QR Codes – Should You Have One?

April 26, 2011 By

The short answer?  Why not? These little black and white graphics have been popping up everywhere and more and more people seem to be interested, so if you’ve got something interesting to embed in one, I say go ahead.

But what are they?
QR stands for “Quick Response” and they are a black and white, two dimensional graphic that you scan with your smart phone that has all kinds of information embedded in it.  It could be a coupon, contact information, a URL, a location using Google Maps (very cool!) or any other data.

How do I scan them?
First you’ll need a reader app. I use QR Reader for iPhone.  There’s a free version, but if you hate the ads, you can upgrade to no ads, for 99 cents.
Visit the app store for your particular smart phone and search for QR Reader and choose whichever one appeals to you.  Once you have your app installed, simply open it when you find a code you’d like to scan, place it over the image and your camera will automatically scan from within the app.  If you’d like to try it now, here’s a QR Code that I generated.  It’s my contact information that will go directly into your phone book and a memo that tells you about a secret code for a major discount on my services.

Do I need one?
Again, why not?  There very easy, free to do and they might come in handy.  My favorite place so far to create them is Delivr – again… Free, easy and I like that they have the contact information option. You just fill out the information, click “generate” and you’ve got the code to embed into any page.

One Last Thing
Make sure you’ve got interesting data to embed.  Whether it’s a coupon code, or promotional text, or whatever, make sure that your data is interesting, otherwise people are just going to get mad that you wasted their time.

Lots of camera phones are also able to read these. Here’s a comprehensive list and instructions for lots of phones.

Need more help with this?  Want to track it? Then, please consider contacting me for a quote.  I’d love to work with you!

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Installing Themes from your WP Dashboard

March 23, 2011 By

It’s so easy to install free, gorgeous themes in WordPress – Here’s a tutorial to get you started. Hope it helps!

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Changing Nameserver Info with GoDaddy

March 23, 2011 By

I created a short video to help with navigating your nameservers in GoDaddy.  Hope it helps!

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What Are You Saying?

December 28, 2010 By

In this time of social media, your website, tweets, Facebook updates and every other bit of social media that you participate in paint a picture for your prospective and current clients. Are you taking that seriously? Does your website reflect the image that you want to put in the public eye? I’d like to suggest that you really take a look at your collective representation and decide if you’re putting your best face forward.

I know it’s very popular lately to hire someone to do your tweeting and update your Facebook page, but I would suggest that you pay very close attention to what they’re saying. Remember, they’re speaking for you. As far as your clients are concerned that’s your voice. I see so many businesses tweeting nothing but links to their website and poorly constructed filler messages with little content, misspelled words and grammar that would make your 7th grade English teacher cringe. Self promotion isn’t a bad thing, but unless you’re a very sought after brand, you’re going to need compelling content to get noticed.  Not everyone is literally inclined and that’s OK. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. If you’re paying someone to be your voice, make sure that it’s a voice you’re proud of – and if you can’t afford to hire someone and you’re not inclined to do it, find someone in your organization who is and make it worth their while to be an effective voice for you.

With a little bit of effort and some observation you can enormously improve your online identity. Don’t let someone else cause you lost opportunities because of these mistakes.

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Three New (to Me) Plugins for WordPress

September 16, 2010 By

I just finished up a client’s site and did some reorganization of some of my own sites. Along the way, I discovered some really cool plugins and I thought I’d share some of them with you.

Popularity Contest – This is a really intricate plugin. What I love about it is that you have all the collected information in the dashboard, but it also comes with all the code that you need in order to display this information on your blog if you choose to. By post, category, archive, etc. You can put the code outside the loop in the sidebar, or footer, or wherever and you don’t have to be really code savvy to do it. Keep track of the popularity of your posts, and/or show it off! Very well done.

No Self Pings – Some people really like that internal links show up in your pings, and some people don’t. I’m of the don’t variety. Sometimes I might link to something strategically for search engine optimization, or whatever and I don’t always want that displayed. Also, if no one else is linking to the post it sort of looks sad to me. I turn ping notifications off because of it. With this plug-in, you don’t have to worry about it. I like that a lot. I just turned ping notifications back on and I’ll keep you posted.

Widget Context – This one is my favorite right now. It allows you to choose what pages certain widgets show up on. I don’t have a lot of use for it on ColorMePink, but I’ve already used it on a couple of client sites and I know that there’s a certain advertising program that won’t allow you to have their add content on your review pages, this makes it super easy to just remove it. You can control widget appearance by URL, category, page, word count, archive, etc. Sometimes something comes along that is so perfect, so useful and so simple that you have to marvel that it was never thought of before.

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Customize Your 404 Page

September 13, 2010 By

When your blog has been up for any length of time, things are bound to change. You may decide to remove a post, or you change a category, or any number of things might happen that will cause a visitor to click through to a link that just isn’t there. Your server probably has a generic “404″ file, you know the ones, black on white, with no way to get back to the main page of your site. If you use WordPress, chances are good that your template has a 404 page already, which is definitely better as it still looks like your template, with your sidebars, header and footer intact and links to your archives, categories, etc. While this is definitely a marked improvement, you might want to take it even further. I added a graphic to my template’s pre-existing 404 file and removed some of the information that I thought was overkill. Here’s mine: 404 page not found.

If you’re using WordPress, it’s super easy. Just go into your dashboard, and under “Appearance” click on “Editor”. On the right side of the page, you’ll see a list of your templates. Click on “404 Template” or “404.php” or something similar. In the editor window you’ll see the code for your 404 template. Copy and paste it into a text editor so that if you make a mistake and can’t figure out what you did wrong, you’ll have the original code to start over.

Open up another window and navigate to your own 404 page. You can do this by typing your domain name followed by something you know isn’t a category or page on your site… i.e. http://yourdomain.com/belching – provided you don’t have an area of your site dedicated to belching, this should bring you to your 404 page.

Now decide if you want a graphic. You’ll have to play around with sizes, depending on the template you’re using, but I found the size 550×600 to work for me. Create your graphic, add whatever information you’d like and upload to your server. Get creative. Remember you can always change it. If you don’t want a graphic you can skip this part.

Go back to the editor window and find the line that says something like “The page you are looking for no longer exists.” or “404, not found” or something like that. that’s going to be the top of your page. If you can’t figure it out, find the area that says “get footer” and look just above that for your main area. I put the code to display my image:

<a href=”http://colormepink.com”><img src=”http://colormepink.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/cmp404.png”></a>

Notice, I link the graphic to the home page, so that if the visitor doesn’t want to be bothered reading, they can just click it. I chose to remove my archives by date because there were just too many, but I left the archives by page and by category.

So go create one for yourself, here’s some creative inspiration. Come back and leave a link to your creation. I’d love to see it!

If all else fails, this gun’s for hire.

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Broken Link Checker

August 26, 2010 By

Recently I participated in the SITS version of Probloggers 31 Days to a Better Blog which was one of the best things I’ve ever done for my blog. One of the most eye opening exercises was Day 27 which was “Go on a Dead Link Hunt“, which I had never done because the idea of going through posts dating all the way back to 2002 was more daunting than I was willing to deal with. Fortunately Kat recommended the Broken Link Checker plug in (duh Christine, of course there’s a plug in – has anyone else noticed that I look for more difficulty when there are simple solutions?!). As is usually the case with WordPress, installation of the plug in was a breeze and it started looking immediately. The results show up right in your dashboard and by the time it was done, it had found close to a thousand dead links. I’m still not done going through them, but this has been so worth it. I’m chunking the task, doing a bit every time I get some down time, but I could not believe the dead links! The vast majority were links to blogs that no longer existed, which was sad – but some were to news stories and opinions that I may or may no longer agree with and some were to photographs that seem to have disappeared over the course of server changes, and subdomain to primary domain and every thing in between.

I’ve deleted quite a few of the posts. (how did I ever post 4 and 5 times a day?!) Memes, quizzes, silly little filler things, I’ve made some of the posts private as I didn’t want to completely delete them, but they weren’t relevant any longer. I fixed links, created forwarders when necessary and at this point, I have less than 100 left. Yay me! *update* they’re all fixed now!

One of my favorite results was concerning a post from February, 2004. We had a wonderful trip to the Florida Keys and I had the gallery stored under a domain name that I no longer own. I was able to find the gallery on an old hard drive and it’s now connected and online once again. If you’d like to see, it’s here.

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Six of My Favorite WordPress Plug Ins

January 19, 2010 By

Every so often I go through my plugins, upgrading, activating, deactiving, deleting. . . While I was doing it today, I thought I’d share with you some of my favorites. Most of them are pretty well known, but I thought I’d share anyway, just in case you might have missed one. I have to tell you it took me forever to narrow it down this far and as always, I do reserve the right to change my mind.

I tried to skip the really obvious ones, but I couldn’t completely as you’ll see below. So, here they are in no particular order, my current favorite WordPress Plug Ins.

  1. Send It Really easy, yet robust newsletter subscription plug in. Yes, it’s in Italian, but there are English instructions too. I love this one!
  2. WP Greet Box – Let’s you show a different welcome message to your visitor, depending upon the referring URL. Very Cusomizable. Change multiple messages, placement, etc. Very easy to use.
  3. Post Ideas – Some people keep them as drafts, but that seems messy to me some how, I much prefer this plug in that lets you jot down any ideas, relevant links, keywords, etc., till you’re ready. Ranks by priority too.
  4. Blog Icons – Makes it ridiculously easy to add favicon and icons for Ipod/Itouch icons to your blog
  5. Follow My Links – Prevents WordPress from automatically adding a “rel=nofollow” attribute. Show your commenters Linky Love, which leads us to: Edit! The gracious author of this plugin was kind enough to stop by and explain that this does not pertain to comments left by readers, only the “authorial comments (i.e., comments made by the post author)”. I took it to mean the author of the comments, because I don’t actually read documentation, I skim it and then just keep pressing buttons till it either works, or I break it completely. You can see his whole comment below.
  6. Comment Luv – Everyone is already using this right? It goes without saying, right?

So tell me, what are your current favorites? Anything you think I absolutely have to know about? I’m all ears eyes. :wassat:

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Some of my (Current) Favorite Plug Ins

December 30, 2009 By

I’ve been having an awful lot of fun this week setting up a couple of blogs for clients, friends and family. Of course I’m always tweaking this one, as I’m sure you may have noticed, but it’s always interesting to start with a blank canvas and build according to the writer’s unique needs and desires. I thought I’d share with you some of the things that I found, some great old stand-bys, and where and how to implement them. We’re WordPress Centric ’round here, so if that’s not your flavor, you might want to skip this.

First I thought that I would try the plug in that’s gotten so much buzz lately; the Google Analyticator. I came to Google Analytics a little late in the game as I’ve been using Sitemeter for so long that I didn’t really see the need to change. Wrong. Google Analytics is so much more powerful with so many different ways of looking at your traffic and your readers. The Analyticator makes it very easy to install your code to each page, but there are also some other features making it really useful, like putting the code in your footer with the click of a button for faster load times, tracking your adsense information etc. Useful stuff!

404 Notifier: A great one for anyone, but especially if you’ve had your site for a long time and there have been several incarnations of it, there are most definitely old links to pages that no longer exist from other blogs, forums, etc. With 404 Notifier, every time someone gets a 404 error from your site, you’re notified (by email or RSS feed) of the page they were looking for and you can then either modify your 404 page to send the visitor elsewhere in your site or simply create another file of that name. Very cool.

Blog Icons might be my favorite one this week – because I’m insane for customized icons. This one lets you easily add your customized Apple iPod Touch / iPhone icon, favicon and feed image to your blog. Go ahead and look, take your iphone and visit colormepink.com – click on the “+” and choose “Add to Home Screen”. Now you have my pretty butterfly icon right there, easy access!

Post Ideas: This is great. Instead of the 300 drafts I would sometimes wind up with, Post Ideas keeps your ideas, target tags and links you want to reference. When you’re ready to write the actual post, click “Write This” and it converts your idea into a New Post and deletes it from Post Ideas. I added a link to this page of my admin panel on my Iphone as well, so I can jot this information down when I’m out of the house. Note: This is compatible with WP 2.7.1 the link is under “Tools” instead of “Manage”.

The last one I’ll talk about today is Podcasting, another one by the developer behind Google Analyticator. Of course you can use it for podcasting, but I needed a way to take a client’s audio file from their commercial and add it to their website for easy listening. This was a simple, elegant way to do it. The best part is, it was so easy to teach the client how to do this for themselves. Yay!

I can’t say enough about WordPress and the community of talented developers working on a never ending stream of great plugins and themes.

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