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What is a CMS?

digitalbenjamin — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 18:16:32 +0000

In web terminology, CMS stands for “Content Management System,” and describes a method of managing content, workflow, and collaboration online. CMS’s have revolutionized the way people think about and control content on websites.

Web CMS’ are designed to simplify the production and publication of content on a website, allowing less technically inclined users to create and publish without having to know a lot of web programming. Today, “open source” content management systems like WordPress, ExpressionEngine and Drupal, which are free to download, install, and customize, have taken the momentum away from proprietary applications.

Content management systems present businesses of all shapes, sizes, and industries with powerful means of creating and maintaining their own website and online content. With the growth and development of open source technologies, versatile content management systems have never been more affordable and powerful.

What is a Mashup?

digitalbenjamin — Thu, 27 May 2010 16:50:37 +0000

A mashup combines web content (such as news articles, blogs, photos, and videos) with some kind of other functionality, creating a hybrid service from two or more different sources.

There are a number of different kinds of mashups on the web today: data mashups, consumer mashups, business mashups, media mashups and more.

Essentially, all of these take a combination of information, mix it up, and deliver it in an interesting new way. One of the most recognizable forms of mashups are in the form of applications for mobile devices such as the iPhone. Mashup Apps like restaurant finders, language translators and more are available for these devices by the thousands.

Another example of a mashup is WikipediaVision, which combines Google Maps and Wikipedia by displaying edits to Wikipedia content as they occur in real-time across the globe. You may also have heard mashup used to when someone takes existing audio, video, text and other mediums and “remixs” them into a new form.

In the business world, mashups are often used for collaboration, project managing, and engaging consumers in unique and interesting ways.

More about Mashups

What is Social Media?

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:03:49 +0000

The term “social media” has rapidly become a standard in both web and cultural vocabulary, and the more you know about it, the better. Social media describes the powerful new ways individuals are engaging with content on the Internet, and vice versa. At its essence, social media is user-centric; it is, just like its name suggests, media that focuses, applies, and depends on social interaction.

Through the use of the web, individuals have never been more closely and immediately connected, and this reality has revolutionized the business community. A true expression of Web 2.0 principles, social media moves past the more traditional forms of marketing, data gathering, and storytelling, and incorporates user-generated content (UGC) as a valuable new medium.

Businesses and organizations care about reaching consumers where they are, and today’s traditional methods support that claim: there are radio commercials (or billboards) for consumers in transit or on the job, television commercials for consumers at home, and print ads (magazines, periodicals, direct mail, etc.) to fill in the cracks. Since the web has become a new “destination” for millions of people all over the world, a new form of communication has appeared out of necessity. Social media charters new waters, and is still being pioneered by everyone from CEOs, schoolteachers, sales clerks and school children.

Sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia demonstrate the great value that has been placed on the user. From a user’s attention to his or her opinions and feelings about products, current events, and much more, social media presents an outlet for (often immediate) expression.

Through the use of social media, businesses now have new ways to reach consumers and markets. They can influence and promote by simply choosing to engage. Influential brands have become more “human” due to their presence and engagement on social media sites. From the user’s perspective, individual opinions and contributions that were once thought insignificant and without the means of expression are now amplified through social media.

Many of today’s companies are reorganizing their resources in order to devote appropriate energy entirely to social media. This new way of communicating and doing business is global, and it’s shaping more and more the way people think and express themselves online.

More about Social Media

How to Market on the Web

admin — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:19:26 +0000

Need help converging your traditional brick-and-mortar to dynamic bricks-and-clicks? Here are 5 simple steps to successful marketing on the web:

1. Ideate

Begin early stages of development with explosive out-of-the-box thinking and rich creative mind-time.

2. Define Back-End Paradigms

Look for top-shelf synergy and pro-active infrastructures in order to incentivize frictionless markets. With accessible elocution, strategic visuals, and scalable architectures, you will appear relevant to today’s metrics.

3. Cultivate Cross-Media Benchmarks

In years past, web marketing was defined by poorly cultivated, dog-eat-dog methodologies. Thankfully, this is no longer the case. Key thought leaders put the final “Kibosh” on old benchmarks and now diversify their portals.

4. Curb Your Infomediaries

Sometimes divisive channels emerge during front-end interfacing. At times like these, it is best to nip your mission-critical infomediaries right in the bud.

5. Execute Leading-Edge Initiatives

Finalize your next-generation schemas with a healthy dose of content, and you’re ready to go live! If you find your B2B systems are still toeing the line, reduce digital overhead, whiteboard some options, and plow ahead!

Some Excellent Examples of Web Marketing*

*We are not responsible for the reliability or accuracy of these sites, browse at your own risk

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What is WordPress?

admin — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:05:19 +0000

WordPress is one of the most popular content management and blog publishing applications available on the web today. First released in 2003 by developer Matt Mullenweg as a basic blog engine, WordPress is now a full-featured, fully customizable website creation tool used by millions of individuals, businesses and organizations around the world.

WordPress is most popular for its packaged application, which can be downloaded for free at WordPress.org and installed anywhere as the basis, platform, and structure for an entire website. It also offers free blog services online at WordPress.com.

Because it is “open source”—meaning simply that all of its code and files are free to use, customize, and enhance—WordPress technology has been harnessed by thousands. From curious individuals to freelance professionals to Fortune 500 companies, people all over the world use WordPress because of its many powerful features. These include a templating system, workflow, search-engine friendly link structures, advanced content categorization, and more.

Powered by a scripting language called PHP and a database management tool called MySQL, WordPress’ templating system allows users to manipulate and customize functionality and content without having to know or edit PHP or HTML code. It essentially makes managing a website much easier for non-developers. Cosmetic, function, and structural elements like “widgets” and “themes” can be changed and easily customized without affecting the actual content on the site, which sits in a separate database. All over the web today, WordPress powers extremely elaborate creative and corporate websites, simple blogs, and everything in between. Its many powerful features include a templating system, thousands of free plug-ins, search-engine friendly link structures and more.

One of the greatest confirmations of this powerful technology is the growing development community that surrounds it. Web developers all over the world constantly communicate about WordPress and discuss ways to make it better. They create custom plug-ins and themes that make WordPress even more robust.

For businesses, WordPress is an extremely versatile technology that helps achieve goals, engage in social media, perform well in search engines, and manage content, minimizing out-of-house costs.

More about Wordpress

What Is SEO?

digitalbenjamin — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:50:37 +0000

SEO stands for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website from search engines. Generally, the higher your website ranks in the search engines, the more traffic you receive.

The process of applying SEO practices to your website relies on understanding both sides of the system. A person must understand how search engines work and know exactly what people are searching on. Most importantly, one must know how to create or maintain a website to have not only good SEO fundamentals, but also an overall strategic vision in how to create a website that is unique and captivating.

Search engines want the most relevant, authoritative, and useful websites to have high rankings. Relevancy and quality are extremely important to search engines, because if they didn’t deliver relevant results to users, users would not trust them. So that brings us to the real question. How do search engines determine which websites are more relevant or authoritative than their competitors? How does Google decide who ranks #1 for the term “Chicago hotels”?

Search engines determine rankings through automated systems using complex algorithms that they tweak regularly. They rely on having little to no human interference when determining search engine rankings. In order to increase your sites rankings, you must increase both your relevance and authority. Increasing your relevance means understanding the keywords you wish to target, and modifying your article to be both easier for search engines to analyze, and more interesting for the people who read the page.

Increasing your authority relies on having relevant content, and is determined by the number of links pointing to your page. Think of inbound links like votes. If someone reads your page and likes it, they may want to link to it from your website. This link represents a vote and adds authority to your page of content.

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What is Viral Video?

digitalbenjamin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 21:45:38 +0000

The widespread availability of cheap video editing and publishing tools have helped create an online phenomenon known as the viral video. Named for the way such videos are spread—and no, you will not contract any kind of biological disease—the viral video is a piece of video content that gains significant popularity through Internet sharing.

Through the use of email, instant messaging, blogging, and services like Facebook, Twitter, and Digg, certain videos (most often comedic or astounding in nature) simply “go viral”—or, spread like wildfire through the many person-to-person channels that exist online.

Viral video is largely responsible for the concept of the “internet fame,” making individuals or groups whose videos go viral famous (or infamous) overnight. Video websites like YouTube are breeding grounds for such hopefuls.

Many businesses have developed their own videos, video blogs (“vlogs”), and other kinds of video marketing campaigns, with the hopes of viral success. Viral success can mean great exposure for a company’s brand or product, and can generate a significant amount of energy across the web.

When you hear “viral” used today, think twice before you cringe—chances are the topic is much cleaner than you think.

What is Twitter?

digitalbenjamin — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:48:54 +0000

If you watch TV, read magazines or newspapers, or do business anywhere near a city, chances are you’ve heard of Twitter. And even if you haven’t yet, you will.

Twitter is most commonly described as a free “social networking” and “micro-blogging” service that gives its users a way to send, receive, and share personal messages and updates, called tweets. But what do those terms mean? Essentially, you could say that Twitter is in the business of connecting the greatest number of people (well into the millions worldwide already, and growing) through free, instant, personalized messaging. Emphasis on the free. And instant. And personalized…

Once a user has created a unique Twitter profile, they can start posting tweets—which are no longer than 140 characters—to their Twitter page. This page is highly customizable, and most users choose a color scheme, design, pattern, or image to make their page their own. Once sent, each tweet appears in a dialogue stream on the page, along with tweets from other Twitter users that person has chosen to follow.

“Following” is a pivotal component of Twitter, as it allows users to include the tweets of other users they’ve found into their own stream of tweets. Think of this as a way of subscribing to another person’s tweets, and having them automatically delivered—like a newspaper, say—to a user’s own doorstep. Many Twitter users “follow” a handful of other users (friends, family, co-workers … even famous athletes, actors, writers, politicians, and more use Twitter and have huge followings) and are in turn being followed by a handful of others.

You can imagine how significant a service like Twitter would be in a world where vast amounts of information are a mere blink away, and people are more than chomping at the bit to share their opinions on it all. Businesses of all kinds are rethinking and restructuring their marketing and communication models based on the vastness and depth of Twitter, devoting people, time, and resources to the creation of business Twitter accounts.

Hundreds of articles and websites on “How to Use Twitter for Business” have surfaced in the wake of Twitter’s success. Marketers are connecting with consumers and industry influencers using the Twitter platform, and are learning valuable lessons about the market at a fraction of the research cost. What’s more, they’re linking their own tweets back to their own web content, and seeing more significant online business in return.

With a popular service like Twitter, the possibilities are seemingly endless. It’s clear that businesses can and are capitalizing on its technology, and enjoying newfound success. Wherever future communication technology is headed, one thing is clear—Twitter will be there. And thousands of businesses will, too.

More about Twitter

What is CSS?

digitalbenjamin — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:34:34 +0000

CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is a simple mechanism that is used in the web development world today to add style to Web pages or documents. When CSS is used, a web page’s—or even an entire website’s—standardized elements such as fonts, colors, and spacing are all controlled by the directions given on the CSS style sheet. This style sheet acts like a switchboard, communicating with the various pages on a website and telling them how and what to display.

The significance behind CSS lies in its ability to separate a document’s content from its presentation. In other words, CSS allows for the things a document is saying to be uniquely disconnected from the way the document looks. This disconnect is actually a good thing, because it means that the look and feel of a page or site can be tweaked, updated, or transformed—without any change at all to the content on that page.

You’re probably starting to see why CSS is such a big deal on the web today: it’s a powerful tool that can set websites free to do what they were meant to do: engage and amaze users and connect them with the content they’re looking for.

more about CSS

What is Web 2.0?

digitalbenjamin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 21:18:09 +0000

Web 2.0 is a term often used today to define a “second generation” of web development and design—it is a far-reaching term that encompasses a great number of new ideas, technologies, communities, and services.

If the “first generation” used the Internet as a simple retrieval mechanism for information, the Web 2.0 generation represents the movement to the Internet as an interactive platform upon which to collaborate, develop, share, and operate simultaneously on the World Wide Web.

Important Web 2.0 developments include web-based communities, hosting services, and applications like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Wikipedia.

An important distinction to draw between first generation web and Web 2.0 is that the latter emphasizes an “architecture of participation.” This concept of web-as-participation-platform has evolved the overall online experience. Key to its success is the empowering of the user to not just access but control data. Think of it as “hands-on Internet.”

In the business world, the Web 2.0 phenomenon has created a stir of innovative activity. Many companies are scrambling to create an “online experience” for their customers/clients, and figuring out how to harness new technologies to expand their brands, products, and influence.

Chances are you’ve heard “Web 2.0” thrown around a lot—it’s important to remember that Web 2.0 is simply a term (its specific, agreed-upon definition as-yet undetermined) and is usually subject to interpretation. The big picture, however, shows Web 2.0 as an important element of today’s buzzing online landscape.