Essential Tips: Working From Home

Working from home sounds easy in principle but it can be quite challenging. The tips below may seem simple on first read, but most of it can be very tricky to implement correctly. I encourage you to make plans as you read these ideas, and check back weekly to compare your progress until you feel you have mastered all the points below. Good luck.

 

Personalize Your Email Campaigns

If you want to achieve the highest brand loyalty and performance metrics, it is imperative to include personalized content in your email campaigns. In today’s world, your email campaign should know a lot about your users, and it should be able to pull up useful personalized content that draws them in, like content recommendations by pre-selected categories, or custom alerts based on the user’s preferences.

Use Dynamic Content to Boost Your Email Campaigns

Email remains the most effective way to maintain a relationship with your audience. However, in this world that is saturated with marketing messages, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to engage users with regular email content.

Get Started in SEO: 1 Week Crash Course

New to online marketing? No problem. We have a super overview to get you up to speed in only one week, and plenty of reading materials to get you speaking SEO and implementing your very own online marketing campaign in no time*.

* there will be a lot of reading and learning, perhaps even some tears before we are done. But the rewards are there for the taking and, if you survive to the 7th day, you're guaranteed to reach the third circle of awesomeness**.

** or at least feel the superb high of achievement.

 

Diversify Your Blog: Do a Blog Post Exchange

We small business owners have been working hard to build a proud blog for our small businesses. We have spent countless hours writing great content and making sure that our blogs accurately represent our brands, give our readers valuable information, and overall make our businesses look great.

Preparing for Drupal 8, Changes, Controversy and Backdrop

The much anticipated new version of Drupal is due to be released in early 2014, and it’s already causing some controversy amongst current users.

Responsive Performance in Drupal 7

One of the issues we face in responsive theming is on-browser performance across multiple devices. Responsive themes are inherently more taxing on rendering engines, but once we add to the page all the interactive bells and whistles (ex: sliding banners, videos, flying objects) we might be setting the browser up for a serious impact on rendering.


John Hannah at Friendly Machine wrote an in-depth look at this issue, and offers some solid advice in the field of responsive performance:

Why Your Drupal Website Needs Regular Updates

All professional software packages are subject to periodic software updates. This is because developers are constantly interacting with users to identify and correct potential problems (known as software bugs) and, even more critically, identify and correct potential security flaws.

Adding Javascript to Drupal

Using PHP

The function drupal_add_js() lets you add a reference to a file, as well as inline javascript code:

drupal_add_js('misc/myscript.js');
drupal_add_js('jQuery(document).ready(function () { alert("Hello!"); });', 'inline');

See the function reference page for additional examples and settings.

Mobile Website Testing on Windows 7

The following are a few of the tools I use for testing mobile sites on Windows 7, prior to testing on actual devices:

Opera Mobile Emulator

http://www.opera.com/developer/tools/mobile/
Emulates the behavior of the Opera browser under multiple devices such as various HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Tablet, Amazon Kindle, and a few others. This is my testing tool of choice because it is easy to use, fast and a close representation of the mobile experience.

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