Content & Blogging Blog

One critical factor many new start-ups forget is that half of creating a successful web app is making sure that its well designed and easy to use. In this part of our series we’ll continue looking at well designed web applications….

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From time to time, Google hosts live chats with webmasters attended by some of their key developers. If anything, this is a great venue to ask that nagging question in your head. The first time this was held was in March 2008, and you can read the details of the successful launch at SEOroundtable.com. As a consequence, a follow up was held earlier this month and an MP3 of the discussions is available here, as well as a transcript of the chat session.
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Being the primary monetization tool for most blogs and other websites, it’s imperative to get the most out of Adsense. While it’s good to read up on other people’s strategies, sometimes it’s nice to hear it, er… straight from the horse’s mouth. Google has recently come out with a video for Adsense optimization and I thought I’d share it with you. But first, here’s a quick summary:
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It won’t be available ‘til August this year, but some Wordpress 2.6 features in development seem to be pretty nifty and worth the wait. If you want to catch a glimpse of the future, head on over to Chris Johnston’s demo site. The username is admin and the password is demo. Briefly, here’s what you can expect:

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Bloggers of the world, rejoice. The day most of you have long waited for is at hand. Well, almost. Feedburner just announced that a week from now, they’ll be offering Google’s Adsense to a few selected publishers for trial (probably the big ones), with the goal of making it available for everyone in the long run. They’re pretty vague as to how long the wait will be for the rest of us, but it’s interesting to study the results of this initial run. Here’s a quote from the Feedburner blog:
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Blog comments are fantastic. They provide a way for writers and readers to interact, thereby building a community, and sometimes even friendship. They’re also great for SEO purposes as they add fresh content to a page with targeted keywords, assuming you can keep the discussion related to the post’s topic. Therein lies the catch. There are a lot of spammers out there just itching to squeeze in unrelated links and advertisements. No matter what you do, spammers will keep mutating and haunt you like a bad virus, but you can minimize their effect on your blog by doing the following:
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There’s been an explosion of resource, recruitment and tutorial sites, in Part 2 we continue our review of the biggest and the best of them, analyze their brands and make suggestions for their growth. Make sure you read Part 1 before continuing.

05. PSD Tuts (Tie)

Founder(s) - Unknown
History - PSDTUTS is a blog/photoshop site made to house and showcase some of the best Photoshop tutorials around. We publish tutorials that not only produce great graphics and effects, but explain in a friendly, approachable manner.
About the Brand - A strong thematic cohesiveness throughout their family of websites.
Alexa.com Ranking - 14,664
Other Properties - audiojungle.com, flashden.com
Ideas for Growth - Their team has successfully created a design and tutorial blog, the audio search engine and a monetized flash resource site. They should take the business model they used for Flashden.net and apply it to resources for AfterEffects or Premier. Alternatively they could create a portal for scripts like Hotscripts.com

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There’s been an explosion of free design resources made available thanks to a number of sites that offer freebies and related tips. In this two part in-depth look, I examine the biggest brands in design blogs and suggest what they can do to make their brands even bigger and better.

This list was compiled and ordered by relevancy as well as their influence on the design community at large. I looked at each groups branding, site design, logo design, the strength of content and resources offered. I also looked at the number of properties each had. Alexa rankings were used to estimate site traffic although a high Alexa ranking did not always equal a higher ranking on this list. I did all this so as not to appear to be biased towards any particular blog or group.

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I recently came across the Mortgage Loan Calculator Widget, a simple widget that provides mortgage repayment calculations. With the credit crunch in recent times, keeping tabs on your mortgage is a highly topical issue, so why not let your users do some quick calculations directly from your website? With a Wordpress plugin for blogs, and a quick JavaScript snippet for everything else, it’s a great addition to any website with a general audience.

The widget fits in to sidebars and other smaller areas of the page; it’s very self contained, so it should fit nicely into your page without breaking out of the box. Copying and pasting the JavaScript into your page will produce a neat little light gray box with some basic loan data inputs:

From here your visitors can easily experiment with different data, or do the same for a mortgage. Clicking “calculate” produces a clean thickbox-style gray box above the current page - you won’t lose any visitors with this widget. A neat dynamically-generated Flash chart helps users see what the output means and watch the progression of their loan configuration over time.

In terms of usability, this is one of those widgets that just works. I’ve had no trouble getting it to work or understanding how to use it, and the design is entirely idiot-proof. This is truly a drop-in-place widget - if it suits your site’s audience, you can simply find a good space on the page and add it in. Your users won’t need any instructions on how to use it, and they’ll appreciate the no-nonsense approach for the results page:

Under the hood, it’s a mini web application in itself, and uses jQuery and a Flash charting system to produce a simple, cross-browser interface. The script does talk back to the mlcalc.com server for some calculations and the chart, but otherwise it is largely client-side, and won’t burden your server with additional requests either.

The mortgage loan calculator widget is simple and effective. It does its job beautifully, and fills a highly approach niche for any current website aiming to be “with the times”. Whether you have a general news portal or a financial planning help site, this widget can just fit in; it will find a permanent home in your users’ favourites and keep them coming back for more.

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Personality is still the name of the game. A recent survey report gives us the latest figures on what kind of blogs people read, and Personal Blogs ruled the chart with a 63.5% reach. Second to that is a 38.9% reach for Family or Friend Blogs. Both suggest that to gain a wider audience, your site must exude a tricky mix of familiarity and individuality. Pondering on these two traits, here are some of my suggestions to make you blog feel more cozy.

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