I’ve always preferred using the Gmail webmail interface, it just makes everything so much easier.
Now Google has added a smart Priority Inbox that lifts separates important and starred emails out of your general inbox. It is easy to swtich on and use, and it works really well. Just like Google’s spam reporting, you can mark the emails that should / should not be in your priority inbox, and the system learns.
If you are already using Google Apps, you should see a red Priority Inbox link near your Settings link at the top right of your inbox. If you are using Outlook or even Apple Mail, watch this video and maybe consider the zen of Gmail.
Some months ago now John Rice from Eternity Photography moved his website on to our WordPress based platform. And more recently he commissioned Tracy Graffin to upgrade his branding and website design.
The new design has a luminous quality to it, with beautiful attention to detail.
In redesigning the website, the navigational structure as well as the look were both very important. John does both wedding and portrait photography. Both of these areas were significant enough to his business to form the two primary sections of his site:
If you take a quick peek at John’s blog, you’ll also see a distinctly different design in place for that element.
I think a blog is a powerful tool for any business website. For a photography business, a blog is a wonderful opportunity to not only show examples of the photography, but to tell the story behind the shots.
Anyone looking to engage a photographer is spoilt for choice. Reading a photographer’s blog is a perfect way to get to know them and their style. A bride and groom get to spend a lot of time with their wedding photographer, and reading their blog can give a lot of clues as to how they go about their work.
Not only do blogs work well for people considering engaging you as a photographer, blogs are great for search engines. Each new blog post is a new page in your website (in the eyes of Google). And if you are writing about topics relevant to your potential customers, search engines will be able to include you in a lot more search result pages.
One important note about blogs and search engines: blogs help your website when they are part of your domain. If you set up a blog on somebody else’s domain, search engines may still index your posts and rank them in results, but they won’t help build your overall domain authority. So where possible, integrate your blog with the domain of your website.
Dave Young and the talented crew from Wizard of Ads have recently launched On Your Market.
On Your Market is for business owners who want to learn more about marketing and advertising.
You can sign up and check out a sample for free – the 12 Most Common Mistakes in Advertising.
Joining this community offers not just high quality educational material. With On Your Market, Dave, Tom, Michele and Craig are creating a community of business owners with a common purpose. Access to marketing and advertising experts, together with access to like minded business owners – what is that worth to you? Check out the introductory offer, which is a lifetime membership for a flat fee. Opportunities like this don’t come around that often.
OM4 helped On Your Market set up the website using WordPress, including integration with membership, forum and e-learning modules. Quite a few moving parts for James to wrangle. The overall result looks great, using a design commissioned directly by On Your Market.
In the simplest cases, you might just want to use a text link or button to link across to your Facebook or Twitter page. But you might also want to make it easier for readers to Like your post within Facebook, or to Digg your post, add it to StumbleUpon.com or Delicious.com.
There are a gazillion other social media sites, so you might want to use Share This to open up a lot more options. And if you like Twitter, perhaps you’d like options to automatically tweet new blog posts, and display links to all your tweets from your website. All of these options are described in the How To articles above.
But it all comes down to time. Ultimately small businesses have to decide where to allocate time. With unlimited time, we could easily keep posting to our blogs, Facebook and Twitter accounts as well as all the other social media sites relevant to us …
In practice however, I often suggest to clients that their first priority should be to use their blog (which will give you better results from Google). Each new blog post can help build authority for your website and attract new search engine visitors. And better still, attract new links to your website.
When your blog is working for you – keep it going, it just gets better over time.
So what about Facebook and Twitter? All of the small businesses I’ve worked with are getting a lot more benefit from Google than Facebook or Twitter. So if you had to choose, I’d go with Google first, which means using your blog.
Getting business value out of Facebook and Twitter involves different skills. You need to think carefully about what you are using these tools for, who you are aiming to reach, and what information needs to be shared to achieve this. Even if you do it all well, you may still find that when you look at Google Analytics for what actually happens, the volume of leads/sales coming from Facebook and/or Twitter pales into insignificance alongside Google.
But there are some businesses that have learnt how to use Facebook and Twitter really well – if you want to emulate them, do your research and be prepared to put in the time to follow through with your plan.
it was developed by a talented team of Sydney-based Google developers.
Google Wave was a unique concept that pushed the envelope in terms of web application features.
it was positioned as the “next best thing since email”.
More than a year on, the dust has settled a little.
I know plenty of people who have tried Google Wave, however none of them use it regularly as part of their day-to-day routine. And it seems that Google agrees, announcing this today on the Official Google Blog:
“…Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.”
It is hard to pinpoint exactly why people haven’t made Google Wave a part of their daily routine, but here’s a few thoughts:
Google Wave was a developer (invite only) preview for almost 12 months. This meant that it was quite difficult to actually obtain a Google Wave account and begin experimenting with it. And now 3 months after opening it to the public, Google has decided that the product isn’t popular enough.
Google Wave attempted to push the boundaries of how people fundamentally use the web. People were given the impression that email would be no longer because people would be using Google Wave instead. Humans are creatures of habit. Some of us have been using email since the early 1970’s (not me – I wasn’t even born then!), and it takes time for people to change their habits.
Personally, I thought Google Wave was very interesting, but I struggled to find real life uses for it. I didn’t have very many friends who were using it. Apart from a few initial “this is cool” type conversations, I was happy to continue using email and Skype.
At the end of the day, even if Google Wave has failed, it has done a great job of encouraging innovation on the web – in Google’s own products such as Gmail and Google Docs, and in web applications in general.
What do you think? Did you try Google Wave? Are you still using it today? Why do you think its user adoption hasn’t met Google’s expectations? Feel free to leave a comment below.
Every now and then one of our clients using Google Apps comes to us saying that their email client (eg. Outlook, Apple Mail, iPhone, etc) won’t accept their email username and password. Common error messages are:
invalid credentials’
‘web login required’
The first thing to check is that you’re using the correct username. For Google Apps users, your username (for POP/IMAP access) is your entire email address (eg you@yourdomain.com).
If you still have problems, Google may have “locked” your account. This can happen for any of the following reasons:
your password has been entered incorrectly multiple times
your mail client is configured to check for emails too often (Google recommends only once every 10 minutes)
To unlock your account, you need to go to https://www.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/UnlockCaptcha
(be sure to replace yourdomain.com with your actual domain name)
The page should look like this:
Google's Unlock Captcha Screen
Type in the first part of your email address (eg type in “you” if your email address is you@yourdomain.com), password, and CAPTCHA. After submitting the form, your account should be unlocked.
If your account seems to get locked often, some people have suggested that using a strong password will help. You can also check the Last account activity details link at the bottom of your Gmail inbox. This should list all the systems that are attempting to access your account.
Well it has taken a while but finally Google Mail / Gmail includes support for images in their signature files.
I’ve always liked simple text for signatures in email, but after setting it up in my own account to see how it looked, I have to say I like it a lot more.
To use this facility, you’ll first of all have to prepare a properly sized version of your logo or image – about 100px or 200px wide is fine, and make sure you’ve reduced the size of the image so it is nice and small. Then upload the image to your website so you can use it from the Google editor. If you have your own WordPress website, use Dashboard, Media, Add New to upload your logo to your own website, and click Edit to get the File URL for your image. Copy that and have it ready to paste in to the Google editor when editing your signature.
If you want to understand how Google search works, go through this diagram in detail.
This is the introductory post on Aaron’s SEOBook.com blog: How Does Google Work
And the diagram (follow link to diagram at bottom of diagram if you want to link to it yourself).
The online shop is built using the WordPress WP e-Commerce shopping cart. To achieve the required layout, we used the Add to Cart buttons, and managed images and product descriptions using standard WordPress pages.
Punch® Coffee is shipped in Australia via Express Fulfillment, so for this project James built an integration plugin to connect up the WPEC shopping cart with the warehouse system. The integration plugin synchronises inventory between the warehouse and the online store. Stock levels are routinely updated from the warehouse to reflect stock replenishment, and decremented in real time based on completed sales.
The shop also integrates to the Australia Post shipping calculator for shipping costs.
If you are looking for a distinctive gift then you should check out not just the packaged coffees, but also the Coffee Caddy, Coffee Blending Caddy and Tea Blending Caddy (all in the Premium Collection page).
We have recently upgraded the OM4 platform to include the latest WordPress (2.9 and 2.9.1) features.
There are quite a few improvements, including:
Undo/trash feature, which means that if you accidentally delete a post or comment you can bring it back from the grave (i.e., the Trash).
Built-in image editor, which allows you to crop, edit, rotate, flip, [...]
