Andrew Miller of YourSearchAdvisor.com made a fantastic presentation at WordCamp in Richmond last week. Here’s a summary of Andrew’s best practices for optimizing search. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: feedburner, Google, relevance, richmond, search, SEO, wordcamp
One of the buzz topics last week was Security & Safety. The issue is URL shortening services. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: bit.ly, rickroll, security, stats, url shorteners, utilities, web
For a couple of years, we’ve been struggling to transfer our experience making broadcast television into a lower-cost web video model. TV commercials can cost $10,000 per second to produce. But shouldn’t real filmmakers be able to make quality content with just a camera and a laptop?
In our new video for Luxe Apothecary, a lot of techniques we’d explored came together in one perfect No-Budget Video (NBV) project. Our experience may be a model for others and has already inspired interesting discussions and new assignments.
The development of an effective No-Budget technique can bring television-quality web video to businesses and content producers of all sizes. Here’s what we learned. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: editing, low-budget, mini dv, no-budget video, technique, video, viral
We continue to install WordPress for clients at an ever increasing pace. But we stopped calling it a Blog. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: blog, blogging, Facebook, feedburner, linkedin, twitter, widgetbox, WordPress
For website owners and creators, it’s important to check for broken links. Here’s our favorite broken link checker. Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s a quick primer on the basics of search for busy executives in the Web 2.0 economy.
Tags: search
TIMA, the Triangle Interactive Marketing Association, had a great seminar on Wednesday presented by Google*. Read the rest of this entry »
Now and then, it’s good to check if all the links on your site are functioning. Here’s a handy online tool to do just that.
Tags: link checker, links, tools, utilities
We’d like to thank our good friend Julie Roland for letting us create her new Web 2.0 real estate web site. Read the rest of this entry »
We found a great tool for analyzing the Search Engine Optimization of any web page. Read the rest of this entry »
We’re big fans of designer and enterpreneur Cory Miller. In his blog, he’s listed 5 Essential WordPress tweaks. We’ve added two more. Read the rest of this entry »
Bigger is not always better. Not when it comes to the size of your webpage. We found a handy tool that measures your “page load.” Read the rest of this entry »
As the usefulness of the web grows, we all have more and more passwords and user names. Some sites allow anything; others want 7 or more characters, upper- & lower-case, numbers. It gets baffling. But here’s a great utility for managing it all.
We recently needed a new camera for video blogging. Thought we’d share the results of our research.
It’s easy to add some bling to your blog with a new theme if you use WordPress.
We’ve blogged about this before, but because keywords are so important, we thought we’d go into a little more detail.
Keywords are nothing more than the most common terms people use to describe something. But choosing the right keyword can mean this difference between success or failure for your website.
For example, we almost called our website “interactive copywriter.” But a keyword search revealed that “interactive copywriter” was not anywhere near as popular a search string as “online copywriter.” Whew! Good thing we looked.
Keywords can be single terms or multi-word phrases (like “online copywriter”). Using a keyword tool gives you objective data about different words and phrases, an easy way to compare their popularity, helps you discover alternatives and gives you more surety about the words or phrase you choose.
We recommend the Google keyword tool for all online copywriting which involves the creation of keywords and phrases.
Here’s another Web 2.0 tip for Boomers.
Favicons (pronounced fave-IKONZ) are the tiny pics you often see preceding a web address in your browser bar. Here’s ours:
In this post , we’ll tell you how to create your own favicons– it’s so easy, you’ll wonder why you waited. Read the rest of this entry »
We all have our own nightmare stories of installation gone wrong. I’m not talking carpeting or kitchen cabinets. I’m talking about installing software.
David Pogue, the technology guru for the New York Times, talks about trying to install software for some new fancy 802n routers - article here. Bottom line: the UI is so confusing, opaque and legalistic that Mr. Pogue never gets the routers to run correctly. Read the rest of this entry »
Part of our mission here at OCDC is explaining the web to digital immigrants such as ourselves.
Search was a 6 billion dollar business in 2006 and is projected to grow at 12% in 2007. Over 1/3 of all purchases of goods and services starts with an internet search. Optimizing your Home Page for natural search helps potential customers find your info on the web. In this post, we’ll tell you how to do it yourself in half an hour with basic web skills. Read the rest of this entry »
We all know when see a website that looks a wee bit “1999.” Lots of tables and no CSS; a relic of the bad-old dial-up days.
Design firms are going to have a very good next couple of years updating all those static Web 1.0 silos. Here at OCDC, we were recently discussing just such a project and someone asked “exactly what is the Web 2.0 look?”
Turns out a lot of us had been bookmarking examples for several months. Here are a few sites we think epitomize mainstream Web 2.0 visual design:
So, after careful consideration, here are a few Web 2.0 design principles we pulled together:
- Lots of white space.
- Tightly controlled color palettes, with just one or two highlight colors and many shades of gray.
- Subtly is a major trend in Web 2.0 design. We’ve seen rollovers so subtle you’re not sure if it’s a link or if your monitor is pulsing.
- Navigation is across the top; subnav drops down a line in Web 2.0 sites. Left nav is pretty much dead.
- Links often call attention to themselves with color instead of an underline. Most links feature rollover formatting using the :hover pseudoclass.
- Gratuitous flash has become extinct (thank heavens).
“Damn hard to get away from tabs,” one of our designers lamented. True that. Interestingly, our friends at Womble Carlyle (see yesterday’s post) have a pretty interesting navigational design (sans tabs).
Finally, hats off to Ben Hunt of Scratchmedia in the UK for his thorough and thoughtful survey of current style in web design. Brilliant!
