Check it out! You can see the cute little side tabs on the left side of this page. You can put anything you like in those side tabs. Most people will put FB and twitter info, but it can be other stuff too. Announce upcoming sales, new backdrops, etc. – really, anything you like! I’m going to play around with it a little bit and see what I come up with. It’s a free plug-in that you can download from SLRlounge, but it’s not as simple as just installing the plug-in and telling it where to go. You have to muck around a tiny bit in the code to make it work. They do have a nice tutorial as part of the plug-in, but if you don’t want to deal with it I can install the plug-in and get everything configured for you. It’s $25 for the service, just drop me a line at heather@lovebugsphotography.com if you need help!
A new single-column version of Tofurious came out today, with lots of bells and whistles. Here is a shot of the new theme:
And here are the important features:
- It’s got a banner that has a non-flash slideshow – so it will work on iPods and iPads!
- Customizable profile section
- A place to do custom post excerpts
- Call to action section
- Roll-out tags
- Post divider upload function
- Widgetized sidebar footer
There are two versions of the theme – a free version without the back-end control panel, and a paid version for those who prefer not to deal with the code. Lawrence is offering a special discount coupon to those who tweet or FB the new release, so be sure to hop on over and check it out!
I recently read a couple of books about using social networking to grow your business. They were both freebies through the Amazon Kindle store, so if you have a Kindle or iPad (or even just the Kindle app on your desktop), they are worth a look.
The first book is 33 Million People in the Room: How to Create, Influence, and Run a Successful Business with Social Networking. It describes some of the various social networks, their target audiences, and how they can be used to expand your presence online. The author discusses several case studies that can be applied.
The second book is Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business. This one isn’t as useful for one-person operations as much of it is about empowering your employees to be innovative and helpful in the customer service arena, but it is still useful for its case studies of how social networking can make a difference.
While I do most of my work on photography-related sites, not all of them are in the photography world. There are many blogs out there with all sorts of topics covered, and sometimes I even get to work on those! I’d like to share a site that I ran across recently that might make sense for those who have blogs that aren’t businesses, or who don’t mind posting about some of the various services and products that are out there. Heck, even some photographers might find it useful in trying to build clientele or introduce new products!
The site is Business2Blogger, and it pairs up businesses with bloggers. If you have a business or a service and you would like to get a little buzz going, one way is to offer those products and services to the people who can talk about it – bloggers! And if you’re a blogger who would like to try these new products and services in exchange for a review on your blog, this is the site that can hook you up.
The service is free to both bloggers and businesses, so check it out!
I get lots of requests for this sort of thing: a video tutorial on how to use your wordpress dashboard! This youtube video will walk you through some of the most important functions of the wordpress dashboard. The full tutorial is here.
