If you are like me then at some time using Pinterest you have come across a pin that you know a friend or family member would like to see, but have no way of showing it to them directly on Pinterest. What I used to do was re-pin the item and share it with them on Facebook. I’ve often wished there was a Pinterest equivelent of Facebook’s “Share” feature. Well, now there is. Pinterest has introduced a feature where you can share pins directly with other Pinners, Facebook friends or email contacts. For all the details go to the Pinterest Blog.

Tags: Pinning, Pinterest, Sharing Buttons, Social Media

The folks over at Gremlin have shared this nice info-graphic to highlight some basic doss and don’ts of Social Media Marketing:

Tags: Facebook, Info-Graphic, Social Media. Twitter

I found this on Facebook and it made me chuckle.

Tags: Facebook. Twitter, Funny, Humor, Pinterest, Social Media

Web Pro News reported today that Amazon has given webmasters and bloggers a new tool to help readers save content to read later. Similar to social media sharing buttons, such as Facebook’s “share” button, Amazon has unvieled a button that can be intserted onto a website or blog that allows users to send the site content directly to their Kindle so that they can read it later.

A spokesperson for Amazon said:

“Adding the Send to Kindle Button opens a website to millions of Kindle customers who can now enjoy the content on Kindle… Readers often encounter news articles, blog posts and other content on the web that they want to read but don’t have time to do so immediately. The Send to Kindle Button lets people easily send that content to their Kindle so they can it read later.

Just send once and read everywhere on any Kindle device or free reading app. No more hunting around for that website or blog that caught your eye – just open your Kindle and all the content you sent is right there. The Send to Kindle Button is also great for readers who want to collect content from the web to use in work projects, school assignments, or hobbies.

The new Send to Kindle website button is available here (WordPress users should look here). It joins previous Kindle apps for browsers, desktops, Android phones and email.

Tags: Amazon, blogging, Kindle, Sharing Buttons, Social Media

If you are a webmaster or work with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or SEM (Search Engine Marketing) you know that you can never have too much data about who is visiting your website and how they found it. It can help you find out where to focus your SEO energies and if your current strategies are having any effect.  Today Pinterest gave us all a new analytics tool to all those who are using Pinterest for their business.

If you have a verified website attached to your Pinterest account, you will be able to access data concerning how many people have pinned items from your site, how many people have seen these pins and how many people visited your site from Pinterest. In addition this tool will show a selection of your most re-pinned, most clicked and most recent pins so you can see how other pinners are interacting with your Pinterest content. This will help a great deal with focusing Pinterest campaigns on what people are actually interested in.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about this announcement is that Pinterest isn’t finished, in the coming months they hope to “add new tools and more detailed insights.” Very good news indeed!

To see the whole announcement, go to Oh, How Pinteresting!, Introducing Pinterest Web Analytics.

For more information regarding using Pinterest for your business, go to Pinterest’s Business page.

Tags: Pinterest, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEM, SEO, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

I am asked all the time what I think the most important aspect(s) of web design are. There are many may factors to consider (many of which I will be addressing in future blog posts, but I think my number one aspect is:

• The Website User is #1: While there are other important things to focus your design on (ie Google-bots for SEO purposes), the potential user must be priority number one. You are building websites for people to use, not just for Google to rank.  There are several things to keep in mind when designing for your users:
  • Use clear easy to understand navigation. – Your site’s navigation should be simple enough for anybody to understand. Clever navigation panes that nobody can understand do nothing but frustrate users and drive them to different sites.
  • Clean Readable Layout – Your layout should be clean with lots of white space to frame the content of the web site. Crowded page elements are difficult to read and use.
  • Design for all common screen resolutions. Don’t assume everyone is surfing the net on a 17+ inch screen like you do. This is even more true with the explosion of portable devices in the last few years.
  • Design with all common browsers in mind. I know, I hate having to check cross-browser compatability as much, if not more, than you do, but it has to be done. You don’t know what browser or what version users will be viewing your site with, so you want it to be viewable in all of them. I suggest–at minimum–testing your web site with Firefox, Internet Explorer (7, 8 and 9 – This is easy to do with IE’s built in developer tools), Safari, Chrome and Opera.

That’s is the top of my list, but the list is long. Stay tuned for more on this topic in the near future.

Tags: Effective Web Design, Web Design, Web Development, web navigation

Picking colors and/or matching colors can be one of the hardest tasks facing a web designer or a graphic designer. I recently ran across a cool on-line tool for
choosing a color palette. Color.hailpixel.com allows the user to scroll through the color spectrum using just a few mouse motions and scrolling and gives a hexadecimal color code for your chosen hue. You can also click to save the hue you have found and proceed to find a complementary color with your first color still on the screen (See screenshot below).

Along with the ColorZilla Firefox plug-in, this has instantly become one of my favorite design tools.

Tags: Color Palettes, Colors, ColorZilla, Firefox, Graphic Design, Web Design

Even if you don’t use it, you’re probably aware that Pinterest is one of the hottest social media sites out there. Thousands of people are “pinning” recipes, funny pictures, and links to their favorite products. It is only natural that the first thought many of us in the web development field had was “How can I use this to boost SEO?” or “How could someone use this to market their brands?” The operative word is “how?”

The first step is setting up a Pinterest page for your business. Then, like with a blog or other social media, you have to build an audience, which means not just pinning pictures of your own products. Pin things that people will want to share and throw your products/services into the mix. Maybe even make sure that your blog posts always have an interesting visual and pin your blog posts, which will give people another avenue to discover your blog and drive traffic to your site. These are some basics I have picked up simply by playing with Pinterest and applying what I already know about social media marketing and SEO, but like anybody passionate about this business I want to learn more. But where can more information be found?

I’ve actually found quite a lot of information about marketing with Pinterest on Pinterest itself (You can find some of my finding on the Leys Web and Graphic Design’s Social Media Pinterest Board). There are also many helpful books being published. One that I haven’t yet had time to read, but which looks promising is Beth Hayden’s Pinfluence.

In short, Pinterest is definitely a potentially powerful social media marketing/SEO tool, if you know how to use it. My recommendation is to learn quickly.

Tags: Pinterest, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Social Media, Social Media Marketing

LinkedIn users will have noticed the addition recently of an “endorsement” feature, with which you can give a single click endorsement to a connections listed skills. When I first noticed this feature some months ago I didn’t think much of it, but a recent discussion by one of my friends on Facebook has made me take a second look at this feature. After doing a little research and running across some good articles on the topic, such as Pam Moore’s and The Brain Yard’s, I am forced to conclude that this is a useless feature than only diminishes LinkedIn’s credibility.

One thing strongly lacking is any sense of context. This feature doesn’t allow for any explanation of the skills you are endorsing or how you experienced them. Am I endorsing Jose’s XHTML coding skills because I worked with him for years and can speak to his specific strength as a coder? Or am I a client for whom he built a website and has limited knowledge of his back-end coding skills? Or am I an old school friend who only knows that he was a B+ average student who struggled with math?

Pam Moore points out that some of the more concerning aspects of this new tool in LinkedIn is the way it is implemented:

• It takes one click, much like the Facebook “like” buttons, which may be a concern depending on how weighted these endorsements become in searches.
• The endorsement feature is being shoved down your throat every time you log-in to LinkedIn or visit a profile.
• People you may just barely know are sending requests for endorsements, which–as The Brain Yards’ article points out–may gilt some into endorsing them. After all, it is just one click.
• It turns LinkedIn to just another social media game, where people collect “endorsements” like Facebook pages collect “likes”

I’ve also had the experience–and been told of similar experiences from a friend of a friend on Facebook–of an acquaintance endorsing me for skills that I know they have no knowledge of, which leaves me feeling somehow obligated to “return the favor” despite my having just as limited knowledge of their skills.

And just why is this needed at all? There is already in place a recommendation feature, where you can write out a testimonial for a contact, explaining your knowledge of their skills in context.

All in all, it seems like this new feature is a waste that will only devalue LinkedIn as a professional social media site. Very sad.

Tags: LinkedIn, Social Media, Social Media Games

Generally speaking, I prefer to code web pages by hand, using NotePad++, rather than using a program such as Adobe Dreamweaver. However, there are some tasks that can be a bit complicated to do manually. For instance, editing WordPress Themes. Even the best HTML coder can get a little mixed up and lost editing WP Themes by hand. I have tried using programs such as Dreamweaver to help when I have web design projects that include WordPress, but with no luck. Fortunately, Adobe itself has posted a four part tutorial on how to use Dreamweaver with WordPress. Check it out here: http://adobe.ly/t2GeLB

Tags: Adobe DReamweaver, Dreamweaver, Tutorials, Web Design, WordPress