Importing Excel Tables into InDesign

InDesign does not import tables from Excel as well as Quark. Here's a tip I found today from an InDesign CS2 user. I'm in CS4, but it should provide a clue at least.

Remember the range of cells that you want to copy (and the sheet name if more than one) from the Excel spreadsheet.

With the Excel spreadsheet closed select File/Place in InDesign. When the Place file window opens check the "Show Import Options" box.

After selecting the Excel file, another window will appear asking for the sheet name and range in the Excel worksheet.

Drag the Place pointer to insert the table. Once the table has been inserted you can double click on it to edit or use any of the InDesign Table Options to alter the highlighted text.

Hope this helps.

How To Change a Favicon in Joomla 1.5

A new article has been written that tells how to change your favicon in Joomla! 1.5.

The word "favicon" is short for "favorites icon", and it is the 16x16-pixel icon that is associated with your website and appears in the browser address bar and favorites menu (and in Firefox and Internet Explorer 7, it also appears on the browser tab). For this website, I am using the default Joomla! favicon because this site is a site about Joomla! The image below shows what your browser's address bar should look like when visiting this site.

All Joomla! installations come with that favicon installed, and a common mistake by many webmasters is to ignore the favicon, thereby keeping the default Joomla! icon for their site. Unless your site is about Joomla, you should not be using the default favicon. A good habit to get into when developing sites with Joomla! is to change the favaicon and use something more fitting for your site, like your logo. This article will explain how to create a favicon and then how to replace the default icon with your icon.

Creating your favicon

For the sake of simplicity, this section assumes you are using your logo for your icon.

Step 1: Shrink your logo

Using graphics software (like Adobe Fireworks or Adobe Photoshop), shrink your logo so that it will fit into a 16-pixel by 16-pixel square*. Then, save your new image as a 16x16 PNG or GIF file called "favicon.png" or "favicon.gif".

* It helps if your logo has relatively square dimensions, like the Joomla! logo.

Step 2: Convert the image to "favicon.ico"

This step is actually easier than it may seem. There are several options for doing this step, but my favorite is a web-based tool by Dynamic Drive called the "FavIcon Generator". You simply click the "Browse" button to locate your favicon.png or favicon.gif file, then click the "Create Icon" button to convert your image. The generator will then provide you with a favicon.ico version of your logo. It really is that simple.

Favicon maker- Create a favicon from any image.

Step 3: Replace the default icon with your own

The default favicon is located in the "images" directory of your Joomla! installation. Remove the default icon from your site, and upload your new icon in its place.
Done.

You may not be able to see your new favicon right away. The reason for this is because the default icon is probably still in your browser's cache. If you clear your browser's cache, you will be able to see the new favicon.

The favicon is a small thing that really will not affect the performance and look of your site, but paying attention to little details like that will give your site a more finished, professional feel.

As always, please feel free to post any questions or comments.

The Contact Us Page

One of the most important Website pages is the Contact Us page. This page is often overlooked or poorly developed, which can lead to user frustrations. Here are a few tips to developing a Contact Us page that meets user needs and drives conversions.

Website Users Expect a Contact Us Page

All Websites must have a Contact Us page because users expect to see one in the main navigation. Website users are quick to assume that the company does not want to be contacted if they can't easily find this page. It is common for Website designers to not place much thought into the development of the Contact Us page and take it for granted. Many Websites either don't have one or leave it off the main menu. This is a mistake that will reduce conversions.

Part of the Website's Conversion Strategy

The Contact Us page is a critical conversion point. A visit to the Contact Us page is a conversion because users have a strong intent to contact the company when they visit this page. Include a link to the Contact Us page on the main navigation and keep it visible on all pages. Track visits to the Contact Us page and all forms of contact made from that page.

What to Include in the "Contact Us" Page

There are five common contact methods from the Web. All should be included on the Contact Us page.

1. Phone - Use a toll free number for consumer Websites.
2. Email - Use a general mailbox or send directly to sales and customer service.
3. Form - Short forms get more conversions and longer forms better qualify leads.
4. Fax - Some people still fax and faxes can be sent directly to email.
5. Driving directions, maps and locations - for visits to your office or retail locations.
6. Also, include photos of people to contact, hours of operations, and timeframes for a return message. Focus on action and less on content. The Contact Us page should not be full of content, but rather clear steps to contact.
   
   

eCommerce Websites and the Contact Us Page

Having an online shopping cart is no reason to avoid having a good Contact Us page. People should be able to contact and buy via the phone or email and continue to shop from the Contact Us page. The page can be used to complete a sale, advertise a special offer, provide customer service and generally enhance the online shopping experience.

Keep the Contact Us page visible, easy to use and offer plenty of options for users to contact the business when ready however they wish to make contact. Also, get feedback on the Contact Us page to insure it meets user needs. This will help the user, drive more conversions and maintain a solid ROI for your Web marketing.

Time Spent on Twitter Soars by Over 3,700%, Facebook up 700%

I just read an interesting report published by Nielsen that examines time spent on multiple Social and Micro Networks. The study compares total minutes in April 2009 compared to April 2008. The results are not as much surprising as they are revealing.

According to Nielsen, total minutes spent on social networking sites has increased 83 percent year-over-year.

Twitter, the social media darling that can never seem to satisfy our insatiable appetite for all things orbiting the Twitterverse, experienced extraordinary growth in the last year with total time spent up by over 3,700%. While currently ranked 5th, Twitter's dramatic groundswell is the most notable on the list followed by Tagged.com, a five year old social network that experienced a 1,000% year over year increase in engagement.

Time spent on Facebook, the popular network that now boasts a $10 billion valuation, increased nearly 700 percent year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009.

MySpace clocked in at a very distant second place with just under 5 billion...read the full article

Research Keyword Effectively - 7 Secrets to Get the Best Performance Keywords for your Business

By: zmilliondollars | Posted: Jun 6th, 2007

To success in the internet marketing, the research key strategy is one of the most significant strategies for your home based internet marketing business. With keywords people are searching for, you can build your website with a good ranking in search engines or you can maximize profits through pay per click online advertising. There are many ways to boost your revenues from those niche keywords.

You will discover keyword search strategies to help you to discover the best keywords for your home based internet marketing business in this article. With those strategies, you can also discover a massive list of keywords and can use it everywhere in your home based internet marketing business.

Generally, the focus keywords are terms, words or phrase, which is related to particular topics, on the internet. The research keyword strategy will involve various aspects, such as discovering focus keywords for sales, driving quality traffic to your website or converting traffic into sale.

The research keyword strategy is the first step towards a successful search engine optimization campaign and other marketing channels. It is important to pay attention to your research keyword strategy. It is obviously that it can be very tricky to choose your niche keywords for your home based internet marketing business or even website.

The selection of keywords should always be based on various aspects such as product names, services, brands, or other general terms. Another interesting point for your research keyword is the geographical. The internet is a global market. Your research keyword strategy should be specified into your market or region or small group of people. Many studies show that most of internet marketing entrepreneurs forget about the geographical research keyword terms.

The highest recommendation for your research keyword strategy is to do thorough market research analysis. With this sense, you will reach wider range of potential buyers through the best keywords. Also, you should study the competitors' keywords, which keywords are profitable and used by your competitors. With those competitors' keywords, you will know that what your competitors are using and marketing on the internet.

Next, you will learn step-by-step of how to research keyword effectively to discover the best keywords for your online business.

1. Brainstorm initially the focus keywords for your business by yourself. Obviously, you should come up with the set of initial keywords for your own business. With those initial keywords, you can derived and generate more niche keywords later. The highest recommendation for brainstorming is to list down all markets, topics, products and services, which you are going to offer to your customers. With those stuffs, you will come up with the initial set of keywords. Perhaps, you can use the free keyword search tools like Overture, Google Keywords and WordTracker (free-version) to get the keyword ideas or initial set of keywords.

2. Ask other people to generate more initial keywords. It is a great idea to ask other people like your family, friends or colleague to get more ideas about keywords in your business. This is pretty powerful strategy for generating ideas for your keywords. Let's think about this way, if you allow 10 people to generate only 10 common keywords for your business, how much finally you will get the common general keywords for your business. That’s 100 keywords without your works! All you have to do is ask people particularly family and friends to help you generate a quick list of keywords.

3. Select the initial keywords for digging down further. When you have a full initial set of keywords, it is obvious that you have to select those keywords for digging down further. In this step, you must think about keywords people are using to search for products in your niche markets. You must ensure that you select keywords that clearly define your home based internet marketing business, products or services. There are some websites on the internet which get a lot of traffic through general keywords, although those websites can not generate any sales.

4. Refine your keyword research with the keyword research tools. There are many keyword search tools available to help you generate more keywords. The challenge here is to determine which keyword is the best to generate traffic. The highest recommends are: to focus on Keyword Index (KEI) value and competitors in search engines. With paid-version of WordTracker or Keyword Discovery, you should select the keywords with high KEI value and low competitors.

5. Dig down into your competitors' keywords. There is no doubt that it is an absolutely great idea to study and steal your competitors' keywords. There are a few powerful tools to help you to study those competitors' keywords in dept. With those keyword search tools, you will discover what keywords they are using for their earning and profits online.

6. Test your keywords through pay per click campaign. To success in the internet marketing business, you have to test everything you can such as keywords, website and strategies. The best keyword research strategy in this article is to test your keywords with pay per click campaigns. With those campaigns, you will know the traffic, conversion rate and bid price for your keywords. However, the awareness of this step is your keyword bidding price in those pay per click campaigns.

7. Use the high performance keywords for your home based internet marketing business. This step is a consequence of the previous step. You will discover high performance keywords with high conversion rate. When you get those high performance keywords, you must use them everywhere in your home based internet marketing business such as article, classified ads, blogging and email.

Final thoughts, there is a sequence of steps to do your keyword research effectively. With those steps, you will discover the best keywords for your business. Those best performance keywords will lead you to success in this internet marketing business.

Get full access to the best keywords researched over 2 million keywords by the expert team. This is another way for your shortcut to get the best keywords. You will discover hot niche markets and keywords from the most effective keyword research. You will save your time and minimize your mistake while you are researching your own keywords. Also, you will discover super-profitable markets and keywords from the best keywords provided to you every month!

Learn more about keyword research and keyword search tools to help you to generate a massive list of keywords in a minute. With those niche keywords, you will maximize your profits in PPC. You will discover great niche keywords with low competitors and high conversion rate, particularly for Adwords and Adsense. You will save your time and will not be headache about keyword research any more.

Read more articles, news, and up-to-date information about keyword research and related keyword issues at: http://www.zKeywordTool.com/blog

About the Author:
Siripong R. or zMillionDollars is a recognized authority on the subject of making money online from home through highly profitable & successful home based business. His websites, www.zMakeMoney.com and www.iPayByClick.com, provide a wealth of informative articles and resources on everything you\\\'ll ever need to know about earning money online.

Printed From: http://www.articlesbase.com/online-promotion-articles/research-keyword-effectively-7-secrets-to-get-the-best-performance-keywords-for-your-business-160259.html

How To Perform Keyword Research For Your Local Business Website

Performing keyword research for your business to display either in a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, article marketing, or social bookmarking is by far one of the most important things you can do to gain traffic to your website. A lot of businesses do this poorly and wonder why they do not get traffic.

For example, let’s say you own a flower shop in White Bear Lake, MN, which is where I live, and you’re putting together a website and planning your onsite and offsite marketing campaign. The first sets of keywords that would come to mind are “White Bear Lake flower shop”, or “your business name” + “flower shop”, or a derivative thereof. Other “local” businesses who are not reading this post, may just decide to use “flower shop” instead. Do you realize how broad that keyword term is and how much you would pay in PPC to get high rankings on Google?

What you want to focus on are the longtail-keywords, keywords that are more than one or two words longs. Longtail keywords provide you with longevity because you have to put thought into them and can quickly achieve #1, #2, or #3 rankings on Google for them.

How do you go about getting those longtail keywords? Start off with the broad keyword for your local business and expand from it by adding related words as prefix or suffix to that word. Ask your customers wheat they would type into Google if they wanted to find your business. Thinking outside the box by asking your customers and clients will quickly enable you to come up with a sizeable list that you can quickly dominate on Google.

You can also grow your list of keywords by remembering last minute keywords. We’ll go back to the flower business example from before. If you have a customer that has forgotten his/her anniversary and is looking for flowers 5 minutes ago, he/she is going to be desparate to find something relatively quickly. He/she might search for “same day flower delivery in vinings” or “last minute flowers purchase” + “your city”. Do you see how the desparateness of this search can produce dramatic results? So, if you had that keyword SEO on your site or had it as part of an article in your acticle marketing efforts, you would definitely attract that customer to your site and have him/her as a client.

I cannot over emphasize how powerful and important it is to do keyword research for your marketing efforts. This is what customers search for in order to get to your site. Constantly grow your keywords list, track what works, and continue to do onsite and offsite optimization in order to get more traffic for your business.

One other trick is to use similar keywords that have some overlap. You can also use the singular and plural form of a term, change the order the keywords, or maybe use the common misspelling of the word in your campaign.

This is by no means an exhaustive tips on doing keyword research. I will certainly revisit this topic again and again

The next post will be on tracking your traffic in order to fine tune your results and better optimize your site. This is probably the second most important thing you could do for your business.

Poll: Business People Say Twitter More Important Than LinkedIn

Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / May 29, 2009 4:39 PM

A month-long poll conducted on business social network LinkedIn has uncovered some fascinating numbers concerning social media platforms and brand presence. The biggest surprise was that Twitter was deemed more important to brands than LinkedIn, and the poll was performed on LinkedIn. With more than 3,600 respondents so far, each well understood in terms of job titles, company size, age and gender - this is a high-quality data set worth paying attention to. The question asked was simply: "What is the most important new platform for brands to master?" Options were Twitter, Facebook, the iPhone, Digg and LinkedIn.

Some of the conclusions were a real surprise. Others confirmed our suspicions. Read on for charts, bullet points and a few thoughts.

Below are charts breaking out the poll responses from various groups and some text we've written to interpret those charts. It's important to remember the question wasn't "what do you prefer" but rather "what is most important for brands to master." Those are related but different questions.

Just for context, we'll start with a traffic graph.

Key takeaways from the poll:

Overall

• Twitter is #1, leading Facebook by a respectable margin
• The iPhone is considered less important than LinkedIn
• Almost no-one thinks Digg is the most important
• There is no consensus; every platform named (except for Digg) has a group of backers that believes it is most important.

About the respondents

• 3,615 respondents is a very good number


• Only 4% were business owners, 26% managers, 56% non-managers


• 75% were from small businesses


• 26% were marketers, the largest percentage among job functions


• Twice as many men responded as women


• 83% of respondents were between the ages of 25 and 54, only 17% younger or older

Most appreciative of Twitter: Business owners, C-Level or VPs. People at large- or medium-sized companies. People doing business development, marketing or creative work.

Least appreciative of Twitter: Non-managers. People at very large or small businesses. Consultants, Salespeople and Engineers.

Most appreciative of LinkedIn: C-level and non-managers. At small- or medium-sized businesses. Doing consulting or sales.

Least appreciative of LinkedIn: Owners and managers. At large or enterprise companies. In creative or marketing departments.

By Job Title

• Business owners are most likely to put Twitter at the top, non-management people are least likely
• Non-managers are most likely to favor LinkedIn, owners are least likely
• Non-C-level or VP managers are most likely to favor Facebook, owners are least likely
• About 1 out of 5 people in all positions favor the iPhone

By Company Size

• Large businesses are most likely to favor Twitter
• Medium and small businesses are twice as likely to favor LinkedIn
• Small businesses are twice as likely to favor Digg
• Medium-sized businesses are least likely to favor the iPhone

By Job Function

• Marketing, business development and creatives are most likely to favor Twitter
• Consultants and sales are least likely to favor Twitter
• Creatives and marketing are least likely to favor LinkedIn
• Consultants and sales are most likely to favor LinkedIn
• Consultants are most likely to favor iPhone, marketing least likely
• Engineers are far more likely to favor Digg than anyone
• Marketing is most into Facebook, business development the least (prefers Twitter)

By Gender

• Women are much more likely to prefer Twitter
• Men are more likely to favor LinkedIn, iPhone

By Age

• 55+ far more likely 75% than anyone to favor LinkedIn
• 25-54 more likely to favor the iPhone than younger or older people

So what do you think? Surprises? Confirmed beliefs? This looks like good quality data to us so we suspect we'll be thinking about it for a while. Two things are for sure - there's no topping LinkedIn for professional background information, and there's no chance we'd be able to trust a poll like this if it was performed on Twitter!