MH1 Web Design Blog

Today the question on every companies mind is “Is Social Media Worth It?”.  Dominos pizza would tell you “Yes” without hesitation.

Last week a video leaked out of two Domino employees doing revolting things to a pizza. Although claiming to be a hoax, the video got millions of views within minutes as it went viral on twitter and other social sites. The video is currently unavailable due to copyright claims done by one employee, but unfortunately for Dominos pizza the damage was already done. CNN has covered the story as well saying the employees have been sentenced to jail time.

Outraged at the video, people on all social media sites (mostly Twitter) were asking Dominos what was going on and how they would counteract this. Once again, unfortunately, Dominos was not on Twitter to discuss what was going on and how they would make things better. Dominos was doing and saying things but just not covering social media sites.

The President of Dominos pizza in the US did make a you tube video to discuss the measures being taken.

However, Dominos biggest failure in this viral disaster was that it was not on Twitter to pick up what was being said about them. So the lesson of the month is that Social Media is not just about viral marketing but for customer relationship as well. Especially relevant when there is an online crisis!

Realizing this, Dominos has reacted positively and set up a twitter account, which has over 1,000 followers already, and they are communicating about the issue openly. If you notice that their twitter name is dpzinfo it’s because they also failed to secure their company’s name on social media sites (highly recommended) and someone else has squatted on their name.

It seems companies would rather learn the hard way. Social media, although time consuming, can save your company at the end of the day. A good start to recovery by Dominos but they are another example for all companies out there to realize how powerful Social Media is.

View what people are saying now on Twitter about Dominos.

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from Wolf21 Internet Marketing Solutions

by Christina Warren

Having a mobile-optimized web site can really make your site stand apart from the pack. Even though smartphones like the iPhone and Google Android devices can display “the full web,” having a web page formatted for smaller screens and with features that can take advantage of a touch screen, geolocation, or address book functionality can make the mobile web browsing experience that much better.

Even just a few years ago, optimizing websites for mobile browsers was a painful and difficult process, in part because of the limitations of most mobile browsers. Today, thanks to the proliferation of WebKit (which powers the browsers on the iPhone, Android and webOS devices, with BlackBerry expected to join the mix next year), it’s much easier to decide on a strategy for making your website pop on mobile platforms.

We’ve put together a toolkit of resources for the designer and non-designer alike to get you started. Did we miss your favorite tool or service? Let us know in the comments!

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Services for Optimizing Your Content for Mobile Browsers

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If you don’t have experience with HTML and CSS (or you don’t have the time), there are a number of services that can create mobile versions of your website for you.

MoFuse and MoFuse Premium — MoFuse has been offering a simple way for bloggers and businesses to easily create mobile versions of their websites for quite some time. For bloggers or smaller sites, the company offers MoFuse for Blogs, which is a free and easy way to quickly mobilize your web site (it uses your RSS feed to generate the new site) whenever it is accessed by going to “m.yourdomain.com.” For businesses or larger sites that want a little more control, MoFuse Premium offers more customizable options.

Disclosure: MoFuse powers Mashable’s mobile website.

Mippin — Mippin is another free service that can create a quick mobile version of your website using your RSS feed. The options aren’t extensive, but the version that Mippin creates should be viewable on almost any WAP compatible mobile phone.

mobiSiteGalore — mobiSiteGalore can create quick mobile versions of websites, offers users some customization options, and can take advantage of the .mobi TLD. mobiSiteGalore will let you create your mobile site from a computer or from your phone.

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Plugins for WordPress and Other Publishing Systems

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Having a WAP-formatted site is fine, but if you want to be able to offer visitors from an iPhone or Android device some really great optimized mobile features, you want to consider creating a separate stylesheet for your website. For users of WordPress and other publishing systems, there are a lot of plugin options available that make adding a mobile theme to your site extremely easy.

WPtouch — WPtouch is a fantastic plugin available for WordPress.org users (WordPress.com users can also take advantage of WPtouch with the recent addition of mobile themes) that automatically makes your site easy to read and access from an iPhone or Android device.

The plugin is extremely robust and even offers backend features like the ability to set an iPhone Favicon (so that when users add your web page to their iPhone’s home screen, it has a great looking icon), the ability to work with other WordPress plugins like FlickrRSS and Blip.it, support for AJAX, customized headers, and more. What I really like about WPtouch is that users can choose to turn it off and access the full version of a website at any time by flicking the mobile on/off switch at the bottom of each page.

WordPress Mobile Edition – Crowd Favorite created this plugin that allows users to easily define what type of devices should be shown a mobile web page (and what shouldn’t — for instance if you want BlackBerry users to see your mobile page but you want iPhone users to see the full site) and it comes with Crowd Favorite’s Carrington Mobile Theme which is easy on the eyes and also fully customizable.

WordPress Mobile Pack — The WordPress Mobile Pack is from the dotMobi team and it is a whole suite of tools for mobile web optimization. It includes a base mobile theme, which is very attractive, a mobile admin panel, mobile ad support and the option for visitors to switch between the full and mobile versions of a website.

WPtap — WPtap is a plugin for WordPress, and the site also offers up some alternative themes for users who want a more customized look and feel to add to their sites. WPtap looks very similar to WPtouch, but the emphasis seems to be on offering pre-built mobile styles.

WordPress Mobile by Mobify — This is a plugin for the Mobify service (see description in the next section). It handles automatic redirection of mobile clients to your Mobify mobile view page.

Mobile Plugin for Drupal — Mobile Plugin offers Drupal sites a mobile optimized view, comes with a mobile version of the standard Drupal Garland theme and includes device detection, hooks for adding mobile-specific features and automatic YouTube mobile replacement.

OSMOBI — OSMOBI is a service and plugin for Joomla and Drupal users that makes it easy to customize your blog for mobile visitors. The service is free for 150 page views every day but premium plans are also available.

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Tools for Designers

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Mobify — Mobify is a really interesting service because it makes it easy for designers or users who know HTML and CSS to painlessly modify and optimize their website for mobile access. The service is free (though paid monthly plans are available for more features) and it works extremely well with systems like WordPress, Drupal, ExpressionEngine and any other system that has predictable URL patterns and well formed HTML.

Mobify has a visual editor that lets you see what your content looks like on different device types and you can then modify the CSS and see the changes in real-time. Some sites that have used Mobify to create mobile optimized versions of their content include A List Apart and revered web developers and designers, such as Jonathan Snook and Veerle Pieters.

iPhoney — iPhoney from Marketcircle gives Mac users a pixel-accurate web browsing environment that is powered by Safari. Why does this matter? Because when crafting the mobile version of your site, it’s important to be able to see how the final product will look on your phone. iPhoney hasn’t been updated in a while but is still a really useful tool.

iWebKit — iWebKit is a framework of sorts for creating iPhone-optimized websites or web apps that can take advantage of the iPhone’s UI elements and other features.

jQTouch — jQTouch is a really innovative jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone and iPod touch. With it you can create websites or web apps with animations, support for forms, customized UI elements, additional extensions, swipe controls, and more. The developer is really active with the project and some of the stuff you can do with it is amazing.

iPhone Compatible CSS Layouts — Matthew James Taylor created a bunch of liquid CSS layouts that are iPhone and iPod Touch compatible and free for anyone to use. If you’re looking for a starting point for building a mobile optimized site, you might want to give these layouts a look.

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Other Resources

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Mobile Web Design by Cameron Moll — This is a really great book (available in print or as an ebook) with tips, best practices, and examples on styling and optimizing your site for mobile content. If it suffers from anything it is that it was written before the iPhone explosion really took off, thus it isn’t as up to date as it could be. Still, for mobile web enthusiasts, there’s a lot of great information here.Craig Hockenbery’s “Put Your Content in My Pocket” — In August of 2007, Craig Hockenberry (from the Iconfactory and one of the brains behind Twitterrific for the Mac and the iPhone) wrote a great article for “A List Apart” and although some of the technologies have evolved, much of what Craig wrote then still applies today. A great read.Smashing Magazines’s Mobile Design Showcase – Need some inspiration? Smashing Magazine did a great roundup of iPhone optimized designs in September.

CSSiPhone — CSSiPhone is a CSS gallery dedicated to iPhone optimized site designs. Like Picasso said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal!”

Opera Mobile Developer Community — As some of our commenters pointed out, the Opera browser lets you see what a website will look like on a mobile handset by pressing Shift-F11. Also check out Opera’s developer documentation for optimizing pages to be viewed on mobile devices. Opera Mobile and Opera Mini is a common browser on many cellular phones.

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Your Thoughts

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What do you think about the direction of mobile web development? Do you have any favorite mobile sites or mobile design tips? Let us know!

Southwest Airlines has been an early adopter of Social Media with a great corporate blog, Nuts About Southwest, and investment in the voice of the customer. They have actually listened to customers through their blog, Twitter, Facebook and other communities online and improved their service because of it.

Many of our small business customers have yet to try Twitter. Although this micro-blogging technology offers some useful tools for companies of all sizes,  some stay away because of the strange, silly name or because they just can not find the time to learn more. There are benefits for small business to reap with Twitter. Not all companies use it the same way. Let’s see what it offers small biz — one-man shows to companies too small to carry a marketing director or department.

Once you sign up for your free Twitter account (using your business name), you create a profile with links to your company website, description, and contact information. You can search other businesses or people across the Internet who are also using Twitter. You can follow them — meaning you receive every tweet they send on your Twitter home page or your mobile phone. Follow the Wall Street Journal, your home town Chamber of Commerce, competitors, partners, your vendors, manufacturers and other business professionals.. almost anything you can imagine. Conversely, people interested in you and your business will click to follow you and your regular posts. Twitter quickly creates a community related to your business. Here are our four reasons we believe you should consider adding Twitter to your array of small business communication tools.

1. Push your message — Companies can use Twitter to publish timely company news and important announcements. You are limited in your posts, called “tweets”, to only 140 characters, so these are short, simple, brief messages or you can post links to longer articles or news items from your company blog, Facebook business account or any other website. Linking to a longer article on another site is called a “retweet”. Cute but easy to figure out in short order. This is a great way to expand your brand presence online as other people follow you. Use Twitter to manage your company brand and reputation online. Think of it as PR on a small business budget. If using Twitter for business, be careful to avoid letting your personal life get in the way. Business associates might not care that you shot a 76 on the golf course Saturday or that your four-year-old lost a tooth. There is place for personal info among family and friends, but your Twitter business account is not it.

2. Information collection — as I said above, Twitter can serve as a one-stop clearing house for all of your incoming business information. You do not have to write articles and participate in tweets. Some companies are active “listeners”. They keep track of trends in their industry and among other industry organizations, or companies.You can use your Twitter business account to receive updates from the various websites and news sources you follow regularly. You can even receive tweets on your mobile phone. With less than 10% of us using RSS aggregators, Twitter has become a faster, easier alternative for small business types short on time and patience.

3. Customer support — in August our web hosting server was hacked and it took my support team 30 hours to reload software and reinstall customer accounts from backups. During this harrowing experience, we had 100+ customers without their business email. What was wrong? When will it be fixed, damnit?! Patience was short for some and communication on the latest developments were extremely difficult.

That’s when I realized that if more clients were using Twitter and following  www.MH1webdesign.com, they could have been updated on the latest progress. No email necessary. Now the task of informing our small business clients about Twitter begins. If they see value in it, they will come along for the ride.

Futher Reading

Twitter’s take on business use

16 examples of huge brands using Twitter

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

There are many ways to enter your website… whether through search engines, typing in the URL, or links from other sites. No matter the size of the business, management often does not have a clue how many people visit their website. Far too frequently, web design customers are very involved during development, but turn into no-shows after launch. Shopping sites that sell online can gauge effectiveness loosely based on sales. Other B2B and B2C firms that depend on their websites to generate qualified prospects might receive leads through web forms. But in either case, these businesses are missing out on the big picture if they neglect to analyze rich traffic data.

Start with your web host

Most commercial hosting providers include some web traffic application that uses web logs to measure monthly, weekly, daily and even hourly visits to your website. These metrics include hits, page views or impressions, unique visitors, and other vital information. MH1 Hosting  includes this service on all of our Linux with cPanel host packages. Even when customers know where to locate their traffic reports, they find the terms and metrics confusing. It’s important to your Internet marketing effort to understand your traffic statistics. It lets you measure who is visiting your web site, where they came from, and what they do when they get there. To make better use of this data, we refer some clients to Google Analytics.

What is Google Analytics (GA)

In short, GA is a traffic measurement application that emails results to you every Monday. It is free, convenient, and easy to manage through Google’s web interface. GA requires registration for a free Google account and some copying and pasting of html code on the pages of your website that you wish to track. The simple presentation of key information is a pleasure to use compared to most hosting web traffic applications. The layout is easier to follow and links to help, definitions and related Google content makes GA superior to many competitors. As an alternative, also consider some of the leading paid, commercial metric services, such as Haveamint.com that offer still more advanced features and customization.

Advantages of Google Analytics:

• View visitors by month, day or hour
• View where visitors are coming from geographically
• See if they found you using a search engine and which keywords were used
• See which other websites they were referred from (used a link)
• Analyze which pages receive the most visits, how long they stay, other pages of entry and exit
• Analyze your bounce rate, the % of visitors who click away from your site without visiting any other pages

How can you use this information?

GA emails you a detailed report in PDF form every Monday or you can login anytime to your account to study your website metrics. Use this newly generated information to:

• Determine which search engines and allied websites with reciprocal links send you traffic and which ones fail
• Discover how effective an advertising campaign is in sending you new traffic
• Save marketing dollars by stopping non-performing advertising efforts
• Rethink the effectiveness of your website pages and features-which pages are most popular and which are ignored
• Modify your page content and offer to increase site stickiness and reduce bounce rate
• Fine tune your overall site to convert initial visits into sales or qualified sales leads

Whether a small one-person venture or a large business enterprise, you must know how your company website performs as part of your overall marketing strategy. Accurate, informative web traffic statistics give you the hard evidence you need to be successful. Google Analytics offers one budget-friendly solution that can help many marketers reach their goals. Let us know if MH1 Web Design can help you implement Google Analytics today.