The Directory vLabCat Directory

It’s going to be hard to sum up everything that is included in our customized eSyndicat directory. In a nutshell, we’ve taken an already robust directory platform and converted into a full on, featured loaded Business directory. One that is not only competes with the major directory scripts out there, but is also affordable and extremely dynamic.

Maybe it’s because we have directory owners on our team, maybe it’s because we see the real potential for Webmasters to make a successful and profitable business, or perhaps we, ourselves are completely sold and committed to developing and evolving a great directory platform.

Whatever the reason, we are happy to announce our Directory Platforms to the public.

Continuing Development Through Plugins and Addons

Part of the reason we chose the eSyndicat as our base platform choice is because of the tremendous possibilities in terms of expanding and developing to take our ideas of what a quality business directory should offer… to the NEXT level. Not only are we creating advanced features to render a great directory product, but we are also putting a considerable amount of effort in extending as many different features through plugins and addons.

This will be an ongoing effort on our part, and as time beats on, we will release more and more great plugin/addon products for our clients to choose from.

An Eye on Social

Face it, social networking is the ‘thing’ to do, and the way we see it, it will be the thing to do for as far as we can see in the future of online interactivity. And, what better way to make use of such a great tool, than to extend it in our directories? Business community meets and mingles with their direct consumer market? The consumer market, aka, local and niche communities benefit by being a part of either their local community or a specific niche… with the edge on finding services, products, commodities and related business interests.

The concept serves the community/consumers well because they can share their favorite dining spot, pub, store, service with others that share a common interest or within their local community. At the same time, they can connect with others and create groups for their schools, churches, sports, specific interests, neighborhoods and more. They can also find out what local events are going on, or, perhaps post a classified — engaging and interacting with those of the same interest or locally.

We understand this importance and see the true benefit with hyperlocal networking and combining the business and consumer worlds.

With our upcoming Go Social Directory addon, which we plan to release by August of 2010 — we are literally putting social networking right at the fingers of directory owners.

Let’s Keep Moving

Now, with our base platforms and products available to anyone who wants to capitalize on all of the above — we are ready to keep a steady but strong pace in continuing development and releasing new products and services that will take our clients to the next level… every time.

One of a weblog’s great benefits is that it essentially frees you from “Web design.” You write a paragraph, click a button, and it’s posted on the Internet. No need for visual design, page design, interaction design, information architecture, or any programming or server maintenance.

Blogs make having a simple website much easier, and as a result, the number of people who write for the Web has exploded. This is a striking confirmation of the importance of ease of use.

Weblogs’ second benefit is that they’re a Web-native content genre: they rely on links, and short postings prevail. You don’t have to write a full article or conduct original research or reporting. You can simply find something interesting on another site and link to it, possibly with commentary or additional examples. Obviously, this is much easier than running a conventional site, and again indicates the benefits of lowering the barriers to computer use.

As a third benefit, blogs are part of an ecosystem (often called the Blogosphere) that serves as a positive feedback loop: Whatever good postings exist are promoted through links from other sites. More reader/writers see this good stuff, and the very best then get linked to even more. As a result, link frequency follows a Zipf distribution, with disproportionally more links to the best postings.

Some weblogs are really just private diaries intended only for a handful of family members and close friends. Usability guidelines generally don’t apply to such sites, because the readers’ prior knowledge and motivation are incomparably greater than those of third-party users. When you want to reach new readers who aren’t your mother, however, usability becomes important.

Also, while readers of your intranet weblog might know you, usability is important because your readers are on company time. (As an example, see IBM’s use of intranet blogs — among the ten best intranets of 2006.)

Usability Issues
To reach new readers and respect your existing readers’ time constraints, test your weblog against the following usability problems.

1. No Author Biographies
Unless you’re a business blog, you probably don’t need a full-fledged “about us” section the way a corporate site does. That said, the basic rationale for “about us” translates directly into the need for an “about me” page on a weblog: users want to know who they’re dealing with.

It’s a simple matter of trust. Anonymous writings have less credence than something that’s signed. And, unless a person’s extraordinarily famous, it’s not enough to simply say that Joe Blogger writes the content. Readers want to know more about Joe. Does he have any credentials or experience in the field he’s commenting on? (Even if you don’t have formal credentials, readers will trust you more if you’re honest about that fact, set forth your informal experience, and explain the reason for your enthusiasm.)

2. No Author Photo
Even weblogs that provide author bios often omit the author photo. A photo is important for two reasons:

It offers a more personable impression of the author. You enhance your credibility by the simple fact that you’re not trying to hide. Also, users relate more easily to somebody they’ve seen.

It connects the virtual and physical worlds. People who’ve met you before will recognize your photo, and people who’ve read your site will recognize you when you meet in person (say, at a conference — or the company cafeteria if you’re an intranet blogger).

A huge percentage of the human brain is dedicated to remembering and recognizing faces. For many, faces work better than names. I learned this lesson myself in 1987 when I included my photo in a HyperCard stack I authored that was widely disseminated on Mac-oriented BBSs. Over the next two years, countless people came up to me and said, “I liked your stack,” having recognized me from the photo.

Also, if you run a professional blog and expect to be quoted in the press, you should follow the recommendations for using the Web for PR and include a selection of high-resolution photos that photo editors can download.

3. Nondescript Posting Titles
Sadly, even though weblogs are native to the Web, authors rarely follow the guidelines for writing for the Web in terms of making content scannable. This applies to a posting’s body text, but it’s even more important with headlines. Users must be able to grasp the gist of an article by reading its headline. Avoid cute or humorous headlines that make no sense out of context.

Your posting’s title is microcontent and you should treat it as a writing project in its own right. On a value-per-word basis, headline writing is the most important writing you do.

Descriptive headlines are especially important for representing your weblog in search engines, newsfeeds (RSS), and other external environments. In those contexts, users often see only the headline and use it to determine whether to click into the full posting. Even if users see a short abstract along with the headline (as with most search engines), user testing shows that people often read only the headline. In fact, people often read only the first three or four words of a headline when scanning a list of possible places to go. Sample bad headlines:

What Is It That You Want?
Hey, kids! Comics!
Victims Abandoned

Sample good headlines:
Pictures from Die Hunns and Black Halos show
Office Depot Pays United States $4.75 Million to Resolve False Claims Act Allegations
(too long, but even if you only read the first few words, you have an idea of what it’s about)
Ice cream trucks as church marketing
This last headline works on a church-related blog. If you’re writing an ice cream industry blog, start the headline with the word “church” because it’s the information-carrying word within a context of all ice cream, all the time.
In browsing weblog headline listings to extract these examples, I noticed several headlines in ALL CAPS. That’s always bad. Reading speed is reduced by 10% and users are put off by the appearance of shouting.

4. Links Don’t Say Where They Go
Many weblog authors seem to think it’s cool to write link anchors like: “some people think” or “there’s more here and here.” Remember one of the basics of the Web: Life is too short to click on an unknown. Tell people where they’re going and what they’ll find at the other end of the link.
Generally, you should provide predictive information in either the anchor text itself or the immediately surrounding words. You can also use link titles for supplementary information that doesn’t fit with your content. (To see a link title in action, mouse over the “link titles” link.)

A related mistake in this category is to use insider shorthand, such as using first names when you reference other writers or weblogs. Unless you’re writing only for your friends, don’t alienate new visitors by appearing to be part of a closed clique. The Web is not high school.

5. Classic Hits are Buried
Hopefully, you’ll write some pieces with lasting value for readers outside your fan base. Don’t relegate such classics to the archives, where people can only find something if they know you posted it, say, in May 2003.
Highlight a few evergreens in your navigation system and link directly to them. For example, my own list of almost 300 Alertbox columns starts by saying, “Read these first: Usability 101 and Top Ten Mistakes of Web Design.”

Also, remember to link to your past pieces in newer postings. Don’t assume that readers have been with you from the beginning; give them background and context in case they want to read more about your ideas.

6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
A timeline is rarely the best information architecture, yet it’s the default way to navigate weblogs. Most weblog software provides a way to categorize postings so users can easily get a list of all postings on a certain topic. Do use categorization, but avoid the common mistake of tagging a posting with almost all of your categories. Be selective. Decide on a few places where a posting most belongs.
Categories must be sufficiently detailed to lead users to a thoroughly winnowed list of postings. At the same time, they shouldn’t be so detailed that users face a category menu that’s overly long and difficult to scan. Ten to twenty categories are appropriate for structuring many topics.

On the main page for each category, highlight that category’s evergreens as well as a time line of its most recent postings.

7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
Establishing and meeting user expectations is one of the fundamental principles of Web usability. For a weblog, users must be able to anticipate when and how often updates will occur.
For most weblogs, daily updates are probably best, but weekly or even monthly updates might work as well, depending on your topic. In either case, pick a publication schedule and stick to it. If you usually post daily but sometimes let months go by without new content, you’ll lose many of your loyal — and thus most valuable — readers.

Certainly, you shouldn’t post when you have nothing to say. Polluting cyberspace with excess information is a sin. To ensure regular publishing, hold back some ideas and post them when you hit a dry spell.

8. Mixing Topics
If you publish on many different topics, you’re less likely to attract a loyal audience of high-value users. Busy people might visit a blog to read an entry about a topic that interests them. They’re unlikely to return, however, if their target topic appears only sporadically among a massive range of postings on other topics. The only people who read everything are those with too much time on their hands (a low-value demographic).
The more focused your content, the more focused your readers. That, again, makes you more influential within your niche. Specialized sites rule the Web, so aim tightly.

If you have the urge to speak out on, say, both American foreign policy and the business strategy of Internet telephony, establish two blogs. You can always interlink them when appropriate.

9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
Whenever you post anything to the Internet — whether on a weblog, in a discussion group, or even in an email — think about how it will look to a hiring manager in ten years. Once stuff’s out, it’s archived, cached, and indexed in many services that you might never be aware of.
Years from now, someone might consider hiring you for a plum job and take the precaution of ‘nooping you first. (Just taking a stab at what’s next after Google. Rest assured: there will be some super-snooper service that’ll dredge up anything about you that’s ever been bitified.) What will they find in terms of naïvely puerile “analysis” or offendingly nasty flames published under your name?

Think twice before posting. If you don’t want your future boss to read it, don’t post.

10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service
Having a weblog address ending in blogspot.com, typepad.com, etc. will soon be the equivalent of having an @aol.com email address or a Geocities website: the mark of a naïve beginner who shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Letting somebody else own your name means that they own your destiny on the Internet. They can degrade the service quality as much as they want. They can increase the price as much as they want. They can add atop your content as many pop-ups, blinking banners, or other user-repelling advertising techniques as they want. They can promote your competitor’s offers on your pages. Yes, you can walk, but at the cost of your loyal readers, links you’ve attracted from other sites, and your search engine ranking.

The longer you stay at someone else’s domain name, the higher the cost of going independent. Yes, it’s tempting to start a new weblog on one of the services that offer free accounts. It’s easy, it’s quick, and it’s obviously cheap. But it only costs $8 per year to get your personal domain name and own your own future. As soon as you realize you’re serious about blogging, move it away from a domain name that’s controlled by somebody else. The longer you delay, the more pain you’ll feel when you finally make the move.

By Jakob Nielsen

Website templates are very affordable and they save you a lot of effort and time when you want to create a new layout for your website. However, a lot of people make mistakes in the process of choosing and using a web template and end up with something that was unlike the image they had in mind. Here are some guidelines to help you avoid those mistakes.

The first obvious mistake you should be aware of is using a template that is very popular. If many people use the same template, your website will not appear unique at all and your credibility as a solid, different website will be tarnished. In other words, you will appear generic just like your next-door neighbours.

To whole point of using a web template is to save time and effort. You just change the title and appropriate details and you’re done. The biggest mistake one makes is to customize the template beyond recognisation. While that may be good in the sense that you’re creating a unique graphic, you’re defying the very purpose of using a web template — saving time and effort.

However, on the opposite side, if a template you purchase is suitable but some changes must be made to suit your site’s theme, then you will have to take some time to make the changes. For example, you can find a very nice template that suits your hobby site except the original designer has put an image of stamps in the header. You can find images of garden plants and spades to replace the stamps for your gardening hobby site. However, do only make the necessary changes and don’t redesign the whole template.

In some circumstances, some people simply make the wrong choice of templates. This is a very subjective issue but you have to be careful in selecting templates to suit your audience. Do not choose templates just because they are pretty, choose them because they serve your purpose.

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No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an empty shell. Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.

The first method is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily. Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.

Ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure the crème de la crème of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.

Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.

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This particular write-up is geared toward using the Arthemia Premium theme with WordPress. Thought I would share it here so that it might help someone else.

AutoBlogged Guide

AutoBlogged is a plugin that allows you to pull content from RSS feeds into your posts. There are several things that you should consider before setting up and sort of automatic feed into your blog.

Research RSS Feeds

Autoblogged comes with a search feature that allows you to use keywords to find RSS feeds rather than an actual URL. While you can assume content from sites like Yahoo News is safe – you should still do your homework.

It’s advised that you consider actually doing a Google search on a particular subject. For instance, google “Business Rss Feeds” and read through the results. One result returned this website that lists the Top 100 Most Subscribed to Rss Feeds:

http://radio.xmlstoragesystem.com/rcsPublic/rssHotlist

To see how the feed looks, click the XML icon next to each listing. Most sites will offer a RSS icon or link to their feed so that you can view its results.

What you see is what you get:

• Some feeds offer images with text.
• Some feeds just offer text.
• Some include ads, such as google ads.

Copyright

Copyright is a hard thing to pin down when it comes to publishing on the Web and with RSS feeds. The absolute best thing you can do to avoid any sort of issues is to get permission.

Sure, it’s a lot easier just to snag the RSS feed URL and provide the source/author – however, sometimes that still isn’t enough. There are other considerations, too. Some sites publish images that they have purchased rights to. If you grab that image and display it on your site, regardless if you have permission to run their RSS feed, you can find yourself in trouble with the owner of that image.

(We will get into other image options later.)

Nonetheless, taking the time to research a quality feed and asking permission to run Excerpts/Content from it on your site – will prevent a lot of issues in the future.

Don’t Just Auto-pilot Your site

Autoblogging is great because it provides you with relevant content without having to write every single article. However, it’s advised that you use Autoblogging as an enhancement rather than your only method of publishing to your site.

Suggested Use

• Research and pick two or three subject areas to post, such as Business, Politics and Technology.

• Make sure that you’re allowed to repost the content on your blog. Most sites do not have a problem with this as long as you’re not posting the full article and you provide credit with a link back to the article.

• Manually pull content everyday. Simply schedule a day of the week, where you will spend a little time processing new content from feeds. What that means is when you setup the RSS feed, configure the feed to pull only the 5 latest posts and set it to manual feed – meaning you process the feed when you want fresh content. This way you can still benefit from pulling fresh content, but you’re in complete control over what exactly posts. * This is the best option so that you can control how the posts look on your home page.

• Provide your own stock images. Take the time to find a stock photo site and pick 20-30 generic images for a specific category. You can set it up so that each post pulls a random photo from your stock images to display as your thumbnails on the home page as well as the post image. This saves you from reposting copyrighted images and gives you control over the quality of image that shows on your site.

While these measures might seem a bit time consuming at first to establish, once you do, your effort will pay off in the long run.

Feed Options

There are a few options you will need to setup before processing feeds.

Tag Options (AutoBlogged>Tag Options)

Here you can set the length of tags, how many tags per post, whether or not you want the original tags from the feeds to display or create your own for each category.

Settings (AutoBlogged>Settings)

The main setting you’ll want to adjust here is the Excerpt. You can control how many words, sentences and paragraphs you pull from feeds. It’s suggested that you pull 50-55 words because of the home page layout.

IMPORTANT

You can pull the full content from a feed to the actual post. The excerpt is for home page purposes and will limit the text on the home page to the amount you specify in Excerpt Settings.

Keep in mind that if you pull a large amount of feed content for your posts – the Premium Theme’s First Post will display all of that content. The other Latest Posts on the home page will display the 50-55 word excerpt.

This is why manually pulling the feeds is suggested. This way you can modify the Last post on the home page with the <!–more–> tag (refer to the Arthemia Premium Guide) to show as much content as you want. Also, you do not have to concern yourself with new posts being processed in without your review when manually processing feeds.

Example Feed

Setting up and processing a feed is straight forward.

1. Navigate to AutoBlogged>Feeds.
2. Create a new feed.

General Settings

In General Settings you specific the type of feed you want, the URL of the feed or keywords. In our example, I am using a RSS feed: Yahoo Technology.

Feed Processing

You can specify when to update the feed and how many posts to pull in. For our example, we are going to manually process our feed and we only want to pull in 5 posts at a time.

Categories

3. Choose which categories you want the feed to post to.

Authors

Specify the Authors that you want to include in the post. You should always use the Author of the post and skip any posts that do not have an author.

Images

This is an important setting. You will want to check Save local copies of all images in the feed. Especially if you are pulling in full content. If you check the Create local thumbnails for each image and pull in full content, it will display the original image and a thumbnail version in the post.

However, you have no control over the size of the image when you Save local copies of all images in the feed. Again, this is why manually pulling in fresh content benefits you. This way you can resize any images that are too large and include and image if a post does not have one.

Post Templates

The default content pull is set to excerpt. This will pull a portion of the post instead of the full content. If you want to pull an all of the content, change <p>%excerpt%</p> to <p>%content%</p>

4. Save Changes to the feed when you are finished.

Processing

1. To manually process the feed, click the Process Now button Feeds screen.

A summary of the feed content will display. It’s clear that some feeds do NOT have images while some do.

How the feed displays on the home page:

As you can see, pulling in only 5 posts manually enables you to quickly provide photos for the posts that do not have images.

Compensating by Adding Default Random Images

The original help article is found in the Support Forums at Autoblogged here: http://support.autoblogged.com/forums/6307/entries/28553.
We’ve modified the article for our purpose.

The design of the Premium theme relies heavily on images on the home page, as well as thumbnails for each article. Most articles that are used from an RSS feed do not have images.

To fix this, we went to sites like istockphoto.com and www.sxc.hu to download both free and purchased stock photos that seemed relevant to the theme, yet generic enough to use with any article. We gathered 50 good photos, resized them all to the same size, and then renamed them 1.jpg through 50.jpg and uploaded them to our site.

Next, for each feed that doesn’t produce good images we added a custom field in AutoBlogged called Image. Note that the Arthemia Premium theme specifically looks for images in this custom field. We set the value of the field as follows:

/wp-content/uploads/business/ [1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10|11|12|13|14].jpg.

NOTE: This setting is in the AugoBlogged>Feeds> Feeds Settings screen. (Where you edit or when you create a new feed.)

Below is a screen shot of our example setting – we are only using 5 default images:

You can use post template syntax in your custom field values and bracketed values separated by pipes indicates to AutoBlogged to pick a random value from the list. In other words, AutoBlogged will randomly pick a number between 1 and 50 to create Image field values.

With just 50 images we do sometimes get two or more articles with the same picture on the front page but for the most part that isn’t that big of a deal and it greatly improves the look and professionalism of the site.

Test the Random Photos

Upload 5 random photos after naming them then 1 through 5. (at /wp-content/uploads/business/[1|2|3|4|5].jpg)

1. Navigate to AutoBlogged>Feeds and either create a new feed or edit an existing feed.

2. Add the following to the Custom Fields panel.

3. Save and process the feed.

The default images display:

Getting More Help

There are far too many scenarios to cover in this guide. Read over the AutoBlogged documentation to take advantage of all the features and methods of publishing feeds.

AutoBlogged Online Help: http://autoblogged.com/online-help