5 Ways For Small Businesses To Get In The Location Game

Location based check-in type services are this year’s overhyped topic – with good reason. While you may not understand why someone wants to be the mayor of their barber shop, you do need to recognize the behavior that social location services such as Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp! and Facebook Places represents for the local business.


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A Fail Whale For the Rest of Us: Social.DownorNot.com

failwhale.jpg

Netherlands-based website monitoring company WatchMouse has created a public website dedicated to measuring performance at social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Del.icio.us, Digg, Xanga and Flickr.

WatchMouse also release uptime statistics for the top 20 social sites for the month of August. The leaders were Orkut, which had no downtime, Flickr with just four minutes of downtime, Del.icio.us with 12 minutes of downtime and the gaming site hi5 with 32 minutes of downtime.

 

 

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8 Things You May Not Know About Facebook

 

Anyone using Facebook probably has a hard time keeping track of all the changes and updates to the service. Even those of us who use Facebook for business are hard-pressed to keep up. In the last few weeks, I’ve learned more about Facebook through trial and error (and my Twitterstream) than I ever have from Facebook’s communications. Here are a few things I’ve learned that you may not know:

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Your Definitive Email Marketing Checklist

1.  You have your entire campaign planned out.

Before you start any email campaign, you should decide on the frequency of your emails, the topics and how they flow together, how you will follow-up, etc. This should all be figured out before writing one word of your first email.


2.  Your email is going to the right list.

If you have multiple lists, make sure that the email is being sent to the correct list. The last thing you want to do is send the wrong message to the wrong audience.

3.  Your message has an effective subject line.

Every email that you send to your list should have a descriptive and relevant subject line that will drive the curiosity of the recipient to open it. Just like your copy will go through several revisions, so should your subject line.

4.  You printed it out and reviewed it.

By printing the email message out and reviewing it on paper, you will be looking at it from a different perspective which will help you pick up errors that you might have missed on the screen. And you never know, some of your list may actually print out their emails to read so this will give you an idea of how your email will look like in hard copy.

5.  You have provided a plain text version of your message.

Most email marketing platforms will automatically convert an HTML email into a plain text version so that recipients who prefer plain text over HTML, or those accessing on a device that doesn’t display HTML, will still be able to see your message. However, since most of these conversions come up short on the formatting side, you should always go in and clean up the plain text version.

6.  All of your links have been tested.

You should always test all links in the email message to make sure they are correct and working. Nothing is more embarrassing than directing a recipient to a broken link. Chances are, once that happens, you will quickly lose their attention and willingness to click-through again.

7.  You tested your email for email client compatibility.

Just like you would test any web site for cross browser compatibility, you should test your email for compatibility with all of the major email clients. I use Salted Services’Litmus for testing. It saves me a ton of time and clues me in on what my audience may be seeing.

 

How Will Google Instant Affect Your Company's SEO?

When Google announced this morning that it would be delivering search results to users in real time as they type a query, it rightfully generated quite a bit of chatter and intrigue in the tech world and beyond.


The changes are certain to fundamentally change the way people interact with the world's biggest search engine. But what is less clear is how this game-changing update will affect search engine optimization and search traffic referrals to Websites.

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Improve Your Website by Removing 4 Simple Things

Marketing experts often tell you which features your website absolutely must have. But for a post at the HubSpot blog, Kipp Bodnar created a list of items you should delete as soon as possible from your site. Here are a few items that deserve immediate elimination:


Complicated animation.
There's little upside to Flash-based wizardry that hinders the visitor experience and impedes search engine optimization. "Perform a test," he advises. "Remove your animation for a set period of time and see how it impacts metrics like lead conversion and time-on-site."

Industry jargon. 
Whatever your specialization, you start to assume everyone understands industry-specific language. This is a mistake. "Look through your website and highlight terms that are not commonly used outside of industry circles," Bodnar says. "Delete the highlighted words and replace them with more common explanations."

Images.
Every website needs images—but you might have too many. Excessive images slow download speed when visitors click on a page, and search engines consider this a negative factor in page rankings. "Websites that have been around for a while can often collect lots of images, and some of them no longer go with the content of the site," he explains. "Keep some images, but go through and remove all images from your website that don’t help tell your company's story."

"Contact Us" forms.
While you must provide contact information, Bodnar believes a generic contact form is more likely to attract spam than qualified leads. He suggests landing pages with dedicated forms for specific offers: "For example, if you have a form connected to a free assessment, you clearly know that submissions from that form are related to potential customers who want a free assessment."

Sometimes less at your website is more—both for your customers' user experience and search engine optimisation.

Mobile Website Key Pointers

When you're designing your site for the mobile web, the secret is simplicity.

Juniper Research estimates that the number of mobile web users will grow from 1.2 billion this year to more than 2.4 billion in 2014. While many of these users will be able to surf the mobile web just as they do on their desktop and laptop computers, hundreds of millions of others will still be using smart phones with tiny screens and limited bandwidth and navigation.
This makes it imperative for your company's web designers to acquire tools and techniques for optimal mobile web design. On the mobile web, minimalism is essential because screen size is small, users may pay for bandwidth by the megabyte, and navigation is likely to be more difficult.
To simplify your mobile design, take the following steps:
  1. Streamline the menu system.
  2. Reduce or eliminate graphics, especially those used in navigation.
  3. Scale back text and break it over multiple pages.
  4. Eliminate Flash and JavaScript--design exclusively in plain HTML and XHTML using CSS (cascading style sheets).
  5. Avoid pop-ups, which can be unpredictable on mobile platforms.
  6. Think small. Mobile phone screen sizes and dimensions vary from 320 x 480 down to 128 x 160 pixels.
  7. Use a mobile theme. 
  8. Design to scroll only vertically.
  9. Limit page width so that users do not need to scroll horizontally to view content. Users should be able to view everything on a page by scrolling up and down.
  10. Facilitate touchscreen navigation.
  11. Make options larger and increase the "clickable" space around them to facilitate touchscreen navigation. This makes the options easier to select on non-touchscreen mobile devices, as well.
  12. Maintain consistency with your main website. Design your mobile site with a familiar appearance and navigation so that users of your main website can transition more smoothly between the main and mobile site. Make sure users can access their favorite information and features using recognizable links.

 

Contributing to ZendFramework - ThinkPHP /dev/blog - PHP

... on contribution

Who hasn't ever started writing his own Framework/CMS? It is considered best practice for learning purposes, but going through all the security stuff can be stressful and boring at the same time. That's where most devs start to contribute to big Open Source-projects like Typo3 or the Zend Framework, because they are already experienced working with it and yet evolving another system on the market or even getting people to contribute seems like an unachievable task. Instead of wasting his time on yet another ACL implementation, the developer is taking part in making a software become even better, no matter if he delivers new features, reports / fixes bugs or works on documentation (another, yet an often underestimated part of contribution). It is also worth noting that every single Blog-entry and every HowTo thats put on the web also is a great deal of contribution that helps the software spreading. Beginners articles are important to put on the web since every one of us had it's beginnings and these are the sort of articles where many people decide to either use the software for a certain project or not.

As you might see, this article is not only a guide on contributing bugfixes, but also I want to motivate you to just give it a try.

... on Zend Framework

Having spent almost a year at the IRC support channel, I can tell they're really fun guys to hang around with. Of course, the Framework itself developed into a great piece of software. I do not want to discuss the up or downsides of a use-at-will framework, neither I want to recommend it over {put your favourite software here}. But what I can talk about is a little summary of the support channel's chatlogs. The widely annouced channel (which is #zftalk on Freenode) includes all kinds of concerns. One kind of people finds bugs, the other do have really clever ideas on improvements, but when you ask them to contribute its all the same: they either think it takes years to get into it, the others think they might be "not good enough for this". We sure won't force or threaten people to contribute, but what I can do is taking the fear out of it and demystify the thing, so later you might see that its actually just a few minutes to spend. Let me just loose a few words to the latter ones before we get into it: You can't destroy anything, and every idea of yours can also lead to a great improvement either realted to your concern or in a completely different area. We're glad that you take your time, even if you are completely new to ZF. Some beginners concerns already caused developers to write guides and articles that are still around and are linked at times in #zftalk...

... on contributing to Zend Framework

Contributing any code to ZF requires signing the CLA, which is an agreement that both you have the right to share any code you supply, and that you will not patent that code. This is to ensure that the frameworks codebase remains business friendly, and free to use for everyone. In fact you have to actually sign a paper, having done this you can just scan and mail or fax it. This is an important step, and none of your code will be used in any official package unless you did this.

The next step will be reading the coding & subversion standards. If you already had a look at actual ZF components code you should be familiar with the standards. Once you took a short insight (you probably wont be able to just remember all of this at once), you can check out the official SVN repository. Notice, that you, even having signed the CLA and being confirmed, do not have commit rights. So you might now ask yourself how to contribute then? All magic is taking place in the bugtracker, ZF's official Jira. All bug tickets, additions and improvements are filed as tickets here. So if you find a bug, report it here, and soon there will be a discussion in the comments section of a ticket.

Mostly all of these people, being listed by their reallife names, are also to be found on different names in the support channel, so feel free to ask them any ticket-related stuff.

The code itself will be submitted as a patch file (svn diff > patchFile), and uploaded in the Jira-Ticket. This might also be done by people who do have commit rights, but one might not be sure how to fix a problem, or any question might be left. This method of code management then leaves it to the original package developer to decide whether a change should be made or it should be thought over again (might have side effects on other packages and so on).

The last yet very important point is unit tests. ZF makes heavy use of them and so should you. The best you can do is report bugs as failing tests with a short description, fix them with the code diff and then deliver them with working tests.

... in closing

As you might now see, once the problems and the contaminated areas are visible, you can pull out your armory and kill the bugs within minutes. The contribution of new packages for the ZF are made in the Wiki, filed as proposals that later get discussed by the community review team, but I might do another article about that one as its a not so trivial workflow. Whenever you fix a bug or deliver an improvement you will be listed on the official Jiras Overview page of top contributors. Can you make it to the top? ZFs bug hunting days are the place for many contributors to join the battle on a shirt, but you might also see that being an active contributor on an open source project might be a good point of interest on your CV.

Having run out of things to say, I want to call all the devs out there to give it a try. A short quote of Ben Scholzen (ZF Core developer): "I code whenever I feel like it": In closing, remember that neither having an account on JIRA nor Signing the CLA ties you in to any minimum commitment, and you can do as much or as little as you are comfortable with. Just pick the level which feels right for you.