Archive for February 2011

The power of creative emails with online marketing tags

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011
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If you are in sales these days you are familiar with the wall that stands between you and your prospect. The voice mail wall. At Canada’s Web Shop we do not use cold calling as a sales lead tactic. If you use cold calling the voice mail wall is even worse, good luck to getting through to the right people. We find that even once you get a prospect in the sales funnel it is difficult to get a hold of prospects.

One of the tactics that we use is creative emails that get prospects attention. Here are a few elements to these creative emails:

Simplifying the drawing of forms in Symfony

Friday, February 18th, 2011
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Implementing forms in 2011 is still a challenge, even with a framework like Symfony helping you along. sfForm is great for defining widgets and validators but it sucks at outputting practical markup.

Practical Markup

For me, the ideal markup for a form field looks like:

This gives me a lot of flexiblity for styling. Unfortunately I was never able to find a way to acheive this using formatters, and so I continued on writing very verbose forms. Luckily I grew weary of this and decided to see if I could create a helper to ease the output of forms. The following is what I cam up with:

Justin Bieber is a true social media story

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011
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For Valentine’s day my wife decided to take our two daughters to the Justin Bieber movie “Never Say Never”.  She asked me if I wanted to come and I said well it would not be my first choice but I would rather spend Valentine’s night with my family.  As I was watching the movie it outlined how he came to fame and how hard this young Canadian boy worked to get where he was, I thought this kid is getting a bad rap from a lot of people just because he is popular.  My opinion of him completely changed and I thought it was cute how all the girls in the theatre (including my two daughters) screamed when the movie was over.

WordPress Presentation – Winnipeg Code Camp

Monday, February 14th, 2011
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The 4th annual Winnipeg Code Camp is happening at the end of the month, Feb 26th, 8AM to 5PM, at the Red River College’s Princess St. campus. You should attend if you are a software developer living in Manitoba!

I’ve had the pleasure of attending the event each of the previous 3 times, and this year I am presenting on a topic which has shaped 2010 for me – WordPress.

Learning from Walt Disney

Thursday, February 10th, 2011
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I just got back from Disney World with my family and I wanted to share some of the differences of the Disney experience and why they do such a great job:

  1. All staff are upbeat and generally look like they are very happy working at their job, this makes it an enjoyable place for other employees to work and an enjoyable place to visit.
  2. The customer is always right, I think they invented this concept, if anything is remotely wrong the staff will do everything in their power to make things right

The Colour of Action

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011
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In 7 Rules for Landing Page Optimization by Jonathan Mendez he recommends:

“Tell your brand team to go to hell and throw your styleguide out the window. Red buttons can by themselves raise your conversion rate.”

We all want our call to action to stand out, but one colour does not fit all. I’ve always been in the school of thought that in order to make your call to action stand out, contrast is your best friend. This is best achieved by selecting a colour directly opposite to your websites main colour/s on a colour wheel. For example, on a Blue website, Orange stands out best. On a green website Red/Violet are your best bet.

Super (Marketing) Sunday

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011
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It’s that time of year again where hundreds of millions of people sit in front of their T.V’s and get subjected to three and a half hours of glorious football, and six to seven hours of product placement and over the top advertisements. Companies obviously pay an arm and a leg for T.V time that reaches a larger audience than any other televised event, and now more than ever they’re trying to stretch that $200,000 minute long commercial into further exposure…using online resources!