Confused about how to use Google Wave, the new Google product that combines messaging, wiki-like features and group collaboration into a single app? You’re not alone.

To clear up the confusion, we recently published Google Wave: A Complete Guide, a feature-length article that explains Wave in plain English.

Now Gina Trapani and Adam Pash have gone a step further, releasing The Complete Guide to Google Wave. The book, which is available for free online, details all of Wave’s features – and some use cases – in 8 chapters. It’s a super-handy reference if you’re still stuck on how to get the most out of Wave. Recommended!

(Via Mashable!.)

9 SEO plug-ins to help you optimize your wordpress pages weights

1. All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack will help you the basic content of the blog search engine optimization elements, including a separate page title, Meta tags, keywords and description.
(Note: All in One SEO Pack is easy to slow down the system and some of its functions can be achieved manually change the code, you can refer to the egg of this article.)

2. Redirection
Modify the previous text of the old Bo, WordPress upgrade or modify the permanent link structure, especially in the blog after the move, there will be blog post link to change.
Generally speaking, each post has a unique permanent URL address, the address change may occur after the visitors unable to visit, redirection plug-in will bring visitors to the new address, to avoid the situation can not be accessed.
(Note: not just SEO, for many useful Windows host friends,, redirection can also help you to remove a permanent link in the index.)

<3. Robots Meta
Under normal circumstances prime search engine will crawl your blog, and contains all the pages, this can easily lead to the appearance of duplicate content, so you need to guide search engines included prime, Robots Meta will make your blog get more weight and flow.

4. SEO Smart Links
Internal links are SEO, one of the key issues, more importantly, the content should have more internal links, you can search within the chain, told the prime engine, what is most important. If the manual to create internal links would be very time-consuming and laborious.
SEO Smart Links will allow you to specify a word such as ‘search engine optimization’ and then the contents of the article it appears a ‘search engine optimization’ is the word, it will be automatically turned into the designated links.

5. SEO Friendly Images
Photo Also in the blog optimization play an important role, so to establish the correct label image becomes very important, and this is precisely the function of SEO Friendly Images, if you prefer to use images in the blog article, then the SEO Friendly Images is a must for small.

6. Google Positioner
Choose the right keywords is very important that this plug-in can help you to bring traffic to track the search keywords, you may aimlessly choice words and then create some content, in the hope to get a good result, but the SEO need to take the initiative to track the results.

7. Permalinks Moved Permanently
Blog main common mistakes is to choose a permanent link to the wrong structure, and start writing blog when you feel the most appropriate choice, but over time you may also intend to change the permanent link structure, and this time you may take several months prime time in order to be search engine re-included.
Permalinks Moved Permanently and Redirection role similar, but more likely a better way to manage a permanent link to change.
(Recommendation: no matter what the situation is not going to change your permanent link.)

8. Nofollow Case by Case
In the last two years, nofollow attribute has been deeply affected a blog, WordPress for all of the message of the connection have used Nofollow tags, which means that a message in the connection does not pass Page Rank (PR). If you want to attract more visitors comments, Nofollow Case by Case allows you to remove the message in the link Nofollow tags, which require exposure of a new blog is very useful.
(Note: Dofollow is indeed a good idea to publicize your blog, but the same will be destroyed Spam your blog, nofollow also the effect of weight change.)

9. SEO Slugs
Do not use was found to prime the engine ignores words, posts often have their title may be elements of search engines is meaningless word, so if you post entitled ‘What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings’, then the a permanent link to the default may be what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings, but you are not more like a permanent link to the following: immediately-higher-rankings
SEO Slugs can automatically link to permanently remove from the meaningless words, to help you achieve better rankings.

You took the leap and installed WordPress to host your own blog because you want complete control over how it looks and works. Now, it’s time to power it up, lock it down, and make your blog completely yours.

What You’re In For

With all the hype around cloud computing and no-configuration-required hosted services, you don’t hear about the joys of running great software on your own server very much. The fact is, if you’re just a casual user who doesn’t know if you’ll stick to blogging over the long haul, or if you don’t want to spend a little time maintaining WordPress, you should sign up for a hosted blog at WordPress.com or Blogger or TypePad. (Also, this tutorial is not for you.)

But if you’re willing to keep WordPress updated religiously, you get access to a whole world of WP plug-ins that add features to your site, the opportunity to create and tweak custom WordPress themes, and a huge sense of accomplishment. In the most recent version of WordPress, keeping your installation up-to-date is a matter of clicking a link when you get notified to do so.

Everything you need to know about installing WordPress is right here. Got it up and running? Let’s get to customizing.

Initial configuration

The first thing you want to do on your WordPress blog is set up a new author with administrative access. Don’t use the default ‘admin’ user to write your posts; create your custom username and give it admin privileges. Then, log out of WordPress and back in as your new username. For security reasons, some folks like to delete the admin user completely (as some WordPress attacks have used it to do bad things to your blog). Once you’ve got your administrative account working, add other authors to the list of users who might be posting to your blog.

Now it’s time to cruise through WP’s settings area and configure things just how you like ‘em. First, set up your post permalinks to look prettier for both humans and search bots. WordPress’ default post permalink looks like http://example.com/?p=123. Instead, under Settings>Permalinks, select something like http://example.com/2009/09/welcome-to-my-blog.

Next up, configure how you want comments to work on your blog. Under Settings>Discussion, you can enable comments and set other advanced options, like whether or not users have to be logged into your site to comment, or if comments should automatically close on posts after a certain number of days, if user avatars show up, or what words in a comment should automatically mark it as spam.

Speaking of, spam comments is a ridiculously epic problem across the internet for all blogs, so how you set up comments will mean the difference between miserable hours spent gardening V14gRa and ‘check out my sexy webcam!!’ comments or not. Coming from Lifehacker’s ‘must register to post here’ model, I checked off ‘Users must be registered and logged in to comment.’ If you don’t want to put up the registration hurdle in front of your commenters, make sure you install the Akisment spam-killing plug-in (more on that below).

Must-have plug-ins

Just like you can extend Firefox with feature-adding extensions, WordPress also has a pluggable architecture and a whole world of plug-ins that can soup up your blog. When youre logged into WordPress, click on Plugins, and search for the name of the plug-in you want to install (which you can do without involving your FTP client). You can also just search on keyword, too—to find Twitter related plug-ins, just enter Twitter. The plug-ins that you use will depend on how you want your site to work and look, but here are a few that every WP user can benefit from.

WordPress Database Backup (Backup): Running your own server and database means that if things go wrong, it’s up to you to have a backup. This plug-in can email a full backup of your WordPress database on a schedule to an address you specify. I’ve had great success building my WordPress site locally with the backup this plug-in created; however, the other resident WP expert here on staff, The How-To Geek, recommends using the old-school cron job for 'mysqldump -uUser -pPassword databasename > filename.bak' approach. No matter how you do it, make sure you’re backing up both your blog’s database and files. It’s worth consulting with your blog hosting provider about the best way for you to do this, too.

FD Feedburner Plug-in (Feeds): Google-owned FeedBurner is a must-use for anyone who publishes RSS feeds, like your blog does. FeedBurner saves you bandwidth costs by hosting your blog’s feed and offers statistics about how many people are reading it; this plug-in will redirect your blog’s feed to FeedBurner for you.

WordPress.com Stats (Stats): See what posts are most popular using this up-to-the-minute statistics plug-in, right inside your WordPress dashboard. WordPress.com stats doesn’t count visits to your own blog, and unlike the richer Google Analytics service, there’s no day-long delay to see what’s happening on your site. To run this plug-in, you have to get a WordPress.com API key (it’s free) and enter it into the plug-in’s settings.

Search Meter (Stats): If you have a search box on your site, you’ll want Search Meter, a plug-in which shows you what readers are looking for and finding (or not) on your site. Search meter also offers widgets you can add to your site which show readers what other readers are searching for.

WP SuperCache (Optimization): The first time a highly-trafficked site like Digg links to your blog, you’ll wish you had installed this plug-in, which maintains high-speed, database-call free ‘cached’ copies of your WordPress pages on your server. Your site will run faster and won’t buckle under the strain of a lot of traffic if you’re caching it with this excellent plug-in.

Akismet (Comments Spam killer): Because comment spam can get so bad, WordPress now ships with the Akismet spam filtering plug-in. Since I’m requiring user registration to leave comments on my WordPress blog, I don’t have any experience with how good Akismet is (and haven’t had any spam at all), but word on the street is it’s absolutely essential for sites with open comments. Like WordPress.com stats, Akismet requires a WordPress.com API key.

Finally, to make your site as accessible to Google and other web search engines as possible, a few Search Engine Optimization SEO plug-ins help. I use All in One SEO Pack and Google XML Sitemaps.

Make Your WordPress Theme Yours

If you’ve got HTML and CSS chops, you can make your WordPress theme sing your tune. (For advanced stuff, some PHP skills come in handy, too.) First you want to start with a base theme. WordPress’ default theme is ok, but if you google ‘free WordPress themes’ or take note of what themes sites you like already use, you’ll find an insane number of gorgeous and eye-catching site layouts. Picking your theme is one of the most fun (and most time-consuming) parts of setting up WordPress. It will be hard to choose!

Once youve installed the theme you want by downloading the .zip file and putting it in your WordPress themes folder, you can dig into the CSS and markup and make it your own. WordPress offers a theme editor in its interface which lets you update files on the fly (under Appearance>Editor). While this is convenient, its also dangerous if you hit the wrong key, save the file, and dont have a backup. My recommendation is to set up WordPress and your theme of choice on your own computer, edit it in your favorite text editor, and upload it to your live server when it’s perfect. I started my WordPress blog with Lucian Marin’s Journalist theme, and made it mine by adding color to the header and tweaking how comments look.

If you’ve got patience and custom HTML you want to turn into a brand new WordPress theme, copy the default theme’s files into a new folder and get to hacking. The WordPress Codex is an invaluable resource for both starter reading and reference as you go. That is, when you get to the part where you’re thinking ‘WTF is wp_list_comments?’, Google it and you’ll find the function reference at the codex. It took me a full weekend of pretty intense theming work to get my first custom theme done and ready to go live, so give yourself some time, and most importantly, have fun with it. Here are some tips and links from my Twitter followers on creating a custom WordPress theme.

Sidebars and Widgets, Oh My!

The easiest way to customize your WordPress blog without digging into code or your FTP client is to do so with widgets. The latest versions of WordPress offer drag-and-drop custom modules you can add to and remove from your blog. When you’re logged into WordPress’ admin interface, under Appearance, click on ‘Widgets’ to see what’s available and add and remove what you want on your site’s sidebar (or top bar or bottom bar, depending on where your theme puts it).

Advanced trickery

Here are a few more tips for advanced WordPress hackers who want to troubleshoot or try even more customization:

• Use multiple custom sidebars: WordPress’ sidebar and widgets feature is very powerful and customizable; in fact, you can create and customize multiple sidebars or site zones to show up on different pages. (For example, the sidebar that shows up on a post page can look different than the one on the front page.)
• Troubleshoot slowness and other problems with Firebug: Every web developer knows that the Firebug Firefox extension is absolutely essential when developing any site, and it’s true for WordPress, too. When my WP site went down because of multiple background 404’s doing resource-sucking searches, Firebug revealed the problem and so I knew how to fix it.
• Use tags to display content differently: You can use conditional tags to display different types of content on your blog in different ways, like a short link or big photograph. I use has_tag to display ‘quick links’ with smaller inline headlines on my front page by assigning the tag ‘brief.’
• Set up a ’staging’ server: Once your blog’s up and running and live, you don’t want to make huge changes to it with the whole world watching. Set up WordPress on your local computer, hack away on your theme and/or plug-ins, then upload your changes when they’re complete and ready.

This post only scratches the surface of WordPress customization possibilities. The good news is WordPress open nature and huge community means that you can find the answer to almost any WP question hitting up Google—or in worst case, asking the forums. Special thanks to the author of this CSS Tricks post who also writes the excellent Digging into WordPress blog, which I referenced for this post.

(Via Lifehacker.)

I’m getting married next July, and being a Mashable editor, I’ve naturally attempted to use social media wherever possible when planning my wedding. Some things for the wedding have required me to go the traditional route — picking out a venue meant actually going to see a few, and to my knowledge, there isn’t yet a way to actually taste food over the Internet. There are plenty of local wedding vendor directories and review sites that were helpful in locating vendors to try out, but actually checking them out in person is a must.

However, much of the wedding actually can be planned via social media and the web, especially if you take a more DIY approach and assemble bits and pieces of the event on your own. I’m taking that approach to the planning of my own wedding and have been relying on social media and web-based tools to help. In this post, I’m open sourcing my wedding planning work-flow and sharing all the tricks I’ve learned so far. Feel free to share other ideas in the comments.

Planning

The first thing my fiancé and I did when beginning to plan our wedding was pick out a color scheme. Once we had our colors picked out, it became a lot easier to start planning everything else pertaining to the design of our wedding, from the bridesmaid dresses to the decorations to the invitations. Check out COLOURlovers and Adobe’s Kuler for active communities of designers that create and share color palettes. If you are color challenged, these sites will help you identify colors that go well together, and if you’d rather create your own scheme, they offer tools to easily create color swatches.

Once we had our colors figured out, the next thing we used the web to help us out with was creating our save-the-date cards and invitations. We looked into traditional, wedding-focused print shops, but we decided that they were both too expensive and not personal enough — we wanted something designed just for us, not picked from a catalog. I am lucky enough to have a close friend who happens to be a great graphic designer and she volunteered to create my save-the-date cards and invitations, but prior to her generous offer, I was planning to use a crowd sourced design site like 99designs or crowdSPRING to get my wedding collateral created.

Before I actually send out my save-the-date cards, I need to get my wedding web site made (the cards have the web site URL printed on them). The web site will have information about hotels and air travel for guests, about local attractions and wedding-related activities, and about the all-important wedding registry (more on that in a moment). I also plan for the web site to also serve as a central repository for the distribution of post-wedding media.

There are plenty of services online that offer web sites catered specifically to weddings, but since I have design-savvy friends and a moderate amount of technical knowledge, I’m planning to go the DIY route. I’m in the process of putting together a page built on WordPress. I’m self-hosting, but there’s no reason why WordPress.com couldn’t work as well (or any other hosted blog solution).

WordPress is actually a great tool to power the back-end of a wedding web site. It lets you keep people automatically updated via blog posts (and RSS), lets you easily add static pages, is infinitely customizable, and there are already a slew of wedding specific themes available for free on the web. WordPress also has iPhone and BlackBerry apps, so you can update your page on the go. In addition to a web site, I am considering setting up a private Twitter stream and Facebook Event page for guests, creating multiple channels for people to stay updated.

Of course the main reason for a wedding web site is to tell people what sort of presents to get you. Right? Right. We considered going the traditional route and registering at stores like Crate & Barrel or Bed, Bath & Beyond — and we probably will register at one of those to accommodate for older or less tech-savvy guests — but no store really completely matched our taste or the small, but eclectic list of things we’d like to get as gifts. That’s why our wedding web site will most likely point to a Universal Wishlist from Amazon, which allows users to create a custom registry combining items for any store on the web, or one from MyRegistry.com, which lets couples create a registry from hundreds of different stores, and request cash gifts (i.e., for a honeymoon or single, big-ticket item).

That’s the virtual stuff covered, but what about the tangible items? What about the things that really matter, like what the wedding party is going to wear? I have one word for you: Etsy. Etsy is probably the world’s largest marketplace of handmade goods, and in it you can find almost anything you need for your wedding. It has been an invaluable resource for us while planning our wedding, and we like being able to support small business at the same time.

Etsy has a weddings category, but branch out and search the rest of the site for the type of items you need. We’ve been able to find everything from bridesmaid dresses, to neckties for the groomsmen, to wedding bands.

It should be clear by now: planning a wedding is a mammoth undertaking (and ours is relatively small at just over 100 guests). Keeping track of all the details can be difficult, but two tools are potentially invaluable for staying organized as the list of items you need to keep straight for the wedding grows larger. One of those resources is Backpack. Though initially designed for business use, Backpack is a single-page, wiki-style organizer that can be amazingly useful for keeping track of who is doing what, what is left to do, and what has already been accomplished. Because Backpack pages can be shared, you can also use the app to get your wedding party involved — dole out tasks to bridesmaids, groomsmen, and relatives and keep track of everyone’s progress.

Another great application for those planning a wedding is the WeddingWire iPhone application. WeddingWire’s app has a built-in vendor search, but more importantly, it has to-do lists and a budget calculator. One thing I learned very quickly while planning my wedding is that everything costs money, and often times deposits are due at specific dates (for the food, for the venue, for the flowers, for the transportation, etc.). The WeddingWire app can help you keep track of who needs to get paid, when, and how much.

The Big Day

All that planning is really the hard part — or so I’m told — but there’s still a lot to do on the wedding day itself. My brother, who was married five years ago and also took a do-it-yourself approach, was actually up at 3 AM the night before the wedding assembling programs — I don’t want that to happen to me next summer! So I’m trying to keep everything organized, and one way I’m doing that is by using services like RememberTheMilk, which offers to-do list apps for the iPhone, Android, and other mobile devices so I (and my bride-to-be) can keep the wedding day task list close at hand and make sure everything gets done.

Because I’m a social media nerd, I’ve considered integrating Twitter into my wedding reception. We’ll certainly have a traditional paper guestbook that people can sign and we can keep as a memento, but in an effort to go geeky, I may attempt to use Twitter to create a real-time guestbook that anyone at the wedding can contribute to and see. The plan is to create a special Twitter hashtag just for the wedding (#catonewedding, for example) and ask people to tweet their thoughts, well-wishes, toasts, or maybe even song requests during the reception. Then, behind the dance floor, we would project the real-time stream of tweets from wedding attendees using Twitterfall, a laptop, and a projector.

Another option in the same vein is the Brightkite Wall, which ties updates to location, supports SMS (for those with older phones), and can insert camera phone images into the stream. I’ve been to events utilizing the Brightkite Wall, and it really is a lot of fun.

Of course, while not every wedding needs tweets (though they can’t hurt!), every wedding does need music and photos. On the music front, we’re planning to use a laptop and iTunes playlists rather than a band or DJ. It’s low budget, but works well and allows us to create separate playlists for different parts of the evening (i.e., soft, background music for dinner, upbeat dance tunes for after the meal, and ‘Closing Time’ by Eagle Eye Cherry when we want everyone to leave). At any time during the reception, it will be easy for someone from the wedding party to man the laptop to take requests.

One thing we won’t be able to do due to a lack of wifi, is utilize the Apple Remote iPhone app that can hook into iTunes DJ and allow anyone at your party to browse your iTunes library from their phone and make requests or alter the playlist. That would have been an awesome way to get wedding guests involved in the music decisions and out on the dance floor, but the lack of wifi at the old farmhouse we’re renting for our wedding won’t make it possible.

Another thing a wedding needs is pictures. We’ll be having some of ours taken the old fashioned way — by a wedding photographer — but given that everyone has a camera phone in their pocket these days, we’re anticipating that a lot of our guests will be snapping photos. We plan to invite everyone to share the photos with us via special, private albums on Facebook and Flickr, and we may even assemble our favorites into a book using Blurb for any close relatives that might want one (like grandparents who may not even own a computer, let alone know how to view a private wedding photo group on Flickr).

The Honeymoon

Just as important as the wedding? The honeymoon. And social media and web tools can be just as helpful (or perhaps even more helpful) in planning your honeymoon. For ours, we’re hoping to travel around Europe for a couple of weeks, and though our plans are still in their infancy, one site that I know will be a huge help to us is YourTour.

One thing that has always frustrated me about most travel booking sites on the web is that booking a multi-leg trip that requires travel between and accommodations in more than one city is a major hassle. The recently-launched YouTour, which right now works only for France, allows visitors to easily plan out multi-leg trips, including transportation, hotels, and activities in both circular or linear itinerary patterns. Support for more countries is reportedly coming in the future, but even just in planning the French leg of our European honeymoon, YourTour should prove extremely helpful.

Another site that I have on my radar for honeymoon planning is Stay.com, which lets users build free, customized guide books that highlight the specific places you’re planning to visit — from museums to restaurants. The site supports a handful of major cities right now, but has plans to expand. In many ways, Stay.com is similar to Offbeat Guides, a service that automagically creates travel guides based on your itinerary with information gleaned from around the web. In my testing, though, the results from Stay.com in the cities they support was generally more relevant to travelers. Though both sites could do with a bit of polish (and each is still under active development), the concept of personalized travel guides is a powerful one and as the technology gets better, services like Stay.com will become must-haves for globetrotters.

Of course, as mobile phones become more powerful, the need for paper guides will decrease. There are a number of iPhone travel tour applications already available, such as those for a select group of European locales from travel writer Rick Steves (iTunes link) that were featured in a recent iPhone commercial.

(Via Mashable!.)

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

If you’re like most socially-savvy companies, your business probably has a blog. It’s a great way to connect with your customers, announce new products, and provide a human face to your company’s image.

While writing insightful and informative blog posts is the most important thing to do with a company blog, the design and implementation of your blog is key as well. The right plugins can help you get discovered on Google, while a cluttered design can turn off potential customers.

With that said, here are some of my top tips for customizing a small business blog so that it is professional, productive, and easy to discover.

1. Install some top blog plugins

2. Integrate social media links and buttons

3. Focus on simple designs, not bells and whistles

4. Do show effort in the design, though

5. Have your blog on your own web domain

6. Don’t hide your ‘about’ information

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

If you’ve used Twitter for more than a couple of hours, you’ve probably already seen a tweet or two containing a word with the hash symbol (’#’) attached to it. That’s what Twitter users call a ‘hashtag,’ and at any given time at least one of them can usually be found among the trending topics on Twitter. But what exactly is a hashtag?

Hashtags are essentially a simple way to catalog and connect tweets about a specific topic. They make it easier for users to find additional tweets on a particular subject, while filtering out the incidental tweets that may just coincidentally contain the same keyword. Hashtags are also often used by conference and event organizers as a method of keeping all tweets about the event in a single stream, and they’ve even been used to coordinate updates during emergencies. In fact, hashtags were first popularized during the 2007 San Diego wildfire, when the tag #sandiegofires was used to identify tweets about the natural disaster.

You can create a hashtag simply by appending the hash symbol to a word, like this: #hashtag.

How to Utilize Existing Hashtags

Unfortunately, as hashtags have become more popular, they’ve also become a vehicle for spam. You should never use a hashtag on a tweet unrelated to that tag, and you should never stuff your tweets with currently popular hashtags with the sole purpose of appearing in Twitter search results. Proper etiquette dictates that you should only use hashtags if your tweet is actually relevant to the tag’s associated meme or topic.

So which tags should you participate in? That depends wholly on your business and your purpose for using Twitter. For example, it’s probably a bad idea to participate in the #robotpickuplines hashtag if you own a health club and use your Twitter account to offer customer service to members. But if you own a record shop, you’ll more than likely want to join in the #musicmonday hashtag, in which people tweet about what music they’re listening to and suggest other musically-inclined users to follow every Monday. Or if you own a restaurant, why not tweet out your specials or some recipes on #tastytuesday.

Use sites like Twubs, a hashtag directory, and What the Trend?, a wiki that attempts to explain what certain hashtags (and other Twitter trends) mean, to locate and identify hashtags that make sense for your business. Also, pay attention to tags being used by your followers and search for them on Twitter to see what sort of tweets are associated with those tags. If it makes sense for your business to jump on board, compose tweets that are on topic and compatible with that hashtag.

How to Start Your Own Hashtags

Once you’ve figured out the tag itself, the next step is simple: start using it and promoting it. Make sure your tweets using the hashtag are worthwhile and add something of value to the conversation. Promote your tag or the social media campaign that uses the tag via other social media channels, such as your blog or email newsletter. Tweet out calls to action explaining your new tag at regular intervals (but don’t overdo it!). For example, let’s say you own a bookstore, and you’re running a Twitter contest to give out a gift card to your store. Your explanatory tweet might be something like, ‘What’s your favorite summer reading material? Tweet using #beachreads to win a $100 gift certificate to Al’s World of Books!’

How to Keep Track of Hashtags

Of course, now that you have people using your new hashtag, you need to be able to keep on top of it so you can respond to participants. One of the easiest ways to track hashtags is by using Twitter Search. You can watch people using your hashtag (or any other tag you want to track) in real-time, and subscribe to an RSS feed of the results. Monitter and TweetGrid are two other good web-based dashboards for performing real-time Twitter searches of hashtags.

You can also use the built-in search functionality of popular desktop clients like Seesmic or TweetDeck, or set up alerts on business-oriented Twitter dashboards such as HootSuite or CoTweet.

(Via Mashable!.)

When it comes to Social Media, a lot of individuals and companies are quite afraid. Fear of the unknown. Fear of lack of privacy. Fear of retribution and negative response. Fear of ex-girlfriends’ new boyfriends, or of strangers stalking your kids. I hope to quell some of those fears with some good old fashioned rationalization and logical determination of what Social Media can do for you.

Social Media for Personal Use

When it comes to personal use, there is a lot more to fear from Social Media on an individual level than on a corporation level. There is a level of comfort that some were able to adapt to quickly (they all work in PR) and some took a little while longer to come around. Some still haven’t come around, but have their little toes in the water and some flat out refuse to be involved at all. Most of the fear in the latter categories come from lack of knowledge about the Social Media networks and false assumptions about what kind of information you are required to share.

Let’s talk about that for a moment. What information, on a personal level, are you required to share? That’s actually a very simple answer, one that seems to elude many. None. You are required to share nothing. Plain and simple. I think this fear of being forced to provide personal data just because you signed up comes from cell phones. I’m serious. When cell phones became mainstream I remember people lamenting that now their friends & co-workers would be able to get hold of them wherever they were and an expectation was set that they would. That’s the way the behavior drove the technology. Few people, if any, mentioned to me that the solution to that is to just not pick up the phone.

It’s the same thing for Social Media. You are only required to share as much information as you feel you should share. This is a fear I myself had to conquer when moving my persona onto Facebook. But then I realized that I can put whatever I want up there. I don’t have to tell people my innermost secrets, I don’t have to put my correct birthday or favorite foods. That’s all optional. I don’t even have to use my real name. The fear here is lack of privacy. People are afraid they will give away too much information. Well, only if you give away too much information. Again, at a personal level you aren’t obligated to do anything at all, so it’s completely up to you as to how you want to represent yourself online.

When it came to more career oriented sites like Linkedin, the logic there was easier. What information would I be putting up on that site that wasn’t already up on Monster.com or Careerbuilder? My resume, after being spread around the internet like herpes backstage at a rock concert, was pretty much public record. With that thought in mind, creating my profile on Linkedin was a walk in the park.

The other thing that really scares people, especially when it comes to networking sites, is connecting with the past. A lot of people have skeletons in the closet that they just don’t want to let out. Or they don’t want to be faced with the decision whether to ‘friend’ an ex on Facebook or not. There is a lot of trepidation about what the expectation is when it comes to selecting your ‘friends’ online. A great rule of thumb when it comes to that is – would you stop and talk to this person in real life? Is this someone you’d recognize in a crowded room? Someone you’d sit with uninvited at a coffee shop if you knew them? I have acquaintances from high school that try to connect with me on Facebook, but I either A.) didn’t like them then and probably wouldn’t like them now or B.) have no freaking clue who they are. Why should I feel obligated to connect? Am I that self centered to think that if I don’t connect they are brooding over it? Chances are, I’m one of a hundred invites they sent out that day.

I spoke to a friend who is consumed by the fear. The media hasn’t helped, with stories of MySpace & Facebook predators and so on. That’s where his fear stems from – he’s afraid his family would be targeted. It may be a harsh conclusion, but you may as well never leave the house and never let your family out of the house as well. It’s a rough and tumble world out there, and even more so online. You have to have a particular constitution about you and be armed with the knowledge of what’s out there and what kind of programs you are working with. The fact that Linkedin pulled in his gmail account address book scared the crap out of him. You can’t be participating online with that glaring lack of knowledge about how the internet and it’s related applications work. Arm yourself with knowledge and the fear will subside.

Getting over these fears are tough. However, they are clearly worth the benefits. I have several thousand connections on Linkedin, people I don’t know in industries I’ve never heard of – but they are there. Ready and mostly willing to provide information and insight when needed. I’ve made advantageous connections on Facebook with people I’ve not seen in years, working for or running businesses that could benefit my life. I’ve connected with people outside my zip code – which is the most important part. I’ve gotten freelance jobs through connections, been involved in projects I never would have known about had I not been connected. With networks like Twitter, I’ve got a constant stream of what’s going on in the world and with subjects I’m interested in. Not to mention the quick availability to self promote via utilities like Digg. Those are the benefits.

In a future post I’ll discuss the overuse & abuse of these networks that only propagates the fear, but again – the fear is only what you make of it. If you don’t post the picture of you getting drunk with a bunch of underage kids at a frat party, then no-one will see that picture.

Social Media for Business Use

With business use, whether it be to self promote or promote your business, there are different fears but based on the same inherent base fears. Lack of knowledge is the big one, followed by general apathy and ignorance. Businesses don’t worry about the privacy issue as much as an individual would.

What they do worry about is the return on investment. Is Social Media worth the time and effort? Based on Social Media consulting being a whole sub-industry of public relations, I’d say many companies think it is worth the time and effort. Basically, companies need to ask themselves if they have the time and resources to commit to networking. If they don’t, then it’s a moot point and less of a fear of using Social Media than an apathetic response.

The bigger question for companies or individuals looking to self promote, is do their customers use it? For me, the answer was a hearty ‘yes.’ As a writer, joining Twitter was one of the best ways to promote my own work. Did I mention that you can follow me? See? Self promotion.

Businesses hire Social Media experts to guide them onto the internet and promote their service and/or product. This is especially useful if a good percentage of their customer base is deeply rooted in the social networks. More companies are adding a Twitter feed to their contact page, or their CEO suddenly has his own blog to rant on.

A fear here is feedback. A lot of companies are flat out terrified of negative feedback. Terrified. Like walking in the dark and likely be eaten by a Grue terrified. However, that suggests something exists that would cause negative feedback. A good key for any company using Social Media is honesty and clarity with customers and consumers. If you have something to hide and it’s revealed, there will be negative feedback. In any forum however, there will always be negative feedback. Have you ever read the op-ed section of the newspaper?

Businesses can benefit the most from Social Media, more than any personal usage outside of self-promotion. Because there is money to be made. How is there money to be made? It’s basic economics. Reach a larger audience, sell more product/service and make more money. There are companies that wouldn’t exist right now if not for Social Media. Independents based online are thriving because of the networking possibilities of Social Media. As are Social Media consulting firms. Self promotion is another great side benefit as well. Can you think of how you would self promote a blog post before Social Media? Email everyone? That limits you to people you know. Send them certified mail?

In conclusion, and to sum it all up nicely (especially the part about using common sense), a quote from Boston based branding & PR Executive Don Martelli:

The social media fear factor is real, but controllable. Rather than being scared of eating bugs and goat intestines, the fear factor — personally and professionally — is really embedded in one thing, engagement. People are nervous of connecting with past lives and sharing stuff that they care not to. Brands are nervous about the two way communication street that social channels pave, especially with those on the road that aren’t kind.

Whether from a personal or professional standpoint, the fear factor can be controlled by using common sense and being transparent in your communications. My advice is to leverage the reach of social media to become a trusted source of helpful content, which, in turn, will help companies and their brands build a following or stronger community.

(Via Geekdad.)

10 Things Every Web Designer Just Starting Out Should Know: ”

There are many aspects of creating a website design. Web designers often have to play multiple roles and be very knowledgeable about building effective and usable site layouts.

Most of the lessons you’ll learn in web design comes from work experience; learning is an iterative process and there is no better way to gain knowledge than to make mistakes (and then and learning from them).

In this article, we discuss 10 essential and general tips that every novice web designer should know.

1. Optimize Web Graphics for Better Page Load Times

Learn how to optimize your web graphics by selecting the proper format and making sure that it’s as small as it can possibly be. Even though people are advancing to broadband connections, there are still quite a few who use dial-up internet connections. Additionally, with the emergence of mobile device technologies that don’t necessarily have broadband-like speeds, having slow page load times due to image file sizes can turn users off.

Here a general rule of thumbs for picking the right file format: images that have solid colors are best saved as PNGs and GIFs, while images with continuous colors (such as photographs) are best saved as JPGs.

There are plenty of tools available at your disposal that will help you further optimize your images and lower their file sizes, check out this list of tools for optimizing your images.

By limiting the number of images you use to the bare minimum, being smart about using images, and reducing file sizes as best as you can, you will significantly cut down page response times of  a web page and improve your web page performance.

2. Keep it Clean and Simple

A good web design is not just one that looks visually appealing, but also one that is user-friendly. A clean and simple web design typically ends up being a high-usability web design that is not confusing to interact with.

By having too many site features and components on a page, you risk the chance of distracting website viewers from the purpose of the website. Make sure each page element has a purpose and ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the design really need this?
• What does this element do and how does it help the user?
• If I remove this element all of a sudden, will most people want it back?
• How does this element tie into the goal, message, and purpose of the site?

Additionally, though it may be super awesome to come up with a new concept or interface design pattern for your website, make sure that the design is still accessible and intuitive to your users. People are accustomed to common interaction patterns, site features, and web interfaces – and if your design is truly unique, make sure it’s not too obscure and puzzling. Be creative, but also keep it simple.

3. Navigation is the Most Important Thing You Will Design

The most essential site feature is the website’s navigation — without it, users are stuck whatever page they happen to land on. With that obvious fact out of the way, we’ll talk about some important points to consider when constructing a navigation scheme.

First, it’s very important to put enough time and a lot of planning on a site’s navigation structure. This is common sense, but it’s still surprising how many web designs take site navigation for granted.

Placement, style, technology (will it use JavaScript or just CSS?), usability, and web accessibility are just some of the things you need to consider when creating the navigation design.

Your navigation design should work without CSS because of text-based browsers. Poke fun of text browsers all you want, but they are still prevalent in many mobile devices. Perhaps more importantly, navigation that works with CSS disabled is accessible (99.99% of the time) via screen readers.

Navigation should be accessible and usable without the need for client-side technologies such as JavaScript or Flash, which users may not have enabled or installed for various reasons such as security or company policy.

It is imperative that you have a good navigation system in place that is located at a highly-visible location. A good navigation is detectable as soon as the web page loads without having to scroll down the web page. This is where keeping it clean and simple plays a major role: a complex and unconventional design can lead to user confusion.

Users must never wonder, even for a split second, ‘Where is the site navigation?’

For sites organized in a hierarchical, multi-level manner, make sure that it is easy to navigate from between parent and child web pages. In addition, it should be easy to reach top-level pages (such as the site’s front page) from any webpage.

The main goal of your site navigation is to allow users to get to their desired content with as few actions and with as little effort on their behalf as possible.

4. Use Fonts Wisely and Methodically

Though there are thousands of fonts out there, you can really only use a handful (at least until CSS3 is fully supported by major browsers). Make it a point to stick to web-safe fonts. If you don’t like web-safe fonts, consider a progressively-enhanced web design that leverages sIFR or Cufon.

Keep font usage consistent. Make sure that headings are visually-different from paragraph text. Use white space, tweak line-height, font-size, and letter-spacing properties to make content pleasant to read and effortlessly scannable.

Perhaps one of the things that web designers often get wrong is font-sizes. Because we want to fit as much text as we can in a web page, we sometimes set font sizes to uncomfortably small sizes. Try to keep font sizes at and above 12px if possible, especially for paragraph text. While many people face no difficulty reading small text sizes, think about older users and persons with low-vision and other types of vision impairment.

5. Understand Color Accessibility

After talking about fonts, we also need to point out the importance of using the right colors.

You  need to consider color contrast of background and foreground colors for readability and for users with low-vision. For instance, black text on white background has a high-contrast, while orange text on red background will make you strain your eyes.

Also, use colors that are accessible to users with particular forms of color-blindness (check out a tool called Vischeck that will help you test for certain types of color-blindness).

Some color combinations work well only when the color is used as a foreground color instead of a background color. Take for example, dark blue text on a pink background versus but pink text on blue background, same colors but different levels of readability and reading comfort. It is important not only to get a good color combination but also to apply it to the right elements on the page.

6. You Need to Know How to Write Code Yourself

With various WYSIWYG editors flooding the market, it has become as simple as 1-2-3 to design a site. However, most of these editors insert unnecessarily code junk, making your HTML structure poorly designed, harder to maintain and update, and causing your file sizes to bloat.

By writing the code yourself, you come out with clean, crisp, and terse code that’s a pleasure to read and maintain; code that you can be proud to call your own.

Knowing how to use a WYSIWYG or an IDE with a visual preview does not excuse you from learning HTML and CSS. You have to know what’s going on in order to create effective, semantic, and highly-optimized web designs.

7. Don’t Forget Search Engine Optimization

A good designer should always remember to keep the basics of SEO in mind when designing a site. For example, structuring web content so that important text are represented as headings (i.e. page title and logo). This is where learning how to code properly comes in handy. Knowing correct, semantic, and standards-based HTML/CSS – you will quickly realize that divs are better than tables for web layouts not only for accurate representation of site content, but also for search engine rankings; you will also know that CSS background text image replacement is a good idea.

8. Understand that People are Impatient

People on an average spend only a few seconds before deciding whether they want to read more or navigate away to another site. Therefore, you as a web designer have to device a way for encouraging users to choose the former option within those precious seconds.

Know that not many visitors will scroll down to view the entire contents of the page if what they see at the top does not interest them. Remember to keep your important elements on the top where they are easily visible, but also do not overcrowd the top half of the page which can intimidate users and turn them off from reading further down the page. Consider the top half of a web design a selling point: be a salesman, make people buy into the notion that they want to see what else is on your site.

9. Learn About (and Be Aware of) Browser Quirks

One of the things you must know as a web designer is that your work operates in a finicky and unpredictable environment: web browsers. It’s not enough that your designs work on a few web browsers, they need to work in as many browsing situations as you can possibly afford. Before production – test your prototypes using tools like Browsershots.

10. Make Designs that are Flexible and Maintainable

A good web designer makes sure that the site can easily be updated or modified in the future. Designing websites that are malleable and easy to maintain is a sign of a great web designer. Make your work as modular as possible by separating style from structure.

Know that our industry is dynamic and still young – things change in a very short amount of time. Keeping this thought in mind will promote the creation of flexible web designs.

(Via Six Revisions.)

(Via Ian Scott.)

Take the work out of finding sites related to the one you’re browsing. SimilarSites is a user-ranked search engine designed to return a list of the most similar web sites.

Plug in a web site at SimilarSites or by using their Firefox extension SimilarWeb and you’re presented with a list of related web sites. For each site on the list you can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. While our test searches returned fairly accurate results there were a few items in each search that definitely merited a thumbs down. In addition if you find a site in your search results that you’re interested in you can run a SimilarSites search on that site with a single click. If you’d like to find site suggestions by keyword instead of using an existing site as your source, check out previously reviewed Youlicit to find related web sites by keyword searches.

(Via Ian Scott.)

With the current craze over Facebook among college students and now even among older people, it’s almost taboo not to have a profile on Facebook. The popular social networking site boasts around 150 to 200 million users worldwide.

If you’re like most people, you have a decently-filled out profile. You’ve probably listed a few of your favorite movies, put down your high school and posted a couple photos. Now that you’ve gotten this far, it’s time to spread your wings.

Facebook is about social networking, so it’s time to actually do get social and do some networking with people other than your spouse or that crush from high school you really don’t remember. A couple of the best ways Facebook allows users to do this is through fan pages and groups.

The first question is whether to start a fan page or group, or maybe even both. Although they sound similar to one another, fan page and groups are two different Facebook features that accomplish different things. Groups are basically the same on Facebook as they are at other websites. They are general destinations for people with like-minded interests to gather and become members of. Group members can write on the group’s wall, exactly as you could on a profile page, as well as leave topics and posts on the discussion board.

Facebook Groups are good for narrowing in on interests. If you’re a part of an organization in a city, you can use a facebook group for promoting upcoming events or post relevant topics that members would respond to. Although groups can be used for conversation, they often become more of an brand identity, rather than a place for dialoguing with other group members.

Facebook Fan pages on the other hand, although they sound like groups, are actually much different. Fan pages allow the same type of interaction as group pages but with much more options for customization and personalization. Similar to group pages, a Facebook Fan page has a wall and can have a discussion board, but it can also have much more, like Facebook applications, flash and html code. Because of the flexibility of using html code, fan pages can be customized to look similar to a web site. Although fan pages often are pages devoted to a particular athlete, actor or hero, they are quickly becoming much more than that, with pages for marketers, realtors, magazines and writers.

So do you want to create a fan page or group page? If you want a deeper relationship with your members and users who are going to come back after joining, then Facebook Fan pages are the way to go. They offer much more customization and allow further reach and interaction with users. If you have a more targeted audience, then you may want to go with a Facebook Group page.

What have been some of your favorite Facebook Fan pages or Facebook Group pages?

(Via Tutorial Blog.)