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Footerama in Smashing Mag’s tweet

whitehats — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 11:22:22 +0000

Smashing Magazine tweets about Footerama! It feels like as if your child is in Dean’s list.

Sadly, Footerama couldn’ take it and it’s server went down! We are working hard on resolving the issue, and soon will be back up with a couple of features added. Please bear with us in our 15 minutes of fame.

Are you paying attention?!

whitehats — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 12:08:28 +0000

“There are two kinds of men who never amount to much: those who cannot do what they are told, and those who can do nothing else.”

– Cyrus H. Curtis

AnuKram – the First Look

whitehats — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:58:52 +0000

AnuKram (Sanskrit for Index) is a minimalist wordpress theme where the emphasis is on the content. The index page, as you can see, resembles the content, index page of an old-age book. The theme is based off Typogridphy framework for its excellent typography support.

Soon to release..

After looking at some HTML5 coding, we have decided to make AnuKram a HTML5 theme. More reasons to enjoy!!

New Colors

whitehats — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:33:52 +0000

So we ditch white!!!

Not from our work ethics. From our website colors. And we go daring – pink. And minimal than before. So no sidebars. We dreaded them when we had to use them on Footerama. This is rather plain. But it’s interesting. There are some cool CSS tricks there, like pull quotes. The posts will not follow one boring template.

What do you think? Like it? Hate it? Loved it, or can’t stand it?

FooteRama.com, and a few free WordPress themes!!

whitehats — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:22:12 +0000

The planned footer designs gallery, http://footerama.com is about to go live. I have just uploaded a temp page with a form for visitors to submit cool website footer designs which I will then add to the database once the website is live.

In addition to that I will be releasing TWO free WordPress themes soon. One called NineteenFortySeven is a newspaper theme, and second one called Anucram for now is based off pocketbooks. Intrigued? Well, you must be!

Keep checking this space for more info.

WP (WordPress) eCommerce Plugin Customization

whitehats — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:23:49 +0000

Recently we had a web development assignment for an eCommerce website.

Due to some circumstances not interesting to others, we decided to develop the website using WordPress 2.8.4 using WhiteSpace theme by Brian Gardner and Zen Cart. After some research WP eCommerce 3.7.4 by Instinct was looking a good choice, if we had to move away from ZC. It was always kept in mind to integrate Zen Cart with WordPress as for some reasons and articles I read online, integration of ZC and WP was easier than configuration of ZC for a static website.
WP eCommerce comes in different flavors – free version that comes with a lot of goodies, and the Gold Cart version with some additional features like Grid View for products.
Our challenges were:

Our shopping cart wasn’t working as it should.
- None of the gateways worked for any Indian Billing or Shipping address.
- PayPal gateway worked fine for a non-Indian shipping address, while the Manual gateway worked at its own whim.
- When the “Make Purchase” button was clicked, all it did was refresh the Check Out page. On Local installation everything worked fine.
Split the categories between the Left Sidebar and Top Navigation bar. Exclude the Top Products category from the Left Sidebar along with other categories.
Display images in the list of Top Products.

Let’s see how each issue was tackled one-by-one:

What you need – download WPStore theme by WPFeed.com. We are going to use functions from this theme for our purpose.

WP eCommerce is a very helpful plugin for creating WordPress based small shops. The plugin comes with great in-built functionality, however, one wishes there were more customizations available for no price.

1. WP eCommerce Shopping Cart fix -

Since the local installation was working as smooth as possible, there was definitely something fishy on the live server side. The issue was found at the most unusual place – the Shipping address (unusual because one, shipping address was not mandatory and two, often when shipping address was selected to be same as billing address the problem would not appear).

The STATE field in the shipping address was mandatory in the eCommerce Shipping Info. configuration. However for some weird reason, this field was not appearing on the front-end screen. So when the ‘Make Purchase’ button was clicked, the Java Script gave “Fill all the required fields” error. It would become confusing for the user because the input field ‘STATE’ was not on the screen at all.

2. Display Product Categories at Different Locations -
We split the Product Categories in two Groups – Categories and Header Nav categories.
If you look in functions.php, the Show_cats function is displayed by the Group Id. This Group ID for the Header Nav group was ‘3′, as the default installation had used 1 and 2 for categories and brands. We created a new function, show_tagline_cat using the same code of show_Cats but with hard-coded group_id 3. The same function was added in the header file to display desired categories links.
During this we also tackled another challenge – sorting the categories. Right now categories are sorted by as-added basis. We have changed this to display them in descending order but it can be changed to display alphabetically as well.

3. Display images in Top Products list -
Adding the code from function display_latest_products to function display_top_products – both from the function.php of WPStore theme. The Latest Products function is set to display product images and the same code can be recycled to display images along with the Top Products as well. You can add a loop in the new function to limit the number of displayed Top Products.
The website looks like this – http://www.highchoicelowprice.com . We have some tidying up to do in the CSS, but it is functional and our client wants to continue with that for now.
Feel free to comment or send questions if you have any.

PS: A super thanks to Jigar Pandya for his untiring help during this entire mission.

Social Media Marketing – an overview

whitehats — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:56:07 +0000

Why you and your company need Social Media Marketing –

The Short Story:

Practically free, high traffic platforms
Very highly sophisticated communication tools at your service, again cost-free
All you have to manage is the content, and great customer friendly service (but you already have it, don’t you?)
Search Engine Friendliness of Social Media and Bookmarking sites
Strong and reliable back-links
Ability to follow trends and market and client inclinations
Marvelous Search Engine Optimization value
For small and medium sized organizations, where by the nature of their business, the knowledge and skills are bigger selling points than marketing budget, it is very important to create your brand as a know-how, go-to place for your domain. You can do this best by investing your time and resource in social media than spending out a fortune on traditional marketing ploys.

The Long Story:

The Hiker’s Guide to Social Media

What White Hats would do for your brand and business:

Help you setup and create User-friendly and SEO-friendly Blogs
Help you generate useful content for your blogs
Spread your blog and its content by Social Bookmarking, Blog Directory Submissions
Help you create great articles about your business
Post articles on high traffic and high page rank article directories so that maximum people read them
Social Media Accounts set-up
Strategy planning for the social media usage that yields maximum benefit to your business
Participate in Niche forums to help others with your knowledge. It creates good karma and establishes yourself as a reliable brand in your field. Remember, what goes around, comes back.
Create a solid Online Reputation by active social and community participation
This and a lot more…

A hiker’s guide to Social Media

whitehats — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:38:58 +0000

Online Marketing did not have a lot of options just a few years ago. The available technology allowed companies and organizations a platform to create forums where people will come and share knowledge, talk, socialize. The best forums did not have the look and feel to crave about. Although from a functional point of view, forums provide a much needed social meet-up place for people with similar interests, sometimes very specific in nature. A lot of times the forums members did not subscribe to the idea of revealing their real identities to other forum members. Mostly they hid behind avatars of Homer Simpson and a nickname straight out of a geek novel.

Blogging came and was seen as a way to put forth one’s ideas on a global platform. Although strictly personal, it was lapped up quickly by netizens. People found it very easy to create blogs and write about stuff they liked, they cared about, that bothered them, that they felt should be changed, just about everything. A few blogs succeeded, a larger chunk went into oblivion. But it changed the way people started connecting.

Soon though blogging picked up as a tool for top executives to connect directly with their audience. There was no press in between and you could (mostly) read thoughts, opinions coming from the horse’s mouth (One of my earlier blog memory is of reading the blog of Rahul Sood). The trend spread like a wild-fire, and for all good reasons. What could be a better way for a company to connect with its clients than a direct communication like this?

At the same time there was another change coming in the way people connected on the web. Social Media. There were websites on the horizon that wanted old classmates to reconnect on the web, new friends to share a space. And it is then that someone realized that under the layer of corporation-customer network of a Social networking sites and its users, another layer could be created – some users would be providers and other its users.

It started with music bands and pop culture as it would normally be. Indie musicians used this free platform to find new fan-base and keep in touch with the existing ones. Demo tapes started to disappear in favor of MySpace links. Soon films joined the chorus, and it helped them create the initial buzz around their upcoming film or album.

The suite of social networking sites was taken further by the likes of FaceBook (a personal networking tool) and LinkedIn (a professional networking tool). Along the same lines a new concept of Social Bookmarking emerged, and people started sharing their bookmarks with the entire works. This started chain reactions in popularity of content that was unbelievable before. Viral spread of information had started to take a new meaning.

By this time everyone had realized why they should be on social media wagon. It was just too good to neglect to network with their clients without practically investing into creating your own system. You could utilize the existing prominent pod, and ride on its popularity and traffic to spread your voice. Just too good to pass up. Today it is absolutely out of fashion to not be on FB or LinkedIn or both.

FaceBook, LinkedIn, Orkut, MySpace – all had a common feature; that of being able to update your friends and connections about your status, i.e. what you were doing, where you were going. Just abut any text or even a link. Some brains thought of creating a service purely based off the idea of status updates. Hence was born Twitter, a micro-blogging facility where you could post a single ‘tweet’ 140 characters long to tell your friends what was up.

Twitter has redefined how companies now connect with their customers. A real time search, link sharing, follow features, interesting buzz creation – all in measly 140 characters was an attractive challenge for corporates. The best part is that you could always silently follow your prospects and know about them, without actually ever intruding them.

It has become hard to ignore these developments for any business. You could only ignore them if you want to ignore your clients (or if you want to create your own platforms which may or may not draw traffic). On the other hand, you can utilize the social media to know a lot about your clients. There is a huge opportunity to have a one-on-one dialogue with the client, as well as mass announcements. And this seems to be just a beginning of what is about to come with Web 3.0.

Custom Shaped Websites anyone?

whitehats — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:55:22 +0000

It is just one of those crazy thoughts that leave as soon as you are out of the shower. But I digress.

“Honestly even with grids and blah blah, the square shape is getting truly boring!”

Will the next generation websites have a form of custom shapes? What if we want to create round shaped web pages? Of course it can be done even today….with lots of white space on the sides.

One reason why custom shapes do not work as well as traditional squares and rectangles is that the custom shapes still needs to be enveloped in a traditional cover. Greetings cards have always trodden on this path with having starfish and octopus-shaped cards, but in the end..alas..they had to be put in a boring rectangle envelope. Another very common example is that of CDs, DVDs and vinyl records (which by the way, are not extinct. Not yet!)

An ‘envelope’ in our sense would be a browser. If a browser window does not support the custom-shape by adapting to the shape of the webpage, it would be useless. That brings me to my next point.

One big evolutionary step the browsers will need to take, with this kind of changes in web design, will be ability shape-shift according to the web-page. The browser toolbars, title bar and status bar – all these can either be in floating form or absent entirely. Who uses them anyway, right? I use my keyboard for most of my operations, and a lot of you would be, too.

So, what do you say? Do you see web designs going this way in the future? Feel free to leave your comments. Let’s have a dialogue, and hopefully we WILL take web design in this direction.

Online Reputation Management (ORM)

whitehats — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 16:27:51 +0000

In today’s time, whether you are a company selling certain services or products or a person going for a regular career – very high chances are that your prospective client or your prospective employer is going to google your name before even initiating a dialog or an interview process.

What if they saw couple of negative reviews? Or that MySpace account where all you posted was pictures from last night’s bachelor party? Or anything that is less than acceptable? May be you were a member of political party with an extreme point of view, which may not be preferred by your employers?

A lot of companies give importance to your behavior or reputation outside the company. If you are a company who sells services it becomes even more important for you to have positive feedback and reviews show up on at least the first three pages of search engine results. Hopefully your clients will not look beyond that page.

We can help you iron out those creases of negative reviews (or objectionable material in a broader sense) to promote your positive USP better online. There are a lot of ways you can do it, and our experience has taught us all of them. A few things by which we help our customers achieve this are:

Search Engine Optimization – so that your website always stays on the first page of the search engine results.
Social Media – we cannot get enough of blowing this trumpet. You got to have a strong social media presence. It helps not only pushing your site higher on the search results, but also establishing a quality dialog with your clients. Plus, you are often saved from establishing your own system for that and let social media take care of it. By handling your customers’ feedback in an open platform, you also establish a better overall trust.
Generation of Helpful Content – We help you push out helpful content to your target audience. It creates a good karma, too.

These two are just a few of our ideas to create a better reputation and ‘online brand’. Get in touch with us so we can help you actually do this.