IdeaCrunch.com

This Just In!

dropdude — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 04:54:35 +0000

Big news! I’m posting something finally here — it’s been a while. Still thinking about what put here and I think I’ve figured it out… Every domain you develop must have a reason to exist — a purpose in life. It takes energy to give a site “life” though, ideas, content, traffic, interest, etc…

I’m going to try again with this site… hold on!

Strengthen Your Brand

dropdude — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:04:05 +0000

If you DO plan to develop your domain, then run out and sign-up with Twitter using the domain as the Twitter username. This will strengthen your brand and it costs nothing! It doesn’t even have to be a Twitter-centric application like Foamee.

Have a Twitter account gives you another possible traffic stream and diversifies your offerings. I’ve seen many Twitter users running Blog to Twitter scripts — any new blog posts also gets posted to Twitter with a small url linkback to the original blog post — but this LAME.

Wordpress: Front End the Back End

dropdude — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 23:05:04 +0000

No question that Wordpress PHP template tags and functions make it easy to construct great user interfaces. But if you’d like to do some of the traditionally back-end functions like Creating Posts or Deleting Posts from the front end, you’ll quickly hit the wall…

Probably the most popular example of this is the Prologue theme which, like Twitter, allows a logged-in user to Create a Post from the front page. Stay tuned here for upcoming articles on how to add functions to your theme for Deleting and Updating posts using Ajax to keep the user on the same page without refresh…!

Hide Your Site During Development

dropdude — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 15:36:58 +0000

Well, you can’t really HIDE a website, but you can redirect users to a safe page that’s away from your work-in-progress. The Members Only Wordpress plugin can help. This plugin redirects unregistered users to the log-in page -OR- to any page you choose.

At LowStart.com, I’ve chosen to redirect users to a “Coming Soon” page and THAT page has a Newsletter Signup form. There’s no sense in re-directing users to a login page they’ll never be able to use, so in creating this page, users will get a taste of what you’re creating and opt-in their email address to be notified when the site is ready to go live.

You DO have to create new header, footer, and page tempate for the task. I’ve taken mine, made copies of them, and then removed all the content and links, oh and removed the sidebar and modified the style of the content page to use 100% of the width…

Now, user’s can at least see what the site is shapping up to be without tripping over code that’s in development and might not be safe to run…

Let Your Visitors Speak!

dropdude — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 07:21:24 +0000

Give your visitors the chance to contribute on the very first page they see… That’s what I’m doing at UseTemplates.com, a site I created for me to keep track of all the themes and templates I run across while browsing the Net. Directly on the home page, users can now suggest a theme to be included on the site.

Suggestions submitted this way are added comments to a ‘suggestions‘ Page. The magic is done by the WP-Wall plugin. When activated, the Wall plugin creates an “unpublished” page and it’s to this page the that comments from the Wall are added.

Modifications were made to the WP-Wall plugin so that it doesn’t display all the Page’s comment a la “Wall” style, and I added a “website” field. If you ARE logged in, I also made the Ajax submit populate the comment’s email field.

All these modifications took about 1 hour to hammer out while watching the Daily Show and Colbert… not bad!

Quick Content For Your New Domain

Jason — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:17:06 +0000

When you register a new domain, it’s important to gauge its traffic for yourself — don’t rely on others’ estimates or statistics. Also, you don’t want it resolving to an auto-parked page with your registrar. Oh, and you want some content there for the accidental visitor and the Google bot to see.

Whew! That’s a lot to do! Not really… once you’ve got the templates created and done the routine one time, you’ll find it’s really not that hard. Here are the steps I made for the recently registered “AdobeArt.com - Adobe Style Art for Your House and Home”:

Step 1: Switch nameservers to YOUR hosting

There is NO sin greater than keeping a new domain at the registrar’s auto parked page. This earns them money while doing NOTHING for you… no sales leads, no PPC, no Google love, NOTHING!

Step 2: Get a free CSS/HTML Template

We’ll be creating a simple HTML/CSS landing page. I found some at intensivstation.ch and downloaded the “fixed box centered” template. Fix up the HTML title and any META content you want in there for index food.

Step 3: Get Content!

Since I didn’t have any real content yet, I at least wanted to let people know that there would be soon. And what better way to let them know than having them sign-up for an email newsletter or alert? So, at a minimum you need a Form and Code to send an email to YOU with the user’s contact information.

I took a quick look over at WidgetBox.com and found one that would do the job. Using THAT widget has some disadvantages though … what I marketing lesson I got, and some good ideas too

Instead, I opted to use Wordpress and the cForms plugin to accomplish the same thing. cForms is incredibly configurable, and I was able to create a Wordpress page template that included nothing but the basic header content and the page content.

Once you’ve got the page template created and uploaded to your theme folder, you can create a New Wordpress Page that uses that template. The new page can have anything you like, but I included ONLY the new Form I created to gather the user’s name and email (and captcha for a little added security).

Next on to the index.html page. Instead of including the WidgetBox.com code, I include an IFRAME pointing to that new Wordpress page containing the form. This way I can use my NEW domain and not the domain the form-widget is coming from. And… Viola!

You can see the end result here at AdobeArt.com. The look is from one of the many available cForms styles and the logo at the top was generated a the ACME Label Maker site.

Step 4: Include Your Tracking Code

Don’t forget to include your tracking code in the index.html page. You’ll be checking… oh, every 3 minutes too see if anyone came by…

Crappy Site Gets Google Traffic, Now What?!

dropdude — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:14:20 +0000

Optimize! I wrote earlier about McJiffy, the free eBay store script — no database required, awesome! — and now I’m actually seeing traffic from Google. I stood up a site for buying hand bags, shoulder bags and purses. These are the searches I’m seeing from Google:

chloe baby silverado, chalkware blackamore,Elliott Lucca Estella Graphite Silver leather bag, COACH LEATHER GALLERY TOTE STYLE, Dooney Bourke Giraffe Wallet, is my coach carly a fake, fake coach bags, designer hand bags

And these are the page searches on the site itself:

kooba, francesco biasia, elliott lucca

I have NO IDEA what these things are, but THAT doesn’t matter. Now that I’ve got Google’s attention, I really need to optimize that default template. Two Things I need to do: 1) discover what those keywords are, what categories they fall into, and make those same categories on the site; 2) get a better template

Stay tuned for a update of BagHound.com and maybe a FREE McJiffy template!

How to Find Unique Blog Themes

Jason — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 06:32:27 +0000

The trick to finding a unique theme for your new blog is to NOT look for them. If you run Wordpress, don’t search Google for “Wordpress Themes”, you’ll get the same old themes everyone else is using.

Instead, look for free HTML/CSS templates, then convert them to blog themes. Today, I’ve converted the template “Internet Studio” from solucija.com into a Wordpress them at my domain drop-catching blog GoDrops.com.

Build A Gallery Of Your Themes

Jason — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:22:04 +0000

When you DO find that perfect theme for your new domain, keep track of it in a gallery! Create content whenever possible and use a domain to match. This also has the benefit of keeping YOU more organized.

You can simply use Wordpress for this and a gallery theme. I’ve started a gallery of themes that I find exceptional at UseTemplates.com.

Free eBay Store Script

Jason — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:16:03 +0000

McJiffy EASy is an open-source PHP script for running an eBay store using the eBay affiliate program, the eBay Partner Network. The nice thing about McJiffy is that NO database is required. Setup is sweet and easy. Caching is in place to speed up category searches.

I’ve got a few of these setup with the default template showcasing such fine products as fly-through window magents and designer hand bags and golf tools.