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Blogging For Web Designers: Editorial Calendars and Style Guides

Blogging For Web Designers: Editorial Calendars and Style Guides
Advertisement A few years ago, you might not have pointed out during a meeting with a potential client that you maintained a blog. Over time, though, blogs have evolved from the being a personal hobby to a serious work tool. In fact, today, web designers are supposed to know much more than just how to design and build websites. Customer’s expectations have increased, and unless you are in position to choose your favourite clients, meeting these expectations requires hard work. Hence, it’s important to keep learning about the variety of design-related fields every single day — be it marketing, psychology, business, copywriting, publishing or blogging. Image credit1 Good news: you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you are about to start and run a blog. Compiling a list of brilliant posts waiting to be published is not enough, though. Editorial Calendar An editorial calendar outlines the editorial content that is planned for the coming few weeks. Why Is It Useful? Drawbacks Purpose

blog.hootsuite It’s your first day as a social media manager for a new company. Where do you even start? This question is a common one, but one that often goes unasked as people are worried about seeming inexperienced or making a bad impression when they start their new jobs. Really, it’s a very reasonable question. Making a critical error would be far more costly than asking colleagues for help. You can’t just jump in and start Tweeting on behalf of a business you’re unfamiliar with. Your first day or week at a new social media job should be spent doing a lot of listening and learning. Audit the company’s existing social media Lifeguards are taught that the first thing you do when you find yourself in a potentially dangerous situation is to look for dangers (fire, wire, gas, glass, as the saying goes). This audit will help you assess the current state of social media within your new company and help shape the goals you set moving forward. An audit will really help you gain a foothold in your new role.

Business Blogging - Creating a Successful Business Blog Learn the tips and tricks you need to know to create a successful blog for your business. Whether you want to start a business blog to help you boost sales or simply connect with your customers, the information you need to develop a successful business blog can be found here. 3 Reasons Why Every Company Needs a Business BlogLearn how every company and organization can benefit from a business blog. 10 Questions about Starting a Business Blog AnsweredAnswers to common questions and links to additional resources, so you can start a business blog for your company successfully. Why Should You Start a Blog for Your Business? 15 Business Blog Mistakes to Avoid at All CostsAvoid this business blog mistakes or they might ruin your blog! Increase Google Traffic to Your Business Blog by Following 5 Easy RulesLearn the 5 rules you should never break if you want to keep Google traffic coming to your business blog. 10 Business Blog PostsWhat should I write about on my business blog?

Online Learning: A User’s Guide to Forking Education | Online Learning At exactly this moment, online education is poised (and threatening) to replicate the conditions, courses, structures, and hierarchical relations of brick-and-mortar industrial-era education. Cathy N. Davidson argued exactly this at her presentation, “Access Demands a Paradigm Shift,” at the 2013 Modern Language Association conference. The mistake being made, I think, is a simple and even understandable one, but damning and destructive nonetheless. Those of us responsible for education (both its formation and care) are hugging too tightly to what we’ve helped build, its pillars, policies, economies, and institutions. The discussion forum, currently the holy grail of “engagement” inside most online courses, is particularly problematic. Rather than simply transplanting the Lego castle of education from one platform to another, we need to start dismantling it piece by piece, all the while examining the pieces and how they fit together. [Photo by wizgd]

Best Free Content Curation Tools 2012 Content Curation has been on the upside lately, and while there are some who don’t think that it is an ethical form of “content creation”, there are those that think completely the opposite. Whichever side you choose to be, you should know that if you do decide to “curate content”, to always give credit to its original source and never copy an entire article even if you are linking back to its original author. That does not have anything to do with curation and may even be considered as stealing content. While I am at it, creating a list of useless links is also not regarded as curating content. Which side are you on? Curating content done properly, IMO has its positives. Be the best curator of meaningful contentFind the best information that others have written and posted online—the best articles, charts, tables, infographics, videos, or pictures. Did you notice the words, meaningful, great information and credit your sources? Free Online Content Curation Tools That’s it!

Site builder shootout: Drupal vs. Joomla vs. WordPress Building a website has never been easier. Gone -- mostly -- are the days of having to hand-code HTML and PHP scripts in order to get a slick, fully functional website, thanks to the capabilities of content management systems that do most or all of the heavy lifting for site creators. There are boatloads of content management systems (CMSs) for serious site creators, but the most common for websites today are three open-source tools: Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Actually, to call them "tools" is an understatement -- these are full-fledged platforms, with tens of thousands of add-on tools created by very active developer communities. These applications have a lot of similarities. Drupal had comparatively sedate beginnings. Both Drupal and Joomla are designed to enable users to build websites with template-based management, and both let users plug in add-ons that provide highly dynamic features, such as e-commerce, blogging with comments or mapping. So which CMS is right for you?

HellBound Bloggers (HBB) - Technology, Blogging and Social Media. Choosing an open-source CMS, part 1: Why we use Drupal Of the open-source content management systems (CMSs) available today, WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are, according to Web technology tracker W3Techs, by far the most popular. But how do companies choose which to use? Conventional wisdom has it that WordPress is the fast and easy way to go, while Drupal works best for large, complex, enterprise-class websites. This month we start a series that looks at this decision through the eyes of the people who use these systems. [For in-depth reviews of these three open-source content management systems, see Site builder shootout: Drupal vs. In this first part of the series, we start with Drupal and two companies that chose it to build and maintain their sites: electronic component manufacturer Integrated Device Technology (IDT) and Fearnet, which offers an on-demand and traditional cable channel as well as a website. Drupal is designed and maintained by website developers who need to build technically sophisticated sites.

The Mogul Mom | For moms running a business, raising a family and rocking both The Savvy Online Engagement Blog - Showing Business Owners and Entrepreneurs how to connect with key stakeholders, influence decision makers and be seen as a thought leader, all via the use of social media.

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