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Sausage Sizzler - Italian Stallion |
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G'day Sizzlers!
Looks like I am off on another short and sweet road trip. I am
going to the FMI Trade Show
held at McCormick Place, Chicago. I suppose you are asking what
the Supermarket Industry has to do with the Web. Well it appears
that every supplier of products and equipment has a Web site -- a
sign that the Internet truly has reached early adolescence!
Seriously, my wife, Karissa, has landed
herself the Sales and Marketing Assistant position at Borgen Systems and this will give her an
insight into the marketing side of the company.
Borgen are paying $130 a piece for Karissa and I to attend two
days of the three day Supermarket extravaganza. Now doesn't that put
into perspective just how cheap Gnomedex
is? So get on your employers back and
get them to spring for a ticket. Lockergnome even includes a
little food and entertainment for the price, along with speakers
that will share their knowledge and experience with you. If that
doesn't convince them let me just say the Italian Stallion himself
will be there! You will go back to the office informed, relaxed
and inspired!
Finally this week I have a quest for you all. See the font used
under the Sausage logo? (It spells out Sausage). I believe this
font was created specifically for us. However if you think you have
seen an exact match somewhere and can get your hands on the
actual font, not only will I be eternally grateful, but I will
award thee with a glorious prize. The Sausage Team and I will
judge if what is found actually does match, with the first
correct entry being declared the winner!
Keep on sizzling!
Nathan Allan
Sausage Sizzler Editor
editor@sausage.com
P.S. The Italian Stallion is only Chris Pirillo so don't get too excited.
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Tables
Roland Piquepaille, an avid reader, pointed out the fact that most
attributes for tables are not compliant with the latest W3C
standards. He also pointed out that regardless of that, a page built to
the standards will not render properly in most browsers.
So it comes down to a matter of testing your page to see how it
looks best on all browsers, or drawing a line and saying you must
use a particular browser to view the page (I am not an advocate
for this though).
So we are still going to go over some of the basic attributes for
a table. Starting with the table tag.
<table align="left" border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" width="90%">
- Align - this with place your table on the web page. Left, right or center.
- Border - set to zero it will display no border. Any other number will add a border to cells of the specified thickness
- Cellpadding - defines the space left around the edge of the interior of the cells
- Cellspacing - defines the space between cells
- Width - defines the width of the table. With a fixed or percentage value can be used.
There are other attributes but these are the basic ones.
Tip by Nathan Allan
Spotlighting some spotlights
Over the past few weeks I have spotlighted a variety of areas
within the forums. This week I would like to spotlight the
ENTIRE forum system. There is a lot of great stuff going on
here. Like what you say? From personal experiences and from
interacting with the people that frequent the forums, there is a
plethora of talent there. I have had the pleasure and privilege
of sharing ideas and getting help from programmers and designers
alike.
The skill set that frequents this bulletin board is literally
unimaginable. Should any headhunter ever need to find talent, I
would say the pool is overflowing.
Lastly, I have seen a tremendous amount of thread views (very
high counts actually) but I have not seen many replies. Why not?
The more people reply and post the more reason there will be for
others to join in.
Come on in and stay for a while:
http://www.sizzlerforums.com/
EDITORS NOTE: Make certain you put a valid email address so your
registration can be confirmed. If you do not receive a
confirmation email, or have had problems registering feel free to
contact me directly at nathan@sausage.com and I will try and
resolve the problem.
Review by Bram Leland Scolnick
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Take it to market!
Did you ever think of yourself as a marketing professional? What
about a sales person? When you set out to build a web site, what
is your goal? Whom are you creating it for? How do you get your
name out there and become as popular as Amazon or Yahoo!?
You have built your web site. You have your products displayed
in blazing glory. You have your content ready for reading. Now
the real challenge: how do you market it? How do you drive traffic
to your site? If you are a company selling products, how do you
tie your company’s product advertising into a strong web
campaign?
There are bunches and bunches of questions to be asked and just
as many answers that can be derived. Many people build a
personal site to show off pictures of kids or family events and
drive traffic via e-mail invites. That works very well because
regardless of design, the content is welcome and a hunger exists.
How do you market your site to a stranger? How do you get the
stranger to be hungry to view your site? I suppose that all
depends on your or your company’s budget. For example, there are
many one-stop travel sites in existence. I have checked out some
of the more known brands such as Travelocity, Expedia and
Priceline. Recently I have been hearing ads on the radio for a
new travel site named Hotwire.
Clearly to be on the radio they have money to spend as well as
‘products’ to sell. Marketing with money is much easier to do
but there also needs to be a smart, effective plan. Think back
to the dot-coms that blew millions of dollars for Super Bowl ads.
Think back also to how many of them died soon.
There are many great ways to market a site. National marketing
is tough to do at first, so maybe its better to start off locally
and then grow into national. Some great ways to market are
relatively inexpensive and easy to accomplish.
Grassroots / Guerilla Marketing is a very effective means to an
end. Create your site and get it ready for visitors. Then you
create a flyer and go to a copy shop to make thousands of copies.
If you want to save money, use letter sized paper and make your
flyer 4-up on the page. Would like to get even more of your
message out? Create a 2-sided document. Care to be noticed?
Use colored paper. Now what? Hit the pavement! Blanket the
parking lots, hand them out to people and create a buzz.
All of this can lead to another great way to do marketing called
‘Word of Mouth’ marketing. The hopes, of course, are that at least
some of the readers of your flyer will check out your site, find
it to be amazing and then spread the word.
What if you have a shopping site of your own and you want to get
traffic to your site? Have you heard of the tiny site named
eBay? The last time I checked they were experiencing ‘only’ 37
million visitors per day (that is individual sets of eye balls,
not page views). What does one do with that? Well, imagine
that you post one of your products on eBay and in your posting you
advertise your site. If all you get is 0.5% click-through, keep
in mind that it is still 185,000 sets of eyeballs. Not bad.
These are only some ways of getting things done. Share some of
your ideas here!
http://www.sizzlerforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=360
Discuss your experiences with Bram Leland Scolnick
Do you have an mLife?
With all the hype and marketing campaigns flying around the
airwaves here in the USA, one might think that wireless phone
service providers are going for broke with their schemes and
scams. Companies such as AT&T Wireless are promoting their new
mLife thing.
What recently caught my attention were their OTHER new service
and the new phones that go with it. mMode. I find it almost insane what this
service and these phones can do. It is 100% focus on services
provided via the wireless Internet. Among other things I have
read, one key feature is High Speed Access. I did not look very
hard for the specs but I do recall a comparison to DSL speeds. I
know that I read information about content provision, and pretty
much anything you can find online.
I am thinking to myself it is going to be a major pain in my butt
to view all this data, even at high speeds, on a tiny screen.
Sure, it is a color screen but tiny.
Then I thought to myself "who on earth is designing the content
for this stuff?" Clearly, wireless is coming on strong and soon
our PDAs and phones will be always online devices somehow
connected to our home or office PCs. Security and delivery will
be factors.
How many of you now consider what your site has to offer now or
in the future in terms of wireless (PDA and cell phone) access?
http://www.sizzlerforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=364
(mLife and mMode are registered Trademarks of AT&T Wireless)
Discuss with Bram Leland Scolnick
Name: The Open Directory Project
Cost: Freeware
Website: http://dmoz.org/
Although not a application, this search engine is still a
Supertool in my eyes and a vital part of any Webmaster's plan in
making their Web site number one.
"The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive
human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and
maintained by a vast global community of volunteer editors." That is
the quote that the Open Directory Project (ODP) uses to define itself.
It does it so well that I wouldn't attempt to re-purpose or put it
in my own words. However it doesn't truly give you an idea of
the size of such a project.
Bruce Perdue who is a reader and volunteer editor for the
directory told me that this directory is used by many well known
search engines for content. In turn this basically means you need
your site reviewed by these guys!
Bruce sent me the following URL which lists all the engines using
the ODP directory:
http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Searching/Directories/Open_Directory_Project/Sites_Using_ODP_Data/
To have your own site reviewed go to:
http://dmoz.org/help/submit.html
Review by Nathan Allan
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- Go to: http://www.sizzlerforums.com
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