Broadstreet Blog
Lately we have been investing a lot of time in developing mobile-friendly Websites. A good example of this is the site we did for Al's Upstairs Italian Restaurant in Columbia, SC. After we got the site up and running, we started checking the analytics to find that 42 percent of visitors were using a mobile device, with over half of these being iPhones.
I was not surprised to see these kinds of numbers for a restaurant site. I pictured folks talking with friends or family and doing a quick search for a local restaurant, or even for Al's in particular. But I went back and checked the statistics of some of our other sites, and we are seeing Mobile usage of OVER 25 PERCENT for all of our sites, including some industrial sites such as BusbeeTruckParts.com and BlackJackFrame.com.
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The giant world that we once knew has become a lot smaller in the past several years. Customers who were once distant our now just a click away, and customers who would have never met are now joined together over the web discussing the quality of our business. The economy has crushed us with tighter lending and lower consumer demand. Society has made a shift towards supporting small and local businesses.
These changes feel a lot like a small town. Small town businesses have long been dealing with customers sharing their personal experiences at the local coffee shop, tight local lending and low consumer demand.
So if the business world is more like a small town, can we learn anything from small town businesses that would be useful? Yes! Here are seven specific principles that work for all small business today.
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It's been over 3 years since I started a Meetup Group for Drupal Developers in Columbia, SC. The groups started out meeting at Richland County Public Libary (which is a Drupal site btw) and since has moved to the IT-Ology building at the corner of Sumter and Gervais in downtown Columbia.
We have met over 36 times since February 2010 and this past week we had our best turn-out so far with 12 Drupal Website builders attending. We discussed Drupal Commerce as well as responsive themes such as Omega. We had several serious newcomers who wanted a better understanding blocks and views and some other more basic concepts.
I spent some time showing people how to evaluate a Drupal module using the information on the Drupal module's project page and how to find the number of downloads for a particular version of the module.
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Based on the number of pranks Google has pulled over the past... four years, (at least), it should be no surprise that they kicked it in full gear this year. If your like me, however, with no knowledge of past pranks, it's possible you got fooled too. Or no, am I alone in this?
The first video I saw, as a subscriber to Google's youtube channel, was this:
Gmail Blue
For a product that actually was launched on April 1st (2004), you’d think Gmail would come up with something a little more involved than turning its interface blue.
So ofcourse, I instantly took to social media. "Is it just me, or is this an incredibly passionate, serious video introducing a product that's only difference... is that it's blue?" Not just blue, but completely blue. The video description did in fact make me lol, "Fast. Beautiful. Powerful."
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Did you know, with 91% of online consumers checking their email daily, email marketing is one of your best means of generating leads, and converting those leads into customers.
Broadstreet Consulting offers to help businesses earn the payoff of email campaigns by making sure you are maximizing conversions and clickthrough rates with every email you send.
To help you understand the layout of such emails, we put together the 7 core components of a 5 star email.
1. A Clear, Attention-Grabbing Email Subject Line.
To reach your customer, you have to be able to break through the noise of the other millions of email. In order to do this, you have to have a compelling subject line that inspires your audience to click on and read your email.
2. Company Branding.
Make sure your email layouts mimic your overall company brand. You want the people opening your email to recognize who you are.
When you start your computer, you may notice several programs launching themselves along with Windows. Maybe you want them there or maybe you don’t, but some applications run silently in the background every time you boot the PC that you may not even know about.
All of these automatically opening programs consume system memory which can drag down your PC’s performance.
We found an easy way to manage these startup programs so you can see what is running on your computer and disable the items you don't need.
Use the System Configuration Utility (MSConfig)
The System Configuration Utility, also called MSConfig, is a very useful tool for understanding and controlling startup programs. By following these 5 easy steps, you can decrapify your PC and increase the start up speed in no time at all.
1. Open the Start menu and type msconfig into the Search box.
2. Click the msconfig search result. The utility will open in a new window.
3. Click the Startup tab. You'll see a list of programs that start when your computer starts.
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Do you keep track of interesting tweets you send?
Chances are if you tweeted, retweeted, or favorited a tweet, it was worth remembering. I constantly retweet links to articles I want to review later. But come on, how many of us actually spend the time scrolling through and picking out these old tweets? Not me!
But what if I told you it didn't have to be that hard?
Twitter stores the last 3,200 tweets you sent, but let's face it, it's not an easty-to-view format. Allmytweets.net is an amazing site that allows you to view these tweets in a bulleted easy-to-view format. All you do is enter your twitter ID and it immediately loads your tweets.
Some say it will retrieve slightly over the limit allowed by twitter, but I haven't even tweeted over 1,500 tweets yet, so I couldn't tell you based on experience.
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Diet Coke turns 30 this year, and everybody is talking about it!
On July 29th the brand launched an excellent marketing campaign, using a FREE marketing tool, twitter, to get its loyal customers fighting for a chance to win free Diet Coke for a year.
A competition via @DietCokeUS asked consumers and fans to tweet the love through birthday wishes, haikus, finishing sentences, etc. and hashtag it #DietCokeBday. The winners received a year’s supply of Diet Coke and a surprise 30 second party with the DC Crew.
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I've had my iMac for probably 3 years now, and I have to say I'm still not really a "Mac Person" like so many are. I love how reliable it is, but a lot of things annoy me about it-- why can't I make a window larger by dragging the top left corner? , for example.
And so my screen saver is whatever I selected the first time I setup my Mac. It scans all the photos on my computer and displays them as a slideshow, and it's always fun to watch it, but occasionally I see a photo I would like find and email or post on Facebook. I don't have a good way to find a photo like that.
One way I do that, though, is to use the iPhoto "Faces" feature, which lets you tag photos (like you do on Facebook), and then it goes out and tries to find photos of that same person. Here's what it looks like on the Faces home page:
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Happy 4th of July to everyone. I'm going to try to consistently blog. It takes discipline of which I have very little. I've been meaning for some time to try switching to Bing. Why? Because some people say it's better and I've heard some interesting things.
The thing I heard about that I like was showing me organic search results with a right sidebar that shows what my friends have said about the topic recently. When I started using Bing, it had an animation come up and tell me about that right sidebar, but then it turned it off. So I needed to learn how to turn it back on.
I googled, "Why is Bing better than Google", and within a click or two I saw an ad or a link for "Google Graveyard" which turned out to be anti-Google propoganda put out by Microsoft
How did I so quickly get directed to TNW (The Next Web). It was a cute, friendly blog about a person who built a "Graveyard of cancelled Google products by a helpful Microsoft employee." All good fun, I'm sure.
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