We just wrapped up a modal contact form utilizing Takayuki Miyoshi’s “Contact Form 7″ plugin for WordPress. Thought we’d share process, we’ve been using both lightbox style modals via jQuery and CF7 for some time – just not together until now.
Author Archives: Wade Sonenberg
Matt Mullenweg WordPress Interview
For those of you not familiar with Matt, he’s one of the original developers of that little software package we call WordPress. No news or insight into WP 3.0, but some of the answers are fascinating – I especially like his analogy for WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org…
Thanks to Anthony Brewitt for the great find.
Google to Penalize Slow Loading Websites
Something that has been hinted upon for a couple years, was finally announced – Big G is working a penalty for slow load time into their algorithm. According to Google’s Webmaster Central blog, the penalty at this time is a minor one, and only affects:
- less than 1% of search queries
- only queries in English made through Google.com
As part of that effort, today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.
It goes on to say that the penalty doesn’t count as much as “Relevancy of the page” – but what else does?
You can check your website’s load time at Pingdom.
Some tips to speed up web page load times:
- Reduce HTTP requests
- Combine all javascript files into one
- Combine all CSS files into one
- Use CSS Sprites to reduce number of background images needed
- Reduce the number of images on a page
- Optimize images to reduce their file size
- Use an Expires or a Cache-Control Header
- Minify CSS and Javascript
- Use HTML and CSS over images where ever possible.
Facebook Networking for Business: It works
Just thought I’d share an example with everyone, saw this on Facebook today – the names & pics have been blurred to protect the innocent:
Building a good network, and asking for help couldn’t be more easy. Ten years ago, this would have taken hours and hours, now just 15 seconds.
Keeping Your Website’s Copyright Date Current with PHP
Never have an outdated copyright date (displaying © 2007 in 2011) again. It’s super easy, and is only one line of code.
© <?php echo date('Y'); ?>
It seems it’s more prevalent around the turn of the calendar year, but why not cross it off your yearly list without even doing anything?
50% Off for Green Companies
We’re offering a 50% discount on all web projects for green businesses from now until Earth Day
That’s right, until April 22, 2010 we’re slashing all web design, SEO, and social media marketing projects in half. As a web design & marketing firm, we’re limited in how much we can recycle, eliminate waste, and cut our carbon foot prints…. so we’ve decided to put our money where our mouth is and try to give eco-friendly businesses a leg up.
Contact us to get started, or tell us what you think of the program…
How it will work:
We’ll run the same free cost estimates at half our hourly rates for qualifying businesses that commission their project by days end April 22nd, 2010. By qualifying businesses, we mean businesses that make a substantial portion of their revenues by marketing, selling, or producing green products and services. “Substantial” will be at our sole discretion, but we mean to help as many green businesses as we can in hopes that we can make this planet a little cleaner and greener for us and our children.
Why we’re doing it:
While chatting last week, it came up that we’re in little position to green our business aside from offering green hosting, operating a paperless office, and telecommuting – the last two we already do! So we figured that if we can help a few green companies be a little more competitive, or offer their employees a little something extra – then it’s well worth tightening our belts for a couple months to do the right thing.
Limitations:
- The program is limited to the first $20,000 in discounted services, if we reach it we’ll be happy to reach out to other firms in order to accommodate as many green companies as we can.
- Rainmaker Web Design will make the sole decision of who qualifies, feel free to contact us to discuss.
- All discounted projects must be contracted by midnight April 22nd, 2010
SEO Friendly CSS Galleries
We’re compiling a list of SEO Friendly CSS galleries for designers who are interested in getting a little link love while showcasing their work. To be considered, the galleries must either have a direct, do-follow link from the actual gallery or a direct do-follow link from a sub-page featuring the work.
We’ll update this page regularly, and hopefully provide an Excel download once the list grows a little bit – so feel free to comment with anybody we missed.
Google Local Search: An In Depth Look
The introduction of Google’s Local Search into it’s regular results (Universal Search) has been a real game changer as more, and more categories and locations are offered up near the top of organic searches. We’re going to cover the bases on what to do to improve your business’s rankings in the local search results & a few pot holes to steer away from. Please note, it’s no substitute or an organic search engine strategy, but can compliment one very well since many of the same content and inbound linking principals still apply.
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Your Site’s Contact Page
- First of all – have a contact page! Title it “Contact” as is the convention around the web, and name it something like “contact.html” or “contact-my-company.php.”
- Include a full address including city, state, and zip code within the locale that you’re targeting.
- Include a local phone number, i.e. – make sure the area code matches the the targeted location’s.
- Have multiple locations? If you run a multi-national corporation, why not hire an SEO company to rank your locations because it gets a little tricky and is outside the scope of this post.
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Title Tags, Meta Tags, and Your URL
- Use a hCard in your website’s head section. Learn here, create here. Simply use it as the markup/HTML for that part of your contact page.
- City/State in Contact Page Title Tag
- City/State in Index Page Title Tag
- Location in URL (Ex. – AthensGAWebDesigners.com)
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Your Local Business Profile
- 1st, go to Google’s Local Business, and claim your business’s profile if you haven’t yet.
- Profile using local phone number (area code matching the target location)
- Location in Profile Title
- Service/Product in Business Category Fields
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Customer/Client Reviews
- Customer Reviews are Important!
- And it’s not just the reviews on Google Maps itself -
- Google feeds it’s listings with dozens if not hundreds other third party review sites. For example: Kudzu.com, Yelp, InsiderPages, and many industry specific review services.
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Pitfalls & What not to do
- Don’t List a 1-800 number on your profile or on your contact page, I know it makes no sense. Have one, get your web guys to use an image to display it.
- Negative Reviews – I know they’re hard to stop, but if you can contact the reviewer & ask them to remove it – do it.
- Don’t use multiple Business Profiles with:
- The same business name
- The same phone number
- The same address (this one is particularly detrimental)
What is Google Wave? Two Video Perspectives
So what is Google Wave, what can it do for my business, and how can I get an invite to try the thing out?
Can’t help you with the third, but hopefully these two videos will help out. The first is a great introduction , in my opinion much better than the techno jargon filled Google intro on their site. The second, is pretty darn entertaining but shows off a good bit of what Google Wave can do….
What is Google Wave?
What can you do with it?
Shotput Ventures: Atlanta’s Startup Accelerator
S
tart up accelerator – didn’t you mean San Francisco?
Nope. While California is still the center of the universe, our own backyard is fostering a growing and quite successful tech start up community.
My Mobuilder co-founder (Hank Nix) and I had the pleasure of chatting with the guys over at Shotput Ventures this morning over a cup of coffee. Right off the bat they were throwing around phenomenal ideas, and asking the questions that scream professionalism. Since we are applying for their summer program, I don’t want to appear a total suck-up, but to say I was impressed was a pretty big understatement. My $0.02 – If you’re starting a venture in Atlanta, at least try to talk with these guys – they’re engaging, professional, and smarter than all hell.