CAKE Web Services Blog

If you’re new to blogging and WordPress, you might be struggling to customize your blog or find more ways for your sparks of genius (aka blog posts) to be found.  Below is a short list of must-have plugins we use on self-hosted WordPress installations.

The plugins listed below assume that you do want your blog to be found.  They also assume you have started a couple services that help you “push” your blog out to the world:

• Twitter:  A feed for everyone!
• Bit.ly:  Twitter posts are short by design.  When your blog “pushes” a link to your Twitter account, you don’t want your new Tweet to get overwhelmed by the blog link’s URL.  Unless you use another URL shortener service, signup for Bit.ly’s free account.  They’ll issue you a special API key to enter into the plugins that work with their URL shortening service.  Add click tracking to that and Bit.ly is a must have!
• Google Feedburner:  Both Twitter and Feedburner are essential tools to help you widen your circle of influence and “push” updates to followers.  They’re both free and very easy to set up.  Google’s Feedburner service even has an email subscription service that will allow you to place “Subscribe” links on your blog and/or website, then subscribers can receive automatic email updates every time you post something new to your blog. Read more…

One of the most frequent challenges we face with clients is what I’ll refer to as “furniture moving”.  All the cosmetic little tweaks that are important, but also take time and resources from SEO and visitor conversion work.  The logo the needs to be 4% bigger, the new photo of the company president that looks almost exactly like the current photo but MUST be replaced before moving forward, or the website design they sweated over 3 years ago and are reluctant to change, even though it’s not ranked well with search engines and doesn’t convert the few visitors that find the site by mistake.

The best looking website in the world won’t achieve your business objectives if it can’t be found and doesn’t effectively “funnel” visitors into taking action with a purchase, a phone call, form submission, or even a Twitter follow.  If the website doesn’t help you move the ball forward, all you’ve done is build a static piece of corporate vanity to place up on a shelf and be admired.  Like the emperor’s new cloths, everyone you ask will tell you how fantastic your new piece of art looks…  Except for paying customers. Read more…

Anyone who’s ever used Joomla has noticed sometimes it’s difficult to properly place a Joomla module in its position. Sometimes the module order for a given position seems orderly, and sometimes there are numerous modules all assigned the number “0″ (that’s ZERO), closely followed by one each in the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, etc… positions.

That’s not a big deal, until you try to re-arrange the module order.  Try changing the order on a “zero” Joomla module and you’ll find the finished results on your website front end don’t always match the order you need. Read more…

Recently, I’ve noticed that the email signatures of some colleagues have grown significantly.  Some even include images, along with privacy disclaimers, etc…  It’s annoying.  Especially when one of them asks me if I got the attachment they sent?  What attachment?  This is a conversation I had recently with someone I communicate with frequently.  I had come to expect that all this person’s emails would have attachments.  That’s how many email programs and servers handle inline images.  They might include them in the body of the email, but they almost always also attach them to the email itself.  It all becomes noise.  I’m sure it’s not what the sender intended when he/she spent valuable time building that elaborate, branded email signature!

By itself, that’s really not a big deal, but in the last year, I have become much more active with my Social Networking.  Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr just to name a few.  Which one do I include in MY email signature?  Do I include them all, and risk others tuning-out my noisy email signature too?

There has to be a better way! Read more…