What is Smart Add On?

Smart Add On is an online tool that not only lets you add a tell a friend/invite a friend button to your site but it also offers your users the following features, FREE.

- Import contacts from Gmail and Yahoo accounts
- Send invites manually to specific email addresses
- Post an update about the site to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Google + and more
- Use own custom button

What’s even better is that all this happens in a smooth functioning lightbox so your visitor never has to leave the page he’s on!

How to Get it

To get a free button for your site, just go to http://www.smartaddon.com/get_addon.html?m
choose your settings and hit ‘Get Button’. No sign ups required!

Then copy and paste the generated code into your web pages and you’re ready to invite people!

Tell me, do you know any other free amazing website tools you’d like to share?
Please add them in your comments below.

Here are 5 hacks that will help you control your users’ experience on the site. The PDF includes the following hacks:

• How to hide certain Dashboard widgets from Contributors view
• How to show/hide content based on whether user is logged in or not
• How to hide Admin bar for all users
• How to disable Admin Bar for non-Admins only
• How to move Admin Bar to the bottom

Please pay with a Tweet or Facebook share to download!

The installation is quick and extremely simple. Once you install the desktop Google drive program, for those of you who can’t find your documents tab on your Google screen, it’s now a part of your Drive.

In my opinion, Google will mainly have to compete with Drobbox, which definitely gets credit for launching the online storage concept. Other services worth mentioning are Apple’s iCloud and Microsoft’s Sky drive however iCloud, being an Apple product, does not offer compatibility over other systems and hence is not nearly as widely used.

So let’s take a look at how Drobox compares to Google Drive.

Size:

Dropbox offers users with 2 GB of free storage space on signing up. Users can get more by referring friends to the service, 500MB per referral, up to a limit of 16 GB. We all know, most of us don’t want to do extra referring work for more space.

Google Drive offers you 5GB space for free without any extra work. No referral programs.

Ease of Access:

Google Drive being a part of Google is always going to be easier to access as all Google services you’re using will be available on a single interface and you’ll login to all using a single ID. This really counts as most of us are logged into Gmail all day so Drive is just a click away. No additional logins required. This is not true for Dropbox as it’s an individual service offering online storage only.

Mobile:

Google Drive is fully supported on the Android platform with a native application (of course it is). As for iOS, Blackberry, and Windows Phone owners, they will have to use a browser to access the site.

Drobox offers dedicated apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry.

Security:

Google drive allows you to enable two-step authentication adding an extra layer so that even if someone has your username and password, they still will not be able to access your files wheeras with Dropbox if someone wants to hack into your account & files all they need is your username & password.

Search:

Amazing search is Google’s forte` and it shows in their Drive too. Searching through the Drive is accurate and fast.

All in all the best service for you depends on the systems you’re using and it makes sense to choose the service that works well with your platform. In my case, I have immediately moved from Dropbox to Google Drive

Tell me, have you tried Google Drive? What are your thoughts about the service? Which cloud storage service do you recommend?

To make this happen I have tried and tested hundreds of plugins over the last 6 months and here are the results.

There is no alternative to Buddypress
(and WP-Symposium is SURELY not an option)

When it comes to starting your own social network with features that engage your users and options for customization, there’s nothing like BuddyPress. Personally I’m very impressed with what it offers. For blogs where the BuddyPress integration does go smoothly in terms of the look of the site, there’s a plugin called Buddypress template pack which usually fixes the problem. In case it doesn’t, you need to know atleast a little html/css/php to hack into the files and fix the issue. Of course, if you’re planning to build a social network, you must already have some knowledge of coding or have access to a programmer.

Wp Symposium on the other hand, through appears to offer a lot of options, the functionality and UI is just not stable. Something, more often than not, does not work as it should, and the entire look (default) of the package is primitive.

Buddypress Activity Refresh

This is the number one plugin you should install after installing Buddypress. It’s such a simple yet effective add-on that it’s hard to believe BuddyPress hasn’t include it in their installation package. It’s the obvious next feature. Activity refresh updates the network’s activity stream in real time using Ajax. So if you’re looking at the stream you see new highlighted updates appearing at the top pushing the rest down; much like you see updates on Facebook.

Buddypress Activity Plus

Your social network is incomplete without this one. Activity plus gives your site the power to let users post images, videos & links to their updates just like on other leading social networks. Needless to say this is great because photos and videos say a lot more these days than just textual status updates.

BuddyPress Group Email Subscription

You need to get this plugin if you’re using BuddyPress groups because being in a group just doesn’t make sense if you’re not subscribed to regular group activities. Additionally you want your members to be able to choose their update settings e.g. All, Weekly, Daily and more. This plugin takes care of your entire group email management seamlessly.

Have you tried buddypress? We’d love to find out what you think about the plugin. Please add your comments below.

I recently set up this new shopping website called “The Peacock Fan” that offers exclusive hand selected products from India including showpieces, home decor items, spices, herbal products, bags and more. Here are some tips to help you understand the scope of such a project and how to make it work.

01. Uniqueness

I know with so many people trying to come up with an innovative business idea it’s kind of difficult to come up with one yourself however, pick an idea that has something unique about it, if not globally, then locally.

02. Payments

If you’re using PayPal, you need to make sure they accept the currency you want to use. Also, If you wish to offer your product to people from the same country as you are located in or rather the country registered with your PayPal account; please note that PayPal does not accept payments within the same country.

Every payment gateway you’re offering needs to be tried and tested prior to launching.

03. Planning

There are so many things that go into planning a shopping website. The most important part is planning how you will handle enquirires and orders as they start coming in. Your plan needs to be tested and fool-proof! This is because if your site gets an overwhelming response right after its launch, you’ll be left with no time for major errors and testing. And if something goes wrong with your initial clients you can be sure they’re not coming back anytime soon! So don’t take the site live until you’re absolutely ready to start taking & processing orders.

04. Photos

Design your site in a way that your product photos look big & really good because they’re what your entire business plan is based on. Don’t provide just a single photo of the product, provide multiple photos taken from different angles if possible.

05. Emphasize

If you’re offering features like “Free Shipping”, make sure you highlight them somewhere on the website header where they can be easily spotted, because that’s your selling point!

06. Support

Provide clear instructions on how your customers can get support if they are facing an issue while using your site. This can be a form or a support forum.

07. Terms

Mention the terms/policies of your company in clear words on the site. You can have a link to the terms page somewhere on your footer. It’s also a great idea to code the site such that your customers need to check “Accept terms & conditions” before placing an order.

08. Mailing List

Set up a mailing list with Mailchimp AND install their plugin called Autochimp for WordPress. This plugin saves your shoppers the trouble of signing up for your mailing list and then confirming and activating their subscription. Once a visitor signs up for an account at your shopping site, Autochimp automatically adds him/her to your mailing list. You can then send out a newsletter to existing customers when new products are available. They of course have the option to unsubscribe if they wish to later on.

09. Have a blog

Blogs help you communicate with your visitors. So even if it’s a shopping website, a blog might help you attract more traffic to the site. Your blog will attract people that visit the site as they’re interested in reading a particular blog post however this gives you a chance to engage them by directing their attention to what you’re selling.

10. Special Offer

On launching the site, offer special introductory discounts or coupons. This helps you build a great initial response. The clients in turn spread the word around for you.

11. Testimonials

Ask your customers to write testimonials about your products and service. Showcase these testimonials on your homepage or inner page sidebars. This helps establish trust with your new visitors.

12. Spreading the word on Facebook

Join a range of Facebook groups, all interested in different things. Post blog post and new product links to groups based on what a particular group likes to discuss instead of spamming all groups you know!
 

Got anything to add to this list from your own experience? We would love to read it. Please add your comments below.

Here are 5 plugins that you definitely should add to your best WordPress add-ons book

01. Restricted Site Access

When working on a site, clients often ask me to limit access to the site under construction only to logged in users. For visitors, they wish to display a message like “Our site is under construction, kindly visit again later”. This is so that visitors, instead of getting a sneak peak sooner, get to see the website directly once it’s ready and officially launched. I used to make this work through coding but recently I came across this nice little plugin that does the trick.

‘Restricted site access’ not only blocks the site from visitors’ view but it also lets you add a custom message to be shown to them. Alternatively, it even gives you an option to redirect them to a specific page!

02. Jigoshop

In my opinion, Jigoshop is by far the best WP e-commerce plugin available right now. I have used it on multiple sites with very good results.

Once installed, the plugin offers a number of options to set up a shopping site, complete with inventory handling, payment gateways, product variations depending on size, colors and more.

My Personal Tip:

To make any changes to the single product page e.g. adding or removing text, changing order of elements; download and make changes to the file jigoshop_product.class.php located here: jigoshop/classes/jigoshop_product.class.php

This can be very helpful as it took me quite some time to figure out that this is the file that controls the elements on the single product page.

The only thing missing is a calculator that figures out the shipping cost based on size, weight, delivery destination etc. To solve this problem, I bought the ‘Table rate‘ extension developed by Jigoshop. This plugin however did not help because it lets you base your calculation either on the item size OR weight. Most courier companies like DHL charge based on size as well as weight.

I haven’t yet comes across a flawless plugin that calculates shipping but I’ll surely let you know as soon as I have!

03. Post Background

Fed up of having every post look just like the next one? Add some creativity to your posts by using the ‘Post Background’ plugin that lets you upload and set a custom background image for every post/page just like you do in case of the post thumbnail image.

04. Boxer

Most premium WordPress themes today come with a lot of shortcodes to create columns/sections within your page or post.

These make the theme extremely flexible as you can set up a page based on the type of layout you have in mind however, not all of us are using themes that have these options.

Enter ‘Boxer’. This is the one-stop solution for all your post & page layout design needs. With a single shortcode, this plugin lets you divide your page into sections based on your specific requirement.

This plugin is SO good, it’s hard to believe they hadn’t come up with it until recently.

05. Punchtab

Give your users a reason to share your site content and leave comments. Punchtab offers loyalty programs that help you offer rewards for your loyal users. Users earn points for every visit, like & comment!

Punchtab works great for attracting new visitors to your site and engaging them. Your website users in turn are rewarded with rewards of your choice e.g Amazon Gift coupons etc.

You can see how it works right here on our site. Just click on the ‘Rewards’ tab on the left and see the plugin in action.

Though all of these plugins might not be suitable for everyone, each one of them is definitely worth trying out!

Do you have any plugins to recommend? We would love to know about them. Please add your comments below.

1. EasyClock app

This is the easiest to use world clock. If you’re having global meetings and need to convert time across different places where your clients or vendors are located, this is the tool for you.

Easytime makes it extremely simple and fast to set up meeting times around the world so that every time you want to set up a call with say your offshore designer, you don’t have to waste time figuring out a time that’ll work for both of you.

2. TypeTester

Choosing the right fonts for your website or blog can be challenging. It’s usually a lot of trouble for both you and your designer to keep changing the site fonts and waiting for your approval. TypeTester solves this problem. This is an online tool that lets you check a range of fonts, sizes and styles as they will appear online. This tool can really help you try out different combinations, make an informed decision and then make the actual font changes on your site.

3. Kickstarter

Kickstarter is the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects. It’s a great way for anyone to test his/her idea and raise funding to implement it. The best thing here is that the creators keep 100% ownership and control over their work.

Kickstarter works on the ‘All or Nothing’ principle i.e. if you create a project and wish to raise 80,000 dollars for it but end up raising only 78,000 dollars; you get nothing because according to Kickstarter’s policy, this protects both, the investors as well as the creators.

4. Pic Markr

You no longer need to know how to use a photo editing program like Photoshop to add a watermark to your photos. Picmarkr easily adds a text based or image based watermark of your choice to images that you can either upload from your computer or fetch from your Flickr or facebook accounts directly. It also offers an option to have the watermark tiled.

5. Adobe Browser Lab

Adobe® BrowserLab is an online program that helps ensure your website displays as intended, across browsers. You can use this free service to accurately preview your web pages across leading browsers and operating systems.

The program also offers diagnostic tools that you can use to optimize your website or blog efficiently.

All you need is a free account at Adobe.

6. Offline Gmail

Haven’t you ever wondered how great it would be if you could access your Gmail even when you’re having trouble with your internet connection? Well, now you can.

Gmail Offline beta is a Gmail app that supports offline access, allowing mails to be read, responded to, searched and archived. Fantastic, simple and it works beautifully.

Do you know any tools that are just as helpful? We’d love to have you share them in comments below.

All Facebook business pages will be converted to the timeline format on March 30, 2012; yours too unless like me you have already made the change.

The new timeline format for Facebook business pages has its goods and bads. Here are a few pointers on what the change is all about.

1. Default Landing Pages Out, Cover Image In

‘Default landing pages’ are going to be out of the picture with this upgrade!

Yes. ‘Default landing tabs’ were a very good marketing tool to have your visitors land on specific pages depending on whether they were a fan or a non-fan. Most of us were using fan-gate apps to encourage fans to sign up for newsletters, contests etc. and non-fans to ‘Like’ our page before taking them to the page wall. The technique had an impressive conversion rate.

Some people are claiming that fan-gates can still work as every fanpage tab now has an individual URL. So you can still create tabs with the help of apps and simply point the “Join us on Facebook” icon on your website to whatever tab you want your visitor to land on and show content based on his/her status (fan or non-fan). In my opinion, fan-gates are going to lose their impact. Pointing users to a specific tab was possible even before the timeline change, the truth is fan-gates have lost pretty much their entire purpose with the new format that no longer allows a default landing tab control.

What Facebook is offering now as the fixed landing tab is a huge cover image/banner with the page wall below. I personally love the cover image as it really helps brands & business promote themselves. It’s a big sized banner you just can’t miss however I do not think it can replace what we had with the default landing tab & fan-gate. This is because, with the old format, you could show anything on the default landing tab; even a huge banner image like the timeline has now but with the new format, you can only have the fixed landing page. Facebook has made it very clear with its latest move that they wish to standardize the landing page across business pages.

To make the most of this generously offered real estate, design a banner in the size 850 px X 315 px. It can be a challenge making the best use of  such a big banner area. Its a good idea to hire a professional to design it.

2. New Apps

Most of the old apps you were using for creating tabs/pages for your fanpage won’t work. here’s an app that can help you set up several tabs including images, video, text, paypal, share/like buttons etc. in no time. It’s an app by Lujure.

With the new format, you can upload a thumbnail for each app you use. This is good because as you can see in the screenshot below, visitors are not likely to find them, definitely not as likely as they were with the old format. With the timeline, the apps, photos, likes etc. are lined up as thumbnails just below the cover page on the right side. In the image below, the thumbnail named ‘Your Stories’ is actually a tab/page.

I asked 10 of my friends to visit this Coca-Cola fan page and noted down what they visited and what they thought the thumbnails were about. 7 out of 10 did not click on any of the thumbnails because they though all of them were photos!

3. Interest Lists

Once you ‘Like’ a page, you see the ‘Liked’ button. This button now has a hover menu with an option to add the page to a specific interest list. For example, our page can be added to a ‘Website tips’ list. Using this feature,  you can organize all the pages you like into interest categories.

4. Highlighting & Pinning Updates

Once you publish an update, you now get options to

- ‘Highlight’ the update which means it’s made more prominent taking up the entire page width

- ‘Pin’ which makes the update stick to the top of your timeline until you change its status or pin another update.

5. Wall Filters

The filters available for showing wall updates are now Highlights, Friend activity, Posts by page & Posts by others. There’s no way to set it to ‘Posts by everyone’ as there was in the old format.

Here’s an official video about customizing your new timeline fanpage

Oen thing I love about the new format is how it has so much packed into a single page. The admin panel, photos, pages, apps and of course status updates with new highlighting features.

What I don’t like is that Fangates are gone!
You still have apps in the form of tabs, but they’re  even harder for people to find.

Do you have any thoughts on the new fanpage timline format? What do you like? What do you dislike?
I’d love to hear it from you. Please add your comments below.

Quite simply, you want the pop-ups to help your marketing efforts but not irritate the visitor to a point that he/she stops visiting your site altogether!

Here are some DOs and DON’Ts for using pop-ups effectively. These will help you get the best out of them.

DOs

1. Whatever you are showcasing on the pop-up, make sure it’s functioning as it should. For example, if it’s a newsletter subscription form, process some test subscriptions to see the entire process through before taking it live.

2. Make sure it’s easy for the visitor to close the pop-up if he/she isn’t interested. You can do this by having a prominent and easy-to-find ‘Close’ or ‘No thanks’ button. Your intention of using a pop-up should be to facilitate visitor access to something very important on your site; not to trick the visitor and force him/her to view something.  Nobody likes nagging!

3. Before taking it live, test your pop-up to check what it looks like on various browsers and screen resolutions. If you’re not careful, your pop-up might just extend out of the screen size or look messy when viewed using different resolutions. It might not even work on some browsers.

DON’Ts

1. Dont’ let your pop-up be blocked by the visitors’ browser. There’s a whole new generation of pop-ups that can’t be blocked by the browser’s popup blocking feature.

2. I have noticed that several blogs are using really bad pop-ups that are sure to drive visitors away. The problem with these pop-ups is they are too damn HEAVY! In a few seconds after the page loads, you see some text hanging around in a very unprofessional way, without any background design or image. It seems as if the page is just stuck and is no longer loading. This is because the pop-up text content loads quickly but the background image (being too heavy) takes another 5-6 seconds to load only after which you can make sense of the whole pop-up design.

Here are two screen shots -

a. A page showing only text content of a pop-up while it’s still loading

b. The page showing the entire pop-up on loading completely after some time.

Even if the pop-up loads just fine on your computer, never ignore the possiblity that everyone’s connectivity might not be just as good around the world. This not only creates a bad impression for your blog but also wastes the visitors’ time.

To avoid this make sure the background or other images you use to design your pop-up are light in size.

3. Don’t go overboard with your marketing technique. Set the pop-up such that it shows up once on any page a first-time visitor lands on or shows up for all visitors once every week etc. Some WP plugins like ‘WP Super Popup‘ offer similar smart options. Do not annoy your visitors with pop-ups loading up every time on every page they visit.

Do you have any pop-up related tips to add to our list? We’d love to have you add them in comments below.

Here are some tips to help you avoid a print disaster:

1. Using The Right Fonts

When designing for print, both font types and font sizes need to be chosen carefully. Some fonts like ‘CG Omega’ have good readability in print while some do not. It’s advisable to always judge the right fonts by taking test prints and not depend completely on how they look on-screen.

2. Using High Quality Graphics is a Must

While for web, 72 DPI resolution graphics/images work just fine; they look pixelated/unsharp when used for print. For print all graphics used must be at least 300 DPI. It’s a good idea to use vector art instead of photos for background etc. wherever possible as they can scale up to any size without any quality loss.

3. CMYK Colors

If you’re getting a brochure designed from a professional, make sure the preview files he/she presents to you prior to printing are in CMYK color. Also colors on the screen look a lot different than how they look in print. Therefore, whatever colors you are using in your brochure design, make sure you test print them before approving the design. In case you’re only getting print material designed from a professional and then plan to get it printed yourself, ask your designer to provide the designs either in .AI (Adobe Illustrator) format or .CDR (Corel Draw format). Don’t forget to have the designer include all the used fonts in the design file, otherwise certain fonts might now show up when you take the file to your printer to get it processed.

4. Print Quantity & Process

When getting a brochure designed, ask questions and collect information on the available options. For example, if you’re using color shades and gradients (instead of or in addition to solid colors) in your designs, Screen printing is not an option. Offset gives the highest quality print but to make it cost-effective you usually need to order for a large quantity. Choose a brochure or other print design based on these considerations, as they can significantly affect your budget and quality of print once the design is finalized and its too late.

Do you have any print design tips to share?

We would love to hear about them. Please add them in comments below.