How To Find New Ideas For Your Blog

Wondering what to write about next in your blog? Hard-pressed for ideas? Fear not, there is now software that suggests new, relevant topics…  automatically, and for free!

103bees is what all the, er… buzz is about.  All you have to do is install around 4 lines of JavaScript in your blog’s footer. Every day you will get the list of questions searchers asked to get to your website. This will give you precise ideas for your next post.

How, do you ask? Let me give you an example straight from the 103bees web site:

“… Let’s say one of your webpages gets visitors for the search query ‘myspace backgrounds’. We can safely assume that those visitors expect background pictures available for download and that they find what they were looking for on your webpage…

… For your ‘myspace background’-webpage you will discover many questions like ‘how do i put my picture in a myspace background’ for instance. Clearly, this very visitor wasn’t so much interested in downloading images, but more in some kind of how-to article. Writing a short blog post with detailed instructions on how to put one’s picture in a myspace background is a good idea and would add content and authority to your website. You could also put a link to the new article on the page containing the background images… “

Incredible, yes? We wasted no time in installing it on this blog and putting our money where our mouth is… by putting our JavaScript where our footer is…

We got hold of this brilliant idea listening to Shoemoney’s Net Income Show on WebmasterRadio where he interviews blogging pioneer Darren Rowse of Problogger. If you’re an Internet junkie, WebmasterRadio is where you can get some of the best fixes on the planet!

A future post will list some of the questions we decided to write posts about.

Stay tuned!

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, blog+posts, blog+ideas, blogging+ideas, ideas+for+posts, blogger, wordpress, 103bees, webmaster+radio, net+income, shoemoney

Style Your Search Button!

Do you feel, like we do, that a grey search button is usually a misfit on a good page?

Firstly, when the rest of your page has been carefully colored, why should one part of it be dull?

Secondly, the grey button critter will stand out from its surroundings because of aforesaid dullness, and for this reason will attract visitors’ peripheral attention.

But you probably don’t want the visitor to be distracted by anything while you are moving him down your carefully planned eyepath, sooooooo…..

GET RID OF THE GREY and make the button blend in with its surroundings!

And if you want, change the color of the text while you’re at it.

You can do all this by using simple CSS commands. Here’s how (the ‘before’ and ‘after’ buttons are shown in the above graphic):

First of all, contain your whole search box code in a “div”. Define an id for it called, say, “mysearchbox”. Then define a class for the button called “.btn”, like this:

#mysearchbox .btn {
      color: #A90000;
      background-color:#FFD700;
      font-size:75%;
      text-decoration: none;
}

In your HTML code for the search box, go to the line defining the search button, and add styling like so:

input name=”sa” value=”Search Our Site” class=”btn” type=”submit”

… and kiss your dull grey search button goodbye!
 
  

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Technorati Tags: web+design, css, search+button, usability

MyBlogLog: The Latest Blog Add-On

If you have a blog and you want to be SEO-hip (and just plain friendly) you should consider incorporating the hottest add-on: MyBlogLog.

This publishes pictures of people who read your blog on your blog. The graphic at left is one version of what you will see.. custom formating is possible at the MyBlogLog web site.

The MyBlogLog panel can easily fit in your sidebar. Actually you can position it anywhere on your blog since it is generated by introducing a snippet of code into your blog page code.

Readers declare themselves on the MyBlogLog web site. They do this by joining your blog’s ‘community’ there. To join a community, readers have only to find the name of the blog they are interested in, and click ‘Join Community’.

But here’s the thing: readers can click on other reader’s pictures and then interact with them through the MyBlogLog web site. This exchange of ideas makes life better for all of us and is one of the great benefits of the Internet …

The MyBlogLog web site contains various indexing features such as most popular web sites of MyBlogLog members, and community-wise member lists.

Of course for all this to happen, you and your readers have all got to register at MyBlogLog.com. But that’s not a big deal, since sharing is what web 2.0 is all about…

If you’re a business blogger, there’s no choice about adding it… it’s compulsory!!

Learn about our Iphone web page design service

Technorati Tags: mybloglog, blogging, seo, social+media+seo, social+media

Create A Demo Mobile Web Site

Want to get a rudimentary idea of what your mobile web site can look like? There’s this web site where you can input limited text and graphics and look at them in a simulated mobile phone screen…

After putting it together, you can even host it free on that web site’s server. We did this ourselves, and you can see the result here.

To play with this free tool, go to mobisitegalore.com.

Even though there are limits on the length of your company name and what you can place on the index page, this web site will help break you in to the mobile web concept.

Definitely worth a try in your spare time!

Learn about our Iphone web page design service

Technorati Tags: mobile+web, iphone+web+site, demo+mobile+web+site

Better Get an Iphone Web Design Fast!

On January 9th, 2007, Apple Chairman Steve Jobs announced that his company had created an Ipod with a phone built in, and he called it.. the Iphone.

The reaction to the announcement was mixed… Cisco Systems sued, saying they had trademarked the name. Experts claim that there is not much to write home about the feature that Jobs touted the most — the Iphone’s touch screen — since mobile phone majors already make phones with them (O2 XDAs, i-mate JAMs and even Motorola’s A1200 MING).

But the fact is, people are saying things like:

“If I am in a bar and there are pleasant people of the opposite sex whose attention I would like to attract, it would not work, I promise you, with a LG KE850 nor yet a Nokia’s N800. But try it with an Apple iPhone. Then they will be all over me like a rash… ” (Gareth Powell in tech.blorge.com )

Knowing the cult-like status of the Ipod, this little doohickey is going to go through the roof when it is released in June. It is going to do for mobile browsing what YouTube did for video posting. Everyone’s going to be browsing the Web from their Iphone, so be forewarned: you had darn well better have web pages that read easily on it, other wise millions of I-surfers ain’t gonna see you!

Basically you want web pages designed according to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C’s) Mobile Web Best Practices… they should also fulfill their purpose for existence and have high usability.

You have till June to upload your pages, which gives the right amount of time to traverse the web design process. You also have enough time to save up the $500 you’ll need to buy the Iphone! Maybe you could fast once a week and use the money you save…

Happy Iphone browsing!

Learn about our Iphone web page design service

Technorati Tags: Iphone, Iphone+web+design, mobile+web

Expressing My Feelings About Expression Web Designer

By R Kamalathasan, Web Designer, The Magnum Group

Recently I had a chance to try Microsoft’s Expression Web Designer trial version, and here are the impressions it made on me.

I was interested in taking it for a whirl to evaluate the buzz in web development circles that Expression Web Designer is a whole new product and not an upgraded version of FrontPage 2003.

My reactions to this preliminary exercise were as follows:

• The design interface looks neat and displays the content correctly when checked with a previously built web site.
• The support for CSS styles was very impressive, showing a very big improvement over FrontPage
• Its error identification capability in code view is also excellent. Problem code is identified by a wavy underline, and when you mouseover the spot, you see a description of the problem in a tooltip. With this kind of help, you can easily construct a standards-compliant web site (which you could not do with FrontPage)
• The Page Editor option contains plenty of improvements over FrontPage. In the authoring tab there are options to choose a default document type, a document type declaration and a CSS schema. There is also a new tab for CSS which applies styles automatically according to the tab’s settings
• The Visual Aids option will definitely be useful for beginners to identify the elements of a page without difficulty.

Surprise: Nothing’s Perfect!

There are of course some drawbacks to employing Expression Web Designer (especially for advanced users):

• The lack of support for PHP and JSP.
• It only works with Windows.

Conclusion:

Expression Web Designer is an excellent tool for the professional web designer that is purely in compliance with Web 2.0 and CSS 2.1 standards. It will go a long way in making the average site conform to current-day coding standards.

Technorati Tags: FrontPage, HTML+editor, XHTML+editor, web+design, web+designer

Ajax: Just Like A Backdoor Thief

So why the devil, after saying so many good things earlier about Ajax, such as likening it to vitamin pills and fast food (hmmmm.. that might not be so good…) am I painting it a sinister shade?

Well actually I don’t intend to imply criminality, it’s more like robbing Peter to pay Paul… and what’s being transferred is page views.

Ajax, as most techies know, stands for Asynchronous JavaScript And XML. It’s a programming strategy that enables a web page to be updated with new information without the page reloading each time. Google Maps and Gmail are examples.

With a non-Ajax page, if you caused a page to change, a page reload would have to occur. But not with an Ajax page. The page is updated without a reload, which implies you can experience multiple page views without the page reloading.

So what’s the big deal?  I’ll tell you what. Web analytics programs, which measure page views (among other things), depend on page reloads to increment their page view counter. With Ajax, the page views occur without the page reloads. The accuracy of your web analytics program’s page view figures is therefore significantly diminished and could mislead you.

It’s like the web analytics program is guarding the front door of your house while all the time, stuff’s being taken out the back!

The solution: Web analytics programs have to start watching the ‘back door’ too!

Matt Cutts, the famous/infamous Google engineer, screamed about this in his blog recently, you might want to look at Matt’s post to delve deeper…

I take this opportunity to wish your web analytics program a happy and prosperous 2007 —

… and a Happy New Year to you too  :-)

Technorati Tags: Matt+Cutts, Ajax, web+analytics, page+views