The first thing I learned when teaching myself web design was how to do basic HTML, the next thing was CSS.

CSS is the coding language that determines the “look and feel” of pretty much everything you see on the web today.

The letters you’re reading right this second are affected in many ways by css. Including:

• The color of the letters
• The font used for the letters
• Whether they are bold or italic or underlined
• The space between lines (not shown)
• What happens when you hover your mouse over a word {see}

And so much more. CSS is very versitile and worth learning even for a part-time blogger because of the flexibility you gain by understanding what’s going on.

For example, say I want to create a box inside my post area with additional content, much like you would see in a magazine article. Like you see to the right here.

<div id="refrigerator">
  <div class="top shelf">
     Lunch Meat
  </div>
 
  <div class="door">
    Drinks!
  </div>
 
  <div class="bottom shelf">
    Leftovers!
  </div>
</div>

This can be done very quickly right in the body of your post. No editing of your theme’s style.css sheet is required. Just use inline css.

Start with a DIV Container

The little box to the right both demonstrates what we’re learning to do and teaches you what a DIV is and how it works.

Just Add Inline CSS Styles To The DIV

The code below is what created the box to the right.

<div style="width:250px;margin:20px;padding:10px;background:#efefef;border:4px solid #e9e9e9;float:right;">
... your content...
</div>

Here are the elements one-by-one:

• Width – kind of obvious right, it’s how wide the box is.
• Margin – margin is the area outside of the div where nothing should be… think of it as the space you want everyone to stay away from your iPad.
• Padding – This is the area around the peremiter of the inside of your DIV that should have no content, think of it as the solid black bar around the screen on your iPad.
• Background – Here we’re adding a color. There is much more to learn about the background element. It can be an image, a pattern, transparent, and more.
• Border – The solid line around the edge of your DIV – first I tell it how wide to make the border, then what style such as solid, dashed, or dotted, then I tell it what color using a hexadecimal color code.
• Float – This tells the browser that we want this whole containter (the DIV) to be on the right side of the container it is within (the WordPress post) and that we want other content to wrap around it on the left.

So now anything we put within that DIV will be part of that section on the page. So if we center a picture or text it will be centered within that section only.

Use For One-Off Styling

You can style anything in this manner, but for things that will happen over and over again, or for pages with large amounts of custom css work, you should identify ID’s and classes and then use a stylesheet for defining css rules for those items.

The reason for this is that CSS on a stylesheet can be edited in one place and tools such as Firebug describe exactly where to find the code if you want to change it. Inline CSS can be much harder to find.

It’s best used for one-shot design work.

Like boxes just like this one!

The post Using CSS Inline to Create an Accent Box appeared first on Crazy Tree Media.

Images

See the plugin live at our sites EverythingEtsy.com and Etsypreneur.com

Getting The Plugin

This plugin is still in the testing phase and isn’t totally complete/ready for distribution. Once its complete we wil submit it to the WordPress Repository where it will be available for download and automatic installation on all self-hosted WordPress sites.

That process may take some time. If you would like to be notified as soon as the plugin is ready for public beta testing, please complete the form below and we will email you.

Crazy Tree Media customers… you can have the plugin now. Just contact us and we’ll install it to your site and configure it for you.

Credit to Twitterlink Comments and CommentLuv

This plugin is based on and derived from the Twitterlink Comments plugin by CommentLuv. Without the work they put into the creation of that plugin, my job would have been much harder and the result probably wouldn’t have been as good.

Any Suggestions?

Head over to EverythingEtsy.com or Etsypreneur.com and give the plugin a try! Let us know if you see anywhere from the user’s perspective that the plugin could be improved.

Thanks!

- Tim

The post Etsylink Comments WordPress Plugin (Beta) appeared first on Crazy Tree Media.

If you don’t know what the Genesis Themes are, you should really check them out. They rock.

For a limited time, Genesis Themes are included at no extra cost in our Blogger and above packages. See plans and pricing.

The post Improve Category Archive Pages in Genesis {Video} appeared first on Crazy Tree Media.

So I usually go ahead and update.

WordPress is no different. WordPress has released probably a dozen new versions or patches since I started using it a few years ago. Back in the day, it was kind of a chore to update. Nowadays it’s as easy as clicking a button or two. (usually)

WordPress One Click Update

When an update is available, you’ll see this at the top of your admin dashboard:

The starting point is obvious… click the link and you’re taken to a page that explains the potential dangers of updating and suggests you should have a full backup of your site before proceeding.

Unless I’ve just made major changes to a site that involved tons of work that I don’t have a copy of, I usually run wild with this and just go for it.

All of my sites back-up automatically at least once a week at a minimum so I know I won’t have to go back too far if there is some sort of catastrophy.

The page also shows the plugins that I have installed which are ready for an update. If I’m in a big hurry I update them all at once, but I usually update the plugins one at a time and check the site after each one. Plugins are more likely to cause problems than the core WordPress code.

Hit the “update now” button and sit back for a few seconds…

Update done. New features are sometimes displayed as shown above.

Usually it’s as simple as that and life can go on.

Keeping Up To Date is a Best Practice

There are dangers with websites. Sites get hacked all the time and the damage can range from annoying to the aforementioned total annihaliation.

Updating your site won’t ensure your total safety, but it is one of the things you can do to at least improve your position.

And it’s easy. So do it now.

Crazy Tree customers on plan Blogger and above have this service included at no extra charge. But it’s not automatic, you have to let us know you need the update.

The post Keeping WordPress Up To Date appeared first on Crazy Tree Media.

The first thing I tried to do was to establish a hosting account and get a domain. Then I manually downloaded, uploaded, unzipped, and installed WordPress. That was all pretty intense for a guy who a few days before had litterally uttered the words “what’s a blog?”.

So when I finally got WordPress installed (it’s much easier now), I figured I was home free. Then I found the WordPress dashboard. No instructions were provided because, duh, it’s obvious. Well, it wasn’t for me. (in fairness to WordPress, there were instructions via the WordPress Codex, I just didn’t know where or what that was at the time)

If it’s not so obvious for you, here’s a quick little rundown. The first picture below shows the overall screen of a typical WordPress admin area. Below, I’ll go through each of the major options and help you know what’s behind doors #1 through 412.

The Typical WordPress Dashboard

Rather than go through this visually based on what you see, I think I’ll go in a more experiental order, based on what you’ll end up using the most.

It all starts with posts.

The Posts and Pages Menu Items

Posts are the most common form of content generation on most WordPress site. Pages are very similar, but posts are the ones that get sent out to RSS and email subscribers and they are the articles you’ll see in your blog “loop” which generally appears in reverse chronological order.

Posts

• All Posts – Takes you to your full list of posts, both published and un-published. From here you can choose to edit something you’ve already started or even a post that you previously published. You can also delete posts and use the “quick edit” tool to add or change categories, make a post sticky, and more.
• Add New – Takes you directly to the post creation screen, which will default to the visual editor. The visual post editor works much like standard word processing software. You’ll see familiar tools for bold text, italics, and changing colors. You’ll also find tools for uploading media such as pictures and putting links in your content. Lots of links in your content is good.
• Categories – This is one of the places where you can go to add a new category. Categories are very useful for organizing your WordPress site into understandable sections. The better you think out your categories at the beginning the better your site will be down the road. It’s a good practice to create your categories first and then start creating content to “populate” each category.
• Tags – Tags have fallen out of favor with me. They seem redundant, but they do have some usefulness in increasing pageviews much later when your site is ginormous. I find it much easier to create tags in the post creation screen, but for finding posts later that have a certain tag, this menu option can be useful.

Pages

• Same as posts – The options on the pages menu do exactly the same things as the posts menu option, but there are no categories or tags. Pages are usually not in a category (though you can make it so using a plugin, which is sometimes useful). Pages are used for “static” content that you don’t want to appear in the blog loop. Things like “About Us”, “Contact Us”, “Resources”, “Services”, etc. are often put on pages rather than in a post.

The Settings Menu

As someone who sets up blogs all the time, I probably would go to settings first. I listed posts and pages first because I remember the thrill of writing that first content and including those first pictures, then hitting publish and seeing it online right away. That was cool. Settings, not so much. At least not to the untrained eye.

In reality the options under the settings menu are pretty awesome. I’ll give you a little insight as to what’s behind each click, but I probably should write another post just about settings.

• General – Things like time zones, date format, and what email address you want notifications to go to are here. (you can also set an email address for each “user” which is where the comments from their posts will be sent, that’s done under “users”) The most important settings under “general” are Site Title and Tagline.
  • Site Title – Your site title is probably obvious, but you might want to skip the “.com” part and you might want to break up the words into regular language. The idea is all about SEO. How will people type your site name into Google after you’re famous? That’s what you want here.
  • Tag Line - The tag line may not be as obvious, but it’s very important. In terms of SEO this will be part of your “page title” for your homepage. It should include keywords if possible. If you hope to sell Jewelry made from silver and freshwater pearls it might say: Freshwater Pearl Jewelry – Handmade with care. Most important keywords first as much as is possible while still making human sense.
• Writing – I very rarely make many changes on to the writing options. The “press this” bookmarklet looks cool, but I’ve never tried it so can’t comment. The only setting I personally use here is to enable xml-rpc publishing so that I can write my blog posts in a desktop app, rather than within WordPress. I use BlogDesk (which may no longer be available) and Kim uses Microsoft LiveWriter which is a very commonly used blogging software. This setting allows thos apps to log-in and post on your blog.
• Reading – Reading, on the other hand, is an important group of options including how many posts you want to show on your blog page (will impact how “long” the page is) and whether or not you wish to show full text in your RSS feed. (not showing full text prevents content scaping but forces your RSS readers to click through to your blog, which ticks Google Reader lovers off big-time, you decide priorities)
  • Front Page Displays – The most important setting under this option is deciding what will be shown on the “home” page of your site (yoursite.com). You can choose for it to show your blog, as we do at EverythingEtsy.com, or you can choose to show a static page, as we do here at CrazyTreeMedia.com
• Discussion – This is all about comments. Comments can be the most wonderful thing about WordPress and the most frustrating too. Comment spam is an issue so you should have an anti-spam plugin such as Akismet installed. But you’ll still want to adjust your comment settings from time to time as you progress. All the settings are here and are fairly self-explanatory.
• Media - Mostly advanced settings I rarely have to change. You may want to play with the standard media sizes (small, medium, large) if you blog mostly from the WordPress built-in post editor. That could save you some time in image sizing. Other than that, default is usually fine.
• Privacy – This is important to check for SEO purposes. For the most part you want search engines to access your site. But if you want your site to be pretty much secret to you while you build it you might turn this off until your site is “ready to present”, but be sure to fix it when you actually want search traffic! To turn off all access to your site to everyone you need a plugin such as WP-MembersOnly
• Permalinks - This is another important setting for SEO purposes. By default, WordPress uses a number to identify your post and that number is appended to your site URL. You can change this via permalinks to include the post title in the URL. It looks like this when you’ve set it to show post title only: http://etsypreneur.com/etsy-as-your-door-to-a-connected-future/ (without setting permalinks, the same post URL would look like this: http://etsypreneur.com/?p=1068 )

More Dashboard Options Explained in Part 2 (coming soon)

Be sure to check out the next part of this post series for more explanation of the WordPress Dashboard. You can also get in-depth details about anything WordPress at the WordPress Codex. The Dashboard section is here.

The post Getting to Know The WordPress Dashboard – Part 1 — Posts, Pages, and Settings appeared first on Crazy Tree Media.

One of the areas to watch out for is personalization of your emails. This is the process whereby the computer automatically inserts the first name or other personal info into an email where you say to. The problem is, the computer doesn’t apply common sense, that’s up to you.

Danger Zone: Clearly Impersonal Emails Personalized

If you look closely enough, you’ll see that this email (which looks nothing like an email) says “Dear Tim” right before some words that sound nothing like an email.

Some people just like the sound of their own name and I’m right there with them, but other than some tiny potential endearment just because I see my name, using it in this email makes no sense at all.

There is no “personal” to this email. It looks like a web-page, it reads like a web-page, it essentially is a web-page that was delivered to my email inbox. Do they really think that I’m going to believe that they wrote this and arranged all these pictures and links, just for me?

Danger Zone: Email list “name field” problems

How does the system know what name to put in that spot anyway? It uses the information input into a form when the recipient signed-up to get the emails. The problem is that people don’t always follow instructions.

I, for example, might decide to use the name of my company, Crazy Tree Media, instead of my name in a form. I might not feel like giving out my name at the time. So, from then on, I will get emails from that company that say “Dear Crazy” at the beginning. Thus confusing me and making me think the email is from my wife.

If you have time to go through your entire list looking for things like this and fixing them, or at least being aware of them, then you can make the call. But sending out a personalized mass email to a list you haven’t looked through name by name is, IMHO, more trouble than it’s worth.

Weigh The Benefit

When writing an email to be sent to the masses, I often ask myself… what is the real benefit of personalization on this email. Sometimes it’s really a big deal. If you’re trying to make your email sound like it really is to just one person, it could be the way to go.

But at the same time, I think it’s possible to alienate people by using any form of automated “trickery”. If it’s clearly a mass email, give folks some credit for knowing the difference. If it really is personal, then you probably won’t be using a mass email system anyway, right?

The post Use Caution With Email Personalization appeared first on Crazy Tree Media.

This means that the home page should not be static (not changing) it should be dynamic. Clients, prospects, vendors, whatever, should get used to seeing different information on the home page of the site when they visit.

By “content” I mean pictures, words, headings, titles, links, announcements, and social media updates (that, ideally would be live on the home page).

An example would be site that has various items on the home page that would change when new content of the proper type was added.

Employee Spotlight, for example. Write a new post in the Employee Spotlight blog category and it automatically goes to the home page of the site.

While this isn’t super-difficult to do manually, it’s much better for it to be automatic because inevitably, any manual work such as “I have to remember to put that new employee spotlight blog post on the home page” just doesn’t get done. The home page becomes static.

(click photo to visit site)

2. Hook visitors with useful, informative, and visually engaging information.

A good blog is heavy with pictures. The bigger the better. The more the better.

The site should be about design, inspiration, and ideas. It should create energy where there was none.

If the site is simply about passing on information, then it isn’t really getting the most value for you. Lots of interactive (clickable) pictures engage users.

Current sites use a good bit of pictures on all pages and these pictures, often coupled with bold headlines, draw the visitor to click. If you can get them to click around a few times they’ll start to build a feeling of “this website is cool” or “I love this website”… the SITE itself is what you want them to love, not your company. That will come as an automatic result.

3. The entire site should look current.

This is much like new cars. You can tell the difference between a brand new car built in 1990 style as compared to a brand new car built in 2010. Both might have the same great key features, but you can tell which is the newer model, even if both are at zero miles.

How much that matters to your target market is something you know better than I do. It matters a great deal to a young person who spends much time online. They will think your site is old. A person who doesn’t spend much time online won’t notice as much, but the site will be older faster if the look starts-off looking dated.

4. The site should work in all browsers.

I recently consulted on a site with a photographic background that worked (albeit stretched on my monitor) in IE and Firefox, but was a mess in Chrome and Safari (webkit browsers).

It’s pretty much impossible to make a photographic background work across the complete range of monitors and websites are constantly working in one browser and not another much to the endless frustration of web developers.

But for this reason, the photographic image background on the site should be either abandoned or set to a fixed size and location with a repeating texture or background color behind it.

In any case, a site has to look professional in all major browsers including mobile.

5. Consider your online presence as one thing.

It’s not good to think of your blog, website, facebook, twitter, and other online interactions as separate entities. It’s much better to think of them as various spokes on one wheel.

The website is the hub but the whole thing is “your online presence” and each leg is important. This isn’t my original concept, this is very widely adopted thinking as the image above demonstrates. Check a Google Images search for “website hub“.

As such, they all need to heavily integrate. This means that as soon as your active on twitter, that we add a “twitter widget” to the home page of the website that shows latest tweets.

This means that the facebook widget that is on the blog, should also be on the home page. It means that the facebook page should link to the blog and the home page and twitter, but not just with a simple link.

Doing this right involves active engagement such as doing a tweet about a facebook event and putting blog posts on facebook and all of it being on the home page of the website.

6. Provide “right now” interaction through lots of forms.

You really want a form on the home page of your website and as many of the other pages as possible. The idea is to make it seem obvious to the visitor that they are choosing not to contact you. Call to action. Call to action. Call to action. Just do it over and over again and you’ll get markedly increased feedback and that will result in conversions to sales.

For Example:

I recently changed a client’s site who offers flight training. We went from a somewhat hard to find (but logically placed) form to having the same form on four or five of the flight school pages. Responses increased ten-fold immediately. Lots of ways to interact are critical. Social media sharing buttons are great for this as well.

————–

It requires a multi-faceted plan of attack to gain an advantage in today’s web. The good news is that many industries are just getting going down these roads so leaders who get it right now will be in what my grandpa used to call “the catbird’s seat” a few years down the road when these things are no longer “optional” to success.

When we’re not busy with our growing portfolio of online publications, we help others accomplish these things with their online presence. Use the form above (it’s real, not just for show!) to contact us today if we can help you.

The post Six Must-Haves For A Great Website appeared first on Crazy Tree Media.

I mention that because I’m reminded this morning about a saying one of my remodeling clients put in my head and it has never left. “The cobbler’s kids need new shoes (or never have shoes?” She said that in response to my whining that my house was always half remodeled, never done, which is EXACTLY how I feel about my website here at CrazyTreeMedia.com… half remodeled, never done.

But, as was the case when I was a remodeling contractor, it’s because we’re busy doing other work and building our service offering. Which brings me, at long last, to my point:

We Can Now Offer $100 in Free Google AdWords Advertising to our clients!

Google AdWords is a great opportunity for businesses to get the word out online. Equally effective for both local businesses and fully online concerns, AdWords has options and tweaks that can be set to perfectly target your ad and make your ad spend optimally effective.

We’ve completed a Google training program that has opened up this opportunity for us to offer coupons, just like the big hosting companies do! Except we don’t just give you a coupon code and say “have a nice day!” with a smile and a wave. We actually help you set-up your account and consider your advertising.

We can also help with Facebook Advertising which has some incredible (albeit a little freaky) targeting options that allow you to only display your ad to very interested groups, such as those who “like” related industry pages.

Let us know how we can help!

The post $100 Free AdWords Advertising appeared first on Crazy Tree Media.

Again!

The following little imaginary interaction is something I would normally keep to myself. Just a thought exercise. Wouldn’t want people thinking I have a multiple personality disorder or anything…

But the truth is that many of our clients face this same process themselves and for some, coming up with the answer isn’t easy. That’s the nature of new things. If you sell on Etsy, it’s hard to say “I sell ___ on Etsy.” because so many people don’t know what Etsy is.

If you’re a professional blogger, it’s even harder because of the minority of people who know what a blog is, the vast majority of them think of it strictly as a hobby. So, to them, you might as well be saying “I’m a professional scrapbooker”.

Yet the need is there, especially if your business is a full-time income, to be able to quickly explain what you do. Below, I’ve copied and pasted a little written exercise I did this morning. I think it’s a good exercise for all business-owners to work through every once in awhile:

What Do You Do?

(italics are my imaginary business guru – that’s him above – he’s mean and whacks me with a stick when I mess up)

Explain what you do for a living in thirty seconds…go:

I own a company called Crazy Tree Media. We build eCommerce websites and business blogs. We also publish a few websites of our own where we sell advertising and products. (what about the felt and Etsy shops)

Okay, that was not so good… try again:

I’m in the media business… er. I’m in media…. er. Online Media.

{Whack!}… This is pathetic… you have to be able to succinctly state your work. Even if it is far-reaching or widespread… again!

What do you do?

My wife and I own a few websites that sell online. We also build eCommerce websites and business blogs for others.

Again!

What do you do?

We’re professional bloggers. (I almost ended that with a question mark!)(insert quizzical look from other person here) Do you know what a blog is? We write online, it’s much like a magazine, like a trade publication…

Stop! Again!

What do you do?

(I used to be able to just say “I’m a remodeling contractor.” and that was it. Next question was usually ‘What type of remodeling?’ or “Really, we’ve been wanting to add-on”…)

{Double whack}…. Stop rambling! Again!

What do you do?

We build marketing machines online.

(quizzical look)

We help people build businesses by teaching them how to use their websites, blogs, and social media effectively.

Good.

A New Outlook

As a result of this exercise, I now have this new statement: We build business marketing machines online. And that really sums it up. That’s what we do.

okay then…

The post Knowing How to Answer: What Do You Do? appeared first on Crazy Tree Media.

• A good website is never done
• A good website is more akin to a periodical than a brochure
• A good website is FULL of useful information
• A good website is an experience (preferably not a painful one!)
• A good website is authentic, transparent, and sincere
• A good website is encouraging and inspiring
• A good website  treats each page with the same importance as the home page (working on it…)
• A good website is current
• A good website is interactive
• A good website is… Worth it!

It’s true.  A good website in the modern web is so much more than just a few pages of pictures and words.  The list of things that can go into making a great website is endless and it changes every day.

We’re excited about being a part of those changes and hope you’ll forgive us for any points above where we’re yet to make the grade!

Like the first point so eloquently states… we ain’t done yet.

The post The Truth About Good Websites appeared first on Crazy Tree Media.