Designmudd Ramblings on mostly Web Design & Development - Print too.

SugarCRM has got to be the most complete opensource project I’ve ever seen. It’s a web based Customer Relationship Manager which let’s you track your clients, projects, leads, sources… it’s all there. At first glance it seems like way too much, BUT as you play with this system, it very easily allows you to deactivate fields, tabs, alter the setup and so on. I’ve been using it for only a day, so please don’t understand my post as being the end-all be-all solution… more of a “Wow, i just stumbled on to this and it seems incredible”. I’m currently plugging in all my clients, projects, users, altering the applications layout and so on.

I’ve been involved in many discussions lately of finding a suitable CRM. I think the biggest problem in trying to find one has been we’ve all been calling these systems Content Management Systems when in fact there not. Content Management is a system to edit content. Customer Relation is the key.

Give it a try and let me know what you think. Enjoy!

Filed under: Software, Business
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I’m starting a list of position titles for Web Design/Development, or Graphic Design in general. If you’ve got something to add to the list, please comment. Thanks, you’re the breast

And yes, I’m putting in the photographers, writers, editors, and so on. Anyone who belongs in a firm.

Level 1
• Partner
• President
• Principal

Level 2
• Art Director
• Chief Designer
• Chief Programmer
• Creative Director
• Director of Marketing

Level 3+
• Copy Editor
• Designer
• Graphic Designer
• Editor
• Information Architect
• Internet Application Specialist
• Interactive Designer
• Interactive Developer
• Interface Designer
• New Media Designer
• Multimedia Designer
• Production Assistant
• Production Artist
• Programmer
• Photographer
• Usability Engineer
• User Interface Designer
• Web Master
• Visual Designer
• Web Designer
• Web Developer
• Writer

Fun Names
• Pixel Pusher

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You’ve heard it before and I’ll say it again, when you submit your site to search engines, you should shy away from auto submission companies that promise you top listing on all the major engines. In fact, it’s the major engines that you want to submit manually. Free Web Submission’s homepage provides a list of the top engines as rated by alexa. When subitting your website you wanna basically hand submit those top 5 engines… Yahoo, MSN, Google, About and Open Directory which refers to DMOZ. The rest of those engines are not nearly as important at those top 5, however it can never hurt to have more incoming links to your site. So you might consider auto-submission to cover those and only those, but what you need to be careful about it that you have control over the list of engines to whom your sending. I say this because you don’t want to re-submit to those top 5 engines as they’ll tag you with spamming the engine and penalize your site. Personally I stick to that form on the bottom of that same Free Web Submission Site and I make sure to uncheck Google and Alexa. Alexa is also one that I hand submit btw. Beyond those, I find that my sites make they’re way just fine into all the other little engines out there once I get listed into some of the bigger ones. So my submittion routing is Yahoo, MSN, Google, About, DMOZ, Alexa, and the list on Web Site Submission minus Google and Alexa. Enjoy!

Filed under: Web
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I’m on Firefox (mac) and have had some trouble installing the toolbar - but wait, there is a solution… right click this link and “save link as”. Save it to your desktop. Once you’ve got the file, all you’ve gotta do is physically drag the file on an open firefox window. Viola, you’ve got Google Toolbar.

Filed under: Web
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Simple Viewer is a pretty awesome photo gallery. I’m building a couple sites that feature a gallery like this… I was basically pulling my hair out trying to find good tutorials or ready-made movie clips that I could tailor into my site (because I’m not as good at flash as I’d like to be). Hopefully I’ll get their eventually, but no better way than to look at good files and deconstruct them. In the Meanwhile, I bought the sourcecode for this simpleviewer MC and that definately speeds up the process of what needs to be accomplished. It was only $50, not too shabby. And there’s a free non-sourcecode version as well. Enjoy!

Filed under: Web, Software
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SELF SEO has a tool very simliar to Overture Tool, but better. It’s faster, breaks you down to searches per day, and also gives you worktracker results in addition to overture results. Give it a try.

Filed under: Web
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Last night I bumped into Andre Chaperon’s Marketing Newsletter. Some Great info there and I’ll begin visiting often. Of note was his most recent entry Google Sitemaps Tutorial for WordPress - Get GoogleBot To Visit Your Site In Under 60 Seconds!.

As Andre says, THIS IS HUGE. I did this google sitemaps stuff on 2 of my sites last night and as advertised, those googlebots are their visiting your site within seconds. At first, I went straight to the google sitemaps site and was a bit overwhelmed by all that I had to do, BUT, if you watch the little video that Andre prepared, it’s very very simple. There’s actually a Google Sitemap Generator for Wordpress (V2) which makes this process honestly just a few clicks. Check out the article, drive more traffic, and enjoy.

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Wanna see some funny ones?

Funny T-Shirt(s)

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Firefox is a great browser for lots of reason. I especially like all the extensions for it such as web developer, add bookmark here & PRGoogleBar. Careful with some of these, i’m on mac OSX and if your on a PC (Windows) i’m not so sure those extensions will jive, dig? The Firefox Browser is loaded with features, extensions and themes - It’s light on it’s feet and it’s great with CSS.

Filed under: Web
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Yup, i got rejected - how lovely. What am I talking about you ask? DMOZ is an open directory project. As it’s “open” it’s run and moderated by tons and tons of voluteers. Not exactly easy to land a volunteer position however as you can see by going through the forum. I volunteered to edit a very small category because I’m a Giant nut (Bigblueblogger is mine). Now when I applied to edit/moderate that subcategory, I thought my biggest obstacle was the fact that I have a site in that same category. Many virtual internet people advise not to choose such a category as it diminishes your chances (because they don’t want you signing up for the wrong reasons). That was never my intention at all, but that’s also not why I got rejected. I got rejected because I didn’t submit ALL my web sites on the application which asked for my web sites. My list goes pretty deep and I surely didn’t think they needed ALL of them… I think that’s nutty.

Why do I want to be a part of that? I don’t know, I think just to work a little on the backend of a directory like DMOZ would be pretty cool. It would without a doubt allow me to focus on writing good, clean, keywork heavy content as I would have to basically re-write (or simply approve) all the sites that get submitted. This is something I’m obviously taking in interest in lately, working with search engines, SEO, and just writing good keyword rich content.

So What next? Well, I’ll put together my list, actually i’ve already started, and i’ll apply again. I think lots of people apply over and over and eventually fix up their application enough to get it - it’s like a driving test. Like I said, the e-mail sent to me only indicated that I was rejected because I didn’t supply all my websites. So i’ll do that and the poor guy on the other end will have alot of clicking to do.

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This is what 1,700 people searched for in a month according to Overture Tool. Directory, DMOZ, google, msn, yahoo… I see the connection. But what the hell is that “movie” doing there?

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I picked up this hot tip on SEO Chat.

Typically you’d go to yahoo’s submit page, type in your url, hit the button and just wait for weeks, maybe months - but there is a faster way. Check this out…

If your site has an RSS feed, good. If it doesn’t, make one. Then find the URL for your RSS feed. The RSS feed for this site (this blog I mean) can be found by simply clicking that link that says “RSS” in the top of my nav column. Once you hit it, the feed URL is simply the URL in the browsers address bar.

After you’ve found your RSS’s URL, go to yahoo.com and click “My Yahoo”. If you have an account, cool. If not, make one. Once you get into “My Yahoo”, you’re gonna “add content”, then instead of searching something in the search bar, your gonna click the teeny tiny link next to it that says “Add RSS by URL”. Once you get in there, add your RSS link. Yahoo will instantly send some spiders to your site and from what i’ve seen so far, they’ve been coming back daily. Your site will be indexed in typically 3 days. I’ll say it again… 3 DAYS! Can’t beat that.

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These are the keywords i’m curretly optimizing the current Talle Creative site for. The site will be changed eventually when things slow down a bit, but for now I’d just like to get a head start on raising rankings. We’re already #16 on MSN for “web design new jersey” and #8 for “new jersey web development”. Not bad for a weeks worth of work. Hopefully the other engines will follow. So, this entry is my plug to get a few “web design” keywords connected to the site, shameless… i know. I added a link towards the bottom of the talle creative clients page (I so need to update that). That link connects to this blog. It doesn’t belong at all, but I wanted to find a way to make this site connect to that site as it will make both more relevant to one another. Stupid, but driving traffic is important and every little bit helps. So… Web Design < -shameless :) We're in New Jersey Fun stuff, i’m digging it.

Filed under: Web
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