Apple iPad

Today, Apple unveiled it’s latest gotta have device… The Apple iPad. This device features a 9.7-inch (diagonal) LED-backlit glossy widescreen Multi-Touch display with IPS technology.

It comes in multiple pricing configurations, based on storage capacity, and whether you choose Wi-Fi only, or the Wi-Fi + 3G model. Prices range from a low of $499, to a high of $829.

At the unveiling of the device, Steve Jobs said,

“When we set out to develop the iPad, we not only had very ambitious technical goals and user interface goals, but we had a very aggressive price goal. “We want to put this in the hands of a lot of people… At $499, a lot of people can afford an iPad.”

Unlimited data is going to be be available from AT&T for $29.99 without the need for any contract.

The iPad screen resolution is going to be 1024×768. This is good news for us web developers in that we probably won’t have to do anything to our websites to make them display properly on the iPad. That’s really good news!

One great feature of the new iPad is that it will run regular iPhone applications, without having to modify the code. They will generally either be centered in the middle of the screen, or enlarged to full screen mode. Also, developers are going to have an updated SDK that includes an iPad simulator, so they can begin to design applications specifically for the new iPad device.

There is even a new program available called iBooks, which is an e-reader program. It allows you to view virtual books in black and white or full color. So far, there are five publishers already set to provide books for this device: Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, MacMillan, Penguin, and Hachette.

Is the new iPad going to replace the Amazon Kindle or the Barnes & Noble nook as the new high-end E-book reader? My guess is yes, but only time will tell.

For more information on the new iPad, check out the Apple website.

The World Wide Web

Many times, one of my customers may want a website designed by me, but they aren’t certain about what features they want. They are not sure of what to ask for, and whether or not they need various features that they have heard that others have on their websites. This article is designed to address the question, “What do you need on your website, and why do you need it?”

Shopping Cart

Just as a real shopping cart allows a customer in a store to place an object in their cart, and continue shopping, a web-based shopping cart allows your customers to place an item into their virtual shopping cart, and continue shopping for more products and services. When they are finished, they “check out”, just as they would do in a retail store.

During check out, the shopping cart adds up the cost of all the products and services, and allows your customer to pay you with a common payment method, such as a credit card, or PayPal. As long as you have a credit card merchant account, once they make the payment, it will be transferred into your business checking account, just as if they had swiped their credit card in a retail store.

One big advantage of having a shopping cart on your website is that it allows you to make money 24 hours a day, even if you have a physical store that is closed for the nite. So, if you normally sell toys or widgets in a retail space, a shopping cart allows you to accept orders, and make money while you sleep. It’s a true money tree, in every sense of the word. After you get up and open your physical store, you check your email, and ship the orders, or provide the service for which you received payment.

If you have many different products to sell (more than 50), I would recommend shopping cart software. My personal favorite is called, X-Cart. X-Cart is the most configurable cart software I have ever used.

If you have less than 50 products, you can get away with just using Google Checkout or PayPal buttons, that redirect your customer to the respective sites, to complete their online purchases.

Community Features

An online community is a collection of people with similar interests who use the Internet to communicate and work together to pursue their common interests.

The most obvious modern example of community websites today would be, Facebook and Twitter. These sites allow people to connect with friends, family, and others with common interests. However, did you know that your own website can offer features that create a community of sorts for your customers? In what way?

There are many ways in which you can provide a community feel, to your website. For example,  you can enable your customers to post questions on a public space where you and your staff, as well as your customers, can answer each other’s questions. You can enable people to post comments on each of your articles, and you can even provide a means by which people can “share” your articles on Twitter on Facebook.

As an example, look at the little icons at the end of this article. If you click on the little “t” icon, it will paste a link to this article to Twitter. You can then share it with all of your Twitter friends. The same applies to the Digg, and Facebook icons, to the right of that.

So there are multiple ways of achieving this community effect. Among them:

• Forums
• Twitter, Facebook and other social media sharing links at the end of your articles
• Enabling comments at the end of each article, like I do on this website

Social media is what websites are all about these days. It’s what your customers expect from you. If information can’t be shared, or if your users can’t interact with you or each other in one way or another, they won’t be coming back to your site, quite as often as they would, if they otherwise could.

Ease of Updation

The easier it is for you to update your website, the more likely it is that you will actually do it. In shopping for a new website, or for someone to update your existing website, I would recommend that you go with a CMS (content management system). A CMS allows you to easily publish new articles on your website, using only your web browser. CMS’ used to be used in the exclusive realm of big companies like Apple and IBM, because of their high price. Now, you have many free options for a CMS. The one I use and recommend is called, “WordPress”.

WordPress is a completely free CMS that is used on a daily basis by literally millions of people on millions of blogs. Yes, I said millions. There are currently over 2.7 million installations of WordPress version 2.9 out there. And that’s just version 2.9! Most of the websites that I design nowadays, use WordPress.

In order to use WordPress, you need to make sure that your new or existing web hosting plan is capable of hosting a WordPress site. If you have me design a website for you, I’ll make sure that your website hosting company supports WordPress.

Marketing

In order to be found on the Internet, you need some type of marketing. In 2010, there are so many websites out there, that you really need to get your brand directly in the faces of your potential audience. This really neccessitates some type of per-per-click marketing with Google Adwords, and or Yahoo Search Marketing.

These companies allow you to bid on common search terms such as Fort Myers web design or websites Fort Myers. When people type in these search terms into Google or Yahoo, they see an ad for your website along with the regular search results. If someone clicks on your ad, you pay a small fee for the click. Hence the term, “pay-per-click” advertising. If you don’t currently have any pay-per-click advertising for your existing business, at least consider using Google Adwords to promote your business, as Google is the most widely used search engine on the planet.

That’s about it. Having a successful business website in 2010 is dependent upon the four major factors listed above. Shopping cart, community features, ease of updation, and marketing.

What are your thoughts? Please leave a comment below.

Not-Free

Adobe Photoshop CS4 – This is the best image editing program out there. Period. It’s the de facto  standard for high-end image editing, period. Available for MAC and PC. Free 30 day trial available.

Adobe DreamWeaver CS4 – This is the best web development program money can buy. If you are serious  about web design, this is the program you want to use. Available for MAC and PC. Free 30 day trial  available.

Free Software

GIMP (The GNU Image Manipulation Program). This program is the best, free alternative to Adobe  Photoshop. Amazingly, this can do most of what Adobe Photoshop does, but completely free. One of the  big things that makes this program such a steal, is that it does layers, just like Photoshop, and it  can even save in Photoshop format. So, if you have to give someone a Photoshop file, you can save  your image in PSD (Photoshop format), and they can open it directly in Photoshop. It also opens, and  works with Photoshop format files. So, if someone gives you a Photoshop file, you can open it, and  work with it in GIMP, just like you can in Photoshop. This is probably among the best of all free  software available for MAC and PC users. Free download here.

Picture Resizer 4.0. This is a free, easy-to-use tool for batch resizing of JPG images. The coolest thing about this  program, is that it’s only 300K in size. So if you need to resize an image to a maximum height of  600 pixels, just name the exe file, “PhotoResizeH600H.exe”, and when you drop images onto it, it  will resize all the images you drop onto the icon, to a maximum height of 600 pixels, and it will  drop the copies into the same folder as the original. Talk about automation! It’s awesome for web  designers, or anyone that posts a lot of pictures online. Keep multiple copes of this program on your desktop with different file names, so you can just drop images onto it for whatever sizes you commonly need. It can even be used for home inspectors  that need to insert images into their reports. It’s always a good idea to resize images before use,  as this avoids unnecessarily long download times on the web, and avoids unnecessarily large file sizes when inserted into reports, documents, or other files. Free download here.

FileZilla 3.3. Need an FTP program that’s better than the one built into your web browser? This one is free, easy to use, supports  FTPS (secure FTP), and is available for MAC and PC. Free download here.

Mozilla Firefox 3.6. Want the best web browser money can buy? Sorry, money can’t buy it, because it’s free, and it’s  called Mozilla Firefox 3.6. Want to avoid all the spyware and adware that most people have on their  computers? Stop using IE. Use Firefox instead, and keep it updated to the latest version, and forget  about it. One of the best things about this web browser is that it uses tabs. Tabs allow you to open  multiple websites, and switch between them.

The next best thing about this browser is that you can install add-ons that allow you to do other  cool things. For example, are you tired of going to a web site, and having it open another browser  window? Install Tab Mix Plus (download link below), and it will forece Firefox to open a website  that would have opened a new window, in a new tab instead. This keeps your window count down, so you  don’t have all that clutter down on your Windows taskbar. You just have one Firefox window open at all times. Free download here.

After you install Firefox, you can download Tab Mix Plus. Free download here.

Sun VirtualBox. Do you have Windows Vista or Windows 7 on your computer, and you wish you could also run all of your old Windows XP programs? You can. Just download Sun VirtualBox, and it gives you a virtual computer, into which you can install almost any version of Windows. The computer stays inside this “virtual box” and doesn’t affect your existing programs, or installation of Windows. Confused? I understand how you could be… Just visit the Sun website for more information. Free download here.

That’s it for now. Enjoy.

Accept Credit Card Payments with Your iPhone

A new startup called, Square, Inc. has released a handy device that allows you to accept credit card payments directly on your iPhone. It’s a little device, called a dongle, that you plug into the audio input jack. You swipe the credit card through the dongle, and you run software to authorize the credit card, and receive payment.

Here is a video on YouTube showing how this new technology works:

This is a rare sneak-peak inside the gates of this beautiful place.

Skywalker Ranch from Philip Bloom on Vimeo.

Simply Kehv Album Cover

KehvMusic.com is the The Official Website of Kehv, The Prince of Reggae Soul. Kehv is an outstanding artist with an amazing voice, and awesome sense of rhythm. I have had the privilege of seeing him perform live several times.

Kehv just released his latest album, “Simply Kehv”. This album is available for purchase on his website, or directly through iTunes.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Version Market Share

Why is this good news? It’s good news, because Mozilla Firefox is the most standards compliant, least dangerous web browser to use. That means that websites will look the way they were meant to look, when viewed in Firefox.

From my experience, the quickest way to get infected with Spyware, Adware, and Malware is to use Internet Explorer. As a matter of fact, for every computer from which I have removed Spyware, Adware, or Malware, the computer user was not using Mozilla Firefox, but they were in fact using a version of Internet Explorer.

Enjoy your web browsing experience the way it was meant to be enjoyed, safely, and beatifully. Download Firefox now!

Most of the time, when customers perform an Internet search for a local business, they will type in a search containing the city name, followed by the type of business they are searching for, such as “Fort Myers web design”. At that point, the search engine will return a list of dozens or thousands of search results that meet the criteria of the search.

Most of the time, when the search is performed, users will only look through the first, and maybe the second page of search results. If your business is not found within those first two pages, you have a very slim chance of someone clicking through to your website, and reviewing your products and services.

To a large extent, whether or not your site is found is dependent upon your efforts to make your site look attractive to Google.

When I say “attractive” I mean that Google is looking for certain things on your website to determine how relevant it is to any given search phrase.

Well then… How do we determine what things Google is attracted to? It’s not as hard as it might sound. Google has created a guide called, “Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide“.

You can download it for free by clicking the download link above. The guide contains everything you need to optimize your site to be found by Google. I have personally incorporated Google’s suggestions on my client’s websites, and have seen the search results move from a fourth place rank, to a first place rank in about a week. There are no guarantees, but the information they provide works.

Incorporate the suggestions in Google’s Starter Guide, and you will be well on your way to marketing your business website.

I’m now providing Google SEO (search engine optimization) service. Are you looking to increase your organic search engine results in Google? I can increase your Google search engine ranking using commonly accepted techniques that won’t get your site banned from Google.

To inquire about pricing or for any other questions, please click the “Contact” link near the top of my site.

Need a custom web-based solution to a common business problem? Allow me to write a custom solution for your business.

To inquire about pricing or for any other questions, please click the “Contact” link near the top of my site.