These are just some of my favorite business related apps. If you’re on the go a lot, an iPhone is a great way to keep productive. It’s also great while sitting on the sofa in front of the TV.

1. E-mail: The iPhone syncs with your iCal and MobileMe account seamlessly.
2. Facebook: Stay in touch with all your friends and clients.
3. Twitter: Set up your favorite list and keep up to date.
4. Bam Analytics: Set up your Google analytics and keep track of how your websites are doing wherever you are.
5. Lynda.com: If you have a spare moment you can watch a video lesson on the latest software applications. Check out a FreePass today.
6. iBooks: A great way to catch up on your business reading. Even load up your own pdf files and e-books to keep up to date.
7. Go Daddy: Find and purchase a domain name or check your mobile mail.
8. Lucy Phone: Never wait on hold again. Find a company, call it up, and your phone will ring you when the call goes through.
9. NetNewsWire: Keep up with the latest news feeds. Syncs with Google Reader. It’s my favorite news reader as it is quick and there’s a convenient Mac app too. Great on the iPad and iPhone.
10. Instapaper: Save a web page or newsfeed and read it later in Instapaper. A great way to catch up when you have a spare moment.

There are many more useful business related iPhone and iPad apps, but these are my favorite, so far. What are yours?

1. Open iTunes.

2. On the top menu click “File”. On the drop down menu click “Add to Library…”

3. Navigate to your e-book or pdf file and choose it.

4. In iTunes click on your iPhone or iPad in the side menu.

5. Choose the Books tab and you will see the file. Make sure it’s checked.

6. Sync your iPhone or iPad and your pdf file will appear in iBooks under the pdf tab.

See, it’s simple. There are other ways to get files onto your iPhone or iPad, including Dropbox, Air Sharing, Stanza and GoodReader apps but I’ll leave that for another post.

You can go online and find a logo design factory that charges only $99 or $149 for a logo with unlimited changes. Realize, of course, that your logo will most likely be designed by students or recent graduates with limited experience. And you will be encouraged to order something else to help the logo design factory generate enough money to make up for that cheap logo.

Or you can hire an experienced graphic design company and pay a fair price for a product that will best represent you and your company.

Get Your Online Logos Now

It used to be that a professional logo design would cost you a minimum of $500 and an average of $1500. You were dealing with professional artists and graphic designers who had many years in the business designing logos. They had talent and experience. They knew how well your logo would stand out in color and black and white. What colors would go with your product and service and what design would create the best public image for your company. You met with the artist in person and discussed your preferences and options. And they took the time to follow their creative process. Creativity is not instantaneous.

Today you can go online and get an instant logo for $99 or $149. How much time and effort do you think was spent on creating that logo?

Keep in mind that your business logo is a graphic representation of your brand. Typically you keep your logo for many, many years. When people see your logo they get an immediate feeling about your business, whether it’s conscious or not. Do you really want that image to be cheap?

Professional Logos Cost Money

Think about big companies like Apple, Nike, Coca Cola, Pepsi, Microsoft, etc. Do you think they contacted an online logo factory and paid $99 for their logo design. I think not. They took the time and spent the money to carefully research their image and brand. They spent thousands of dollars. Maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars building a brand image that matched their product or service.

Choose Your Logo Creator Wisely

So when it comes time to choose a company or person to create your own company’s brand image, don’t you think you deserve to get something that best represents you? I think you do.

You want to be proud of your company. You want to be successful. And you most certainly want to present an image of yourself that is both professional and exudes success. To achieve this you have to spend a little bit of money.

And always remember. You get what you pay for. This fact almost never changes.

1. All in one SEO Pack Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. Appears on every page and makes adding keywords and meta tags easier.
2. Easy Adsense Easiest way to show AdSense and make money from your blog.
3. Exclude Pages from Navigation Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. Very helpful for those special landing pages.
4. Follow Me The Follow Me plugin is designed to allow users the ability to add links to their social media profiles in their blog. Shows up on the side with a pop up of your chosen social media such as Twitter and Facebook.
5. Google Analytics for WordPress This plugin makes it simple to add Google Analytics to your WordPress blog, adding lots of features, eg. custom variables and automatic clickout and download tracking.
6. My Category Order My Category Order allows you to set the order in which categories will appear in the sidebar. Uses a drag and drop interface for ordering. Adds a widget with additional options for easy installation on widgetized themes.
7. My Link Order My Link Order allows you to set the order in which links and link categories will appear in the sidebar. Uses a drag and drop interface for ordering. Adds a widget with additional options for easy installation on widgetized themes.
8. My Page Order My Page Order allows you to set the order of pages through a drag and drop interface. Perfect if your theme is not exactly WordPress 3.0 compatible.
9. NextGEN Gallery A NextGENeration Photo gallery for the Web 2.0. Lots of options to choose from.
10. WP-DBManager Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

By the way, did I mention these plugins are all free? Some of them do ask for donations and I encourage you to do so. Somebody has to support these people so they can continue to create the wonderful plugins.

You should be aware that background music that automatically starts playing when a web page is loaded may not be appreciated by a large number of your visitors. Some of them, when greeted with the sudden blaring of music from their speakers, may immediately hit the BACK button of their browsers. This may occur even if you’re playing a piece of music that you think is well loved by everyone: remember, there are people who surf the Internet in public libraries, at work, or in the dead of the night when others are asleep. Others may already have their favorite piece of music playing on their computer speakers, and your auto-playing music file will only cause them to be annoyed.

Even if you are satisfied that your website has the type of target audience that will enjoy your background music, there are alternatives to automatically playing music that you might want to consider. For example, giving visitors a link which they can click to play music would allow you to showcase your music while remaining sensitive to your visitors’ preferences.

Common features of Today’s Websites

The great sites above share the following design features:

• Simple layout
• Centered orientation
• Design the content, not the page
• 3D effects, used sparingly
• Soft, neutral background colors
• Strong color, used sparingly
• Cute icons, used sparingly
• Plenty of white space
• Nice big text

Let’s look at these features one by one.

Simple layout

It feels like we’re seeing more simple 1- and 2-column designs than in previous years.

The overall feel you get is that designers generally agree that simple pages work better.

These pages read in a straightforward way from top to bottom, and you don’t find your eye skipping around trying to work out what to look at. It’s a much calmer and more solid browsing experience.

Centered orientation

The other thing you notice about all the hot picks above is that they’re all laid out around a central axis.

Whereas a couple of years ago, you’d find a lot of liquid layouts and left-aligned fixed-width layouts, today content goes in the center of the screen.

Left-oriented layouts are much less common than they used to be.

Also, liquid (full-width) layouts are less popular.

The wisdom has always been that we should try to get as much information “above the fold” (i.e. visible on the screen without scrolling). Liquid layouts achieves this.

However, today we seem to be more comfortable with scrolling, and we’re willing to put up with scrolling for the benefits of increased white space and line height.

Design the content, not the page

Good modern web designs put less energy into designing the page background – the canvas and permanent page features – and rather focus on designing the content itself.

This reflects the principle of drawing the viewer’s attention to the content. This is also great for search engine optimization. They love relevant content.

We see the effects in:

• Freer, less boxed-in page layouts
• Softer, simpler, receding page “furniture”
• Strong color and 3D effects used to draw attention to the content itself, including the main branding
• The focus is on making the site’s subject look good, rather than making the web designer look good (which is better for the designer in the long-term!)

Why center-align?

When the content sits in the center of the screen, it feels up-front and confident.

It also gives a sense of simplicity and balance, which reflects the move towards clean, more Zen, design.

The most common centered designs are either fixed-width (i.e. master width in pixels or percent) or sometimes zoom-width (i.e. master width in ems). The benefit of restricting the width of the content (particularly with zoom-width, which resizes as the font size changes) is that the line-length is prevented from getting too long on larger screens. (Very long lines of text are less efficient.)

3D effects, used sparingly

Every single one of the hotties uses gradients subtly, either to give bars a slight roundedness, to create a soft feeling of space in the background, or to make an icon stand out with embossing and subtle drop-shadows.

Reflections & fades are very prevalent. Drop-shadows are still used, but with care.

Soft, neutral background colors

All the hotties have a plain background, the most popular being white and greyscale fades. These give a cool, neutral, soft base against which you can flash strong color to draw the eye.

Strong color, used sparingly

A soft, stylish background is the perfect base for adding eye-catching features. Strong colors and tonal constrast are great for drawing the eye to the more important elements on the page.

Cute icons, used sparingly

There’s a theme here: Don’t use too many attractive elements on the same page view (i.e. that appeals to the eye and draws the user’s attention).

As with strong color and 3D effects, appealing icons and buttons can add that bit of polish to help give a page a high-quality feel. But used too much, they’ll have the counter effect, cluttering the page and confusing the user.

Plenty of whitespace

Today’s web designs are so fresh, they feel like they’ve taken a deep breath.

Your eye needs space (guttering in typo language) round stuff to help you clearly and cleanly identify things.

In general, the more white space the better.

Of course, “white” space doesn’t have to be white. But it does have to be space!

Make the most important text on the page bigger than normal text

Like the other design techniques we’ve seen, it works when used in moderation. If all your text is big, then none of your text is big.

Use bigger text to help your visitors see quickly what the page is about, what’s most important, and figure out where they want to look next to find what they want.

Copy on this page courtesy of Ben Hunt and “Web Design from Scratch”

When I found out about the MobileMe Calendar beta update I eagerly signed up and did not think of the consequences. I was approved to try out the beta and pressed the little update button.

The result was that my entire iCal on my iMac was “wiped out” and replaced with the new MobileMe Calendar beta.

From what I understand, the MobileMe Calendar beta moves the local iCal information from your local Mac and stores it on the MobileMe “cloud” or server. So everything you enter on your iCal is stored online and no where else. All updates are sent to your other iOS devices. And when you update info on your iPad or iPhone this is sent to the “cloud” and then down to all other iOS devices. In this way everything is kept up to date and in sync.

Unfortunately iCal is no longer automatically backed up on your hard drive or Time Machine. You have to manually back up your individual calendars in order to have any sort of backup that’s not on the MobileMe server.

So when I updated to MobileMe beta and synced my Todo iPad and iPhone apps, there was no longer any iCal info on my computer and all the info was wiped clean from my Todo apps.

Of course this was very upsetting since I no longer had any of my Todo’s on my iPhone and iPad. Also at this time iCal does not sync it’s todo list feature with any other iOS device (which is still very annoying).

The good news was that I was able to “downgrade” my MobileMe calendar server back to the pre-beta mode which restored my calendar as it was before I updated to the beta. Any changes made after I updated to the beta was lost.

And when I re-synced my Todo apps on the iPhone and iPad I got all my info back! So everything is back to the way it was before I got myself into this mess.

The good folks at Appigo and “Todo” are going to look into this and hopefully come up with a workable fix. If not, I’m worried that when this new MobileMe calendar beta becomes the only option, my Todo apps may become useless.

This is known as a Top Level Domain (TLD) which started in South America but is now available worldwide.

The abbreviation .co can be interpreted as any number of things, from company, community, commerce or any other word you like that begins with “co” such as con.

Is this just another way of wasting your money?

True, some people think this is just another way of getting you to pay a premium amount of money to reserve yet another version of your domain to prevent others from getting it. While .com is the most popular choice, you also have .net, .org, .info and much more. How many people reserved a .mobi domain for mobile phones and now wonder why they bothered?

On the other hand, if you have a company name and cannot get a .com domain for it, now’s your chance to reserve a .co version. I’ve already registered creativejuices.co and cjuices.co. See if your domain name is available at my Creative Juices Domains website. And if you do reserve it there you’ll be contributing to the survival of Creative Juices since I am a GoDaddy registered reseller. Yay me.

How this plays out remains to be seen. Will search engines like this new domain extension? Will people get confused between .co and .com thinking it’s a misspelling and end up going to your competition by mistake? Do you want to take a chance and ignore this opportunity and let somebody else get your desired domain name… again?

Read “New domain .co goes up for sale” by Jennifer Scott from ITPRO for more information.

Any kind of social networking involves sharing your “brand” with the world. You want to present your best image and you want people to recognize your company wherever you are.

So if you’re into twittering for your business, you really need to create a custom backdrop. It is the first thing people will see before they decide to follow you. So at the very least you should have your company logo and design/color scheme that matches your website. (What, you don’t have a website? Contact Chuck at Creative Juices immediately.)

Always Build Your Brand

Besides building on your brand, your custom twitter backdrop also allows you to give more contact information on yourself and your company, beyond the 160 characters twitter allows. That’s 20 characters more than an ordinary Twitter post. This is a great opportunity for you to show how professional and creative you really are. And it’s all free. Unless, of course, you hire someone to utilize their creative juices and create an outstanding twitter backdrop for you.

Dropbox allows you to view documents, spreadsheets, photos, videos and presentations. A neat feature is that you can snap a photo with your iPhone and save it to your Dropbox direct. You don’t even need a MobileMe account.

And the great thing is a Dropbox account is free and comes with 2 GB of storage space. For most people that’s quite a lot of space. If you have a lot of heavy duty files you can purchase a Pro plan up to 100GB. I am not an affiliate of Dropbox but I do find it worth looking into if you haven’t already installed it on your iStuff. Dropbox is also available for non-Apple-ites, who use Windows or Linux.

Although I love my new iPhone I was disappointed that, for the moment, pedometer apps do not run in the background. At best you can play music in the background while using the pedometer app. My biggest issue, aside from the left-handed antenna glitch, was that after starting and then stopping my pedometer my phone was stuck in the portrait position and wouldn’t change to landscape unless I restarted. And the pedometer stopped working.

After several calls to Apple, trying to figure out why my phone would lock up in the portrait position, without manually turning this feature on, I was instructed to reinstall the operating system and load everything from scratch. And if this didn’t work I was going to have to bring the phone in to Apple for repair or replacement.

By this time I was fairly convinced that the iSteps pedometer app was causing the problem since it was not updated to iOS4. I backed up my iPhone, did the reinstall and lost all my folders, data and passwords.

Before I started the long process of reconfiguring everything and entering all my data, I ran the iSteps app and what do you know, my iPhone was stuck in the portrait position and the app no longer worked after I quit it and restarted it.

So I deleted the app, restarted the iPhone and no problem. So I restored my backup giving me everything I had before I wiped it clean. I found a new “All-In” Pedometer, and haven’t had a problem since.

The lesson here is, back up your iPhone regularly and if you have an iOS operating issue and suspect it’s related to an app, delete the app and check again for the problem.

Update: iSteps has recently updated their app to be iOS4 compatible.