…the medium you choose is just as important as the message…twitter was tailor made to advertise to kids.
Read MoreArchive for the ‘Findings’ Category
Using Demographic Research for Search Engine Optimization
Last week we talked about how demographic advertising can be implemented into your ad materials to cover a large base audience. Including those ideas in your advertising materials is one thing, but actually using them in Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing is completely different. Applying demographics in advertising is a matter of knowing the types of people you want to reach as well as understanding their general habits. Using demographics to enhance your SEO is similar, you just need to think about the sort of things your audience searches for and tailor your website accordingly. There are a…
Read MoreA methodical look at Hotel booking engines
5 major brand hotels sites evaluated by users in a formal study. See the results.
Read MoreFrontend Optimization, pt. 4
In the fourth part of our multipart Frontend Optimization series I’ll cover my notes from Steve Souder’s “High Performance Websites” and “Even Faster Websites” books that can help reduce your file sizes and configure your Apache settings to squeeze out more speed.
Reduce File Sizes
- See optimizing images for reducing image sizes.
- Minify CSS and JS files. Use Google’s Closure Compiler for JS and ICEY for CSS.
- Minify HTML files with HTML Tidy.
- Reduce file size with using relative links including //subdomain.example.com instead of http://subdomain.example.com
Configure Apache and .htaccess
- Disable ETags
- Add future expires headers
- Enable GZip Compression
- Since 15% of users don’t have gzip due to proxies you can override that with gzip detection. See…
Launching New Products on Facebook and Twitter
Last time we talked a lot about MySpace’s rise and fall. One thing they did to get to where they were for so long was entice companies to launch new products through their website. They bent over backwards to get Apple to launch the new iPods on their site and lots of other companies started launching their latest gadget or ‘whatsit’. Sadly, they couldn’t carry that momentum for long. At the very least, however, it opened the door for other companies to debut all kinds of products on social media sites. Sure it’s a risky move; it’s like announcing your…
Read MoreEasy Ways to do Online Event Advertising
One of the first advertising jobs I had was working on a midnight movie film festival for a local movie theater chain. We had a very limited budget and were forced to do a lot of different things to get our message out and in the process I learned a lot about event advertising. In a lot of ways event advertising is easier than advertising a product or brand. Your only competitors are other events going on at the time and the TV at home. If you know exactly what your competition is, it’s a lot easier to plan an…
Read MoreGeneric Twitter Widget using jQuery Template Plugin
I swear on every new project I start, I’m always recreating the same old twitter sidebar widget. NEVER AGAIN! I finally sat down and made an extremely generic widget that with some css tweaking, should be able to fit into every project.
A few minor features it includes:
- Linkifying twitter text — adds links to #hash tags, @replys and standard links.
- TimeAgo function — The twitter API sends the time the tweet was created using a funky time format. This function returns it in a more pretty form such as “3 hours and 26 minutes ago.”
- Loading icon until tweets are received from the…
