Order the MacHeist bundle today and get over $900 of essential mac software for only $39. Make sure you watch the video on all of the cool applications the bundle comes with. 25% of sales go to your favorite charity, so order now and pass it along to your friends! The more sales that are made means the more applications you get to download.

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Here are the six steps to planning and executing a successful website:

1. Planning - Forming an Idea and Setting a Goal.
   • You have a great new website idea. You can see it all playing out perfectly in your head. All of the instruments strike every note in harmony in your symphony. This idea is so big you can maybe even see yourself making executive decisions from your cell phone on a remote island in the Bahamas. This can all come true, but you have to do your research first.
   • Research - Your great idea will succeed if it provides significant value. You just have to make sure someone else isn’t already doing it!
   • Competition is always healthy, but don’t go after a saturated market. A small amount of competition lets you know there is significant potential in that area, and other people are willing to put money on it. However, it will take too much time, money and effort to establish yourself and then start competing with the big boys if you go after an older market with established players.
   • Map it Out - Get your ideas on paper. Create a site map that visualizes each page in a bird’s eye view and explain the workings and function of each page. Getting a site map together will help you understand how the pages interact and organize the project.
   • Target and Positioning - Who is your audience? Entrepreneurs, local retail stores, bloggers, internet marketers? How are you going to approach them? Are you an expert in the field or just a fellow friend? Why are you better than the competition? What is your unique selling proposition?
   • Set a Goal - What are you trying to accomplish with this new website? Do you want to inform the public about a topic, do you want to start selling a product or do you want to create a new way to network?
   • Allocate the Funds - Just as they say, “don’t try to be your own accountant,” don’t try to be your own web developer. Anyone can create a basic HTML page in Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or even a simple text editor. But hiring an expert pays off. Things will get done right the first time, your site will be optimized for search engines and humans, and they can implement complex programming modules like payment processing APIs, message boards, forums, blogs, etc. You may also need some extra software that will enhance your website. Here are some examples of things you may need down the line:
     • Software
       • Shopping Cart
       • Message Board or Forum
       • Website Password Protection
       • Development Software like Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Textmate, etc.
     • Hosting
       • Domain names (you can purchase domains like mydomain.com, mydomain.net, etc. for under $10 a domain)
       • Hosting package (from $3.99 a month for simple shared hosting if you have less traffic to $100+ a month for dedicated hosting if you have lots of traffic)
       • Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate
       • E-mail addresses
     • Labor
       • Designers
       • Developers
       • Salespeople
2. Outlining and Content Creation
   • Design - Design isn’t just about making things look good. Make sure your website design integrates functionality and design. Construct your webpage to be “eye AND brain friendly.” Follow some design guidelines like the 7 +- 2 rule from StomperNet. Don’t overwhelm visitors with choices and keep things simple.
   • Content Creation - The core of all websites is the content it provides. The content provides the value and makes people come back to your website wanting more. Generally, the more content you provide and the more frequently it’s updated, the better off you are for gaining new visitors and being indexed by search engines. If you are developing a corporate website, deliver clear and concise messages that make a point. Although your company may have started in 1867, most people won’t want to read three or more pages about the years of history.
3. Development
   • Turn Layout into Working Site - Use the correct tools. Make sure the web developer uses the newest standards to create the website layout. XHTML and CSS (table-less design) are the best tools because they separate content from style, creating a semantic format for easy updating, search engine friendliness, cross browser compatibility and faster page loading.
   • Integrate Content - Copy and paste is the easiest way to integrate the text.
   • Dynamic Functionality - This the tricky stuff. There are lots of tools being used for dynamic websites. BizWidgets uses PHP and MySQL for dynamic websites that interact with databases. They are both open source which eliminate a lot of overhead like extra software or hardware (Ruby on Rails is another awesome new language, check it out!). There are other alternatives like ASP/MSSQL, J2EE, Perl, Coldfusion, Java, C, etc. We prefer PHP and MySQL because it’s popular and that means there’s a lot of resources if you get stuck and need help. There are also lots of code libraries and frameworks built (like CodeIgniter) which include standard website components and eliminate your redundant code.
4. Review
   • Revisions - Don’t be too optimistic and expect everything to fall in place the first time! Make sure you bugproof everything, test the website in different browsers, have friends, family, and coworkers go through the website. Everyone browses websites differently, and they will probably find a bug in a few seconds that you would never see! Review the content, design, and functionality to make sure things flow smoothly for a good end-user experience. Make sure you get a lot of opinions from people other than the development team because being involved in a project doesn’t give you a birds eye view of everything.
5. Implementation
   • Make it Live! After your design is complete and functioning 100% up to its potential, you can move it from your staged server to the real live website!
6. Promotion
   • What is a website without any visitors? Now that your great new website is done and bugproof, you need to show the world how wonderful it is. Of course, if you already have some credibility on the internet, that can help a ton. But even then, your website may not be an overnight success and you will need to promote your new venture.

With recent phenomena like Ron Paul raising 4.2 millions of dollars in a 24 hour period (that’s approximately 3 thousand dollars donated every second) and the plentyoffish.com creator making millions of dollars a year from internet advertising, everyone (even Hillary Clinton) is waking up and smelling the potential! Too bad Hillary’s party didn’t do their research on YouTube before posting a campaign video for internet enthusiasts without watching it first! Using the internet and social networking as leverage to spread your message is becoming a powerful tool in your company’s arsenal. Growth can spread more rapidly with the viral marketing effect and travel far and fast without the cost of using the traditional mass media.

What all of this means is, if you want to get your company or your name out there, you need to get started with social networking and using web2.0 services. Internet Marketing geniuses like Ed Dale and Brad Fallon are teaching everyone the importance of web2.0 with free courses like Thirty Day Challenge and paid programs like StomperNet. Joel Comm found the Next Internet Millionaire by creating the first internet marketing reality TV show (like an online version of the Apprentice). RSS feeds allow you to syndicate your message over video, audio, or text. In combination, these tools can accelerate the process of establishing yourself and they can give you significant amounts of traffic, allowing you to use that traffic and convert your visitors into buying your products!

To begin establishing your online presence, you need to start signing up on social networks. Like investing, diversifying your name and spreading it in as many places possible is a good ingredient to becoming established and driving people to your website. Services like Digg can send massive surges of traffic to your website (sometimes enough to crash your server!), while del.icio.us and stumbleupon can deliver loads of balanced traffic over a long time period. This helps people recognize your name and deliver targeted traffic. Below is the list of bare essentials with bunch of extras (over 100 in the lists), and aggregating services to help you keep track of them all.

The Essentials

1. Digg - Find great articles here. The community decides what stories make it to the front page of the website by digging (voting for) or burying (voting down) stories. If one of your blog articles makes it to the front page, you’ll see huge spikes in your traffic. Just make sure your server can handle the load from thousands of people visiting your website at the same time. Sorry, that means paying more than $2.99 for hosting!
2. del.icio.us - The original social bookmarking site. You bookmark pages you like with a description and list of relevant tags you create. Then you can network with people who have similar interests as you to share and exchange links that interest you. If you use this service a lot, you can even get the RSS feed for your newly bookmarked sites and put your recent bookmarks on your blog!
3. Technorati - The original blog aggregating service that allows you to syndicate your blog articles. This site takes all of the blogs on the internet, crawls them regularly, and feeds them to you on their site. It keeps account of who’s talking about who and gives sites an authority ranking based on the number of people talking about that blog on their own blogs. This is a great way to discover other bloggers with your interests and syndicate your own articles for everyone else to read.
4. BlogRush - A new, innovative way to rush people to your blog by syndicating your article headlines on other blogger’s sites. You get a widget that you put on your site and you get credits based on your amount of traffic, referral traffic, and other various variables. It’s a great way to drive targeted traffic to your site from other bloggers’ websites. In a way, it’s like free advertising that leverages your existing traffic to get ad space on other websites.
5. Twitter - A microblog even more informal than the Tumblr microblog, Twitter allows you to blog about everything you do. You can blog from your phone, house, car, airplane, taxi cab, movie theater…you get the point. You are limited to 140 characters per entry, and you just tell Twitter what you are up to at the moment. You can make friends and follow them to see what everyone’s up to at the moment. It’s strangely addicting, check it out!
6. Facebook - Many people think of Facebook as a time-wasting website you visit to keep up with your friends. While Facebook is great for keeping up with old friends, they are inventing new ways to get your business name out in the world using a popular social networking platform. Now you can develop software products purely for Facebook and even start making money from your facebook application!
7. StumbleUpon - StumbleUpon is an addicting service to find interesting and entertaining articles, videos, and photos on the internet. StumbleUpon is different because you are directed to different websites randomly rather than you choosing where you navigate. Of course, with SU comes a profile page where you can add friends and share links.
8. YouTube - It’s a lot easier to watch a video on something rather than reading a long article about it. That’s why video and audio will be a main ingredient to internet marketing in 2008. If you aren’t afraid to start video blogging or creating entertaining or educational videos, you should start. You can reach millions of people in days with this new platform and it’s a fun community to discover and learn through video.
9. A Social Network/Community of your choice. I am a member of the CodeIgniter forums for PHP/MySQL programming that uses their MVC php framework and I try to participate in there when I have time. I also always find awesome new stuff in different niche interests at 9rules.
10. An Aggregating Service - There are so many social networking, bookmarking, and article websites now that it’s really hard to keep track of it all. The popular ones that I use are MyBlogLog, Lijit, and FriendFeed. FriendFeed, for example takes the RSS feeds from all of the popular services like Digg, delicious, twitter, and youtube, and makes a news feed similar to the facebook feed. It’s a good way to have one RSS feed for everything you do online instead of one feed for each individual service. MyBlogLog takes your blog and social bookmarking services and makes a community out of your own personal internet presence. You can join communities that you like and network with other bloggers. Lijit does something similar and they both provide a widget for your blog that helps keep traffic stats from other community members.

Blog Platforms/Hosts:

1. Aeonity
2. Blog
3. Blogates
4. Blogetery
5. Blogger - Google’s blogging platform. There are many built in widgets but not much flexibility.
   
6. Blogr
7. Blogsome
8. Blogster
9. Bravenet.com/webtools/journal
10. Clearblogs
11. Easyjournal
12. eHow
13. Googlepages
14. Hubpages
15. Iseekblog
16. Myspace
17. Sampa
18. Squarespace
19. Thoughts
20. pbwiki
21. Wikispaces
22. Squidoo - A cool platform to create pages about anything you’re an expert at.
23. Stikipad
24. Tumblr - An awesome personal blog platform that Google likes.
    
25. Typekey
26. Livejournal
27. Socialogs
28. Wordpress - A great blog platform that BizWidgets is using until our own blog platform is released

Social Bookmarking and Submission Sites (like del.icio.us):

1. Sphinn - If you add a bookmark button on your blog besides digg and delicious, sphinn is also a good one.
   
2. Google Bookmarks
3. Furl.net
4. Diigo
5. Wirefan
6. Bibsonomy
7. Blinklist
8. Blogmemes.net
9. Bluedot.us
10. Myjeeves.ask.com
11. Simpy
12. Spurl.net
13. Netvouz
14. Folkd
15. Blinkbits
16. Bmaccess.net
17. Shadows
18. Smarking
19. Blogmarks.net
20. Plugim
21. Linkagogo
22. Mister-wong.de
23. Sk-rt.com
24. Webride.org
25. Connotea.org
26. Kick.ie
27. Thoof.com
28. Corank.com
29. Megite.com/discover
30. Metalz.info
31. Emodrama
32. Musigg.org
33. Screamfeed
34. Yample
35. swik.net
36. Backflip
37. Dotnetkicks
38. Jumptags
39. Fark
40. De.lirio.us
41. Explode
42. Relevantlogs
43. SocialPoster - An aggregating service so you can post to tons of bookmarking sites in one trip
44. SocialMarker - Another aggregating service so you can post to tons of bookmarking sites in one trip

News Article Websites (like Digg):

1. Upcoming
2. Propeller
3. Reddit
4. Indianpad
5. Newsvine
6. Slashdot.org
7. EZineArticles - Submit articles and get traffic to your own site

Social Networking and Community Websites:

1. Google Groups
2. LinkedIn - A professional networking service like Facebook, except for business professionals.
3. Flickr - a cool photo sharing community site
4. Last.fm - A music community that gives your iTunes music a feed that is syndicated on last.fm’s website.
   
5. Bebo
6. Friendster
7. Google Calendar
8. Jaiku - A microblog like twitter.
   
9. Pownce - Another microblog like twitter.
10. Jumpcut
11. MySpace
12. Plaxo
13. Metacafe - Video sharing community like YouTube but with less restrictions and ability to monetize.
14. Bumpzee
15. Orkut

Cool Extras:

1. eBay
2. Amazon
3. Alexa - A Traffic Ranking/Analysis website. Very cool.
   
4. Wikipedia - If you can find relevant articles to your blog or pages, Wikipedia articles have high page rank and can deliver traffic, just make sure your site is relevant before you add a link!
5. RSS Feeds - Use these to keep up with people and their blogs! Almost everything has an RSS feed you can subscribe to now.
6. Netflix
7. OpenID - Use one username and password for everything.
8. Second Life - A game where you have a second life. It’s truly changing how games work and you can actually make real money in this game.
   
9. Shelfari
10. Textamerica
11. The DJ List
12. Amazon UnSpun - A list ranking service.
    
13. Squidoo Plexodex - Another list ranking service.
    
14. 30 Boxes
15. Wakoopa
16. Wink
17. Zorpia
18. Taggly
19. Teenwag
20. Lipstick
21. Rawsugar
22. Hi5

Wow, that was tedious creating all the hyperlinks. I know I probably left a lot of cool services out, so feel free to add services you enjoy in a comment below.

Try to use the same username on all of the services. This can help search engines know that the username is really you. Also, add avatars, fill out personal information, post pictures, and add friends! This will help expand your online presence and people will feel more welcomed at your profile pages. They will be more likely to add you as a friend and you will stand out from other users who don’t have profile pictures or information attached to your username’s profile.

Also, make sure you have a tracking service like Google Analytics or StatCounter so you can keep track of what parts of your website that your visitors like, and you can figure out what’s bringing traffic to your blog and what’s not.

Wikipedia defines Really Simple Syndication as:

“RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed,” “web feed,” or “channel,” contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.”

Basically, RSS is a way for you to keep informed from your favorite news sources and even on topics you choose by subscribing to feeds generated by those websites. So, instead of bookmarking all of your favorite sites and wasting time throughout the day checking for newly posted articles, you can just have them delivered to computer’s mail inbox or your favorite website reader such as Google Reader. I posted a picture below of Mac OS X Leopard that has your RSS feeds right inside your Mail program:

Click the picture for full size version.

And, if you don’t like reading, you can also subscribe to VIDEO podcasts (sometimes called vlogs/video logs or vodcasts/vcasts) or AUDIO podcasts. If you use iTunes, you may notice the podcast icon in the navigation list on the left. Subscribe to your favorite stuff there! If you want to browse a directory of podcasts that can be automatically delivered to you, go to the bottom right corner of iTunes and click “Podcast Directory.”

Click the picture for full size version.

While you’re at it, you can subscribe to my blog by clicking the RSS icon at the top right of my website!

Watch a video on “What RSS is:”

This post is a teaser of what we are releasing in the next few weeks. We haven’t given it a name yet, but it will be an open source web publishing and content management system built in PHP, specifically CodeIgniter. We are integrating the best features from the popular content management systems and blogging platforms like Wordpress, Tumblr, Expression Engine, etc. and building a CodeIgniter library that you can edit easily and use for your own websites. Since it is open source, we will always accept your suggestions and implement them in new releases. It’s going to be simple, functional, and it won’t be packing any extra weight. We like how CodeIgniter is structured and we build our applications the same way: the basics are always there, but if you need customization, there is always room to flex.

Plus, if you remember our user management system that we released a while ago called EzAuth, this new content management system will integrate perfectly and seamlessly. We appreciate all the great feedback on EzAuth and we take a great amount of pride in the interlocking web solutions we are developing for small businesses.

Thanks everyone. If you want to be informed when we release our new CMS system, please send an e-mail to cms@bizwidgets.biz and we will send you download information when it comes out. Again, thanks for the support everyone!

read more | digg story

A few years ago a new client approached our agency with a marketing challenge. The client wanted to launch a new concept to the marketplace, and wanted to do it entirely by word of mouth. So we wrote our briefs, called our meetings, gathered the brain trust…and we met, and met, and met. Finally, we had a plan: we were going to apply our marketing wizardry to the college market, because after all, what better way to spread the word than through students who were wired in to the latest and greatest ways to get the word out?

So we met and we met and we applied our proven marketing methods, gathered our thoughts and dumped them into a slick, clever PowerPoint preso (in case you’re not cool enough, that’s a cool term for presentation). Man, are we cool.

So the big day came around…we were going to unveil our cool preso to our group of college interns — including my two sons who are in college — we were just gonna blow them away with our plan…after all, we’re the marketing mavens…the experts who know everything, right?

So the group assembled in our formal conference room. The lights dimmed, the projection system fired up, our preso flew onto the screen with our objectives and our strategy  and our goals and our expected outcomes…slide after slide, wipe after fade, surely this had to blow them away, didn’t it?  When the preso was over, the lights came back on, the marketing mavens lined up around the room like colonels and generals checking out their troops. “So what do you guys think?” we asked them.

“I thought you went to college.” one smart ass kid said (I think it was my son). And the comments went downhill from there.

Lesson learned: relevance…if it sounds too good in a meeting, we’re probably just talking to ourselves.

“You must first connect to iTunes with an internet connection to enable YouTube.”

These instructions assume that you have the “Installer” application (from jailbreakme.com) on your iPhone.

1. Go to Installer
2. under Sources folder, install Community Sources
3. Under System folder, install BSD Subsystem
4. in Sources icon (still in installer), add this source i.unlock.no
5. Under Unlocking Tools folder, install YouTube Activation
6. Restart

Credit goes to mrzeve on the MacRumors forum.

Source: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=377844

You can see a few sample applications on our demo page, at http://bizwidgets.biz/demos/ezslide/. Also, if you find a cool new way to use EzSlide, send us a link.

Since EzSlide is in early development, we will always be open to suggestions. Thanks!