One of my most favourite FREE anti-spam plugins is Antispam Bee, found in the WordPress plugin repository. It has a number of settings that help keep the spammers away, along with notification when spam is being caught, either as a dashboard graphic or an email notification. The plugin has a 4.7 star rating and has been downloaded and installed as of this moment, more than 200,000 times. Unfortunately it is incompatible with Disqus, Jetpack comments and Ajax comment sytems, but all else does well. For complete details, https://github.com/pluginkollektiv/antispam-bee/wiki (you may need to use your Google translate function).
Archive for How To…
By Jemma Fong
A year ago, after 4-months of extensive research, planning, writing, editing, and rewriting, my colleagues, Susan Baka & Allyson Ward of Bay Communications, Liz Valentine of Valentine Dimensions and myself worked collectively to produce 8 publications and PowerPoint presentations for the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development & Trade eBiz section of their website. This week these publications have now been made available online. It is good to see them in their final format. This project was a good experience but deadlines were tight. It was my first time writing and as the technical consultant for this project, it was an opporunity for me to bring my expertise of the web to the table. Click http://bit.ly/146t9dJ to view the publications.
- Creating a Dynamic Web Presence
Small businesses can easily create more interactive sites to engage their target audiences.
- E-Commerce: Purchasing and Selling Online
Includes tips and strategies for attracting, serving and keeping your online customers.
- Social Media Marketing
Focuses on using social media (Web 2.0) techniques to promote your business online.
- Cloud Computing
Describes cloud computing and explains the benefits, concerns, types of cloud computing and what to consider when moving your business to the cloud.
- Blogs for Small Business
Focuses on the opportunities, benefits and how to’s of creating a successful blog to market your business.
- Successful Online Display Advertising
Discusses techniques to advertise your business over the Internet.
- Increasing Traffic to Your Website Through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Techniques
Examines techniques to increase the volume of traffic to your website from potential customers using search engines.
- Integrating Mobile with Your Marketing Strategy
Explains how small businesses can integrate mobile with their marketing strategies to gain an edge in reaching out to and strengthening relationships with customers.
I came across this video and thought of sharing this video with you as you embark another year of planning out your blog messages to your readers:
Interview with Duane Forrester, http://youtu.be/2sQrdP4Dk4U
Click on link for video
His message is, “Without passion, a blog cannot become established as an authority or sustain readers. Forrester believes a lack of passion is the “biggest killer for most blogs out there.” He goes on to say that if a blog does not have passion, it will run out of steam before it can reach success.
Passion results in value, which leads to loyal readers. When businesses and people enforce these practices, the readers will go on to share this valuable information socially and produce links, which will establish the blog as a resource.”
So as you move forward into the new year, make sure to dig deep into your heart and bring forth the passionate nature of your business messages into your writing.
HTML – Hyper Text Markup Language
WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get editor
For some of my clients who are using a content management application or WordPress, there are times when you will need to use HTML rather than the visual mode of a WYSIWYG.
Some common challenges that need to be considered are the following:
1. Copying and pasting document content from Word or PowerPoint or Adobe PDF, Excel
a. Challenge: spacing or font formatting that seems to have been brought over from source document.
b. Solution: always copy and paste source material into NOTEPAD and then re-copy and paste into your WYSIWYG editor.
2. When either copying source material in, or writing directly into the editor
a. Challenge: Sometimes extra line spacing occurs when you don’t want it to.
b. Solution: You may need to look at the HTML source to see if an extra <p> or <br> was added. Please note, a full carriage return [enter], it will give you a <p> paragraph break, whereas, if you hold down the [shift key] and [enter] it will give you a <br> line break.
3. Bullets – ordered and unordered
a. Challenge: When putting in ordered bullets, sometimes the numbers won’t line up properly especially when there are 2, 3, level of bullets.
b. Solution: Add all the text before putting in the bullets, make sure where there are supposed to be bullets, you have a full carriage return between each one, then highlight this list, and then apply the bullet icon.
All HTML tags need an open and close tag, for example <tag>information goes here</tag>
| Tag | Purpose | Examples |
| <p></p> | paragraph | |
| <br> or </br> | Line break | |
| <ol> </ol> | Ordered List (1, 2, 3, I, ii, iii) | <OL > or <OL> or <OL > or <OL > |
| <ul> </ul> | Unordered List (bullet formats) | Or <UL > for square bullet |
| <li> </li> | bullet | |
| <i> </i> | Italic | |
| <em> </em> | emphasized | |
| <table> </table> | Insert a table | |
| <strong> </strong> | Bold | |
| <b> </b> | Bold | |
| <tr> </tr> | Insert a table row | |
| <td> </td> | Insert a table cell | |
| <span> </span> | Attribute, formatting style |
<span> |
| <div> </div> | container | <div> |
| <tr align=”center”></tr> | Align table row center | |
| <tr align=”left”></tr> | Align table row left | |
| <tr align=”right”></tr> | Align table row right | |
| <a href=””> </a> | link | <a href=”/membership-benefits” title=””>Benefits</a> |
| <img src=””> | image | <img src=”http://www.ydomain.ca/images/89/newlogo.jpg” alt=”keyword” title=”keyword phrase” width=”280″ height=”210″ /> |
| <h1> </h1> | Header 1 | Largest heading |
| <h2> </h2> | Header 2 | |
| <h3> </h3> | Header 3 | |
| <h4> </h4> | Header 4 | |
| <h5> </h5> | Header 5 | |
| <h6> </h6> | Header 6 | Smallest heading |
| | Non-breaking space | Good for indenting |
| Copyright Trademark Registered Less Than Greater Than Ampersand Quote Apostrophe Cent Euro One quarter One half Three quarters Degrees Larger middle dot |
© ™ ® < > & ” ‘ ¢ € ¼ ½ ¾ ° • |
© ™ ® or ® < > & " ' ¢ € or € ¼ ½ ¾ ° • |
| <title> </title> | title | |
An element that has an opening and closing tag is referred to as a container element because anything contained between these tags are affected by the element.
Closing Tags cannot be placed just anywhere. Use the “Last In = First Out” principle or “LIFO”. That is, the “Last” tag “In” must be the “First” tag “Out”. Another way of stating this is that the last tag activated must be the first tag terminated. An example of a correct sequence of tags is:
<tag1><tag2> statements </tag2></tag1>
So when you look at the code, you don’t have to get too scared off, just reference this table to see what those tags mean. When in doubt, just give Jemma a call, 416-451-2063
Before making major changes to your current website to reflect the New Year, take a good look at your results and happenings of 2009 – how did your website fare?
Have you reviewed your annual statistics? What months did you have the most traffic? Is that typical for your audience, or are they looking for things that are most wanted in a given time period? What is your bounce rate like? Are people coming to your site from a search engine result only to find no relevancy to what they were looking for? Take a deeper look at those keywords, see if there are ways you can fine tune them to fit the relevancy of your audience needs. Have you set your goals for 2010? What measurement tactics will you utilize to measure those goals?
If all this sounds overwhelming and you are just looking at a screen with a bunch of numbers with a foggy mind, give me a call, I would be happy to consult with you and get you on track so that in December 2010 you can look at these numbers with fresh ideas for your future and continuous growth. Call Jemma 416-451-2063
Ever wondered how to add Google Analytics to your blog. A huge thanks to Michael Pick for his hard work in creating this.
Here are the easy steps in writing:
1. Go to google.com/analytics to set up an account.
2. Put in the name of your blog, set country, time zone and add contact info.
3. Agree to the terms of service, create new account.
4. You will see a chunk of code, copy and paste into notepad
5. Now go back to WordPress.
6. You can choose automated way – via the Plug Ins
7. Manual way: Go to appearance menu, choose editor option and choose footer.php template, paste in the code just above