Flashback to 2012: Wordcamp Seattle takeaways from a first-timer

Seattle Art Museum hosted this year’s Wordcamp Seattle on Saturday May 19 and the event was nothing less than amazing!  As a growing enthusiast of WordPress, building all of my client’s websites in this platform over the last couple years, I was in web design heaven at Wordcamp.  Honestly I wasn’t exactly sure what to…

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Change your Website Favicon, Please!

I have to admit that one of my biggest pet peeves when visiting a website is seeing a default favicon image in the top title of the page, whether it be from your website hosting company or the theme logo.  If you don’t know what a favicon is check out this screenshot:

I don’t really know why that bothers me so much. Perhaps it’s because I feel it is in an important piece of keeping consistent branding on your site.

Most of the time it is fairly easy to change out your favicon image.  You can even just changeout the favicon.ico file in the file directory of your site through FTP.

Did that last sentence just sound Greek to you?  If so read on – there are other ways.

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Optimizing Your Feedburner Email in 10 minutes

Although I am just getting started blogging on my site, this is one post I have been aching to write even before my new website launched. Feedburner is no doubt the most popular method for emailing blog posts to subscribers. However, I think many users do not realize its potential and all the ways the service can be utilized to maximize readership and sharing. This post will take you through 5 major ways to easily optimize your Feedburner account.

I’m going to walk you through one of my client’s Feedburner’s accounts because she is really active at testing which methods work best for her readers. Keep in mind not all optimization techniques work for all types of markets. In my opinion, this is true for much of the online marketing advice out there. Sometimes generalized assumptions may not work well for your type of customers or readers. You need to experiment and test and find which method works best for your business.

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7 Reasons why you should use an Email Marketing Service to send your Newsletters

Gone are the days that sending bulk email from Outlook is common practice.  If you are a small business and sending frequent email updates to a growing email list it is best that you set up an account through one of the many email marketing services out there; such as, Constant Contact, MailChimp, iContact, Emma to name a few.

Designing good emails takes some practice and over the past couple years, email creation has been a key part of my business and something that has kept me very busy.  Surprisingly, coding emails is very different from web design.  Email programs such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and especially Outlook can all render an email differently.  Not only that, email coding is a bit “old school” and precise.  Archaic (in a technological timeline) methods such as utilizing embedded tables are best when creating emails and the coding must be precise because email programs are not as forgiving with mistakes as web browsers are.

But why all the tech talk you ask?  Why should you care?  You just want to send a nice looking email and not worry about coding it.  I tell you this because knowing WHY  you need to go through an email marketing service  is important for many reasons.

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