especially if you want to target a specific kind of person, and there's no guarantee that they're paying attention. Websites are like brochures that are free to reproduce, interactive, and quickly distributed to people who are already looking for them. No advertising medium even comes close to the ease-of-use and effectiveness of a website.

4. A Website is a Worldwide Presence.

On the web, it doesn't matter whether someone is next door to you or on the other side of the world, they can see your website just the same as anyone else can, and it doesn't cost you or them any extra. Phone and mailings both cost enormous amounts long-distance, but your website lets you send information anywhere without any extra effort or expense. You can make friends and contacts in places you've never been and will never go – suddenly, working globally is no more effort than working locally.

5. Your Website Can Make You Money.

There's a lot of money on the web, and it's not hard to get some – the longer you're online, the bigger your share can get. If you have something to sell, you can sell it worldwide, thanks to credit cards. Most hosting companies even offer merchant accounts Micfo has several great ways for you to accept online payments and build your business. Doing business online eliminates almost every overhead there is: all you need to do is have the goods. If you've written something useful, you can put it out there with a few ads. You won't get rich overnight, but you can set up a steady trickle of income... and there's no limit to the number of trickles you can set up.

6. Your Website Can Save You Time.

Giving out information takes time, whether it's on the phone, or in brochures, or even if it's just emailing your family. Websites are designed to save you time. All your family and friends can read your online diary (known as a blog), but you only had to write it once. Customers can see your whole product catalog without ever needing to talk to you or visit you. This is the power of the web: things on it are written only once, but can be downloaded endlessly – a good website runs itself, and keeps being useful to people for much longer than you'd expect.
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Submission

Alright, I'll admit it: I'm too damn lazy to code up my own custom blog.

The original plan was to create my own database-driven, fully dynamic, ajax-enhanced blog that is very similar to wordpress, but unique as well. The idea was great. In fact, I had several plans for it, including a public release once it was finished. But, as I have stated above, I am a lazy bastard, and gave up on this idea for now.

Besides, why do all that work myself to achieve something that will be lacking when I could just use wordpress and start blogging in 10 minutes?

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