www.massagewarehouse.com

via Portable Massage Tables, Massage Chairs and Supplies | Chicago web design.

By Jennifer L. Schiff

Think that having an eye-catching logo and distinctive online brand don’t matter — or are unimportant if you have a distinctive product or service or low prices? Think again. Both elements play a crucial part of a successful small business marketing plan.

“I won’t go so far to say that having a good or bad logo will make or break the success of your business,” said Candy Phelps, the owner of iCandy Graphics and Printing, “but it will definitely increase your success if you have a great logo and branding identity. If you have a cheap-looking, generic website and a cheap-looking logo, you’re sending a message to your customers that you may be cheap about other areas of your business, like your products and services.”

via Marketing Strategy: Why Logo and Web Design Matter – www.smallbusinesscomputing.com.

(AP) – 1 day ago

PHILADELPHIA — A 1971 painting by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta has sold for $1.5 million, two months after the Pennsylvania artist’s death.

Frazetta’s managers said this week that a private collector bought “Conan the Destroyer” from a family trust. Managers Robert Pistella and Stephen Ferzoco call it the price the highest ever for a work by Frazetta.

The illustrator died in Florida in May at age 82. His iconic illustrations of Conan the Barbarian, Tarzan and other characters often graced comic books, album covers and movie posters.

The Associated Press: ‘Conan’ painting by late Pa. artist goes for $1.5M.

there’s many documentation and theory about project management and project workflow on disciplines such as software development, web design doesn’t seem to have received so much attention. Every web design project is different, and sometimes it’s part of a bigger web development initiative. However, there’s some steps that are common to most web design projects and constitute the minimal web design project workflow.

Web design: Project workflow – by Irene Lizarraga – Helium.

CSS attempts to create a balance of power between author and user style sheets. By default, rules in an author’s style sheet override those in a user’s style sheet (see cascade rule 3).

However, for balance, an “!important” declaration (the delimiter token “!” and keyword “important” follow the declaration) takes precedence over a normal declaration. Both author and user style sheets may contain “!important” declarations, and user “!important” rules override author “!important” rules. This CSS feature improves accessibility of documents by giving users with special requirements (large fonts, color combinations, etc.) control over presentation.

Declaring a shorthand property (e.g., ‘background’) to be “!important” is equivalent to declaring all of its sub-properties to be “!important“.

Example(s):

The first rule in the user’s style sheet in the following example contains an “!important” declaration, which overrides the corresponding declaration in the author’s style sheet. The second declaration will also win due to being marked “!important”. However, the third rule in the user’s style sheet is not “!important” and will therefore lose to the second rule in the author’s style sheet (which happens to set style on a shorthand property). Also, the third author rule will lose to the second author rule since the second rule is “!important”. This shows that “!important” declarations have a function also within author style sheets.

via Assigning property values, Cascading, and Inheritance.

A trade group called the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC) has been circulating a document entitled “Council To Counter Web Content Generators Growing Clout”. They talk about “job threatened journalists” and “diminishing content standards”. Look, see what happens when the proletariat gets their hands on the printing press!

The pundits have also weighed in. So many journalists, eh. Looks like an over-supply if you ask me Some of them could learn a thing or two from SEOs.

For starters, many seem to be working on the false premise that Google returns “quality” results. Since when has Google ever been about “quality” results? Google’s aim is to return links the searcher finds relevant.

via Content Farming – SEOs Get It, Journalists Don’t | SEO Book.com.

I googled it and came up with nothing.

It must be randomly generated content to foil spam blockers.

It worked and also caught my attention.

If you’re using location extensions as part of your local ad campaigns inside Google AdWords, you can now show up to four addresses with a single ad. Google announced the change this afternoon, and used this screenshot of a search for “Toys-R-Us” that includes four locations:

via AdWords Expands Location Extensions: Now Up To 4 Locations Per Ad.

With this post, I return to the topic I got sidetracked from a few months back: where is search going? I’ve had the chance to talk to Stefan Weitz from Microsoft, The Search author John Battelle and, this time around, I had the chance to pose a few questions to Johanna Wright, Google’s Product Management Director for Web Search (by email). If we’re exploring where search is going, at some point we have to poke the 800 pound gorilla and get its thoughts. While I didn’t have the chance to follow up on any of the thoughts from Johanna (as you’ll see, we didn’t agree on all points), I thought it most appropriate to post my questions and Johanna’s responses in their entirety.

comScore has indicated that more and more search is happening outside the typical search portals like Google. In fact, Google itself reminds us that YouTube is the number two search engine. Most of these searches are launched as part of a larger overlying goal, ie getting information and doing something with it. Can Google keep delivering a useful search experience from a one-size-fits-all portal? Will search functionality splinter over multiple destinations and applications?

via Where Is Search Going: Google’s Johanna Wright.

Biz Stone

What is your search engine of choice? Google? Yahoo? Bing? Try Twitter.

According to cofounder Biz Stone, who spoke yesterday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Twitter now reaches some 800 million search queries per day. That’s over 24 billion searches per month, more than Bing (4.1 billion) and Yahoo (9.4 billion) combined.

While Stone’s company is still a long way off from Google, which supports around 88 billion search queries per month, Twitter is quickly catching up. Since last April, Twitter searches are up 33%. To put that in perspective, a study by Nielsen last year concluded that Bing was the fastest-growing search engine in the U.S. after it ballooned over 22%. Now it seems Twitter has taken the title.

via Twitter Now the World’s Fastest Growing Search Engine | Fast Company.

2 weeks ago we were in L.A. meeting with the Fox Audience Network folks formally MySpace MyAds and during the course of the night we got into this discussion about how all of these people are entering the world of “making money online” or “making money from home” but have no clue about the basics of salesmanship or marketing. Offline or Online.

I am talking about the “weapons of marketing” if you will. Things like scarcity, fear, authority, association, trust, perception, social proof, and call to action. Course there are quite a few I am leaving out off the top of my head.

Its amazing to me how many people just make a website, landing page, ad, email – not incorporate any of these – fail… and then give up “cause it doesn’t work”.

via How To Sell Shit.

“Creation comes out of imperfection.”

There’s an old proverb in the video encoding world: “Speed, size, quality: pick two.” It means that you always have to make a trade-off between the time it takes to encode a video, the amount of compression used, and the picture quality. Well, this release of HandBrake refuses to compromise. It picks all three.

Download it now.

via HandBrake.

Making a child theme is very simple. Create a directory, put a properly formatted style.css file in it, and you have a child theme! With a little understanding of HTML and CSS, you can make that very basic child theme modify the styling and layout of a parent theme to any extent without editing the files of the parent theme itself. That way, when the parent theme is updated, your modifications are preserved.

For this reason, child themes are the recommended way of making modifications to a theme.

via Child Themes « WordPress Codex.

By Jon Cooper, Vice President of Content, Journal Register Company

This weekend Journal Register Company’s 18 daily websites and newspapers were published using free tools and crowdsourced journalism.

Today — July 4, 2010 — marks not only Journal Register Company’s independence from the costly proprietary systems that have long restricted newspapers and news companies alike. Today also marks the start of a revolution. Today marks the beginning of a new path for media companies whose employees are willing to shape their own future.

What began as a quiet conversation back in April has become a wide open opportunity. What seemed impossible less than 90 days ago has become reality and has left us asking “why not?” and “what’s next?”

via The Ben Franklin Project.

The goal of effective information architecture (IA) is to make the products, services and information on your website easy to find. Sound familiar? This is same goal that an SEO professional has. But the skills of an information architect are quite different from the skills of an SEO.

Four fundamental skills that information architects have are:

• Categorization
• Organization
• Prioritization
• Labeling

Let’s look at these skills individually, and how each of these relate to the field of search engine optimization.

via Key Information Architecture Concepts Every SEO Should Know.

Entitled Drupad, this iPhone app gives Drupal lovers the power to manage their site on the go and is even iOS 4 compatible (unlike many blog apps on the app store unfortunately).

Priced at $4.99 USD, Drupad may seem to be a bit pricey when compared to other CMS/blogging apps (with the exception being Joomla Admin Mobile which is twice as expensive!).

For those of you wondering whether this app is worth the price of a hamburger or sub sandwich, here is an in depth overview of Drupad for those addicted to all things Drupal (and that mysterious blue face that haunts me at night).

via Drupal For iPhone Is No Longer A Myth Drupad | The Blog Herald.

Google is among the biggest proponents of a collection of Web technologies that reproduce many important features of Adobe Systems’ Flash, but it’s not yet time for regime change at YouTube.

One of the most important parts of the upcoming HTML5 standard is support for video that can be built directly into Web page without requiring a plug-in such as Flash Player. Other open standards such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for formatting, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and Web Open Font Format (WOFF) for typography can mimic Flash features, but Flash’s ability to deliver streaming video to multiple browsers is one of the main reasons it’s got such a strong incumbent advantage.

via YouTube: Why the Flash era isn’t over | Deep Tech – CNET News.

And this is where small time-savers become handy. Be it a handy checklist, batch installer, dummy image generator or converter from Excel spreadsheet to HTML — all these things can save us a couple of minutes every day, making our work easier and more efficient. And this is why we keep collecting them for Smashing Magazine’s readers. Whether you like lists or not: this one will probably help you find those little nuggets out there that will help you avoid headaches and stress. Below we present useful time-savers for web designers.

via 50 Powerful Time-Savers For Web Designers – Smashing Magazine.

Professional Spa Supplies

This article pulls together principles from psychology, marketing, UX design and photographic theory. It provides a set of principles to follow when commissioning and editing photography and when planning and designing profitable e-commerce user experiences.

via How To Use Photos To Sell More Online – Smashing Magazine.

It’s like Google stalking, but official, and thus marginally less creepy!

Google Buzz, their most recent foray into social networking, was not a resounding success (read: total privacy shitshow) and I imagine there’s some lingering skepticism about Google’s ability to actually keep all of its users information on lockdown.

Google Rolling Out “Google Me,” Their Facebook Killer.

It will capture what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame… basically it saves webpages as images – either to a file, or to the clipboard. It captures Flash too!

via Screengrab :: Add-ons for Firefox.

Presenting a professional image can be a challenge for start-up enterprises that are short on funds. CurdBee has become popular among freelancers by helping them polish one crucial part of their presentation: invoicing.

The site, from Vesess Pvt. Ltd., a Web-design and application-development company based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, offers users two tiers of service. The standard edition is free and gives users the ability to easily create invoices with their own logo and branding, as well as allowing them to set up payments via PayPal and Google Checkout, in multiple currencies.

via A look at sites that offer free software tools for managing a business – WSJ.com.

http://www.kedersolutions.com/

A popular question on our Webmaster Help Forum is in regard to best practices for organic link building. There seems to be some confusion, especially among less experienced webmasters, on how to approach the topic. Different perspectives have been shared, and we would also like to explain our viewpoint on earning quality links.

If your site is rather new and still unknown, a good way marketing technique is to get involved in the community around your topic. Interact and contribute on forums and blogs. Just keep in mind to contribute in a positive way, rather than spamming or soliciting for your site. Just building a reputation can drive people to your site. And they will keep on visiting it and linking to it. If you offer long-lasting, unique and compelling content — something that lets your expertise shine — people will want to recommend it to others. Great content can serve this purpose as much as providing useful tools.

A promising way to create value for your target group and earn great links is to think of issues or problems your users might encounter. Visitors are likely to appreciate your site and link to it if you publish a short tutorial or a video providing a solution, or a practical tool. Survey or original research results can serve the same purpose, if they turn out to be useful for the target audience. Both methods grow your credibility in the community and increase visibility. This can help you gain lasting, merit-based links and loyal followers who generate direct traffic and “spread the word.” Offering a number of solutions for different problems could evolve into a blog which can continuously affect the site’s reputation in a positive way.

via Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Quality links to your site.