The best home improvement squidoo lenses

Squidoo seems to have missed the mark when it comes to offering an information community. A quick look at the top Squidoo lenses reveals that most of the information on the site is either for SEO purposes or money making purposes. This may well be the intention of the website, to create a way for people to build their own profiles without breaking SEO rules. However it seems it is falling shorter than something like Hub Pages as a corner of information for the web.

Squidoo is a website that allows anyone to publish and create a community. The pages people create are called “lenses”. Lenses are pages that gather everything someone knows about one topic.  It’s a simple, fun and interesting way to develop a community online that does not revolve around Facebook. Apart from the fact that Squidoo is currently filled with spam, it is a neat idea.

Home improvement is a growing niche online, so we thought we would highlight what we thought were the best home improvement lenses, and why.
Vegetable Garden Layout
There is so much detail, and so many pictures, going through all the possible connetations of a vegetable garden, it is mind boggling.
Gothic Style Bedrooms
With Twighlight being such a massive hit, we can only assume that people are hell-bent on making their bedroom look like something out of a Brams Stoker novel. It seems that this lense caters for those people that love the nightlife, but don’t know how to boogy.
Romantic Outdoor Lighting
With Valentines day a painful day away, this had to be slipped in there. If you are willing to spend money on Amazon then this lense is the one for you.
Insulation
The best insulation available in Australia is discussed in this lense.

SEO Sydney

Increase web conversions

Increase web conversions

Sales training Sydney

Sales training Sydney

The lookie loos

The lookie loos

Sydney SEO

Sydney SEO

How to install insulation

How to install insulation

increase wordpress speed

how to increase wordpress speed

cheap car insurance quote

cheap car insurance quotes

The benefits of using facebook at work

the benefits of using facebook at work

Who is Eduardo Saverin?

Eduardo Saverin (born March 20, 1982) is one of the co-founders of Facebook, along with Mark Zuckerberg. He owns a 5% share of Facebook, worth $1.3 billion. In The Social Network, Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin gets screwed. But Saverin writes, "The true takeaway for me was that entrepreneurship and creativity... are perhaps the most important drivers of business today." His $1.1 billion stake in Facebook probably helps.

Recently has been hiding out in Singapore for the better part of the last year-and-a-half. We have heard told he lives in the penthouse of the tallest building of the city, and is a regular at Singapore’s club hot spots, especially a place called The Butter Factory. Rolling with the city’s socialites aside, locals say that Saverin is pretty low-key. No one who has spoken with had ever heard him refer to himself as the “co-founder” of Facebook. It either goes unsaid or, on one occasion, he told someone who’d never heard of him he was merely a “programmer of Facebook games.”

Saverin is also an occasional guest blogger on CNBC.com. Last Friday he wrote that what he found most compelling about the film was “who said what to whom and why.” He wrote, “I have wondered how Hollywood would depict [Facebook's] creation and development on the big screen,” noting that “the movie was clearly intended to be entertainment and not a fact-based documentary.

Mobile Marketing

• Bank of America has more than 930,000 customers for its mobile banking services and is one of leaders in the space.
• Mobile click-through rates average 8.9% up to 49%
• Android has doubled market penetration and overtaken iPhone in the last 8 months.

There are basically three leading, different and incompatible operating systems on modern mobile smart phones. First there was the Blackberry, which handles email and business applications very well, and over a secure connection. Next there was the iPhone, which is Apple’s offering. The iPhone broke the mould with its applications market and has lead the industry for the last few years with slick design and flexibility. However, in the last few months, Google’s Android has come on the scene with its own applications market, and is now leading the pack.

So what does this mean for marketers?

Although mobile browsers only make up around 1% of total web traffic, you have to look at the demographics of mobile web browsers. For one they are almost certainly educated, tech savvy and with disposable income. Secondly, the lions share of web browsing happens during the commute. Basically you know you are talking to the early adopters when you are marketing online. Also, this segment is probably the fastest growing market segment at the moment, with mobile browser usage doubling every few months.

Who is doing it and what is working?

It seems that all the cool kids are doing it. Samuel L Jackson has his own app. Most of the big companies have started some kind of mobile marketing program, because Mobile Marketing can provide marketers with theholy trinity of

marketing, timely, personalised, actionable marketing messages. There are dozens of great mobile marketing case studies to look at that show how easy it is to get a response out of targets. The methodologies vary too, with some mobile marketing groups using SMS, and others using applications.

SMS marketing?

An example is this case study; McDonald’s says, send a SMS to Santa & get your gift within seconds. Promoted using unique codes on cups for consumers to send in with 1 text message – right in the restaurant. Every code wins – for the first time even physical prizes. It resulted in a stunning 25% response rate – with more than 1.5 million participations in five weeks.

Mobile App marketing?

This is where the cutting edge cool is at. Almost all smart phones now use GPS  to give users their current location. Now marketing professionals are tapping into this, providing targets with information about their brand. Reebok released a free app that allowed users to customise their trainers. This creates engagement and interaction directly with the brand. Time Out offer an app, like many other media groups, that taps into their information system and provides users with what is going on, events, gigs around them right at that moment.

So what does this mean for marketing professionals?

In almost any industry, you must be looking at mobile marketing as part of your mix. There are thousands of ways you can provide information to your customers through mobile marketing platforms.

Magento Designs

As Magento has started to emerge as a great tool for businesses who wants to sell online. With its full offering of options and features, Magento is hard to go past when it comes to an eCommerce platform.

Since we our first post on the best wordpress themes for business, and since we offer Magento as part of our own eCommerce Design program, we decided we could do a similar post on themes for Magento. Based on what we already know works for business, we thought we would find Magento themes that have the following criteria;

1. Menu bar across the top.
2. Two Column Layout
3. Space for your logo in the top left hand corner.
4. Background colour of the body is white.
5. Stretchable side areas (outside of the body)
6. CSS menu (not images)

When you are looking for a Magento template, there are some key things you should look out for;

Decide what your brand is; choose a flexible template

Have a look around at the competition, what they website looks like and how they are producing their website. Find a template that looks flexible and can adapt to your brand. If the buttons are blue and white, but your branding is all red, then maybe you should look elsewhere.

Breathing space

Your ecommerce website should breath. Too much clutter and you will confuse your buyers. Every element in your wordpress website should be given breathing space. It should also mean that when you add a widget to the sidebar, whether it is an image or text, it should not destroy the flow of the template.

Based on these recomendations, these are the latest best Magento themes. If you want to purchase any of these themes, all you have to do is click on the images.

This cohesive theme includes design for everything you need to launch your online store:

• Homepage (Image gallery is included for free)
• Category Landing Page / Product Listing Page
• Product Page with free Lightbox gallery integration included
• Register / Sign In Page
• My Account Pages
• Shopping Cart Page
• Checkout Page
• Content Page template
• Email Header

Tribeca is a clean, magazine style Magento theme. It has penty of room around the elements, plenty of breathing space and the main text is balck on white, which make it easy to read.

Crisp and Clean includes all the pages you need to set up your online store. The main thing we love is that, again, the elements have plenty of space to breath.

• Ultra crisp, clean and clear http://960.gs/ layout.
• Plenty of white space for high legibility and easy reading.
• Unique custom gallery on homepage
• Detects iPad visitors and serves up an iPad-friendly version of the site
• Custom lower galleries with reversing arrows
• Lightbox gallery on product pages for displaying jumbo product images
• Custom cart preview modal window
• Amazon style (but better looking!) huge multi-column subnavigation

This furniture store theme is lush looking, and inviting!

• Modern, luxurious, professional, clean & elegent design.
• Unique slideshow is designed for showing off Furniture.
• All blocks are customized.
• All cart & checkout progress pages are customized.
• All product catalog pages are customzed.
• All customer pages are customized.
• Banners for Furniture products & the targeted business included.

GENERAL FEATURES

• Div/Tabless HTML mark-up.
• XHTML 1 .0 Strict valid.
• CSS 2 .0 and CSS 3 .0 valid.
• Cross-browser support. Compatible with all major browsers such as IE7 +, Firefox 3, Safari 5, Chrome 5, Opera 10.
• Prototype-based Javascript (avoid javascript confliction).
• Support Magento CE version 1.4.0 and higher.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)-orient in design and development, fast loading.
• Full PSD files supplied, easy to edit.
• Well-structured and commented HTML & CSS for easy customization.
• Full user guide documentation to help you installing and utilizing the theme.

This cohesive theme includes design for everything you need to launch your online store:

• Homepage (Image gallery is included for free)
• Category Landing Page / Product Listing Page
• Product Page with free Lightbox gallery integration included
• Register / Sign In Page
• My Account Pages
• Shopping Cart Page
• Checkout Page
• Content Page template
• Email Header

Time to first byte (TTFB) is the time it takes for a browser to start receiving information after it has start to make the request to the server. In some situations, as much as 75% of the time spent loading a page can be taken up by waiting for the first byte of data to arrive. You can test your time to first byte by using something like Byte Check or Load Impact

There are a few factors that come into play with TTFB, such as the network you are on and the server that your website is hosted on. The only thing that is controllable is the server you are on.

Optimise Your Database

This is both in a database size sense, and using the “optimise tables” sense. If you are using WordPress you can use one of the database optimising plug ins to remove your old posts. If you have a mySQL database that is over 10MB, then your server is going to spend a few milliseconds crawling through the tables to find the right data. The smaller you can make it the better.

Once you have reduced the overall size of your database, you can then optimise the tables, which will reduce any overhead you might have.

Take note of the host you are with

Even if you are using a CDN, your host will have an impact on your time to first byte. We ran a test on 4 identical websites using 4 different web hosts based here in Australia, and we found there was about a 20% difference in time to first byte depending on the server you are on. Sometimes it is both impractical and too costly to move to a new hosting provider, however it is something you need to look at next time you are in the market for a host.

Use Amazon Cloud Space

Using a Content Delivery Network is worth your while because not only can it reduce the bandwidth burden on your current host, but it can improve the speed of your website by a huge amount. You can self host as a CDN, but it won’t reduce your burden, it won’t change the TTFB, and it might only reduce your overall website speed by 10%.

We started out using the normal Amazon S3, but we actually found it to have a slower load time than our own server. However when we switched to Amazon Cloud Space, we went from an overall  TTFB of 4 seconds to 1 second. That is a 75% reduction in load time just by using the Cloud Space.

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