The Daily Dose

These days, we are connected 24-7 to our clients and their needs. Whether it be Twitter, Facebook, email, instant messaging, office phones or cell phones. More and more each day, technology makes it more difficult to take a minute to yourself and disconnect from work.

I have decided to share how I have recently learned a way to turn the emails off and stop being controlled by the sound of my cell phone alerting me of new emails on my days off. I came across an application called “Away Find”, www.awayfind.com. Essentially, it allows you to turn off your email and receive only messages considered to be an absolute necessity to respond to. Read the rest of this entry »

Original post by www.onlinedesignbureau.com, to read this post at its original location, click here.

Many people are frustrated that they don’t seem to be able to generate any leads from LinkedIn, while it seems to be the perfect vehicle for others. This tutorial will help you in generating business from LinkedIn. The topics we will cover are the following (click on the link if any of these topics interest you in particular):

1. Create your personal profile
2. Create a company profile
3. Promote your profile
4. Find leads on LinkedIn

Step 1 Create your profile

1. Open an Account

Without an account on LinkedIn, you aren’t going to get very far, so join LinkedIn here. Once you’ve confirmed your email address, you’ll be able to fill out all your details, such as experience, previous work, education and contact preferences. Do this, it will help people who want to find someone with your skills.

Read the rest of this entry »

Starting a business can be difficult. It seems as though everything is set up for failure and success is a distant sight. From start-up fees, to incorporation fees, property tax, sales tax, and the list goes on, everything seems so expensive. Well, we have found 3 applications that have become essential to our daily routine that come to us at little or no cost. They cover these 3 areas: Invoicing & Receipts, Payment Terminal, & Email Marketing. Let’s get to the meat…

Working Point: Invoice & Account Management

www.workingpoint.com

This particular service is one of the most helpful that we have found as a small business. It provides a professional invoicing and receipt system for you, and your clients. You can see overdue invoices, open invoices and payment history. You can create as many items as you need in your inventory for faster reference when building an invoice. (Smart software suggests items as you type). When complete, you can save the invoice as a PDF file to send from your email account, or send the invoice to your client directly from within Working Point.

And there’s more! You can log expenses, track bills, export reports & handle most requirements your accountant will request when it’s tax time. Somehow, when you tie in a bank account to Working Point, from time to time, it will actually connect activity in your account to payments made inside of your Working Point history. Amazing stuff. 

Some of the features discussed are for premium members only ($10/month) but a free version is available with limitations. We started with the free version to “check it out”, and slowly realized it was worth the money to upgrade.

Bonus: If you have a PayPal account, Working Point will add a “Pay with PayPal” button to your invoices. Your clients can click on the link and be redirected to make a payment using a credit or debit card.

Mail Chimp: Build & Deploy Email Campaigns

www.mailchimp.com

Mail Chimp… what a wonderful tool. While most email marketing and management sites require a monthly fee to access all of their features, Mail Chimp is FREE! Yep, totally free, so long as your email subscriber list is less than 500 and you send less than 3000 emails per month. As a small business, this should be more than sufficient. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently, I purchased a book by the name “Re Work” written by the founders of 37 Signals, Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson. I was instantly hooked while standing in Barnes and Noble after reading only one excerpt from a page I had flipped to for a preview. This is the excerpt
-Draw a Line in the Sand
“A strong stand is how you attract superfans. They point to you and defend you. And they spread the word further, wider, and more passionately than any advertising could. Strong opinions aren’t free…
Lots of people hate us because our products do less than the competition’s. they’re insulted when we refuse to include their pet feature. But we’re just as proud of what our products don’t do as we are of what they do.” Read the rest of this entry »

Research Shows That IE Still Holds The Majority of The Browser Marketshare

If you are a web designer, programmer or both, you are well aware that Internet Explorer is the least favorable browser to build websites for. Pages render differently from one version to the next. Functions work in IE7 that may not work in IE8 and IE6 is an overall nightmare. Firefox has gained in popularity over the years and it seems to handle most functions across websites very well. It renders graphics very similar to that of Safari’s browsers. Keeping all of this in mind, ALL BROWSERS have their own set of bugs and the fact remains that some folks (a lot) do not keep current with browser updates. This means that you must cross check all of your builds across several browsers to ensure that all users get the most from the browsing experience you intend them to have. Anything less may result in lack of revenue or loss of a potential sale/client.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, the buzz surrounding social networking concerned “data portability” — giving Facebook and MySpace users, for example, an easy way to connect to one another without the need to create new profiles. That once-deafening buzz has now fallen silent, and the social networks are back working to corner more of the Web in exclusion of others.

“Facebook and MySpace are having trouble monetizing their database,” said Tony Roth, chief executive officer of Celect.org, part of the VComm Network. Celect.org provides Web-based network services, including integrating a variety of different social networking tools, for its various membership organizations.

Facebook friends, for instance, are valued at 5-to-10 US cents each, Roth estimated.

“Social networks are indeed becoming more antisocial,” he told TechNewsWorld. “If they start to commingle, they will find their member values decreasing even further.” Read the rest of this entry »

While reading the book on SEO by Kristopher Jones, I came across a great tip. The advice given was to maintain fresh content on your website so that users and search engines alike, crawl your site more often. Enter www.freshcontent.net The site offers tons of FREE feeds from a vast selection of categories including arts and entertainment, business, marketing, shopping, travel and many many more. These feeds appear as your own content on your site and there’s never any need to update as freshcontent.net pushes “fresh content” to the feed on a regular basis.

The script is easy to install. Simply click on the category in which you want to feature on your site, and copy the javascript source code. Once you’ve copied the code to your clipboard, open your web pages source code in your favorite editor and paste to your websites source code. If you find difficulty in doing so, freshcontent.net provides support and instructions to install as well.

I strongly encourage those who have a website and/or build websites to pick up this book. The topics are easy to understand and 100% relevant and helpful. After applying the techniques discussed within the pages, our website has received a significant increase in traffic. A Dark Rising Grafx “Best Buy”

This is a pack of over 100 icons that can be used to fully customize any website with a similar theme already in place or perhaps you will take a look at the set and be inspired to build your site around them. Either way, we hope they are useful and most of all… enjoy!

Click Here For Free Download

Icon set comes to us courtesy of Web Treats Etc. Be sure to visit the site and follow them on Twitter for updates.

What are the best ways to boost your position in search engines? What keywords should you use on your web-pages? And which tools should you use to improve the quality of backlinks, link popularity and Google Pagerank? We deliver answers. Here is the list of the most useful SEO-tools you might be willing to use, developing and optimizing your next web-site. Our personal choice: 156 Seo Tools – one of the most comprehesive lists with essential SEO-references and tools. For even more resources check out the SEO section of The Web-Developer’s Handbook. Links checked: May/11 2008 Read the rest of this entry »