Points to watch out for are – the number of years it took for a new thingamajig to gain 50 million users :

• Radio 38 Years
• TV 13 years
• Internet 4 years
• AND Facebook only took one year to gain 200 million users!

WATCH THIS VIDEO :-

DID you know - Even The Royal Family not only have a Website, they have a YouTube Channel, a Flickr account and Twitter.

DID you know – Children are being named “Facebook” : -

As reported by CNN, a man in Egypt has named his baby daughter Facebook in honor of the role the social  network played in the recent revolution. Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram reports that Gamal Ibrahim gave his daughter the name “to express his joy at the achievements made by the youth.”

The following slideshow also conveys similar facts about the Social Media revolution, if you can call it that.

If you have more than 20 products you really need to have them detailed on an Excel spreadsheet; – top row – product number, name, full description, price, weight, product options, stock quantity, etc.

The spreadsheet data can then be imported into the eCommerce catalog, you then format the descriptions and set up the individual product options. And triple check everything.

The image on the left shows a sample product page – main product photo, title, description, price, optionals – some of which change the price, enlargeable thumbnails of extra photos. Click the image to see the actual webpage.

Work out your packaging and shipping costs for each product too. For the UK – FedEx have different rates for England, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Island, Channel Islands – there isn’t one UK rate.

Brands can make use of the existence of FOMO to fine-tune messaging, offers, contests and more to tap into fears of missing out. Altho there is no cure for the common FOMO, businesses, marketeers and brands can focus on easing it, escalating it, making light of it or even turning it into a positive.

Do you fear your business is missing out by not getting a better website and marketing online effectively? – If you think so – call me on +44 (0) 1543-415423

See the SLIDESHOW:

From www.jwtintelligence.com by Christine Miranda:

Our May 2011 trend report takes a close look at FOMO, a four-letter acronym that has come to so fittingly characterize our radically transparent, real-time, one-upping, hashtag-ridden and, let’s face it, generally overwhelming world.

For those unfamiliar with the expression, that’s Fear Of Missing Out, the uneasy and sometimes all-consuming feeling you’re missing out—that your peers are doing, in the know about or in possession of more or something better than you.

While we’ve always had a fear of missing out, today it’s exploding with the proliferation of real-time, location-based and social media tools. We’re exposed more than ever before to what others around us are doing, and we’re filled with a gnawing uncertainty about whether we’ve made the right choice about what to do or where to be—not just in a given moment but in stages of our lives as well. Our friends aren’t helping, touting their every FOMO-worthy move on the go.

This report identifies which cohort is most prone to FOMO and how they respond to it, spotlights how FOMO is manifesting in the zeitgeist, and looks at the wide-ranging potential for brands seeking to tap into FOMO.

The report includes insights from interviews with experts and influencers in technology and academia and results of a quantitative study conducted in the U.S. and the U.K. Using SONAR™, JWT’s proprietary online tool, the survey was conducted from March 4-15, 2011, among 590 Americans and 434 Britons aged 18-plus; we also polled 87 teens aged 13-17 residing in the homes of adults surveyed. We also consulted our internal Bing team, who had carried out its own strategic exploration of FOMO back in February.

Masai / Omega manufacture a range of high quality Land Rover accessories. In addition to web and graphic design Masai wanted an instructional video, an eCommerce system and some copy writing too.

KP Events needed their old website modernised – in fact both clients took advantage of our excellent Wake Up Your Website Service.

The KP Events website now looks radically different and the owners are 100% happy. The brief was basically – make it blue, lively, modern, neat, clearer navigation, and make the back-end easier to use too.

For both sites we did a lot work in Photoshop – cleaning up photos, making graphics, cleaning logos, making sprites and route maps, etc. Also created a few PDFs.

Let’s use the analogy of custom building a desirable house……

If you wanted an impressive and desirable custom designed home – you’d hire an Architect to design and manage the project.

• You would need to set out a realistic financial budget capable of producing the desired results
• You would have to decide on and provide an extensive project brief and get involved in ongoing discussions.
• Realise that there’s plenty to do – crucial research, comparison, compromises and decisions over cost, quality, practicality, efficiency and improvements.
• Understand that some things cannot be controlled by either you or the Architect/Manager e.g. the weather, 3rd party contractor reliability, availability, etc – so you should be prepared for delays and re-adjusted costs, consider and deal with amendments and corrections.

So if you have high expectations for your website -

1. Decide what exactly you want your website to achieve
2. Write a Marketing Plan with a SWOT analysis
3. Prioritise
4. Work out a realistic budget
5. Hire a hard-working, pro-active and dynamic web designer/manager
6. Provide detailed, effective and ongoing briefing
7. Be flexible

In my written instructions for each application, boxes you need to click for each step are in italics.

1. General Internet Speed: You can tweak your windows registry using TCP Optimizer.

a) SpeedGuide.net TCP Optimizer *Doesnt need Installing.
Direct DL Link: http://www.speedguide.net/files/TCPOptimizer.exe
Website: http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php

Once it’s open, click Modify All Network Adapters then click the bubble next to optimal settings. Then Slide the connection speed to your match your approximate broadband speed. If you don’t know your broadband speed go to www.speedtest.net. Once done, click apply and reset your computer. (A quick note to remember, all these settings are applied to your specific broadband connection.)

b) Turn off QoS Packet Scheduler

Go to control panel and then network connections. Right click the connection you’re using for your internet. (It will be “local area connection” if you’re using a cable and “wireless area connection” if you’re using wireless.)  Then click properties. Untick “QoS Packet Scheduler” and click ok.

—

2. Torrent Downloading: The best torrent client by far is uTorrent.

a) Download uTorrent 2.0.3
Direct DL Link: http://www.filehippo.com (Download the latest version)
Website: http://www.utorrent.com/

Run the Set-up guide. (Press Ctrl+G to bring it up) Set the test location (I used London, UK) and click Run Tests at the bottom. You should then get your results:

Make sure your upload limit is set at 80% of what your connection can handle. Utorrent should do this for you.
As you can see my result was 108.7kB/s but it set my upload limit to 90.0kB/s. These settings are all fine.

b) Advanced uTorrent Settings

Get into Preferences (Ctrl + P)  and then go to these sections and make sure the following are ticked:

1. Connection
- Enable UPnP port mapping
- Enable NAT-PMP port mapping
- Add Windows Firewall exception

2. Bittorrent
- Enable DHT Network
- Enable DHT for new torrents
- Enable local Peer Discovery
- Enable bandwidth management
- Enable peer exchange
- Ask tracker for scrape information
- Protocol Encryption set to Outgoing: Enabled
- Allow incoming legacy connections

3. Advanced
- net.max_halfopen – set it to 60 from 8 and click set.
- peer.disconnect_inactive_interval – set it to 600 from 300 and click set.

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3. Internet Browsing: Stop using Internet Explorer, and get used to a much better, much faster browser. That being Google Chrome.

Google Chrome 6 Beta
Direct DL Link: http://www.filehippo.com
Website: http://www.google.com/chrome

Note*: Alternatively you could try out Firefox, however it is a little slower to run on older computers. On the plus side, it’s very customisable when it comes to add-ons etc.

Firefox 3.6.8
Direct DL Link: http://www.filehippo.com
Website: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html

The website was old fashioned, badly laid out, had slow loading images, didn’t portray the quality of the club and its massive success, and the business owner was not enjoying adding updates or promoting it. So we had a meeting and started planning the improvements.

As you would expect, the revamped site’s function is to quickly give details of forthcoming shows but we also wanted to include everything that people would want to know – how to get tickets, directions, who’s played there before, what the club is like, etc.

The main objective was to truly represent the club’s popularity and success with a high quality website, the way it was before did not do the club justice at all – you would never have believed the shows are always packed out.

We designed the new website to help ensure the shows are always sold out and to help the Stroke Club progress to putting on more than one show a month.

We focused on the design from a function view point rather than a certain look – it had to be fast loading, easy to use and navigate, but also simple to update and have a system for managing show dates and supplying them as RSS feeds to subscriber’s emails.

We optimised the site code and content for search engines and added buttons for people to add it to favourites, Facebook,  Twitter, etc, and designed a crisp new logo with a showbiz feel.

Ken Jenkins the club manager is now proud to talk about and promote his website unlike before the revamp, and the task of convincing some of the best London-based comedians to take the long road to Lichfield is easier now, with greater confidence that it’s both a professionally managed club and it will be packed out.

We also manage the site’s content on an ongoing basis – updating the show details and photos – so life is a lot easier for Ken now – he just books the acts and we update the website.

“Roxbourne were very helpful and imaginative in designing the perfect website to meet my needs. Their knowledge and advice was invaluable and they also provide excellent support. I have no hesitation in recommending them.”
- Ken Jenkins – The Stroke Comedy Club, Lichfield

What we could do for your website…

In other words – Wake Up Your Website will get your site more attention, enquiries and sales – we’ll turn it into a modern, hard working 24/7 marketing machine for your business.

Find out more about our website overhaul and promotion service “Wake Up Your Website“

Before:

After:

Thanks to the work of hundreds of contributors to WordPress, plug-ins can address a lot of these drawbacks.

So here is a top ten list of some of the ones we use. No doubt we’ll do a part two to this post if it’s useful to anyone!

1. Customising The “Read More” Tag.

A small problem I faced was when someone clicked “More” or “Read More…” to read the rest of a blog post, It would scroll the article down to where the more tag is. This plug-in prevents this and starts the post properly from the beginning.

Search “More To the Top” when adding a plugin.

2. Adding Custom External Hyper-links to your Navigational Menu

Normally WordPress only allows internal pages to be added to your navigational menu.

With the plugin below all you have to do is: create a new page, give it a title, and right at the bottom you’ll see the “Page Links To” box. Next to “Point to this URL” type in your link URL.

Search “Page Links To” when adding a plugin.

3. Re-arrange your Posts (For Bands and Clubs etc.)

If for example your posts are “events” for a band, or a club, you may want to have posts show up that are a date in the future.
Normally when you set the date of a post to the future, it won’t show it until that date, however once the plugin is installed and active you can set the date of your post to the date of your event. It’ll show the events in date order.

Search “No Future Posts” when adding a plugin.

4. Re-arranging your Pages (For Sidebar Vertical Menus)

If you don’t want your pages to arrange themselves in date order, having to go through each one and giving them an Order number can be a pain.
With the help of this plugin it becomes as easy as “drag and drop”.

Search “My Page Order” when adding a plugin.

5. How to Duplicate Posts Easily

Once installed, the plug-in will add a “duplicate” option next to edit, quick edit etc.

Search “Duplicate Post” when adding a plugin.

6. Check Blog Visitor Stats within WordPress

The visitor stats will appear in your dashboard, and in the drop-down menu for “dashboard”.

Search “WordPress.com Stats” when adding a plugin.

7. A Better Meta Widget

Once installed you’ll get an extra widget named “Enhanced Meta”. It allows you to have a whole list of links in your sidebar for example, a login box, or new post etc. Pretty useful.

Search “Enhanced Meta Widget“ when adding a plugin.

8. Maintenance Mode

This plug-in allows you to put a temporary maintenance page up, whilst you work on new major updates for your website. Useful for websites under construction.

Search for “Maintenance Mode” when adding a plugin.

9. Change WordPress Navigation to Horizontal

This is one of my favourite plugins. It moves all the navigation for WordPress to the top of the screen, saving ALOT of screen space for editing posts etc.

Search “Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu”when adding a plugin.

10. Enhanced WordPress Code Editor

This is a favourite too, it completely changes the code editor to give you numbered lines, and colour coding for tags, properties and comments etc.

Search “WordPress Code Editor” when adding a plugin.

Well that wraps it up, I hope I’ve shown you some gems that some of you may not have known about. I know without these plugins the WordPress experience wouldn’t be quite so appealing

Peace.

Some common symptoms of Spyware are:

• Website Redirections: Upon visiting a website it sometimes re-directs to a different advert filled website.
• Slower Computer: Your computer takes a long time to boot up and load programs.
• Regular Blue Screens: Often during boot up.

This guide will not only teach you how to remove Spyware, but every other kind of nasty “threat” you may find. These include:- Adware, Malware, Trojans, Keyloggers, Dialers, Hi-jackers and worms.

You don’t need to get too caught up in what all these things are, all you need to know is you don’t want them on your computer!

Unfortunately there isn’t one piece of software out there that can catch it all. Therefore I will recommend various different applications that you will need to cleanse your computer of the above filth.

SUPERAntiSpyware – Free Version

Direct Download: SuperAntiSpyware Official Website

SUPERAntiSpyware picks up the nasty things that Spybot does not, to put it plain and simple.

First of all you’ll want to go into “Preferences” and make sure it looks like this:

This will avoid the program bugging you in future.

Now, you are able to…

1. Search your computer for problems

Step 1:- Scan Your Computer

Step 2:- I'd recommend a "Complete Scan" the first time around.

Step 3:- This was my result after the scan.

Step 4:- Make sure everything is ticked, and click next.

Step 5:- It should of worked its magic and removed all the infections.

Spybot – Search & Destroy – Free

Direct Download: Filehippo.com

Spybot is not only very good for removing Spyware it’s also good at preventing you from ever picking it up in future.

Using screenshots I’ll show you how to:

1. Update Spybot to keep up with the latest threats

Step 1: Click either of these options

Step 2:- Some of these servers don't work, choose the one I picked.

Step 3:- Make sure everything is ticked, and click continue.

Step 4:- Everything will download, and apply. Click Exit when its done.

2. Immunise your system from picking up problems in the future

Step 1:- Click Immunize

Step 2:-

3. Search your computer for problems

Step 1:- Clicking "Check for Problems" will start the search immediately.

Step 2:- Instructions in screenshot