Online Marketing Minute: What is online marketing?

Hearing a lot of hype lately about online marketing? What is online marketing? Online marketing uses the web to tell people who you are, what you offer, and how they can get it. Instead of offline options like newspaper, fliers, and radio, online marketing uses websites, email, social networks, and more to get and keep your customers. Nearly 80% of the US uses the Internet! That includes everyone, kids through seniors. 97% of us use the Internet to research products and services in our local … [Read more...]

Online Marketing Plan

What is An Online Marketing Plan? I believe that an online marketing plan is the way you intend to use the web, mobile, and other digital resources to support your business's overall marketing plan. In that sense, it's just one piece of the pie that may also include non-online slices like radio, print, television, and publicity. This post briefly describes the pieces of a marketing plan as I see it. Setting Your Online Marketing Objectives The objective addresses the “big picture”. How will I … [Read more...]

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) and Site Slowness

I've used the excellent Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) for about a year-and-a-half now on various client websites. Overall, I've found that it works great and has a responsive author who cares about updating and performance issues. Why this post then? Because after experiencing deadly slow post updating and post saving on a client site over the span of more than 60 days, we were finally able to track down that YARPP was causing saving or updating posts and pages to take more than a … [Read more...]

Style Nth Word In a Phrase

The CSS Scenario Recently my graphic designer used a nice styling on a client's webpage headlines--all words in the headline were one color and the last word was a different color. It adds for a nice effect I think. Of course, as the developer I'm the one who has the responsibility to bring that to life. After a few quick searches on Google for phrases like, CSS Style Nth Word CSS style last word, CSS style first word php style nth word, php style first word, php get first … [Read more...]

Hawaii Picture of the Day

I just launched the Hawaii Picture of the Day website. I'm particularly pleased with the widget and iGoogle gadget I wrote so people can add it to their own sites. Here's how the site widget looks in real time: The site concept is simple: post good pictures of Hawaii to help people discover, be inspired, and be refreshed--daily. The site is built on WordPress and integrates tightly with MailChimp for e-newsletter subscribing and sending. Just publish a new post and an email with the post's … [Read more...]

Convert MS Access Date to Unix Timestamp to MySQL Timestamp

I came across a problem today where I needed to convert a date in an MS Access Database to a MySQL timestamp using PHP. The solution was pretty easy, but took some thinking through. Here is the answer to save you some time if you need it. Get the date from your MS Access database. If you're using PHP to do this, you'll likely use the odbc_exec($connection, $query) function and the odbc_fetch_array() function. Convert the MS Access date format into a UNIX Timestamp using PHP's strtotime() … [Read more...]

Social Media: Keep It Simple

Clients often ask me how they can be successful in social media. With social media advice blaring from every corner of the marketing and product world, there are an unbelievable number of opinions on the right answer to this question. There are also unbelievable amounts of complexity, nuance, and unadulterated bull. What's a person to do? Instead of all that, let me give it to you plainly. Your priorities for using social media successfully are: Audience Content Brand Simple, right? You … [Read more...]

Should I Still Use Yellow Pages?

Although I normally focus on online marketing, print is still an important part of the marketing mix. I thought I'd take a quick look at yellow page phone books because 1. they used to be the gold standard, and 2. there are now online versions. Yellow page phone books seem to have been losing relevancy over the past decade or so. Dex's own advertising recognizes that more and more often yellow pages are being used as doorstops and booster seats than finding a business. Last night my wife … [Read more...]

Website Font Replacement Options Comparison

The Website Typography Battle It turns out there is a battle raging on the best way to display fonts on websites. Most website owners today can choose from about 10 fonts. A lot of work has been done in the past decade to give website designers, developers, and branding folks a way to display any font they want. There is still no clear winner, but we're getting closer. If you're looking to go beyond the basic web fonts, here are the options I'm aware of today (condensed version): 1. sIFR Is … [Read more...]