Thought I’d pass along a few of the interesting sites I found last week…
Inventables
Bendable wood, aluminum foam, and translucent concrete are just some of the super-cool (and pretty affordable) materials available from Inventables – the “innovator’s hardware store”.
Web design tools and resources I use
A pretty comprehensive list of resources (with links) from Ethan at Elementiks. I typically use my bookmarking service (pinboard.in) to keep track of this type of info, but I really like the look of this page and find it very easy to use.
Google Recipes
Did you know Google’s getting into recipe searches? Take a look at this article if you want to make recipes on your site more Google-friendly. There’s even a hRecipe WordPress plugin that seems to incorporate these microformat standards (although I haven’t tested it.)
The Case of the Missing Design Apprentice (ZURB)
Talk about a timely article… At the last Boulder Open Coffee Club, we talked about this seemingly always-present gap between companies seeking programming talent (UI/UX, front-end, back-end) and people who are looking for work, but may not have the exact skillset required. If companies are no longer willing to take the time and effort to “train someone up” for these roles, perhaps the community should.
Google Courts Yahoo Users with New Delicious Bookmarks Importer Tool
I love delicious.com, but with Yahoo’s decision to shut it down sell it, now may be the time to make the move. I switched to pinboard a couple of years ago, but it looks like you can now roll everything over to Google, too.
And, just for fun…
Artist Mia van Beek can take your child’s drawings and turn them into jewelry or keyrings.
So, you’ve created a great website for your business and sent an email out to friends and family letting them know you’re up and running. You’re all done… Just sit back and let the traffic come to you, right?
Not quite.
Your website is only the starting point for building your reputation, creating a community, or expanding your reach. You need to get your message out to and participate in the communities you want to reach, but if you’re not a digital native, this task can be quite daunting.
But, I have a blog (that I actually post to). Isn’t that enough?
Do you offer and email subscriptions? Are you using Feedburner to optimize/publicize/monitize your feed? Are you keeping track of analytics for your feed? Are you using automated services like Twitterfeed () or Involver (Facebook) to push your feed to Twitter or Facebook? For corporate types, have you connected your WordPress blog with your LinkedIn profile?
AAAAAAAA!!!!!
Although the list of services can seem overwhelming, the good news is that most of them require just a little bit of initial setup and then you’re done – you focus on creating content for your blog and let these services spread it the web.
A few tips…
- Start with Feedburner. “Burn” your feed and set it up for email subscriptions.
- Change the default feed on your website to your Feedburner feed.
- There are several plugins available for WordPress that will handle this for you, or if you’re using WordPress+Thesis, you can set this up from the Dashboard –> Thesis –> Site Options –> Syndication/Feed URL.
- Once your feed is setup and you’re ready to expand, I’d recommend starting with a Twitterfeed hookup to Twitter.
- If you’re new to Twitter, make sure you spend some time familiarizing yourself with the community and general rules of posting etiquette.
- Wendy Kier has some good advice about giving your Twitter a facelift (I especially liked #4 – Make your Tweets Rare) and you can learn all you ever wanted to know about Twitter (and then some!) from the awesome folks at Pistachio Consulting.
You can, of course, continue the process with Facebook and LinkedIn and, depending on your business, you even may want to get involved in location-based services like Google Places, Foursquare, or Gowalla, or review sites like Yelp.
Still confused? Contact us for help.
