Of course it is but you’ll need to know a little PHP and understand how WordPress works.

Setting up your post for a scheduled takedown

First, you’ll need to add a custom field to your WordPress post. There are a couple ways to do this, the easiest is to add a custom field with the name “takedown” and the date you want WordPress to remove it in the Value field. Technically, the name isn’t important (nor is the date format) if you know what you’re doing but let’s try to work with these two standards for now.

1. Set the Custom Field Name to takedown
2. Set the Value of the Custom Field to 2010-05-01 (year-month-day)

Now save your post and let’s take a look at the next step.

Detecting the current date

PHP allows us to fetch the current date using the date() function and using some formatting options we can return the value of the date based on the format we need which is date(‘Y-m-d’);. If you add the code <?php date(‘Y-m-d’);> after the very last line of your footer file, you’ll see todays date appear at the bottom of your website.

Now let’s make sure to remove it from the last line and work on comparing the date instead.

Comparing the current date

Now that we know now the actual date, we need to know what day we want the website to stop showing our post. For this, we need to fetch the value stored in takedown using PHP:

$takedown = trim(get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘takedown’, true));

$takedown = trim(get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘takedown’, true));

if (strlen($takedown)==10) {

// your code here

}

For some reason, even if the value of the variable is not found WordPress assigned something too it so instead of using isset() or testing for NULL, I’ve found the safest thing to do is check the string length. Since we know the only variable that is valid will be a YYYY-MM-DD format, testing for a ten character string will ensure we’re on the right track. You could also use checkdate() if you’re server supports it.

Finally, I compare the two dates using the code:

if ($date(‘Y-m-d’) >= $takedown) { //yourcodehere;}

Deleting the post

There are a couple ways in WordPress to change the status of a post or delete it outright, in my case I simply want to convert posts from Published (which means they’re live) to Pending (for my review) so that I can manually delete the posts later if I want.

To do this, we will make use of the WordPress function wp_update_post() like so:

$my_post = array();
$my_post['ID'] = $post->ID;
$my_post['post_status'] = ‘pending’;
wp_update_post($my_post);

This code simply tells WordPress to update the current post and set the status to pending which will convert the post from live to hidden.

If you want to completely delete the post on a schedule, you can do so using the wp_delete_post() function instead of my code above.

The final code

Here’s the full code assembled for you, to make it work you should place it in the single.php file just below the final line of code on your website. It is important to note that this code will only activate after the takedown date, when the specific post is viewed so technically, if a page is to be taken down on the 1st of May but nobody visits until the 10th, it will still be live until the 10th.

$takedown = trim(get_post_meta($post->ID, ‘takedown’, true));

if (strlen($takedown)==10) {

if ($date(‘Y-m-d’) >= $takedown) {
$my_post = array();
$my_post['ID'] = $post->ID;
$my_post['post_status'] = ‘pending’;
wp_update_post($my_post);
}

}

Working with local 3D artist Joshua O’Neill, I created artwork for dozens of series and hundreds of discs in a fraction of the time it would have taken to setup photographic settings for the discs.

This week, while I was wildly clicking around looking for something completely unrelated (standards compliant xhtml) I came across a website for Oliver James Gosling, a freelance web developer in Bristol who’s got to have one of the sexiest websites I’ve seen in weeks, if not months. The piece of art came from DropStudio, another Bristol boy named David Robinson. My theory is that the recent snowstorms kept them at the office and if you look at the portfolios for either of them, creating spectacular work.

I don’t know either of them and this isn’t a paid advertisement but and so I don’t mind saying that the two of them (who seem to work together on a number of projects) do a wonderful job combine two very different disciplines, something more web professionals should keep in mind.

Web designers, design. Web developers, develop.

Below is a tag cloud (a visual representation of keywords) for 300 different marketing job searches I conduct each day, it’s an interesting way to understand what the country is looking for and how it’s promoting employment across the country.

The US Dollar

The first, and most obvious flaw in hosting anything in the United States is the US dollar itself, with poor performance over the past year a US dollar costs between 95¢ and $1.05 per Canadian dollar but in recent years past, it could have costed up to $1.50 to purchase a US dollar! That means that the $6.95 a month I pay with BlueHost actually costs me anywhere from $6.60 per month to $10.40 per month depending on influences outside my control.

On the other hand, web hosting in Canada would have cost a US customer $6.95 Canadian per month, or as low as $4.63 per month with fluctuations in the currency giving US based business a savings of up to 33% per year for hosting here in Canada.

Privacy Issues

When it comes to domain hosting for the average business, privacy is not something most think about but for larger businesses or membership based websites, hosting a website in Canada has the often unforeseen advantage of being regulated by the Privacy Office of Canada, not the US Department of Homeland Security or the Digital Millennium Act. While it could be fair to say that US based businesses should abide by these laws, businesses not based in the US may find themselves benefiting from Canadian rules over US based laws.

options

First, in a new HTML document (which you can create using something as simple as NotePad or Textedit simply by saving your text document with the .html extension), you’ll want to create a new heading. You can do it by including the following code in your document:

<h1>Hello World</h1>

This text adds a standard heading to your website but what if you want to centre the heading on the page? Easy! Let’s modify the standard <h1> tag to apply a style sheet directly to it:

<h1 style=’text-align:center;’>Hello World</h1>

You’ll notice that I don’t need to setup an individual style sheet to accomplish this task, simply adding the style attribute will allow me to make the changes to this one specific item. If I want to be able to centre multiple items, I could use a style sheet class to accomplish the task:

<style>
.center {text-align: center;}
</style>
<h1 class=’center’>Hello World</h1>

Note the class is represented in the style sheet as a period (.) plus the name of the class. Similarly, if I wanted to assign the centre to all occorances of the <h1> tag I could use:

<style>
h1{text-align: center;}
</style>
<h1>Hello World</h1>

Laurel Sutton has a great article on Marketing Profs called 10 Best and Worst Internet Company Names of the Decade that reads like a dummy’s guide to naming your business. I wish I could say that these are common sense examples but a lot of the companies Laurel references spent HUGE money to screw up. Speaking of “common sense”, there’s a good piece at Knowthis.com about common mistakes in marketing, I wish I could say that I’ve avoided these in the past but … I’d be lying.

I’m a sucker for Ruth Mortimer’s blog about marketing, it’s not just that she’s a wickedly cool writer or that she got a sense of humour about her industry. I think it might be because she’s hot. Speaking of which, I read an article in the fall about the ratio of clicks on Facebook for ads with attractive girls vs. normal ads which I can’t find now but … her rock’in blog reinforces that data.

Those wacky Aussies have a great article about marketing (or the lack thereof) and cities, which again reinforces my opinion of most civil servants but also leaves me wondering why cities can’t seem to get the hang of technology. Speaking of people who can’t get the hang of technology, staff at the  VANOC (Vancouver Olympics) can’t seem to understand bitching about major sponsors is a bad idea.

The boy was confused because the owners didn’t need to use wheelchairs and so he asked his father why they choose to spend the money on putting in an expensive ramp. His father then explained that the ramp wasn’t for the owners but it was for the customers. Still confused, the boy pointed out that not a lot of people used wheelchairs and his father, always patient agreed yet also pointed out that since there was only one restaurant in town that was inviting to people in wheel chairs, they would all eat here.

Regardless of your business, the web is not unlike the restaurants of Hamilton in that there are not a lot of people with visual impairments yet those few websites which make the effort to accommodate them, get all their business.

Helping the Visually Impaired View Your Website

When creating a website, it is vital to remember not all your audience members have the physical or technological capacity to see the web the same way you do. In fact according to the American Foundation for the Blind, roughly one in ten people suffer from significant loss of vision. That means that over 30,000,000 Americans have difficulties reading poorly designed websites.

Building better websites to help an aging population, as well as those who simply lack modern computers (15% of people surfing our websites use computer monitors of 800×600 pixels or less) is easy if you take the time to follow some basic tips:

1. Ensure all images are properly labeled using the ALT attribute
2. In an image is used as an interactive element, describing the function of the element
3. Provide captions for multimedia elements such as audio, video and rich media
4. Use verbose text links, avoid using “click here” whenever possible
5. Use CSS structure for design and W3C compliant layouts for websites
6. Make the most of lists and headings to help identify key elements
7. Summarize charts, graphics and images with the longdesc attribute
8. Avoid unnecessary scripts, frames and applets

How Helping the Blind will Help Build Your Business

While ensuring that people with disabilities have free and easy access to your website should be motivation enough to build a great website, there’s a wonderful side benefit for modern companies which should never be overlooked, Google.

Over the past decade, Google has dominated the online search market and is responsible for two thirds of all searches in the world, that’s over 6,000,000,000 (six billion) searches per month for 2009 and the titan of search engines shows little sign of stopping. The objective of every business with a website is to appear in the coveted top of a Search Engine Result Page (SERP) to drive more traffic to their website site but to understand how this is accomplished, a basic understanding of Google is required.

At the very core of what makes Google capable of delivering such great search results is a small software application called a spider. These spiders are constantly crawling the web, searching for new content, indexing pages and reporting back to Google with the most updated information possible and these spiders, are blind. Therefore, if you want to help Google drive traffic to your website, it is imperative that your website effectively be readable by people with visual difficulties. With that in mind, let’s take another look at why out simple steps to helping the visually impaired are important to Google and other major search engines:

1. Ensure all images are properly labeled using the ALT attribute
   this allows search engines to know what a specific photo contains and focus the page relevance as well as return results on the Images search engine
2. In an image is used as an interactive element, describing the function of the element
   this allows Google to transfer the description from the element to the target page which increases the visibility of the link in Google’s results
3. Provide captions for multimedia elements such as audio, video and rich media
   Google is unable to view the contents of interactive rich media such as Flash or audio files, the caption is Google’s only way of knowing what the file is about
4. Use verbose text links, avoid using “click here” whenever possible
   Google uses the hyperlinked words to help determine what a link is about, for example linking the phrase Fredericton web design to our homepage  helps the search engine understand which keywords we want to promote
5. Use CSS structure for design and W3C compliant layouts for websites
   At their core, a webpage is nothing more than a computer document just like a Microsoft Word file but readable by web browsers. Similar to Word documents, these files must be compatible with the software reading them or problems occur and in the case of webpages this file format is defined by the W3C standard. If you want Google and other search engines to be able to read your website, you need to comply to these standards.
6. Make the most of lists and headings to help identify key elements
   When a person looks at a webpage, some words appear bold or larger. These elements help us see when words and phrases are important, similarly search engines use heading tags and formatting elements to assign importance to phrases
7. Summarize charts, graphics and images with the longdesc attribute
   As with all graphics,  spiders are unable to read the content of a photo or chart.
8. Avoid unnecessary scripts, frames and applets
   While  helpful for displaying information to 90% of the audience, frames, scripts and applets make surfing the Internet almost impossible for the visually impaired as well as major search engines.

Ensuring your website is optimized for both search engines and the visually impaired is just one of the many services offered by Ross Creative, if your business would like an Accessibility Report completed on a web property please contact our web strategy team today.

The most important form of Organic Marketing is being found on the results pages of a popular search engine such as Google but how does Google rank those results and how does it know who’s the best to link to? In order to determine which websites to return as part of their Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s), Google employees a proprietary technology called PageRank, this system of ranking webpages does two important things:

1. PageRank returns high quality links for visitors, which in turn increases Google’s reliability and;
2. PageRank removes poor quality links for visitors, also increasing Google’s value to consumers

How PageRank Works

The exact formula’s used to calculate the PageRank system are hidden but based on the original patent and filed documents, PageRank works by calculating a value for your website based on both the volume and quality of websites which link to your website. What that means is that making your website popular is not only a matter of increasing the number of links from websites to your website but also the quality of links from those websites to your website.

For example, here are the PageRanks for some popular websites:

• CNN.com – 10
• Google.com – 10
• Yahoo.com – 9
• Microsoft.com – 9
• ESPN.com – 8
• Apple.com – 8
• NBC.com – 7

These PageRank results are based on a number of factors but primarily, the sheer volume of websites which are linking to each. For example, 45,000 websites link to CNN.com while only 12,000 link to NBC.com but if you delve deeper into the PageRank formula you’ll also discover that the CNN.com links are most likely a higher PageRank value themselves.

A Simplified Understanding of PageRank

To make it easier to understand how Google calculates PageRank, let’s assume that each PageRank value is worth a certain number of votes but since we know that higher PageRanks are worth more, we can assign more weight to each.

If we use the chart above as a rough indicator of the PageRank model (remember nobody really knows how they assign values) than we can determine that the best way to increase the positioning of a website on Google is to increase the number of people linking, but also the quality of people linking.

For example,receiving 1,000 links from poor quality website (PageRank 1) would return 1,000 votes but a single link from a popular website such as CNN.com (PageRank 10) would be worth 1024 votes.

Using the same example, receiving a million links from websites Google considers to be worthless (PageRank 0) or damaging (spam websites, sites that spread viruses etc), would result in no bonus to your website.

What does a PageRank really mean?

With this understanding of how Google calculates PageRank, it is easy to understand then that Google uses PageRank to determine the value of your business and it’s website simply be determining both the quantity and quality of websites which link to your business.

Websites with a high PageRank rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages, which allows more potential customers to find them but PageRank is just one of many factors which leads to higher visibility and should be treated as just one step in your Organic Marketing campaign. You can download the Google Toolbar for free to see the PageRank of each website you’re visiting or if you would like to learn more about our Social Media Marketing, including Organic Link Building please feel free to contact Ross Creative.

From this concept, OntoLove was born. The website is a free online dating tool designed from the ground up to be user friendly and allow people to build dynamic social media profiles without creating a ‘meat market’ feel.

What was important to us is that people be able to explore their personalities and meet people freely, to be able to join online communities, talk about their favourite television shows, bands and hobbies as part of the process. OntoLove isn’t about searching through avatars in hopes of picking out the prettiest girls, it’s about trying to form friendships with like minded people which could lead to love.

The OntoLove model uses an Ontology based system for matching people through social and personal traits, the site doesn’t restrict users to simple datasets but instead allows them to explore and interact with other users, while also offering the type of privacy protections which can enhance the user experience.

The website is a closed community, members are allowed to invite new members on a regular basis but are encouraged to only invite members who will add to the community. Because of this, the website growth is slow but members are active in a wide variety of areas.

The Idea
The idea for OntoLove came from watching our friends and specifically sisters try and fail at online dating. It wasn’t enough that free online dating websites failed but even high profile, paid websites tended to result in dates that nobody would want their sisters to go on so we build OntoLove as a means to help women meet men but this lead to an interesting notion, what if the website was more like a friends site than a dating site? What if a dating website wasn’t about ‘hooking up’ but instead about getting to know people? OntoLove helps people meet new friends, because the best lovers aren’t the ones with great profiles but the ones who can make you smile. Visit http://ontolove.com today to learn more about Ontology based romance.

Once everything’s moved, the new design for my website will be ready to go online as well as the new skin for http://regentware.com.

Why Use Facebook?
Beyond the simple and staggering number of people who use Facebook, there’s a certain mindset to the community website, it’s about sharing positive experiences and linking to content worth sharing with friends. Since Facebook is about social community, linking to favourite pubs and eating establishments is just one more way for people to tell their friends who they really are.

How much does it cost to market with Facebook?
It’s free. Seriously, building a Facebook page costs nothing except an hour of your time to assemble some text, a few photographs and  a little bit of technical know how. Once you have the basic content together, setting up a Facebook profile is completely free for your company.

How to setup a Facebook profile for your restaurant
Setting up a Facebook page is actually very simple, first you need to visit Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/ and click the  Create Page link.  The next step will ask you to select your business type, just follow the picture here and select your local business as a restaurant.

Next, let’s add the title of your page. This should be the name of your restaurant or something very similar, often if you have a commonly named restaurant (There are over 700 Crown Pub’s in England for example) you may need to add a descriptive phrase such as the town or area to the title.

Finally, you need to verify that you are in fact a human being by typing a series of letters and then you can create your restaurant’s Facebook page. If you don’t already have a personal profile, Facebook will ask you to create one but don’t worry, it’s also free and easy.

Marketing with Facebook
Once your restaurant has a page of Facebook, you can easily upload some photographs and a brief description. It’s also possible for you to add your restaurant’s hours of operation, specials etc to help people know more about your business.

Since Facebook works through social networking, you’ll want to tell your local ‘real world’ customers about the new addition, you can run a small promotion in store and give away a free lunch once a month to somebody on your new fan list. Once your fan list starts building, each friend of your new addition will see that they’ve joined your page! That’s the best “word of mouth” advertising you could ask you.

Why Use Facebook?
Beyond the simple and staggering number of people who use Facebook, there’s a certain mindset to the community website, it’s about sharing positive experiences and linking to content worth sharing with friends. Since Facebook is about social community, linking to favourite pubs and eating establishments is just one more way for people to tell their friends who they really are.

How much does it cost to market with Facebook?
It’s free. Seriously, building a Facebook page costs nothing except an hour of your time to assemble some text, a few photographs and  a little bit of technical know how. Once you have the basic content together, setting up a Facebook profile is completely free for your company.

How to setup a Facebook profile for your restaurant
Setting up a Facebook page is actually very simple, first you need to visit Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/ and click the  Create Page link.  The next step will ask you to select your business type, just follow the picture here and select your local business as a restaurant.

Next, let’s add the title of your page. This should be the name of your restaurant or something very similar, often if you have a commonly named restaurant (There are over 700 Crown Pub’s in England for example) you may need to add a descriptive phrase such as the town or area to the title.

Finally, you need to verify that you are in fact a human being by typing a series of letters and then you can create your restaurant’s Facebook page. If you don’t already have a personal profile, Facebook will ask you to create one but don’t worry, it’s also free and easy.

Marketing with Facebook
Once your restaurant has a page of Facebook, you can easily upload some photographs and a brief description. It’s also possible for you to add your restaurant’s hours of operation, specials etc to help people know more about your business.

Since Facebook works through social networking, you’ll want to tell your local ‘real world’ customers about the new addition, you can run a small promotion in store and give away a free lunch once a month to somebody on your new fan list. Once your fan list starts building, each friend of your new addition will see that they’ve joined your page! That’s the best “word of mouth” advertising you could ask you.

Packaging isn’t limited to a grocery store (although it is a perfect example of packaging), we also judge the quality of a product based on its packaging at trade shows and industrial equipment, taking the time to put a little bit of trim work and paint on an old house almost always increases its value in the marketplace so why then, do so many people forget to properly package their own products?

Tropicana’s branding gamble
Packaging is such a funny thing that  we often don’t even notice how powerful it is but take the below example of what happened when Tropicana Orange Juice changed the packaging for its iconic orange juice from the traditional design on the left (with a great big orange) to a more upscale, generic style on the right.

The result (beyond a ton of media attention) was a consumer rebellion at the cash register, designers seem to like the new design but consumers hated it. The result? The company switched back to their original design. More importantly it helps designers and marketing people remember that packaging, whether it be retail or commercial is critical to the success of a product.

Regent Software is the brain child of Christopher Ross, a Fredericton website designer, online marketing junkie and software developer with a split personality. When he’s not busy creating awesome logos and websites, he’s building software tools for marking companies, custom database solutions and helping businesses market themselves on the internet.

The new design will be ready for Regent Software over the next few weeks but in the mean time, the website is here so our software is available for download.