March 30, 2010
Social Media
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There are far too many ways to add social media links and icons to your blog. However, if you are playing the social media PR game, it’s a necessary part of your web presence plumbing, those share, tweet this, facebook icons on your site and your blog.
Up to now, I had been happy with my socialable plugin, resisting the siren call of adding bolder and bigger social media icons to my sidebar. Then I looked at AddThis.
AddThis button bar is simple to add to your blog
It’s so dead simple, you can’t help but to just do it. As long as your wordpress theme is widget aware, all you have to do is cut and paste HTML code into a Text Widget that you drag and drop to your sidebar. The step by step instructions are right there on the AddThis web page. The simplicity of the user experience is something that should be strived for by all webdesigners.
You can see it in my sidebar to the right. I still have sociable but I updated the settings to show it only on individual blog posts so I didn’t have dueling social media button bars on my home page.
AddThis also generates cut and paste code for your website, blogger.com and myspace for four different types of buttons.
March 20, 2010
Search Engine Optimization, Web Development
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Many people are familiar with google analytics, a free service from Google that provides traffic statistics. Fewer are familiar with google webmaster tools which is packed with all sorts of useful information about your site. Google webmaster tools gives you a number of hints on what to change or fix on your site to help it rank better, you can register sitemaps, see information on crawl information, and even on your site performance.
However up to now, it’s been a pain to help clients, especially the less technically knowledgeable ones, set up verified google webmaster tools access to their site. For every google account, you had to upload a file to the root directory or add a meta tag to the home page. Now, as long as you have one user is verified, that user can easily add additional verified users.
In a blog post, sharing the verification love, the webmaster central blog outlines how it is done. The one caveat is that the access is binary. Unlike google analytics you can’t give “read only” access.