WordPress.org just released WordPress 3.3 named “Sonny”which is dedicated to the great Jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt. WordPress 3.3 offers a number of new updates and tweaked features. The first of these is a redesigned dashboard, which features menus and toolbars that are more cohesive and easier to maneuver on smaller screens such as iOS devices like the iPad tablet.

According to WordPress, “Experienced users will appreciate”:

• The new drop-and-drag uploader
• Hover menus for the navigation
• New toolbar
• Improved co-editing support
• Tumblr importer
• Pointer tips for new features included in each new update
• Friendly welcome message for first-time users
• Revamped help tabs throughout the interface
• Improved dashboard experience on the iPad and other tablet computers with better touch support.

I’ve already updated most of my personal sites to WordPress 3.3 and enjoy the new admin toolbar and the layout of the side navigation menus.  Once I am fully familiar with this version we will begin moving all clients to 3.3. That won’t happen right away though. It is one thing to experiment on your own domains, but something else entirely to risk your client’s websites by not being entirely sure that this is the best version of WordPress for their particular site.  One thing that I do love already is the drag and drop interface for images and other media. Since I use two monitors it saves a lot of time hunting through files looking for the correct image and then going through the steps necessary to upload it. Now I just have to find it and drag it. Love it!

You can download it from WordPress or update inside your existing dashboard. Be sure to backup your WordPress website before updating and check to see if there are any plugins that need to be updated at the same time. If they are not compatible with “Sonny” don’t update them. And if you are running Shareaholic (Sexy Bookmarks) be certain to update your preferences after updating that plugin or you will lose them and have to start over.

I will be writing more about “Sonny” as we work with it and please let us know your thoughts of WordPress 3.3 in the comments.

Did you know that Verisign will be increasing prices in the New Year? My account manager at Godaddy sent me a reminder email this morning and I wanted to give you a quick”heads up” on the upcoming Verisign price increase before the New Year so you can plan for renewals in 2011 or first thing in 2012.

On January 15, 2012, VeriSign, the registry for .COM and .NET, will increase prices: 7% for dot COM and 10% for dot NET . As a result GoDaddy, as well as other registrars, may be forced to raise prices for registration, transfer, or renewal.

This is a good time to go through your domain names, determine which are keepers and which can be let go and renew for multiple years to lock in savings at today’s prices.

Free SEO Tools

Have you ever wondered which keywords your competitors are using to rank high in the search engines? This is important because if you are focusing your efforts on the wrong keywords, your website will not rank on the first 3 pages of search results. And we all understand that these are the most important pages!

Niche Watch is a free online tool that helps you see the competitors for your niche keywords. This tool will help you gain a better placement in search engines by helping you compete with your competitors’ keywords.

If you use the Mozilla Firefox web browser, there is also an add-on called Niche Watch Tool 2.0. This tool will provide you with your backlink numbers, indexed pages, keyword occurrences on the page, page rank, all in anchor, all in title, and all in text rank for both domain and webpage information.

No, the title is not a misprint. I am indeed talking about the dot  CO (.c0) domain extensions as opposed to the dot COM (.com) domain extensions.

It’s been a year since the .co domain extension premiered in the domain world. With Amazon’s recent acquisition of A.co & Z.co, and Overstock completely rebranding as O.co, the .co extension is as promising as ever.

You may not know that .CO domains renew a bit differently than .com and .net, so they must be renewed AT LEAST 39 days before the expiration date displayed in your Domain Manager. This means that now is the time to renew your .co domains in order to avoid downtime and possible expiration.

If you own any of these domain extensions, be sure to be on top of the correct renewal date.

Wanted to give all of my fellow domain name junkies a quick heads up. This is an email that I got a few minutes ago from my account executive at Godaddy. (Some people go to Disneyland for vacation…. I go to GoDaddy!)

April 2011,

Denise,

I wanted to give you a heads up on .org and .biz domains because the registry has decided to raise their prices and they will be increasing the price on April 1, 2011. This change will take effect starting at 12:01am PST, April, 1, 2011 on the GoDaddy.com website. If you have any domains with .org or .biz extensions I am recommending that you renew them before April 1st so you don’t have to pay more for your renewals on any .biz and .org domains extentions within your portfolio.

Sincerely,

Tim Harris
Executive Accounts Manager

Your business website is essentially your storefront, business card and most significant marketing piece all rolled into one.  How it affects your visitors and customers is critical to your success.  Provide a memorable experience and customers are sure to return time and time again.  And above all remember that people come to your website or blog for one reason, and one reason only. What’s in it for them? You need to be sure that you are providing answers to questions and solutions to problems or they won’t stay. Worse, they won’t return.

Make your website interactive.

As the Internet continues to grow and evolve it’s becoming more important to create a community around your business. To accomplish this you want to engage your visitors and customers.  This can be accomplished a number of ways.  You can:

• Provide a forum. If your site is built on the WordPress platform there are several really great forum plugins available.
• Post surveys or polls.
• Enable visitors and customers to review or rank items.  For example a “How valuable was this article?” question and a scale of 1 to 5 stars or a ranking from 1-10.
• Offer a blog and inspire comments and feedback. And this is important, post to that blog at least 2-3 times each week! Your visitors love fresh and relevant content and so do the search engines!
• Host contests and sweepstakes
• Publish video and audio content as well as written content.  This gives users another way to access you and your personality.

Make sure your website provides value.

People go online for a number of reasons.  They go online to research a potential purchase, to seek solutions for a problem they’re having and to be entertained.  If your website provides all three; products, information, and entertainment then you’re in terrific shape.  The good news is your content can provide both the information and the entertainment and when written well, can also inspire purchases.  Here are a few ideas to provide value for your customers and prospects:

• “How to” articles, videos, and audio
• Tips articles, videos, and audio
• Case studies
• Workbooks and reports
• Interviews with experts
• Product reviews

Make sure your website is easy to navigate.

I cannot stress this enough! It takes a visitor about 20 seconds to make a decision about whether they’re going to stay on your website or click away. If your site is laid out nicely, with products and services, information, prices, FAQs, and content easy to find then people are more likely to hang out – the longer they stay on your site the more likely they are to make a purchase or to return again. Be sure to install Google Analytics on your site so you can see and analyze your traffic. You will be able to track page views, visitor information, and conversion rates. You can also set goals that can help interpret data by comparing several factors at once. For example, you can calculate how many of your conversions (completed purchases) were generated by females between the ages of 18 and 24 who live in California. Did I mention that it is free?

To make your site easy to navigate consider:

• Keeping your site simple.
• Keep your pages uniform with the same options and appearance.
• If you have a lot of content, great!  Use drop down menus and organize your content by topic for easier access. If your site is built on the WordPress platform the PageMash plugin is a wonderful tool for organizing your pages and dropdowns.
• Offer a search function where users can search for products, services, or content topics quickly and easily. Typically visitors will look for this in the top fold, so don’t place it so far down on the page or sidebar that it gets overlooked. When you have a lot of content, a search function is critical.
• Provide a way for users to easily go back to previous pages.  A back key is an option however if every page has the same options and drop down menus, including the ability to quickly return to the home page, a visitor will always be able to find what they need.
• Test your website’s appearance on different browsers to make sure every visitor has a good experience. Browser Shots is a great free resource to test your website’s browser compatibility in one place. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue.  A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser.  Then they will make screenshots and upload them to their central dedicated servers for your review.

Make your website easy on the eyes.

Ever visit a website and the text was so small or the colors so incompatible that you couldn’t read a word?  Readability is critical to a selling website.  Make sure:

• Your colors are easy on the eyes. Black and dark backgrounds are extremely difficult to read and many visitors will simply leave because they find they are struggling to hard to read the text. Yes, it may look cool, but does it work?
• Your graphics aren’t distracting. If you have too many flashing or rotating images, it distracts the eye from the real message.
• Keep formatting like underlining, bold and italics to a bare minimum. One of my pet peeves when landing on a site is to see a lot of underlined text. My first instinct is to always hover over it to see what the hyperlink is. Let’s face it; we are now trained to look at underlined words or sentences as a hyperlink. Finding that they are not can be both irritating and disappointing.
• Spacing between sentences and paragraphs is adequate. Make sure you have plenty of white space to give the eye a rest.
• Font size is large enough for people to read and font is easy to read

Give them a soft sell.

People expect to be sold to and they’re looking for it – they’re wary.  Instead of hitting website visitors with a hard sell, provide information, solve their problems and show them the benefits of your products or services.  They’ll be much more receptive and appreciative. You need to create that all important, “Know, Like and Trust” factor. People will visit your site to find out information, to find answers to questions and to see what is fresh and new in your business. Once they know, like and trust you, they will be willing to buy from you, or buy  other products and services based on your recommendations if you are an affiliate marketer.

Creating a website that sells requires a structured approach and a desire to create the best experience possible for your visitors.  Once you’ve created your website, consider testing it and asking associates, friends and family for their opinion.

For a free website consultation or evaluation (see… here is the soft sell!) please call us at Your Office On The Web, 888-719-6711. We are your partner in success.

An online presence is important these days for whatever enterprise you engage in. To connect with a wide variety of people there is no bigger forum than the Internet. If you are looking for a way to show off your expertise and also make a little money while doing it, consider starting a blog.

What is a Blog?

A blog is actually an online journal of sorts. With a blog you can upload daily posts about anything that you want. Some people create personal blogs as a way to keep in touch with family members. Pictures, videos and other information are uploaded so your loved ones are current with what is going on with you.

Here we are going to talk about business blogs. This is a blog that you begin to attract traffic in order to sell products or services. To be interesting to others, your blog will need to:

• Have updated content for visitors
• Be marketed to draw traffic
• Register with search engines so it can be found in the rankings

How to Start

If you are new to blogging and are simply engaging with family and friends on the Internet, consider using a free blogging platform to get you up and running. Sites like Blogger.com, WordPress.org, Blogspot.com and others offer free blogs to users. Depending on the platform you choose, the themes and plug-ins (added features) will vary. Most will walk you through the process step by step so that you can be up and running in no time. Frankly, I am not nuts about any of these platforms if you are planning on building, creating and growing an online business.  If your eventual aim is to blog on a business level I strongly suggest that you purchase your own domain name at Godaddy for about $11, get your hosting account set up at HostGator and either learn how to build your own website/blog on the WordPress Platform or hire a professional to do it for you. And you can’t go wrong with the WordPress WishList Member plugin if your plan is to build a communinity or continuity website.

Before you start posting, decide what will be the theme, or niche of your blog. A jack-of-all-trades type of blog doesn’t do as well as one that is geared towards a certain niche. If you like crafts, that can be your niche. If you are an expert on pet care, share that. This is a pet loving world! Create posts that talk about how to craft, what to craft, how to make crafting profitable and so on. Once you have decided on a path, it is time to create that great content.

How to Make Money

In order to make money with your blog, you need to have people visiting it. That is where marketing comes in. To draw traffic you have to get the word out about your blog. Tell all of your friends and family members that you are online with your blog for a start and begin posting your blog links to your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Any money-making venture will take place once you have built your readership with interesting posts. Then you can put into play a number of profitable additions:

• Google AdSense
• Selling Advertising
• Affiliate Marketing
• EBook Marketing

The simplest one to pursue is Google AdSense. You are using targeted advertisements to create revenue for your blog. You are paid per clicks on the ads.

There are other options where you can get paid when someone makes a sale on that website. That is more likely to happen when you join an affiliate program. Join affiliate programs that work well with your website niche.

E-books are short, downloadable electronic books that you can create yourself and sell on your website. They can be on a variety of subjects but in order for them to sell, you must be able to offer new information to your customers.

Blogs can be used to build revenue. Start with your chosen niche and market your blog to find the traffic you need. Then, utilize these ideas to turn a profit.

“What is a cookie and why do I need to know about them?” As a web developer this is a question that I hear from clients all the time. And if they don’t ask the question, I answer it anyway.

Cookies are a small text file composed of alphanumeric characters, which is created on your computer when your browser accesses a website that uses cookies. The name cookie derives from UNIX objects called magic cookies. These are tokens that are attached to a user or program and change depending on the areas entered by the user or program.

There are two types of computer cookies: temporary and permanent. Temporary cookies, also called session cookies, are stored temporarily in your browser’s memory and are deleted as soon as you end the session by closing the browser. Permanent cookies, also called persistent cookies, are stored permanently on your computer’s hard drive and, if deleted, will be recreated the next time you visit the sites that placed them there.

Both temporary and permanent computer cookies can be used for many helpful purposes. Automatic registration logon, preserving website preferences, and saving items to a shopping cart are all examples of cookies put to good use. But permanent cookies also resulted in unanticipated uses, such as Web profiling.

A terrific resource for all things cookies is All About Cookies.org which is a free resource designed to help marketers and consumers understand cookies and the issues surround the use of cookies.

If you want to create cookies on your website there are many javascript sources that you can use. Just Google the words “Javascript Cookie Script” .

Here are several resources for you:

TechPatterns.com – Javascript Cookie Script

The JavaScript Source - Cookie Scripts

CookieCentral.com

If you own a web site with many redirects pointing to it, then make sure those redirects are SEO friendly. People  query keywords differently and might trigger one of your site’s redirects. 

Too many websites lose out on valuable search engine traffic due to incorrectly configured redirects. It is very important that when a search engine crawls your website it is able to follow any redirects you have set up.

However, if the redirect isn’t able to link on a results page, then you lose a potential visit. To help combat this problem, try using this Search Engine Redirect Checker.

Weekly Recommended Resource

Or, in this case, “resources!”.

A well thought out and impeccably maintained membership site allows you to deliver specialized and well packaged knowledge, expert guidance and personal tutelage.

I am often asked what my favorite builders tool for a membership site is. Hands down, I recommend Wishlist Member but there are other membership platforms that we also work in for our clients and can recommend from experience.

Customer Hub is a membership center for Infusionsoft users.

Digital Access Pass offers excellent sequential content delivery for your drip campaigns. (This is also a “hands down” recommendation).

InfusionWP is a WordPress plugin that will turn a normal WordPress site into a full featured membership site, with all the imaginable protection controls at your disposal, yet drawing its data from your Infusionsoft application.

Membergate Subscription Web Site Manager is a high end solution for large membership sites.

Social Sam. This platform ranges from free for your first ten members to $8 per month for up to 100 members on up to $2,000 for 100,000 members.

If you have recommendations for other membership site tools or builders I would love to hear from you!