Internet Business
Should I say “Us” or “Me” on my website?
Small businesses often dither between using first person or third person on their websites. The temptation is to say “Us,” in order to look like big, professional brands. However, that isn’t always appropriate. Imagine that you are talking to an artist and ask about one of his paintings for sale that might look good on your wall. “We find this to be one of our most meaningful works,” he says. “However, we can sell it to you for the price you are asking for, if you can pay us in cash.” Sounds awkward, right? The “big business” feel can come as outright deceptive sometimes. People like sincerity. If your business has...
Read MoreWhy You Should Never Use Flash for Magazines and Newsletters
PDF is the natural format for material, such as magazines and newsletters, with static content and a fixed page-by-page design. However, there have been several times I notice magazines will show their content on the website using a special Flash plugin. This is a bad, bad idea, for many reasons: Flash is not supported on iOS devices, and is being dropped from Android devices. It’s becoming less popular everywhere. PDF, on the other hand, can be opened on any platform; even smartphone users have a choice of apps for how they want to view them. PDFs are more easily shareable. If one person likes your sample, that person can share it with friends, who can open it...
Read MoreHow to Use the New Facebook Timeline for Your Fan Page
Facebook is a beautiful place to promote your business. Unless you don’t like change or loss of control; in that case, you’re in trouble. Once again Facebook has changed, affecting fan pages for brands, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs and other organizations. The new Timeline format is designed to showcase your fan page in a visually appealing way, giving you more images to customize to represent yourself and your brand. More than that, it can even show historical information! See the Subway page for a great example of how to use the new Timeline features… you can select entries in the timeline from as far back as the 1960s. I couldn’t phrase the...
Read MoreFacebook cuts off the edges of my thumbnail images!
If you look at your Facebook fan page, odds are you’ll see five photos—the five that you most recently added or that your fan page was most recently tagged in—in a photo strip across the top of the page. The image, above, of Oreo’s use of the photo strip is from the excellent article 35 Creative Facebook Fan Page Photo Strips. There are, as you might guess, 34 other great examples there of how brands are making use of those images. Most fan pages are not effectively using this, however. Honestly, it can be a bit tricky. First, your photo strip thumbnails are in random order. On a personal profile you have some control over the order of the...
Read MoreCan’t Invite Friends List to Facebook Page or Event?
Facebook doesn’t want you to sent out thousands of unwanted invites to your friends. They really, really don’t want you to. So over time they continue to alter the way certain functionality works. When you invite people to a Facebook fan page or an event, for example, the “select all” button is gone, leaving you to click them one by one. Instead of showing you all your friends by default, they show ones you have recently interacted with (supposedly). Then you have a drop-down to choose from. The contents of that drop-down are: Recent Interactions Search All Friends Some of the cities your friends are in Your universities Some of the Facebook...
Read MoreGreenGeeks vs HostGator
Selecting a web host is a challenging experience for a web designer, or anyone else making their own website. There are a great many web hosts out there, and it can be hard to tell the difference. The obvious differences–such as price–are typically small and don’t mean much in the long run. What does an extra dollar a month mean, if it results in faster load times? What do a few more megabytes more matter, if the server is frequently down? Unfortunately, the important questions are very difficult to tell without personal experience. I’ll share some of my thoughts here, comparing these two hosts: HostGator and GreenGeeks from the perspective of...
Read More