I just added the Facebook Like button to each of the posts on Websites for Small Biz.

How did I do that? Easy, if you have a single.php file in your theme. Use the code in this WP Recipes post. I added it just below
<div class=“postmetadata”>
- code will vary from theme to theme.

Why the Like button? Folks can Like your post with one click. Easy exposure. No need to comment, just click.

Thanks to Robert Kopacz for his encouragement (who also has the Like button on his Madison, NJ video posts).

Has anyone tried out the new Tweet button from Twitter? I clicked on it on one post and find it created a funny looking shortened url. But that was just one post. Just did another one – it worked fine! Update: I just added the new Tweet button from Twitter and deactivated the BackTweet button.

Popularity: 4% [?]

For most of you, I will suggest you use WordPress. End of story. It is easy to use, easy to optimize for search engines, easy to install and to upgrade. Drupal is complex and typically needs a web developer to set it up (will this change with Drupal 7? Wait and see).

So why should some companies or organizations go with Drupal? I’m sure Drupal experts will have more answers than these, but at present I have three:

1. Dates: Dates and its various formats are built into the Drupal core. I did a calendar for WordPress, and the only place dates are set up as dates is in the scheduling and publishing function, so at first I used that for the calendar. Later we switched to using custom fields, which I would suggest with WordPress. Will WordPress 3.0 and its new content type functionality help make dates easier to use in WordPress?
2. Fine tuned Roles and Permissions: Also built into Drupal is the capability to put users in certain roles and fine tune the permissions allowed for each user. I am currently using a Drupal module called Taxonomy Access Control to do the fine tuning of permissions.
3. Views: once you learn how to use Views in Drupal, you can display your data in multiple ways and locations on your site.

If you have worked with both WordPress and Drupal, what do you see as the strengths of these two systems? Weaknesses? Looking forward as both grow and continue to compete with each other.

Some links that discuss WordPress and Drupal:

• Comparisons between WordPress and Drupal
• Drupal vs WordPress: Which one is right for you?
• Drupal 7 vs. WordPress 3: Battle of the New Features

(Oh, and that’s not the *real* Drupal icon on the upper right of this post – that’s my dressed up version).

Popularity: 14% [?]

I see posts and workshops where people say, learn how to do your website yourself. I am all for someone learning how to code, learning HTML, learning CSS and SEO. However, if you think all this is simple, then you haven’t learned much. I’ve discovered that most difficult website challenges happen around the time of upgrades. This post will end with some common precautionary steps one should take in upgrading a CMS (content management system) software using one of the big three, WordPress, Joomla! or Drupal. I also note a few tales specific to those systems.

Recently, we upgraded a site at Rutgers from Joomla! 1.0 to Joomla! 1.5. When an upgrade this major is done, first it is done on a “play” copy of the site, called a sandbox. That way initial problems are discovered and fixed before going live. I encouraged my clients who use WordPress to do the same: do the initial upgrade on a copy of the site. Although at first I found few problems, as I went through our newly upgraded site, I noticed that the global settings had been changed. So there is a warning specific to Joomla!: check the global settings. We also had to change several modules related to playing videos, a photo gallery, and a slideshow. So I had to tweak specific files to get those to work again.

Some upgrades are small, and some are big. Last year I started working on a site that was done in Drupal 5. I discovered it was so much work to change that particular site (because a lot had been tweaked and tailored to the site) to Drupal 6 that the client and I decided it was a fine time to switch the entire site to WordPress. An upgrade from Drupal 6.2 to Drupal 6.3, on the other hand, would not have nearly been as dramatic.

Sometimes you can use upgrade time as a time to reassess how your site is done. Soon WordPress will release WordPress 3.0. You can read this post on Six Revisions to learn more about the new features. One of the new features is a new default theme. I am strongly considering using the new default theme for one of my sites instead of the current one, as the new default theme looks promising and has flexible options.

Here are a few basics steps in upgrading (can you think of others? feel free to say so in the comments):

1. Make a complete copy of your site and upgrade that one first. Look at it carefully to see what might have stopped working and what may need fixing.
2. Back up both your database AND your theme files. If for some reason your site doesn’t work after upgrading, try the default theme. Does that one work? Then something in your theme files needs fixing. Or consider switching themes. If you have tweaked your theme a lot, you may find you need to rework the theme to get the tweaks to work again.
3. Check the pages, the posts, the videos, photo galleries, the forms, and any other specialized feature you have added to your site.
4. Sometimes a plugin that worked before will not work with a new upgrade. Remember that you can delete a plugin by renaming the plugin folder (or deleted the plugin files) so it doesn’t get picked up by your CMS.
5. Permissions: I find this is more of an issue with Drupal or Joomla than with WordPress. Make sure the people that need to see a page can see it, and those who should not cannot.
6. Conflicting plugins: You may proceed to use your site for a while and then discover something that used to work no longer works. In one case with WordPress, for example, we had loaded two plugins that conflicted, so a page no longer sorted properly. We deleted the less useful plugin, and the problem was fixed.

Finally, if something does go wrong that you cannot fix, be aware that someone else may have had the problem. Search the web for a solution or ask on Twitter. If you don’t find an answer that way, try asking the question in a forum.

Do you have any upgrade tales?

Popularity: 3% [?]

In an effort to explore the question of “Do you have social media icons with links on your website or blog?” I set up this poll. I am hoping we can all gain from the information.

The poll will be open for one week. If you could also answer the question about your background, that would helpful as well.

Upcoming: a slideshow of social media icons on various websites or blogs. Feel free to submit a link to your site, if you wish me to include it in the slideshow. Also, if you have a linked icon to social media not included in this poll, please mention it in your comments. I didn’t want the poll to get too long.

For those wanting more explanation: A social media icon is an image that represents a social media site, with Facebook and Twitter being the two most popular. Users are encouraged to click on them to connect and to gain more information about a person, business or organization. These two polls were created with a plugin called WP-Polls.

Popularity: 7% [?]

One easy way for a small business to get some presence on the web is by creating a Facebook Fan Page. Can you fill out an online form? Then you can create a fan page. Here are two small hurdles for you to overcome in creating the page:

1. Where do I create the page? Answer: Create a Page.
2. What kind of avatar do I need for the page? Answer: a vertical one (or a square) – size can be up to 600px in height – maximum size is 200px by 600px.

Use Keywords on Your Facebook Page

When you create your page, if you are a local business serving a geographical area, be sure to put keywords describing the area in your description if it is not already in your name. So, for example, if you are in New Jersey, and you expect people will use the search term “New Jersey” to look for a business like yours, be sure to use New Jersey. Put keywords into Google and see where (or if) your page shows up with those keywords.

Update the Page

Update your page frequently, but not so much to be annoying. Provide a service in your updates!

A. Harrington Limousine Services is one example of a small business with frequent updates related to travel, snow, spring, supplies and local charities. Note also the creative use of the professionals in the photo welcoming you to their limousines. You can use your logo, but if it’s longer in width than in height, it’s going to get cropped, so be prepared to experiment with the avatar that you use for the page.

Interact with the Customers

Use the opportunity to interact with your customers! In this example, a restaurant called Fiddleheads in Jamesburg, New Jersey writes a comment back to an enthused customer:

Shorten Your URL

It used to be that you had to wait until you had 100 fans before you could shorten your Facebook Fan Page URL. No more: see
Create a Facebook Fan Page URL in 2 Minutes or Less. So what are you waiting for? Make it is easier for customers to find you.

Get Fancy: Learn FBML

Facebook even has its own mini language for manipulating your fan page. If you are a small business, you can probably do a lot without many of the bells and whistles of FBML. Know it’s available so if you want your page to have an extra special zing, FBML might have a way to do it. FBML can help you add video, change the look of your fan page, or add more boxes to your page. See more on FBML in the “Learn More” section below.

Learn More

For more information:

• How to Create the Perfect Facebook Fan Page by Jesse Stay
• 3 Really Simple Ways To Spruce Up Your FaceBook Fan Page by Donna Maria
• Why Doesn’t Your Organization Have a Facebook Fan Page? by Ryan Hanley
• 26 Facebook Fan Page tips for business users. Or the Fan Page cheat sheet. by Jimmy Gilmore
• 13 Ways to Move Your Facebook Fans to Action
• Tutorial: Customize Facebook Pages with “Static FBML” application
• Add Multiple Boxes on Facebook Fan Page Using FBML

Do you have a favorite Facebook fan page, your own or someone else’s? Feel free to leave the link in the comments, and I may feature the page in a future post.

Feel free to follow this blog on Facebook at:
http://www.facebook.com/websitesforsmallbiz
I welcome you and your input.

Popularity: 43% [?]

With this post I am starting a new section of my blog in which I will highlight posts from elsewhere that might be useful to you as you think about your website and growing your business. Each post of Link Picks with include one of my photos; if you want to see more of my photography, please visit the photography category of my Here in HP blog.

Four Common Steps Every New Blogger Would Face When Starting A Blog

Marcell Purham writes about approaching a new blog: design & code, posts & tutorials, building a list of followers, and making money. If you need help with design and code, these are some of the services I can provide.

How to receive notifications when someone posts to your Facebook fan page

If you have a Facebook fan page (and these are really easy to set up and useful for a business or organization), you will discover that you don’t get notifications when it is updated as you do for your personal Facebook account. Pete Codella has a workaround, where you “like” your Facebook fan page update and thus get notified. As you will read in the comments, it’s not perfect, but it could be useful to you.

How small businesses can use Twitter lists

Location, subject or theme and thought leaders are some ideas of how you can organize Twitter lists to the advantage of your business or organization.

How Many of These Social Media Questions Can You Answer?

Shari Weiss is teaching her students about social media. She asks some great questions to get one thinking about social media. I like “How can you detect if someone is insincere?”

Hope you find these useful. As always, feel free to comment on any of these topics.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Here are three pearls of wisdom for you on blogging and your small business (or non-profit organization):

1. If you are going to choose or start with only one form of social media, set up a blog.
2. Whatever system you choose for your blog, keep it up-to-date. (side note: I had a Drupal installation that I wasn’t keeping up-to-date; yesterday it got hacked. Since I am not using it anyway, I just took it offline. Unless you are extremely technically-inclined, I don’t recommend Drupal for a small business blog – stick to WordPress).
3. Links in comments in WordPress installations by default are nofollow.

Many of you may ask, what does that mean, that a link is nofollow? It means that when a search engine such as Google crawls your blog, it does not follow links that are labeled “nofollow.” Google explains: “those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results.” You can see the nofollow tag if you look at the source code for a post on your site. It might look something like this:

Should you do anything about the nofollow tag? If you are just starting out, just leave it as is. After blogging for a while, you can read the pros and cons of changing the nofollow tag to dofollow (easiest way to do this is add dofollow plugin – I definitely DO NOT recommend directly changing your core WordPress code as some posts suggest).

As an experiment, I just changed this blog to dofollow – so if you are more inclined to leave a comment because this is a dofollow blog, then the experiment works. If you leave a link that has no relation to the post, your whole comment may be in danger of deletion. But you won’t do that, right?

Thanks to Hannah Katsman for coming up with the idea for this post.

Popularity: 3% [?]

What is a Twitter Landing Page? Why create one?

Twitter presents many people to you in a stream; you are given one link in your profile to make a presentation. Some professionals develop a unique Twitter Landing Page to introduce themselves to new people. To learn more:

• ProBlogger: Develop a Twitter Landing Page
• Unbounce: What is a Twitter Landing Page?

And here are ten pages that I found noteworthy:

Glenn Hilton

Glenn Hilton’s page features a large graphic with a photo in the upper left corner that changes upon refresh and a Twitter-like look. He explains his use of Twitter, and he has a comment form at the bottom.

Meryl K. Evans

Meryl K. Evans uses her page to give a basic introduction to herself. The main graphic on the page is her logo – the other eye-catching elements are the subscribe buttons – clearly, she wants you to come back and read more!

Eric Hall

What I like about Eric’s page is his photo: it’s warm and welcoming. Makes one feel comfortable approaching him to do business. Under the company logo he has a search box, giving one the opportunity to find out more in an easy fashion.

Joanna Young

Joanna’s photo of an orange umbrella surrounded by many gray umbrellas with “Power up your words and find your writing voice” catches my eye. Yes, the image does exude confidence.

Leah Jones

The Twitter landing page of Leah Jones has one big image – her company logo. On this page we learn about “phatic communication” and how she wanted to hate Twitter when she started.

Matthew Lyle

I like the black-and-white sophistication (matched with monochrome photo) and clarity of Matthew’s page.

Beth Kanter

Beth’s page features both a smiling, friendly photo of herself as well as an action photo, showing her presenting. The page has a multitude of information and links to more about non-profits in general.

Heidi Cool

Heidi welcomes readers to her page, explains her web development business and social media philosophy, and tells her Twitter following policy. The main imagery is her photo, which has a black background, as does the background of her site.

Laura Fitton

Laura uses a lot of icon imagery on her Twitter Landing Page. The background is basic white, and the yellows of her books on the right stand out against the abundant use of the sky blue color on her page. Her attractive photo, with its dark brown background, is in the upper left, a place one’s eye usually looks first.

Leora Wenger

Finally, here is my page – I emphasized imagery and design with just enough text to relay the message. Plenty of links to click on this page if you want to find out more.

Thank you to Debra Askanase and Nedra Weinrich for suggesting some of these pages.

Upcoming Posts – Your Input Wanted

Do you have a page on your website (or on a friend’s) that you feel is noteworthy? Feel free to include the link in the comments.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Audience for New Websites for Small Biz blog

I plan to gear the new blog toward any of these readers:

• Small business owners who need a website
• Small business owners who want to improve their website
• Technical people who work for small businesses or for organizations such as libraries, university departments, agencies
• People who are thinking of setting up their own business or setting up a professional blog
• Students who want to learn web design and/or development
• Anyone curious about technical aspects of websites, WordPress or other web building systems

Topics for the new blog might be WordPress, Twitter, social media, Drupal, PHP, learning to code, hiring technical staff, networking, logo design, web security, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), navigation, CSS and more. Once the blog gets established, I plan to have guest posts or interviews, too.

Popularity: 1% [?]