• Twitter
• Groupon and Living Social
• LinkedIn

These are in fact some of the best web application on the internet and they have Ruby and Rails to thank for that.

You might be wondering why should I care about these low-level tools?

The answer is really simple, every company, whether now or in the next few years will want to start investing in web applications.

Having the ability to create a web application for a given problem that you are having will make your business more efficient and scaleable as it grows. Often times business, buy the software they need from vendors and for the most part that is good and it can work. However, there are times when it doesn’t work and you end up fitting a square piece of software into a round hole.

It would have been much easier to build a small web application using ruby on rails instead. This way, you could have had what you really wanted rather than spending time and money customizing an off the shelf piece of software for you and your team.

Where do I get started?

Start by making a list of the things that you currently do, but know that you could do better.

Then, call in someone like me to help figure out which areas of your business are prime for a web application.

Since we having been working with Ruby on Rails for over 7 years, we will likely use that tool for the job.

What kind of web applications could I possibly want to build?

It really depends on your business, but here are a few that we see often.

• Vendor / Supplier Reviews
• Custom contact managers
• Workflows with custom notifications
• Tools that integrate with an existing accounting system
• Custom financial reporting
• Automating tedious manual labour.

All of these things can be automated using a web application written in Ruby on Rails.

Invest in home grown technology sooner rather than later, it will pay off in the long run.

Thanks for reading.

Finding web pages

One of the most obvious ways is of course to search for something. This is the primary purpose of a search engine and should be no surprise that Google, DuckDuckGo and Yahoo will deliver good results.

Discovering competition

Every business has competition and it’s good to know what they are up to. Focusing on your competition isn’t good, but knowing that they are there is crucial. Another to use a search engine as a tool is to search for keywords that you think potential customers might search for. See who comes up on top or on the first page. Visit their websites too see what they are doing that you aren’t.

You don’t need to make this an obsession but it should be something you do every month.

Checking that your pages are being indexed well

Another search engine tool you can use comes at the end of the discovery and writing process.

After you have identified your keywords and created some content about them, you should periodically run some searches to make sure that your pages are tracking well for those keywords.

There are search engine tools and other seo tools that you can use, but typically, just running the searches by hand will give you the confidence that your site is being seen and noticed.

Well, there you have it. Some tips and tricks for using your favourite search engine as a business tool.

The time has come to get your head out of the sand.  The mobile is here and it’s not going anywhere.

More and more people will be using, iPhone, Android phone, Windows Phones, yes, even Blackberry’s to find your content.

As much as I would love to sell you an expensive application.  The fact is that many don’t need it.  An optimized, mobile website made with jQuery mobile is all you really need.

Mobile websites and mobile website developers are scarse resources these days.  We want to change that.  Make sure you call us today so that we can get your setup on the mobile web.

For proof and fun, visit ewakened.com from your favourite mobile website viewing device.

Have a fantastic day,

Kent

One of the questions that we see all the time when people start getting into Pinterest is

How can I decide what image I want people to pin?

Or, we also hear.

Pinterest, keeps saying that my page doesn’t have any images to Pin… that sucks

We agree.

I am going to walk you through how to add any image on your website and make it available for pinning.  We are going to use this blog post as an example.  Let’s say that I want you to Pin this blog post to one of your Boards.  The problem is, if we hit the Pin It button in our bookmark bar, we get the following image.

What you see when you normally Pin this page… not very exciting.

Here is the strategy we are going to use.

1. Create a new image that we want to become our Pin image.

2. Add that image to this page

3. Hide the image for normally viewers using a good, easy, non sneaky css property.

Step 1.

I am going to use Illustrator to create a quick image.  Here is what I want the Pin for this page to look like

http://www.ewakened.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ewakened-custom-pin.png

Stept 2.

I have in fact, already added this image to the page.  You can see it in the source.

Step 3.

Now to hide the image from view.  We don’t want to use

But we can simply move it SO far off screen that no one will ever see it.

So the entire image tag will look like this:

That’s it!  Try it now.  Event though this page has crappy images on it, the image we added can now be used for a Pin.

Look at me now! A custom Pin for Pinterest.

Simple, easy, effective.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Starting your inbound marketing campaign

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve probably noticed that over the past couple of years, there has been an overwhelming trend for business websites to “go mobile.” For many years, the most popular (and only) way to access the internet was through the use of a desktop computer. Eventually, laptops became a much more practical tool due to their portability. Today, however, mobile devices such as cell phones and tablets are quickly becoming the preferred method of surfing the web. In fact, technology experts speculate that in the not-so-distant future, people won’t be using desktop computers at all.

So, what does this mean for your web presence? Well, in short, it means everything. In this day in age it is not only important to have a website designed for mobile use – it’s a necessity. Choosing to forego a mobile design is sort of like amputating an arm – it limits your reach and gives more power to your competitors. Given the mobile trend, it’s best for your company to design mobile first. Design of the traditional website is secondary.

Let me put it this way: Imagine a potential customer needs a good or service that your company provides. If they are like most modern individuals, they will take out their mobile device and quickly type a phrase into their preferred search engine. From these results, the potential customer will likely click the link to a company website for more information. The page may load slowly, awkwardly or be difficult to navigate if it is not optimized for mobile first. Design plays a role in a customer’s impression, but usability plays an even larger role.

All in all, if you plan to remain a contender in your industry, it is imperative that your website be accessible from nearly every conceivable browser and device. The better your site is optimized, the greater your reach.

For fun.  Head on over to www.ewakened.com on your mobile device.  It’s looks different.

Changing directions

Whereas outbound marketing generates cold leads and few guarantees with any client, inbound marketing engages with prospective clients familiarizes them with your company before you first make contact. When a sales representative contacts a lead generated through inbound practices, the lead is considered “warm” because the prospective buyer has chosen to engage your company’s sales staff after learning about the products or services offered.

This means that, instead of pitching products or services more or less blindly to generated leads, your inbound leads will already have an interest in the offerings of your business. Not only are the leads closer to committing to a sale than would be the case for many outbound leads, but your sales staff also becomes more efficient because they don’t have to play percentages and focus on volume — every lead they pursue is high-quality, putting the onus on sales staff to close the deal.

Implement Your Own Inbound Marketing

I see businesses of all shapes and sizes looking for ways they can increase the quality of their sales leads and take advantage of inbound marketing strategies. Through the Internet, there are a variety of ways you can increase your business’s exposure and engage with current and prospective clients, ultimately leading to inbound sales leads.

In this day and age, businesses cannot afford to overlook the social media as a tool for building clients. Facebook profiles, Twitter accounts and other social networking tools can help you build an online following that produces residual exposure to your prospective client base. Interacting with consumers through these platforms can help strengthen brand loyalty and trust with consumers.

Developing search engine-optimized web content will help your company appear more prominently in online searches. Blogging regularly on subject matter of relevance to your clients can keep leads returning to your site, resulting in repeated exposures while establishing your business as an industry expert.

Take advantage of Free Services

When developing your inbound marketing strategies, consider implementing some free service offerings as a way consumers can test-drive your business. Through the use of webinars, e-brochures, or other online tools and materials that can benefit your targeted consumer base, you can demonstrate your business’s expertise and value to your clients while getting your name in front of potential leads. Inbound marketing requires a time investment from your business, but the end result will be better leads, more efficient sales and expanded revenue streams.

So, we wanted to post this… post to let all Canadian would be App developers to know that the App approval and company approval process takes time.  After doing some research we heard that it could take up to 10-15 days to get the company approved, let alone the Apps approved.

We did not factor this into our plan and luckily we built these Apps for us and you, but not for clients

Make sure you keep these timelines in mind when planning your release.

Get approved before you want to launch!

Have a great weekend.

They have designed a wicked landing page and it’s now up, ready for you at http://www.thesmilenyc.com/

Can’t wait to show off the full site.  It’s going to be fully designed for mobile.

Love it.

Many times when you hire a company (that’s not ewakened) to build your website, the company will setup your website so that yourdomain.com and www.yourdomain.com go to the same place.

This is good, but having two domains pointing to the same place is bad for Search Engine Optimization.  It essentially creates two competing domains.

There are many ways to fix this.

1.  You can change your server’s rules to automatically route non www requests to your www domain.

2. If you are using Ruby on Rails, or Ruby you can add a simple rule like this into your production.rb file

This will force your server to send a 301 rewrite rule and search engines like Google will always index and look for your www.yourdomain.com rather than yourdomain.com

1.  You can hire us next time and never worry about things like this again

Let us know if you have any questions.