Google Fonts Gives Web Designers Variety
For years, designers have complained of only being allowed to use Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, or Courier as marketers and web developers forced the usage of web-friendly fonts for usability and search engine optimization. The idea of these four fonts being known as the web-friendly fonts is quickly becoming extinct.
The 5 Useful Benefits of Using Dropbox
I have been using Dropbox for the better part of a year now and have found it an effective service in my everyday business activities. I started by using the free 2GB account for the first few months but as I got used to the service, I found myself using it more and more and upgraded to a larger account. Here are the 5 reasons why Dropbox has become an essential tool for my work:
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Google Adsense In Your City: A Learning Experience
Last month, I traveled to Las Vegas to attend the Google Adsense In Your City. Since launching Vancouver Trails in 2007, the Google Adsense ads being run on the website have been the primary way of generating revenue from that site and this event offered a good opportunity to catch up on what I was doing right and what needed improving.
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Search Google Using an Image
Google Images now offers a feature where you can search the Internet for similar images. To do try an Image search:
- Go to: http://images.google.com/
- Find a photo on your computer in your Explorer (Windows) or Finder (Mac).
- Drag that photo to the browser and drop it into the Search Field on the Google Images page.
- Wait for the photo to upload and voila!
Here’s a screenshot of the Google Image page that shows the sample Starry Night image being dragged to the search field:
How can I use this?
This is more than just a cool feature as there are several business applications this can be used for.
- Copyright: If you have photos on a website you run or on Flickr, try search with one of those photos and see if any other websites are using your photo that maybe did not ask for permission. You might be surprised!
- Designing with Stock Photos: If you simply do not have photos for your website and need to buy stock photos from a service like iStock, try searching the web with that stock photo to see what other companies are using that same photo. Discovering that a competitor is using the same photo is like wearing the same outfit to a party as your friend.
- Partnerships / Linking: Sometimes websites put a logo of your company on their site but don’t provide a link to your website. Try searching with your logo and see what comes up. This may present some opportunities to follow up for link building.
It’s widely known that one of the methods Google’s algorithm ranks sites on is unique content. Will this content start to include images? Or maybe it does already.
Google+ Launches Business Pages
The Google+ social network has finally launched their Business Pages where companies can now create their own profiles, similar to Facebook pages. While still in its infancy, Google+ Pages allows a company to include a brief description of themselves, their website, photos, contact info, gain followers, and send status updates to those followers.
While this just seems like a splash-in-the-pan compared to all the features Facebook Pages offered, businesses should setup a Google+ Page because more features will be rolled out in the next year and these pages will become part of Google’s search algorithm. In other words, there will be a positive SEO value to setting up a page and doing so sooner may keep your business ahead of the competition.
One thing to keep in mind is that Google+ Pages can only have one administrator at this time, so make sure the right person sets up the account for your company.
Here’s an introductory video from Google:
Dealing with UTF-8 Character Encoding In PHP and MySQL
The other week, a colleague of mine sent an interesting article about UTF8 encoding through the web stack. The post talks about how you have to force each part of your web application and software into UTF8 as they fight to default to their own default encodings. Most of the time, we think that setting the charset of our tables to UTF8 in the database and then declaring the HTML document as a ecoded in UTF8 is enough, however you should also specify that data transferred between your application and the database is also encoded as UTF8.
Here’s a summary of the points to be aware of:
1. Code Editor Preferences – Make sure the code editor that you are using is opening and saving your code files in UTF8. A lot of editors default to native Windows or Mac encoding, which can cause characters to appear differently.
2. Create MySQL Tables set to charset=utf8 and to collate=utf8_unicode_ci – MySQL by default collates to Latin1 so you will have to define both the charset and collate when you create your tables.
3. Tell MySQL that .sql File is UTF8 – If you are using the SQL pane in something like PHPMyAdmin, you may not have to worry about this step, however if you are using MySQL’s command line or a different 3rd party MySQL client, you have to tell MySQL that the .sql file is encoded in UTF8. If you don’t tell MySQL the .sql file is UTF8, it will default back to Latin1 and corrupt your data. For a command line example, refer to rentzsch’s post.
4. Exporting Tables – If you’re transferring tables between two databases, make sure to set the default-character-set=utf8 when using mysqldump.
5. Specify the Database Connection in your Application – A lot of developers forget to include a line of code to tell their web application to connect to the database using the UTF8 encoding. In PHP, you can use the mysql_set_charset functions like:
$link = mysql_connect('localhost','username','password',TRUE);
mysql_set_charset('utf8',$link);6. Specify Encoding in HTTP Headers – Include some PHP code at the top of your application to specify the HTTP Headers:
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');7. Specify Encoding in HTML – Include a Meta tag in the <head></head> of your HTML documents that defines the encoding as UTF8:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
8. Specify Encoding in HTML Forms – If your application is using forms that Insert or Update data in the database, you should also specify accept-charset=”UTF-8” in the form tag:
<form name="webform" method="post" action="formscript.php" accept-charset="UTF-8">
Dealing with character encodings can be a very tricky, especially if your web application uses different languages with different character sets (ie. Japanese), however if you ensure your encoding is set in each step, it can save you a lot of headaches down the road.
Thanks to rentzsch for their informative post on How To Use UTF-8 Throughout Your Web Stack.
Google+ Shows Promise but Where’s the Support for Businesses?
Google rolled out it’s social networking equivalent to Facebook, called Google+, this summer and the initial features look promising. Google+ organizes your Friends into Circles, or custom named groups that you can add your contacts to. Many Facebook users have become Friends with family members, work colleagues, old high school buddies, etc. and find it challenging to update their statuses with personal opinions or photos knowing that they might risk one of their co-workers seeing private messages. Google+’s Circles enables you to organize each of your contacts into a different category and choose which updates and content those people see.
Google+ has done a great job of implementing a system that is easy to use and navigate. Even though the system has nowhere near the number of features that Facebook has, it’s a great start and it seems that updating certain things is easier to find compared to having to dig through menus in Facebook.
Now What?
After experimenting with Google+, the common reaction has been “Now what?”.
The big piece of the puzzle missing from Google+ is the ability for users to setup Pages for their Businesses, Organizations, Bands, Political Groups, etc. and for users to be able to follow those pages that they are interested in. Businesses have been itching to include their brands on Google+ but Google has been slow to respond.
In early July, Google announced that business accounts would be coming soon but then followed up with a message several days later asking businesses to stop making new accounts. This past week, several of the most popular companies who were able to setup Google+ Pages were removed without warning, including Mashable and Sesame Street.
Google should have probably waited in rolling out Google+ until the capabilities to add businesses to the system was ready. We have become so accustom to services on the Internet being accessible immediately and on demand that we don’t have the patience to wait for, what seems like a basic system, to be implemented. Google should have recognized this.
Still, Google will have all of these tools for businesses shortly and will continue to integrate their services with Google+, such as Maps, Places, and Calendars. Most importantly, the features on Google+ will tie back into search results since, after all, Google is all about “Search”!
Responding to Negative Online Feedback
Here are some tips for dealing with negative online feedback:
The Best Offense is a Good Defense
Encouraging customer comments on industry specific sites and in common web directories, such as Google Places, should be part of your online marketing strategy. Staying on the offence by doing a bit of work on this each month and getting positive feedback can save you a lot of hassle in the long run when you do get a negative feedback.
In addition, Google displays its comments in their search results and there is no doubt that positive and negative feedback on your company factors into search engine optimization. With this in mind, include online comments and feedback as part of your online strategy before somebody leaves you a negative response and you find yourself behind the 8-ball.
Tags: google, google comments, negative feedback, Social Media, user feedback
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