If you are looking to take advantage of Twitter in your business without it taking over your life, here are some great “shortcut” tools and applications to keep you in the social media game without sacrificing all of your precious time!

Tweetdeck: A desktop client that allows you to manage all of your Twitter activity without being logged on to the web.  This is very popular due to its ability to organize your followers into groups.  Tweetdeck has also recently added the ability to update your Facebook status from the interface as well chat with your Facebook friends.

Twellow: The Twitter yellow pages! Find Twitter users by category or geographic area.  This is a good way to find new and interesting people to follow.

Tweetie/Twitterberry: For those of you looking for ways to tweet on the go, I prefer Tweetie for iPhone.  I have also heard good things about Twitterberry, which is for the Blackberry.

Grouptweet: Group message broadcasting for Twitter.  This tool gives you the ability to send private tweets to only a select group of followers which you choose.  I’ve seen this used successfully for everything from web development projects and school assignments to diet and exercise accountability clubs.

Monitter: This is one of my favorite tools.  It lets you monitor Twitter for a set of keywords and see what people are saying.

Twitterfox: If you use the Firefox browser, this is a nice extension which notifies you when your friends update their status on Twitter.

Twitthis: A way for people to send Twitter messages about blog posts or websites. When you click on the TwitThis button or link, it takes the URL of the webpage and creates a shortened URL. You can then send the shortened URL and a description of the page to others on Twitter.  I love using this to quickly share the URLs of interesting articles or posts I come across while browsing the web.

Hashtags.org: Hashtags bring some order to the updates of Twitter users.  For example, a couple of years back the hashtag #sandiegofires was used in order for those interested to easily follow this topic.  Hashtags.org provides real-time tracking of all the hashtags being used on Twitter.

WhoShouldIFollow: This is a very simple tool which looks at your current friend list and recommends others to follow based on that list.  One of the Twitter questions I am asked most often is how to find more people to follow.  This makes it quick and easy to do.

TweetBeep: If you want to know when someone mentions your name, company, product or competitors you can get updates sent to you to stay on top of it all.

Twitterfeed: Allows you to quickly tweet your blog posts.  Just sign up and enter your blog feed and Twitter login information.  When you publish a blog post, it will be sent to Twitter automatically.

These are some of my top picks–there are too many tools out there to even begin to mention them all.  However, I recommend getting started with some of these and keeping an eye out for any others you think would help streamline your Twitter experience and save you time.  (You’ll never have a shortage–there are new applications arriving on the scene every day!)

© Communicate Value. All Rights Reserved.

From the announcement we learn that the speed penalty was introduced following experiments by Google that revealed the impact website speed has on Internet users.

But the results of the experiment come as no surprise even for someone that has started to use the Internet recently; users prefer websites that load faster and tend to spend more time on such websites.

However, the search engine giant has been careful to state that even though website speed is now a factor, it is not the primary parameter for determining results. The quality and relevance of information is still the determining factor, but if your website speed is slow, you will receive a Google penalty.

This implies that it is important for you as a webmaster to assess the speed of your website to determine whether you are moving further down the search engine results pages (SERPs) because your website is slower than your direct competitors.

How Can Google Know Your Page Speed?

It is vital that you understand the basics of how Google’s algorithm determines your website speed and thus your SERP ranking. The search engine uses two main factors when it comes to speed assessment.

First, your website will receive a higher speed ranking if it responds faster to Googlebot, the crawler program Google uses to find and index websites.

Second, your website will also receive a good speed ranking if it records a faster loading time on Google Toolbar than your competition. To better assist you in analyzing your website speed, Google has added a page speed report to their webmaster tools found within the Google webmasters ‘lab’ section.

The tool and the reports can be used to compare your website’s page load times to that of other websites. Once you are armed with the information of where your page ranks in the speed hierarchy, you can start to make the necessary code and structure changes to make it respond faster.

Your first priority should be to make sure you have no SLOW pages on your site. Pages that take two seconds or more to load and pages that are marked as SLOW in Google Webmaster Tools need to be improved to avoid a Google penalty for website speed.

When you have no slow pages left, try to make all your pages load in less than a second. Read on to see why this is important.

Having a website that loads quickly has more benefits than just higher search engine ranking and avoiding a Google penalty.

A website optimized for speed reduces the bandwidth required on your hosting service, thus reducing your overall hosting costs.

Faster websites also provide a better browsing experience because users are able to get information faster and navigate through your website more easily.

In addition, websites optimized for speed work better when accessed on mobile phones, PDAs and other devices that do not have the same level of processing memory as your standard laptop or desktop computer.

Even though you can have a mobile variant of your website which is trimmed down, some users will want to view your site in full HTML on their phone or PDA and a faster loading website will have a better chance of successfully loading on such devices.

As a webmaster, there are a number of free tools that you can use to improve the loading speed of your website. I have listed three of the more popular ones below:

Page Speed

Page Speed is an open-source add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser. It evaluates the speed of your website and gives you suggestions on how to improve your website speed.

Page Speed runs tests on the architectural configuration of both your web server and your website’s front end code. After running these tests, it gives you a report on your website speed and suggestions on how to improve the speed of your website.

Yslow

Yslow is a free Firefox add-on from Yahoo integrated with Firebug software for website development. It displays statistics, an evaluation report and also provides suggestions on how best to improve the speed of your website using best practices.

Yslow comes integrated with other tools for performance evaluation, including Smush. Use it and JSLint to further enhance your website performance. Yslow is a Yahoo product but is still useful for avoiding the Google speed penalty.

SSEL Speed Tools

There is also a website speed check at Secret Search Engine Labs where you can get a quick answer on how big your webpage is and how fast it loads.

The Website Speed Quick Fix

There are several factors that affect page load speeds on your website, many of them technical and best solved by your webmaster or developer, but some changes you can do yourself as long as you have some experience with HTML and creating web pages.

Reduce the number, size and quality of images and use less audio, flash and Javascript. Reduce the length of the page by splitting a long page into several short pages. Strip the source code of redundant HTML, Javascript and CSS code that just slows things down. Don’t use images and other components that are linked live from other domains; instead use a copy on your own server.

And don’t forget to keep your eyes on Google Webmaster Tools to see how your site performs compared to the competition.

One of the most exciting features about wordpress is the fact that you can customise it to meet your needs. There are literally thousands of free designs available on the internet, and if this doesn’t suit you there is a whole heap more available for purchase. WordPress also has a great feature which allows you to install plug-ins. These plug-ins are small pieces of programming that change how wordpress works, in some way. For example you may have a plug-in which automatically deletes spam (undesirable) comments left on your site, or even one which automatically places advertisements in each page you create. The possibilities really are endless when it comes to customising wordpress to suit your needs.

The first thing you need to do to get wordpress running is to download the latest version, this is available on the wordpress.org web site. You will end up with a .zip file which is around 3mb in size.

Although the wordpress installation is a very simple process, it is recommended that you possess the following skills to make it easier.

• A server with PHP and MySQL (required!)
• The basics of MySQL database management (creation, backup, etc.)
• Basic knowledge of how HTML/CSS and PHP work.

For this guide I am installing wordpress on my local apache server, although the steps are exactly the same for those of you using a Linux hosting environment with cPanel.

Step One: Upload the wordpress install zip to your root directory, you can also use a sub directory if this is where you want the wordpress site to be located (for example blog.yoursite.com).

Step Two: Unzip/decompress the wordpress zip file, a folder named ‘wordpress’ will appear. It is in here where the main files for wordpress are located. Open the wordpress folder and move the files from ‘public_html/wordpress’ to ‘public_html’ if you want the wordpress install at the root of your site, otherwise you can leave them in the folder and the wordpress site will be located at ‘yoursite.com/wordpress’. Please note you can change the name of this folder as it will appear in your URL.

Step Three: You will need to create a database and user for this wordpress installation and assign privileges to the user. This can be done through cPanel easily, make sure you remember the password and other details as you will need these soon.

Step Four: Navigate in your web browser to the location of the wordpress files, this may be ‘yoursite.com’ or ‘yoursite.com/wordpress’. You will be asked to create a configuration file, click the button and one should be created for you.

Step Five: A screen will tell you that wordpress requires your database information; click next and there is another page where you enter this information. Database host is almost always localhost and you can use any table prefix if you only have one database for multiple systems. The rest of the information you should know from creating your databases in step three. If you enter the information correctly you will be asked to run the install, click the button now.

Step Six: Once the install is complete you get to enter some basic information on your wordpress site. Choose a site name and enter your email and a secure password for your admin account. Ensure the password is strong as people will often try and hack the admin accounts for wordpress sites. You can now log into your wordpress site and will be greeted by the sleek dashboard. Your base installation is now complete.

The first thing you will want to do once your installation is complete is to write your first post. On the left hand side of the page is the administration menu. Click on the item named ‘posts’ you are now taken to a list of active posts, and will see a test post. It is a good idea to delete this post as it is only there for testing purposes, hover over the ‘Hello World!’ post and you will see red text saying trash, click this and the post is deleted.

On the admin menu you will notice the posts item now has sub items (or items below it), these are specific options to do with the posts, and each main item on the menu will have sub items like this. You can show and hide them at any time by hovering over the main menu item and clicking the arrow to the right. Click on the ‘add new post button’ and we will write the first post for your site. Choose a title for your post then go to the next larger box and begin writing it, you may like to take this time to familiarise yourself with the features available inside the post box. Once you have written your post you need to choose a category, these categories are used to sort the posts on your web site. On the right hand site, click on the ‘add new category text’ and create a new category. You can manage these categories on their page which can be accessed under the Posts menu item. Click the ‘blue publish button’ on the right hand side of your page and the post is now published to your web site, wasn’t that easy!

Other important aspects of wordpress sites are pages. These are more static than posts and appear separately. Common uses for pages are for contact forms, about us pages, whereas posts are used for actual content. Click on the pages menu item to the left, then on ‘add new’, we are going to create an about us page. Enter the title of the page ‘about’ or ‘about us’ will work, then go about adding the content. Once you are happy with what you have written you can publish the page.

Adding a new theme to wordpress is a very simple process and it can help your site look more appealing to visitors. On the wordpress.org site there is an ‘extend’ category for themes, it is here that you will choose a look for your site. Once you have found a theme that you like, you can download it (which consists of a zip file). You will now upload this to your themes directory, this is located in the ‘wp-content/themes’ folder of your wordpress site. Once it is uploaded you will need to unzip/decompress it. Go back to your wordpress dashboard (admin menu) and click on appearance, now choose the Themes option. This page will list all of the themes you have in your directory, find the one you have just uploaded and select ‘activate’. Congratulations, it only took several clicks of the mouse but your site now has a whole new design.

Plug-ins are just as simple as themes to get working in your blog. You can look through the plug-ins section at wordpress.org to find any that interest you. Once you find one that you want on your wordpress site, download it (again a zip file, are you surprised?), but this time upload it to ‘wp-content/plugins’ and unzip/decompress. Click on the plugins menu item on the wordpress administration menu and your plug-in should be listed here, click on activate and the plug-in will begin working on your site. At this time the specific plug-in may require custom settings, you will get a popup notice if this is the case.

In this guide we only covered the basics on wordpress and the features any new site administrator is likely to use. There is so much more to wordpress and trying to write about every little feature would result in a massive book! We recommend that you take a look through all of the options of the administration menu, just so you can get an understanding of anything. If there is something that you would like to change it can likely be done easy using this menu. If you have any further queries, the wordpress.org site has a whole wiki dedicated to helping you solve your problems. We hope you found this guide useful and decide to go with wordpress; the power it offers web masters really is unmatchable by any other CMS. Good luck with your web site, and remember to make backups often, you never know when you will need them.

Why is accessibility important?

Broadly speaking, web sites have to cater for all tastes and needs. There are different kinds of internet users besides “normal” ones, which a site should be addressed to:

• persons with eye disabilities
• people who owe downgraded computer configurations
• people who use different internet browsers
• Statistical data revealed that there are about 20% people around the world who can be included in the above categories.

On top of that, web content should also be more available to all users regardless of the user agent they have (computer browser, mobile phone or voice browser) or of the external factors that affect the environment (too much light or noise). Another reason why site accessibility is worth considering is the rapidity of finding information in which everybody is interested.

Language is a problem that must be taken into account: users from anywhere might visit your site and might not fully understand the language of your site.

But, maybe the most important explanation of the importance of accessibility is the fact that it lowers costs and brings profit. Subsequently, why not bother finding out ways to make your site more accessible?

8 Tips to make your site more accessible

• Validate HTML documents beforehand!
  Using HTML is certainly one of the most important features which should be considered with the view to increase your site accessibility. But the matter is not as simple as it may appear: much attention is needed, taking into consideration the fact that there are different types of browsers, some older and some newer, providing different ways of validating HTML. In order to be sure about your HTML text, you could use specialized programs like: W3C HTML Validator or WDG HTML Validator enabling you to correct the possible “spelling” errors that you didn’t notice. Beware of the many programs claiming they can validate HTML
• Draw attention wisely!
  On the other hand, when you think of using HTML, do not employ it only in an aesthetic purpose; the emphasis should be laid on the structure and on the content, rather than the presentation itself. For instance, when you use bold, you should always use it in order to highlight a statement, an idea, a problem, not only for catching the eye. For strong emphasis, use EM or STRONG elements.
• ALT as a textual option
  With reference to the images, when using IMG and AREA, you should also provide ALT as an alternative; its purpose is functional, rather than descriptive. Nevertheless, should you want a decorative image, use ALT=”", which is indicative of the absence of image content.
• Do not replace text with images
  Choosing to replace text with images usually reduces web site design accessibility. By and large, text is more flexible providing users the possibility to choose font. Consequently, not doing so may result in a poor image quality on some hardware configurations.
• Color suggestions
  1.Be sure to specify all color attributes; they are sure to provide accessibility for a good website! The risks of not specifying them all involve inaccessibility on the part of the users whose browser colors might not match those specified by the author. Specifying a hexadecimal triplet in the <#rrggbb> or <#RRGGBB> forms is almost of vital importance on the grounds of the fact that older browsers might not support color names.
  2.At the same time, authors should be sensible when choosing a color for the text, meaning that it should be easy to read on the screen; in this respect, the color of the text should obviously be in contrast with that on the background.
  3.It is highly recommended that the visited and the not visited links shouldn’t be the same color, due to the users’ potential confusion.
  To find out more about this issue read our article: Choosing the Right Colors for Your Web Site
• Use relative FONT sizes
  When talking about HTML, one cannot fail to mention FONT, which is another accessibility issue with websites. FONT should rather be avoided – this is certainly a strong tip to improve site accessibility. Make sure that you let the user the possibility to change font size! Relative FONT sizes are preferable.
  Again, FONT is another aspect related to the form of the website. So, do not try only to draw attention without having reasonable content!
• Do not rely on JAVA scripts
  Some browsers do not provide support for Java scripts; therefore sometimes it would be better if you didn’t use it. Nonetheless, Java scripts are usually known as factors to increase accessibility, providing helpful hints to users. The main suggestions regarding this matter are:
  1.To ensure the Java scripts accessibility.
  2.To offer a non-Java alternative.
• Organize your Page
  ◦Ensure that you have a relevant content structure, for a better understanding.
  ◦When giving links, it is advisable that you mention the entire link lest the visitors be confused regarding its destination.
  ◦CSS might be a good idea in order to emphasize textual links; providing more visual impact on the user.
  ◦The presence of a site map, a search box or a site logo are hints indicative of an accessible website.
  ◦Testing your site on real users in advance is a good way to analyze its accessibility and to foresee to some extent future site traffic.
  The bottom line is to keep the content simple, clear and easy to scan.

Conclusion

Finally, you should bear in mind that a usable website is first of all an accessible website. Website accessibility is only a small detail in creating a web page, but it provides a strong asset in front of other sites that do not take it into account. Not to mention the fact that, speaking in terms of costs, the expenditure for this “feature” is quite low in comparison with the beneficial effects it involves.

So, the main benefits which are worth paying attention to are:

• website traffic
• ease of finding information
• rapidity of getting what you search for
• higher engine ranking
• preventing risk of legal action on the part of the people with special needs
• better server performance
• better website reach
• faster download times
• website PR increase
• avoidance of bandwidth bottlenecks

In order to take advantage of these, keep in mind:

• Validate HTML documents beforehand
• Catch the eye with ideas not with layout
• Provide ALT as a textual option
• Use contrastive colors
• Avoid images of text
• Relative fonts are better
• Offer non-Java alternative
• Keep content simple, clear and easy to scan