We (illuminea) are so excited that we could be part of the creation of a shiny new plugin: Official Mad Mimi Sign Up Forms! for Mad Mimi, the email marketing service.

Mad Mimi is all about making their users life simple. With WordPress being the winner in terms of market share for CMSs, they wanted to serve that market.

When Mad Mimi asked us to work with them to develop their official WordPress plugin, we were super excited, since we love WordPress and urge all our clients to offer newsletters!  This plugin does what many of our clients will need, which is to easily integrate Mad Mimi sign up forms into their site.

How does it work?

Well… it pretty much does what it says. It makes sure that WordPress peeps have an easy way to display sign up forms on any WordPress site and don’t have to mess around with form embed code.

The way the plugin works is that first you create some forms in Mad Mimi, so that people can, let’s say, get updates about all the yummy cupcakes you’re baking (only organic, sugar-free, fat-free of course), and then head on over to the WordPress plugin, and validate your API key.

Once you’re connected, you’ll see all of your lists displayed and you can insert any of your Mad Mimi forms into your site by using a widget, shortcode, or template tag.

Behind the Scenes

As part of the development team, I got to be involved in the whole creation process for the Mad Mimi plugin. After talking to Mad Mimi about what features they want and don’t want, we understood that they are really in tune with their customers and know exactly what functionality they would find helpful (easy-to-use widgets) and what functionality their customers wouldn’t want (tons of configuration and options).

Once we had a list of the features, we created a mockup wireframe in my fave program Mockflow (drag and drop heaven) to create a preview of how the settings page and widget could look in WordPress.

Mockup preview:

After some back and forth discussion, we agreed on the final version and coded the mockup into a reality.  After a series of tests and minor changes, and writing up the documentation, it launched on June 3, 2013!

The real deal in a WordPress installation:

The settings page in the WordPress Dashboard

The widget

Despite their name, the Mad Mimi team is so nice and fun to work with, and at one point, they even said “You guys are friggin’ pro”. Does life get any better?

You can download the Official Mad Mimi plugin here

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Recently I’ve been experiencing difficulty focusing, and a definite decrease in motivation. It happens to the best of us – go to work every day, do yo’ thing, and come home. It gets monotonous, even in the framework of an exciting, ever-evolving career such as online marketing.

For me, specifically, it was because I had to take care of three emails that I did not. Want. To write. And every day I came into the office, I saw the judging, saddened eyes of my co-workers. (Attention co-workers: It’s actually me, not you. Self-judgement goin’ on here. I was just using you to judge myself. You would never judge – you guys are great.)

Today, I discovered the supreme, sure-fire, guaranteed way to unstick my stuck self. (Do I sound like an infomercial? I feel like I sound like an infomercial.)

I woke up at 5am.

And that was it!

Hubby was sleeping. The fridge was sleeping. Hell, the whole world was sleeping, except for a few birds right outside my window. (I threw a shoe at the window to make them stop. They didn’t.)

It was an incredible moment. New mothers everywhere probably want to kill me right about now, but 5am is the absolute bomb. I got done with all of my emails. All three of them. I spent some time catching up on industry news. Got some decent work in. I knocked out this blog post. And then for good measure I solved P vs. NP. (Just kidding.)

And then I got going with my day.

Why did waking up at 5am unstick me? Truth be told, I’m not sure. It was probably a combination of factors:

• Dragging myself up and out when I’m already running late is anything but inspirational…forcing myself out of bed a couple of hours early was highly empowering. And with great power comes…whatever happened this morning.

• Typically, first thing in the morning my brain is abuzz. The standard getting dressed, making lunch, and rushing out the door is such a waste of creative power. Waking up and working right away was amazing.

• Zero distractions. Zero. Except for the non-shoe-heeding birds, which faded into the background after a while.

I love myself right now. Right now my self-perception is of a power-walking online marketing virtuoso with a constant supply of Starbucks and perfect hair.

I’m going to hate myself at 4pm.

The post Wake Up You Lazy Schlub! appeared first on illuminea web presence agency.

Well, fret no longer! Here are five free image sources that you could consider using. Just be sure to use them according to the instructions on the sites (and see below about how we hold no responsibility for how you choose to use images):

sxc.hu 

This site is rich with high resolution, beautiful images. You need to sign up in order to download pictures but it’s worth it.

Flickr Creative Commons

On Flickr you can use the advanced search to find free images. Just make sure you mark the “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content” checkbox and then check both checkboxes under the main one. When you use images from Flickr in this way, be sure to give credit to the source with a link back to the Flickr page where you got the image from.

Tip: Make these links open in a new tab so that people aren’t taken away from your website.

Microsoft Office Images

You can easily download an image straight from the search results. They are not huge (for example one I downloaded was 849X566) and they are JPGs.

Photo Pin

PhotoPin helps bloggers find images by using the Flickr API and searching creative commons photos to use for your blog.

And it has a really cool interface.

Pikiwiki

Pikiwiki is a database of free Israeli and Jewish-themed images.

Are there other resources?

Please share links to other free image resources in the comments. Thanks!

Legal stuff

We are not legal experts and so we hold absolutely no responsibility for which images you use and how. Please make sure to use them properly in order not to infringe on any copyright laws.

Enjoy!

The post Five free and legal image sources appeared first on illuminea web presence agency.

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I agree with almost everything Calvin wrote but there are yet more lessons I learn from the stories Calvin brings. Here is what I learned:

1. Based on the standards of the time there actually were enough lifeboats on the Titanic.

Do we at least look smart? (photo by Keith Williamson on flickr)

At the time, the amount of lifeboats necessary per ship was based on the ship’s weight. In retrospect, that is obviously a terrible way to calculate how many lifeboats are needed per ship. I can just imagine a very important-looking committee of middle-aged, pipe-smoking white men coming up with that idea and feeling very smart about it. It seriously boggles the mind.

Lesson learned: Although it often feels as though everything that could have been thought of, has been, that’s never true. Don’t let yourself get stuck in old habits but instead, always question techniques and methods, even those that are widely accepted. This will allow you to constantly develop professionally so that every project you manage is an improvement over the last one.

2. When the wireless operator got a message from a nearby ship warning the Titanic about icebergs  he answered: “Shut up, I am working Cape Race!”

Well, first of all, yikes.

Lesson learned, #1: No matter what position you hold or how much pressure you’re under, it’s always important to properly process what other people are telling you. Humility is key for succeeding in any job. That doesn’t mean that you need to allow yourself to be pushed in every direction, but being open to what others have to say can really enlighten you to the work at hand.

Lesson learned, #2: Of course, don’t say “Shut up.” It’s rude.

3. The wireless operator was focused on sending and receiving messages for passengers instead of on life-and-death-related communication.

Often clients can persuade us to focus on less important tasks instead of the core tasks of the project. Or they might want us to work in a way that we know from experience is at least somewhat detrimental to the project. We might be tempted to give into this because it’s easier to go along with their requests rather than “confront” the client and tell them what we think is best for their project.

But, surprise surprise, the customer is not always right. And, shockingly, most clients actually do hire us for our professionalism which means that they need and very possibly even want to hear our professional opinions on whatever they are requesting of us.

I’d like to assume that if passengers of the Titanic were told the day after a huge iceberg was narrowly missed (in an alternate universe, of course) that personal messages had not been sent or received because it had been a particularly dangerous night at sea, most would have been capable of understanding that decision.

Lesson learned: Be honest about your opinions with your clients, trust that they hired you for your professionalism and give them the benefit of the doubt that they are capable of dealing with a certain amount of “confrontation” in regards to their project.

4. The lookouts had no binoculars

I see here the importance of creating a healthy dynamic between the management and the team. The management has to have enough humility in order to hear the team members’ opinions and the team members need to feel comfortable sharing their ideas and concerns, especially if they see a real problem in the project. In the case of the Titanic, the lookouts should have felt totally comfortable complaining to their superiors about not having binoculars (I imagine this fact made them feel quite uncomfortable). 

Lesson learned: Everyone should feel comfortable communicating so that everything is done responsibly. Sometimes it’s going to be the “little guy” who understands really what is going on. It’s also important to get lots of input from the client since they are usually the ones who really understand aspects of the project that are difficult for us to understand by ourselves.

5. One family’s nurse took one of the children to a lifeboat without informing the parents.

…Because of this, the parents searched incessantly for the child and ended up dying with their other child.

Sometimes keeping people up to date on a project and keeping a project tracked properly (which is sort of like communication in a time capsule) feel like a serious waste of time. You have deadlines, people on all ends waiting to hear from you, and meanwhile you’re spending time organizing small details non-stop. Making sure the financial side of the project is up to date and filling out a project log all take so much time. And yet, it is specifically this effort that keeps projects moving smoothly without any big misunderstandings happening.

Lesson learned: Spending a substantial amount of time on considering who needs to know what and making sure they receive the relevant information in a timely manner is not a waste of time. It is actually what prevents misunderstandings and wasted time in the future.

6. The father of one of the victims received a bill for his son’s band costume a few weeks after the disaster.

Oy vey.

We all think that our jobs are about things like site planning, web design, web development or SEO when really all our jobs have so much to do with dealing respectfully and sensitively with the people around us – including the management above us, our coworkers, the project team and our clients. Sometimes it can feel so frustrating, thinking about how much time is spent on the human aspect of our projects. It can seem like a waste of time, energy or even money, having to figure out how to properly deal with particularly sensitive situations. But this isn’t actually a waste of time; it’s a basic part of any project (or anything we do in our lives).

Lesson learned, #1: Sometimes extremely sensitive issues arise. In order to deal with them properly, they must be given serious thought and probably discussion within the team. Figuring out solutions for sensitive issues inevitably takes a large amount of energy and time and it’s best to come to terms with this and not consider it a waste. Communicating clearly and sensitively helps keep everyone on the same page. It will create a feeling of everyone being on the same side, working together, not against each other and it will help the project turn out as good as possible, even if there are glitches.

Lesson learned, #2: Every project has the potential of involving financial loss. That’s just the way it is. When that happens, get over it and move on.

7. The Titanic wasn’t built for speed. And yet, during that maiden Titanic voyage, White Star chairman J. Bruce Ismay reportedly pressured Captain Edward Smith to increase speed.

We all know that feeling of getting pressure to do things quickly. It’s a funny thing, our culture today. Because people are used to getting things quickly, sometimes even when it comes to tasks that are extended and complex, people try to get them done quickly.

Speed is overrated, especially when on the Titanic. It was such a beautiful, luxurious ship, that people would probably have been happy to spend an extra couple of days on board rather than rush to their destination (especially in the good ol’ days when people didn’t feel as rushed).

Unfortunately, speed today is considered an ideal at the expense of more quality ideals. But, as Calvin wrote: “in a project world governed by quality, time, and budget, at least one will have to yield.” Higher speeds cause stress, don’t allow people to think things through and often leave everyone involved feeling unsatisfied. Rushing a project also often makes it go out of budget since there is more quality assurance later and often the client will need changes done to the site later which, if planned properly, could have been implemented into the site during the project, as part of the original scope of the project.

Lesson learned: Don’t rush unless completely necessary (which is almost never, considering we’re building websites, not saving lives).

8, 9 and 10. The recovery crew recorded information and a description of the victims in as much detail as possible.

Click on that link at your own risk (it’s chilling and strangely addictive).

Lesson learned: See #5 for the same lesson learned. It’s so important and helpful to keep things documented.

In conclusion

“Sigh… If only Deena had been the project manager on this ship.”

Most of these lessons are easier said than done. One of the reasons we don’t want to admit most of what I’ve written here is because it makes projects much more complex. But these points affect budget, timelines and as strange as this sounds, it affects the emotional side of our work. I recently read Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. One chapter talks about airplane accidents and shows how, more than anything, the problem is almost always a lack of productive communication. Most of the examples of accidents that he brings could have been thwarted if people had communicated openly and confidently.

I think that more than ever today people fear open and straightforward communication. This is probably why people act out online when they can hide behind their screens and then pretend everything is OK in their “real life” interactions. For some reason people are scared of each other. But it is precisely open communication that can make a project really amazing, making the client feel that they got what they really wanted and needed from us and make us feel proud of the products we are creating.

I recommend you try it. It’s extremely challenging but very rewarding, professionally and personally.

Read the article that inspired this post here.

The post 7 (more) project management lessons from the Titanic disaster appeared first on illuminea web presence agency.

Have you ever heard of The 5 Whys? It’s a problem-solving technique innovated by the good folks at Toyota in order to determine the underlying causes of technical issues with their cars.

While there was a bit of criticism as to its practical application for Toyota itself, I think it definitely applies to online marketing in general and SEO specifically. Online marketing is not one-dimensional; it’s both a science and an art. Without the data and statistics to back you up, you’ll lose clients and you won’t have any rationale for what you’re doing. But you also need to be creative in order to truly achieve visibility and to stand out in the loud, busy webosphere. And I think that the 5 Whys can contribute toward both.

Let’s use denture-friendly-gum.com as an example. (No, that site doesn’t actually exist, nor are they a client.) D-F-G.com is not doing particularly well in terms of their organic search rankings. Now the nice folks at D-F-G are new clients, so they’re not upset with us, they’re upset at their previous SEO company. Yay. Nevertheless, since D-F-G has been burned in the past, they’re more cautious, and less likely to be impressed by the services and results that we promise them.

In order to make them happy with us, we need to produce results. In order to produce results, we need to understand the underlying causes behind the rankings that are tanking. (And the chalice from the palace…)

So here we go…The 5 Whys:

1. Why are my rankings decreasing? Because Google is finding my site less relevant than it used to.
2. Why is Google finding my site less relevant? Because there are competitors that Google is finding more relevant.
3. Why are my competitors more relevant? They’ve created an active Google Plus account, not to mention a couple of great Facebook contests and giveaways. Plus they do Pinterest. Other than that, they have zero backlinks, and their on-site SEO is meh.
4. Why is social content worth anything from an SEO perspective? Google has started to take social signals into account more for ranking factors. Google values fresher content. And of course, let’s not forget the absurdly disproportionate impact that Google Plus has on rankings. Also, the coolness factor of having their faces showing up in Google’s search results can impact their CTR. (Go Google Authorship!)
5. Why has illuminea not done this yet for D-F-G? Up to this point we were getting the lay of the land, trying to understand what your position is versus that of your competitors, and what your competitors are doing that you aren’t. Now we know!

Please note – the above was just an example. It’s possible that D-F-G in the past implemented a terrible link building strategy where they hacked strong sites and redirected pages to their site. Or it could be that their content sucks. Or they’re a local business and so they’re not ranking on a national level anymore. Etc.

Whatever the specific scenario, the principle still remains – know why you’re doing something before you’re doing it. Knowing why provides the framework for your work and your strategy. And since the same central answer applies throughout the campaign, it’s available for you whenever you need to answer a client.

The post The Five Whys: Critical Thinking for SEO appeared first on illuminea web presence agency.

I’m a lazy schlub. And I’ll be the first to admit it. If everything in my life could be completely automated, I would be a happy person. Wallace and Gromit style.

Happily, my sheer, unadulterated inertia actually contributes to my professional development. If I couldn’t copy-paste my work, it would take longer and the end product would be less. And while each client has his or her specific goals and objectives, certain basic concepts apply to all of my clients across the board. And in those cases, I apply those concepts with a vengeance.

For example, Google Analytics lets you share custom reports. Literally, all you have to do is copy-paste the URL to the browser in which you’re logged into your Google Analytics account, and you’re good to go. Okay, maybe you have to tweak slightly – remove certain metrics, edit the brand names, etc. But the bulk of the work is done for you.

I use the following custom Google Analytics reports for all of my clients:

Content Efficiency Analysis
Keyword Analysis
Visitor Acquisition Efficiency Analysis

Content Efficiency Analysis

This report tells me which specific pages are high-performance and drive revenue. If you segment it properly, it can also tell you which categories of content perform well, which is great for larger sites.

It also tells me which pages/categories are performing poorly, which means that I can look at those specific pages to find out why. I think that the most interesting discovery I made over the recent past was that a client’s 404 error page had a pretty high user engagement and a remarkably low bounce rate. (As a side note, there’s a fantastic TED talk by Renny Gleeson on how you can use 404 errors to build relationships with users instead of pushing them away from your site. And clearly this client did a good job of doing precisely that.)

Keyword Analysis

Keyword Analysis is a handy little report that lines up the keywords that are driving traffic to your site alongside the pages that users are landing on. If users are unengaged, bouncing off at a rapid rate, or aren’t converting, you can check specific pages to find out why. Maybe the page is ranking for the wrong keywords for which another page on the site would be better suited. Or it’s an opportunity for you to build a well-optimized landing page for a keyword that you’re ranking well for but is performing poorly. Either one.

Visitor Acquisition Efficiency

If you want to find out about the performance of all traffic from all sources across the board, then this is the report for you. It lists your traffic sources, the engagement level of visitors from each of those sources, and best of all, their average monetary value.

Through this report I discovered that users arriving from relevant online communities and forums had a ridiculously high conversion rate for one particular client. So I had some nice actionable data: I followed up by accumulating a list of additional relevant forums.

So, to summarize: if it wasn’t for the sharers and carers out there in the SEO industry, I would be a lot less efficient in my work, and I would get a lot less done. The end.

The post A Lazy SEO is A Good SEO appeared first on illuminea web presence agency.

Even if you’ve never seen a single episode of “How I Met Your Mother”, I’m pretty sure that you’ve heard the 2am rule: Nothing good ever happens after 2am.

It’s a rule that I bitterly regret not following a couple of weeks ago, when a 2:15 am working spree found me accidentally deleting not one, not two, not even three, but four Google Analytics accounts. They were old accounts, but I still needed them. Like, really, really needed. I can’t say the word “really” enough times to adequately express how badly I needed those accounts to not be deleted.

It was, in a word, unfortunate.

I’m not typically one to publicize my idiocy. I usually try to hide it as best as possible. (Even when it’s fairly self-evident. Mea culpa.) The reason I’m airing out my immense bêtise is because, happily, there’s a fix!

As so many before me have done, in a desperate attempt at salvation, I Googled the problem. For the most part the results only contained partial solutions. But by piecing them together, I obtained the the complete fix. And since I was clearly not the only one who had committed the ultimate Analytics fallacy, I thought I would share the wealth.

The first thing you need to make sure to have is an Adwords account that uses the same login details as the Google Analytics account in question. Without the AdWords account, there’s not much you can do. It would appear that Google only publishes contact details for their paid services – AdWords, Apps, and the like. Analytics being free, it’s impossible to call Google through the platform. “Don’t be evil” my hindquarters…

Log into your Adwords account and note your Customer ID. (The ten-digit code in the top right-hand corner of the page.) Then visit Google’s Worldwide Phone Support page and find your country. You could theoretically email or chat with the Googles during normal business hours, but I was feeling much too dramatic and harried to wait for a response that might take days to arrive.

Call Google – if you’re lucky you’ll get my new best friend David, who was supremely helpful. And extremely talented at deciphering panicked babble. After you outline the issue, you’ll receive an email from the Google requesting the UA numbers for the deleted accounts. You must explicitly request that they reactivate the accounts for legal reasons, but after you’ve responded to the email with the numbers and explicit request, you’re done! It takes a couple of business days, but your account(s) will be restored.

P.S. A cautionary word: do NOT keep the number so that you can just call my new best friend David and say hello. Apparently he’s a very busy man.

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For the past two years I’ve worked from the comfort of my comfy Jerusalem apartment. And it was awesome.

Sort of.

For those of you who haven’t seen The Oatmeal’s comic on why working from home is both awesome and horrible (warning: highly NSFW), it offers some pretty decent insight as to why my life was marginally fabulous up to this point.

It was endless loads of fun working in my jammie jams. There’s nothing I love more than working in complete and utter squalor, because I don’t have to clean up. Because I don’t have to see a single. Other. Human. Being. If I don’t want to. (Except for my poor husband, who stayed with me throughout the complete and utter degradation of my personal hygiene and social skills. Gd bless, honey.) Eating my meals on the couch. Taking naps on the couch. Basically, never, ever leaving the couch. Singing off-key in accompaniment to my music (on the couch), which I could do because I was the only one listening.

But after a few months, the awesome wore off. I was lonely. I was bored. I was growing incapable of carrying on a conversation with other human beings. Eating potato chips and cottage cheese for lunch every day started getting old. My muscles began to atrophy. (Quite literally – I actually needed physical therapy to get myself in working order again.) And the worst part was that I was comfortable. I got to set my own hours every day. I never had to leave the house. I never had to coordinate an outfit, or wear something nice to a meeting. Hell, I never had to wear the bottom half of my jammie jams.

Life wasn’t good, and it wasn’t gratifying. But it was very, very adequate. “Adequate”, however, proved to be insufficient. As I grew more unhappy, I became more open to the idea of something different than a complete lack of day-to-day socialization and general mental health. So when I was offered the opportunity to work from an office, sure, I balked. But I was also semi-excited.

At the beginning of August 2012, I started working at the illuminea office with real people. Real people who expected me to answer questions and respond to comments in real time, instead of ignoring the blinky chat until I felt like it.

I won’t lie. I spent a good quantity of time in front of the mirror at home, practicing my facial expressions, making sure they matched what I was saying. And conversing casually with my reflection. You know…small talk.

“How was your weekend?”

“How was your weekend?”

“How was your weekend?”

Slowly but surely, I began relearning the art of conversation. (And make no mistake, it is an art. Abstract though it may be…get it? Art pun!!) I started wearing real clothing. (As real as it gets in Israel…T-shirts and jeans are as dressy as it gets for a wedding, not to speak of an office.) My singing stopped, although that seems to have translated into awkward little dance moves in my swivel chair instead.

While it wasn’t exactly the easiest transition back into civilization, it was a necessary one. While I can’t exactly walk around the office bottomless, I’m feeling much more like a whole person than I have over the past 2+ years. I have to meet with clients face-to-face, and I have to formulate complete sentences – sometimes several times a day. But I’m proud to say that I’m a big kid now. (Cue inspirational music.)

The post I’m a Big Kid Now…Making the Transition from Couch to Chair appeared first on illuminea web presence agency.

I finally figured it out, and here’s an explanation of what was adding these strange parameters to our AdWords destination URLs, and how to solve the _kk and _kt and similar version control issues.

Why do these destination URL shenanigans matter? 

1) It wastes time if you keep making the same changes (updating destination URLs, in this case) over and over.

2) It makes the Destination URLs Report a lot less useful  ( Google Analytics Advertising -> AdWords -> Destination URLs) . Here’s what it looks like: when it has been muddied by the _kk and _kt parameters.

The AdWords Destination URLs report can normally allow you to easily compare which landing pages are converting best, so you can determine the results of an a/b test where the pages are managed by different systems. For example, you might compare a standard site page on WordPress vs a custom-designed landing page on Unbounce, a landing page creation tool. (Normally, Unbounce would tell you what the conversion rates of your different pages are, but that only works if both pages were built on Unbounce. )

(There are workarounds to getting the answers in Google Analytics even with the _kk and _kt variables. However, they’re a lot more time-consuming and require you to go to Excel, which means the online tracking systems failed to achieve their core purpose.)

Additionally, by comparing and contrasting your landing pages, you can see what elements are most common on the high-converting landing pages vs those on the low-converting pages, and figure out what works and what doesn’t. 

3) It breaks redirects. If your ads were originally created to send traffic to page x, but then page x gets 301 redirected – the redirect won’t work if there are parameters added.

We ran into this issue as we managed the AdWords before and after a site redesign, and while we set up redirects properly, the parameters being added back caused the ads to send traffic to 404 Not Found pages.

4) As an AdWords service provider, this kind of thing can make you look bad. I initially reported this situation as my own error in somehow forgetting to save changes / leaving the work incomplete.

Rubbish!

I did my job… Salesforce undid it. 

How is Salesforce adding parameters to AdWords destination URLs?

Salesforce has an app called Salesforce For Google AdWords, which allows an integration of the two marketing platforms. 

Salesforce used to do this by default. The goal was so to see what keywords, ads and landing pages generated particular leads. Then Salesforce would tell you if those leads turned into sales or not, so you knew where to reinvest (or cut investment) in your ad campaigns.

In the following screenshot of the AdWords Change History Tool, you can see the Salesforce app (user email sfgadev@salesforce.com) edited the ads and added in the _kk and _kt parameters via the AdWords API. Click the image to make it larger.

So how do you stop Salesforce from doing this?

How do you manage version control in AdWords?

First, you can just go to the Account -> Access Settings and remove access for sfgadev@salesforce.com. 

Second, you need to have a project management site or document where you share and annotate changes. Everyone on the team needs to use the log, for EVERY change. Alternately, you can do this by email but it’s obviously more cumbersome and not purpose-built.

Takeaways

This experience shows how important it is to get as much information as possible out of clients when working on their web presence. But sometimes, if the client is a large-ish enterprise, they might not even be aware of the integrations that have been set up on their end!

In those cases, there’s nothing you can do but sleuth around until you find the answer. In this regard, both the AdWords Change History tool and your log of the team’s actions are really valuable!

Liked this post? Get the illuminea newsletter for more like it!  (Over there, in the sidebar to the right)

The post Who Keeps Adding _kk & _kt To My AdWords Destination URLs? Salesforce Was It You? appeared first on illuminea web presence agency.

Anti-link building? Isn’t SEO all about link building? Well, it was. Until the recent Google Penguin and Panda algorithm updates, almost any kind of link helped prop up a site’s ranking. Obviously, quality links had a better impact than poor links, but overall it was all good. With the recent algo updates, bad/spammy links not only stopped adding value to a site, but they can even lead to a site being penalized. For this particular site, a third party marketing company had built thousands of overtly spammy links over five-ish years that left a definitively clear, and bad, footprint. (In their defense, for years it worked really well.) A hefty percentage of them were contextual blog links: links with exact-match anchor text within blog posts that contained essentially (if not exactly) the same content.

My job was to make sure those links were no more. Mafia-style. To that end, I started the exhaustive process of aggregating data and contacting the owners of hundreds of sites to tell them to point those links somewhere else. (Just kidding…I merely wanted them deactivated. I would never do what I just implied I did…really.)

The problem, however, is as follows: spammers want to make a quick buck. Any quick buck. And thanks to Google’s lovably named and universally reviled Penguin update, they have an entirely new technique by which they can do precisely that.

Webmasters and businesses are scrambling to undo what they spent the past few years doing. Links from older, authoritative (albeit irrelevant) websites were the holy grail, and now they’re like the matza that you have left over after Passover. It’s everywhere now that it’s no longer useful. And thanks to the blogosphere buzz (actually more of a dull, resounding roar) generated by the Penguin updates, spammers are highly attuned to the general air of online desperation.

So when I emailed a bunch of spammers who’d initially charged the site a fee to put the link up, I received a statistically significant quantity of responses indicating that they’d likewise be charging the site to take them down. Responses such as “We could understand your urge to remove link. But, due to increase in spam link removal requests and spammers claiming link. We charge $3/ link removal from the site.” (And yes, that’s a verbatim quote.) My personal favorite was the guy who kept on insisting it was his “friend’s” blog, and his “friend” wanted a $10 fee to remove the links.

Fortunately, although the percentage of blog owners demanding compensation was quite substantial, those who responded by immediately removing the links was much more so. And Penguin being an algorithm update (as opposed to a penalty), reinclusion is automated – manual reinclusion requests won’t help. But the automatic side of things in this particular instance is a good thing. It means that although a bunch of sites are still going to have spammy links pointing to my client’s site, a solid 80% of them will be gone, and I’m thinkin’ that should be enough of a difference to trip Google’s sensors during their next update. (If anyone knows/thinks otherwise, feel free to contradict!)

So those of you out there who also have to remove links: the situation isn’t as bad as it could be. It seems that enough sites are willing to remove links without compensation, so hopefully that should help you balance things out in the big G’s eyes.

P.S. All of this is assuming that the remaining webmasters don’t catch on to the compelling advantage that the more opportunistic spammers clearly recognized early on. SEO…can’t live with it…

P.S.2 Before you’ve decided that your site has been affected by the latest Penguin update and subject yourself to the link removal process, you might want to read the handy-dandy guide for diagnosing Penguin that Distilled put out. You never know – you might just have an unrelated penalty. That having been said, it doesn’t hurt to be proactive and get started on the sites that leave the most conspicuous footprints.

The post Why I’m Winning the War Against Spammers appeared first on illuminea web presence agency.

• What are the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? 
• How do I choose which one to use?

First let me tell you in general the main benefits of each.

WordPress.com

WordPress.com is really, really easy to use. Yes, you need to learn how to use it but it’s so user-friendly that with almost no technological background, you could have a wp.com blog up and running within minutes. And then you could spend the next couple of days playing around with the functionality and themes it offers and you’re basically done.

WordPress.org

Unless you’re really comfortable with technology, you probably won’t be able to get a WordPress.org site up and running by yourself. Although it is relatively easy – a few clicks of a few buttons in a few different locations – it takes some technological bravery. But boy oh boy is it flexible. With WordPress.org you can build almost any site you could imagine and as long as the developers of the site are decent, the experience for the site owner will be really pleasant.

The major similarities between wp.com and wp.org 

The dashboard and content management system – The dashboard is where you make content changes to your site. They look identical in both, with all the functionality in a left-hand sidebar. wp.org sites will have more options but they are both easy to navigate and very similar to each other.

Menus – In both you can create whatever menus you want and depending on the theme you choose, you’ll be able to set them as your main navigation, in other menu areas and in widget areas.

Widgets – Both have widget areas. These are defined areas around your website (like the sidebar, the footer or homepage areas) into which you can drag mini programs called widgets. The basic widgets are available in both wp.com and wp.org and they include text widgets (you can enter HTML and text), menu widgets (you can show a WordPress menu) and category widgets (this shows a list of your site’s categories). WordPress.org takes it a large leap further by allowing you to install plugins to your site which sometimes add widgets, for example, we use a premium plugin that adds a form widget to all our clients’ sites.

Differences between wp.com and wp.org 

Here are the main differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org:

So, which one should you use? 

I’d say that WordPress.org is the robust yet possibly overwhelming option and WordPress.com is the simple yet lovely option. If you just want to blog and you’re just starting or you just want to deal with as few technical things as possible, WordPress.com is the way to go.

If, on the other hand, you like the idea of having much more flexibility to add functionality or have custom design, then WordPress.org will be your choice. 

But either way, they are both easy to use as content management systems and you can always start on .com and move to .org when you’re ready because moving between the two is relatively easy.

My lecture on WordPress.com at WordCamp Jerusalem, September 2011

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Add Google Authorship to your content (00:40)

When you associate certain pages/users on your site to your Google+ profile, Google pulls in your picture when those pages appear in search results. Like so:

Why, hello, Friendly CEO!

This is beneficial because:

1. Seeing a picture of someone increases trust-worthiness of the content and as a result, it could increase click-through rates.
2. You can directly tie yourself to your content so that if anyone scrapes your content or steals it then you will still be recognized as the original author by Google.
3. Some are saying that soon authorship will become a ranking factor. 

How to do it:

Part 1 – in Google+ (3:28)

• Make sure you have a Google+ profile. If you have a Gmail or other Google service, you probably have Google+ already.
• Go into Google+.
• Go to your profile page – an icon in the left sidebar.

• Click “Edit profile.”
• In “Contributor to…” you can add sites where you contribute content.

Part 2 – in your WordPress website (5:25)

• Install the free WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast. (Miriam highly recommends this plugin for many reasons – most of this webinar is based around this plugin.)
• Activate the plugin.
• Go to your profile in your WordPress Dashboard.
• In your profile is a field called “Google+”. Insert the URL to your Google+ profile there. 

• Save changes.

Yup. That’s it. There are lots of tutorials on very convoluted ways to do this but Yoast’s SEO plugin makes it this easy.

Please make sure you have a good profile photo of yourself on Google+ since in a week or two (that’s how long it takes for Google to index this change), it’ll start showing in search results!

How to give authorship to the homepage of your site

In your WordPress Dashboard, go to SEO > Titles & Metas > Home

In Author metadata, from the dropdown menu, choose who you want to be the author of the homepage.

If you have a multi-user blog, then by default, authorship is shown on a per-post basis based on the Google+ URL that appears in each author’s profile.

Add Facebook opengraph info to site (10:35)

This is a way to tell Facebook and other services (theoretically) specific information about the site or the page they are on.

In the Dashboard, go to SEO > Social > Click the checkbox “Add OpenGraph meta data”. Click Save Settings.

That’s it.

So, what does it do?

With OpenGraph (OG) activated, you have more control over what title, excerpt and image show when people share your content on Facebook. 

Titles and excerpt

When you share a page or post on Facebook, normally Facebook pulls in the title and the first couple of lines from your post (the description). But in each individual post editor is a “WordPress SEO by Yoast” area and if you go there and give your post a special SEO title or meta description, that is what will be pulled in instead.

Add a unique SEO title and/or Meta Description to your posts/pages

If you prefer to show a different description for Facebook, you can go to the Social tab in this area in the post editor and add a different description there.

Picture

Often, without Facebook OG installed, when people share web pages on Facebook, random images, such as ads from websites, are pulled in as image options.

But, with OG installed, if you choose a featured image for a post/page, that is the image that will be pulled in to a Facebook posting.

Alternately, if you don’t choose a featured image, all the images added to your post will be made available to those sharing your material.

Homepage

Sharing homepages is often most problematic in regards to the image and the description. To remedy this, go to: SEO > Social.

Insert a link to an image and create a description.

Very important! Debug!

Any time you make changes to OpenGraph general settings or settings regarding content that has already been published, if you want Facebook to recognize the changes right away, you need to use the Facebook Debugger tool. 

Go to the Facebook Debugger and enter in the URL of the website where you made changes. Click Debug. This will tell Facebook that you have new information.

Make sure you don’t have two plugins running at the same time that add OpenGraph.

Implement the other seven tips for socializing your site

1. Get Facebook Insights for your site (19:00) – If you link the Facebook Insight tool to your site, you’ll get information about how people are Facebook-interacting with your site.
2. Add Twitter cards to site (20:34) – This is similar to OpenGraph. You add information to your site’s page so that when people share your content on Twitter, it is shared in the way you want. Learn also how to add authorship for Tweeting.
3. Add posts to LinkedIn profile (24:13) – Learn how to automatically share your blog posts on your LinkedIn profile. There are different options so you have more control over which posts you want to share.
4. Add Twitter follow buttons to site (27:20) – Allow people to follow your Twitter account from within your WordPress site.
5. Add Facebook album to site (29:44) – Embed your Facebook photo albums in your website.
6. Facebook’s plugin for WordPress (36:23) – Allows you to do things like automatically post new content to the author’s profile page and to a fan page, it allows you to tag friends on your site, add Like and Subscribe buttons and a Recommendation bar. And you can activate Facebook comments instead of native WordPress comments (learn why Miriam doesn’t recommend using Facebook comments).
7. Social plugin by MailChimp (46:23) – Boosts your website comments in a much better way than Facebook comments. It allows you to comment signed into Facebook or Twitter or neither. And all the comments are being saved in your database so you control your comments. (If you have the problem that Miriam mentions in the webinar, you are probably using Hostgator. Go to this link to learn how to get around the problem.) Allows you to post automatically to your social networks.

That’s it folks. Here’s the webinar:

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We are not PayPal experts, but using PayPal has become an integral part of our business, since it opens up an easy and relatively inexpensive way to accept payments for us and for our clients’ websites. And, unlike many US-based services like Stripe and Authorize.net, with PayPal your money isn’t stuck online, you can see and feel the actual money by depositing it into an Israeli bank account.

PayPal’s Documentation and Phone Support

Recently, PayPal redesigned their website – well some of it anyway. The homepage and some of the sales pages are new and shiny, but most of the support documentation is still stuck in their design mode circa 2001, which makes it hard to find clear answers to our questions. Luckily, Israel has a customer service number which we call every once in a while to get real answers.

PayPal’s shiny new homepage

PayPal’s not-as-shiny support documentation

As we wrote in June 2010, PayPal has an Israeli customer service phone number you can call. The number is: 073-713-7777. But there is something very strange about it… you can’t call the number from a land line! Only from a cellphone.  Yup.

The menu is in Hebrew but if your Hebrew isn’t great, try pressing 2 and then 2 again. The representatives speak English and Hebrew.

PayPal’s Recurring Billing Options in Israel

We offer WordPress hosting and maintenance on a monthly basis and we manage the recurring payments via PayPal. Some of our clients don’t have PayPal accounts and prefer paying for the recurring monthly or annual payment by credit card. Currently, Israeli PayPal account owners can only accept recurring credit card payments if the payer opens a PayPal account and links it to their credit card. They don’t even have to put any money into their PayPal account, but it has to exist to make the credit card payments. (Note: payers using credit cards do not have any additional fees added on to their payment by PayPal.)

However, US PayPal account owners can use PayFlow PRO to do recurring billing directly to a credit card (without having the payer set up a PayPal account). That’s a much more user-friendly system than the current one available to Israeli merchants.

It’s awesome that PayPal has worked so hard to become compatible with the Israeli financial systems. Their efforts mean that they are pretty much the only option available to Israeli merchants who don’t want to go through the standard complicated and expensive credit card merchant account setup. But there are still some things that need improving: like a phone number that works with land lines, and an easier way to accept recurring credit card payments.

The post PayPal in Israel: Recurring Billing Options and Customer Support (only from a cellphone) appeared first on illuminea web presence agency.

SEOmoz is one of the biggest SEO community hubs on the web and they are trying to find the best location for their next 2 meetups, or what they’ve dubbed a MozCation.

We really want them to come to Jerusalem!

We put together a list of 11 reasons why SEOmoz should shlep to Jerusalem so please check it out.

Tweet to vote for Jerusalem to be the #MozCation destination. They will be selecting the winners on July 31, 2012.

About SEOmoz

SEOmoz offers some of the highest quality content about SEO on their blog. Every Friday, SEOmoz CEO Rand Fishkin presents Whiteboard Friday with amazing SEO-related information and tips.

Recently, I really liked his video post Improving Social & Subscription Calls to Action – Whiteboard Friday where he discusses his annoyance with too many calls to follow me! friend me! subscribe! and then offers tips on how to best implement engagement with users. 

What’s your favorite piece of wisdom you’ve learned from SEOmoz?

Thanks for helping us try to get SEOmoz to come to Jerusalem!

The post Vote for the SEOmoz MozCation 2012 Meetup in Jerusalem! appeared first on illuminea web presence agency.

However, there is an app that we stumbled across recently called the “Smart Suggest to friends” by VTools, that gives fans the option to recommend a Facebook Page to their friends. Here’s how the app will look:

To use it, go here and choose which page you want to add the application to. If you want to customize how the app looks in your tabs, move it around by clicking on the little edit icon and selecting “swap position with”.

If you want to change the icon associated with the app or the app’s title, go to the Edit icon, and click on “edit settings”. You can then change the Tab name or change the image by uploading a new image.

To see how the app looks when someone uses it, look at illuminea’s Smart Suggest in action on our Facebook page.

The post Facebook App brings back the beloved “Suggest Page to Friends” feature appeared first on illuminea web presence agency.

This digital world is also unstable. Hackers, cyber thieves, and environmental factors (like dropping your phone in the toilet) all threaten to destroy our digital content at any given time. That is why it is critical to make sure that, in addition to securing your devices and content, you are also backing them up. Just ask anyone who has had their Gmail account hacked and deleted if they wish they had backed it up.

But backups are annoying. It’s hard to remember to do them, and they take time. So the best backup program is one that you set and forget, that works automatically in the background. Here are some ways you can set up automatic backups for your critical data:

Back up your files with Dropbox

Dropbox is not meant to be a backup solution, but it can work quite well as one. If you’re using Dropbox, your files are being automatically synced in the cloud, so you’ve got at least two copies of your files: one on your computer, and one on the web. Even better, set up another computer to also sync with your files, and you’ve got three sets.

Back up your social networks and Google data with Backupify

It’s pretty much impossible to back up Gmail. Yet it can be done with a service called Backupify that automatically backs up all your Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites, Google Contacts, etc. If you are using Google Apps, you can set it to back up multiple users in your Google Apps account.

With Backupify, you can also back up your social networking data (Facebook and Twitter activity). It’s a paid service, but if you think about how much it would cost to lose all that data, it seems like a small price to pay.

Back up your WordPress Website with…a whole bunch of options

There are about a dozen decent WordPress backup plugins and services to choose from. Some are for free, some cost. But many can be set to automatically back up your WordPress site’s files (theme files and uploads), and database, automatically on a regular basis. Make sure you’re not only backing up your site to the same server where your site sits. If that server has issues, you could lose your site and your backups. Therefore, it’s important to send your backups to an off-server location, like Dropbox, Amazon Web Services, or to another server via FTP.

To see a good roundup of available WordPress backup solutions, and their features, check out this post on WPMU.org which includes a handy PDF feature comparison chart.

Backup your smartphone with Google Sync and Dropbox

You can generally back up your smartphone by plugging it into your computer and running a syncing program, like iTunes. However, this method is not automated, so let’s look at some ways you can automate your backups.

I don’t know about you, but the most important content on my smartphone is my email, calendar, contacts and photos/videos.

My email, calendar and contacts are all run through Google and are syncing two ways – new data created on my phone, like a new event in my calendar or a new contact, are synced back to Google. New events etc. added on a desktop are pushed to my phone. My Google email is constantly being synced. Note: I understand that syncing Google data works more smoothly and completely on Android devices. But you can set it up to a certain extent on your iPhone too.

As for photos and videos – Dropbox recently added an AWESOME, life-saving feature via their mobile apps for Android and iPhone – you can configure your settings so that photos and videos stored on your phone are automatically synced to a folder in your Dropbox account called Camera Uploads. You currently can’t choose where these files are stored, and they must go to a folder Dropbox creates for you called Camera Uploads. But it’s a small price to pay for automatic backup of your precious pics, which are now also being synced with any computers linked to your Dropbox account too, giving you multiple backups.

When you enable this feature, Dropbox adds another 500 MB to your account, gratis.

Here’s how to set up your photo/video Drobpox syncing. Note: these instructions are based on an Android device, but are probably similar for the iPhone:

1. Install the Dropbox app – to find it, search for Dropbox in Google Play or iTunes.
2. Go to your app’s Settings. On Android devices, click the button to the left of the Home button, and choose Settings.
3. Under Settings, click on Turn on Camera Upload. You will then be able to choose whether photos are uploaded only when the phone is connected via Wifi, or also via Data plans. Once you’ve chosen your settings, the Camera Upload settings will look like this:
   

Now the Dropbox app will automatically sync your photos and videos to your Dropbox account.

Using the above apps will provide you with automatic backup coverage for your email, calendar, Google docs, contacts, files, photos and videos, also known as Digital Peace of Mind.

The post How to automatically backup your digital life with Dropbox, Backupify, Google and more appeared first on illuminea web presence agency.

Hmmm…

What else did we learn? Well, here is Miriam’s 40-minute monthly web trends lecture from June.

And below are some of the main points from the lecture. Please let us know what you’d like to hear about in future lectures. On July 31th, Miriam will be talking about the most important steps you need to take to make your WordPress site social-friendly. Or, shall we say, sociable.

Sign up here.

Twitter

Expanded tweets: Now in your mobile app you’ll be able to see rich media like photos and videos as part of a tweet.

@replies for verified Twitter accounts: Twitter now gives celebs a way to verify their account because of all the fake celeb accounts out thee. 1-2 years ago Twitter made it so that you cannot see @reply tweets to people you aren’t following. But now you can see them for verified accounts. You know it’s a verified account because it has a blue check next to the name.

Twitter Cards: It’s like Open Graph from Facebook where you can control how the title, image and other elements of your content appear in Twitter. This includes giving attribution to the correct Twitter account. That means that no matter how many times a page is shared from your site, your Twitter account will always be attached to it.

You add it similarly to Open Graph, in the header code of your site. (More info at 5:15 including how to add it to a WordPress site.)

YouTube

No more downloading MP3s from YouTube: There are many third party services that allow you to download MP3s or MP4s from YouTube. MP3 download sites are popular because people like to download just the songs, without the videos. This goes against YouTube’s terms and services and it is a copyright violation since many people upload copyrighted content to YouTube. YouTube has blocked the major offenders from the site.

Facebook

How to turn off facial recognition: For a while now on Facebook, after you upload pictures, the systems tries to recognize the same face in different pictures. Now, since Facebook acquired an Israeli (woohoo!) company, face.com, facial recognition is being taken to another level. However, if you want to minimize the big-brotherness of Facebook by a notch, and don’t want Facebook telling your friends to possibly tag your face in more photos,  do the following:

Go to: the small down arrow in the top right hand corner of the screen > Privacy settings > Time and Tagging > Edit Settings. Click on “Who sees tag suggestions when photos that look like you are upload,” and then in the dropdown change the option from “Friends” to “No One.”

This service is opt-out, not opt-in. In other words, you’re automatically allowing the facial recognition unless you choose otherwise.

Facebook email address: They changed our default email address to our Facebook emails.

Also an opt-out service. How to change it:

Your profile > About > Click “Edit” on Contact Info area. Change the settings next to the email addresses:

There are two settings for each email address. In the left column you decide if your email will be viewable by no one, friends, everyone or custom. In the right column you decide if the email will show on your timeline. Of course you should hide your Facebook address if you have no use for it.

Facebook and diplomacy: Check out an innovative use of Facebook for diplomacy by the American ambassador to Syria at 13:48.

Export Facebook events: You can now export Facebook events to your email or your calendar! Learn how at 14:30.

Pinterest

More attribution tagged to pins: Last month Pinterest added attribution from other sites. For example, if something is shared from YouTube, stuck to the pin is attribution to YouTube and the page it came from. Very important for giving proper credit.

Now it’s been added for more sites. This attribution will also be added retroactively which is really cool.

LinkedIn

Targeted Status Updates has been rolled out to everyone: You can post an update to a specific demographic so that your post can be specialized for those viewers while not worrying about wasting other people’s time.

A new followers insights page: Just like in Facebook. It includes stats about your visitors, engagement, etc.

WordPress launched 3.4 (and 3.4.1)

Lots of new things to talk about here!

Easily embed tweets: Take the URL of the tweet and paste it in the editor. Unlink it and then in the front end it will show a live tweet with retweet, favorite icon and everything.

Add links in photo captions: You can now create a link in a photo caption and link it anywhere you want. Now if only WordPress would make custom links from a photo in a gallery…

New theme customizer: You can make changes to your site and see the changes you’re making as a live preview. Make the changes, see what it looks like and then once you publish the changes, they will actually be live.

In RTL installations, a LTR button. Writing in English on a Hebrew or Arabic WordPress site just got a lot easier. Read more about it here.

And way more! This is an outline of the first half of the lecture. To hear more about SEO in WordPress and other topics, continue watching from 24:00.

And here is the slideshow

The post Men more easily influenced on Facebook and other online marketing news from June 2012 appeared first on illuminea web presence agency.

Why will computers stop being able to surf the web?

Starting in 2007, an Internet fraud ring running out of Estonia infected millions of computers worldwide with a virus to manipulate internet advertising. The way they did this was by redirecting users to rogue DNS servers which gave the cyber thieves the ability to manipulate users’ web activity by redirecting them from legitimate websites to fraudulent ones.

US authorities seized the rogue servers and replaced them with legitimate ones in order not to disrupt victims’ access to the web. However, those servers have been funded by US taxpayer dollars since November 2011, and of course this cannot go on indefinitely. The planned date for turning off the servers is July 9, which means that computers that have been accessing the web via these rogue-turned-legit servers, will lose that ability.

How to check if your computer is using rogue DNS servers

To find out if your computer is clean, or is using the rogue DNS servers, take the following steps:

1. Find out what your computer’s IP address is. You can do this by visiting this site: WhatIsMyIP. Your IP address is the 10 digit number that looks like this: 12.123.12.123. Copy it down somewhere.
2. Visit the following page on the FBI site: https://forms.fbi.gov/check-to-see-if-your-computer-is-using-rogue-DNS. Paste your IP address in the tiny field that appears towards the top of the page:
   
3. Click on Check Your DNS. If your computer is clean, you’ll see the message: “Your IP is not configured to use the rogue DNS servers,” and you can breathe a sigh of relief.

If your computer is not clean, then you’ve got quite a job ahead of you. Visit this page on the DNS Changer Working Group site to see the steps you should take to clean your computer. Yikes.

Sources:

Internet doomsday on July 9th? Don’t panic!, Sophos Naked Security Blog.

International Cyber Ring That Infected Millions of Computers Dismantled, FBI.

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Wufoo

Wufoo’s fun and clear user interface

I wanted to love Wufoo – it’s probably the most popular online form builder – and how cute is their logo?  The user interface is so amazingly user friendly and easy to use. The free plan gets you up to 100 submissions a month but there are some major features that are lacking. I know we internet peeps expect almost everything to be free these days, so it’s hard to complain about their amazing free product missing a few features. But for me, these features were huge and meant not being able to use the free version. Here are the 2 major drawbacks of the free Wufoo plan:

1. The “report abuse” link in the form.  After I filled out the form and published it on the client’s site, I was surprised to see that there was a “Report Abuse” link next to the submit button.  Ummm.. what? I tried searching for a way to remove the “report abuse” link but discovered that there wasn’t one and I would have to wait until it just disappears after a “reasonable amount of time”.  Well, I didn’t have the luxury of waiting around for Wufoo’s algorithm to determine whether or not my form was spammy or their vague definition of time. Of course if you upgrade your plan, the link magically disappears.
   
   I was glad to see that I wasn’t the only one upset by the intrusive link. In fact, I enjoyed reading someone’s comment in the Wufoo forum about how she planned an event with Santa and the “report abuse” could be misconstrued to be reporting child abuse!! That’s no good.
2. No option for a “Thank You” page: Our client wanted people to fill out their form and then be taken to a Thank You page. But that option isn’t available in the free Wufoo package which was upsetting.

I think Wufoo’s website should be clearer about the limited features on the free plan.

JotForm

Another online form builder, Jotform, came up very high in my search results. This is a great alternative to Wufoo because I was able to set up a normal form (without a report abuse link) and enter in a URL for a Thank You page. However, here are the problems I had with Jotform:

1. Although Jotform’s interface loads really fast and you never even have to click save, there is not enough distinction between the tabs in the editing area. I was never quite sure which tab I was in and kept clicking around a lot.
2. I had to do some fancy CSS footwork to get the form to look right. There was a big margin to the left of the form which was really problematic since it made half the form was hidden from view. Also, I wanted to create a dropdown select box that only listed countries so I had to use the Address field and hide all the other fields (street address, city, state, zip code) except for country. In order to fix all the CSS, I had to go into Jotform’s editor under Preferences > Form Styles.
3. There was a javascript conflict on my site so I had to switch from the javascript embed to the iframe embed code and then it ran smoothly.

In conclusion, Wufoo and Jotform are both great services, but if you’re looking for a more complete free solution, Jotform is the way to go.

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