Streaming Video

Streaming Media on the Rise

Streaming media is becoming more and more popular.  In fact, new HTML5 code makes streaming video a whole lot easier.  Even the video giant Youtube has made their iframe embeds naturally html5 compliant, so long as the browser supports it.  This means that you will see mobile responsive resizing of the streaming media.

Interestingly, cable ratings have been falling, while streaming media has been on the riste. What does this mean for the web?  Many sites are realizing that there lies a great opportunity in pushing their content out to be streamed.  When streaming devices pick up these streams, this is a great exposure opportunity for the content originator.  Whats even better, boxes like Streamsmart TV’s open android based streaming media device offer a free opportunity to be streamed and a free opportunity to view the streams.

How can you have your content streamed?

Ramp gives a great breakdown of the value of video streaming, and of course offer the solution to get this accomplished.  Streaming video is still in it’s early stages, and it’s real easy at this point to get a leg up on your or your client’s competitors by offering live streaming video for events and other valuable content.

If you need assistance in getting a stream set up on your site, we are always willing to help.  There’s really no reason to stay in the pack now.  Jump ahead and show your the leader!

The post Streaming Media Options for your site appeared first on Dzinepress.

Are you Mobile Friendly?

Check out Google’s Pas/Fail test here.  If you pass, congratulations!  You will keep your traffic and get your non-mobile-friendly competitors traffic to boot!  If you fail, it’s time to act FAST!!!

How to Get Mobile Friendly

The biggest killer to Mobile Friendly is your theme.  Sadly, not all “responsive” themes are mobile friendly.  Google judges on legibility of font, having all displayed items viewable in the viewport, and proximity of touchpoints.  A properly configured quality fully responsive theme should do the job.  My Theme Shop is known for their very fast, mobile friendly, fully responsive, SEO friendly themes.  I personally have used their themes and can recommend them.  If you click here and enter the coupon code “mythemeshop25”, you will get 25% off the purchase price.

No matter which way you go, just make sure you don’t miss the deadline!  April 21 is right around the corner.  Get mobile friendly now!

The post Mobile Friendly Themes a Must? appeared first on Dzinepress.

Large Size and Poor Optimization

In a world of ever increasing connection speeds and diminishing patience, the importance of having a fast-loading website cannot be underestimated. You can be selling the world’s finest goods, but if your site fails to load within a reasonable time frame (reasonable slowly becoming synonymous with instantly), then your merchandise will fail to find buyers. Nothing better illustrates this than Amazon.com. Back in 2006, the retail giant has estimated that for every 100ms increase in page loading times, their revenue shrunk by 1 percent, BartRead says. A second’s delay? That’s 10% revenue just gone.

Images are typically the bulk of a page’s size and can cause even the most well designed page to grind to a halt as the connection struggles to download it. If your site is full of un-optimized images with large file sizes, you are looking at an uphill struggle in the battle for the clients’ attention. How to deal with it?

First, slim down the images. While having large, richly detailed images available on your site is a bonus for clients who want to familiarize themselves with your offer, they should be optional, not mandatory. Instead of full size images scaled down by the page, create separate thumbnails that will load faster and use less space. Don’t forget to use the right format for the job. Large, detailed images will usually benefit from being saved in a compressed JPG format. However, if the images are composed of fairly simple shapes or solid colors, then a PNG or a GIF (depending on their precise shape) are a better choice, as they offer lossless compression, excellent quality, and retain the small file size.

Lack of Context

This sin might sound a little odd. After all, if the image is placed on the page and accompanied by plenty of descriptive text, it has the right context, right?

Not quite. Context means different things to humans and search engines. What you see on the page is not necessarily what the spider (a bot that crawls through web pages and collects them for the search engine) sees when it performs its routines. If you want to see the world through the spider’s eyes, view your page with the images disabled.

A website that provides proper context for the images will display the alt text of the file where it would normally appear, EConsultancy points out. If your site does not show any text, merely esoteric file names, that means your site lacks context.

How to fix it? Ensure that each image on the site has proper alt tags. This step is ignored by a vast majority of eCommerce sites, leading to sub-par SEO performance and lost sales. The alt text should be descriptive and provide the reader (human or otherwise) with a basic understanding of what is in the image. While you’re at it, you should also ensure that the file name of the image is legible to humans and spiders alike. A string of numbers is meaningless. Mahogany-finish-nineteen-century-cabinet.jpg is the exact opposite. A proper file name combined with the right alt text can do wonders for your SEO.

No Narrative

While narrative is usually associated with literature, it is one of the key components of the user experience on your website. Think of your store in terms of the story it tells. Do the images fit in with the atmosphere you want to create? Or do they clash with the rest of the site, aesthetically or thematically? Does the flow of the site provide a good user experience or on the contrary, does it suffer due to stilted connections between the text and the imagery? While integrated platforms like Shopify minimize the risk of this happening, they can only do so much before systemic problems manifest.

Resolving problems in this area is not as simple as it would appear. Most of these are caused by not having a strong core concept driving your eCommerce venture. If you experience this, Growth Spark says, then you should consider re-evaluating and then revamping your site to provide a single, coherent experience. Images are at the core here, as the lighting, colors, even the angle at which the photos representing your wares matter. The devil’s in the details, particularly in eCommerce.

Bottom Line

When it comes to images, it’s an area where it’s extremely easy to make mistakes. Fortunately, these mistakes can be rapidly undone if you know what you are doing and what you want to achieve.

The post The Three Deadly Sins of eCommerce Site Images appeared first on Dzinepress.

Ever wondered how to create nice short compact Amazon links, without having to “rebrand” the URL to a different domain link shortener, like tinyurl.com, goo.gl, or bit.ly?  Well, it’s a little known fact that Amazon actually has their own url short link service!  It still speaks “Amazon” to the readers and doesn’t cause them to wounder if the link is really going to take them to Amazon or who knows where.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Keep just the important parameters at the end, such as your affiliate link or perhaps your keywords (if your a seller).

2. Keep the ASIN number of the product you are driving traffic to

3. Build your URL as such:

http://amzn.com/[ASIN]/?[parameters]

That’s it!  Nothing to it.  Now you have a nice compact understandable URL that is much more attractive for those skeptical ones that want to make sure your URL is legit, and it fits nicely in tweets and other locations that allow minimal characters.

Enjoy!

Image Source

The post Creating Short Amazon Links appeared first on Dzinepress.

Click Here to see the Top 10 Web Design Tips

The post Top 10 Web Design Tips appeared first on Dzinepress.

Every one of your customers have different motives, different devices used to connect, different locations and different time constraints. Now, technology allows marketers to gather individualized information about what a visitor is searching for and make their visit  a higher conversion visit!

Here are Three tips from www.entrepreneur.com that are worth implementing:

 

1. Visitor frequency should determine different user experiences. A visitor to a website for the first time will almost always be looking for different information than someone visiting the site repeatedly.

David Reischer, marketing officer at LegalAdvice.com, suggests tracking each user differently to give different user experiences. “We utilize a cookie to track a returning visitor so that we can direct them to the most appropriate and relevant page. This makes site navigation easier for repeat users.”

To increase conversion of first-time visitors include a phone number or business address, a contact form to capture leads, or a video tutorial to explain a product or service to a first time visitor.

“For frequent visitors, add a spot to sign up for a mailing list or add information about new products or services,” suggests Sadan.

Related: The Next Big Thing on the Web: Sites Tailored for You

2. Geo-location helps bring together online and offline marketing. The ability to know where someone is at the time they visit a website is game-changing for marketers.

“Online we can follow our customer’s individual buying journey, optimizing it every step of the way,” explains Bart Heilbron, CEO and co-founder of BlueConic, the real-time system of online customer engagement. “However, we were never able to use these insights in our offline interaction. With geo-location, we are now able to.”

If someone is only blocks away from a business and searching on a mobile phone, chances are they can be easily converted as a customer if they see an address and even a coupon that says, “Come in today and get 20% off.” For restaurants, an OpenTable button to reserve a table, or a Google Map app that provides step-by-step directions to the store location are critical for conversion.

3. Adjust content based on certain times. Changing the content on a website based on the time of day, week or even season can increase conversions as well. Consider replacing a phone number available to website visitors during business hours with a contact form when the business is closed. This will avoid missing out on potential customers who want to get in contact outside of business hours.

“The ability to offer different products over the course of a day based on targeted trends, habits or culture will increase conversions,” said CEO of internet marketing company WebiMax, Ken Wisnefski. “For example, a restaurant offers a different menu throughout the day as they switch from lunch to dinner.”

The post 3 Tips for Designing your Website For Each and Every Customer appeared first on Dzinepress.

The post Video: Web Designers Workflow appeared first on Dzinepress.

Most people go to Google or Flickr to pick up and icon.  The problem is that those icons get overused.  You need something original, catchy, and that sets you apart from the others.

We have your solution!  Findicons.com has a vast repository of FREE facebook icons that are sure to stop your searching for the perfect fit.  All you have to do is create an account, find the icon you like, and download!  These are licensed for commercial use and ready for you to go grab!

You can find the icons here.

The post Icons: 265 Free Facebook Icons appeared first on Dzinepress.

MOZ has developed and distributes for free a downloadable PDF. Make sure to go and get it! Here are the key benefits and features:

• Save the Google searches for your new inbound visitors: This cheat sheet covers all of the details you would normally spend hours researching online. This leaves you with more time for the important things (like laughing at JennaMarbles or pretending you don’t watch Vine compilations).

• Available both online and offline: You can store the free downloadable PDF wherever you want. Save a hard drive, kill a tree! (It’s printable.)

• Updated for the inbound marketer: With new sections like responsive design and rel=”author”, you can uphold your flawless nerd reputation by publicly shaming those who make syntax errors in their code (and are foolish enough not to download this cheat sheet!).

Source: The Moz Blog

Image Source: Nancy White

The post SEO: Web Developer Cheat Sheet for 2014 appeared first on Dzinepress.

Favicons are typically 16 pixels by 16 pixels, and that is how we are going to make ours.

Instructions to Making a Favicon

1. Create the Master file. First, open your logo file in Gimp and save this project as “favicon.xcf”.
2. Keep the Graphics. The graphics is typically the left most part of the logo.  If this file has layers, delete the company name and tagline layers.  If not, crop out all of this logo except the graphics part.
3. Select the graphics.  You can use the rectangular select tool to draw a rectangle around the graphics.
4. Fit Canvas to selection. This is at “Image/Fit Canvas to Selection”.
5. Make the canvas square.  Open “Image/Canvas Size”.  Whichever dimension is larger, make the smaller dimension identical.
6. Scale to 16px. Open “Image/Scale Image”.  Make sure the unit of measurement is “px” or “pixels”.  Then set the width to 16.  The length will automatically size to 16 as well.
7. Export to an “.ico”.  Click “File/Export” and change the file extension to “.ico”  Do not adjust anything on this next window that opens.  Simply click “export”.
8. Check your work.  Open your favicon file and make sure it looks correct.
9. Save your master. Your done!

Creating a Favicon is Simple but Vital

Making a favicon is really fairly simple.  It is such a differentiator.  You can quickly spot an amateur website simply due to the lack of a favicon.  Make your site stand out with completing this easy but important step.

The post How to Make a favicon With Gimp the Simple Way appeared first on Dzinepress.