GoldHat Blog

Imagine you were on a planet where trees grew with no effort required by you at all. Now imagine on the same planet the air is automatically cleansed, and plants spring out of the ground on their own. Now imagine in this same world, people living in freedom, harmony with nature, and appreciation of everything around them.

When I'm asked to review a website or evaluate it the first question I want to answer speaks to website quality. I want to know if the site has a solid foundation, is it structured well, is the code valid and organized, is it functional and bug-free. Whether the goal is improving conversion or search rankings, website quality is the starting place. So what practical steps can you take to measure a website's quality? Here are 10 ways to test website quality and performance.

Republican's suffered their second defeat last night at the hands of Obama and the Democratic party. During the 2012 there were lots of interesting comments by Republicans suffering from severe cases of foot-in-mouth syndrome. Always entertaining to watch especially from north of the border! This is our take on the lessons that Republican candidates need to learn.

In my 10-years of building websites primarily for small businesses I've seen a wide variety of different perspectives on the importance of a business website. Many small business owners do realize the impact their website can have in the growth of their business. Some even see the potential for their website to be a direct revenue generator with ecommerce. But there are others who either don't see that potential, or don't understand how to take their website to the level where it becomes a positive driver of business growth.

Buyers are the most powerful group in the entire economy. Sometimes in the age of outbound marketing we might forget this, because in the past companies have been able to exert enormous control over which products and services consumers purchase. But that system of push marketing, with its slick advertising and hype tactics, is quickly dying. Outbound marketing becomes a little bit less effective, every single day. That's right, every DAY!

Today I went to Google in search of a live chat service that I could integrate into GoldHat.ca and along the way I discovered new titles in another category of software, real-time analytics. I've been wanting some way of engaging in a conversation with visitors to this site for some time. I've also wanted people who have questions to be able to open a live chat and get answers right away.

The images of people sorting through trash in impoverished nations is heart-wrenching to watch. The idea that the only way to survive for many is to pour through garbage and pull out bits of materials and sell them or in some cases to eat the food scraps they find, is a shame. It is obviously evidence of a global economy that doesn't really work very well.

The purpose of an economy is to distribute resources. It should this efficiently and effectively, which also means fairly. Generally speaking, each person should have equal access to resources but the amount they receive should be based on their effectiveness in contributing to the overall health of the economical system.

Simple digital marketing strategies are faster and more repeatable. If it takes a team of virtual rocket scientists to implement your complex digital marketing system, and dozens of pieces of software, it will probably also cost a lot and require an unreasonable degree of precision. Bottom-line is it will not fit well into the ROI equation. To consistently receive a return-on-investment from your digital marketing efforts you need to keep costs low, implement your tactics quickly and keep moving and keep growing.

I first discovered the Envato Network last year when searching around for Drupal Themes. What I found is a network of sites that is like heaven for web developers, designers and anyone who likes building or promoting websites.

Find out how an article writing company can enhance your business and take it to the next level. Learn how to spot good companies from ones that provide less-than-quality service.

Learn how SEO Article writing can increase your search engine rankings. Discover the rules that will get you ranked faster so your business can be found by potential customers.

Article writing services can be a major asset to your business, and used effectively you can build an inventory of engaging written materials that promote your business and inform prospective customers. But you must choose article writing services carefully. There are many article writing services available on the market today that claim to offer professional quality writing, and SEO benefits, but are actually being produced in offshore writing factories by untalented non-English speakers. Riddled with grammar errors, spelling mistakes and poor use of language, these type of factory formed articles are flooding the market at an alarming rate. Google is reacting by improving its ability to distinguish between quality writing, and cheap SEO articles that are barely readable to humans.

I'm not going to mince words about Enom's approach to selling its "goMobi" service. Its a scam, pure and simple. The way it works is, you the customer order a domain, and they conveniently stuff your shopping cart with this goMobi service that you probably have never heard of or wanted. They call it a trial, so no charge appears at the time of purchase. Then later you are billed for it.

Choosing the right digital marketing agency can make a big difference in the success of your business. How do you know if the agency your looking at hiring is the right fit for you? In this post we offer a few simple tips on how to select a digital marketing agency.

Concrete5 (C5) is a promising "next generation" CMS system that incorporates MVC architecture and "edit-in-place" technology. As a Drupal developer, I'm interested in looking at it from a Drupal perspective and piecing together which aspects of C5 relate to which parts of Drupal. If your looking to try C5 and are more familiar with Drupal concepts, I hope this article will help kick-start your evaluation or learning process.

This is part 2 of a series of posts on this topic, please stay tuned for more if your interested in C5,

Email marketing is a great way to keep customers engaged with your brand. That is marketing-speak for getting the people who already buy stuff from you, to buy more of your stuff more often. But it does go beyond that. Aside from selling more stuff to existing customers, sending an email gives them a reason and a reminder to share your company with other people they know. And it makes it easy for them to do that because all they have to do, is forward your email.

Concrete5 (C5) is a promising "next generation" CMS system that incorporates MVC architecture and "edit-in-place" technology. As a Drupal developer, I'm interested in looking at it from a Drupal perspective and piecing together which aspects of C5 relate to which parts of Drupal. If your looking to try C5 and are more familiar with Drupal concepts, I hope this article will help kick-start your evaluation or learning process.

Smart business people do not writer their own sales letters, websites or brochures. They have enough writing to do in email and possibly a personalized blog. It is just not cost-effective to put time into hours upon hours of writing. So they employ copywriters, or marketing firms that in turn provide copy services.

Digital marketing can produce an almost endless stream of data related to campaigns. Who has not looked at Google Analytics or another traffic analysis system and thought, this is just too much information? So the key to digital marketing metrics is knowing which numbers really matter and focusing in on these. Today I'll share just a sampling of my favorites. These are the numbers I look at regularly and each one is very relevant to our results in a given area of digital marketing.

It is no secret that people love to be rewarded. Adding an incentive to your marketing programs or offers can really give them a boost. Part of the reason is psychological, not only for the people who participate in your offer but also for your business as well. It is just easier to "get behind" and focus on a program that contains an incentive. Plus it leads to a lot more positive feedback from happy incentive earners.

Accurate estimations are so important to working in the technology and creative services industry. This seems especially true when we are working on a fixed-rate basis, or hybrid basis where hours are added to a base estimate. But even on a completely hourly agreement, estimations still play a role in creating accurate schedules and enabling sound management of the project. So estimations always matter. The challenge is how can we be more accurate, and take some of the inevitable guess-work out of estimating?

You may have heard of the concept of business process documentation, or the term BPI (Business Process Improvement). These both refer in some way to the concept of writing down what a business does so that the steps required to get things done are clear, organized and can be repeated. At the height of the BPI world are complex flowcharts, sophisticated formulas and standardization such as ISO certifications such as ISO-9001. But what about the small business that wants the benefits of process documenting without the big ticket cost or the massive time investment?

Master these 3 lessons in efficiency to get more of what really matters done. Remember efficiency is not just about getting a lot done in a day, its about doing the right things. The things that make a difference in reaching worthy goals. That is what we want to apply our effort towards, consistently each and everyday. Imagine what a small improvement in efficiency could mean for your results?

First Efficiency Principle: FOCUS

If your planning to someday sell your website it is a good idea to understand how to create and estimate website value and the principles behind appraising a website's worth. Of course this is not an easy thing to do, as there are many different ways of gauging a given website's value. Today I want to share a few techniques I've used in creating website appraisals.

Drupal site development doesn't have to be complex. Drupal 7 has made basic installation and configuration simpler than ever before. Here are just a few of the most common Drupal site development tasks to consider when creating a new Drupal site.

Drupal site installation

Install the latest version of Drupal CMS core.

Install and configure PathAuto Module

http://drupal.org/project/pathauto

In PHP programming IF statements are used to determine "if" a certain condition has been met, and contains actions to take IF the condition(s) are met. Here is a simple example of a PHP IF statement:

Email marketing can be a very effective way to keep in touch with your customers. Keep your website visitors engaged and coming back to your site. Done well, an email marketing system can be one your most valued marketing assets. In this article we'll touch on 5 keys that stand out as the most important factors in email marketing success.

There are 3 major web browsers active today. And no, Netscape isn't one of them. IE continues to be the most popular overall, despite its regular decline. Firefox (to my surprise) is also on the decline. Both are losing market share consistently to Chrome. Google's Chrome browser made massive gains last year while the losses in share were fairly equally split between IE and Firefox. Below are the market share change numbers for major browsers in 2011.

Facebook marketing can be a rewarding part of your marketing mix. Currently 1 out of 5 page views in the US are Facebook pages. Even more impressive, out of 845 million world-wide users Facebook sees nearly half of them visiting on a DAILY basis. That translated into real opportunity for your business to reach your target market using Facebook marketing.

Today I coded my first jQuery Plugin with the help of the excellent tutorial You Still Can’t Create a jQuery Plugin? on TutsPlus.com. I decided to start with a very simple hover fading effect and I named my jQuery plugin Hover Fade. All it does is create a fade in and fade out effect on any matching elements. It provides 3 property settings: opacity, speedFadeIn, SpeedFadeOut.

Here is the usage of the plugin, this will create a fade to 50% opacity

Just tried the Drupal Features module out for the first time today! Wow! I'd heard the hype, but now I've seen it myself and I'm thrilled about it. In case your wondering what the excitement is all about, basically what Features does is provide an "automatic Drupal module builder". It allows anybody, without any coding, to export features of their Drupal site in the form of a working Drupal module that can be installed on any other Drupal site.

As a business owner, when should you start planning to sell your business? As part of the start-up of course! Planning your business so that it will be ready for sale in the future is a "right here, right now" type of activity. Why is that? Because it don't do it now, when will you? When the business is underway, and customers are knocking down the door? Of course if you have an existing business it is never too late to update your business plan, and add a selling strategy to it. The key is to understand what makes a business "sale ready".

Here is a list of exciting Drupal development topics we are looking to cover in the coming months on the GoldHat blog:

If there is one thing that can trip you up severely in moving a site or setting up a local work environment for development, it is the massive MySQL database dump. There are a number of options for importing MySQL databases, but most have at least a few potential pitfalls when it comes to the super large file. Let's take a look at a few of the options for importing large MySQL databases. Several of the examples here presume that you are using WAMP on a Windows box, similar strategies may work with other setups locally or on a server.

When your building a company and a brand, the colors you choose mean something. Each color has its own "feel" and can invoke emotions in the person viewing it. Though a person viewing a logo, or a website may not realize it consciously, they are impacted by the color scheme used. One of the key goals in choosing a color scheme is to create harmony or matching between each color used. And there is a whole science (or art!) behind making color schemes that communicate the right message. Today we just want to look at individual colors, and what these colors tend to represent.

In PHP programming variables are used as storage containers. You could think of them as a fruit bowl. What can you store in variables? Data of various types. Just like we can store oranges, grapes and kiwis (the fruit, not New Zealanders!) in a fruit bowl, we can store the information we will need later in a PHP script inside a variable.

In PHP we name variables starting with a dollar sign ($) followed by the name. For example this is a valid variable name: $my_variable. Notice that we can use underscores (_) within the variable name to make the variable more readable.

Why would you want to learn PHP? For one thing, it powers most of the Internet as we know it today. That's right, behind the XHMTL/CSS you see in the browser source code, it is PHP that does the work on the majority of dynamic sites. From blog systems such as WordPress, to eCommerce systems like Magento, PHP serves as the programming power for millions of great websites.

We all know how popular YouTube is. But how can you take advantage of the opportunity that YouTube presents? Well there are several approaches the small business owner or professional can take to promoting their business on YouTube. One of the most effective options is to use YouTube as a platform to showcase your expertise, and in the process share valuable information with prospective customers.

Your sites ranking in search engine results, especially Google results, depends in part on the inbound links to your site. The quantity, quality and relevance of those that link to you is paramount. So it is vital that at least part of your internet marketing strategy should focus on development of inbound links.

Here is a draft of some steps to take within the first 2-3 months of a new site search optimization campaign. This is not intended to be a complete list of search optimization steps, but it can give you an idea of what is possible and a few of the foundation laying efforts that are needed. I see a lot of information out there about the fundamentals of keyword selection, page optimization and other search marketing efforts. But before we do all that, we have to complete some setup and lay the foundation for success. This include our search optimization tracking.

Drupal has already earned top CMS rankings and awards, and in the minds of thousands of developers around the world it is the best CMS hands down. However, if we measure by usage rates, Drupal is not currently the leader. The number one CMS in terms of sites driven remains WordPress. Drupal is a distant second, or by some counts third.

Mobile users are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. And in fact the rate of website optimization for mobile versus the number of mobile users is absurd. The visitors are flocking to sites in droves via their mobile devices, but only a fraction of sites are at all optimized for mobile. This realization recently sent me searching for a solution.

I'm sure you have heard it before, a dozen times over in fact, planning makes all the difference. Well your going keep hearing it, because it remains a fact. Never has that been more true than in the complex world of internet marketing. Here we have so many different options, so many choices, so many opportunities. There are plenty of potential pitfalls, and lots of room for spinning in circles without a clear strategy. So it is really critical to take the time to form a plan that is detailed enough to guide the direction of your internet marketing.

If your domain has been blacklisted by Google, there are some steps you can take to restore your search rankings and have your site appear in Google search results. Google provides a simple 3-step process for this which is described in the wiki article Reconsideration requests.

According to Google the steps are:

I was updating our product information for web hosting packages today and got to thinking about how great cPanel is. If your not familiar with it, cPanel is the control panel for web hosting used by many web hosts around the world. It is one of if not the best control panels, and it really outshines many of the custom control panels that we see popping up at many web hosts such as Go Daddy.

How do you get out of the catch-22 scenario where you need customers and sales, but cannot afford the marketing budget to generate those sales? This situation is faced by many small businesses and start-ups and in some cases it can break a business that had real potential. Internet marketing actually offers a way out that was not available through most traditional channels. Here are 10 of the things you can do to market your business online without spending a dime.

Digital marketing is powerful for businesses of every size because it gives them an opportunity to develop their own audience. Before the internet, most smaller businesses had little or no audience they could call their own aside from direct customers. Instead they had to turn to costly media like radio, newsprint and TV to "borrow" access to a larger audience. And so the cost of advertising was kept very high, because there was very little alternative.