As a web designer who works most often with local businesses, I’m often asked how to increase visitors to a website, and how to get better rankings in Google. The answer I give usually falls on deaf ears: there is no magic bullet for getting high rankings on search engines, or increasing readership to a blog. The truth is, it takes professional level marketing skills to stand out on the web.

I have facilitated more than one client starting a blog. However, I’m tempted to agree with the author of the article linked above: if you don’t have professional quality content (writing and photography), and if you don’t know how to properly leverage that content across the major online marketing channels (email, social media, advertising), you probably shouldn’t bother blogging.

The problem is not that blogging is a bad idea. The problem is that most small business owners don’t have a marketing department to make it truly work. A well executed blog post is not something you dash off on a moments notice (that’s what Twitter is for!). A well crafted blog post takes hours to produce, and producing regular, keyword rich content is a full time job. Here’s the bare minimum for a good blog post:

• First, you have to have a point for the article that ties into something you are trying to promote.
• It has to be written and edited by someone who knows how to write.
• There has to be pro caliber photography (it’s okay to use stock photography, just be picky about it!), and finding the right image takes time.
• Then it likely needs to be looked over by someone who actually knows how to code html, both so it doesn’t look “broken”, and leverages good SEO techniques.
• Last, it has to be incorporated into an email newsletter, mentioned in a genuine Facebook post on the company page (not an “auto post” plugin for WordPress), and again on Twitter.

What’s the chance that a dentist’s office, or a restaurant, or a general contractor has someone on staff that can do that?

I still don’t have a silver bullet. I do have contacts if you’re interested in professional photography, copywriting, and marketing. And hey, I happen to know a little about html code and SEO techniques myself!

About a week later, Firefox 5 was out, and I thought “Oh wow, I better go update!”. Only Firefox 5 didn’t really look or act any different than Firefox 4.

Yesterday, I received a prompt from Firefox “Version 6 is out. All users are strongly recommended to upgrade” or something to that effect. First of all, thanks for telling me a new version is out, I think that’s new. Second, though, why should I care about version 6?

Getting the latest and greatest is exciting and all, but I don’t like being forced to upgrade my software for anything more than once every six months or so — frequent updates are a pain! Don’t make me upgrade unless there’s some awesome new feature.

Now, I’m a web designer and front end developer, and I use Firefox and Firebug for all of my development work. You would think I care about all of the incremental feature increases. But let’s take a look at what’s new in Firefox 6:

• The address bar now highlights the domain of the website you’re visiting
• Streamlined the look of the site identity block
• Added support for the latest draft version of WebSockets with a prefixed API
• Added support for EventSource / server-sent events
• Added support for window.matchMedia
• Added Scratchpad, an interactive JavaScript prototyping environment
• Added a new Web Developer menu item and moved development-related items into it
• Improved usability of the Web Console
• Improved the discoverability of Firefox Sync
• Reduced browser startup time when using Panorama
• Fixed several stability issues
• Fixed several security issues

Am I excited by this release? I am not. I’m a fairly web-savvy person, and I don’t even know what most of those features are.

Are there geeks out there who are excited by this update? I’m sure there are. But those who are excited by this update are going to be looking for these changes and features. The vast majority of everyone, especially those who just use Firefox to browse and don’t give a damn about development features, are going to be asking themselves, why do I need this new version?

In my opinion, this should be version 5.1, and I’m super annoyed that I’m going to be guilted into downloading this version after being prompted about it every day (probably even multiple times per day).

Firefox, you’re about to lose me. Stop with the stupid insignificant updates, and tell me when there’s something I care about and I’ll happily download a new version.

I’m not impressed by browsers with high version numbers, and it seems to me Firefox is engaging in some petty antics to drive up their version number so it looks like the browser is highly evolved. Stop it! Firefox 3 was highly evolved! It kicked all the other browsers’ collective butts!

If Firefox wants to be the darling of web geeks only, and alienate “normal” users who don’t care about JavaScript consoles, it needs to seriously consider re-branding and just releasing a “geeks only” alternative.

The project has a mobile specific version (ie. it uses a whole different site for the mobile version). This site is an e-commerce site using CommerceV3 cart software, and it is challenging to look through the various template files to figure out what the markup of the pages is going to be. It would be much easier, I thought, if I could just ‘view source’ on the iPhone’s rendering of the site to see the markup.

How do you view source on the iPhone? There are several apps and bookmarklets that will do this, and for those I urge you to simple google “view source mobile Safari”.

The simplest thing for me turned out to be something I did not know about: you can use the desktop version of Safari to surf the web with a user agent alter ego! In Safari, choose Develop -> User Agent from the main menu.

There are choices there to view a site as Internet Explorer and Firefox (I have no idea how well those work, but I’m certainly intrigued by the possibility of cross browser testing with this feature), but the point here is that you can choose “Safari iOS” in a multitude of flavors, which allow you to view a site as if you were on an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad. Once the setting is turned on, start browsing, and you can view source for any mobile site you like!

FB.login() called before calling FB.init()

I had a listener attached to my logout button, which called the FB.logout method, and that was failing, too, with the same error message.

It turns out that I was calling the Facebook JavaScript more than once, and this caused the error (and would likely cause errors with all FB functions, but I’m not sure). I had updated the Facebook Like buttons on my site, and copied the code from Facebook directly, which includes a script tag that loads the Facebook JavaScript. However, I’ve already got the JavaScript loaded, so you don’t need to include it again.

To review, when adding Facebook social plugins, don’t add the script tag to load Facebook JavaScript if you already have the JavaScript loaded!

After having used the service successfully for months, including on IE, I suddenly started getting the following error when viewing my site in IE:

Error: Invalid Argument on Line 4 Character 91

This was pointing to the Typekit js file. There is clearly nothing wrong with Typekit’s javascript.

As it turns out, there was a random and apparently unrelated item causing this: I had an unclosed <span> tag in my document. Adding the closing tag suddenly made my Typekit javascript error go away. Why? I don’t know. I’m not that smart. =)

What I do know is that validating my page at the W3C validator helped me find out I had an unclosed tag. Moral of the story? Validate your pages!!

There are a number of suggestions I’ve read.

• Rename the stylesheet every time you update it. This undoubtedly works, but is a pain in the butt.
• Use PHP to place “cache-control” and “expires” headers in your document. These theoretically tell the browsers when they should look for new versions of the page, and if you set the dates to the past, the browser should always load a fresh version of the page. In my experience, though, this doesn’t force the stylesheet to be reloaded.
• Force a reload in Firefox by hitting “shift-reload”. This does force the html to be re-rendered, but in my experience does not force the stylesheet to be reloaded. And, it obviously only helps if you’re using Firefox!

Here’s the one thing that does work: use PHP (or whatever parallel command you have at your disposal) to add a meaningless yet oh-so-handy date query string to the URL for your stylesheet. In other words, if your styles are in a file referenced at http://example.com/styles.css, it will now look like this http://example.com/styles.css?d=123456789.

The server will ignore the string attached to the end of that url, but to the browser, this looks like a brand new stylesheet has been requested, and will no longer use the cached version of the stylesheet.

I develop in PHP, so I use the time() function to append a UNIX timestamp to the end of the url. In practice, then, a sample css tag in your document head will look like this:

I hope this helps solve a common development headache for you.

While this might not be the only reason it doesn’t work, the solution presented on the page linked previously is to make sure the html you’re providing as the wrapper has a closing tag, which according to jQuery it’s not supposed to need.

However, this works in IE8:

And this does not:

Notice the only difference is the html inside the .wrap() of the second one does not have a closing tag.

Email is different than social media, though, in many positive ways. When someone gives you their email address, it’s a measure of trust and how much they specifically want information from you. On Facebook, there’s a sense that all of the content flowing through your news feed is not necessarily all that important. It’s overwhelming to imagine looking at all those little blurbs from your friends and pages you’ve liked.

With email, many people are more selective, and read (or at least open) every piece of mail they receive. I know I do.

I think the problem with many people who use email marketing is that they just send out the same message over and over again, usually that they’re having a sale. GoDaddy and Barnes & Noble are two advertisers that I know are going to tell me I can “save 20% with this coupon”, every single time they email me. Okay, sometimes it’s 30% or 25%, but seriously, those messages get old and I don’t really bother to read those emails anymore.

Email marketers can learn something from social media marketers who tell us that you want to have a conversation with your prospects and clients, rather than just barraging them with offers. (Many companies spending their efforts on Twitter and Facebook should pay heed to this, to). People want to be involved with companies they like, or feel like insiders. Email marketing should tell stories and invite feedback. Yes, it’s important to send the occasional discount offer, too—but today’s consumer is inundated with offers and choices. The way to keep people is to make them feel special.

My favorite emails come from smart companies like Sitepoint, which offers books, tools, and information for web designers. Their emails always contain one central story, with well chosen advertising mixed in. They often have polls that I am interested in, which lead me back to their website, and they absolutely overdeliver in terms of the wealth of links to interesting blog and forum topics on the website.

Of course, I’m a web designer and have special interest in these topics. But this is the way you want your email marketing to work—if someone is interested enough in your field to have signed up for an email list, give them good content, instead of annoying them with offers. When they are looking forward to your messages, they will see you as a trusted advisor, and buy your products, or visit your ad-driven site.

Do you want help with your email campaigns? I offer a full range of email marketing services.

I build the majority of my websites with WordPress, an open source software. Originally designed as a blogging tool (currently it is the most popular engine for blogs), WordPress has evolved over the years to become a powerful, flexible CMS.

WordPress makes it easy to create and edit pages, update text and photos, and provides a canvas for strong search engine optimization (SEO) practices. Perhaps most importantly, WordPress has a huge community of contributors, and the software has thousands of useful modules available called plugins which can help WordPress adapt to whatever needs you have.

Custom WordPress Websites

Though it is possible to launch a WordPress site quickly and cheaply (the software is free), it takes a lot of work to customize, just like any website. I’ll work with you to create a unique and beautiful user interface (“look and feel”), help you organize your content into logical, user-friendly pages, secure great imagery for your site, and help you establish a strong SEO foundation for your site.

Completely custom WordPress sites start at $1950.00.

WordPress Websites based on a Premium Template

For startup companies or personal websites for which $1950 is too high a starting cost, I am willing to work off of a premium template. There are several good sources on the web for finding richly featured, contemporary templates for WordPress, just waiting for a skilled hand to personalize them.

WordPress sites built on a template start at $295.00. Typically, this involves me picking out a template with you, doing a basic customization such as adding your logo and changing background color, and then arranging your first few pages for you. More involved customization equates to a higher cost.

Please contact me with any questions. If you’d like to get started developing or re-developing a site, you might like to fill out my Web Design Questionnaire, which is always step one.

Email Service Provider

Many entrepreneurs wonder why they can’t just use Outlook for their email marketing. There are lots of reasons, but limits on how many emails you can send through your ISP is one big factor, and another is that there’s so much more to email marketing than just sending emails. A good service provider gives you all sort of tools to simplify and automate the tasks you’ll be doing—manage your email list, create plain text and HTML versions of your campaign, and allows you to see how your email is being received via reporting.

The biggest name in the field is Constant Contact, though there are zillions of others, including Vertical Response, iContact, and Campaing Monitor, to name just a few. I’ll help you choose the right one for your situation.

Email Registration on your Website

If you don’t have a way for someone to sign up for your email list on your website, you’re completely missing out.

Graphic HTML Emails

The tightly designed ads you receive in your inbox are HTML based emails. A graphic or HTML email is little more than a mini webpage, broadly speaking. However, it does require specialized knowledge to code an HTML email so that it looks the same in the dozens of applications people commonly use to read email (Outlook, Mac Mail, Thunderbird, Gmail, mobile phones, etc.)

I have been sending out HTML emails since 2004, and I think I’ve got it down. Do you want to deliver graphic email? Are you having trouble with the emails you’re sending out? We should talk.

Email Design

All of the email service providers listed above let you use a template to generate your emails. That’s fine if you want something blocky and ugly. When you’re ready to send out sophisticated and unique looking email, you need a designer, preferably one who understands the limitations of email (Hint: — I do! ).

The visual design is only half the story, though. The other half is the story: what are you going to say in your beautiful email? I have years of experience helping my clients craft messages that are consistent in tone, succinct, personable without being hokey, and easily read.

Questions about email marketing? Drop me a line.