Category: Blog

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What is advertising? {Mad Men quote}

Screen Shot 2013-03-06 at 1.47.15 PMAdvertising is based on one thing, happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams reassurance that whatever you are doing is okay. You are okay.

— Don Draper, Mad Men

I know he’s just a fictional character and it’s not really the full story on what advertising is but something about it stuck with me. There is some truth that advertising is about happiness; but not just about happiness, it’s about emotion.

Link to video to get the emphasis:

https://youtu.be/E0L8f1IY1Vk?t=49s

 

 

And I know, I know, I’m a little behind on getting into the tv show Mad Men but finally started watching it on Netflix last night.

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SEO in a nutshell (really oversimplified)

There are certain things that can be done to increase your chances at showing up for certain search words and phrases. HOWEVER, no matter what is done to increase those chances, we do not have control over the search engines.

If you absolutely MUST show up for a certain search phrase, I would recommend PPC (Pay per click) using Google AdWords, Bing ads and Yahoo Advertising.

However if people are not even searching for xyz (description of your product/service and any related terms) then you still need to find other ways to increase demand. Send samples to bloggers, advertise in traditional media, go to trade shows (the list goes on.)

This is oversimplified but hopefully will help you grasp larger seo and marketing concepts that require this base knowledge. SEO is not a quick fix. Neither is building a website.

Related: SEO / SEM / PPC

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Fixing the VMWare “Windows could not find a driver for your network adapter” error

Seeing this error message in VMware can be more than annoying:

Screen Shot 2013-01-30 at 11.35.17 PM

Particularly after you’ve installed, reinstalled, removed and reinstalled VMWare Tools and done… well almost everything else you’re told to do to fix it.

So then you come across this tip: See if your vmx file includes the following line of code and if it’s missing, add it.

ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000e"

Say wha? Yeah I was lost on this suggestion when I came across it in the forums particularly after searching my computer for .vmx and coming up with nothing.

Ok – here’s the step by step of how to do that:

  1. Close/turn off your virtual machines (not suspended) if they are open but leave VMware open.
  2. Go to the “Virtual Machine Library” (shift+command+L)
  3. Right click (control+click) on the virtual machine you are having problems with and select “Show in Finder”
  4. Right click on that file and select “Show package contents”
  5. Find the file ending in .vmx and right click on it. Open With > Text Edit
  6. Now search for the following in the file:
  7. ethernet0.virtualDev = "e1000e"

    IF you have that line of code in your file then your problem is somewhere else. However if you don’t find this line of code in the file, you need to add it. Yes, just copy and paste it exactly as I have it above and add it to the file in Text Edit. Then Save > close and you should be able open your virtual machine in VMware and connect to the internet now.

It looks like it’s a fair number of people upgrading to Windows 8 in VMware from another older version of Windows (7, Vista, XP) may encounter this problem.

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What is a brand? And “The Brand Gap”

Branding is not the same thing as a visual identity. Branding isn’t what you tell people you are, it’s what people think you are. Brand is your business’ personality. You can’t control it completely but you can guide it to a certain extent but to do so, you have to first have a clear idea of who you want your business to be.

If your business were a person what kind of personality would they have?
Ex: Geeky? In crowd? Athletic? Professional? Sense of humor?

If your business were a magazine (or a couple of magazines) what would it be?
Ex: Wired meets Martha Stewart Living? Inc meets Garden & Gun?

If your business were a famous person who would they be?
Ex: Mick Jagger? Donald Trump? Lady Gaga? Michelle Obama?

These are just some quick questions I sometimes ask people about their business. The simpler version is “how would you describe your business? What kind of adjectives would you use?” Knowing this can be very helpful for creating a design to match.

However no amount of saying one thing will change how people perceive you if you are clearly another. IF you can barely turn on your computer and you think doing a self promotion on facebook once a month counts as social media, you clearly are NOT a tech savvy, social media wielding entrepreneur.

If you want more ideas or details,
the following is a good slideshow on the subject of brands:

The Brand Gap from coolstuff

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How do I rebuild a site in WordPress on the server while leaving the existing site live until it’s done?

These instructions are for designers and developers working on a linux based server.

1) Leave the existing site

2) put all of wordpress in a folder (usually “wordpress”)

3) build the site in wordpress and test it thoroughly.

4) put an htaccess file in the folder outside of the “wordpress” folder that redirects everything correctly to inside the wordpress folder as if it were in the public_html folder. Also, do your 301 redirects here for pages that need to redirect to specific wordpress pages or categories. Should look something like this:

RewriteEngine On

# Old redirects made Dec 6 2012
RewriteRule ^about_us.html /about-us/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^services.html /services-pricing/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^index.html / [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/wordpress/(.*)$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /wordpress/$1 [L]

 

7) Log in to wordpress, got to settings> general > and change WordPress Address (URL) and Site Site Address (URL) to not include the /wordpress/

Screen Shot 2013-01-15 at 3.14.50 PM

 

8) delete old site files that are outside of the wordpress folder just in case.

And you should be done. htacess files can sometimes be a little persnickety but the above directions and code should cover most basic situations.

If you’re on a Windows server you have to install something on the server and there may be some differences in the rewrite rules. I don’t work on Windows servers enough to give full details.

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Remove “Home” label only on homepage of WordPress theme

This is code to remove the “Home” label at the top of the page (typically just below the navigation menu) only on the homepage but leaving the page names on all of the other pages.

Find the file in your theme that calls the entry header. For the Twenty-Twelve theme, this will be in your content-page.php. (I also recommend creating a child theme instead of editing the existing Twenty-Twelve theme but we’ll save that for another time and focus on the code snippet for now.)

Replace:

<header class="entry-header">
	<h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
</header>

 

With:

<!--conditional use header - no home on homepage-->
	<?php if( ! is_front_page() ) :?>
		<header class="entry-header">
			<h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
		</header>
	<?php endif; ?>
<!--conditional use header - no home on homepage-->

 

 

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Adding new google calendars to your iphone

“Why am I not seeing a new google calendar on my iphone?” Is probably the question you are asking yourself.

Once you have your phone set up to connect your account, you will need to visit the following two websites from your iphone:

  1. m.google.com/sync/settings/
    Here you will check which calendars you wish to see on your device.
  2. google.com/calendar/iphoneselect
    For some reason you also have to make the same selection on this screen as well. I’m not entirely sure why, but it works (as of Jan 2013.)

Revisit these steps any time you add an entirely new calendar or someone shares a calendar with you that you want to see on your iphone.

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Creating a PDF from Microsoft Publisher

If you are using:

This last one you would use the 2-step download listed first and not the other files. Instead of saving the file to a pdf you will “print” and select PDF995 from the list of printer options once installed. Basically this last one acts like you’ve installed a printer that “prints” a pdf for you. It’s software I have used and trusted for … probably going on 6+ years now. It’s a great emergency backup and is in fact what I used with your Publisher file because the file was locked somehow and I couldn’t resave it to a pdf even though I have that option on my computer. The paid version of this (only $20) just removes the ads.