Creative Storefront

WorkingPoint: Can it replace QuickBooks?

Bradley Charbonneau — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 18:35:57 +0000

That’s the question I need to answer. WorkingPoint.

Forget what you do. Write about how you do what you do.

Bradley Charbonneau — Wed, 26 May 2010 18:16:36 +0000

Lee Foster is an excellent photographer and prolific travel writer. He posts his writing at his website, has a bazillion stock photos from everywhere on the planet, and even now has iPhone apps for travel photography. Wow, he’s on top of things.

But the content I’m most interested in reading is how (and what) he’s doing in our social media world. I can see that he’s doing it, but I’m curious about how he’s doing it, how it’s working for him, what’s working, what’s not, and how we can learn from it.

Laurie King over at Travel Writers News is also interested as she mentions Lee’s article in her own commentary on apps and the future of journalism. She’s also interested, for her travel writing readers, about how a pro in the industry is doing things. What’s especially interesting about Lee’s write up is that he gives real numbers, real percentages of commissions so we can see first hand what’s going on behind the scenes.

I’ll be curious to see if these posts by both Laurie and Lee get more traffic than a post about, well, travel itself. Stay tuned.

WordPress 3.0: WP + WPMU

Bradley Charbonneau — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 15:02:09 +0000

Hmm, maybe don’t need to “learn” WP MU after all …

WordPress 3.0 MU Merge Settings To Create Network Blogs

Was talking with someone just yesterday about WP MU and how it might be a solution for her. Thought to myself, “Hmm, guess I should become more familiar with MU … ” but maybe I should just wait for 3.0.

SEO Smart Links Plugin

John Muldoon — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:33:17 +0000

This is a handy plugin for the internet marketing crowd. It does a number of things very well, but my favorite feature is the ability to universally turn a given word on your blog or website into a link to a specific page. This is really great for SEO and for affiliate marketers. The fundamental benefit is the same for each; you’re passing your audience to someplace that should be contextually relevant to them.
In the SEO world, you’re also passing authority and PageRank for a keyword which becomes the anchor text of your link. For affiliate marketers, you can write a really useful post about website hosting, for example, and every time you mention one of your smart link keywords, it can turn into your affiliate link to Go Daddy. Maybe you were planning to create those links anyway, this just saves you time. Just as an example.
You also have the ability to set a maximum number of smart links to be generated on a given page or post. This is good because none of us wants to be spammy or mess up our users’ experience. I set the limit on this page to 3 links, so even though all of these are among my smart link words, the plugin stops linking them after the third: go daddy, domain, domains, domain name, hosting.

I’m using this on a client’s website to link certain technical keywords contained in their copy to a glossary page which defines those words. This is a real help in terms of user experience for sites which may be unable to avoid technical or complicated language.

In all, a great plugin that can really help streamline and accelerate your content-driven internet marketing business. Throw the developer a bone, I’m sure he could use a cup of coffee.

Link to SEO Smart Links Plugin.

Where to get Traffic Reports

Laurie McAndish King — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:55:31 +0000

Wondering how much traffic a site gets? For good-sized sites, you can check on Alexa.com or Quantcast.com. Quantcast also tells you about your audience: gender, age, children per household, education and income levels, and other demographic information.

WordPress training for new users

Laurie McAndish King — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 20:30:52 +0000

New users don’t get the benefit of WordPress—you can easily update it yourself—if they don’t know how the software works, so I usually include an hour or two of hands-on WordPress orientation and training along with the website. I just finished working with a newbie (she was familiar with online editing, but that’s about all); here’s what we were able to cover in an hour:

Logging on
Creating a new user profile
The difference between pages and posts
Categories
How to create and edit a page
How to create and edit a post
The “Visit Site” and “Edit Post” buttons
“Draft” and “Publish” status
Post-dating posts
Using the Tiny MCE Advanced plugin to fine-tune your editing menu
How to upload a photo, adjust the size, add vertical and horizontal space around it, add a caption, and right- or left-justify the image.
How to add a link
Blogrolls

In a second hour of training, we’ll cover:

SEO basics
Slideshow functionality
Hmmm; still thinking about what this particular website will need …

What’s the best forum plugin/add-on for WordPress?

Bradley Charbonneau — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:18:12 +0000

We have some “private” discussions going on here at Creative Storefront and I’d like to have them here on the site somehow rather than just emails.

User Access Manager: we can create categories that are only accessible to certain users. Works well, but then are posts sent to RSS? Also are posts then visible by title, but then restricted/closed? Are they listed in the Recent Posts? (I don’t want them to be.) I think I’d rather have these private/back room discussions less prominent.
bbPress: forum software built by Automattic (the same people who run WordPress), so of course there’s seamless integration. Full-blown forum software so it has all of the bells and whistles.
WP Forum: a WP plugin that’s been around a while, but hasn’t been updated in since Sep 2008.
Forum Server: they modestly promote, “This is a much more advanced and better than the WP-Forum plugin … ” but hey, worth looking at.

Thoughts?

CS Logo Type Study (how to brand ourselves)

Tim Johnson — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 19:56:54 +0000

I have been thrilled to be a part Creative Storefront and be able to garner tips, tricks and advice and perspective from all the great talent that has showed up. However being from a graphic design background I just couldn’t sit back and not contribute to the branding and design of the site. I mean what is “Glow Theme”? So (w/ apologies to Zoey Setiawan) I have done some type / logo studies that I am posting here in hopes that they generate some discussion among our members and players.

These are quick studies in script fonts, scale and emphasis of the operative word. When I think of Creative Storefront I keep coming back to the strip mall, aluminum door and window frames with the templated style signage in front. Think sheet metal, cables and house paint.

The last 4 are using a German utilitarian font Din Schriften. These work the best for me as they are clean, simple, clear and the font treatments lends itself to variety of signage and background treatments.

The very last one works best overall for me. I can see the background treatment being easily extended and/or tweaked to work through out site as headers and buttons.

Keyword Chaos

Bradley Charbonneau — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:00:17 +0000

So this site has been live only a few weeks and already we have a zillion keywords (tags — I just liked the alliteration of Keyword Chaos). What’s a good strategy for keeping tags useful? What I’ve usually told people, including myself as I try to keep tags to a minimum, is to use tags that are “smaller” than categories. So if I were writing a post about setting up Outlook with Gmail, the categories might be: Email, Gmail, and Tutorials, but the tags could be: smtp, pop, SSL, iPhone, etc.

How smart are your tags?

User access levels: posts just for a certain group

Bradley Charbonneau — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 19:20:29 +0000

Test post. I want this post to only viewable by admin users. Ideally not even visible to the public anywhere on the site (not just a “You’re not an admin, so you can’t read this.” I also don’t want it going to the RSS feed. Although it probably already did …

I’m testing out User Access Manager. Looks great, but I just posted this and it showed up under recent posts. Hmm.