Bigpacific Media

Update: New Template System for Wordpress

September 10th, 2009 No Comments

wpremix

WPREMIX – TAKING WORDPRESS TO THE NEXT LEVEL

This template system appears to have everything needed to fully customize a Wordpress blog. It is especially attractive for designers – once you get past the rather steep $275 for an unlimited license use (you can’t resell it as a system, but you can use it for any number of clients) it’s clear there is a lot of mileage in the product down the road.

The features include:

WYSIWYG page editor
Over 50 templates, each of which can be further customized
Flexibility – instead of having to use a plug-in like WidgetLogic to manage what sidebar content shows up on what posts or pages (and havingto know conditional tags as well to make that happen), it’s all built into the system
Smart drop menu – now this is something I’ve wanted with Wordpress templates for a while, in an easy-to-manage system
Dynamic codes – insert javascript or php modules using the code guide
Add on modules – support for modules like shopping carts, image galleries, etc.

You can also get the license for $75/single use, which means you can use it on one web site. What I really appreciate about the WPRemix business model is that if you go for the one-site license and decide to upgrade, you just pay the difference, and they make this policy very clear on the Purchase page.

And if you purchase WPRemix right now, you get an additional Magazine template valued at $39, and a FREE BBPress Forum add on that is fully compatible with the WPRemix system.

Click here to visit WordPress Remix website!

Thanks to John Chow for introducing me to this interesting and exciting product.

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Twitter: Does It Have A Place In Your Business?

June 19th, 2009 No Comments

The best thing about Twitter is also the worst thing. It’s quick and easy to use! Why is that bad? Because like many other online marketing tools and social networking apps, the risk of lost productivity can offset any gains achieved through the visibility.

If you let it. It’s also an incredibly effective tool not only for brand building, but for functional application of ideas that have always worked well offline.

Self-discipline online is up to each individual and company. Speaking as an easily-distracted self-employed business owner, I know the traps after a dozen years working online. Every day something new and exciting hits the web, and some are destined to truly change business and society. Well, maybe 1% of them. The other 99% are super-crackers, bursting on to the dark stage of the web with a crash of cymbals and lights, and their goal – whether by design or a changed trajectory of ambition – is to capture as much market share and $$$ as they can manage in the short window the flavor-of-the-day environment offers. In that funnel is the lost productivity of workers, at a scale impossible to calculate.

That’s the downside.

The upside is that Twitter, used properly in the business setting, is incredibly effective at building brand, communicating with customers, and even driving immediate sales.

For example… let’s say you’re a brick-and-mortar real world business renting kayaks and selling outdoor marine gear. How can you use Twitter effectively in your company?

Firstly, post your twitter link everywhere you go online, with a “Follow Me On Twitter” tagline that takes visitors to your twitter page where a one-click push gets them in your ‘twitter list’ – or twist, as I call it. Now you’re building your list.

What do Twitter users want when they follow someone?

NEED: A feeling of direct relationship with your company. As fast as you can get news out, they care enough to be the first to receive it. GET: instant information and being part of the ‘inside crowd’ for your business – a friend, even, of your company, often with the loyalty friendship suggests.

NEED: First mover advantage. GET: Blast a Tweet to a group you designate your best customers and let them know first about the launch of a new product, and perhaps even combine it with a real-time social networking wine & cheese after hours for your Twitter followers only.

NEED: You need to move product to make room for this season’s incoming items arriving this afternoon. GET: Run a timed sale… give a start and end time, with discount and what items are covered and send it to your tweet list.

NEED: Your mailing list to grow. GET: Start or grow your list by offering a service like weather tweets, guide tweets out on the water, or discounts if someone brings a friend into twitter who buys something.

So you can see how powerful Twitter can be in comparison to traditional methods of communication such as newspaper advertising (do you really want to wait until Friday to start your sale?) or email newsletters (are they checking their mail? did you get caught in their spam folder?).

So think hard about how YOU can use social networking in your business and then build it into your schedule responsibly (I twitter once a day, on my coffee break and have alerts about who has joined my list turned off on my phone to minimize distractions).

Related post: Twitter Add-Ons

Technorati Profile

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What is Twitter, and should you use it?

February 19th, 2009 No Comments

Keep in mind that this is a business blog, so everything we talk about here is presented in relation to its effectiveness or detriment to small businesses. What is advisable for business may not hold true in the personal arena and vice-versa.

Most of the people I talk with in small business – unless they are specifically an online marketing business – have no idea of what twitter is at best. At worst, they’ve heard all the worst stories about Twitter and all other social networking tools and have dismissed them entirely.

I say: NOT SO FAST.

One should never dispense with gaining an understanding of a product or service that might be relevant to a business. Knowledge is power, and if you don’t understand something, how can you possibly decide whether it might offer a benefit?

Twitter.com

So, first: What the heck is Twitter?

It doesn’t help that the name of the app sounds inconsequential or cutesy. It is what it describes, for sure… quick social commentary. If you’ve been at a party and someone important has walked into the room, causing a sudden surge of whispered comments, or a pal called you up with a hot news flash, you’re hearing the real-world version of twitter.

Online twittering happens by SMS text message – and really that’s all it is, a big dressed up version of text messaging, with a whole bunch of bells and whistles the online environment can provide. For example, you can blast a twitter to a group of friends at one time, set up different groupings of twitter contacts, time delay your tweets, add pictures, and follow conversations with individuals instead of having everything all lumped together in one big inbox – like the one I have to wade through on my Blackberry.

Twitter is also often referred to as a ‘micro-blogging tool’, whereby authors post mini blog comments with a restriction of 140 characters or less. This month there were an estimated 6 million users of Twitter, and the service is the third-largest social network, behind only Facebook and MySpace.

For the full background and current development of everything Twitter, check out the Wiki.

Next post: Does Twitter Have a Place in Business?

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1st Ever Twitter Shorty Awards

February 12th, 2009 No Comments

I found this story on my morning troll through the news sites: CNN’s story about the first ever Twitter Shorty Awards, hosted by Rick Sanchez (one of my favorite anchors through the pre-US-Election coverage, @ricksanchezcnn).

1st Annual Shorty Awards

The awards honored ’short and sweet’ tweets that had a significant impact on events and issues. Award winners, selected from 50,000 public nominations, voted on by tweets included Justin Hart for politics, Wendy Leidhecker for business, Phil Pearlman for finance, MC Milker for green, and Charles Trippy for humour. A full list of nominees is available at the CNN Web Site.

The Shorty Awards web site gives all the info, including links to all of the actual winning tweets. Here’s to 2010!

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Spam: The Sequel

February 12th, 2009 No Comments

Well, it’s day one on the big 30-day Free Trial experiment of Spam Arrest. Since I use multiple pop accounts I decided I’d start with my biggest email offender, my main webmaster@ account. And, since I use Microsoft Outlook (2003) and pop accounts, it was a bit of a job getting it all set up right.

Don’t get me wrong – the configuration instructions at Spam Arrest are quite clear, I was having trouble figuring out how to deal with several kinds of spam: garden variety, spam generated by my own server as I hunt down and close all the relays spammers are using to spoof my address (thank you Verio, for all the great support), and trash to a bunch of aliases I just can’t shut down in case the one random person tries to reach me.

When you manage a number of high-traffic web sites and your own virtual server, it gets pretty complex figuring out what rules to use, whether to allow mail from your own domain (I frequently ‘mail’ myself things between computers when my remote file transfer is buggy). For the average user though it is dead simple to set this system up, and customize the message your users get when you’re asking them to take an extra step of adding themselves to your safe sender’s list by completing a one-time captcha routine.

So far, I am picking through my unverified box a few times a day and finding ‘real’ addresses to authenticate, but on the good side, I got 10 pieces of mail today that landed in my Outlook inbox!! If I can keep it up, I’ll soon be able to add this critical email account to my blackberry.

http://www.spamarrest.com

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Spam: I like it fried in maple syrup. That’s it.

February 11th, 2009 No Comments

I have been working on the Internet since 1997. Back in those days, spam was unknown (at least in my circle). I was one of the first people in my circle to ever become a reseller for a hosting company, managing my own private server through Verio (Iserver way back then). I was learning everything – unix commands, coding HTML, perl and scripting, cgi, javascript – and I was a totally self-taught geek coming late to the game after spending 15 years in small community newspapers doing production management. In fact I had just finished riding the change from the old compugraphic typeset-to-waxer into desktop publishing, and going from Mac to PC to Mac again. Learning and changing was a part of the way I did things.

However, in my naivety and short pants, I made the fatal mistake – like many did back in the day – of making my main email address the root address for the domain. Webmaster@. The legacy of this lives on today, in the approximate 1600 pieces of spam I receive each and every day, even running SpamAssassin on my server.

I recently read uber-blogger Tim Ferris’ post about outsourcing email (when my ratio of ‘real’ mail exceeds my spam I’ll take another look at outsourcing) and noticed he doesn’t suffer much from spam. This is the best-selling author of The Four Hour Work Week (now in its 40th printing, in 33 languages), an international speaker, adventurer and networker extraordinaire. To say he’s not suffering from spam is like the Post Office saying everyone takes their flyers home instead of dumping them in the recycling bin. My first reaction? Yeah, right.

So I will be the first test case with Spam Arrest. I’m off to set up my 30 day trial account and I’ll update this post with results as I get them, hopefully in a much leaner inbox!

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REVIEW: Secure e-mailing, and a great substitute for FTP

February 10th, 2009 1 Comment

Are you still working in insecure email settings, discussing information your competitors should not know about? Are you sending large files broken down in chunks, laboriously winzipped for compression, or worse, trying to use your anonymous FTP server that comes with your hosting account?

Have you tried other encryption tools for email and found them overwhelmingly complex, involving each party passing hard-to-remember keys back and forth?

Have you successfully sent a large file only to have it bounce at the recipient’s end because it’s crushing their inbox? Did your message even arrive (everyone loves turning off ‘message received’ functionality in their email programs)?

Why, might I ask. Especially when there is an affordable, encryption based service like E-Courier.ca as an alternative?

Never mind security concerns that include identity theft, legal liabilities from mail read by parties not intended as recipients, and the like. For that reason alone if you have a company and conduct sensitive business through email channels, you need this service. Many of the companies you deal with have failed to implement even the most basic of security measures, such as encryption of laptops, or running networks without firewalls. Can you really trust that your personal or business information is secure?

Offer your clients and customers the security of military-grade encryption, and be a leader in protecting their information. Work in a format that anyone can use – no special software to install, or complex instructions. For businesses working with large or sensitive file data – architects, accountants, mortgage brokers, IT developers, the legal field – this type of application is a no-brainer.

One of the greatest things about E-courier? Your clientele gets to use the system for FREE. That means if you’re an architect working with 5 contractors or homeowners, they can receive, edit/comment and return the documents securely through your E-courier pipe.

What do you need to take advantage of E-Courier? An email address. An internet connection. A web browser. It’s that simple.

For more information, contact E-Courier.ca and quote the Bigpacific Promotional Code. I’ve tried the system and it is bonehead easy (which means it’s for me… I loathe messing around with encryption on the local computer side – blech.).

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Animoto Takes Slideshows to the Next Level

February 10th, 2009 No Comments

After getting some great press in Entrepreneur Magazine this month, Animoto’s business is taking off, and taking slideshows past the often-clumsy freebie sites – and yet it still offers such ease of use it’s simply mind-boggling.

Turned on to it by my partner, who had picked up Entrepreneur in an airport bookstore to pass the time and then immediately created a nifty show linked to a Facebook account, I was intrigued.

Created by TV and film producers, Animoto offers all of the slick production values you’re used to seeing in those mediums or created by really talented people using semi-professional software and apps such as SlideshowPro, Slideshow Producer, and the Adobe/Mac products – for FREE, or for really affordable $ if you want all the bells and whistles and ultimate control over the product.

It exports to DVD/CD, is completely automatic (if that’s the option you choose), and no two videos are the same. The software intelligently maps the music you choose and creates unique transitions and elements with the pictures you upload. For commercial users, there’s a large library of royalty-free music and the ability to include text (in sophisticated fashion) over your images, unlimited dvd-quality videos, call to action incorporation, spotlight feature and suppression of some of the Animoto branding. No whitelabel version yet but who knows – just ask.

I’ve purchased the business level version as I want to run shows on my commercial regional portal, www.bigpacific.com.

Here’s my first slideshow, in the freebie version:

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Ready-made Templates for Wordpress

February 5th, 2009 No Comments

I have been experimenting with various ways to implement Wordpress for my blog. The first thing I tried was a hosted blog on Wordpress.com. If you have simple needs like just posting a diary or sharing information with family and friends, or doing a simple add-on to your own web site then the free wordpress.com is likely for you.

The pros are that it’s a simple process from start to finish. But if you want to add a domain name you either have to buy it elsewhere at a service that allows domain forwarding and gripping (1) and make sure it loads your mysite.wordpress.com web site, or you have to pay wordpress.com $15/year to do that for you. If you want to add any plugins that commercialize your blog, you’re also out of luck. In an interesting inversion, the .com site for wordpress is for the community of free wordpress users, and the .org site is for those who want to run wordpress in a self-hosted environment to take advantage of the many options not available to the .com users, namely – plugins to commercialize your blog, and huge template selection from within wordpress.org and all of the separate providers, like www.colorlabs.com and uniqueblogdesigns.com, my current favorites.

Also, if you’re someone with a bit of programming skills and you like to tinker with CSS, you can try it on wordpress.com but you must buy a premium upgrade for the changes to ’stick’. Running a self-hosted blog basically means you can roll up your sleeves and get in there with the design wrenches, if you care to. The two third-party wordpress template providers I mentioned above give you dead-easy management of your blog without having to touch code… and if you want to take it further you can.

I find for most entry level blogs, the selection of templates at Wordpress.com is adequate. Most designs come in several colors, and you can substitute your own header graphics, so long as you make them the size Wordpress recommends in the editing area. And you can always commercialize them the cheap-and-dirty way by just including the banner ad code in the top of a post, and hosting the actual ad on space you have elsewhere online. Often businesses that have affiliate networks provide code for copying and pasting into a post or an ad management module and their graphics are hosted on their own site to both control the brand and make it easier for the end user to send them traffic – because hey, that’s what it’s all about, right?

WHY I PREFER SELF-HOSTED

I’m such a sucker for design and control. When blogs started getting popular, I toyed with the idea of getting into the business of designing themes. After all, I’ve been in web design for a dozen years, so it can’t be too hard…

I remember getting slammed in the early newsgroups because I bought one of the first versions of Dreamweaver back when it was Macromedia – version 1. The so-called ‘elite’ coders were disgusted that I didn’t hand-code all of my pages. I almost quit building my very successful tourism site, www.bigpacific.com, because I was so intimidated by all these jolt-drinking uber-coders who just had to do the math with the tables. And then I had an epiphany: if there’s something plug-in that I can use, or a faster way to do this, or an application that enables my design-oriented mind instead of forcing me into being a ‘programmer’, why wouldn’t I use it? It was free to leverage the incredible talent of people writing java and javascript, cgi/perl, asp (If you don’t know those, good for you!). It was affordable to buy small plugins to my sites and instantly enable them into being ’smart’/thinking/interactive sites instead of typical brochureware.

That’s why I love UniqueBlogDesigns.com. I’ve got two completely different experiences with these folks – one was for a totally custom blog creation, which you can see at http://www.bigpacific.com/wordpress/. It’s beautiful, functional, and incorporated a lot of cool things unique to my site – custom header development, incorporation of my Slideshowpro content, and a separate, slimmed down version of the template for inside pages.

The Citrus Theme from Unique Blog Designs

Click here to check out the great templates at Unique Blog Designs

The second time around, I chose to buy the Citrus Theme, pre-made, from UBD. It’s gorgeous, affordable, and comes in six colors and I can use it on as many sites as I like. Of course, I was spoiled by UBD’s design crew the first time around and now I’m likely signing up for the premium forum membership so I can get in and tweak backgrounds and link colors etc. for this site, which uses the beautiful lime-green version of citrus, very suitable to tech content.

Lush Arthemia Template from ColorLabsProject

The other theme I’m going to be working with next is Arthemia, from ColorLabsProject. I like this one because of the variety of colors, the strong use of icons/thumbnails, the simplicity and clean lines of the template. I plan to use this template for a blog about politics and volunteerism globally coinciding with Barack Obama’s election as US President. I think it’s a great ‘newsy’, community style look.

You can either hire techs from either company to install the theme for you, or you can follow the readme instructions and video tutorials, or call on the after-sales support and they’ll help walk you through it. Of course, if you want to get really comfortable working with your blog, you should really sign up for the BecomeaBlogger.com course!

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Becoming a Blogger, for the average person

February 5th, 2009 No Comments

So, I’ve blogged for a while. That is to say, I’ve started blogs in blogger.com, and wordpress.com. I help my customers set up blogs for their businesses, but typically these are tourism-oriented businesses for which the blog is an adjunct. They use them to talk about what’s going on in their community and environment and create a sense of destination to encourage bookings.

Like many other new bloggers, I have built and then abandoned a few blogs. Lack of interest, lack of consistency, no clear purpose, no follow through. I finally have one successful blog that operates as a main front page to my regional tourism portal, which you can see at www.bigpacific.com.

I have watched as a number of bloggers rose in stature as mine faded into obscurity. My favorite is johnchow.com, a Vancouver blogger who was featured in our daily newspaper about 8 months ago, making $15,000 a month at the time of the article. He now makes $40k a month and has 45,000 subscribers to his blog/newsletter, and posts twice a day. His blog is about making money online. He shares his money, and his expertise, with a weekly luncheon where any blogger is welcome to attend – the Dot Com Pho.

John’s blog is fairly eclectic. In addition to the moneymaking stories, he posts on philanthropy, food, travel, gadgets, and reviews of software. It’s shown me that it’s the consistency and frequency that’s important and not so much the ‘perfect’ and perfectly targeted content.

One of his posts was about a great online blogging course, utilizing audio and video, from Yaro Starak and Gideon Shalwick called “Become a Blogger”. The first level of the Become a Blogger site is FREE. It includes a Roadmap Report – the prerequisite to starting the video courses. Remember, the 20 page report (pdf, or mp3 audio file) is FREE. It covers ‘The 5 Major Milestones You Must Reach to Become a Successful Blogger’. This section should not be skipped – it’s invaluable information that will ensure you’re not wasting your time on your blog and positioning yourself for success.

The next step in the course is a 10-part beginner blog video series. Now, as someone who has blogged, set up externally hosted blogs, and dealt with hosting, domain names, and technical stuff for over 10 years, I thought this was a bit of a time waster before I started. Boy, was I wrong. I can procrastinate with the best of them, and have needed to upgrade to Wordpress 2.6.3 for quite a while, and it’s a critical part of the entire course. So that’s the step I’m at.

I’m inviting you to join me in learning how to blog, from a beginner’s perspective, and share your experience in the Grok the Net community.

If you’re already way ahead on the technical/setup side of things, I invite you to head up to the next level of the course – BecomeaBlogger Premium. This is where the rubber hits the road and you learn the ‘X Factor’ strategies that will separate your blog from the millions of others out there.

So that’s Day One. See you tomorrow!

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Update: New Template System for Wordpress

Twitter: Does It Have A Place In Your Business?

1st Ever Twitter Shorty Awards

Spam: The Sequel

Spam: I like it fried in maple syrup. That’s it.

REVIEW: Secure e-mailing, and a great substitute for FTP

Animoto Takes Slideshows to the Next Level

Ready-made Templates for Wordpress

Becoming a Blogger, for the average person

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