Easy Website Design with Simpl

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Simpl  says, “The easy way to build a website.” It’s free for your website design, and free to host for two weeks (currently free for two months), and it really is the easiest website design tool I’ve ever seen. It’s only available for iPads running iOS 5.0 and up though.

Here’s how to get started with Simpl.

Download the Simpl App from the App Store in your iPad. You can also click on the App Store icon and search for “Simpl.” To get started, click the gear in the upper left hand corner, if you are not already on the Settings screen. Then add some information about your website. There is even space to add a description and keywords for SEO.

simpl-settings-screen

Simpl Settings Screen

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Google Places When You Work At Home

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Google Places for Business

Google Places for Business

Using Google Places is a great way for a small business to get online and listed in local search. You can provide information about your business — what you do, your location, a link to your website, contact information, hours of operation, photos, videos, and also promotions for your business. But what do you you do if you work from home? You probably don’t want your home address listed in a local search. Google doesn’t want you to use a PO Box location for your Places page either.

Google has a solution for work-at-home businesses though. When you create your Google Places listing, you enter your home address, but there is a check box to hide your actual street address in the search listings, and you can specify a service area instead. See the FAQ at Google Places for Business.

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A Members-Only WordPress Website Theme

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An Educational Group Website

This WordPress website theme is for an educational group. It has a members-only area for some of their pages and their monthly newsletter. The site also has a contact form, a styled photo album gallery, and a login form that redirects to the members-only pages. Their monthly newsletter has eight sections, but is easy for them to update. They also use a group mailing list to communicate information.

Small Business and NonProfit Marketing for Free

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http://mrg.bz/ScUNDB from http://www.morguefile.comSeveral people asked this week how to market a business or charity (or even yourself), if you have no money for advertising and marketing. The short answer is if you don’t have money, you will need to spend time. You will need to take time to build relationships and network and time to follow leads. Ideally you will want to maintain a relationship with acquaintances, clients, and potential clients long term. Social media like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn can help with this.
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Screen Capture and Screen Cast Videos with Jing

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Jing Sun Logo

There are lots of tools to use for screen captures, but one of the most useful and intuitive applications to use for screen cast video capture is Jing by Techsmith. It’s available for Windows and Mac. There’s a free version and also a Jing Pro version for $14.95 per year. Screen shots and videos can be easily saved and shared on your favorite social media site; that’s the beauty of Jing. Your Jing account is connected to a Screencast.com account with 2 GB storage for easily storing your videos.

Once you sign up for your account, and install Jing, you can begin recording immediately. If you want to record audio, be sure to plug in your mic first. You can also set your Preferences by clicking on the gears on the sun logo before your first recording.

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Importing your Tumblr to WordPress

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WooThemes has a new Tumblr importer for WordPress – Tumblr2WP. I tried it out yesterday, and it worked really well getting the content over to this newly installed WP blog.

This is what happened:

  1. The text and images inside the posts imported nicely.
  2. The images for the Tumblr image posts did not. I didn’t have very many, so I just copied them  from my Tumblr, and then inserted them into the correct image posts.
  3. The post types had the correct Format type, except that the normal posts were labeled as “Aside,” instead of “Standard” in WordPress.

It might be useful to try adding the WooTumblog plugin to your WordPress before importing. I’m curious to know if that helps with the image import.

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How To Encode Ogg Theora Video

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Ogg-Theora video is the open source codec supported by Firefox, Chrome, and Opera to play HTML5 video. If the world were perfect, and all browsers supported Ogg Theora this would be the HTML code to play this simple HTML5 video demo:

<video src="Videos/cat.ogv" controls></video>

If you use this format instead, you will be ready to add the code to play H.264 and Flash:

<video width="320" height="240" poster="Videos/cat.jpg" controls>
<source src="Videos/cat.ogv" type"video/ogg">

</video>

where “poster” is the image used while the video is loading, “width” and “height” refer to the video dimensions, and “controls” adds the native video controls. The Dev Opera site has information on other attributes and also how to script your own controls.

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