We put dozens of Chrome Extensions to the test and in different combinations, in order to provide today's most productive chrome extensions for web development, SEO and social media marketing, starting with the general plugins:

Chrome Extensions by Google

For starters, these are the most general yet popular plugins for Chrome from Google that enable you to conveniently communicate straight from your browser bar.

10. YouTube

This extension will create an additional button below YouTube videos, which allows the direct conversion and download of any YouTube videos you may be viewing. This can be used from downloading marketing related YouTube documentaries for references on an offline meeting or simply to download mp3 versions of your favorite videos.

9. Gmail for Chrome

If you are a consistent Google Mail user then this plugin is a must-have. Keep track of your new mail from the browser bar without having to navigate to your Gmail page.

More Plugins by Google

There are countless more Google Chrome Plugins that aren't relevant to this post, but for those who use these Google Products, here would have been the continued list:

Chat for Google: This is an essential plugin for active Googler's who use GTalk, Gmail chat or Google Plus chat features. With this plugin, you can keep a chat box right on the browser and chat while surfing.

Google Voice (by Google): Similar to the Gmail Plugin, this extension will display incoming text messages and voice-mail's via your browser tab - a must have for Google Voice users.

Best Social Media Plugins for Chrome

In our second section of Best Plugins for Web Developers & Marketingwe list with a few noteworthy Chrome Social Media Extensions to make the lives of Social Media Marketing managers significantly easier.

8. Twitter Buffer Extension for Chrome

For those that aren't familiar with buffer, it's a Twitter Browser Extension that allows you to 'Add a Tweet to Buffer' in addition to the traditional tweet button. Tweets added to 'Buffer' will be tweeted for you after certain time intervals to avoid the typical 'instant' tweet. A must have for power tweeters.

7. G++ Google Plus Extension

If you actively use your Twitter, Facebook and Google+ profiles for social media marketing or just like to keep track of all three social networks, you may want to take advantage of this Google Plus Extension for Chrome. It enables you to view your Twitter and Facebook feeds and post to them directly from your Google Plus account - An amazing time saver.

More Social Media for Chrome

There are countless more Social Media extensions for Google Chrome out there, yet many that will be quite uninteresting for most web marketers. Nonetheless, we suggest AddThis for Chrome Plugin as a backup extension for all other social networks.

Web Development & Design Extensions

For Website Developers and SEO professionals, we arrive at the most juicy of all extensions. The below Developer Extensions & Plugins intend to save a essential hours in the SEO & HTML optimization process and are crucial to take advantage of.

6. W3C HTML Validator

There have been many plugins attempting to list the W3C Validator errors in a plugin window, but failed due to the limitations set by W3C. A temporary solution for this are a combination of two plugins, HTML Validation and W3C HTML5 & CSS3 Validator. The HTML Validation extension will provide with the error count, while the W3C HTML 5 extension will give you quick access to the error documentation pages on the W3C website.

5. Chrome Sniffer

Chrome Sniffer is a light-weight, subtle display script identifying extension. Basically, you can quickly see what CMS a website is running on, what scripts are active and more cool features.

4. Color Picker

This plugin is unbelievably useful for graphic and web designers. With just a click on the this plugin in your browser you can very accurately choose a color from anywhere in the browser and get the exact HTML hex color codes. Color Picker is very light and you will find it to be the best eye dropper tool available.

3. Screenshot for Chrome

This Chrome extension is one of the most useful and dynamic screenshot tool out there. Take a screenshot of a whole page, a section of a page you mark, crop, draw on and much more - directly from your browser. In fact, all the images on this post, 10 Best Chrome Plugins for Web Developers, have been done with this extension.

Chrome SEO Extensions

To finalize, we filtered out the best Google Chrome extensions for Search Engine Optimization. Depending on your SEO research habits, your extension requirements for SEO may vary, but we believe that simplicity in these plugins are necessary. With that, the Chrome Inspect Element tool and with some solid SEO knowledge your browser will be sufficient to determine the status of any website.

2. SEO SERP

This plugin is an amazing time-saver to check search engine rankings for your website. No plugin of this type is perfect, as search engines do react differently towards these kind of tools, but this one does good enough at the time of this post.

1. PageRank Status

And finally, a light-weight SEO tool that will provide you with the most significant information of a Page on a website - its PageRank. The PR of the website displays instantly as you browse each page, which helps you determine which pages are indexed, stronger or weaker than others. And if you do need more information of the domain, a click on the plugin icon will bring up some more data - which for most today may be irrelevant information.

Summary of Best Chrome Extensions

Feel free to comment, contribute or suggest changes to this list, as I will make changes to keep this post up-to-date with recent plugins and extensions.

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JavaScript Banner & Social Media

Fashiondressstore's homepage uses large images and an animated Javascript banner to feature their specials and new products. Across the site, a custom cursive Google Font is being used to display for headings. Aside from featuring top categories and specials in a sliding banner, FDS makes use of social media to capture immediate attention.

FDS Homepage Design

Magento to Sell Dresses Online

The catalog pages of FDS are easy to navigate with today's typical browsing and sorting options that come with the Magento CMS platform, which is today's most recommended E-commerce platform. Dress categories can be accessed via a convenient drop down from the main menu and the catalog pages have the ability to sort by prices, colors and sizes.

Fashion Dress Stores Prom Dresses Category

Lightbox Effect and Social Media

The online product pages make use of the popular lightbox effect to display the images when clicked on. This conveniently allows visitors to browse all images for that product with no reloading of the pages. The social media sharing features gives visitors the option to share or send the products via their preferred social community and allows webmasters the convenient tracking of every share.

Fashion Dress Store Product Page

Subscribe today or contact us to find out more about Magento E-Commerce Development.

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1. How to Properly Advertise Your Online Store
2. The Evolution of Web Design

Most Used CMS

First, let's bust some myths about WordPress being comparable to Joomla, Drupal or other CMS Frameworks. A common rumor is that WordPrss and Joomla are the top choices for content management, and sometimes even Drupal is mixed into this comparison - but that these frameworks are even comparable to WordPress in terms of capacity, functionality and popularity is unjustified and actually deserves a better analysis.

Here is a breakdown of the top one-million websites using a CMS.
Content Management System Distribution by trends.builtwith.com - last updated on April 28

As you can see in the above statistics, Joomla nor Drupal are even close to WordPress' usage, therefor are incomparable when it comes down to choosing the most popular system for your website.

WordPress Development

When choosing WordPress for your current or next web development one should predetermine the requirements before hand. The WordPress platform will be suitable for almost all types of websites, especially those that require maintenance, consistent updates and customer management. But unlike other content management systems, WordPress comes with many more features that will require experience and expertise for web developers to take advantage of - Plugins, WP PHP template files, RSS Pinging & general blog knowledge. If all these tools are understood and incorporated correctly, only then will the true advantages of using WordPress be recognizable.

WordPress Developers - Requirements

Before WordPress development begins, make sure that it will be including these features regardless of the website type in order to maximize its potential:

WordPress SEO

This is a whole other topic in itself, yet is critical, therefore I highly suggest reading and understanding Yoast's WordPress SEO article.

Permalinks

Although this is explained in the Yoast's WP SEO Article, it should be noted one more time, because changing the permalinks after launch may cause loss of rankings if not addressed. This is a basic setting that can be done via WordPress' admin - Settings - Permalinks, yet is often overlooked.

RSS, Subscriptions & Pinging

This is more for those expecting continuous updates on their website, subscribers or just general bloggers. Subscription features can be done in many ways, via social media, third party tools or via WP itself. Pinging the website after every post is also (or should be) basic practice, yet these two sections are not being used to their potential.

All the above features are important and will be broken down further in upcoming posts (subscribe to get notified). All the above features (and many of the best ones) are open source and free to use. There will be a set of different features depending on the type of your website or its goals, which brings us to our next topic.

Website Types we Don't Recommend WordPress For

Now, WordPress may be great for many type of sites but instead of breaking down what type of websites it's good for, we'll take look at what we wouldn't recommend it for:

E-Commerce

Although there are many plugins for this, WordPress is not what you should use if you are creating a website focused in selling products. For E-Commerce website development, we recommend Magento, which we will discuss in an upcoming article.

Customer, Sales and Task Management

Inquiries of this type have been common for us but to get to the point, no, WordPress is not intended for client/customer management, sales and/or tasks management and developing this from WordPress would require a lot of reverse developing and on the long run, may not be worth it. For this we would recommend Sugar CRM, Custom Development wit frameworks such as CodeIgniter, or a third-party software if applicable.

Social Community & Membership Websites

Lastly, although there are many plugins for this such as BuddyPress, WP Members and others that usually need to be purchased, we don't recommend WordPress development either. In some cases, you may be able to make this work, but specific features such as Forums, Wikis, Support or Facebook type Websites will have CMS systems that are specifically made for them.

WordPress Development Summary

If all the above is understood, there should be no problem to determine your platform during your next web development project. If you still have a hard time figuring out which CMS to use or are unsure whether your site applies to WordPress, feel free to subscribe to our newsletter, contact us or consult with a WordPress Development Company.

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For all upcoming restaurant, recipe or just food related websites, we are proud to announce a new, free set of icons created exclusively for our Web Marketing Blog, by Los Angeles Branding and Logo Design expert, Omid Mousaei.

You may download and enjoy these Icons with and/or without utensils for your personal or commercial projects, but may not distribute them other than sharing this page or Omid's Logo Design Company, who we thank for this contribution!

Click Here to view a full size image!

To download, please follow the download form below:

Download

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1. Work in .PHP instead of .HTML

If your page isn’t already a .PHP file, then you must change this in order for the include code to work. You simply have to rename the file, regardless of its content, because the .PHP extension will render your HTML code normally and in addition also render all PHP code in the file. If you want to keep the .html in the URL, it can be cloaked back to it via an .htaccess file, which we will discuss in our upcoming post.

2. Use Relative URL Paths

Using relative URL paths is crucial for faster speed and is the foundation of many other techniques, such as safe domain changes, including of files, etc. The way this is done is quite simple. Whenever linking to the root of your domain name for example, instead of using a link like this:

<a href="http://www.your-website.com/">Home</a>

You can simple use the forward-slash "/", where the "/" links to the root (in that case, the index) by default.

<a href="/">Home</a>

If the above example is understood, you would then want to link to subpages and images using the relative path as well. Linking to subpages within the root level would like:

<a href="/about.php">About Us</a>

Or grabbing images within an image folder on the root can be done with the following code:

<img src="/images/file.jpg" />

Note that this can be done from subfolders as well, considering that you remain on the same domain, the “/” will always point to the domains index.
This method is not only much safer for domain changes and deeper folder structures, but also help avoid mistakes of missing the ‘www.’ or misspellings, making it also friendlier for crawlers.

3. Keep Web Page Structures Consistent

Now that your site is compatible for this method, you will want to make sure that all your html pages are consistent, meaning that the headers, menus, footers, sidebars and other sections you may be using are identical html with the same css rules. This way, once you implement includes on all the pages there won’t be any unwanted design problems.

Once you have a good idea of what code snippets will be identical, you will want to cut that out of every page and place it in its own .php file. Since the purpose of this is not only reduce disk space, but also speed up page-views and load important parts of the website first, you will want to use them for the following sections at the least:

• One include For the JavaScript and CSS files in the Header, another for the ones in the Footer.
• One include for each repeating menu, such as Header and Footer menus.

4. The Include Code

Now, let’s start including external files into your website. If your include file (exp. header.php) is located on the same server drive as the page requesting it, you can simply use the below code:

<?php include ('header.php'); ?>

If although, you were putting all your include files in a folder called /includes, you would target it like this:

<?php include ('includes/header.php'); ?>

Pages that are requesting an include file located a directory above the page, even if you are already on the domain root, can include that file via:

<?php include ('../header.php'); ?>

The above steps are enough to see a significant change in your websites performance if implemented correctly and can be handled with little to no PHP experience. Please feel free to add suggestions and/or comments as well as subscribing to enjoy our upcoming posts.

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With online attention spans growing shorter, you may sometimes find it difficult to keep your website's visitors interested and engaged. If they can't navigate quickly and easily, they're more likely to click away--but how do keep your website traffic flowing and increase conversions? Follow these top 10 tips to engage your online customers, and you'll be sure to see a boost in your sales and profits.

1. Write Unique Product Descriptions: Online shoppers love product descriptions just as much as they love product images, but how will they find your website when hundreds of other e-commerce merchants are selling the same products? Well, lucky for you, search engines love product descriptions too! Your products may not be unique, but you can write unique, accurate, and detailed product descriptions that are dense with keywords to help you boost your website's search engine optimization (SEO). Unique product descriptions will also give your website more personality and leave your customers wanting more.

2. Include Multiple Images: A picture is worth a thousand words, so be sure to include multiple images of your products to say even more. Highlight different angles and features of your products to show versatility. Do your products come in a variety of colors? If so, display images of your products in a range of colors.

3. Website Appearance is Important: Similar to the idea of how you eat with your eyes first, consumers shop with their eyes first--meaning the aesthetic quality of your website may influence your site's conversion rate. Would you shop from a traditional store with clutter that you have to step over to avoid tripping? Most likely not. Like traditional store owners, try designing your website around the theme of your products--if you have one. For example, if you're selling children's toys, why not try a more playful website design?

4. Easy Website Navigation: Imagine you're walking through a grocery store, and the sign above the isle you're approaching lists pasta, pasta sauce, and soup. Great--you love soup! However, when you walk down the isle, you find no soup, no past, and no pasta sauce. What you do find is toilet paper, paper towels, and tissues. Just like in a traditional store, your online store should offer organized, accurate, and easy-to-understand navigation. You should also organize the links on your website based on their importance, and your visitors should be able to find them easily.

5. Simple and Quick Checkout Process: As an e-commerce merchant, you understand that consumers choose to shop online for the ease and comfort, and you want to reassure them that they've made the right choice by shopping at your website. You've dedicated countless hours to making the browsing experience fast, fun, and convenient, so those final moments during checkout should be just as simple. Require your customers to provide minimal information--name, billing and shipping address, payment information--and be sure your site is able to store information to streamline the process for returning guests.

6. Update Your Website Content: Keeping your site's content fresh by updating it at least once a week will bring customers back for more. It will also help your site rank higher in search results. Google's new search algorithm focuses on new and fresh content, giving it higher precedence in result listings. Google wrote a great analogy to help explain the algorithm, which says, "Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer's day, are best when they're fresh." Write unique and interesting content that will make your customers look forward to what you have to say. This will not only keep your customers engaged, but also help you build a dedicated fan base.

7. Use Real Customer Experiences: Your best friend Adam just told us about his new television: 42" LCD screen, 1080p resolution, high definition. He said he bought the TV at a great price--the lowest around--and the customer service made him feel like a friend, not a customer. After hearing Adam's story, I'm ready to ask where he purchased his TV, because I want one too. Don't you? Absolutely! Real customer experiences sell, so display your customers' testimonials for others to see.

8. Integrate Live Chat Support into Your Site: You can't shake hands with your online customers or walk around your store with them offering help, but you can reach out to them by using live chat tools. Research has shown that live chats increase conversions, and they also help increase the overall ticket amount.

9. Create a Blog: If you're an e-commerce merchant selling beauty supplies, then you probably know a great deal about cosmetics, perfume, nail polish, salon products, etc. Don't keep all that knowledge to yourself--share the wealth! Create a blog and write product reviews, beauty tips, seasonal trends, and any other topic to engage your customers and convert them to buying from your website.

10. Incorporate Social Media: Now that you have a blog, why not jump on the bandwagon and get yourself a Twitter account and a Facebook profile for your business--maybe even Google+ and Pinterest too. Once you establish yourself on these social media networks, add links to your pages on your website. Let your customers know that you want to network with them. Include an RSS feed so they can receive updates when you publish a new blog post. Encourage your followers to interact with you by tweeting at them. Promote your business through Facebook by offering discounts and promotions. Add the +1 button to your website so people can recommend your business to others. Pin photos of your favorite hairstyle, summertime fragrance, and nighttime eyewear to your board on Pinterest.

About The Author
Meghan Faye Wolff is the senior copywriter and marketing specialist for Instabill Corporation. Instabill offers online payment processing solutions for offshore and high risk merchants around the world. Meghan blogs about leading e-commerce and payment industry news.

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This article is an updated version of the one published in 2010, titled "Three Ways to Advertise on Facebook - Successful Social Media Marketing". Since then, a lot has changed in social media: More results have been analyzed, markets changed, Google+ joined in and so on. What we can see for certain is that social media has taken over almost every aspect of our traditional web surfing, especially Facebook. In a separate article, we will discuss Google Plus's impact on this, but here we will revisit the previous Top 3 Facebook Marketing strategies.

Originally, we discussed three advertising methods: Facebook PPC, Facebook Groups, Facebook Business Pages. The first method is still accurate, but the last two are redundant, so we will merge those together and go over a more significant method, Ranking Facebook Search.

Facebook *PPC, a Demographic-Targeting Advertising method:
With Facebook advertising, you can target advertising directly to users, depending on their age, country/city of residence, what languages they speak, which school they go/went to, whether they are male or female and many other options. This makes it amazingly easy for many businesses to target advertising to their target demographic.

Example: Targeting University of California Santa Barbara students between 21-24 to come to the 21+ new UCSB Jazz Lounge down the street.

Facebook Pages & Groups, Originally called FB Snow Ball Method:
Creating a 'Facebook Fan Page' for your company allows friends & customers to 'Like' your company. This works well for businesses that have a motto or cause. For example, an energy efficient lighting company could have a motto 'Go Green', giving more initiative for people to 'Like' its page on Facebook. The snow ball effect occurs when a Facebook user 'Likes' a page or its post, and this 'Like' then displays on the users Facebook wall/feed. All the users' friends and subscribers see what the user 'Liked', which leaves potential for additional 'Likes', hence repeating the cycle. What has also been added is the 'Reach' and 'Talking About This' feature in every Facebook page - allowing the admins of corresponding pages to see significant analytic data, such as how many people see a post, how many of the page subscribers talk about the page, etc.

A concern regarding this method, comes from a recent analysis by Business Insider, that shows that only 1% of a brand page's followers interact with it, which you can read about here.

Last But Not Least: Facebook Local Search

Another marketing feature that should be taken advantage of is getting your Facebook business page found locally for your services. Applying this method is very similar to on-site optimizing your website. This means you want to clearly announce your services / keywords on your business page that you want to be found for. In addition to that, Facebook uses many social factors to determine your rankings, such as how many 'likes' your page has, where these likes are located, etc. For Example: It is more likely for your business page to be found for its keywords if the person searching has mutual friends that 'liked' your page, is close to the business location or you simply have many 'likes' from people in the searchers location.

Other Social Media Websites for Advertising:

There are many more social media websites that offer advertising applications. LinkedIn for example, a social media website for business professionals, has their own *PPC application and just in the last year we have seen a significant boost in mobile social media sites and advertising methods, which will be discussed in a separate post. Where to advertise depends on your business. Social media marketing, even just Facebook Marketing, is time consuming, requires planning and maintaining, so make sure you got the right social media marketing experts on your team.

*PPC - Stands for Pay-Per-Click and is an advertising method used by various websites, where advertisers pay for every click on their advertising banner (either in the form of an image or text link). This is a popular method used by Google AdWords, Facebook Advertising, LinkedIn and various other websites to make it more affordable for advertisers. Other methods include Pay-Per-Impression, Pay-Per-Action, Pay-Per-Lead, and many others. Find out more by subscribing to our blog.

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Billboard advertising is just one advertising format in the category of outdoor advertising (also known as out of home advertising), which includes bus, bench, bus stop, airport, mall, train and gas station advertising, to name a few.  Out of home advertising is one of the fastest growing advertising formats in the United States because it reaches the masses on a daily basis.  Both Fortune 500 companies and government agencies use outdoor ads to reach their target demographic.

Most companies allocate about 10% to 20% of their advertising budget to outdoor and the rest to other advertising formats, such as TV, radio, internet and print.  These advertisers find that this allocation yields the highest rate of return on their overall advertising budget.

Industries that succeed with outdoor advertising include financial services, consumer products, lifestyle, and technology companies

To advertise on billboards or other outdoor advertising formats, contact an outdoor advertising company to obtain a free quote.

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