Web Marketing Pro Blog

I’m happy to report that the Web Marketing Pro Blog now runs on WordPress version 2.5. Soon I will be able to say the same for the main McBuzz Communications website and blog.

This is the third 2.5 upgrade I have done. All have gone smoothly. Within the week, I will be making a video tutorial that walks through the steps.

It’s definitely one advantage of hosting your blog/website on WordPress.com that you don’t have to worry about things like upgrading the software. But there are many more disadvantages. For example, check out the nifty “Share This” button at the bottom of this post. This is a great “Web 2.0″ feature to add to a site, and because it’s a WordPress plugin - one of the best - it takes all of 5 minutes to install. On WordPress.com-hosted sites, you don’t get to install plugins.

If you are interested in upgrading to WordPress 2.5, or you have already done so and would like to share your experiences, please post a comment.

Thanks for visiting the Web Marketing Pro Blog!

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I received a snappy-looking email update from a company called JointContact a minute ago. Checking the footer, I found “Powered by VerticalResponse”. McBuzz is always looking for good ways to reach customers and we advise our customers about how best reach out to customers of their own. VerticalResponse looks like a good candidate.

I bring this up for two reasons:

1. Email marketing is not dead. Done right, with an easy double opt-in and an equally easy opt-out, it is actually an essential part of any good web marketing strategy.

2. Facebook is another great way to reach new and existing customers. VerticalResponse tells how in this post on their blog: Facebook - How Do I Love Thee?

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It has been far too long since my last post here on the Web Marketing Pro Blog. Not a blogging strategy anyone should try to emulate! The Facebook conference (Community Building in the Age of Facebook) mentioned in my last post was excellent. Many of the new things McBuzz has in the works center around the great stuff I learned there — with guidance and inspiration from the awesome group of web professionals I met. To see who I’m talking about, go to the Seattle Facebook Event website.

Running two blogs under one domain as we do with the main McBuzz Communications site and the Web Marketing Pro Blog has been a worthwhile endeavor, one that I’m about 99% sure I will not continue when mcbuzz.com gets its next revamp.

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Does it seem like everywhere you look right now someone is talking about Facebook? I’ve seen reports about Robert Scoble taking over Facebook. Scoble is someone to take note of, whatever he is up to. Here Scoble offers a video of Steve Broback talking about a Seattle Facebook Event called Community Building in the Age of Facebook. Scoble uses video all the time on his blog and elsewhere. More and more, this is going to be how people blog and put information up on websites. And Scoble likes Facebook. So we should keep an eye on Facebook.

Scoble thinks Facebook is hot because it is much more of a “media channel” than a blog. I’m still getting my head around this. Here’s a good rundown of Facebook for Professionals in the meantime.

What’s your point?! you ask? Mark McLaren and McBuzz Communications will be attending the Seattle Facebook Event. Very fired up about it. Check it out!

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Description: Mark McLaren of McBuzz Communications LLC shares a new free Web-based tool called Sketchcast that can be used to create presentations - with audio and video - in minutes and then publish them on the Sketchcast website and on your own website or blog.

Watch the short presentation above. This Web-based communication tool is fast, free and fun. The reasons I say Sketchcast lightly rocks are these:

• Sketchcast presentations contain no keywords or tags that search engines can read. Although you save time creating Sketchcast presentations and posting them quickly, if you want search engines to index your creation, you still have to write keywords and/or tags and work them into your post somewhere.
• You can’t insert backgrounds, so you can’t give tutorials using screen captures in which you talk about and draw over top of web pages, software programs or other materials.
• You can’t splice one presentation to another.

No doubt, they will be expanding Sketchcast’s capabilities in the future. I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes! Here’s a more thorough introduction by Sketchcast’s Rich Ziade:

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If you use WordPress, you may have discovered a problem with search results on your website or blog: a search using the search form (a.k.a. searchform) on an internal page generates either no result (the page does not change) or a “Page not found” 404 error. Fortunately, I can no longer demonstrate the problem for you on this website, because I found and corrected the faulty PHP source code.

Here’s what you will find if you are experiencing the problem: when you or someone else submits a query using the WordPress searchform, that is, you type something into the Search box on your website or blog and click the ‘Go’ button, you see no change in the page or you see a “Page not found” page, and in the web browser’s address window you will find a URL that looks similar to this:

http://www.mcbuzz.com/web-marketing-blog/
about-web-marketing-pro-blog/?s=[search term]&sbutt=Go

The URL shows the page that the search was done from:

http://www.mcbuzz.com/…/about-web-marketing-pro-blog/

which is why it doesn’t work.

The solution is simple. The URL should be:

http://www.mcbuzz.com/web-marketing-blog/?s=[search term]&sbutt=Go

with no specific page in it, just the home page. (On the Web Marketing Pro Blog, the home page is http://www.mcbuzz.com/web-marketing-blog/.)

In your WordPress theme source files, the search <form> tag contains an action attribute that is empty, so it looks like this:

<form id=”searchform” method=”get” action=”">

The searchform is usually in a theme’s sidebar.php file. Sometimes it is in the header.php file.

You need to insert a bit of code into the action attribute. Using a text editor like NotePad or WordPad, change the action attribute so it looks like this:

<form id=”searchform” method=”get” action=”<?php bloginfo(’url’); ?>/”>

Watch out for the two “>” brackets at the end. You need all of

<?php bloginfo(’url’); ?>/

between the action= quote marks.

Make that change, and your search results will be good to Go!

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Matt May, Accessibility Engineer at Adobe in Seattle, gave a great talk last night on Web Accessibility. The talk was sponsored by Refresh Seattle.

Matt is someone we all can — and should — turn to with questions about Web Accessibility. It’s clear why Adobe and W3C/WAI chose Matt to articulate and evangelize accessibility standards:

1. Matt really knows his stuff (an understatement).
2. He makes the material accessible.
3. Matt is accessible.
   

A quick glance at the Federal Government’s Section 508 website shows why this is so important: it’s dense as hell, therefore most of us will never read it. Although it’s absolutely clear that Matt could tell you in great detail about many aspects of accessibility, like most Kung Fu masters, he restrains himself.* Here’s how he typically states the importance of accessibility in software and Web development:

Standards-based development is kind of important when it comes to making reasonably-sized sites reasonably accessible.

A mealymouthed stance? No way.

To turn standards into reality, we (and by “we” I mean Matt) must reduce the “oh my god, how will we do it?!” factor as much as possible. Sure, companies that do work for government agencies will try to comply with Section 508 as much as the law requires, which might mean hiring an “expert”. But what about all the other software and web pages out there?

It makes a lot of sense to put the emphasis where it will do the most good: by making reasonably-sized sites reasonably accessible — because that’s a whole lot better than nuttin’, honey. And, by keeping it simple for these sites’ developers and other stakeholders, we stand a much better chance of helping them inspire others to follow suit.

Something else Matt said helped reinforce his position. When asked to recommend a book on accessibility standards, he said he could not — because those on the market devote too much attention to compliance (with Section 508, for example) versus simple ways to achieve more accessibility, more quickly. (He may have hinted that he was hoping to correct the situation himself, I’m not sure. But maybe a book, by its nature, would do less for the cause than newer media in smaller doses, like video or podcasts, along with the Web and PDF.)

Matt will be posting links related to his talk, and I will include those as soon as he does. Meantime, here are some other resources:

• Matt May’s blog (views are his own - check it out!)
• Web Accessibility Initiative - Quick Tips to Make Accessible Web Sites
• Accessibility at Adobe (some good stuff here)
• Matt’s profile at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
• World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative (W3C/WAI)

*To my knowledge, Matt is not really a Kung Fu master — just in case you were going to refrain from making any negative comments below. Fire away!

Mark McLaren
McBuzz Communications

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