I had the pleasure this past week of attending the Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta.   Many thanks to Todd Lewis and the folks at IT-oLogy for inviting me to serve as a volunteer at the conference.    I met a number of really talented and in some cases world-renowned developers.   

I spent most of my time at the registration desk, but found time to get away and see several sessions.  Of course I was most interested in those related to Drupal.  In particular, I was thrilled to hear Jason Smith of MediaCurrent talk about the massive project to replace Weather.com with a Drupal site.   I expect that site to be something really special and something the Drupal community can be proud of.  

So it turns out jquery is easy. I can't believe I have gone this long as a Drupal themer and not bothered to try jquery. I saw all these $ and () and just figured it would be complicated.

Well I been messing around on jsfiddle.net, making some pretty interesting things - ex. http://jsfiddle.net/tesliker/L9uPm/3/ , but then I turned my sights back to integrating this with Drupal. This is where I had some trouble. Besides the fact I always forget to run cron after adding new JS and CSS stylesheets, it turns out you have to wrap your jquery in a special wrapper so that the $ variable does not confuse Drupal. Anyways, here is what I ended up doing to get this up and running correctly.

I added my custom module.

I named it custom_js, and added custom_js.info with the following code:

I then added a custom_js.module file with the following code:

We at Broadstreet are happy to announce that, in conjunction with IT-Ology, we are offering free training for Drupal, the open source content management system used to power some of the world's largest websites.

The class, Introduction to Drupal, will take place on Saturday, October 12, 2013, from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm at the IT-Ology training center on 1301 Gervais Street in Columbia.

The course will be led by SC Drupal User Group leader Tom Sliker, and will cover an overview of Drupal as well as more advanced site building topics. By the end of the training each student will have their very own, fully functional Drupal website.

To sign up for the class, please visit ColaTechEvents.com.

I'm tired of the generic terms I see listed as ways to improve your online presence. "SEO, Social Media, Blogs, Link Sharing," etc. These are all very broad terms that go much, much deeper. To learn how to do it right will take years of research and experience. 

For those of you who honestly want just a few, simple techniques to improve your online presence, here it is.

Clear call to action. Keep your visitors engaged.

A call to action (CTA) is a set of words, graphics, or buttons that prompt a user to take immediate action or continue on an intended path toward completing your end goal. Every website should have a clear purpose, some goal they want their users to complete. And it should be obvious to both the business, and the consumer.

As an example, last month we did some major revamping of one of our sites. We realized that our call to action could be a litte... louder.

This call to action is what the search engine ad links to now when they search for terms related to Isuzu Trucks. It's very clear - if you are shopping for an Isuzu truck, call now, or request a specific part.