I’m sure you have become used to seeing all the advertising that pops up while you are watching a YouTube video, even if it is a video embedded in another website.

If you own the rights to that video, you can turn off the advertising in your YouTube (Google) account settings.

Go to YouTube, and log in. Under your name you will find a ‘Settings’ link. On the left side of this page you will see ‘Manage Account.’ After clicking on that you will see ‘Content displayed along with my uploaded videos,’ expand that and you will see a radio button that says “Do not allow advertisements”

There you have it. While in here you may want to poke about and see if everything else is set up as you like it.

Well, those days are over and we would love to offer you some pizazz to your website.

We do have to be careful about one thing, and that is licensing. Not all fonts have been released to be used freely on websites.

There is a great site that offers a great selection of fonts to look at and we encourage you to take a look to see if there is something there that you like.

http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/list/mostdownloaded

Take a look and contact us if you would like to change your overall font, some of your items such as headings or navigation and we will go to work. If there are other fonts that are not there, we can look into the licensing for you.

Contact us if you have any questions.

We’re trying out Aller Regular on this blog now, but who knows, we may change it for another tomorrow.

By clicking on it you will place similar ads on your own profile automatically. If this happens to you, be sure to go to your own profile right away to clean up the posts.

If you cannot read something without clicking on a link, don’t do it..

Apparently these scams are numerous, but also be even more careful of the phishing attack, and if you are ever asked to enter your username and password make sure the url is really Facebook’s (ie www.Facebook.com). If you make this mistake, immediately change your Facebook password.

You can read more about Facebook scams here http://ldw.me/k5

• When taking photos, be sure to set the resolution high, then back up far enough on your subject that no cropping occurs.
• Remove photos often from your camera to prevent it from becoming an overwhelming task.
• When removing photos from a camera, or copying from another source, take the time to either tag, or at least create sub-folders to separate different events.
• If sharing your photos with others, use an easy to use online service such as Flickr, Picasa, or allow us to set up a ZenPhoto site or other cms based site for you.
• When uploading photos, only upload the ones that you feel will be useful and choose the best of duplicates rather than uploading them all.
• Before uploading, resize your images for the web, this will save you much time in uploading, but also make the photos ready for website use. You should keep the original in a corresponding folder on your computer for print use. form more information about resizing, you can see our blog post “How to optimize photos for the web or email“
• While uploading, or immediately afterward, tag your photos and add captions. This is something we have seen over and over where a client uploads a ton of photos, thinking I’ll tag them later and then never do. It is better to upload a smaller set of useful photos than an unruly bunch that are not.
• Tagging is what makes the photos useful. Create many tags, but try to use a consistent system for tagging (for example if you used a tag ‘bird’ be careful not to tag others ‘birds’ but rather use ‘birds’ even for singular items).

Taking some time to organize photos will save a lot of time later on when you want to start using these photos. Contact us if you would like more information on photo management systems that can be installed on your website.

First create a new menu and call it “hidden” or something useful for yourself to remember. Do not create a corresponding module for this menu, alternatively you can create a module but mark it as ‘registered’ or ‘special’ so it will not be seen by the public.

Using this new menu you can create links to articles, or any other available menu item choice. When you create the menu item there is a field called “Link” that is automatically populated when you create the item. This is the relative URL of the page (add http://yourdomain.com/ in front of it for a complete URL to use on another site). If you are using Joomla SEO settings, you can use the alias field to create user friendly links to this menu item.

Note: Though this menu is not published, you can still set your modules to show or not to show on the pages of this menu, or you could even create a different template for these pages.

A WordPress Plugin Review: Webpsilon Morfeo Gallery

Here at LDW, Morfeo Show has been one of our favorite plugins for our clients’ Joomla! sites. Thanks to Webpsilson Morfeo Gallery is also available for WordPress.  I find the WordPress version every bit as user-friendly as the Joomla! version. It provides for basic image needs very well.

While the Joomla! version is more advanced and offers a wider range of gallery themes, I do not believe the WordPress version is limiting. It’s meant to display within blogs, whereas the Joomla! version has been developed to be very versatile for websites’ many needs.

There’s one limiting factor with Morfeo on WordPress: you have to get your photos to the site using ftp, and many bloggers are not familiar or comfortable with the ftp side of a website. There is a workarround for this by changing your default upload location to the Morfeo image folder, but you have to remember to switch it back to the default once you are done.  Even with this limitation I feel that this is a plugin worth mentioning.

Thanks to the developers of Webpsilon Morfeo Gallery—it was just what I was looking for.

A WordPress Plugin Review: Subscribe2

The Subscribe2 plugin is a way for your WordPress visitors to sign up to receive an email subscription to your blog. You can configure the frequency with which subscribers receive emails: every time you post something new, weekly, daily or even hourly if you prefer. I set mine to only send out an email when there is something new to read.

My goal was to create a separate page on a WordPress site which would give the visitor a place to sign up for the subscription. I was provided with two options: I could manually insert the Subscribe2 token into a newly created page, or I could simply press the Subscribe2 button in the WYSIWYG and it would be inserted on the new page. I picked the latter, and there it was. Subscribe2 also has a widget option, in case you would prefer a widget on your blog’s sidebar rather than having a separate page for email subscriptions.

I really enjoyed working with this software. Plugins can sometimes be a struggle to get to work, but with Subscribe2 this was not the case. I am happy with this plugin’s performance and would recommend it as a simple and effective way to handle email subscriptions on a WordPress site.

I have found that this application works well to get my basic ideas in one place and up on the website in draft form. When I do get to the computer all I have to do is proofread it, get the layout right and send it on its way.  I am also able to add categories and tags right from the phone. Note: there was more editing to do with voice to text than if I would have simply typed the blog post.

The mobile wysiwyg has the ability to add links, bold, blockquote and italics.  It even enables the user to add images. However the image uploader works much better on the web based version of WordPress. When done from the phone I was not able to pick where the photos would be displated or how large they would be.

This week I found it to be an entertaining way to post my blog.  Time will tell if it is just a novelty.

Well, here goes nothing… post!

So now you’ve picked out a template and it is time to do some customizing Figuring out a color scheme can be fun with a great online tool called Color Scheme Designer. Often the best way to start is to look at a picture that you want to use in the site, either as a banner, or a prominent picture. Install a great little plugin in Firefox called ColorZilla. Once installed, restart your browser and open that picture in Firefox (you can use file, open from a browser window). In the lower left corner of firefox, you will now see a little eydropper, click on that eyedropper and then click on a region of the picture with a color that you would like to use as a starting point. You will see the color changes in the lower left icon. Right click on this color and copy to clipboard.

Open Color Scheme Designer, to the lower right of the big circle, you will see ‘RGB:’ and some number, click on these numbers and paste or type in the color you chose with colorzilla. Now you have your starting point. Depending on how many colors you would like on your site, you can chose mono, compliment, triad etc from above the wheel to see complimentary colors. To take a look at how the colors work together on a website, below the boxes of color on the right, click on ‘Light page example’ and ‘Dark page example’.

You should also take a look at the ‘Vision Simulation’ link at the top right, to make sure that someone with a different visual perception would see your site. Once you have finished playing around and have decided on a color palette you like, you can click on ‘color list’ below the big circle, highlight all the colors and past them into an email to send to your favorite web-design team, or use them yourself when constructing the css file for your website.

If you have other ways that you have picked out a color scheme for your website, please add a comment so that others can benefit.

The component I chose to handle this chore was JFusion. It offers web administrators a way to integrate a variety of software into a Joomla site without the stress of core hacks or bridging the two. Some of the currently supported software is phpBB, myBB, Moodle, docuwiki, Oscommerce, Magento, and vBulletin. After seeing this list and the good reviews that Jfusion received I thought that it would be a worthwhile component to get familiar with.

I found Jfusion to be easy to install. The documentation provided was easy to follow and easy to understand. All the information that I needed on the project at hand could be found on Jfusions web site. This is a very well supported project and one that I will use again.

If you are a person interested in installing Jfusion I would warn that the initial learning process is time consuming but worth it. Once you have read the documentation and been through the setup you will feel that you understand Jfusion. I know that future installs and setup will go very quickly now that I have learned this process. It is definitely worth reading the documentation and understanding the software you are trying to integrate before jumping in.

All in all I feel that Jfusion is the only way to go when attempting an integration. If you have a Joomla site and are interested in adding a forum or other software to it please contact us. We would be happy to help you through the process.

I speak mostly of Google as they are the most popular search engine, but others are almost the same.  Their purpose has always been to aid in peoples ability to find the information they are looking for quickly and accurately. It used to be that there were ways that you could buck the system and get higher rankings than a similar site by stuffing keywords, or creating similar sites that point to each other, but the great folks at Google have found ways to close up these opportunities and make their search engine is even more accurate. When I say accurate, I mean that they want to deliver the results that make people think “that is exactly what I was looking for.” So, if you are looking for “what makes an airplane fly” you don’t get a website that is selling air sickness pills.

One of the main ways that Google has found to determine this is by watching peoples habits. And though there is a lot of talk about how scary this is that Google is collecting so much information, one of the benefits is that they can develop profiles on websites and see if they are accurately answering peoples search requests. This can be done by looking at how much time people spend on a site, or how many additional links they click on before they find one that finishes their search.

With this in mind, if you put your attention into developing a site that answers people’s questions, in an easy way, and then draws the reader further into your site you will create a solid ranking with Google that wont be swayed by short term tricks. This is the most important thing to spend your time and energy on.

Now, if you have created the ideal site, answering the questions you feel people are looking for, the next most important thing you can look at is how are my search results displayed. Google will first display the page title. Therefore it is important that your page title is catchy. If people are scanning the results, you want yours to jump out at them. In Joomla, your page title is created from the title of your article. So, instead of using ‘About Us’ you may want to try ‘About ABC Widgets’ Google uses the meta description if the search keywords in the title or meta description, and if they keywords are in the text of the page it brings in snippets from that page. So be sure to look at your meta descriptions. In Joomla, there is a default meta description in Global Configuration, and this is what will shop up on all pages that don’t have their own meta description. So, when you create new articles for your site, be sure to fill out the description with something that will catch a persons eye when scanning results, especially on important pages on your site.

If you have completed those two, next you should look at getting inbound links, and not just any inbound links. You will actually loose position if you sign up for what are called links farms, or sites that list many links to all sorts of content. So avoid those emails that say “we want to link to your site,” and then you go look at their site and it has nothing to do with your content. The best inbound links are ones that people will naturally want to follow, because again, Google will be watching. So if you have links floating around on sites, and nobody has ever clicked on them, they are really useless, and maybe even count against you. Whereas links that are on sites that have very similar content to yours, and therefore naturally somebody who is looking for further information would be bound to click on them, these are ideal! One way of finding these sites are to look at the other search results for any given keywords. Look over the other results and think “would this site allow me to add a link?” Blogs have made this work easier, as sometimes you can find an article on a blog that covers a topic related to your website, and you can go and post something as a comment that will allow for a link to your site. A word of warning however, most bloggers do not like posts that are not really content. So don’t post “I really liked what you said” and then hope that the blogger will allow your comment. The blogger may tag you as spam and you wont show up on any blog posts after that as the blogger wont even see your comments. So get into some real discussions with people blogging. Post if you are really interested and have an important item to add.

I think you can see the general ideas here are not about “how do I get better search results” but more about being a genuine contributor to the World Wide Web, not just a opportunist. Create a great website, use the meta description the way it was designed, and get involved in what others are doing in your project areas and soon Google and other search engines will take notice of your organic traffic that is developing and assist by raising your site in the list of results.