Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Wayne did some sleuthing this week to find out why someone would create a website widget for free. The reason: inbound links. A great number of the inbound links to Ignite Social Media‘s website, for instance, come from the download page for its “Follow Me” plugin, according to data from Yahoo Site Explorer. The…
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Are you stopping visitors from commenting?
Blog comments are something that you should typically encourage because they give readers a chance to participate in the conversation. Comments give readers the opportunity to relate their experiences, offer their point of view, and provide related information. This interaction within the blog can help to expand the original blog post, sometimes giving it a life of its own. If one of your blog’s goals is to encourage commenting, you should try and make the commenting process as simple as…
Around the Office: Facebook loses face; airplane cell phone bans are serious
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. While he’s still among the site’s 687 million users, Daveed has been thinking about the millions of Facebook users logging off for good, especially in Canada and the US, and among younger users. It’s too soon to tell if the social network is on its way to becoming the next MySpace,…
Around the Office: hands-on with Kohana, picture sharing with DailyBooth, and more
Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week. Roberto had a very good first impression of PHP5 framework Kohana, and actually liked its modules for database interactivity and cookies. With its basic template system, simple installation, and online learning resources, he’d recommend it to developers who want to save lines of code and time, but be warned, it only works with PHP…
Does your website have an effective call to action?
A “call to action”, as the name suggests, tells your visitors what they should do. In the case of a website, it’s basically a message that links to a desired action. A successful CTA will help persuade visitors to take your desired action, which you should be able to determine based on your business goals. It can be a short phrase as simple as “Click here!”, but should be something at least a little more specific or sophisticated. In this…
How to read your site’s statistics: 6 tips
As we wrote in a previous post, statistics are necessary to determine if your website is meeting its goals. But it’s hard to know if you’re meeting your site’s goals if you don’t know how to read the multitude of numbers and graphs provided by a service like Google Analytics. In this post, we offer five suggestions on how to read your Analytics statistics beyond simply hits or views to help you determine if your site is attracting the traffic…
Healthletica Print Design & Layout
Kobayahsi Online created a poster and brochure to support the opening of a new Healthletica location, helping drive local interest, brand recognition, and foot traffic.
Healthletica WordPress Design & Development
Under the creative direction of Finesilver Design Inc., Kobayashi Online created a website website with flexibility in mind. Based on the WordPress Content Management, Healthletica’s 20 pages are easily edited through a Web-based administrator control panel.
Do you own your blog?: Owning your domain
With the wide variety of free blogging platforms, blogging is essentially free. However, to get the impact you’re looking for, it may be worth it to blog using your own domain. In fact, it can be easy to setup and doesn’t have to be terribly expensive to get your blog on a URL that you own. Many blogging platforms allow you to buy a custom domain, including Google’s Blogger platform, and WordPress.com. You can also transfer a domain name you…
Fathom Co. WordPress Design & Development
Created in cooperation between Kobayashi Online and Laura K Brand Design, the website for the creative and dynamic PR firm Fathom Co. Fathom’s Web presence now helps grab the visitor’s attention.