optimizing a website for apple’s iphone/itouch

one of the hottest new trends in website development is providing a mobile-friendly version of your website for people who use apple’s iphone or itouch. i’m not talking about testing and adjusting certain details of your website until it looks the same on mobile safari as desktop safari. i’m talking about providing a re-packaging of your website content so that it looks leaner and performs more impressively on mobile screens. espn and major league baseball both provide this dual functionality with their websites – and now so do i! i still have a few small details to iron out, but then it will be perfect (thanks to a great tool called WPtouch 1.7.5). if you build a website with me, then i’ll provide the same service for you. it makes a huge difference in how people experience your content with this type of wrapper enabled. are you ready to get started?

please note: while things like youtube videos, lightbox effects on images and pdf downloads all work – you still can’t view flash content like music players on apple’s iphone/itouch. it makes no sense that apple continues to lag behind on this, but there’s nothing i can do about this.

search engine optimization (seo) for beginners

search engine optimization (seo) is not the easiest way to boost your marketing. it’s a ton of work and there are no guarantees it will produce the results you seek. even when you achieve results through seo, you still have to make good on customers who are shopping heavily. if you want your ‘organic’ position to be high – listing somewhere along the first or second page of key searches on the left – then seo is for you. if you just want to be on the first page for key searches, then an adwords campaign is far less involved and quicker to results. let’s look at what you can do to make good on internet traffic and searches now – before you hire a professional to provide full-blown seo services.

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today’s zen: on fear

“fear comes from the selfish idea of cutting one’s self off from the universe.”
– swami vivekananda

turn customer service into a marketing tool

it’s an interesting concept, isn’t it? since we all know that we can’t afford to sleep at the wheel in an economy like this, and we can innately sense that competition is fiercer than ever, does it not make sense that sound customer service would be more important than ever? sure – it was always important – but i think we all know that far too many companies made their name on an adequate (at best) customer track record. customer service is perhaps the most important force behind two marketing tools that should be alive and well in your arsenal – referrals and upselling. i’ll cover these subjects separately in future posts, but let’s look at what you can start doing TODAY to shore up customer service – while also bolstering your marketing.

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