Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

I am speaking at the Big Morning 4 Your Business Free business seminar Thursday 29th May.

I am presenting on two topics:

Stop Your Website Sending Your Customers to Your Competition

and

Move Your Business to the Cloud Cost-Effectively

The event is a caffeine-injected morning of FREE interactive business development sessions giving you the tools and contacts to grow your business in ONE big hit! (hope that means good coffee!)

Put on by the Regional Development Australia – Moreton Bay Group the morning is:

• A high-quality program delivered by 18 industry experts
• Meet the experts one-on-one
• Visit the trade tables
• Learn from the region’s businesses
• Network with other business owners

Here is the slide show I am presenting. Hope you can make it!

Time for a link dump from my browser – clearing out tabs.

Education

How to Create a Portfolio with Evernote (Education Series) – Evernote is an awesome app – We use it all the time on various android and windows platforms.

Social Marketing and Web Development

Building trust - The Connection Constant

Want to build a online store? Choosing a payment gateway

Facebook – how to convert your personal account into a Facebook Page - for all those people who created a “person” for their business page.

More how to convert Facebook profiles into business pages including tricks and traps

Drupal

Configuring and adding images to Drupal 7 content with Wysiwyg, IMCE and Lightbox2 – very good tutorial

Excel

Probably the best explanation of using INDEX function for non volatile dynamic range creation in Excel

Windows 8

There will be lots coming on Windows 8 on this blog later – for now heres a very good read about how Windows 8 can pool data storage

Business

Realities of Business is a new website by a great friend to promote his new book. Worth a read! Buy it now!

Photography

Two local photographers worth checking out.

Helen Graham

Dale Travers

BuzzGrowl is a pretty cool plugin that's very easy to install on any website. It creates a floating bottom right corner box that searches for and displays social media commentary about the site you are on. It provides easy ways for people to see the commentary about your site and participate by sharing on Facebook, tweeting or retweeting others comments.

I was able to install it in under 5 minutes, its a simple script that needs to be added to your page. Get your script from BuzzGrowl.

Here's some of what people have been saying about it:

BuzzGrowl is a premium answer to onsite social media engagement. If you're a small blog, you'll love it. - Brad McCarty, Editor, TheNextWeb
Many site owners will be interested in using [Buzz Growl]. Website publishers will love it. - Marshall Kirkpatrick, Co-Editor, ReadWriteWeb

And here is a video about it.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques are very important for websites to hit that coveted number number 1 spot on related keyword searches.

With Drupal there are some specific tools that can assist with this. The major Search Engines, (Yahoo, Bing and Google) provide tools to do this and there are some Drupal modules that work with this.

The following process takes you through the entire process - excluding signing up for the accounts at Yahoo, Google and Bing.

Before starting make accounts (or sign in with your existing accounts) to each of these services:

• Google https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home
• Yahoo https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites
• Bing http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/#

Then make sure you have a current download of these modules:

• Global Redirect http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect
• Site Verifications http://drupal.org/project/site_verify
• Xmlsitemap http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap