01.17.11
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Head First WordPress (Jeff Siarto) – A great fit for a specific audience

Summary: Very practical, in-depth guide to setting up, customizing and using WordPress blogs – but does require a fair bit of background knowledge.

“Head First WordPress Book ReviewHead First WordPress” by Jeff Siarto does a great job providing helpful and often very in-depth information about how to use the WordPress blogging software. To really get the most out of the book, though, you do need a fair bit of prior knowledge to go with it.

The book is presented in the light-hearted style consistent to the “Head First” series, and I’ve always enjoyed that style, especially for quite technical – and often quite boring – information. It starts by outlining the steps required to set up a blog, then gives detailed customization information and concludes with some creative suggestions on how to use your new site.

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01.06.11
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Mac app store opens – and this time, it really might change everything.

Apple's new Mac App StoreWindows PC users have long bemoaned the difficulty they have finding safe, virus-free software on the internet. And while Apple’s new app store may have at least partially solved that problem for Mac users, developers have to be more than a little concerned about potential difficulties the store may cause them.

Today’s launch of the Mac App Store comes as part of an OS update patch, and once downloaded reveals a screen that iPhone/iPod/IPad users will be very familiar with.  It looks and functions almost identically to the existing app stores, right down to the simple purchase and install procedure, even for expensive and more elaborate software. Continue reading →

01.05.11
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Is social media right for marketing your small or medium sized business?

Social Media for small business
Image by Matt Hamm.

Tips for social media marketing, and the many different ways social media can be used to promote small / midsized businesses (SMBs), can be found in almost endless numbers on an incredibly wide variety of websites. But there’s one crucial tip most small businesses won’t see – and that they should consider before any of the others; namely, is social media right for you at all?

Marketing budgets for SMBs have always been tight, and human resources to manage these dollars are becoming even more scarce. So while there are clearly great opportunities for small and medium businesses to use social media to market themselves, it’s equally clear that social media isn’t for everyone. Continue reading →

12.16.10
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Good, bad and ugly photo use on web pages.


What could this cute puppy possibly have to do with this? Read on...

Is this photo relevant to the page? No - but it might serve a purpose anyway. (Plus, how can you go wrong with a picture of a puppy?)


There are only a handful of organizations left that don’t understand the necessity of having a solid web presence and the tremendous value one can offer. Which is part of the reason it so surprising that usability gets so very little attention.

Usability experts work with web designers and programmers to ensure that sites are easy to use, intuitive, and help the user to achieve whatever they are trying to do with their site. A relatively obscure man named Jacob Nielsen is the Wayne Gretzky of usability, and his useit.com website is one of the best resources available for learning more about usability.

So I was more than a little surprised when I found myself disagreeing with his latest article on the effective photo use. Continue reading →

12.02.10
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Apple, net neutrality, now Starbucks. Is the internet at risk of becoming a vast wilderness where all anyone can see is the view from the highway?

Starbucks' inadvertantly wades into the net neutrality debate.I have to confess, I’ve sometimes lumped the net neutrality folks in with the tinfoil hat crowd. At first I wasn’t convinced net neutrality was really that big of a deal, and even if it was, I generally give corporations more credit than most who comment on these issues online.

But now I’m not so sure.

With Starbuck’s announcement earlier this week of a proprietary digital network available in their stores, I’m thinking it might be time to fire up my own tinfoil hat.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Starbuck’s network is a great offering for its customers, but it further fragments an internet that is becoming more and more limiting.

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