Posts tagged spring
3 Sure Signs Your PPC Campaigns Need Spring Cleaning
May 9th
There is no mistaking the official arrival of spring in northern climes. I am not talking about the beautiful blossoms of the dogwood, apple and cherry trees, or the distinctive powerful fragrance of purple lilacs, our official state wildflower up here in New Hampshire. For me, the true sign of…
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Spring Search Fever: How Users Look Up Garden Center Products & Services
Apr 8th
It’s spring, and garden centers everywhere are getting ready to service the needs of home gardeners and small landscaping services. Garden center search traffic is similar to Christmas retail search traffic in that the majority of the searches occur during three or four months of the year,…
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4 Reasons to Spring A Few Bucks For That Premium WordPress Theme
Jan 29th
When it comes to launching blogs and Websites, small businesses often go with WordPress, and for great reasons: it’s customizable, widely-used and – best of all – free. In addition to the core product, there are tons of free plugins and themes available that make building out the ultimate site a cinch.
Sure, we all love free stuff. But just because there are hundreds of free options within reach doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be willing to spend a few dollars.
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Enhanced Security
As we wrote a few weeks ago, free WordPress themes can come with security exploits. An analysis done by Siobhan Ambrose on the WPMU.org blog showed that most Google results for the query “free WordPress themes” led to themes containing security exploits that enabled the inclusion of malicious code hidden in one or more of the themes PHP files. In other cases, themes can come with SEO spam baked right in, which can in turn hurt your own site’s search rankings.
To be fair, most free WordPress themes do not contain vulnerabilities of this sort. As Ambrose recommends, you can safely download legitimate, free themes from WordPress.org, Smashing Magazine and Woo Themes, among others. But in general, premium themes are probably less likely to come with security issues than free ones. If problems do arise, many premium themes come with technical support to help troubleshoot them.
Better Design
Let’s face it: In many cases, when a site is sporting a free WordPress theme, you can tell. A surprising number of business sites even go with the default theme or another very popular option. For personal blogs, this can be forgiven. For businesses, it can look unprofessional.
Even though there are quite a few free themes that look premium, on the whole, the ones that cost a few bucks are more professionally-designed. It’s worth investing a little bit to help your site stand out in the cookie-cutter crowd.
We rounded up six especially attractive WordPress themes for small businesses, but that’s only a small sampling of what’s available.
We can’t overstate the importance of design when it comes to business sites, especially if your site is used to sell products or capture leads. When a crummy-looking site or bad user experience can mean the difference between a completed transaction and a disgruntled would-be customer, investing in a good design is worth it.
While It’s Not Free, It’s Also Not Expensive
Small businesses are justifiably a budget-concious lot. That’s what makes open source products like WordPress so appealing. Yet while premium WordPress themes are not free, they’re still pretty cheap. Consider it could cost thousands of dollars to get a professional design firm to give your site a facelift, paying $20 or $50 is a drop in the bucket.
A membership to the high-quality theme directory Elegant Themes only costs $39 per year. A subscription gives you access to over fifty premium themes, with new ones being released all the time. Other examples include WooThemes, Premium WordPress and Theme Forest.
Customization and Documentation
Anyone who knows their way around HTML, CSS and basic PHP can customize pretty much any WordPress theme, but many premium theme developers make it easier by providing detailed documentation and, in many cases, the original Photoshop PSD files for easy graphics manipulation.
Another perk of premium themes is that many of them offer more options for customizing your site’s appearance from the WordPress admin. For example, Elegant Themes come with their own settings area called ePanels, from which you can control graphics, color schemes, SEO settings, advertisting, the site’s navigation and some aspects of its layout. Many of these things are typically only editable at the theme level, which obviously requires some coding ability.
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SEO junkies are attending Spring Fair 2011 – PRLog.Org (press release)
Jan 26th
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SEO junkies are attending Spring Fair 2011
PRLog.Org (press release) SEO Junkies will be at the Spring Fair International, on stand 5H60, this year, promoting their range of SEO services that are aimed at improving the … |
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Kinect-Type Technology Promised for All PCs This Spring
Jan 3rd
One of the companies behind what’s called a key technology inside the XBox Kinect motion-controller says it has struck a deal with PC maker Asus to bring a similar interface to PCs. Matt Rosoff of Business Insider reports this afternoon that the company, PrimeSense, will show off the product called Wavi Xtion at the Consumer Electronics Show this week.
“The companies imagine it being used not for games, but for browsing multimedia content and accessing the Internet and social networks–basically, the main things consumers use their PCs for,” Rosoff writes. “There will also be APIs for third-party developers and a Wavi Xtion store where developers can sell motion-controlled apps.” The devices will reportedly work on all PCs, not just computers from Asus.
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It’s a little surprising that Microsoft didn’t get an exclusive license on the PrimeSense technology, but perhaps that would have required an acquisition one of the companies didn’t want to happen and perhaps there’s more to making Kinect what it is than PrimeSense would have us believe. APIs and an App Store sound quite intriguing, if trendy.
The day the Kinect went on sale, we asked leading gaming and wireless analysts about the prospects of it, or something like it, going beyond gaming and into web connected devices around the home. They had varying estimations of the likelihood of that occurring.
James McQuivey, Consumer Product Strategy analyst at Forrester, had written two weeks prior that, “”Kinect is to multitouch user interfaces what the mouse was to DOS. It is a transformative change in the user experience, the interposition of a new and dramatically natural way to interact — not just with TV, not just with computers — but with every machine that we will conceive of in the future.” (Get Ready for Kinect to Completely Change Our Lives)
McQuivey grew even more effusive in December, after smashing his hand through a lightbulb while swinging his arms around playing with his Kinect.
“Kinect feels very, very real. When you play it, you have a tendency to lose your sense of space and placement in the real world…
What will we call the new experiential medium that will result from natural user interfaces+3D+touch interfaces+augmented reality — technologies which are all conspiring in this decade to alter our lives? This part game, part narrative, part interactive, part video, potentially collaborative, experience-rich medium could, in 2020, be a $10 billion business. More interesting to me, who will be the Shakespeare, Cervantes, or Kurosawa of this new media? Or should I ask who will be the Bell, Edison, or Jobs of this new technology ecosystem?”
25 days after its launch, the Kinect was outselling what was the world’s fastest-adopted consumer electronics device in history (the iPad) 2 to 1.
A Kinect-type interface for all PCs? That sounds very, very hot – if it can be executed well.
Russoff writes that the system will launch in the second quarter of this year.
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Google ‘Spring Clean’ Search Results Pages
May 7th
In case you haven’t noticed yet, the look and feel of Google search results have changed. A post in the Official Google Blog by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience, says, “While we are constantly rolling out small changes and updates, today’s changes showcase the latest evolutions in our search technology, making it easier than ever to find exactly what you’re looking for.”
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