Twitter Resources

By Tim Priebe on March 3, 2010 at 2:09 pm in Link Roundup,Social Networking

PrintUnlike some other social networking sites, Twitter does not have third party applications on their website. Instead, they allow those to be hosted on other websites, and let those tie directly into Twitter. Here are a few of those Twitter resources I’ve found useful

TweetBeep.com

tweetbeep

If you are familiar with Google Alerts, then you’ll understand TweetBeep.com, which bills itself as Google Alerts for Twitter. Basically, you can enter search terms, and TweetBeep.com will email you tweets that match the search when they show up on Twitter.

TwitBacks.com

twitbacks

If you’re not a graphic designer yourself, TwitBacks.com is a good resource for getting a background image for your Twitter account that’s more customized than the backgrounds Twitter offers by default. They have over 80 backgrounds, and you can customize them online with your social networking links, a longer biography than Twitter allows, and even add a picture of yourself or your logo.

SocialOomph.com

socialoomph

If you’re looking to schedule tweets, automatically follow those who follow you or automatically send direct messages to new followers, SocialOomph.com is the choice for you.

Twitter Feed

twitterfeed

Tweeting about your latest blog entry is made automatic with Twitter Feed. Just enter in any RSS feed address, customize the settings if necessary, and every time you blog it will be pushed automatically out to Twitter. Of course, other RSS feeds will work as well.

Twitter Grader

twittergrader

Wanting to see how well you’re using Twitter? Twitter Grader is an automated tool from the guys that brought you Website Grader. While this type of tool should be taken with a grain of salt, it is neat to see how you rank compared to others in your town.

Your Twitter Karma

twitterkarma

Your Twitter Karma will give you a list of all the people who you’re following or who are following you, and will let you filter the list. A good tool if you want to see who’s following you that you’re not following, or vice versa. It was extremely useful when they would let you bulk unfollow people you were following who weren’t following you, but apparently Twitter asked them to remove that feature. Also, it’s a bit slow and the site is as ugly as sin, but it’s useful otherwise.

Know of some other great Twitter resources you’ve found useful? Please let us know!

Websites that turn a profit – Saving Money

By Tim Priebe on November 6, 2008 at 6:30 am in General,Link Roundup

Now that we’ve talked about saving time, let’s talk about saving money. This one is actually pretty easy to see from several standpoints.

First, the flexibility of a website can save money over traditional marketing materials. Let’s say you have some marketing material printed up. 5,000 brochures, 5,000 business cards and 5,000 fliers. As is common with small businesses, things change. Maybe it’s an email address, maybe a phone number, maybe even a service or product you offer. All of a sudden, you’re out over $1,000 dollars.

With a website, it’s different. You don’t have to spend tons of money to reprint brochures, business cards and fliers. Instead, you just go online, tweak your website’s text, and you’re good to go.

Another method was brought to our attention by one of our earliest clients, Cactus Jack’s Family Fun Center. One of the reasons they wanted a website was to save money on an ongoing basis with advertising. The fact that you can fit plenty of information in a website means you’re not paying to cram all that info into a phone book ad or into a television spot. Instead, you put just enough information to whet the appetite of your potential customer, then send them to your website for more in depth information.

While ads in the phone book, newspapers and magazines are still helpful, you don’t have to sell the product right there. You do still need to have eye-catching and memorable ads, but you can do the actual sales pitch on the website.

Finally, some websites simply save money on postage and gas. While musicians like The Herndons and Devin Derrick could mail out sample CDs to get their music out there, why not put a website up and include samples on the site instead? Sure, photographers like Beautiful Bride Photography and Colette Staats could drive around showing potential clients their portfolios, but why not point them to their websites?

I think you get the idea.

< Back to part 2 On to part 4 >

Open Source Web Design

By Nick Little on August 25, 2008 at 6:30 am in General,Link Roundup

I have always wondered what open source tools are out there for web design just in case I decide to boycott Adobe or Adobe goes bankrupt or something. It turns out there are some pretty good options for web design. None of them are quite as good as Fireworks or Dreamweaver, but they do get pretty close at least for the classic Apache, MySQL, PHP setup.

The best PHP editor actually turned out to be the best CSS and Javascript editor I could find as well. They are actually plugins to one of the best open source IDEs (Integrated Development Environments) available, Eclipse. Eclipse can be downloaded from www.eclipse.org.The plug-ins for PHP, CSS, and Javascript are PHP Development Tools, CSS Eclipse Plug-in, and JavaScript Editor Eclipse Plug-in, respectively. The PHP Plug-in was designed to work with XAMPP, a cross-platform Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl distribution.

Last, but not least we have the GIMP. It is by far the most popular open source image editing application. It lacks many of the features of Photoshop, but most can be accomplished using either plug-ins or a combination of steps. Exporting images using slicing is much more difficult than using Fireworks, but it can still be done.

Using open source software would not be my first choice, but if something happened where I did not have access to Adobe products I would still be able to be productive.

Website Resources for Small Business Owners

By Tim Priebe on July 30, 2008 at 6:30 am in General,Link Roundup

Recently I scoured the web to come up with some website resources that could be useful for small business owners. While I’ve personally written on a lot of these topics in the past, it’s good to get a third-party point of view. As typically happens, I found others had already come up with great lists.