Drupal 6, a winner?

Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website.
The built-in functionality, combined with dozens of freely available add-on modules, will enable features such as:

• Content Management Systems
• Blogs
• Collaborative authoring environments
• Forums
• Peer-to-peer networking
• Newsletters
• Podcasting
• Picture galleries
• File uploads and downloads

and much more.

Drupal 6 has a lot of great additions like:

• Built in triggers: you can tell Drupal to do things when say for example someone post a comment.
• Better Forums: more features now.
• Drag-and-drop admin UI capabilities. It is easier to manage where things appear on your pages.
• Much faster than it was in previous versions.

You can get Drupal at: http://drupal.org/

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Video advertising and monetization

Last month, Google product managers and marketers held a workshop on video advertising and content monetization at the Ad:Tech conference in San Francisco.

You can hear some perspectives on industry trends, some new details about AdSense for video, and the opportunities that Google is offering advertisers to get their messages in video content.

Trends in video consumption, habits, and the estimated market size for video advertising.

Robert Victor describes the evolving needs of buyers and sellers, and previews how Google and DoubleClick In-Stream can fill the gaps.

Detail about AdSense for video, describing the various formats and recent success stories

Tracy Chan describes the compelling opportunities for advertisers on YouTube

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Is Google page rank really that important?

Google page Rank is based on links between your web pages and other web pages.
You can see the page Rank of your website in the Google PageRank bar on the Google Toolbar.
It shows a numerical value of 0 to 10.

The higher your Google PageRank, the higher Google is likely to list you in the search engine results pages.

The higher the Page Rank, the more relevant other people will consider any particular page on your website to be.

The higher your Page Rank, the more people will want you to link to their website.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Dreamweaver Video Tutorials

For those of you learning web design, here are some "killer" video tutorials. Not much has changed since the initial release of Dreamweaver in 2004 ... especially when it comes to the basics.

So whether you are learning Dreamweaver MX or Dreamweaver CS3, you should find these videos useful.

Click here to go to Dreamweaver MX Video Tutorials

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Google alerts to keep up with your industry

As explained by Google: "Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic."

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

• monitoring a developing news story
• keeping current on a competitor or industry
• getting the latest on a celebrity or event
• keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams"

Of course, we care about "keeping current on a competitor or industry."

Each time Google finds a reference to the topic you request, it will be send you an email with all the new information it finds pertaining that topic.

It's fast and free. Google Alerts can do all the legwork for you and send you all the relevant new information in your industry.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Why do you have a website?

If you have a website, and are not so satisfied with the results it's giving you, you need to ask yourself a few things.

What kind of website do you have and what's its purpose?

Is your website a brochure, an e-commerce catalog, or a direct-mail-style pitch?

Do it has audio and video? Is it of professional quality?

Is your website over-optimized for the search engines, and baffles your visitors when they get there?

Beware of search engine tactics and second rate media that actually gets in the way of effectively delivering your marketing message,.

When telling your business story, and creating a memorable brand image, you need to be on target, and eliminate the noise.

Deliver your message and tell our story in a memorable manner to a motivated audience.

Do optimize your website for the search engines, but don't let that get in the way of your message.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com

Use a Sitemap file to give information about your website to Google

There are two types of sitemaps.

1. The common HTML site map page lists the pages of your site. It is meant to help visitors find the information they need on your website.
   
   
2. The XML Sitemap - usually called Sitemap with a capital S is a way for you to give Google information about your site.
   

Simply put, a Sitemap is a list of the pages on your website.
Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.

Read more about creating a Sitemap for your website and submitting it to Google here.

The Web Design Team at
web-design-miami.com