A couple years ago I would have said it depends. Now it is a necessity.

It doesn’t matter how big your business is or how much money you bring in. If you exist, I want proof of it on Google. I can bring up a business listing and even get reviews within minutes right from my cell phone anytime, anywhere.

We live in an on demand world where everything is a click, flick or a button press away.

But I Can’t Afford a Thousand Dollar Website!

Well me neither.

Luckily I make them for a living. For those not as fortunate feel free to learn more about how I can get you up and running with a customizable website for very short cash. The truth of the matter is, you really don’t need a thousand dollar website. There are tons of free content management systems and thousands of open source plugins on top of that creating endless possibilities for a completely unique, dynamic, out of the box website for your business. It’s not always about the glitz and the glam but about easily providing the information your audience needs.

Your Online Identity Freebies

User moderated reviews and online discussions have become the corner stone of a business’s online identity. These sites dominate the search engines and our mobile phones when searching for information about businesses and therefor should not be overlooked. You should check these sites to see if your business is already listed and add/modify as needed.

• Yelp
• Google Maps
• ZoomInfo

These sites require more attention on your part if you decide to participate. They take time to develop interested audiences but can be well worth it in the long run.

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Don’t Be A Sucker

That basically just means don’t spend thousands of dollars on a crazy flashy website for your corner store boutique. Web developers are a dime a dozen – you can find them at your local college campus, all over Twitter and dominating craigslist. Be careful any way you go about it though. If you think you are getting ripped off, you probably are. Get a couple quotes for the same project and learn the lingo. Don’t go overboard with Internet marketing techniques like social media marketing and SEO. Get yourself a functional up to date website that provides your audience with what they want.

- Photo by Curious Expeditions

As I submerse myself more and more into the world of Thesis from DIYthemes, I am gaining a huge appreciation for all of the enhancements it provides to the WordPress platform. Furthermore, I have developed a new found appreciation for developers who have taken the time to create WordPress plugins that integrate easily with the Thesis theme.

If you don’t know about Thesis yet, check out my post about why I am such a fan.

The following plugins all make use of the Thesis framework to make their installations extremely painless. Most make use of Thesis additional WordPress hooks to display content in places that were previously inaccessible. I’ve yet to find a solid list of Thesis ready plugins on the Internet so I took the time to put this list together for whoever is curious.

Thesis OpenHook

Thesis OpenHook takes the process of modifying Thesis and simplifies it! I couldn’t properly make a list of Thesis ready WordPress plugins without including the grandfather of them all. This plugin lets you take full advantage of Thesis additional hooks.

Thesis Import/Export

With this plugin, you can download individual data files for Thesis Options, Design Options, and all OpenHook content.

Yoast Breadcrumbs

Automatically add breadcrumbs to your site with no Template tweaks as long as you are running Thesis.

Thesography

The purpose of this plugin is to make displaying EXIF data as convenient as possible, while using as much of WordPress’ native image handling as possible. It can be inserted automatically into the Thesis theme.

Javascript Nofollow Links

This plugin replaces the standard anchor tag for comment author links with a bold tag and adds javascript behavior on the new tag to allow it to be clicked. It contains code for Thesis theme users to remove the redundant link on comment avatars.

PixoPoint Menu Plugin

Adds an SEO friendly, accessible regular or dropdown menu to your WordPress blog. Uses wppagemenu() which is also used by Thesis so no extra steps are needed after installation.

Commentwitter

Gives commenters the option of Tweeting their comments with a link to your post. Uses Thesis hooks to automatically display necessary code below your comment forms.

Visual Recent Posts

This plugin gives the look of a magazine-style website with thumbnails and excerpts in a clean layout. Easily place your Recent Visual Posts by simply inserting your desired Thesis hook on the settings page.

FV Descriptions

Simple plugin which allows you to mass edit the description fields of your choice

Honorable Mentions

These plugins don’t use the Thesis framework like the plugins above however were developed with Thesis in mind at some point during their development process.

• Results Count Remix
• WordPress Menu Creator
• Ajax Edit Comments
• WP Greet Box
• Subscribe to Comments

It’s important to note that most other plugins would work just as well with Thesis than with any other theme. This is only a list of plugins made with Thesis in mind. If you know of any other WordPress plugins that make use of the Thesis framework, please share them below.

Disclaimer: All links to Thesis from this blog are an affiliate link. If you purchase the theme through one of these links I will receive a percentage as commission. This is the first (and probably only) product I would ever endorse for money.

Rather than reinvent the wheel here I’m going to share some articles I both agree with and have found helpful in the past. WordPress is extremely powerful in it’s simplicity but is made more powerful by it’s loyal users. The future of this platform is very exciting as we stretch the possibilities of traditional websites.

First off, we have an excellent article by Devlounge which poses some great questions:

• Things To Consider When Using WordPress as a CMS

Next we have a series of articles from Noupe convering some excellent WordPress as a CMS plugins, techniques and unique uses:

• 101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress
• 40 Exceptional “CMS Enabling” WordPress Plugins
• 25 Unique uses of WordPress as CMS

Now WordPress isn’t the perfect CMS solution right out of the box, so NoScope.com discusses it’s shortcomings and some possible improvements:

• 10 Changes To Wordpress That Would Make It A Killer CMS

It would also be nice if you took the time to keep your WordPress CMS somewhat user friendly so we’ll turn to Stylizedweb for that:

• 10 Steps to a Client Friendly Wordpress CMS

And finally, a few lists of plugins that can help you successfully turn your WordPress blog into a fully functional content management system:

• 31 WordPress CMS Plugins via Jon Bishop (me)
• The Autopsy Of WordPress As CMS With 25 Great WP Plugins & Designs via Onextrapixel
• Use WordPress As a CMS: Plugins, The Bare Minimum via Themeshaper
• Top 10 WordPress CMS Plugins via Blueprint Design Studio

WordPress is what you make of it. For some it is a simple blogging platform no different than Tumblr or Blogger. For others it is an all inclusive content management system for their corporate website. Developers continue to recommend WordPress as a CMS because of all the extended functionality contributed by the community as well as it’s raw simplicity.

So I decided to put together a list of plugins that can help you turn WordPress into pretty much whatever you want it to be. All plugins link to the WordPress plugin repository and have been updated within the year. This list differs from previous plugin lists because of it’s depth and thought that went into comprising the list. I was very careful to not just repeat what other blogs have posted and hope you find something new and useful here.

SEO

HeadSpace2 SEO

HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site. The is by far the best SEO plugin I’ve seen for WordPress. Makes it easy to manage meta data across the entire site or for specific pages/posts.

Redirection

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

Image Editing

Scissors

This plugin adds cropping, resizing, and rotating functionality to Wordpress’ image upload and management dialogs. Scissors also allows automatic resizing of images when they are uploaded and supports automatic and manual watermarking of images.

Contact Forms

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

MM-Forms

MM- Forms is the easiest form builder I’ve come across in the WordPress Plugin directory. It’s simplicity is no testament to how powerful it actually is which makes it the perfect add-on for any WordPress blog.

Search

Relevanssi

Relevanssi replaces the basic WordPress search with a partial-match search that sorts the results based on relevance. It is a partial match search, so if user inputs several search terms, the search will find all documents that match even one term, ranking highest those documents that match all search terms.

Search Everything

Search Everything expands WordPress’s built in search functionality to also include tags, categories, revisions, images, attachments and more.

Admin Enhancements

Custom Admin Branding

The Custom Admin Branding Plugin allows you to re-brand the Wordpress login screen, the admin header and footer with your own custom images.

MailPress

With this plugin you will be able to send beautiful and styled html and plain text mails based on dedicated themes and templates for any e-mail notification issued.

WP e-Commerce

The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

Events Calendar

Events-Calendar is a versatile replacement for the original calendar included with WordPress adding many useful functions to keep track of your events. The plugin has an easy to use admin section that displays a big readable calendar and lets you add and delete events.

Magic Fields

Magic Fields allows you to create new “write fields” as the author calls them. This basically means you can create additional types of content like pages, posts and links.

WP-CMS

WP-CMS is a plugin for Wordpress that changes the functionality of the Wordpress admin backend to act more like a CMS. The blog functionality becomes optional and the focus is on writing pages to make Wordpress as user friendly for you and your clients as possible.

WordPress Admin Quick Menu

This simple WordPress plugin allows users to add quick menu items to the WordPress sidebar. It’s designed to help webmasters have easy access to external pages such as Analytics and shopping carts in their WordPress admin panel.

User Management

Role Scoper

Role Scoper is a comprehensive access control solution, giving you CMS-like control of reading and editing permissions. Assign restrictions and roles to specific pages, posts or categories.

User Access Manager

With the “User Access Manager”-plugin you can manage the access to your posts, pages and files. You only create a user group, put registered users to this and set up the rights for this group. From now on the post/page is only accessible and writable for the specified group. This plugin is useful if you need a member area or a private section at your blog or you want that other people can write at your blog but not everywhere.

Content Enhancements

TinyMCE Advanced

This plugin adds 15 plugins to TinyMCE: Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Date and Time, IESpell, Layer, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras

WP-CMS Post Control

WP-CMS Post Control builds upon the new controls in WordPress 2.7 to give you complete control over your write options. It not only allows you to hides unwanted items like custom fields, trackbacks, revisions etc. but also gives you a whole lot more control over how WordPress deals with creating content! This helps you use WordPress more like a CMS, alowing you to totally customise what your authors see and us

More Fields

More Fields is a WordPress plugin that adds boxes to the Write/Edit page. These boxes contains input fields, so that additional (more) fields can be added to a post. For example, if you write about books, you can add a box where you can enter title and author, etc. The boxes can be placed either to the right or to the left on the Write/Edit page.

Side Content

Side Content enables you to define a set of widgets which are effectively placeholders. Each one is empty until you assign content to it when editing a page. This enables you to extend the content of the page into the sidebar

Page Blocks

The Page Blocks plugin extends your WordPress pages by combining the dynamic content of widgets with the static content of pages. Up to four “blocks” can be added to each page (two above and two below the page’s content), and widgets can be added to each block in the same way they are added to sidebars

Page/Post Management

My Page Order

My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface.

Dashboard Pages

Rather than have a majority of the dashboard widgets focused on new blog posts and comments it puts the sites page listing front and center in the dashboard for easier and quicker content management.

pageMash

Customise the order your pages are listed in and manage the parent structure with this simple ajax drag-and-drop administrative interface with an option to toggle the page to be hidden from output. Great tool to quickly re-arrange your page menus.

Navigation

Wordpress Navigation List Plugin NAVT

The plugin gives you the ability to create unique site navigation from your pages, categories and users using a Drag ‘n Drop Interface; arrange the items within a group in any arbitrary order. Navigation groups may be composed of any combination of pages, categories, Authors, (Editors, Contributors, Subscribers), internal/external links and list dividers.

Multi-level Navigation Plugin

Adds an SEO friendly, accessible dropdown/flyout/slider menu to your WordPress blog

Core Enhancements

WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Assorted CMS Solutions

WPML Multilingual CMS

WPML makes it possible to turn WordPress blogs multilingual in a few minutes with no knowledge of PHP or WordPress. Its advanced features allow professional web developers to build full multilingual websites.

Pods CMS

Pods is a CMS framework that lets you create, manage, and display your own content types. Don’t bother hacking blog posts into becoming something they’re not. With Pods, create entirely new data structures with only the fields you need. Like Drupal CCK, you can set up relationships, allowing for a whole new level of interconnectedness.

Flutter

Flutter is a feature rich WordPress CMS plugin that focuses on easy templating for the developer and simplifies content management for the admin by creating custom write panels that can be fully customized (radio buttons, file uploads, image uploads, checkboxes, etc).

Ryans Simple CMS

Converts your WordPress admin panel into a simple CMS. This is aimed at web designers who want to provide a simple administration panel for their clients to update basic static websites.

There are over 6000 plugins in the WordPress Plugin directory. Some are broken and others are just not worth your time. However, you should at least know about these 13 as they are either the most sought after or provide much needed functionality to WordPress.

Lijit

Wouldn’t it be cool if your search page also included relevant results from your social media accounts as well as friends in your blogroll? Seems to make perfect sense which is probably why Lijit did exactly that. They have an awesome group of people working over there with a solid product. At least give it a try.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

A great way to keep people on your blog is to recommend similar blog posts when they have finished reading the current one. The plugin has a bunch of settings making it easy to customize for your blog.

WP-PageNavi

The traditional “Previous Posts” and “Next Posts” in wordpress is unintuitive and boring. This nifty little plugin makes it easier to navigate farther into ones archives by jumping to different pages. It’s standard functionality on most popular news sites so it only makes sense you would have it on your site as well.

WP-DB-Backup

This one is straight and to the point. Back up your wordpress site so if something goes wrong you don’t kill yourself.

Contact Forms 7

You would think contact forms would be built into wordpress but remember wordpress is a blogging platform and not a CMS. However, we can turn it into a CMS by adding plugins like this. It has pretty much all the functionality you would need out of a contact plugin including extensive customization capabilities and the ability to export data in multiple formats.

WP Ajax Edit Comments

I like when sites give me the opportunity to edit my comments after I’ve posted them. I don’t think not having this functionality would prevent someone from commenting but it’s a nice treat after the fact.

Subscribe to Comments

This plugin goes on my list of essentials. It’s the easiest way to get repeat visits from your commenters. It basically allows commenters to subscribe to all future comments on a post.

WordPress Blog Stats

I use this in conjunction with Google Analytics for two reasons.

1. I like having stats integrated into my dashboard.
2. I like being able to use that data with other plugins.

It’s not like the data is collected any faster than Google Analytics as both have a decent delay however it’s nice to see what another service has to say about my websites traffic.

Multi-Level Navigation Plugin

In my quest to turn WordPress into a proper CMS, this plugin has been crucial. It’s hard to find a customizable browser compatible dropdown menu plugin, but here you go.

Akismet

This one’s simple, it marks spam as spam for you so you don’t have to.

WP Super Cache

This cool little plugin caches your posts so traffic spiked from popular social bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon won’t crash your server.

Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin has been around for awhile and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. It’s an easy way to take control of your XML sitemaps and encourage Google to get your site listed in their index faster.

All In One Seo Pack

Although it can be argued this plugin is not as useful as it used to be because of changing SEO standards, it makes it easy to edit the meta description and keywords of individual posts as well as manipulate the metadata of your entire site from one location.

- Photo by Muffet

Part of keeping up to date with industry trends is knowing where to look for good quality web resources. Some sites stick out in this category more than others. I thought it would be nice to share a list of the sites I frequent the most often when in need of inspiration or web design help. I found most of these sites through Digg and Twitter over the years and continue to find new excellent resources from friends and followers.

I visit some sites more often than others because of the frequency and quality of the posts they provide. Specifically Smashing Magazine and Fuel Your Creativity have continuously stuck out.

Please share some of your favorite blogs that provide resourceful posts about web design in the comments.

(Note: This code is meant to be put in your Wordpress Template. However, it should be easy to modify it for other uses.)

Awhile back, I tweeted about how I wasn’t a huge fan of the AddThis button and I felt the need for more actionable social sharing buttons. That led to a few conversations with an AddThis representative about how I could still use their JavaScript to help track my custom buttons usage.

So now, with this code, you can use any custom social bookmarklet you like, and still track the button usage.

So first and foremost you will need an AddThis account.

Then you need to add the AddThis javascript to your HTML. I like to put it in the footer so all of my content can load first.

Next, you will need to add the following javascript, substituting the “YOUR-ACCOUNT-ID” with your AddThis username. I usually put this right above the first link that will be using the AddThis code.

Finally you will need to add the ‘onclick’ javascript to the anchor tag like I do in the example below. The key here is to put the name of the service you wish the button to link to where I have inserted ’stumbleupon’ below. A full list of services can be found on the AddThis custom services page.

So that is how I am able to track my sharing button usage on my site through AddThis without using the AddThis button.

TweetSuite

TweetSuite is an excellent plugin developed by ’social & viral marketing scientist’ Dan Zarrella. It started off as a plugin that returned all ReTweets of a post and has turned into a complete Twitter/Wordpress solution.

Features include:

• Server-side (no-JS or remote calls) TweetBacks
• ReTweet-This buttons for each TweetBack
• A digg-like Tweet-This Button
• Automatic Tweeting of new posts
• A Most-Tweeted Widget
• A Recently-Tweeted Widget
• A My-Last-Tweets Widget
• A My-Favorited-Tweets Widget

CommenTwitter

I designed CommenTwitter to both increase the quality of tweets about posts as well as generate traffic to that post. I believe people should be just as proud of their comments on other peoples blogs as they are of their own blog posts.

Basically what you do is input your Twitter Credentials before you submit a comment. This in turn tweets an excerpt of your comment along with a link back to the original comment in it’s entirety.

TweetStats

TweetStats is a nifty little plugin that works alongside the TweetBacks plugin. It ultimately allows you to add a widget to the sidebar of your most recent and most popular tweets. I’m hoping this is the beginning of a new generation of plugins working together to present the best content to it’s readers.

Automagic Twitter Profile URI

This is a great plugin that uses a commenters email address to ping the Twitter API and retrieve their Twitter username. It then “automagically” adds the commenters Twitter name next to their name in their comment.

Tweet This

I’m not a huge fan of setting up wordpress to automatically update your Twitter feed every time you post. I think it should be on the publisher to write tweets that are both personal and more attractive to draw in their followers. However I do think it is important to allow other to easily tweet your post.

Twitter Tools

Twitter Tools is another one of those complete Wordpress/Twitter solutions.

Features include:

• Archive your Twitter tweets (downloaded every 10 minutes)
• Create a blog post from each of your tweets
• Create a daily or weekly digest post of your tweets
• Create a tweet on Twitter whenever you post in your blog, with a link to the blog post
• Post a tweet from your sidebar
• Post a tweet from the WP Admin screens
• Pass your tweets along to another service (via API hook)

Twitter Remote

While not technically a Wordpress plugin, I’ve always been a fan of the MyBlogLog Recent Readers widget and this would be the Twitter alternative. It basically just display a list of the most recent Tweeps to visit your blog.

I think these plugins best represent the potential when discussing Twitter/Blog integration. It’s time we start working on more practical uses and stop reinventing the wheel. I hope you enjoyed my list and please feel free to add your favorite Twitter/Wordpress plugins in a comment below.

I’ve made this mistake in the past and it may have cost me a few readers. People get trigger happy with their plugins and readers can’t get to the content.

You need to remember that the content is the main reason someone might be reading your blog at any one point in time. If your blog takes 5 minutes to load there is a good chance they are going to bail.

I’ve set up a development blog for the purpose of testing my blogs speed when adding and updating plugins. The goal is to keep the load time down to seconds. This way I know my blog can handle the load when getting a rush of new readers from a social bookmarking site or high profile twitterer.

My basic rule of thumb is if the plugin isn’t beneficial to the reader I don’t use it. I have since removed all back links to blog directories and any traffic boosting programs. I even got rid of sociable because it added a half a second load time to the page.

There’s nothing I need to put in my sidebar I can’t create a new page for and its not worth the hassle.

So please use plugins that direct me to your best content and focus on helping me, the reader.

- Photo by Editor B

The other day I was thinking that it would be great if Twitter could be used as a communications platform for discussions around blog posts. I mean we already do this but lack organization. We all know organization isn’t Twitter’s strong suit.

Ultimately I think it would be beneficial if everyone tweeted their blog comments. Currently you’ll see things like:

“Commenting on Jon Bishop’s blog” or “Reading This Awesome New Post”

Every once and awhile someone will actually provide value when Tweeting about one of my posts … but this is rare. I think more people need to start speaking up as it is only through the general consensus of the greater population that we can come to the most logical solution.

So this is where Commentwitter comes in. Ultimately my goal is to give the commenter the option of sending their comment to twitter and allowing people to follow that blogs comments both in the blog and in twitter. The main reason for this is to generate a buzz and encourage commenting on peoples blogs. It will also improve the quality and value of people’s tweets revolving around blog posts.

So here it is, Version 1.0 of Commentwitter.

I’ve talked about variable video and personalized video a little in the past. Now let’s look at some more examples and break down some of their components.

Here are some examples:

• Inspiring Escapes
• Dexter
• Haunted house
• Walts wisdom
• Carmen has a crush on you
• News3Online
• Disney World – New
• I Love You – New

There are 4 main effects that can be achieved in a variable video:

• Variable text – example: holding up a card with the persons name
• Variable image – example: holding up a picture of the person
• Variable audio – example: saying the persons name with actors face covered
• Variable video scenes – example: saying the persons name without actors face covered

If you wanted to create a variable video campaign, there are multiple ways to go about it. All of the above effects can be recreated using Adobe Flash. If you only plan on doing variable text and/or imaging in the video you may not need 3rd party software. If you do wish to integrate your variable video campaign with other software, XMPie recently announced video integration capabilities with their system.

Another important aspect of variable video is the story. To properly recreate any of the videos shown in this post you would need actors, sets, equipment, scripts, etc. But, one great thing about variable video is it’s surprise factor. You could get away with crappy quality video as long as the personalization tied in seamlessly.

The most important part of any variable video campaign is it’s final conversion screen. This is where you encourage personalizing the video for someone else. Someone the user believes will find the video entertaining. People love seeing their name in lights and now everyone can be part of the internet video phenomenon.

Contact Magicomm to learn more about variable video.

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve had the privilege of working on a cross media marketing campaign for Canon Europe. In true ‘I can do anything’ fashion, we at Magicomm decided to throw everything we had into it. The campaign is going to be showcased in the Canon booth at Drupa.

I’m not only excited about this campaign because of the client, but what we did in the campaign itself. It’s basically your standard PURL, kinda like the one we did for Magicomm, however we’ve simplified and viralized the whole microsite. I’ve been talking alot about interactive video in the past couple weeks and the potential it has as a marketing medium. Now I finally get to put my theory to the test as the last page of the PURL features its very own interactive/personalized video.

The PURL will go live in Drupa mid next week and we’ll have it live for the public a couple days after that. Be sure to check back to see how the campaign is doing as well as learn a little more about how effective it actually was.

I talked awhile back about personalized video and how it could be (is) the next big marketing medium. The benefits of personalized video are obvious, you’ll get better quality personal information and it is very viral.

The key here is personalization and interactivity. The internet took a turn a few years back with the rise of social and interactive networks. From that point on, the user was given control, and thats the way it going to be from now on. I showed in my previous post how successful personalized video is and now, I want to show you how easy it is to pull off.

Here are two videos i made when first experimenting with how flash could be used to manipulate video:

The best part is that i made each of those videos in under 15 minutes.

All you need to do it upload your video in flash:

1) File -> Import -> Import Video

(Note: I had to rerecord my video as a wmv because i could not get avi to work properly)

2) Then choose:

“Embed video in SWF and play in timeline” is what allows you to manipulate movieclips on top of your video. Now what you could do with this is map certain items to sync with the video and possibly even change those items at run time. You could insert personalized images, text, etc.

This is a little trick I’ve pulled on some family members in the past and most recently on my boss for April Fools. All you need for this is a working version of Adobe Flash.

If you cant see whats happening, basically the effect is that the desktop looks like its moving back and forth. 

So all I am doing here is tweening 2 instances of the desktop (which i Print Screened) over a static instance. Then all you do is full screen the SWF on your targets desktop. You can do a lot with this little gag including; hiding the users mouse, popping up text and moving icons at will.

Back when GMail did their YouTube contest, i used this gag to simulate the envelope moving across multiple screens.

A few things to remember when doing this are:
Make sure your stage width and height are the same as the target monitor
I use PNG’s of the desktop so there is no quality loss
Make sure you do View -> Full Screen and not just maximize the SWF

* Update: Here are the source files of an example

There’s a small back story to this entry. Ive been working with an open source content management system for my company Magicomm and it eventually came time when we decided we were going to start our own blog. My goal was to use the preexisting framework of the CMS to smoothly integrate the blogging software into the back end of the system. It turns out this was the easy part….

So now the goal of this entry. When it came time to output the data into your common blog format I found that their were some small things that helped my blog get indexed by popular blog directories as well as other assorted social media aggregations.

So ultimately I’m assuming you understand the general format and benefits of a blog. You’ve got your title, author, timestamp, and a post of some sort. Other optional features include keywords, permalinks, comments, and an RSS feed.
Now I want to go into a little more detail about the code side of this and show you where some simple HTML syntax separates the blog from the..um… not-blog.

Rel-tag

First I’ll talk a little about my favorite blogging feature, the ‘rel-tag‘. Rel-tag is basically a keyword that physically sits on your screen as apposed to META keywords which hide in your page’s header. Now when you’re displaying ‘rel-tag’ that relate to a specific post you use the relationship attribute of the anchor tag to define the hypertext as a ‘tag’.

As you can see it it pretty simple to establish a tag. Basically rel-tag is a MicroFormat and what you are doing is declaring that this link is an author-designated keyword for this post. Also note that in the URL of the link I’ve separated the two words with a + sign instead of a space (You could also use %20). You want to try and be sure that your tags relate and are appropriate for your post. Alot of social media aggregators use this information along with specific information in your RSS feed to categorize your post and you can often see your tags displayed on sites such as technorati.com and mybloglog.com.

Permalinks

The second thing I would like to talk about are permalinks which are also often called bookmarks. Permalinks are basically links back to a specific entry that will never change. This makes them ideal for bookmarking which is why it comes as no surprise that the following helps you establish a permalink/bookmark.

As you can see we once again use the relationship tag to define the Permalink. This is not always necessary however Ive found that certain social media sites use the bookmark relationship to determine if this link is a permalink or not.

RSS

Now last but not least there is the RSS feed. I could go on forever about the different formats and everything you can stuff into a solid feed, but i wont. The only thing i want to mention here is how to make your feed available to social media sites (seems to be the theme here). Basically what you do is use a combination of rel=”alternate” and type=”application/rss+xml” to define a META link to an RSS file.

Thats pretty much it. I hope that between the 3 things I’ve showed you and some of the resources ive presented you should have a social media friendly blog thats ready for the masses.

Here’s another effect using AS3 to make fog with source files below.

View: http://bishport.com/fog.html

Source: zip

This is my first attempt at creating a realistic flame effect in Actionscript 3.0 so be gentle.

View: http://bishport.com/flame3.html

Source: zip

So its no news that a personalized landing page as a response portal to any kind of direct marketing campaign can increase response rates dramatically, but where’s the next step up?

Well it seems as if there are multiple cross-media technologies emerging from the web to help engage, interact and even entertain the user, therefor increasing conversions. People have seen XMPie and other related products do cool things with people’s names and putting them in the picture. But what if the user could change their name at runtime. Furthermore what if the users name wasn’t in a picture, but in a short movie. This is the future of PURLs as a response portal and will be a hit in the social media world. Already I was pointed to a website for a TV Show on FX and I was amazed at what they had done. Here is a PURL someone made for me. I like everything about it, from the page looking like a blog to my name being inserted into the movie.

Now here’s something my own company put together. Basically I wanted the user to be able to interact with the flash movie in real time from outside of the movie itself via the web-form. Using javascript, I was able to insert the users name into the newspaper at runtime and its had an amazing response. People need a break from their every day activities and these fun side trackers give them this opportunity, so both the user and the company win.

So I’ll say it now and say it loud. Get Interactive, Engage your Audience and become successful.

Can search engines read flash? A lot of people think that because flash is a program running on a website, it cannot be read by search engines. This is true to some extant however that does not mean there aren’t methods to make your flash movies Search Engine friendly. In fact Google CAN index your flash movies. In “Google Can Now Index . . . Flash!An Interview with Michael Marshall by Robin Nobles” (here), they discuss how Google indexes your flash movie and different things the author can do to help the process.

There are also other methods you can use if you want to be sure all search engines are indexing your flash movie. I use SWFobject. Here’s a brief explanation of how it can be used with some examples.

So first thing you need to do is upload swfobject.js to your website and link it in your header somewhere:

View Live Tutorial

And your done! So here's the result:

And here's what you see if you don't have javascript or Flash Player:

And here's what the search engines see:

Not too shabby.

The cool thing about all of this is the code is valid HTML and XHTML 1.0. There are also a bunch of other cool features with swfobject so explore their website and have some fun.

Now there has been some discussion on whether or not the content in the div tag that is being overwritten might be looked at as spam by Google at some point. So far it hasn't been a problem and as long as developers don't abuse this we should be good well into the future.

So go off and have fun with flash. Make many websites and flash intros to your hearts content (if your into that sorta thing). The future of flash looks brighter every day.

These are just a few ideas to get you started. Any true SEO expert will tell you there is a lot more that goes into it including but not limited to incoming link monitoring and maintenance, following Google’s new search engine patents, optimizing for keywords, etc.

So there are 3 main things to remember when optimizing your website:

1) Choose appropriate keywords:
This includes making sure you have those keywords in 3 different places; your site content, your Meta content, and your incoming links. Also don’t use your keywords too much, this is known as “stuffing”, but too little and Google won’t index your site properly.

2) Friendly URLs:
The following is BAD:
      mysite.com/index.php?car=jeep&type=wrangler

This is GOOD:
      mysite.com/jeep/wrangler

The difference is easy to see, one is easier to read for both humans and search engines. Also it is a good thing to be specific, so use your keywords in your URL where you can.

To accomplish this most people use Mod-Rewrite (Google it). Another alternative is to use a Content Management System for your website that will automatically create friendly URLs for you. I use PHPwcms but other good ones are Drupal and Mambo but I found mine at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/.

3) QUALITY incoming links to your site
This is the most important in my opinion and usually the hardest to pull off.

Basically the idea is Google will boost your site up on the rankings if you have alot of incoming links from sites similar to yours. This does not include link compilation sites and Google might penalize you for this. Usually the best thing to do is contact the administrators of similar sites and request an affiliate link in exchange for a service or a back link. Another good strategy is to put out press releases with your sites link in it.

Extra Knowledge:
So if you can’t tell, Google is the most popular search engine out there getting roughly 91 million searches per day. That’s a little less than half of all searches done daily. So it’s usually best practice to optimize your site for Google. If you want more information just contact me through facebook and I can give you some extra pointers.