8 Reasons Why Now is the Time to Update Your Website Design

Posted on Mar 24, 2009 by Damien to Web Design

With the current downturn in the economy it’s often the opinion that what you have online right now will do till things turn around. You are not alone in this strategy but lets look at what’s wrong with this idea why NOW is the perfect time to give your online presence an update.

1. A site update can bring in new traffic and generate additional interest where the old site may have gotten stagnant.

2. Conveys an air of success and the view that your company is doing quite well even in an economic downturn.

3. Allows you to expand your business and possibly add new items to your site that could generate additional traffic and therefore additional revenue such as news feeds, blogs, discounts, newsletter signups, etc.

4. Optimizing the site during a redesign is often one of the reasons for the update and is extremely helpful in getting your site back up to where it should be on Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo.

5. Allows you to re-focus your website to better suite your clients. During the redesign process we analyze what was lacking in the older version and make sure to make your site as profitable as possible using analytics and user tracking.

6. Your competitors are either stagnant or they’re scrambling to update themselves. Now is the perfect opportunity to fly past them and absorb they’re market share with a fresh new look.

7. Gives you an entirely new online presence for which to market in social networks, media campaigns and print advertisements. Something you’re not only proud of but excited to introduce.

8. Now may be the perfect opportunity to take control of your newly designed site by adding such tools as a full site CMS, allowing you to easily manage your online content and keep it fresh and new.

By updating your online presence, updating your online technologies and paying careful attention to tracking traffic, usability and customer focus the return on investment can mean the success of your overall business plan. A redesign/revision can take care of all of those loose ends you may have wished for when initially launching your site. Now is the time to bring those ideas to life and reinvent the face of your company online.

THAT Agency can help. Contact us now about your redesign at 888.873.3281.

Fighting spam from inline email addresses using JQuery Plugin – Version 1.0

Posted on Mar 19, 2009 by Rich to Technology Trends, Web Development

This is a JQuery plugin I have been working on to try to eliminate; if not help, fight spam through bots and such going through websites and scraping email addresses.

Basically it works like this:  You add the emails in a certain way in your code, be it yourname^yourcompany#com or however you want to add it. Then let the plugin work its magic. The code will be shown as above, but will behave as if you had typed in yourname@yourcompany.com. Simple huh? Well here we go:

Javascript

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<script>
$(document).ready(function(){
// example 1
$('a[rel*=spemail]').spemail('|,:','linkbase');
// example 2
$('#email').spemail('|,:','mailbase');
// example 3
$('#plainemail').spemail('|,:','plainbase');
});
</script>

HTML

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<p><strong>Example 1:</strong> <a href="yourname|yourcompany:com" rel="spemail"></a></p>
<p><strong>Example 2:</strong> <span id="email">yourname|yourcompany:net</span></p>
<p><strong>Example 3:</strong> <span id="plainemail">yourname|yourcompany:net</span></p>

As you can see in the examples above, the code in the DOM, will handle specific email pieces based on their ID or rel. Try it out and see. It works well.

Check out a live example of Fighting spam from inline email addresses using JQuery

or

Download the Fighting spam from inline email addresses using JQuery Plugin – Version 1.0 source files

Tags: DOM, email, Javascript, jQuery, jQuery plugin, jQuery tutorial

Banner ads get BIGGER

Posted on Mar 11, 2009 by Nicole to Web Marketing

Paper ads are dwindling away, so marketers are finding new ways to reach consumers. The internet is the only growing market for advertising in this high tech world. EMarketer said in November that U.S. online ad spending would reach $23.6 billion in 2008 and $25.7 billion this year.

How do you reach people when they have been brainwashed to ignore banners? For many years it has been thought by advertisers that they have to have flashy, annoying banners to get attention. “Studies show we ignore banner ads,” said Jose Castillo, a new media consultant in Johnson City, Tenn. “Making them bigger and more intrusive won’t work. We will tune those out as well.”

Advertisers won’t stop trying though. A new kind of banner is one that takes up the entire screen. It’s the “Make the Logo Bigger” of the banner world. “The In your face” banner that can’t be ignored until the XXL is selected at the top. These banners allow people to interact by playing games, watching video trailers and taking online polls.

Google and other search firms say that people don’t mind banners as long as they pertain to what they are searching for. So if someone is looking for restaurants then they wouldn’t mind seeing a banner of the newest restaurant in their area.

There are 3 new types of advertising banners that people can expect to start seeing. They are the “fixed panel”, which disguises itself as being part of the page but scrolls up and down as the user does; the “XXL box, “ in which users can turn pages within the ad; and the “pushdown”, which opens to display a larger ad. These large format ads could very well work at getting the attention of consumers.

Retailers higher marketers for insane amounts of money and they want a return on their investment. A few high traffic sites such as People.com and CCNMoney.com have used these ads and they prove to work. Advertising is never going away; it’s just changing mediums and moving with the times.

Internal Links with Favicon using jQuery

Posted on Mar 9, 2009 by Rich to Technology Trends, Web Development

After thinking about doing something with favicons and links, I came up with this very simple jQuery Plugin that would allow all the internal links in your website to actually have your own favicon implemented on the left side of the link.

First of course, you will need jQuery, which you can always download on the jQuery website.

Then you will need the internalFavLink plugin.

Here are some screen shots:

DOM

Add to your DOM Call

RESULTS

Shown Results

So some things I thought about before adding this to the blog.

1. What if I don’t have a favicon? Well, then either create one from an image and use this favicon creator tool from Dynamic drive, add it to your site and you will be able to use this plugin.

2. What if my favicon is a .png and not an .ico file as in the plugin? This is simple as well, just find the code in the javascript file called favicon.ico and change it to yours.

3. What if I want the favicon to be after the link? This is also simple; in the plugin javascript, just change where it says “prepend” to “append”.

The plugin is very simple. So if anyone has any ideas on how to improve please let me know.

You can also see the Internal Favicon Link jQuery Plugin in action!

Tags: DOM, favicon, internal links, Javascript, jQuery, jQuery examples, jQuery populate, jQuery tutorial

Facebook Fan Page Design Updates

Posted on Mar 7, 2009 by Rick to Social Media

If you administrate or belong to a fan page on Facebook, you may have noticed a new layout sometime in the past couple of weeks. As part of Facebook’s new website design which started back in September 2008, Facebook finally rolled out the new fan page design. The new fan page design comes with new functionality that may have a pretty cool impact on the network as a whole. Facebook recently released an overview of the changes to come.

New Design
The new design makes fan pages look a lot more like typical profile pages. Fan pages now have display multiple tabs for video, photos, info and other applications. Additionally, fan pages have been redesigned so that the news stream is the focus of the page, as is also the case with profile pages. Overall, the new design seems to make it easier to organize information on fan pages and also puts an emphasis on fan updates and user comments.

New Functionality
According to Facebook, the way that fan pages interact with the rest of the network will also change in the near future. Eventually, fan pages will interact with the network more like the way individual profile pages do. For example, each time a fan page administrator adds a photo, shares a link, comments or posts an update to the fan page, that update could potentially stream to the news feeds of all its fans.

From the standpoint of a fan page administrator, this can be a great thing as more exposure will be given to the fan pages. In the past, marketing a fan page was a bit more difficult because fan page activities did not stream into news feeds the same way that profile activities did. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the rest of the network with regard to fan page growth and users willingness to become fans.

Sample Fan Page:

Click to enlarge

Tags: facebook