Simply put, the sales funnel is a way of looking at the way a business sells its product. It isn’t so much a radical new idea or extreme marketing technique—instead, it’s a tool that allows a business to maximize its selling potential by analyzing the entire sales process, from the first contact with customers to the final sale.

Imagine a funnel: wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. As you progress down through the sales funnel and closer to the final sale at the bottom, prospective buyers will drop out, narrowing the funnel. Remember that this isn’t a bad thing; it’s simply the process of transforming potential buyers into committed clients. Analyzing the flow of prospective customers from one stage to the next can help you identify your weakest steps—helping you make your business plan stronger than ever.

Both major corporations and small businesses have increasingly dedicated a growing percentage of their marketing budget to online campaigns. Most people on the Internet still find websites through major search engines like Google and Yahoo.

In order to achieve high search rankings, websites must master search engine optimization. However, all too often, sites place too much emphasis in building up external links to their web pages. As a result, they neglect the importance of proper onsite SEO.

“Where should we go?” you ask in an email.

“How about that sushi place on the other side of town?” he says. “It’s about thirty minutes.”

“That sounds pretty far. What about Lil’ Saignon?” you ask. "It’s a lot closer…"

“Ah, but this one is brand new – and they have the best squid you’ve ever tasted...” He includes the link to the website, but it’s one of those restaurants where the menu doesn’t list the prices. 

“Hmmm,” you say to yourself. “I don’t know if it’s worth driving all that way and paying who knows what for squid.” But, your mutual friend vouched for him, so you go ahead and agree.

“Great!” he sends back. Then at the bottom of his email you read, “Hey, by the way, you mind picking me up? My car’s on the fritz.”

"Well, fine,” you say. But you’re starting to think twice about this whole thing.

“Ah, thanks!” he says, “Look, it’s right up your alley. The only thing is I’m not sure how long we’re going to have to wait at the restaurant. See there’s no reservations. And there’s always a line.”

You email him back and say, “Look, can you give me some more info about this deal you’ve got, because I’m pretty busy and I want to make sure it’s for me.” You’re getting anxious now.

His response comes back quickly. “There’s nothing to worry about! You’re going to get a lot out of it, I promise. But hey, one last thing – I’m kinda broke, do you mind picking up my tab – just this time? It’ll pay off in the end. I promise.”

This friend of a friend – We’ll call him Jerry – has just put you through the worst sales funnel of all time. You haven’t even gotten to the business proposition yet, and already, he’s asked you to go somewhere unfamiliar to you. He’s giving you vague reasons that it will be worth your while. There will be a wait during which you’ll probably want to leave. Turns out he also needs a ride – for someone with a business deal, he seems awfully needy. And then, when you finally agree based on his good name, he raises the price by asking you to pay for his meal too.

When a customer hears about your product or services, whether it’s via your website, an email campaign, or an advertisement, they’re looking at an open door. If they step through it, they’re inside your sales funnel. Jerry got you this far. You admitted that you were interested in what he’s got to sell. But – the more difficult that sales process is, and the more confusing terms you heap onto the customer as they travel down the funnel – the more likely they are to back up, to click away, and to cancel the purchase.

In this article we’ll take a closer look at how a/b testing can make a significant improvement to the elements critical in driving e-commerce sales. Get the most out of your e-commerce strategy by following the guidelines and tips mentioned here.

Of course, you will want your levels of customer service to be as high as possible for more reasons that good marketing, but how can you use great service to promote your online company?

While it is obviously important for your website to rank highly for relevant, high traffic terms, restricting your efforts to solely a handful of primary keywords can lead to you overlooking one or two easy wins that are available with just a little effort and no expenditure. If you are still waiting to see the fruits of your labour in organic search, let’s see how you can effectively drive traffic towards your site in the meantime.

Now, this article isn't about the history of copywriting or the origin of why we use that term. It's about a handful of ways you can write quick, timely “copy,” with your keywords and terms and keep it coming out on a regular basis to satisfy your throngs of adoring online readers (or, you know, at least your mom).

As SEO’s, we rarely become involved before a site is designed, coded, and often live. At that point, we sit in our ivory towers and point, ‘That’s wrong, that’s wrong, this is wrong, and that’s wrong.’ Then everyone else grumbles and hates us. I cut my teeth in SEO working for a web design company, and over time, I’ve learned how decisions made as early as the first wireframe can ruin an SEO campaign that doesn’t even start until 2 years later. Come, friends, let’s have a heart-to-heart discussion.

Luckily, the Internet's come up with some pretty handy tools for bloggers to help take their blog over the edge. From poll creators to interactive thesauruses, here are the top three tools for savvy bloggers.

Well, one, actually – if it worked REALLY well, but stay with me here – you'd probably want a few. Maybe at least three or four? Five even? (Also, who's footing the bill here, because the US closed down our space program and is kind of broke).

Let's say you wanted to supercharge your rocket with five propulsion units – now that's a rocket that's going to get some results. Same thing with your written content when it comes to powering conversions. The more pieces of content you have driving people to a specific page that you want to convert, the better your chances of conversions will be. Also: this article assumes that you already know which of your pages/items are converting well and which need help. If you don't know that, we'll cover it in a later post.

This guide is a quick and dirty “how to” on getting a bunch of content out there to direct traffic at a  low-performing page. It uses a lot of techniques that we've discussed here on Virtuosi Media before. It will not instantly make you a million dollars or drive that page to the top of Google searches. It will, however, get you on the path towards increased sales down the road. Like anything, though, it'll take time.

As a matter of fact, this whole six part series has been a special event. We hope that you've enjoyed it. We had fun doing it. We'll definitely do another one some time in the future. Check back with us every two weeks on Tuesdays for more great ecommerce, SEO, and content marketing articles. You'll be the first to know about special events.

Keeping a website visible amidst the millions of other domains online is a constant and often exhausting challenge. That’s why so many websites look for outside help in fighting the battle for search engine rankings.

As history proves, picking the right ally is everything.  Choosing the right SEO company is a crusade all its own.  There are plenty of companies out there, all offering different services at different prices, making different claims and different promises.  Finding the right one takes time and research, but here are a few good things to keep in mind while you’re shopping for the best SEO company for you. 

Here is a look at the series so far:

• What is Content Marketing And How Can It Benefit Your Business?
• How To Plan Content Marketing Strategies For Your Website
• How To Create A Schedule For Your Content Marketing Plan
• How To Manage Multiple Authors For Your Website

Without further ado, let's get into using other sites and blogs to support your content marketing and SEO efforts.

First off, let's get this out right off the bat: Guest blogs and curated posts/links on other people's blogs/sites are some of the strongest ways that you can promote your website, boost your online visibility, and gain powerful backlinks. Comment links and forum posts have their place – usually to participate in the conversation surrounding your chosen issues (ecommerce, environmental issues, tech sales, whatever). But when you get a guest blog or a shout out from another site that includes a backlink to your site with your preferred anchor text, it sends a very clear message to your readers and to Google (and the other big search engines). It says: “Hey! This person is worth your time and attention!”

So how can you get these guest blogs and how can you best use them to your advantage? Let's find out.

• What is Content Marketing And How Can It Benefit Your Business?
• How To Plan Content Marketing Strategies For Your Website
• How To Create A Schedule For Your Content Marketing Plan

If you've been following us since the beginning, hopefully by now you have a broad idea of how you're going to accelerate your content marketing, improve your online presence, and hopefully drive conversions. But you might also find yourself thinking: “This is a big job! How can I do it all on my own AND run my whole company?”

What Is Good Web Design and Why Do You Need It?

Creating a website is not a big deal at all! You don’t necessarily need a professional PHP or HTML 5 website. There are several platforms out there that offer options that work well on a tight budget (although these, of course, these have limitations). The main thing your website needs is to be clear and easy-to-understand along with being easy on the eye. Make it simple for users to quickly find the information they need. If the visitors can easily connect with your business website, they will start to trust you and begin to develop a relationship with you. Users will definitely want to find out more. Let’s take a look at what factors make a good website and why you should focus on them.

If you're just joining us now, take a minute and familiarize yourself with the first two articles in our series so that you know what we're talking about here.

• What is Content Marketing And How Can It Benefit Your Business?
• How To Plan Content Marketing Strategies For Your Website

Setting Goals

As we discussed last week, if you don't set concrete goals, then you have nothing by which to measure your efforts. This is true of everything, but in content marketing, this takes a few forms: regular, ongoing goals, discrete goals, and long-term goals. They all affect each other in the long run, and we'll see how shortly. A few notes about schedules before we get started. Some of these points may seem like common sense, but you'd be surprised how many sites ignore them.

Here's a checklist of what I recommend you look for when “shopping your own shop”:

1. How do you define success?
2. What's keeping you on track for your eventual goal?
3. Do you have only one goal or do you have various smaller sub-goals?

Hopefully even these few questions have started you thinking about how important it is to have an effective content plan and editorial schedule in place for your website before you start cranking out content (or squeezing it out, or dragging it out). Having a strong, well-defined plan in place before you begin will help keep you on track for your goals and make managing other authors easier (we'll get to that next week!).

This may mean you getting that job position you applied for or further consolidation of a business relationship. That is why it is very important to know how to go about making an effective follow-up letter so you can grab a higher chance of a favorable outcome. Here are some guidelines on how to do just that.

This is the first article in a series of articles about content marketing. Over the next five weeks, you’ll learn how to plan your content marketing strategy, how to get and manage multiple authors for your site, why your strategy should span multiple web properties, and how to drive traffic to your site with content marketing events.

With the help of your lead generation efforts, your small business will benefit from powerful online presence and bolster your credibility as an expert in your field. The only problem is it must be done the right way and there are just so many things that could go wrong with your site.

We'll be releasing more video in the coming weeks on our YouTube channel (don't forget to subscribe!). Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Whilst a specialist will no doubt help direct the social campaign of a company, the rewards of effective use of social media can only be achieved when said businesses are using social accounts on a daily basis to engage with their audiences. I will now explain further using the example of Twitter to illustrate why this is the case.

With technology, we now have the tools to make marketing much easier. But the downside is that technology also makes it less effective. Think about this, your TV ads may not reach your intended audience who use TiVo to record their favorite programs. Caller ID now blocks calls from marketers. Your e-mail campaigns can easily be blocked by spam filters, while RSS and online media sites can put a serious damper on your newspaper and magazine advertisements.

What's more, traditional advertising and online initiatives to find more customers are very expensive.

So what's a business owner to do?  Turn to inbound marketing!

Many copywriters praise the virtues of the swipe file, a collection of what they consider well-written articles, headlines, offers, etc. When they need an idea, they simply reference this file and "swipe" a headline that will work for them and change a few details. But even more valuable than a swipe file is a ready stock of headline formulas--tried and tested headlines that work every time. There are lots of these, but here are five of the best. Memorize them and you'll always have a powerful headline for any occasion.

Quite seriously though, installing and operating Rank Checker really is a fairly simple process that almost anyone should be able to complete with relative ease, as long as they follow the step-by-step instructions that we're posting below. 

In the simplest terms possible, Rank Checker allows you to keep tabs on where your business is ranking for the keywords that you want to capture in search.

So where do you begin to try to grow the online visibility of your local business?  Here are a few tips to get any business owner headed in the right direction with online marketing.

Choosing 5 winners from the many entries was difficult, but we did so based on the quality of the entry and the persuasiveness of the pitch, among other factors. Some of you told about your business in detail and others tried to swing a deal in your quote request. After much deliberation, I’m very pleased to announce that we’ve selected our 5 winners.

So, how can local businesses turn a negative review to their advantage?

Strong copywriting on the internet is the same as speaking to a group in an auditorium with a firm, confident voice. When you have a site with good copy on it, people pay attention, listen, and trust you.

Weak copy erodes consumer confidence, is uninformative, and ultimately costs you money. In this list we'll run down five ways you can fire up your ecommerce copywriting, allowing you to draw people in, keep them there, and convert them into sales.

So what can be done?  What steps can you take to make sure that your social network profiles are safe and secure? 

The result is a new emerging shopping trend termed “social shopping”. This is newly coined phrase to explain the common practice of youngsters to seek advice from friends before buying anything, from clothes and shoes to laptops and electronics. Interestingly this does not imply that people go shopping in a group-instead it involves smart use of the smart phone! According to a study conducted by Yahoo! social shopping has revolutionized the way in which people buy clothes now.

While we still plan to implement a comment module for our CMS, we decided that we couldn't go without comments any longer. We wanted to give our users a voice and start building a genuine community. That's why, as of today, all of our articles, tutorials, and download pages will now feature comments using Disqus.

Why We Chose Disqus

We've had our eye on Disqus for a while now. A few of our client sites are outfitted with Disqus and when we built our business contest page, we decided to try it out as well. We liked it a lot.

There are some features that makes Disqus particularly appealing: login through multiple providers (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, OpenID), easy moderation, and quick installation time. It didn't take more than a half hour to integrate the comment into our site.

So What Now?

As I mentioned above, we really wanted to begin building our community. We wanted to hear your input, answer your questions, and allow you to interact with other users from all over the world. We wanted to give our guest authors an opportunity to see feedback on their awesome articles. Most of all, we just wanted to provide a great environment for business owners, programmers, and designers to come together around their passions.

Eventually we'll migrate to our own comment system, but until then, we'll be using Disqus. With that announcement, we can't wait to hear what you have to say!

Just as the search engines have taken notice and adjusted the way they index and display content, so too must your business develop an online marketing strategy that focuses on the creation of quality content rather than an overreliance on SEO and empty copy.  

In light of the above, now is the time to utilize the services of a professional copywriter who can create compelling and quality content that will advance your brand in the eyes of readers.

Content is king and drives traffic, which, in turn, drives revenue. Below we will discuss ten benefits of using professional freelance copywriters.

Ultimate Business Contest: Win A Free Website - $21,000+ In Prizes

Update: The contest is now closed. Special thanks to all of our contestants and sponsors. We'll announce the winning entries on our blog on Tuesday, May 31.

We’re having a contest and if you’re a small business owner, you have a chance to win big! We’re giving away over $21,000 $22,000 in prizes, with the Grand Prize package featuring a free business website valued up to $10,000 and other prizes from our sponsors, all designed to boost your business’ success online.

Interested in increasing your bottom line, improving the image and visibility of your business, and doing it all for free? Read on!

That's why I'm very honored to announce that Virtuosi Media has been selected as one of the best web design and development companies in 2010 by Web Hosting Search, a website that provides some of the best webhosting reviews on the internet.

Thanks, Web Hosting Search and thank you to our users and clients as well. We continue working hard for you. Be sure to check out our web design portfolio and to check out our online business resources.

How well does your website represent your business? Do you even have a website? What kind of impression does your website make on visitors who could become customers? Do you convey a professional, competent image? Are your visitors able to find the information they need?

As the owner of a Vancouver-based web design company and a heavy user of the web, I’ve seen my fair share of business websites and not all of them have been pretty. In fact, some of them have been downright frustrating to use. And others, dare I say it, have made me cringe to even look at them because of the design.

If your business has an unprofessional website, you’re driving away potential customers and ultimately it means that you’re losing money. There are a few common issues that many unprofessional websites share. As I cover each issue, I’ll also point you towards a solution.

And yet, how many of us approach our businesses, our websites, and our products the exact same way?

You’re a programmer and you have a googolplex of ideas for web apps, iPhone apps, Android apps, desktop apps, and apps for the holodeck that you’re building in your garage (and your wife won’t let you get any more parts for it until you get a few venture capital partners or until the prices of replicator and tractor beam units come down to a more reasonable level). Despite your many ideas and your obvious ability to program them with such beautiful code that it would make Shakespeare weep if only he had been a programmer and, um, if he were still alive; you have a slight problem.

You can’t design.

It’s not that you personally can’t design, it’s just that you happened to choose a profession that requires terabytes of left brain thinking. In fact, the left side of your brain apparently fired the right side of your brain in a cost-cutting move the minute it became CEO of your daily activities. The right side of your brain has been missing ever since and is currently believed to be sipping hot Earl Grey tea with a group of yetis in the Adirondack mountains wearing the socks that keep disappearing from your laundry.

Because of your tea-sipping, yeti-loving absent hemisphere of gray matter, your designs are somewhat lacking. I don’t mean that in a bad way, unless, of course, you didn’t mean to give that squirrel sitting outside your window watching you program a seizure when you loaded your app.

Does Good Design Matter?

“Oh yeah?” You say as you lean back in your ergonomic black leather chair, arms folded and basking in the glow of your dual 23” monitors. “Well, it’s not like good design matters – just look at how successful and popular Craigslist is.”

“Oh my,” say I, quite a bit flustered and without words until I remember what happened to MySpace, “…but whatever happened to MySpace?”

Aha! Touché!

You see, design matters a great deal to any website or application. Chances are that your end users aren’t able to read the green code that’s streaming down in the background of your app (give them a break, they’re newly unplugged from the Matrix and probably don’t yet know that the cake was a lie). Their main experience isn’t with your beautiful code, but with the design of your application and its user interface.

Did you know that you only get milliseconds before a user forms a subconscious opinion about your application or website? Getting that first impression right is critical because it will influence how your users use and view your work from that point forward. Even if your application functions flawlessly from a technical view, it will still face significant psychological hurdles because of a poor visual first impression.

Craigslist wouldn’t fly if it were launched as is today, much like a hippo trying to gain orbit on a pair of butterfly wings. Even Fantasia couldn’t pull that off. Craigslist is a holdover from the early days of the web. It gained critical mass early on and any better looking competitors now have to overcome the user base problem, which is neither insignificant nor inexpensive. Craigslist’s outdated design also sets an appropriate psychological tone for its users, who are looking for a cheap deal.

Your app isn’t in the same situation as Craigslist and you don’t have the same built-in advantages. It’s 2011 and poor design won’t cut it anymore. If you want to remain competitive, gain a decent user base, and become even marginally profitable, you need to have a solid design. It doesn’t mean that your app needs to be the digital equivalent of the Mona Lisa, but it needs be solid. Usable. Reliable. Think more Norman Rockwell and less Pablo Picasso.

Design Principles You Can Reproduce In A Lab Experiment

Now, I ‘m not God’s gift to the design world. I have some artistic talent, but some of my early designs probably brought at least a few squirrels to a premature end. I’ve improved over time, but I look at the absolute genius and imagination of some the designs I see on the web or in print and I wish that I had the chops to pull something like that off. Perhaps someday I will.

I think many of us find ourselves in that position. What is design, anyways? Is it all just touchy-feely-wait-for-inspiration-from-your-own-personal-creative-muse or are there actually rules? As programmers, we like rules. In fact, the more that I think about it, graphic design should have an API, shouldn’t it? A well-documented, reliable API that works every time, with nary a fail whale to be seen.

Truly great design masterpieces do require a certain amount of innate talent. That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are rules and principles to design, underlying concepts that serve as a solid foundation for the meaning you’re trying to convey through your work. There’s no guarantee that a good design will make whatever project you’re working on successful – there are far too many other factors involved. However, a bad design will almost certainly sink any ship before it’s even out of port. I’ve learned a few of the principles I’m about to share the hard way, but the reason I’m sharing them is so that you’ll be able to skip straight to the end of the book to find out what happens.

Before diving into specific principles, I want to emphasize a higher level concept. Your design should never be the main attraction. If it calls too much attention to itself, it prevents your users from doing what they want to do. Good design enables; it never shouts. The goal of your application as a whole shouldn’t be to show off how cool it is – drama queens get frustrating after a while, just like the whiney kids in the supermarket – but it should be to allow your users to feel awesome because it helps them do cool things. If you do things right, your users won’t even notice your app because they’ll be too busy using it.

And now for specific, actionable principles that you can use to help improve your designs and make them solid. You may not win any awards, but at least you won’t be laughed out of the room because you mistakenly thought Halloween was a week earlier than it actually was and so you showed up to work dressed as a giant bunny rabbit eating a raw carrot.

• Design First - Design shouldn't be an afterthought; it should be a first-class member of the planning stage. Your user interface and the flow of your application will most certainly affect your programming decisions. If you simply slap on a design afterwards, it shows. Your design is the way your users interact with your programming and they'll form their opinions first and largely based on your design. Give design its proper importance.
• Stay Simple - Don't try to do anything too fancy or adventurous. Get the basics down first, then you can start experimenting. Don't try to emulate the Star Trek computer interface. It’s still too soon for that – we’re just not ready.
• Be Consistent - A consistent design is part of the foundation of a good design. Keep track of your margins, sizes, and placement and maintain them throughout the design. Use the same icons and wording in the same order and location for similar functions throughout your application to minimize confusion.
• Prioritize - What is the primary purpose of the design? Every page, every screen should have a primary action that it’s trying to get the user to perform. Emphasize that purpose. Make it obvious.
• Remove Clutter - Only include the elements that are necessary to the design. Remove everything else. Ruthlessly.
• Use Whitespace - Allow for proper margins. Large blocks of text with little or no margins aren't very readable. Ditto for other design elements.
• Use A Color Palette - You shouldn't use more than 4-5 colors in total. If you're having trouble choosing a color scheme, check my article on choosing a color scheme for your website.
• Consistent Fonts - Stick to one or two fonts. Use them consistently, usually one for headings, one for paragraph text. Calculate and maintain consistent font-sizes, line-heights, and line-spacing. Do not use Comic Sans unless you can fend off rabid velociraptor zombies.

As you begin to develop your skills and master the basics, play around with different mediums and different styles. Learn the basics. Know what works and why. Only then can you start bending and breaking rules, so long as you do them with a purpose. You’ll find that your most creative moments will be those when you take two very different ideas or styles and merge them into something new that still somehow works.

If you want to learn more details about tools and implementation, check out any of the following design blogs:

• Smashing Magazine
• PSD Tuts
• Abuzeedo
• UX Booth
• I love typography
• Jason Santa Maria

Of course, I'd love it if you also came back to visit us. We'll be posting more articles on design and the future and we need more writers and readers. If you enjoyed this article or found it useful in improving your designs, please share it with your vast social media empire, er, I mean friends. Yeah, that’s it…share it with your friends.

Let me give you a few highlights of what the redesign includes:

A completely new site design - We did a whole lot more than just a new coat of paint. If you remember our old site, there isn't much that the two designs have in common. We wanted a more polished and elegant feel and so we went all out. 

You'll find little details all over the site where we tried to go the extra mile.  For this redesign, we redid all of the artwork, the fonts, and the copy. There are well over 40 custom icons across the site, with more to come. We've progressively enhanced our design. If you browse the site in different browsers, you'll notice a slight difference between Internet Explorer 8 and older versions of IE and modern browsers like IE9, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. (Also, despite our massive tutorial on the topic, we've dropped IE6 support for our website and all products going forward. Talk about a relief!) 

New software - Our old site was a static site, but now we've installed a content management system which will make maintenance and management far easier. We were able to create over 30 different page configurations without breaking a sweat. More on that below. 

More content - If you haven't noticed, our new site is significantly bigger. We've expanded our content categories and we've added new content. We have a lot in the pipeline that we'll be releasing over the coming months. If you're interested in business, development, or design,  you'll love our site. We are also accepting external authors for the first time, so if you have a passion for any of those topics and want to write about them, let us know.

A new search interface - Searching for information on our site should now be a lot easier. We have search available on every page and also an advanced search feature. If you're familiar with any Google search hacks, a lot of those will work on our website as well.

A brand new tagging system - If you want to browse different topics across our site, our new tagging system will be your new best friend. Tags are available at the bottom of most pages and our tag filter can help you narrow your focus by creating tag sets with just a few short clicks. If you want to see all of our tags at once, check out our tag cloud.

RSS and Atom feeds for every category, tag set, and search - We went all out on this one. Now you can subscribe to our content in multiple ways. Take a look at our feed directory for our category feeds. Or, if you just want to subscribe for a certain tag or keyword, we offer feeds for every search and tag set.

The Real Deal

While we're excited about the website redesign, which we've been working on over the last few weeks, what really has us pumped up is the software that the site is running on. We've built a completely new type of content management system and we're about to run it through its paces. 

I'm not going to give away too much information about it just yet. I will say, however, that it will be a commercial CMS and that it is in a late alpha stage. We still have some features to add like user registration and comments, which we'll gradually roll out on this site over the next weeks and months.

When we get to a stage with our CMS where we feel comfortable with its stability and feature set, we'll begin a limited developer beta to really begin testing it out and to give developers a chance to begin building extensions. After that, we'll open it up for a public beta. We will have an email list for it in the future, but for now, if you're interested, send us an email.

Finally, I want to point out our email newsletters. We're going to be sending out 3 different email newsletters about once month, one for those interested in business, one for developers, and one for designers. In our newsletters, we'll be highlighting articles, products, and news of interest from our site and from around the web. Sign up is free and we'll even throw in some goodies from time to time.

That's it. We would love to know what you think of our new site. Since we're still testing out our software, there are bound to be a few hiccups. If you have any problems, let us know and we'll try to fix it right away. Thanks, everyone!

Many of these anti-patterns were developed in the early days of the web when any interactivity beyond the hyperlink was novel, even if it was unfriendly to users. Even today from time to time, clients, colleagues, and family members all get that telltale gleam in their eyes and somehow you just know what is going to come next.

"Hey, what if we...", they start to say as your eyes gloss over and you silently wonder how you arrived in your current situation.

In this brief article, I'm going to give you the winning argument for most of these impending design battles. You won't win every battle, but you'll have a lot better chance at avoiding having to implement anti-patterns in your designs.

Included in this pack are the following social media sites:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Digg
• Reddit
• LinkedIn
• Delicious
• StumbleUpon
• MySpace
• Technorati
• Yahoo Buzz
• Google Buzz
• Slashdot
• Plus icons for email and RSS.

Each button comes in full color and grayscale versions and is 50px X 50px. Download format is a layered .png file.

There are many places on the web that will help you mix-and-match a color palette. Everything from color wheels and color pickers to hex color charts and lists of all named HTML colors. In fact, there are entire design communities that revolve around and celebrate color. Adobe Kuler, ColourLovers, Color Scheme Designer, ColorMatch5K ColorJack, and ColorStream (iPhone app) are just a few of those communities and tools that you can use to look for inspiration or for creating that perfect color scheme.

1. Danger: Not Knowing Your Audience Can Be Deadly

Writing for the web is different than writing for the printed page. Many techniques will carry over, but there are some subtle differences of which you should take note. The web is an interactive medium and your users are generally looking for specific types of information rather than passively consuming a story or an article.

Audience attention span is much shorter online than it is for printed media and that means that your readers are less likely to make a time commitment if you don't capture their attention immediately and then hold it through out your piece. Readers are also far more likely to skim through any lengthy amount of writing and so your titles and headings have an increased importance online. The stakes are extremely high because if you fail to keep a reader's attention at any point, they will leave and use a search engine to find a more relevant website.

1. Tips for Staying Focused

If you are having trouble staying on task there are several techniques available:

• Do the thing you loathe first. Sometimes by getting your most dreaded task out of the way you will enjoy the rest of your day.
• Break down a big job into sections and attack each section at a time.
• Each day set a timer for 10 minutes and perform as many repetitive tasks as you can in those 10 minutes.
• Reward yourself whenever you complete a task - talk to a co-worker briefly, get a cup of tea, treat yourself to chocolate at lunch or take a short walk.

Try all four methods to find out which method works for you.

1. Renegotiate Contracts

Many vendors will agree to reduce your contract rates especially if you dictate to them that another vendor has offered you a better rate. Below are some specific types of contracts you might be able to renegotiate:

Telephone - I know of someone that was paying $500 on his cell phone alone per month. I urged this individual to renegotiate his contract. I have also renegotiated our business services and saved $2,000 per year on long-distance and regular business services.

Mortgage - With mortgage rates not able to retreat further than low tide now is the time to refinance with a lower rate. Make sure to check that the penalty for ending the higher rate mortgage is not more than the interest rate savings over the term of the mortgage.

Joomla's admin interface can be overwhelming at times. To be honest, the way some things are organized can be confusing for beginners and may take a while to get used to. I'm going to attempt to help minimize the confusion by guiding you through some of the common tasks you'll face when creating a website.

If you've never logged into the administration section of Joomla, you can find it by typing the URL of your root Joomla directory and then adding administrator/. The login page should appear and you should login using the username and password chosen during installation.

What Is Joomla?

First, let me explain briefly what Joomla is. Joomla is a Content Management System, also referred to as a CMS. It may sound like a mouthful, but a CMS is basically a piece of software that you can install on your server that will allow you to quickly build and easily manage your website.

One of the nice things about Joomla is that it's free and open source. It also has a very large community of developers around it, so if you need help with something, chances are someone in the forum will be able to assist you. The large community also means that there are numerous add-ons, called extensions, that are available for Joomla that will allow you to upgrade and enhance the capabilities of your website.

But that doesn't mean that your business can't benefit from it if you're able to use it correctly.

A fad? Let me explain. Recent studies have been producing statistics that severely undercut the media hype around Twitter. I'll first present the data and then dissect it in a way that's meaningful to your business. Some of the data will vary depending on the date, the methodology, and the sample size of each study, but it should provide a clear picture in aggregate.

Twitter is growing, with an estimated 44.5 million unique visitors in June 2009, up 19% from the previous month. 45% of those visitors are from the United States. According to Alexa, a web stats company, Twitter is the 20th most popular site on the internet and Compete ranks it as the third most popular social network. It also ranks third behind Facebook and email as a way to share links.

Preparing a bank reconciliation, or a bank rec, at the end of each month is one of the best ways you can check the accuracy of your accounting records. A bank reconciliation statement will confirm that all the transactions in your cash account match those of your bank statement and vice versa. Bank reconciliations not only catch errors and adjustments but they can also discourage fraud.

In this article, you will learn how to prepare a bank reconciliation and I will define all of the related terminology. I'll also give you a simple example that you can use as a bank reconciliation template and answer some of the more common questions people will have about procedures and policy.

All right, you say, that's great advice, but what does it mean? How do you apply it? This isn't one of your normal viral marketing articles. I'm going to break down and dissect techniques that will give your blog articles, your tutorials, and your written content a chance to go viral.

What this article isn't is an article about how to create a viral video of a cat, someone falling down a flight of steps, or a dancing baby. In fact, I'm not going to talk about videos at all. Instead, I'm going to focus on the intentional steps that you can take when writing website copy that will be beneficial to your business and your website.

Will following these tips guarantee you'll instantly be the top site on the internet and everything that you touch will turn to gold? No, no one hits a home run every time and you might have to do some trial and error before you get it right. These aren't tricks; they're solid principles that you should be incorporating into your writing anyway, but they will give your written website content a better and a more consistent opportunity of becoming a talking point around the web.

This is your viral strategy tutorial and you have our permission to vote for it, link to it, submit it, tweet it, share it, and tell your friends about it.

What's different about this SEO guide? We're not a search engine optimization company and I'm not trying to sell you SEO services. I hate buzzwords without meaning or explanation (or value), so I'm going to be specific, not generic. This isn't a guide for how to build links or how to use social media effectively; it focuses solely on on-page optimization techniques.

Best of all? These are simple tips and tricks that you can incorporate into your website without much effort. It should take about 10 minutes to read this SEO tutorial for beginners, but implementing it will begin a process that will make a difference for your search engine rankings - you'll rank higher and convert more effectively.

In order to save you time, I've compiled a list of PHP, Perl, and JavaScript regular expressions for common use cases that have been tested and are ready to go. This isn't a regular expression tutorial or even a reference; you can think of it more as a cheatsheet for when you just need the regex but don't want to put a lot of time into relearning regular expressions.

Stop. Ok, I feel your frustration. You're a web developer and you're ready to tear your hair out because you have to support Internet Explorer 6, but, to put it tactfully, IE6 doesn't support you. You've spent hours on it, but you just can't seem to get your layout right. I can empathize. I can also help.

This isn't one of those rants about IE6 or a campaign to try to kill it. There are enough of those around the web, but they don't help if you need to support IE6 because it still has a significant enough marketshare that you can't ignore it for business reasons. No, this is the resource you've been hoping for.

I've scoured the web for resources and also included some of my own fixes for IE6 and now I've put it all together in this cheatsheet/reference manual as a resource for anyone who has to deal with Internet Explorer 6. Where possible, I've done my best to provide the cleanest and valid solutions to each bug instead of ugly hacks. I've also tried to give proper credit for each case, but some of the solutions have been shared so many times that finding the original discover of each fix is difficult. If you see a missing credit or if I missed a bug and fix, please contact me and let me know and I'll update this page.

This massive IE6 guide took a while to put together, so bookmark it, share it, tweet it, and use it to save yourself and your coworkers hours of screaming at your monitor and banging your head against your desk or other inanimate objects. Don't be fooled, however, this cheatsheet is as much for me as it is for you.

If you haven't read the previous articles yet, I encourage you to read them first as this article will help solidify the concepts explained in the first two parts of this series.

If you haven't read the first article yet, I encourage you to read it first as this article will build on some of the principles established in the first.

Track Individual Twitter Accounts

First we'll look at ways to track individual accounts. You can look up statistics for your own account, but that's not the only way you can use these services. You can also use them to track your competition or people you'd like to emulate to see how they use Twitter.

Done right, the best employee of any business is its website. The website provides a first impression into the professionalism of your brand. It gives technical support, issues follow-up emails, lists contact information, and offers driving directions. A business website can generate leads, close sales, and create long-term fans.

We've done some research and found 4 niche social bookmarking sites for businesses. These sites aren't for business news, but rather focus on the entrepreneurial side of business and how you can improve all aspects of your company. Whether you're looking to improve your business or have business-related content you want to promote, we've gathered together the information that you really want to know.

Stop! Before you rush to submit all of your content, we ask that you respect these bookmarking sites. Be relevant. Be social. Write good content. Don't spam.

If you sign up for any of these sites, we'd love to be your first friend. Find our profiles and befriend or follow us. And if you have great content, be sure to let us know about it, we just might promote it.

Accounting software such as Quickbooks and Simply Accounting have a built-in Statement of Financial Position (SFP) and the Statement of Profit and Loss (P&L). These accounting packages also have budget modules in order to create a budget that reflects your business plan that can then be compared against your actual results. Either program is good for small business but I favor Quickbooks because of its flexibility.

While I'm not going to go into the specifics of setting up either Quickbooks or Simply Accounting, both have set-up wizards that will guide you through the process. Instead, I'm going to focus on some basic concepts that will enable you to understand the accounting principles used by both programs.

I've looked at a few rounded corner solutions, but so far I haven't really found what I was looking for, so I decided to try working it out myself. I wanted a solution that was lightweight, valid, cross-browser, and didn't require JavaScript. The technique I came up with isn't the end all solution for rounded corners and I'm sure that I'm not the first to use it, but it did meet my needs, and so I'm satisfied with the result. The only caveat I'll make before we dive into the code is that I did end up needing a single line of JavaScript in order to make Internet Explorer 6 function properly without flickering. Let's get started.

If you're just starting out, chances are that you are programming in a procedural manner. In a way, procedural programming could also be called linear programming. One thing happens and then the next. Code is executed from the top of the file to the bottom.

OOP isn't as linear as procedural programming. Code is often broken up and distributed across multiple files, each one with a single purpose. OOP is also more abstract than procedural programming because it looks for patterns and reusability. The same code can be loaded and executed many times to accomplish a task without having to retype it.

A Quick Overview Of Exchanging Links

A link exchange, also called a link swap or a reciprocal link, is a simple concept from the early days of the web. Bob contacts Mary and offers to link to her website from his site if she will do the same in return. Voila, a link exchange!

The purpose of a link exchange used to be to send traffic from one site to another, but as search engines gained in popularity and usefulness, people discovered that the more links they had pointing to their site, the higher their site would rank in the search engines. Link exchanges multiplied, in some cases even morphing into link farms, pages with nothing but links pointing to other sites.

Of course, the search engines eventually caught on to this tactic. They began to add other factors into their ranking formula and over time, the power of a single backlink became diluted in comparison to what it once was. Links to your web pages are still a major part of getting them to rank well, but the effectiveness of the classic link exchange is dead.

Don't believe me? Let's put link exchanging to the test.

In its simplest form, RSS is really just a list of similar links with a title and description. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and it is a dialect of XML. RSS comes in three versions: 0.91, 0.92, and 2.0; with version 2.0 as the most current and common version. You can download the sample files for this tutorial here.

How is RSS used?

RSS is used in many different ways by both people and websites. In general, because RSS works as a syndication channel for a list of links, any consumer of the information in that channel is called a subscriber.

One of the largest benefits to RSS is that you can view headlines from multiple sites without having to visit them directly. This is usually done using a program called a feed reader, which gathers all of the different RSS feeds that you instruct it to and displays them in a central location. Although there are many different feed readers out there, Google Reader and My Yahoo! are two of the more popular ones.

Many RSS feeds are updated dynamically whenever new content is added and thus enable subscribers to visit sites only when there are updates. This saves an enormous amount of time for users who wish to keep track of news or information on a variety of websites. Some RSS feeds even contain the entire piece of content and allow subscribers to view it without ever having to leave their feed reader.

Websites can also get the contents of an RSS feed and display them as a section of their website. Because websites aren't limited to just their own RSS feeds, this allows them to display content from all over the internet. Although we won't cover reading RSS feeds in this tutorial, displaying external RSS feeds on your site can be a great way to augement your already existing content.

You've paid a company a lot of money to have your site submitted to thousands of directories. You may have taken the time to list yourself in hundreds of search engines. You've tried increasing your PageRank, decreasing your outbound links, and buying incoming links from important sites.

You have (multiple) accounts with many of the social bookmarking sites and you've tried MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and a myriad of other social networking sites. You've tried to build up a network of blogs, Squidoo pages, and other websites in an effort to drive traffic to your site and to get your site higher in the search engine results page for that one vital keyword.

You've done all this to promote your site...and it's not working.

No one's clicking on your ads. You aren't selling as much of your affiliate products as the internet marketers told you that you would. Your sales conversions are abysmal. You just don't get enough traffic and the traffic that you do get doesn't stay on the site and doesn't do what you want it to do. You've poured so much time and energy into your site, but it seems like it's been an absolute waste.

Why?

MooTools is a JavaScript library that can be used to manipulate parts of your web page, dynamically transmit data without reloading the page, and it also provides numerous effects, transitions, and user interface tools. This tutorial covers some of the basics for working with MooTools version 1.11, although it should also apply to version 1.2 as well. If you don't know JavaScript yet, you'll pick up many of its basic concepts by reading through to the end.

What exactly is a JavaScript library? JavaScript is a powerful programming language, but it can be difficult to understand and implement. MooTools is a collection of files written with JavaScript and it extends the functionality of the language and also provides shortcuts for performing certain tasks.

There are many JavaScript libraries available such as Prototype, YUI, and JQuery, but it is important to note that MooTools is not compatible with them. This means that if you include MooTools with another library, chances are that your page isn't going to function in the correct manner. So if you want to use MooTools, you're going to have to use it exclusively.