The most common reason for using Google AdWords is trying to sell more. People tend to use search advertisement more than content as it usually brings more results which is actually logical since you are targeting people who are actually searching for things you want to sell.

However, during the past few years Google AdWords has evolved into a powerful tool which enables you to do much more then increase targeted visitor traffic to your site - it can help you brand your business.

If you are working with large daily budgets and are trying to raise awareness of your brand in online environment, you might consider using AdWords image ads.

AdWords allows you to place image ads into content in formats of .gif, .jpg, .png and .swf. It supports most of the common standard ad banner sizes including:

• 468 x 60 Banner
• 728 x 90 Leaderboard
• 250 x 250 Square
• 200 x 200 Small Square
• 336 x 280 Large Rectangle
• 300 x 250 Medium Rectangle
• 120 x 600 Skyscraper
• 160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper

Let’s take a closer look at the .swf ad format. This ad format actually gives you quiet some flexibility and allows you to be much more creative in advertisement messages you serve to your potential visitors.

You should keep in mind the fact that the ad size can not exceed 50k limit, however, 50k is more then enough to deliver a good, creative and informative ad. One of the best .swf AdWords content ads I’ve seen so far was the ad for Croatian site called njuskalo.hr. While limited with 50k file size they managed to deliver a content rich ad which left an impression of looking at 10 seconds long video ad.

Few tips on using .swf ads in Google AdWords content advertisement:

1. Carefully think about concept of your .swf ad concentrating on how it will fit into different ad sizes.
2. Create the .swf ad for every ad size available. You don’t wanna end up losing a potentially great place to advertise at just because you were to lazy to create an ad in format the site displays.
3. Make ads rich with both motion and content. There is no point in creating a static img and serving it as a .swf ad when you can do so much more.

You can run two different types of custom applications on a device, and they are web and native applications. Native applications are installed directly on the device and can run without the presence of a network connection. Web applications use a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code to implement interactive applications that live on a web server and are transmitted over the network and run inside the Safari web browser.

It does not support the creation of other types of code, such as drivers, background applications, frameworks, or dynamic libraries. If you want to integrate code from a framework or dynamic library into your application, you should link that code statically into your application’s executable file when building your project.

The iPhone SDK supports the creation of native foreground applications that appear on the device’s Home screen only. Main components of the iPhone SDK (just to remind you, every time I write or say iPhone I mean iPod touch to) includs the following:

Xcode Tools - provides the tools that support iPhone application development, including the following key applications:

• Xcode - an integrated development environment that manages your application projects and lets you edit, compile, run, and debug your code. Xcode integrates with many other tools and is the main application you use during development.
• Interface Builder - a tool you use to assemble your user interface visually. The interface objects you create are then saved to a special resource file format and loaded into your application at runtime.
• Instruments - a runtime performance analysis and debugging tool. You can use Instruments to gather information about your application’s runtime behavior and identify potential problems.

iPhone Simulator - a Mac OS X application that simulates the iPhone technology stack, allowing you to test iPhone applications locally on your Intel–based Macintosh computer.

iPhone Reference Library- the SDK includes the reference documentation for iPhone OS by default and you can download a more complete version of the iPhone Reference Library (including sample code and conceptual documentation) by subscribing to the iPhone OS Library doc set.

Notice the word free in the title. If something is declared as open source this does not imply it should be free. Take a look at FogBugz. It is, one of the best open source project tracking tools currently available. However it’s quite expensive. Maybe not so expensive to larger companies but for small businesses and freelancers it sure is.

Yesterday I came across dotProject tool. If you are like me and came to PHP from .Net world then your first though might be that this is .Net application due to the “dot” in the title. Well, it isn’t, it’s a PHP powered collaboration tool.

To find the download link for dotProject just visit their official website at dotproject.net. Installation on local web server (WAMP) was quite painless. All I needed to do is to create my database before installation. I haven’t had much time to go trough the code, for what I saw (declared variables using var) it seems to be PHP4/5 oriented.

Although the interface itself is quite old looking, I’m surprised at what this app can do for now. Here is the screenshot of the initial screen.

dotProject web application screenshot

If you dislike the interface you can feel free to submit something to the community and make your own theme since dotProject supports themes.

You can declare multiple companies, assign multiple projects to companies, assign tasks, tickets (bug resolving), upload and track files, contacts and so on.

With that in mind and the fact that it’s free I find this app to be great choice for freelance work on more time consuming projects. I’m not gonna say It’s a good solution for serious business, or that this can be worthy replacement for apps like FogBugz, all I say is that you give it a try if you manage to spare some free time.

Building backlinks is the most important part of SEO work. The only thing more important is how relevant the becklinks you build are. You could actually rank at number one spot on Google for a keyword you don’t have anywhere in your content solely based on your backlinks. This have been proven in practice many times and I have personally done this on several keywords.

How do you build quality relevant backlinks for your targeted keywords?

Most of you will first think of specialized web directory listings which can actually be good for your ranking, however, in most cases it just isn’t enough to give you first page listing on major search engines for your targeted keywords.

Next thing people tend to try is link exchange with relevant web sites. This is also a grate way to gather some relevant backlinks but in case you are promoting a new website with no page rank or visits it’s pretty hard to find good relevant websites willing to exchange links with you.

The only thing that’s left to you is to build your own quality relevant content with backlinks. The technique I love to use to provide myself with relevant backlinks is building blogs with relevant content. This can be a pretty hard job but it really pays of in the long run. There are some tips that could help you speed up the process:

1. Use wordpress.com for creating your blogs. - Wordpress has grate on-site SEO and blogs on Wordpress.com get indexed pretty quickly. Once you create an account there, you can create unlimited number of blogs without having to register any new accounts.
2. Write more then one post per blog. - Google loves backlinks that look natural and active blog that has your link in blogrol seems pretty natural. You can also include some backlinks inside blog posts linking to relevant parts of the website you are building backlinks for.
3. Use Scribefire - Scribefire is grate firefox plugin that will allow you to write into your wordpress blogs from your browser. It helps a lot to have all your blogs listed in it and be able to drag-and-drop pictures from the web directly into your blog posts.
4. Your blog posts don’t have to be masterpieces - Remember you are not writing content for readers, you are writing it for spiders so it only has to seem relevant to the topic.
5. Promote your blogs - You won’t have much use of these backlinks if you don’t build backlinks for the blog. Luckily, building these backlinks is not so hard as you can use all the benefits provided by RSS feed. Submit your blogs RSS feed to as many services as you can that will create some backlinks out of it. It is also easier to do this when you have more blogs to submit at once.

It’s been a while since my last post. I’ve been working on Magento quite actively last two months. I noticed this negative trend in my blogging; more I know about Magento, the less I write about it. Some things just look so easy now, and they start to feel like something I should not write about. Anyhow…. time to share some wisdom with community

Our current client uses somewhat specific (don’t they all) store set. When I say specific, i don’t imply anything bad about it. One of the stand up features at this clients site is the advanced search functionality. One of the coolest features of the built in advanced search is the possibility to search based on attributes assigned to a product.

To do the search by attributes, your attributes must have that option turned on when created (or later, when editing an attribute). In our case we had a client that wanted something like

http://somestore.domain/catalogsearch/partnumber
or
http://somestore.domain/catalogsearch/brand

instead of the default one
http://somestore.domain/catalogsearch/advanced
with all of the searchable fields on form.

Some of you might say why not use the default and call it a day. Well, default one does not get very user friendly when large number of custom added searchable attributes are added in Magento admin interface. Then the frontend search form gets cluttered and users are easily to get confused.

So in our example we would like to use the advanced search and all of it’s behaviour and logic but to use it on somewhat special link and to hide unnecessary fields. Therefore, our custom  pages he would have only one input field on form and the submit button. How do we set this up? Well, all of the logic and functionality is already there.

What we need is to:

• use the http://somestore.domain/catalogsearch/partnumber as a link
• show only custom_partnumber field on the search form

First, we have to see where does the /advanced come from. Lets open our template folder at

app\design\frontend\default\default\template\catalogsearch\

there you will see the /advanced folder. Make a copy of that entire folder, in the same location, and name it to something like /custom.

Now your /custom folder should have 2 files: form.phtml and result.phtml.

Next in line is the /layout folder in our template. You need to open catalogsearch.xml file. Go to line 64. Do you see the <catalogsearch_advanced_index> tag there. Make the copy of it (including all of the content it hold with the closing tag also). Put the copy of that entire small chunk of code right below. Now rename all of the occurrences of “advanced” to “custom” there like on code below:

<catalogsearch_custom_index>
<!– Mage_Catalogsearch –>
<reference name=”root”>
<action method=”setTemplate”><template>page/2columns-right.phtml</template></action>
</reference>
<reference name=”head”>
<action method=”addItem”><type>js_css</type><name>calendar/calendar-win2k-1.css</name><params/><!–<if/><condition>can_load_calendar_js</condition>–></action>
<action method=”addItem”><type>js</type><name>calendar/calendar.js</name><!–<params/><if/><condition>can_load_calendar_js</condition>–></action>
<action method=”addItem”><type>js</type><name>calendar/lang/calendar-en.js</name><!–<params/><if/><condition>can_load_calendar_js</condition>–></action>
<action method=”addItem”><type>js</type><name>calendar/calendar-setup.js</name><!–<params/><if/><condition>can_load_calendar_js</condition>–></action>
</reference>
<reference name=”content”>
<block type=”catalogsearch/custom_form” name=”catalogsearch_custom_form” template=”catalogsearch/custom/form.phtml”/>
</reference>
</catalogsearch_custom_index>

Do the same for <catalogsearch_advanced_result> tag.

Now go to the app\code\core\Mage\CatalogSearch\Block folder. And make a copy of /Advanced folder naming it /Custom. Open /Custom/Form.php and replace class name Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Advanced_Form with Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Custom_Form, then open /Custom/Result.php and replace class name Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Advanced_Result with Mage_CatalogSearch_Block_Custom_Result.

Inside Form.php there is getModel() function. DO NOT replace the Mage::getSingleton(’catalogsearch/advanced’); with Mage::getSingleton(’catalogsearch/custom’);. The point is to use the default advanced search logic here. Same goes for getSearchModel() function inside Result.php file.

Next in line, controllers. We need to make the copy of AdvancedController.php and name it CustomController.php, then open it and replace the class name Mage_CatalogSearch_AdvancedController with Mage_CatalogSearch_CustomController.

Inside this CustomController.php there is a function called resultAction(). You need to replace the ( … Mage::getSingleton(’catalogsearch/advanced’) … ) string ‘catalogsearch/advanced’ with ‘catalogsearch/custom’. This is the one telling the browser what page to open.

Now if you open your url link in browser with /index.php/catalogsearch/custom instead of /index.php/catalogsearch/advanced you will see the same form there.

And for the final task… As we said at the start, the point of all this is to 1) get more custom link in url and 2) display only one custom searchable attribute field in form. Therefore, for the last step we need to go to the template\catalogsearch\custom folder and open form.phtml file.

Inside that file, there is one foreach loop that goes like
<?php foreach ($this->getSearchableAttributes() as $_attribute): ?>

All we need to do now is to place one if() condition right below it. If your custom attribute name (code) is “my_custom_attribute” then your if() condition might look something like

<?php foreach ($this->getSearchableAttributes() as $_attribute): ?>
<?php if($_code == ‘my_custom_attribute’): ?>

…

<?php endif; ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>

And you are done. Now you have somewhat more custom url, and only one custom field displayed on that url.

This might not be the best method of reusing already written code, however I hope it’s any eye opener to somewhat more elegant aproach.

Enyoj.

Most of the researches show that online advertisement, despite economic recession, will continue to grow. According to IAB’s Internet Advertising Revenue Report, first half of ‘08 was up by 15.2% compared to the same period in 2007. According to the same report, most of the revenue of online advertisement (44%) is generated by search engine advertisement followed by display adds (banners, rich media, digital video, sponsorship) which generated 33%. The last place is reserved (as usual) for e-mail (2%).

Why do people continue to expend their budgets for online advertising?

It’s all about control. Compared to the advertising in traditional media, online marketing offers more control over your budgets. When advertising online you can see exactly how much costumers has any of your adds broth to you and thus for you can cut your resources on campaigns that produce low conversions.

Also online advertising is in many cases much cheaper then advertising in traditional media witch means you can advertise more cost effectively. If you invest the same amount of money in to traditional media advertising and online advertising you will gain much more money from online advertising.

However, if you are thinking about massive amounts of money and branding an huge international corporation you will still need to rely on traditional media.

According to a June McKinsey & Co. survey, 91% of 340 senior marketing executives worldwide are using online advertising. Due to economic recession 55% of them are going to cut traditional media advertising budgets precisely in order to increase budgets for online marketing.

Quite a few people have asked me for a price filter functionality that comes with Magento. Mostly, the questions are same: How does one put the price filter anywhere on the page? How does one set it’s on price ranges in that filter? What defines default price ranges. Is it possible to set price filter for all my products instead of just single category? Lot of questions. The answer might be simpler then you might think.

There are two ways to approach this problem. Head trough wall or stop and think approach.Default Magento price filter works with algoritam which functions on the following logic

1. Find the lowest and highest price in the range of filtered products.
2. Find what power of 10 these are in.
3. If there’s 2 or less ranges available we go one power down.

So one approach would to be to somehow override default price filter logic by rewriting it and embedding some new logic of yours. I call this one head trough wall. I’m not implying that this is wrong approach, on the contrary this is the generic solution. However it does require some more time to come up with.

Second solution is by far more easier. It involves using simple HTML (could use it in your static blocks).

If one wishes to use the price range filter to filter trough entire product collection he can simply create a subcategory under the Default root category and add all of the products to it. Then we write some static html code with urls made to fire up the price filter.

Let’s look at the default Magento sample data. It gies you the following category layout

Root Catalog (6)

• Furniture (6)
• Living Room (4)
• Bed Room (4)

Notice the url link above… It wont work if you put it like http://somesite.domain/furniture/living-room/?price=1%2C199

You could therefore create simple HTML like

<select onchange=”setLocation(this.value)”>
<option value=”http://somesite.domain/all/?price=1%2C10000″>  <!– Here you place your own ranges –>
0,00 € - 10 000,00 €
</option>
<option value=”http://somesite.domain/all/?price=2%2C10000″> <!– Here you place your own ranges –>
10 000,00 € - 20 000,00 €
</option>
<option value=”http://somesite.domain/all/?price=3%2C10000″> <!– Here you place your own ranges –>
20 000,00 € - 30 000,00 €
</option>
.
.
.
</select>

And put it into some of the static block. Notice the links in above HTML code. The /all part of the url is the url key of the All category in which we added all of our products.

Last, but not least is understanding of the “price=…” parametar.

1%2C10000 - where 1 stands for first range of 10000 (last number)
or
2%2C10000 - where 2 stands for second ranfge of 10000, (first would be 0-10000).

So if we were to write something like
3%2C10 it would be the price range from 20-30, where 3 stands for third range of tens (number 10). Firs is from 0-10, second 10-20, third 20-30.

Most of this is quite selfexplanaory so, for those who need this kind of functionality across some special pages, hope you integrate it withouth any problems.

To develop applications for iPhone and iPod Touch, first of all you will need a Mac OS X computer running the Xcode tools. Xcode is Apple’s suite of development tools that provide support for project management, code editing, building executables, source-level debugging, source-code repository management, performance tuning, and much more.

The center of your development experiences is the Xcode application. Xcode is an integrated development environment (IDE) that provides all of the tools you need to create and manage your iPhone projects and source files, build your code into an executable, and run and debug your code either in iPhone simulator or on a device.

The iPhone Dev Center is Apple’s portal page for iPhone development.
Once you have Mac up and running, you need to go to http://developer.apple.com/iphone/, create a login, and download the iPhone SDK on to your Mac. Here, you can download and find tutorial videos, documentation and everything you need for iPhone application develop.  See http://www.iphonedevcentral.org/.

The iPhone SDK contains the code, information, and tools you need to develop, test, run, debug, and tune applications for the iPhone OS. The Xcode tools have been updated to support development for the iPhone OS. In addition to providing the basic editing, compilation, and debugging environment for your code, Xcode also provides the launching point for testing your applications on an iPhone or iPod touch device. Xcode also lets you run applications in iPhone simulator, a platform that mimics the basic iPhone OS environment on your local Mac computer.

The de facto standard for programming for the iPhone is Objective-C. The Objective-C language is a simple computer language designed to enable sophisticated object-oriented programming. Objective-C extends the standard ANSI C language by providing syntax for defining classes, methods, and properties, as well as other constructs that promote dynamic extension of classes. The use of objects and object-oriented constructs is fundamental to the design of iPhone applications, and understanding how they interact is critical to creating your applications.

If you are completely new to iPhone OS and to Mac OS X, taking the time to understand the basic design patterns and conventions of iPhone OS is critical to writing code for the platform. Applications operate best in iPhone OS when they take advantage of the power the frameworks provide. If you spend time trying to work around the basic framework behaviors, you may find creating your application much more difficult than simply learning the basic design patterns in use.

The basic information that every iPhone developer needs to know is in Cocoa Fundamentals Guide. This document covers the basics of the Objective-C language and the programming conventions and design patterns used by UIKit and many other system frameworks.

Once you understand the basic conventions you use to create iPhone applications, you can refer to iPhone Application Programming Guide for specific details on the development process. This book provides key conceptual and task-based information on how to write iPhone applications, including examples of how to display a user interface, handle events, and take advantage of key iPhone OS features. It also describes the overall development process and explains how you use Xcode to build and run your applications.

Did you know that you can actually track what your visitors are searching for inside your website? We are going to explain you how it’s done via Google’s Analytics tool. It is possible to track your internal site searches if your internal search engine passes the search term in the query string as Google Analytics tracks everything entered in location bar of user’s browser.

In order to set up your internal site search tracking you will need to:

1. Edit your main profile information settings and select the ‘Do Track Site Search’ option.
2. Enter in the query parameter that appears in your URL when you search on your site. Make sure to enter in just the part before the ‘=’. For example, in the URL: http://inchoo.net/?s=seo, the s is the site search query parameter.
3. Save Changes.

How can internal site search analysis benefit me?

If you are using Google Analytics you probably know where do your visitors come from and what search terms do they use to find you. However the search terms you see are the terms you are already search engine optimized for as they can already find you via thees terms. If you start tracking what are your visitors searching for once they are already inside your website you will understand what other search terms you might wish to optimize your website for.

Not only the keywords that your visitors are searching for inside your website are important, you can also track the start and destination pages.

Start pages are pages from where your visitors start their search on your website. If some page inside your site is often a start page for site search this means visitors can’t find what they are looking for on that website. You should find destination pages for thees searches and see what are they actually looking for on the start page and try to optimize the start page’s content and include more valuable content for your visitor.

Something wonderful happened today. Brian Gardner, the creator of the notorious premium Revolution themes for Wordpress, just released a new set of open-source Wordpress Themes under the name of Revolution Two. All of the themes on the new site will be made available under the open source/GPL license.

All the old premium themes customers will still have access to all the support they are currently getting. And the current themes will not be released as Open Source, but will be taken down from the market. It’s just the new themes that he is releasing on Saturday that will be open source.

Take a look at complete list:

• Revolution Code Blue
• Revolution Code Gray
• Revolution Code Red
• Revolution Church
• Revolution Lifestyle
• Revolution Charred
• Revolution Chrome
• Revolution Black Canvas
• Revolution Office
• Revolution TV