This image was named 'hero' on the Apple website. Could it be just that?

This week, Apple added yet another addition to their product family – the Magic trackpad. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t really bat an eyelid, however, there’s something about this product that shouts business strategy particularly loudly.

Haters have dismissed it as just another interface device a bit bigger than what exists in many laptops, and hey – the good old mouse works, so why change?

Apple brand aficionados, have done what they usually do. Gawp at how stupendously beautiful it is, buy it, and scream from the rooftops how its changed their workflow, productivity and overall sex appeal. Yeah baby.

Anyway, I digress. Analysis of Apple versus / other pissing contests are the online equivalent of feeding a dinner party Marmite or Marmalade to see who kicks up the most fuss in their respective defense. A hearty steak – it aint.

At the risk of sounding like I’ve been drinking from the Apple Kool aid, the reason I personally think that this product is REALLY important is this:

The iPad has been a huge commercial success as well, (which was incidentally conceived as a concept before the iPhone was), giving rise and rise to new applications using gestures, pinch and zoom, and other sexy human interface innovations. These have proven to be extremely popular with  users, and as one iPad user recently described to me after using it for a while to browse - ”It’s like I’m touching the internet now”. We will continue to see applications developed for this platform, primarily because of the experience that it provides.

Developers today not only want to build great software that people use, but great software that people can touch feel and connect with as well. If you take a snapshot of what is hot in the gaming market for example, the Wii and Microsoft’s Kinect both use gesture recognition as a way to further engage an audience.

Other companies such as Synaptics, (RIM / Blackberry’s hardware partner) have also recognised this trend, with software and hardware solutions to implement this.

At the crux of it, I the introduction of the Magic Pad is undoubtedly to bring the touch applications which have already been developed back to the desktop – giving developers who have created apps for iPad or iPhone another market place, and a boost in desktop sales for Apple.  In one simple motion, and with the introduction of one hardware product Apple may have just laid the ground work for a military assault on the desktop market in 2010. Things are already looking positive, according to reports released in March – and this is undoubtedly a hardware product that is only going to bolster that position.

Magic Trackpad, more than just another interface device? is a post from: Webdistortion

Google Checkout

URL: http://checkout.google.com/

Google Checkout is Google’s attempt at a replacement for PayPal, and is still very much an inferior product, with only a small subset of the features offered by others. As for the actual transaction costs, they have completely mimicked the tiered cost structure of PayPal, as low as 1.4% + £0.20 per transaction, but as high as 3.4% + £0.20 depending on your monthly sales volume. further details can be found on pricing here.

In a similar vein to PayPal, Checkout is a middle man solution – storing credit and debit cards in its system, and then using those to transfer funds to a fro a bank account.  With the ability to embed “buy now” buttons if shopping cart functionality isn’t needed.

The adoption of Google checkout hasn’t been all that they have hoped, but that could all change pretty soon. If TechCrunch’s prediction on Google Games is correct, we could see a much more mainstream take up of Google Checkout. At time of writing they were running house ads that looked like this isn’t far of the mark.  Technical support for Google Checkout would need to improve somewhat if they are going to get the traction they need however; an outage of the service back in April saw many developers and e-commerce merchants disgruntled, with no apparent response from the Google team. Checkout is available to customers in both the U.S and Europe.

Money Brookers

URL: http://www.moneybookers.com/

Money Bookers is a UK based company,  and is Authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority of the United Kingdom (FSA). They offer a number of benefits including sending money securely worldwide to anyone with an email address – even if the recipient does not have a Moneybookers account yet, and accept business from lots of different currencies.  January 2010 they were reporting a user base of 10.8 million accounts – although this doesn’t indicate how many active.

Following the online wallet model, they hold all payments in limbo prior to transferring through to the final recipient, giving you some amount of protection. Escrow services are available for auction services. All previous transactions can be found in the history section of your account which can be accessed at any time and the data can be easily exported to an excel file if you want to maintain a digital backup. In the setup of an account there are a lot of verification procedures, which can take time, and they are certainly not as easy to use for someone in the US compared to someone in Europe. That level of protection will however help to give users piece of mind.

Their fees are on a flat per transaction basis, where uploading fees to a moneybookers account is free, but withdrawing funds from your account costs you. Further details for different countries can be found here.  As with Google Checkout and Paypal, they do offer a payment API - however there didn’t seem to be any quick “copy and paste to buy now” type scenario, which will put off some of the less technical users who are looking for a quick e-commerce solution. That said, requesting money is a simple matter of logging in and sending a money brookers email.

Paymate

URL: http://www.paymate.com

Availability: Australia, USA, New Zealand

Paymate provides secure, reliable and innovative Internet-based payment services to buyers in 57 countries around the world and sellers in Australia, New Zealand and the USA. You can use Paymate to receive online payments via credit card, and like PayPal – you don’t need to have a merchant facility with a bank.

Although this is a service which exists inside particular locales, it is still a worth competitor to PayPal, and has performed particularly well on Ebay Australia – where Ebay were forced to accept it as an alternative payment provider for fears of anti-trust litigation.

Details on the fees charged can be found here – with the fee for buyers in the UK at the time of writing being 3% + 0.25p  per transaction regardless of the size of transaction. However there does seem to be charges for chargebacks and a credit check charge for new customers opening an account.

OboPay

URL: https://www.obopay.com/

Obopay is one of the first mobile payment systems to make it to the web, enabling customers to transfer money to one another right from the mobile phone.  Technically this is achieved using a combination of the technologies offered on mobile devices – traditional SMS, WAP,  HTML / Web apps and bespoke iPhone applications – allowing them to cover all bases regardless of  the handset capabilities.

With more and more of the web moving mobile, its no surprise to see startups taking advantage of this, and wedging a foothold in this space. For example in May that announce that they were going to allow banks a branded payment solution to take advantage of the growing mobile trend – saving them the hassle of the implementation, and allowing OboPay to get on the pig’s back so to speak.

Amazon Payments

URL: https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/personal/money

Amazon have a number of interesting products under their ‘Payments’ banner. They have a system  for sending money which is free to use for sending money between Amazon users, and they have a number of more ‘E-commerce’ related products. If you are looking to just send and receive money in the U.S. they have a pretty attractive offering.  If however, you are needing a transaction option, you are going to have to pay for the privilege. 

All of Amazon Payments uses their databases stored internally to aid with the checkout process, essentially giving sellers less hassle with the checkout process, also giving access to Amazon’s patented ‘One Click order’ services. In a similar vein to PayPal, they also offer cut and paste HTML code for their Simple Pay product, which can get you up and running quite quickly if you only have a handful of digital products to sell. Processing is performed on Amazon servers, prior to the customer being returned to finish the checkout process, which isn’t that big a deal considering its an out of the box payment solution.

As for costings, this is worked out on a per transaction basis, with fees starting at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction for volumes under $3000. See more details on the pricing for business accounts here. 

At time of writing, Amazon Payments UK hadn’t been rolled out, and the service exists for the U.S. only. 

Notable Mentions – Digital Software Carts

These other links and systems may be suitable for a variety of scenarios, including digital shopping carts, card processing and digital wallet solutions. Some of them mirror the free software features found in PayPal, some of them are just bare bones solutions, but hopefully they will be useful for you to review.

E-Junkie

URL: http://www.e-junkie.com/

Provides shopping cart software which integrates with PayPal and other card processing gateways. If you are selling digital goods, thoroughly recommended folks.

Kagi

URL:: http://www.kagi.com/

In a similar vein to E-junkie, Kagi offers a digital goods delivery, and integrated shopping cart experience solution for those looking to get up and running without the hassle of setting up a full e-commerce store.

Digital River

URL: http://www.digitalriver.com

Digital River’s Element 5 product is also used across the web for digital software delivery, and its shopping cart is well respected.

Other PayPal Alternatives

Some of these additional alternatives may also be applicable to your particular situation.

1. Neteller- Prepaid card solution, giving you a mastercard that you can use instead of a credit card.
2. CCNow
3. PayPay
4. DirecPay – PayPal Alternative in India
5. AlertPay
6. Liberty Reserve
7. Strictpay
8. Perfectmoney
9. TrialPay - Ad funded Payment Platform used for social games on sites such as Facebook, and for software companies who can offer trials.

17 paypal alternatives for easier e-commerce. is a post from: Webdistortion

What are question queries?

Simply put, question queries are the direct questions that your visitors are asking the search engines, and landing directly on your site.  e.g. “What colour is the sky?” – Google have been trying to improve this section of their algorithm,  (see this research paper from Googlers who realised that question queries, as opposed to keyword queries failed more often) – with a social question engine Vark (acquired) most likely being used to improve the results when question related queries are presented.  Interestingly, they also found that question queries are also formulated more often when other search terms failed, so this often presents webmasters with an opportunity to “plug the hole” so to speak, and provide searchers with the information they need.

Finding your own question queries?

The first thing to do, is to work out what constitutes a question. My own technique for this with Google Analytics, is to pull out all question words. For example “Who”, “What”, “Where”, “Why”, “When”,”Should”,”Can” are all words that constitutes a question when used in a long tail phrase – particularly when used at the start of the string. You can create a segment to show you these quite easily.

In Google Analytics Under “Manage Segments” > Go to, Create New Segment, then make your screen look like this:

Or alternatively,  I’ve shared the segment directly here. You should hopefully be able to click on that link and apply it to your own Google account. Once you have that in place, you can apply the filter, and see what terms come back. Plugging these back into Google will let you see how you are performing, how well your page answers the query, and where you can possibly improve.

If nothing else, this data alone could make up the basis of a frequently asked question page that takes visitors to other pages within your site that better answers the question.

Segmenting question queries for fun and profit. is a post from: Webdistortion

Raise awareness

If you know in advance that you are going to be raising money for a particular cause or charity that is time sensitive, start raising awareness from day one, prior to you having the methods in place to collect funds.  Tease and Reveal if you will.. You can also start to attract Twitter followers, without the need for any fancy website, and inform your audience of the work that you are doing. When you are ready to take donations, you’ll have already built up a decent sized audience from the beginning, making things that bit easier to get off the ground.

Get Friends and Family in first

A very simple little tip is to get your friends and family to donate to your cause online first. Assuming that you are showing (see Update Progress) your audience who has donated, and the amount that they’ve pledged, this will prevent people from being intimidated by your page, and scared off. The sheep effect most definitely comes into play here.  As people will generally match the previous amount which has been donated, it makes sense to get your big spenders in at the ground level.

Give people a goal

Human rational behaviour is naturally goal driven (Douglas T. Kenrick. et al. Social Psychology: Goals and Interactions) , and one of the easiest ways to garner a response in your audience is to give them a goal. Whilst in many cases, there isn’t an upper limit to the amount of money you are hoping to achieve from sponsors, not providing one actually negatively impacts progress of the fundraising campaign – as the participants have no focus.  One of the easiest ways to improve your response is to set a goal for you audience, and if you manage to exceed it, so much the better.

Update Progress

The progress of your fundraising should continually be communicated to your audience. Assuming you’ve set a goal, a visual indication of the progress that has currently been made further encourages people to respond. It also plays a big part in getting the people who have already donated to spread the message further.

For example, if they know that their donation accounts for a small amount of the total, they will tell their friends about the campaign so their own donation isn’t ‘a lost cause’, and help to keep the ball rolling. You can also employ Twitter to great effect here, with regular status updates reflecting the distance to goal, and encouraging retweets of the cause. It’s also a great way to rally the troops behind you. Knowing that others have donated money also serves as a form of social proof, and increases the likelihood that others will also donate.

Provide Incentive / Reward

Incentives are often forgotten when trying to encourage people to react. These don’t always have to be financial – something as simple as a badge, a website link, or a twibbon can be more than enough to get people behind you. In particular a badge that the pledger puts on their website and / or twibbon (showing on Twitter for example) helps to provide a viral element to the campaign and raise awareness of your cause.

Viral Element

There should be some part of your campaign that uses the web to its full advantage, and encourages a viral effect as an important step in the fundraising process. One of the easiest ways to do this is to use the social media tools which are already out there.  Adding a Twitter / Facebook  sharing option with friends, or even a status update letting people know that a pledge has been made can be enough to increase the reach of the campaign exponentially. Add to that an incentive, and you’ve got a real reason for others to publicise your fundraising efforts – and it doesn’t cost you a thing. Widgets that people can embed on their own website or on their social profile also help to give additional reach to a campaign.

Listing Donations

Listing donations can have a positive impact on the response. Take care though. Some people are comfortable putting their name beside a donation, others are not. On the whole, selfless acts are hard to come by, and many businesses are quite happy to receive an extra bit of publicity for taking part in a fundraising event, so providing a form of advertising for the pledger is never a bad idea.  You may (as I’ve mentioned) want to link to their website alongside listing their name.

7 tips for more successful internet fundraising is a post from: Webdistortion

Who needs venture capital funding to get their idea off the ground? If you’ve been holding back because of it, you might just find there’s help out there, fueled by the community, and managed by some of these fantastic sites, which can help you fund your idea, business startup or music project.

KickStarter

URL: http://www.kickstarter.com/

KickStarter has received quite a bit of publicity recently for its efforts. Most notably the open source facebook alternative Diaspora managed to raise $10,000 in just 39 days, proving that the concept had legs, and that crowdfunding as  a concept has the community well and truly behind it. It’s not just software projects that the site caters for, out of all the current activity on the site, software is probably the most dull – as creatives around the world have embraced it as a way to realise spectacular dreams.  With everything from life sized mousetrap games to one man’s cultural journey across Mexico KickStarter has clearly captured the imagination of its audience.

As far as the rules for funding goes, KickStarter keeps things simple. In order to receive the funding needed, a project must reach or exceed its funding goal or no money changes hands. If you do manage to reach your goal, 5% is taken from the project creator. Personally I think this is fair, with the current traffic / reach of the site, the tools available to manage your project, and the empowerment that a site like this gives individuals 5% isn’t that big an ask.

RocketHub

URL: http://www.rockethub.com/

Another very similar site to KickStarter is RocketHub. Describing themselves as a grass roots crowdfunding site, Rockethub’s focus is again within the creative arts, with the two audiences for the site split into ‘Fuelers’ – those providing financial assistance to cool projects, and ‘Creatives’ – those coming up with the concepts, artwork and music and in need of funding.

One fundamental differences between KickStarter and RocketHub is the use of rewards and badges to help encourage interaction on the site, and to help get users engaged with the projects needing assistance. A perfect example of game theory in action.

They also differ in that the fees for RocketHub are a little higher (or less depending on how you look at it) – 4.5% goes to Fuel RocketHub, and 3.5% is applied to cover PayPal’s transaction fees. Whilst PayPal is an extremely well recognised payment system, it would be nice to see them trying to eradicate that extra 3.5% by using an alternative gateway.

Edit. I got this completely wrong, RocketHub’s fee is actually either the same or lower than Kickstarter’s. Rockethub always charge a flat 8% while Kickstarter charges a flat 5% AND passes along the Amazon Payments transactional fees to the artists who utilize their platform – which can be anywhere between 3% and 5%. So the total Kickstarter fee can be anywhere between 8% and 10% while RocketHub always offers a flat 8% fee.

Quirky

URL: http://www.quirky.com/

Quirky offers product designers and inventors a shot at getting their product to market. They call their product a ‘social product development tool’ – which it is, allowing the community to vote for products that they think would sell, and are worth creating, in the process single handedly changing the way people think about product development. Feedback can be received on product direction, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, all from within the Quirky site, resulting in products that have a stronger vision than those generated through traditional means.

Submitting an idea to the site does cost $99, but with the support and feedback received on an idea, and the Quirky site offering a way of getting a product to market that wouldn’t have otherwise made it, this is a cost that many will and have happily paid. You only need an idea, and a few scribbles / scans to potentially get your idea in front of millions.

Fundbreak

URL: http://www.fundbreak.com.au/

Fundbreak is an Australian crowdfunding website, again with the all or nothing funding model, fundbreak insist that your goal is reached prior to receiving any funding at all.  Fundbreak fees are set at 5% for invitees, or 7.5% for standard joe public users plus 2.4% for Paypal transaction fees making it one of the more expensive options considering what’s out there at the minute, however sometimes having a dedicated site for a particular country can help attract a local audience.

If you have a project that is performance art or requires a live audience this can be a worthwhile advantage and I’ve no doubt that the majority of Fundbreak’s traffic is currently Australian. Worth noting as well that anyone can launch a project, or support a project to meet its funding goal. You are not required to be in Australia.

Some of my favourite projects being created at present on Fundbreak are ‘Tell me a story‘  and ‘Oceans and Wires‘ two projects that received more than 100% funding and perfectly show the sort of creativity that can be taken for a walk and tested out online.

CatWalkGenius

URL: http://www.catwalkgenius.com/

Cat Walk Genius gives all you budding fashion designers out there the chance to launch your own clothing line, all by using the power of the crowd.  You can be part of your own fan-funded collection, needing nothing more than your browser, a sprinkle of talent and some creativity.  As with the other crowdfunding websites mentioned, their are two audiences. Supporters – the folks interesting in helping a designer financially, and the designers – who create the magic. You can apply to be either or both a designer or supporter.

As a supporter, should you choose to back a designer who’s work you like, you are effectively buying shares in their lines. Starting from as little as £11, not only can you aid the production of clothing that you like, you are effectively investing in their future sales for up to 6 months.  If your designer hits the target and their new collection goes on sale you get a share of the sales revenues, proportionate to your share of the funding.

As a designer, Cat Walk Genius allows you to rally your troops, and sell direct to your fans through the site. You will be able to fulfill orders all without the cost of setting up your own online e-commerce shop.  Adding images to a profile page is free for designers (up to a point) – with additional images costing a small additional fee.

Overall Cat Walk Genius provides an innovative platform for designers to receive the recognition they deserve, and build a fanbase around their collections, all through the power of crowdfunding. Genius indeed.

Fans Next Door

URL: http://en.fansnextdoor.com/

Fans next door is a European Crowdfunding website  (still in beta) and as yet they don’t  take a cut for promoting projects through their site, with the only additional costs being the PayPal processing fees. They currently accept all types of art forms, from literature to films, visual arts and craft, music, performances, fashion, design, and video games. As the user base grows and additional forms of projects come along we can expect this to evolve.

The reward concept has been used in the promotion of many of the projects, with the system being architected to show what you get from artists for increasing amounts of funding. For example €10 may get you a copy of the artwork, €20 may get you a copy of the artwork signed etc. etc. The more of a fan you are, the more you can expect to receive.

IndieGoGo

URL: http://www.indiegogo.com/

IndieGoGo offers a wide variety of creative art funding categories, with projects in everything from Inventions to Gaming to Mobile Apps to Performing Arts. No matter what you are trying to raise funds for, there will be other projects in that category currently receiving funding. Another benefit that IndieToGoGo offers is that they have hooked up with suitable partners to help give your project extra reach through commercial channels.

Probably the most impressive of these partnerships is MTV New Media, which could see your work being featured on MTV or VH1 – with of course, your permission. Desirable content includes fictional and non-fictional web series, shorts and other digital content, with the partnership helping to discover develop and distribute the best projects and creative talent on the web. At the very least it gives project creators a chance at much needed additional exposure.

Another recognised side effect that IndieToGoGo have capitalised on for project creators, is unique rewards and pre-sales. Unique rewards have been used by artists such as Dizraeli to provide backers with artwork, private concerts and signed albums to further fund his musical pursuit. Pre-sales obviously allows you to generate interest in a concept or project prior to even starting it, with the web becoming your marketing machine, and IndieToGoGo your vehicle.  Unlike a few of the other crowdfunding sites mentioned here, if you don’t fully reach your goal – you keep the current funds to date. With a few of the others mentioned here, (such as RocketHub and KickStarter) you must fully realise your specified amount prior to receiving anything. I’ve no doubt that this financial safety net will appeal to many project creators.

CoFundos

URL: http://www.cofundos.org/

CoFundos operates on the basis of pledges, allowing you to signup, and create an open source project / idea that you would like to develop. Crowd sourcing is used at all stages of the project to allow contribution of the requirements and refinements to the project.  Essentially, the system gives users of open source software the ability to fund specific developments that may not already be in the existing software path, and spread the cost amongst the community.

Developers can choose to take your idea or project on, and when the implementation has been agreed by multiple bidders are requested to make the respective donations.

Profounder

URL: http://www.profounder.com/

Profounder operates on the basis that inside everyone’s social circle both online and offline – there are people who are willing to support your dream. Each of those people potentially becomes an investor in your company, and equity is split amongst them.  Profounder gives you the tools to raise the capital that you need, and the tools to manage all of the associated book-keeping, legals and compliance fillings.  Right now, the site is still very much in alpha status, with registrations due to open in the Autumn. Still you can sign up for status as an ‘alpha entreupreneur’ if you want to start earlier than that, and are serious about using the system.

9 crowdfunding websites to help you change the world. is a post from: Webdistortion

But what if you are actually selling online, rather than just providing content?

Online retailers and affiliates are often perfectly placed to turn this kind of information directly into profit as and when it happens. However, thankfully, it’s the few and far between that tend to really monitor what’s happening out there to maximise sales – so here’s some of the places I personally recommend online retailers keep an eye on.

Google Insights for Search

URL: http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Unsurprisingly, my first turn is to Google to find trends, but it does take a bit of poking around to find the data you want. Instead of comparing two terms (side by side) – the secret with find what products are currently going ‘hot’ online is to completely ignore the keyword selections, and just select from the locations radio button. The results are interesting to say the least, and allow you to specify alternative categories – giving access to different niche information. For example selecting ‘Technology’ showed that searches for ‘Windows 7′ were currently shit hot, and that demand exists out there for this at the minute.

The other obvious advantage to this tool, is that you can specify regions, so if you only do business for certain products in certain parts of the world, you can drill down to find the popular products there and then.

Ciao Charts

URL: http://www.ciao.co.uk/charts.php

Ciao started as a product review engine and was purchased by Microsoft in 2008. The currently use it in the UK to power their Shopping results for Bing Europe. The most notable useful section is Ciao Charts, which provide a breakdown of historic sales data in a variety of categories (which can be accessed via the archives). This is extremely useful data for retrospectively viewing what has been a popular and easy sale – all  without lifting a finger.

Amazon BestSellers

URL: http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/

Amazon is probably one of the best websites for spotting trends on, not least because of the breakdown that it provides. You can find bestsellers in all of Amazon’s 25 category breakdowns.  It’s not only retailers who may find this information useful. Bloggers who are writing inside a particular niche (e.g. music) could do worse than spotting which artists are making waves as regards sales data goes, and it’s also not a bad indicator of who could potentially be going in at number 1 in the Charts – stacking the odds in your favour if you fancy a flutter on such trivial matters. Mover’s and Shaker’s also let you see what is getting hott(er) over a period of time in each category, and Amazon publish annual press releases containing the previous years sales data, and historic Bestseller information.

Rank Forest

URL: http://rankforest.com/

With Amazon exposing a number of API’s to its data, and having the proprietory algorithm ‘SalesRank’ – there is a whole world of data for retailers to tap into.  Unsurprisingly  third party websites have cropped up that use these API to work out historical sales data, and to give indicators of product verses product comparisons. RankForest is one such site.  One of the most useful elements of the service allows you to compare two products alongside each other, and view which one has trended more positively over time.  Retailers can take much more calculated risks on product lines as a result, choosing to stock a safer bet, and affiliates can use the information to maximise returns if unsure between two potential products.

Ebay Popular Keywords

URL: http://buy.shop.ebay.co.uk/

Ebay provide a complete A-Z glossary of the most popular search terms used on their engine. You can use this to see what its currently popular within the auction site, and with Ebay’s size, this will commonly translate into general demand for consumer goods online. The service provides every product you can think of, with everything from Abba to Zziplex in the index.

Kelkoo

URL: http://shopping.kelkoo.co.uk/ssq_a_0_100.html

Kelkoo is one of the highest traffic comparison engines on the net, and they too supply a wide range of ‘popular’ insights for their search.  Like Ebay, we can obtain an A-Z breakdown of popular keywords, which incidently seems to correlate with some of the Ebay data quite nicely. They also however provide Top Categories,  Brands and  Stores – which provides a certain amount of insight in its own right.

Overview

Whilst instinct, attending tradeshows and personal taste are great ways of working out what to buy for next season, it also makes sense to supplement these decisions with the data from the wider internet community as well. Algorithms that exist on your competitors websites to maximise sales, can just as easily be turned around to your advantage and help you understand what is hot and what is not.

We noticed several retailers and affiliates getting in quickly, and out quickly – and making an absolute killing on ‘Vuvuzela’s’ during this World Cup, riding the demand trend, and building content around them. What ways do you guys best keep your finger on what products are making an impact?

Finding realtime product trends to maximise sales is a post from: Webdistortion

Find the problematic pages

When you’ve an established presence, it becomes more and more important to start to analyse your content and the ways in which people interact with it. With social media being such a powerhorse for traffic, interaction and engagement are fast becoming the new backlink, and knowing how people are reacting, can help you maximise the impact your content is having.

Doing so can help to open up a couple of opportunities, and even provide ideas for fresh content. Find your popular content, re-read, and expand upon it to make it even better.

You can do this very simply by looking at your ‘Top Content’ report in Google Analytics. If you are getting lots of visitors to a page, but have a high bounce rate,  that may indicate a page that could do with some extra work.

Keep an eye on ‘Time on Page’ as well, as this could show that the content IS being engaged with, but just not enticing people to visit other pages on the site, and potentially an underlying navigational issue. Another tip is to make sure you select a large enough date range here, as short sharp bursts of traffic for one or two days can influence this report dramatically.

Back date your links

When you start blogging, often you need to rely heavily on supporting material that others have created to explain concepts, and supplement your own writing. Absolutelynothing wrong with that – but sometimes, we forget that older content may benefit from the NEW content that we’ve created.

This is where the concept of ‘back dating’ your links comes in, where you return to old content, re-read, and where appropriate provide links through to the new material. It’s a surprisingly simple way to keep visitors on your site, as they click through from older pages. Personally, I see it as freshening my older content and introducing readers to additional new pages on my blog. At the very worst, you can expect the search traffic that lands on these (sometimes naive) pages to stay that bit longer on your site.

There are of course much more automated ways to do this, with plugins that match keywords in your content with pages on your site. However, before running headlong into this option, you have to be aware that different context’s that keywords are used in, can accidently link an article that makes little sense in the current context of your writing.

Respond to comments quickly

Hat tip to Dawn from Sensei Learning and Performance for this one, who recommends responding to comments on your blog quickly. I’d second that opinion with vigour, adding that along with responding quickly, a good comment plugin (see Subscribe to Comments from these marketing plugins for wordpress) can help your blog grow, receive repeat traffic, and increase engagement from your visitors.

Responding to visitor comments on a one to one basis helps make you accessible to your readers, and contributing actively to the discussion can help to clarify your points further.  The more content you can provide, whether through your blog article itself, or via comments, the better for organic traffic.

Reward reader comments

You will find that a very small percentage of your site’s visitors will  comment on your material. Typical engagement rates are about 0.57% for Facebook fan pages – and that’s on a platform who’s user interface is designed primarily to encourage interaction.

Rewarding comments is a sure fire way to do that. Some commenting systems such as Disqus provide built in ‘Liking’ of comments that others make, and this sort of social validation can provide increased interaction. I have however been vocal about commenting systems in the past. Another option is to utilise plugins such as CommentLuv – which reward commenters with a juicy link to their last blog post.

Use Interactive elements

Interactive elements shouldn’t be underestimated in increasing interaction.  Video, slideshows, and images can all help to keep visitors browsing around your site. My own recent experiment with my blog’s category pages (more spacing and showing image previews for posts) showed an increase in pages per visit of 11%. That’s a huge indicator that people stop and take notice when you provide visual content on your site.

Keep an Eye on Your ‘Refresh Rate’

The guys over at Analytics Pro’s have an fantastic post that I recently came across, explaining a concept known as ‘refresh rate’ – a reflection of pages which are viewed more often than others in a session, indicating either a higher engagement or something particularly impressive about those pages. Recognising these and analysing them can make a real difference to both navigational design, and content production for increased engagement in the future.

This hack is well worth taking a look at,as is their Analytics Toolbar – which adds some extra bits and bobs to your Google Analytics reports. I’d recommend you run this regularly to identify your most engaging content, and provide more of it!

Tease out your subscribers

For bloggers, if you have a high number of your visitors typically coming as the result of RSS subscription, it may be worth providing a link to your comments from just your RSS feed. As I’ve mentioned here before, RSS footer allows you to do just that, and can tease your visitors out of their RSS reader and onto your blog to share their thoughts.

Mine your search

Your website’s searchbox is a goldmine. When someone searches on a website, it generally means one of two things. Either, they’ve been on the website before, spotted a useful piece of content, and want to see it again – or -  they are new to the site, and want to find content centered around a particular subject.

In either case, knowing (and providing) the answers to those queries can greatly enhance your visitors experience. So mining the queries that people use to find content, or the queries they are using that result in ‘No results’ can be useful as part of a content development strategy.

The following Youtube video shows how you can track site search queries, although you may want to programmatically integrate with Google Analytics yourself (using Event tracking).  Its a relatively trivial task to send unsuccessful search queries back to Google for tracking. You can then use this to either improve your search, or to better integrate carewords into existing content.

How to increase reader interaction on your website. is a post from: Webdistortion

These span the entire content creation and marketing spectrum and are handy little hints that you can apply instantaneously that will make a difference to your site and traffic.

1) Syndicate, Syndicate, Syndicate

Syndication is the process by which web feeds are available from a site in order to provide other people with a summary of the website’s content. If you are supplying an RSS feed for your visitors – then you are syndicating.

Once your blog or website gets to a certain size, you’ll notice that more and more frequently other websites want to use your content for their own, either with or without your permission.

This can be both a blessing, and a curse.

A common recipe for those looking to make a quick buck online is to use your RSS to republish your content (sometimes in its entirety) on another site, and fill the remainder of the sites full to the brim with Adsense. So called MFA sites.

Other times, you may actually be encouraging syndication – setting up relationships with other authority websites that will republish your content with attribution, and increase your reach, brand exposure and subscriber count.

At the crux of it, I recommend you don’t fight it. You can delay your RSS feed by a few minutes to help Google figure out who the content belongs to, and you can ensure that you aren’t getting outranked by someone else. Make sure that you have links back to your blog from within your posts, or simply within your RSS, and you’ll benefit. Personally, I ensure that the title of my posts are links as well as headings so that scraper sites republish the main theme of my posts as a link when they do so, giving maximum relevancy.

The way I look at is, copy theft, in this particular instance is more likely to benefit the original source than the thief, especially in the long run as search algorithms improve to combat it.

A couple of rss plugins and links to help you out:

Add a digital signature to your RSS with Copyfeed (WordPress plugins) – this can help find the folks who rip your links out completely by creating your own RSS digital signature.

Delay your RSS feed – this little snippet in your WordPress blog will do just that.

How syndication can backfire - Dave shows us a case study, and what to do.

RSS Footer – allows you to insert additional links back to  your posts only in your RSS feed.

2) Find new places to carry your content

When you are just getting your feet wet, often, you’ll not have a clue where abouts to get syndicated from, or where the low hanging fruit is. Thankfully, there’s a great big Google in the sky to look after us, and give us the information we need. It’s not rocket science, simply a matter of thinking a bit more creatively. I have three favourite techniques for finding new places to share my content.

1) Exploit user news sections

Loads of websites advertise the fact that they allow user contributions. In the web design niche, there are an absolute shed load of places you can submit your links to.  But the real magic is finding them. A couple of Google queries for me turn up a whole boat load of user news links.

allinurl: “user-link-feed”

allinurl: “community-news”

allinurl: “submit-news”

allinurl:”submit-user-link”

My own collection of these previously shows the sort of things that you can search for, with the majority of WordPress blogs, including my own using the ‘TDO mini forms” plugin, which has its own digital fingerprint in that it publishes to the ‘user-link-feed’ URL by default unless you specify a different one. You may find a common thread inside your own niche that can be exploited.

2) Follow the A-list breadcrumb trail.

A-list bloggers are at the top of the syndication tree. You’ll notice that whenever you get a link from them, a multitude of additional links show up around the web, embedded in the exact same article, syndicated on a different domain. That’s great news for SEO, as it gives you not just ONE link back, but many.

Using this knowledge, you can easily find the places that others get syndicated from. Here’s an example. Pick a blog. Any blog. Let’s say for example – Seth Godin’s.

One of Seth’s recent posts is entitled “Do You Have the Right to be Heard” – we can easily see where this is post is being syndicated with a Google query. Notice how I’ve included both a snippet of the post alongside the title with the ‘+’ operator.  This helps filter out the people who are tweeting, or mentioning the post, and are actually including the content alongside it.

See here:

http://bit.ly/cthFZ8

You can trawl these results manually, picking out the low hanging fruit that you can use for your own site. Some of the sites you can just email and ask if they will syndicate you stuff – others provide a web form to add yourself.

The great thing about this technique is that you can repeat it across a variety of niches and with various high profile bloggers to turn up other interesting sites that you may not be aware of.

3) Use Pligg fingerprints to find social sites in your niche

Pligg is an open source ‘Digg clone’ – a website which allows visitors to vote up and down stories and promotes both news and blog posts. There are many successful Pligg sites out there. Sphinn is one.  Developers Niche another.  The great thing about software like this, for marketers is that it can be easily fingerprinted.

Here’s a couple of searches that turn up Pligg sites.

your source for social news and networking
+”upcoming news” +”published news” +register

Again, you can use this in conjunction with other keywords related to your sites topic to return relevant sites to promote your content.

3) Link to fresh or viral content

When you write a blog post, often you’ll need to find good reference material to support your content and provide value to your visitors. One often overlooked tip, is to link to fresh content – especially when faced with the choice between the old and new. If you can find a blog post that you like the look of, which is still on the home page of the site in question – you are likely to benefit for two reasons.

Firstly, the majority of traffic to large sites lands on their home page directly. It stands to reason that fresher content therefore gets more eyeballs, and if you have managed to (pingback) the post, you will also get a steady trickle of their visitors as a result.

Secondly, if you are really quick to link to content that has only just been published, you’ll also benefit from the RSS subscribers of that blog clicking through to the blog post you’ve linked to, and thus again, receive a percentage of these visits following your pingback home.  There are a number of ways to stay ahead of the curve, but these change detection plugins can be set to alert you when high traffic sites publish new content.

Linking to viral content offers the same sort of benefits – just take a look at the Digg, Reddit or Delicious homepages, or PopURL‘s to view the content that others are swarming around. All of these provide evidence as to both what content people care about, AND where perhaps you can link to both now and the future.

What do you think? What do you do to increase your reach that bit further?

3 simple content strategies to increase your blog’s reach. is a post from: Webdistortion

1) Google News Considered

In order to get your site into Google news, firstly you need to submit to Google for direct review. I’ve heard that you are more likely to get included here if you have multiple authors, and update more regularly i.e. once a day- which makes sense, but many sites don’t even take the time to have a go at getting listed! I have however heard of quality blogs making their way in here as well.  Getting listed in Google News has a number of benefits, firstly it increases your traffic, and secondly it revs up the crawler activity (Newsbot is different from Googlebot) on your site in search of fresh content, getting you into the index faster, and into the news results for keywords when they occur in real time.

2) Sitemaps Created

There are a couple of different types of sitemaps for websites. Whilst many folk get the ordinary plain and simple navigational sitemap, and this is generally what people talk about when they say they’ve created one – there are a couple of other more specialised sitemap that webmasters miss out on.

In particular, on Google -  there are sitemaps for the following:

News Sitemaps – for use on Google news, these follow a specialised format which you can find out more about here. If you are running on the WordPress platform, thankfully there is also a plugin which handles the creation of this for you.

Video Sitemaps – video sitemaps are important to bring your video’s into the SERP’s. Surprise surprise, that video sitemaps associate an individual URL with an individual video, which can aid in the creation of thumbnails of a video in a search result. This can significantly increasing clickthrough’s from the SERP’s when it occurs. Yahoo are using an alternative format that Google also support – it’s called Media RSS and is also worth exposing your content through. If you have multimedia content such as video, that is traditionally difficult to both discover and categorise, you’d be crazy not to take advantage of these glaringly obvious wins. Bing are also supporting Media RSS.

Mobile Sitemaps – Mobile sitemaps work in much the same way as traditional navigational sitemaps, but allow deeper indexing for mobile crawlers. If you have mobile content on your site, that is either no followed or hidden to prevent duplicate content problems, mobile sitemaps are the perfect solution.

Code Search – If alot of the content you create on your website is code related, you could benefit from exposing content in a code sitemap. You may, for example run a code search engine of your own, or indeed a forum which allows code to be submitted. This helps categorise both language and license, making it more easily discoverable by Google’s crawler.

Geo Sitemaps (KML) – If you are providing alot of locale relevant content, including addresses, then supplying a geo sitemap can help your content reach that bit further, for example within Google maps, and within Google earth. Essential a KML sitemap will associate content with an exact location, and helps to get additional local traffic.  With more and more location aware applications making their way onto the web, it makes sense to provide this information in a machine readable format.

3) Rich Snippets Present

Search is getting smarter. More and more engines are now pushing for information to be marked up in more elaborate ways, both to help them understand context, and to deliver superior experiences in what is a VERY competitive market. Rich Snippets are one such way that the search engines are doing this, and you need to know about it.

To display Rich Snippets, Google and some of the other search engines look for additional markup formats (microformats and RDFa) to determine if they can be used.  In most cases, it’s as quick as wrapping the existing data on your web pages with some additional tags. The following blog post from the Google Webmaster Central blog explains more in detailed analysis of what is going on. Google isn’t the only search engine asking for web pages to contain additional markup however  – both Bing and Yahoo are also using it, so again it is both best practise and worthwhile doing it. Again, this is something that (if / when) you supply, will drastically increase your clickthrough rate.

There are also WordPress plugins out there to help you in that pursuit, assuming you are running on that platform. For other sites, you should look after it manually.

To test that your rich snippets are showing up ok, you can test them here.

To learn more about RDFa, this site has a pretty good breakdown of attributes that you can use etc.

4) Open Graph Protocol Implemented

Its getting pretty hard to ignore Facebook, and as it gets bigger and bigger you’d be mad to not tap into the wave of traffic that is out there for the taking. They have implemented the ‘Open graph protocol’ to help integrate existing webpages into Facebook’s architecture, making it easier to ‘like’ content. Thankfully all that most bloggers need to worry about is the fact there are WordPress plugins out there to help you do so.

• Open Graph Protocol Plugin for WordPress – My own personal favourite, this plugin properly implements the full scope of the open graph plugin, providing meta data in the header of your page so image thumbnails etc makes its way into Facebook when someone shares your post.
• Like – This plugin supports multiple languages, gives a number of display options and can be shown at the top or bottom of a post, on pages and on the front page, all based on what settings you select.
• Facebook Like Button – There is a settings panel to shape how the like button appears with this plugin
• Facebook Like Button Plugin – You can use a shortcode to insert this easily into posts.

5) Meta Tags Present

Whilst meta tags are becoming less and less important, they are still worthy of a mention, not least because they influence clickthrough rates, in particular the meta description tag.This could make the difference between you getting the clickthrough, or your competitor getting it.

Other meta tags that should absolutely make it into your site, are the verification meta tags for each of the relevant Webmaster Tool logins. You should be paying attention to what is going on within webmaster tools, for Google, Yahoo and Bing – to help pick up on any information that they provide, and to better understand how well your site is performing.

5 tactics you’ve probably missed to increase your traffic is a post from: Webdistortion

However, not everyone out there is as familiar with the language of the web as I was. I have recently noticed a few simple mistakes  from both newbie and more established bloggers that could make a real difference to their overall impact of posts, both as far as SEO goes and for the experience of their readers.

You can forgive me if this is teaching you to suck eggs – but its information that I feel needs to be shared, and should save those writers new to the game learning the entire HTML language just to format their posts in  professional way. I’ve also found it hard to find decent reference material for clients that concentrates on the bare essentials to get up and running within WordPress – without providing the entire scope of the HTML language to learn – and thus saving on support queries. Perhaps you have the same trouble.

Headings

Headings in a blog post are pretty crucial to your success. Firstly, they attract attention. Secondly they allow your readers to jump logically between sections of your post quickly, and skim / scan your content at a glace. Thirdly, headings allow search engine spiders to more easily figure out the context of your post.  As a basic guideline, your main title should describe the contents of your post overall, and individual headings after that, should describe the contents of paragraphs that follow them.

Headings in HTML range from H1 all the way to H7 , With H1 being the most important, and H7 being the least important. You can use multiple headings on the same page, with the unwritten SEO exception of the H1 tag, which should be the single most important or highest level subject of the page.

If you think about headings as a ‘weighting’, with H1 giving the most importance to its contents, you may find that a couple of headings deserve the same ‘weight’ on a page, and this is fine.

As an example page about a person.

[H1 Header] – <h1>Your name</h1>
[content] Give a little background about yourself
[H2 Sub Head] <h2>Why you rock</h2>
[more content] Highlight why you rock
[H2 Sub Head] <h2>Where you are from</h2>
[more content] – Give a little background about where you are from

As a basic guideline, use heading tags to separate sections of your posts. Your blog post title should be inside H1 tags (ask your web developer or check by viewing source of your page) – sections thereafter should be tiered according to importance.

Have a quick look at this HTML page to see some example headings.

Images

Images are one of the most important ways to add polish to a blog post, and can be a great way to spice up content and give people motive to share with others, but you have to be able to do three things to master your images in your posts.

1) Align Them
2) Link Them (or not as the case may be)
3) Resize Properly

Aligning Images

Aligning images in your posts will be a determined by two things. Firstly the CSS that is attached to your blog design / theme, and secondly the way your blogging platform handles it.

Whilst many people can’t control the CSS (the style sheet which controls how your HTML looks) – here’s some ways you can control images a bit better using HTML.

A basic image tag looks like this…

<img src=”imagename.jpg” ></img>

This code references the image file. Simple enough. When you add a standard image in your blogging platform, all of these things are done for you, and an image appears automagically on your page. But the real control over it comes when you jump into ‘source’ or ‘HTML mode’ in your editor. Other attributes worth noting for the image tag can be found over at W3Schools, which is a great learning playground if you aren’t familiar with HTML.

Here’s a basic example of an image inserted in HTML. Nothing special going on here.

To align an image left in WordPress

<img src=”imagename.jpg” style=”float:left;margin: 0px 15px 15px 0px;” ></img>

Notice the extra bit of padding around the image to prevent the text getting too close to the image. I’ve opted for an inline style here for two reasons. Firstly, whilst an external stylesheet is the ‘correct’ way to do things, it doesn’t account for the problem with rss readers – which often don’t download the attached CSS from your blog, leaving your images badly aligned in your RSS reader. Inline styles are the only way to maintain validation, and keep things looking the way you want.

Here’s a basic example of an image aligned left in HTML. There’s also margin of 15pixels on this to give room for the text.

To align an image right in WordPress

<img src=”imagename.jpg” style=”float:right;margin: 0px 0px 15px 15px;” ></img>

Again, I’ve padded the aligned image here, with 15 pixels left and bottom. The image will naturally float to the right, and text will flow around it naturally.  The margin values work in a clock like fashion. If you can visualise a compass, starting at the top their are values North, East, South, West.. So in this example there is a margin zero top, zero right, 15 bottom and 15 left, giving the text room to breathe.

Here’s a basic example of an image aligned right in HTML. Again margin of 15 pixels used.

To clear the next paragraph and image

Occasionally you will find that all this floating of images causes all sorts of hassles and hardships for your post layout in the browser. The main reason things go awry is normally a lack of text around the image to push it down suffuciently, leaving you with something that looks like this:

Oh crap. What have I done wrong?

You can see that when you’ve got enough paragraphs underneath the first image, things behave themselves. This is exactly the same HTML – just more text.

See what happens when there’s enough text

So how do you fix things when you don’t have enough text to flow around the image, and still maintain the image alignment? The answer lies in the clear property, which instructs the image to not ‘flow’ in beside the first floated image. This pushes it onto its own line as you would expect, the paragraph continues to wrap into the left of image 1.

When the second image is cleared right

To associate paragraphs together

Sometimes even the above solution won’t be what you are looking for, and you’ll want to keep each image associated alongside the body of text in the line of the reader. To do so, you need to divide the text into sections. The norm for this is the <div> element, which you can wrap around the HTML of choice. When you’ve done this, you can then tell the div you want to clear it around the first image.

When a DIV element is used, and cleared right.

Link an image

There are a couple of scenarios where you may want to link an image. You may want to link to another part of your site, someone elses webpage, or a larger view of the image itself.

Here’s how to do all three.

To link to the image itself.

With WordPress, the default behaviour when you upload an image, and insert into a post, the image will be linked to the full size image, so all you have to do is upload and click insert. The same is true with blogger, which also links to the “large” image.

The basic html for linking to an image looks like this. Notice how the “anchor” tag wraps the image.

<a href=”imagename.jpg”><img src=”imagename.jpg” ></img></a>

Basic link to the same file you are showing as an image.

To link to a larger view of the image itself.

Many blogging platforms allow you to insert an image that is a resized, or thumbnail version iof the original. Linking to the original is a pretty simple process as well though.

The basic HTML for link to the larger version looks a bit like this. Notice the URL / HREF  for the link tag is different from the image tag, so its going to a different place.

<a href=”imagelargeversion.jpg”><img src=”imagesmaller.jpg”></img></a>

Larger link to the file you are showing as an image

To link to an external webpage

It is possible to link to another webpage using the same sort of logic. The anchor tag surrounds the thing you want to link whether it be text, or an image.  The http of the URL denotes the protocol, (HTTP) over which  the visitor will get sent, and to send a visitor away from your own site, as a rule of thumb, your href should always start with http://.

Here’s the basic code for linking an image to an external webpage.

<a href=”http://www.webdistortion.com”><img src=”imagename.jpg”></img></a>

Link an image to an external website.

To get rid of blue border around an image

This is a common query for HTML – and one that is easily fixed with a little css. The key is to eradicate the border on the image tag itself, and can be performed with the following HTML

<a href=”http://blog.webdistortion.com”><img src=”imagename.jpg” style=”border:0px;”></img></a>

Here’s an example of a linked image without the blue border.

To give an image a 1 pixel ‘pictureframe border’

Sometimes you may want to give an image an extra border. This can be a really nice little touch, particularly if your images are on a clean white background.

<img src=”imagename.jpg”  style=”border:1px solid #ccc;padding:15px;”/>

Here’s an example of an image with a one pixel border applied. Notice the padding element to give space between image and border.

Resizing Images

Resizing images seems to be something many bloggers struggle with. I’ve seen many occasions where an image has been inserted as a massive image, then later ‘dragged’ to a more respectible size for the post. Wrong Wrong Wrong.

All this is doing behind the scenes, in the HTML is changing two attributes on the image. ‘Width’ and ‘Height’ – which don’t actually affect the underlying image file.

<img src=”imagename.jpg” width=”100px” height=”100px” ></img> -

Here’s an example of a badly resized image. See how long it takes to download yet it appears small!

Notice how this image is 100 x 100 pixels. However, if it is really bigger than that prior to being used on the page then this is the wrong approach for a number of reasons. Firstly, it increases the download of your page by some margin. Correctly resized images are smaller to download than their larger counterparts. Secondly, they are also much crisper to the eye, and aren’t pixelated. Two pretty good reasons to make sure the images you use in your post are correctly resized.

Here’s how the above image should have downloaded. See how much faster it downloads.

How to resize an image

Find an image tool that you are comfortable using first and foremost. Windows still doesn’t come with adequate tools for resizing an image out of the box, so here’s a collection of a couple of the better open source and easy to use tools if you are on Windows. If you have a more professional image program such as Photoshop or PaintShop Pro, then that will work even better and give you many more options. For back to basics, simple resizing, these are the best programs out there for newbies IMO.  Gimpshop is simply a free photoshop clone.

Image Resizer Clone (all Windows platforms)
Irfanview – Great little image viewer and resize tool
Gimpshop – Photoshop clone

For Macintosh

iResize
EasyCrop
SmallImage 2.0.6

The below video shows basic image resizing in Photoshop. Gimpshop works in a pretty much the same way, and the other programs mentioned are also pretty similar in functionality.

Typography

Another important part of a blog post is the typography you use for different elements in your blog post. For example, you may have a quotation that you wish to highlight visually different from the other text on your page. You may also have code in your post which needs special or dedicated formatting to appear perfectly for your visitors. Here are a collection of some of these typographic elements and how to use HTML to make them appear the way you want them to. As previous, I’ve created independant HTML pages that you can view the source of to see how they are put together, hopefully – this will be easily replicated in your own blog posts with a copy paste of the source code, and I’ve kept all styling inline so they appear in the same sort of way when viewed from an RSS reader.

How to style a quote with blockquotes

Quotes are a great way to highlight something someone else has said. For a classic, simple quote that doesn’t involve images, these examples show how a simple little snippet of code can make all the different to your post. The basic HTML for a quotation is achieved through the blockquote element.

<blockquote>What you have to say</blockquote>

Here’s an example of a blockquote element which has been styled.

Here’s another example of a quote with inline styles applied.

How to change the font size and style

Sometimes you may want to step outside the boundary of what your designer has put in place as far as fonts go. The main way in which you can do this is to style the parent element which contains your text. For example if you wanted a particular paragraph inside your blog post to have a different font size or font style, you simple use an inline style like so.

<p style=”font-size:14px;font-family:Calibiri”>My newly formatted text</p>

You can see an example of this in practise here, with a number of alternative font styles.

How to style a list in WordPress

There are two main types of list in HTML. An ordered list (which has a numeric entry denoting an order) and an unordered list (which doesn’t). The HTML to create a list is very simple, but sometimes you may want to turn off bullets or change the margins on the elements. Here’s how to do that.

Remove bullets, numbers or margins from both ordered and unordered lists.

Overview

Hopefully some of this will be of use if you are learning WordPress, or have clients needing to better format the information they are displaying – and gives a small insight into the World of HTML code for anyone not already familiar. Leave a comment if you’ve got a particular need or “how to question” for the WordPress platform, and I’ll do my best to answer somewhere in the post.

Essential HTML that every newbie blogger should know is a post from: Webdistortion