Creating accounts and remembering passwords for every site you visit has always been a major pain. A simple way around this issue is OpenID. This technology allows you to use a single account to control access to lots of sites in a secure way.
You probably already have an OpenID account but just didn’t know about it.
Keep reading and watch a quick video to see how easy it is to set up…
Posted: June 26th, 2010 |
Filed under: Improving your site, Online tools, Productivity, Quick tips, Technote | Tags: authentication, demo, domain, Google, openid, own, security, video, yahoo
If you’ve installed WordPress for your business’ website, blog or news section, you’ll need to install some extra plug-ins to really get the most from this excellent software. They’re all free (although a donation is welcome) so install them right now.
Out of the box, WordPress doesn’t insert some common meta tags in your pages. Although the importance of these (specifically keywords & description) has been reduced since the early days of SEO, they still hold some value and it is just general good practice. This plugin has a wealth of features (and documentation) to help make your site a bit more Google friendly and to get it set up properly took me about 15mins. If you only have time to install one plug in, this is the one – it really is superb.
To make sure that Google (and Bing and Yahoo!…) knows where all your pages are, you can submit an XML sitemap. However, editing the file manually every time you create a new post is a major pain. This plug in does the editing and submits the new sitemap to all the search engines automagically! Make sure that you take a couple of minutes to configure the plug in to get all the categories and tags that you want into your sitemap.
There are a whole host of ways to integrate your WordPress blog with Twitter but this plugin gives you a couple of powerful features that are really slick. Once installed, you can create your own url shortening structure (now, that looks pro doesn’t it!) and you can track clicks from Twitter in your Google Analytics account. You can also restrict the posts that are tweeted by including or excluding a specific tag/category.
Posted: June 19th, 2010 |
Filed under: Improving your site, Online tools, SEO/SEM, Site design | Tags: blogging, Google, seo, social media, tips, Twitter, wordpress
If you want to share large files with your suppliers (videos, photos, artwork etc), the best service I’ve found is drop.io. There are lots of file sharing services out there but what’s so great about this one is that it is totally free (up to 100MB per file), its quick and doesn’t require registration or other annoying shenanigans. If your data is particularly sensitive you can password protect it at no extra cost. The premium versions of the service allow much larger data storage and shorter url’s (not that the 7 characters of the free version are too long). Quite simply there’s not much more you could want from an online file sharing service. If you think there’s something better please let me know.
Posted: August 21st, 2008 |
Filed under: Online tools, Productivity | Tags: collaboration, free, service
If you’re planning a new website or an update to an existing site, its a good idea to think through what sections are going to be included and how the website’s going to grow over time. This used to be done with PostIt notes and a pen but the sparkly free service over at WriteMaps is so much easier and you don’t loose your afternoon’s work when the wind blows through the window!
Of course in this web 2.0 world its a free service, allows you to work collaboratively with your team and the interface is simple. Perfect!
Linkorama: WriteMaps
Capturing ideas and suggestions from your customers or potential customers is a vital part of developing your product and customer base. Its really easy to take a more structured approach to customer feedback by using the excellent Uservoice. The service is currently free (while its in beta) and I suspect it’ll move to a ‘freemium’ model once its live.
Users can leave new suggestions for you or vote for the features that they feel would best enhance your product offering. By including a snipet of code on your website you can add a button to allow customers to add feedback with the click of a button without actually leaving your site. Once you choose to implement an idea you can interact with contributors via the service which really does create the kind of reactive “we’re listening” kind of feel any good business wants.
I’ve just been looking for a decent web based image editor for cropping and scaling images without having to buy desktop software. Well I found Picnik and what a beauty she is! It allows you to do all the basic features of Photoshop with some of the more advanced stuff like filters thrown in for good measure. If you need to scale some images for your website look no further than this excellent free app.
Posted: July 4th, 2008 |
Filed under: Online tools, Productivity | Tags: CMS, free, images, service, tips
I had to find a solution for a client who wanted to be able to upload news articles to their otherwise static website. Having looked at options like Adobe Contribute and not really seen the benefit, I thought Blogger’s FTP publishing setting must be worth a look. Sure enough, you can customise the template to simply output a list of news articles without all the usual blogger stuff on the page. So you’re really just using Blogger’s interface and article management tools…which as you’d expect from Google are very user friendly. Once you’ve FTP’d the finished pages to your server, you can then either include these lightweight pages in a news page by using a server-side script language like php or asp. If you don’t have access to a scripting language on your server, you can simply use an iframe to embed the content. Slick, free and very quick to set up – winner!
