Real Simple Success

• RT @atsmith: Great advice: The 70/20/20 Twitter Engagement Formula + http://ow.ly/gelB #

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• RT @davekerpen: TwitterKeys: Enhance your Twitter conversations - The Next Web http://tinyurl.com/5d5eyd #
• RT @RetailEmailBlog Ann Taylor Email: :Join us on FB “…where our Style Director is sharing the latest…” NOT just “join us,” but here’s WHY #
• Email nav bar converts better than or as well as the main content http://tinyurl.com/rbx6uq #email #

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• OnePageCMS: This is INCREDIBLY COOL. Instantly insert edit box in a boring old .html file, and it’s Wysisyg. http://tinyurl.com/lxmwvc #
• Email campaigns best & worst open rates. Kind of surpsising. Intereting. http://tinyurl.com/9yb3hp #email #
• List of web design, SEO, marketing checklists. http://bit.ly/Fk7uE #
• “Facebook: many ppl have yet 2 figure out the most effective way 4 using the site 2 generate sales” http://bit.ly/1Nwa5B #facebook #

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• Chris Anderson: The Q is: cn U use free as a form of marketing 2 attract a minority of yr users 2 pay 4 a superior form. http://bit.ly/FCHrD #
• “give away the abundance and charge for the scarcity” … http://bit.ly/FCHrD #
• RT @inspiredm: 8 Simple Ways to Improve Typography In Your Designs http://bit.ly/bD5JC Nice tips! #
• To do lists that don’t make life hard. VERY sensible stuff! http://tinyurl.com/2ovj8m #
• Work in dashes. http://bit.ly/YVNBw
  #productivity #
• Realizing that every time i really sat down & took the time, things turned out well, & produced a good result. #
• .. ‘twas when I thought about it, & thought s’more, then, worried a bit more about it, then did not do it, then, results unfavorable! #

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Want to know what your web designer is saying? CSS, HTML, server, URL, and many other terms nicely eplained here: http://css-tricks.com/web-nerd-terminology-explained/

I have noticed that it’s very handy to use the QuickPress panel in the WordPress Dashboard (the page you land on when you login to WordPress), to quickly add post ideas, as they come to me. I can then flesh them out later, and not lose them.

It’s very quick to add things here, and you just click Save Draft to save the idea without having it go public.

I’m just going to mention that I added an Involver.com app to my FaceBook page, and something caught my eye, and even scanning, this very subtle thing got me to like them more.

Screen cap:

Why? Well, I’m gonna say it’s something about the informal tone, of the “thank you”. For some reason, it felt real.

I’m not going to go into all the reasons this particular thank you felt real, only to say that something about it felt casual, confident, and easy. Like the difference between walking up to someone with comfort and confidence, and walking up to her hoping to God they will accept you, I think.

The first one feel much better to the girl.

It’s similar, isn’t it?

photo credit: JB London

For the average consumer of web design services, the move from table-based layouts, to css- or tableless-layouts, probably means little. However, it’s important that you know the basics of what CSS Style Sheets mean, and why you want to find a web designer that uses them.

This post is not designed to teach you CSS (you could go here, or here for that). It is designed to give you the bottom-line context as to why it matters to your website.

Bottom Line Summary:

Cascading Stylesheets, or CSS, a.ka. CSS Style Sheets, are a system that lets web designers’ jobs become much easier, freeing up their time to focus on making sites more beautiful, faster loading, and easier to use.

While CSS has been around for a while, the biggest developments happened when the majority of web browsers supported the use of CSS layout techniquest — that is, ways of laying out the page using CSS rules. Before this, web designers had to use HTML commands meant to represent tabular data — tables — stretching the use of HTML for tables far, far beyond its original intended use.

The bottom line for a web design customer is: If your prospective web designer does not design with CSS-based, tableless layouts, do not use that web designer. They are 5 to 10 years behind the times, and this lack of up-to-dateness will probably affect other aspects of their practice, as well!

And now, to the bigger context…

CSS Style Sheets Overview

A CSS style sheet is a special file, often contained as a single doucment on a website, along with the HTML files that represent the content of the site.

The HTML file points to (references) one or more CSS style sheets, which contain the formatting instructions. This leaves the HTML file to contain the content of the page, relieving it of the duty of representing the formatting.

For example, an HTML file might contain an instruction like the following. Let’s say the purpose here is to provide a caption that would go below a photo:

<p class="caption">The 1908 Fire Ravaged Much
 of the City, but Spared the Opera House</p>

The corresponding CSS file, could then contain an instruction to provide formatting for the “caption” class, shown above:

.caption {
  text-align: center;
  color: #333;
  font-size: .9em;
  font-style: italic;
}

Now, let’s say this type of caption appears a hundred times throughout this website. All the web designer has to do is specify the “caption” class each time he or she wants the appropriate formatting to appear, knowing that the browser will refer back to the instruction in the CSS style sheet for formatting instructions.

In the “olden days,” before CSS style sheets, here is what that same HTML code might have looked like:

<p><font color="#333333"><font size="2"><i>
<center>The 1908 Fire Ravaged Much of the City,
but Spared the Opera House</center></i></font>
</font></p>

Now, notice how much more code is there, just to represent the same thing! Imagine that code repeated 100 times, and you’ve got some idea of what kind of savings CSS style sheets buy you.

But now, the real savings, comes in layout—the positioning of elements on the page.

CSS Style Sheets for Layout - Why It Matters

In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, as web design became more and more sophisticated, web designers found the need to specify more and more complex page layouts. They found that the easiest way to do this — often, the only way to do this — was to use the HTML codes intended to represent tables. Here is an example of a sensible use of tables:

The real function of tables was intended to represent tabular data, like the table above. However, web designers often found themselves using these same HTML codes to represent tables, within tables, within tables, just in order to layout a simple HTML web page, with, say, a footer, a header, and a sidbar.

<table>
  <tr>
    <td>
      <table>
        <tr>
          <td>cell</td>
          <td>cell</td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
          <td>
            <table>
              <tr>
                <td>cell..

… Well, I hope you get the idea here. What you had in the above HTML example, was an extremely messy series of nested tables. And while you, as the viewer, wouldn’t have had to see the HTML code shown here—the web designer would still have had to deal with it, and that is the main point!

With the advent of CSS-based layout techniques, the underlying HTML code got much simpler. And what’s more, it made much more sense. The result was that layouts became cleaner, easier to maintain, and easier to develop.

While the complexity of table-based layouts almost demanded the use of special tools that shielded the designer from the HTML much of the time, with the advent of CSS-based layouts, it became much, much easier to work in the underlying code — reducing the need for fancy programs like Dreamweaver, and giving the careful web designer much more control over his code.

I hope this article gave some degree of context to a rather complex subject, without being either too overwhelming, or too general.

photo credit: Wall Tea

Sonia Simone has an excellent post on CopyBlogger about all of the fear — other people’s — that we are coming up against, when we try to motivate them to use our products or services.

Harkening back to the days of sea monkeys, when as kids, many of us were titillated by the promise of owning a kingdom of miniature sea people, only to find out that sea monkeys were just brine shrimp.

The betrayals went on from there. Simones point, is that when we are approaching someone with an offer, we are going to come up against all of the built-up disappointment, resentment, and cynicism that has built up since we were kids.

The circle of trust, for anyone, is pretty small. We need to build it up in as many ways as possible, and keep earning it.

Link: http://www.copyblogger.com/copy-conversion/

As I am getting more into this area of marketing a site through “organic search,” or “SEO,” I began to start questioning some of the practices I started to do. Do I feel right doing things that go against the intent of the makers of a system, just because I can, and I will get a result from it? When is it right to create a pseudonym?

I am reading from the book The Art of Power, by Thich Nhat Hanh. He always speaks about the importance of looking deeply into the motivations for our actions. If we do this, we can preserve our personal trust in ourselves. Do I want to trick people, just because I can? Some SEO practices veer into this territory, even when most people might call them “white hat,” or “grey hat.”

I have to think about the intentions of others, so that I will be contributing to a civilization where people can trust one another. I made a personal list of things that I considered ethical, versus grey area, or black area, for me. Many practices in SEO involve working with the way Google (and other search engines) intend to find good information, and doing things that way. On the one hand, aligning with that way, can be a good way to get valuable information—your information—found by Google.

On the high end, it could even be a service, because Google does want its search results to be relevant. It does everything it can to make the highest search results reflect relevant information by genuinely interested people, with a good intention to help visitors. So, if I have a good intention to help my visitors, and this intention aligns with a business intention, then I am moving towards having a really ethical business.

On the other end, however, it is easy to try to “trick” Google, to get better results. The difference is between aligning with the way Google finds relevant information, and tricking the intent of that same formula, or algorythm. In the former, you find out how to line all the parts up, to generate a win-win solution for everybody. Everyone wins.

In the latter, you look for holes in the algorythm—exceptions or rules Google hasn’t thought of, to get past Google’s rules.

I began to construct a list of things that I felt were possible to align with, grey areas, and ones that definitely weren’t. Now, none of these things go into the realm of what would normally be called “spam.” It’s just that for me, some of the greyer things still don’t feel right. They don’t feel like a good way to contribute to the kind of world I want to be living in, where we can trust each other, and we are honest even when we don’t have to be, to avoid “getting in trouble.”

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