When I first thought of launching a blog of my own, I decided to research into available scripts and tools and see if anything surpassed WordPress in quality. I’d encountered a few subtle bugs in WordPress while working for my clients, so I wanted an alternative.
One of my friends sent me his commercial script for testing. He talked a lot about its benefits, but after a few hours of struggling with simple tasks (which take 5 minutes to solve in WP) I said no, thanks. Even the best product built by a solitary programmer can never beat something created by a team, so I looked into a directory of free scripts and soon found a couple of leading blog scripts built by teams. One of them seemed popular and had on its website a list of blogs powered by it. I visited those links one by one – only to discover that some of those blogs no longer existed, and the rest of them had been moved to WordPress.
I have set up a blog using Drupal – but Drupal is too heavy for a single blog, and lacks certain features. For example, its default comment form doesn’t allow your visitors to insert their website URLs. Unregistered visitors can’t enter their names either. And besides, setting up a blog takes more time than with WordPress.
So I gave up. My blog is powered by WordPress – as is this one. I’ve customised the theme, of course – modified it greatly, so nobody will ever recognise the original theme downloaded by me for free. I’ve also installed a few plugins – the necessary minimum: one for SEO, one for captcha and one for social bookmarking. WP’s subtle bugs have spared my blog so far (fingers crossed), but I’ve had more than one opportunity to appreciate the benefits of this particular script: flexibility, availability of good plugins for nearly every purpose, relatively small size of the script itself and intuitive admin interface. It also generates valid HTML code, which is an important consideration for a web perfectionist like me.
Posted in The use of social networking sites to connect people has become so widespread today.But other than those who just want to communicate with friends, old and new, social media is also currently being taken advantage by business oriented people as a way to reach their target clients and improve their businesses.
People involved in small business have found a powerful marketing tool in these social networking sites.
Among the top social media used by business people today are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. By using these sites, you are able to expose your business to more people, at both a local and international level.
Facebook has become highly popular in recent years attracting millions of users from across the globe. This popularity has, in fact, led the site’s management to offer marketing platforms that encourage people to share their business endeavors and build communities as well.
To use Facebook to your advantage, make sure to create an interesting personal profile page. Include photos and business information that will attract visitors and encourage them to read through your profile.
Update your information regularly so that existing and potential clients know what you’re up to. Discuss recent happenings regarding your business and interact with readers who post comments on your page.
Be friendly at all times and don’t forget to create a “fans” page and invite clients to join.
In just a few years, Twitter has attracted a steady following that is increasing rapidly as the “buzz” around Twitter spreads.This is the power of social networking sites – they are viral.
One advantage of Twitter over the others is that it lifts the lid on the activities and conversations of other people. What we are seeing today is news being reported on Twitter before the media even has a chance to tell us.
For business people who want to maximize the vast communication potential of this social networking site, it is best to be consistent when tweeting (telling people what you are doing).
This means not only providing information to your followers about what you are up to with your business, but also adding value.You need to share tools, tips and strategies and make your updates interesting and engaging.
LinkedIn is an ideal site for entrepreneurs because it gives you the opportunity to grow your business using less of your own money.How?LinkedIn is used by many professionals to search for potential employees and also as a means to expand their business contacts.
Providing a detailed profile (business information and photos) is the best way to expand your network of contacts through LinkedIn.
You can include a link to your website or blog for those people looking to access more information about you and your business. Interaction is key and you can do this by answering questions that provide valuable and interesting information.
YouTube
YouTube is a phenomenal success in terms of video sharing on the internet. This social networking site has become the Number 2 search engine, behind Google.
If you have not tried live video streaming as a marketing tool for your business yet, it is time to jump in front of the camera.Videos are very powerful tools in drawing online traffic.
Create a short but clear video featuring yourself talking about your business and how you started out.Tell them about your journey, provide them with success stories and share your passion about your business.
Create several short videos (perhaps video seminars you conduct, presentations you make, or other business projects) and upload them on YouTube. Make sure that you post your videos in the category relevant to your business to draw the right target audience.
In using social media to market and improve your business, building trust with your audience is essential. You can only do this by being honest and providing consistently interesting, useful and valuable information. What matters most is that you share your experiences and knowledge.Doing so can influence people’s lives and encourage them to take action.
By Wendy Moore
Copyright 2009 Savvy Web Women Pty Ltd
Author: Wendy Moore
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
If you are considering creation of a website and trying to choose one of the content management systems available for free, Drupal is definitely an option to consider. Having worked with it for about two years and developed several websites (usually within a team, but also once or twice without any help), I can safely recommend it to you if you are looking for a website larger than five pages and/or more complicated than just a blog (for a simple blog WordPress is, without a doubt, the best solution).
What can Drupal do for you?
Drupal gives you a flexible, easy-to-learn and highly configurable site administration interface, with which you can control nearly everything. It supports search engine friendly URLs and never introduces any obstacles for search engine spiders trying to access and index your site (too many CMS’s do). It gives your webmaster (or you, if you are DIY’ing your website) full control over the code. It also supports blocks (small pieces of code you can insert into any area of your template – header, content, footer, right or left column, you name it) – some of those blocks are standard and come with the system, but you can create your own. Very convenient – I’ve used them a lot.
Drupal comes with a set of modules, which you can enable or disable depending on what functionality your website needs, including blog and forum module. Some of them come by default with the standard installation package; there are also a lot of additional modules, which you can download and install onto your system. If you have an experienced Drupal programmer on staff – or are about to hire such a person for the project – you can have bespoke modules developed using Drupal API and adjusted to meet your needs.
If you need an e-commerce website, Drupal has advanced solutions for it too, and a good programmer can enhance it greatly to customise the functionality of your e-shop. I have participated in such a project: the result was amazing.
Using some CSS and very little editing to templates, an experienced web designer can customise the look and feel of your website: there are practically no restrictions to it. For SEO there is yet another module available, which, once installed, enables individual meta tags for every page. And even if you don’t know any HTML, with Drupal you will soon learn how to add new pages with content all by yourself.
What else?
If you would like to have a forum and a blog, you can enable the necessary modules in one click, and then create as many categories and subcategories as you like. There are additional modules available too – e.g. for tag clouds and other blog-related functionality you might need. Drupal’s website hosts a large community where you can find answers you any “how to” questions that may arise in connection with setting up and customising your site. If you need additional functionality, you can post your request to Drupal developers: they are paying attention to their users’ desires and continuously working on new additions: that’s why new versions of the system are released so often. Security holes get found and fixed very quickly too.
I won’t say that Drupal is perfect: no software is. But it’s definitely very good, and the chances are it will satisfy any needs you have in connection with your web presence. In experienced hands Drupal-based websites become feature-rich and professionally looking.
Just make sure you have a professional to do the job – but this is true regardless of your choice of a CMS. Another important thing about Drupal: it’s completely free.
My online life has gone through different stages. I’ve started with forums – mainly SEO-related ones, as it was my main field of expertise in those years. I’ve participated in several forums – been a moderator and even a super moderator, have tried to run my own forum – about my home city – but finally reached the end of that particular stage.
My next step into the online world was discovering business networking. My first business network was Ecademy; then I switched to BetterNetworking.
Stages tend to overlap: I still sometimes visit one of those multiple forums I used to be active at; at the same time, I feel like my business networking is far less active than three years ago. It could come back though: benefits of such activities to small businesses are hard to overestimate, and I’ve found a lot of clients through networking and hope to find more. I might even start running groups again…
It was fun, running groups (in those days they were called “clubs”) in Ecademy. People asked me sometimes how I managed to create decent communities within a few days without ever touching “Message All Contacts” – and if it was hard to review long dead clubs. My secrets were simple though – sending personal invites to every would-be member. Yes, personal – written from scratch every time, no copy and paste. Then, once people arrive, I did many things to keep them interested – daily jokes, contests, games (like creating a story together, each contributing exactly 5 words, or something similar). For business clubs, it could be something else – questions and answers, for example, or free website reviews offered weekly.
It required time and effort, of course, but friendships formed in the process have become unbreakable. They have survived my break-up with Ecademy. They have more than once brought me business. They have made my life better – emotionally and otherwise. They have been entirely worth it.
Now a few words about another stage I’m going through. It is called blogging – meaning not posting short stories on a social networking site, but having a blog on a separate domain. Blogging for business and blogging for fun – as a personal hobby. I’m discovering the art of bringing audience to a brand-new blog – once I figure it out well enough to share a few tips, I’ll post them right here, so watch this space.
There will be WordPress tips too, for those who’d like to DIY their blogs: every day I learn something new about this amazingly flexible platform. For now, just a simple advice: if you would like your blog to be popular, make it different. Your content, your design – everything should reflect on your own personality and be absolutely different from the next guy’s. Once you’ve achieved that, it’s the first step on your road to success.
This is my first post here, and I’m very grateful to Romany for inviting me to participate. I’ll do my best to be worthy of the invitation.
