... on track
Tay Valley Township comes on as OnCouRSS’ newest client!
OnCouRSS recently won the bidding on a web development project with Tay Valley Township. This project is going to incorporate a new, clean design with a WordPress platform. This will allow the Township to accept applications and payments online as well as to publish news and information in a timely fashion.
We are really looking forward to getting rolling on this one!
Renfrew County Catholic District School Board hires OnCouRSS for new web project
The Renfrew County Catholic District School Board has just come on board as one of OnCouRSS’ newest clients. This project will be based on WordPress Multi-User allowing the Board to have a home-base site and the schools to have a similar look and feel along with some autonomy.
We have currently finished the design phase and are in the process of populating the Board site. This one is going to be A++!
Managing categories in Community PAL
Please Note: CPAL is best viewed and manage in Internet Explorer.
To login: https://www.cgis.com/CommunityPALmanager/Login.aspx
1. Enter your Username and Passoword
Login to CGIS Community Pal Manager
2. Click the “Proceed to Search Form” button.
3. Search for any record in the database – you need to open a record in order to modify the categories. You can search on a word that STARTS the phrase / business name or a word that is IN the phrase / business name.
4. Open a record by selecting the one you want in the drop-down and clicking the “Select” button.
Select a business / record
5. Click the Categories button at the top of the screen.
Go to the Categories section
6. This will display the primary category/s that relate to the business you have selected. To see the secondary category/s click the primary category – to see the tertiary (third level) category/s click the secondary category.
View the record categories
7. To add a new Secondary or Tertiary category (Primary categories need to be added by CGIS) enter the category name underneath the appropriate category level and click “Add New Secondary / Tertiary”. This will add your new category name to the drop-down list.
Add a new category
8. To add the new category to your selected record use the drop-down field and select it. Click the “Add Secondary / Tertiary Category” button. Whether or not you add this category to the current record, it will be available to assign to any other record in the system.
Assign the new category to your record
9. To delete a category from a record or in other words to un-assign it, highlight the category, check the “Delete Category” box and click the appropriate “Delete Category” button.
Delete the category from the record
Delete the category from the record
10. To delete a category from the system, or in other words to purge it from the system, it needs to be listed in one of the three category windows (Primary, Secondary or Tertiary) of the record you are in. If the category you want to delete does not relate to the record you are working in then assign the category in question to the open record temporarily, highlight it, check off the “Purge Category” box and click the “Delete Category” button.
Purge the category from the system
Purge the category from the system
11. You will get a warning when you want to totally remove a category from the system. If you are sure you want to proceed then click OK.
Purge warning
Purge confirm
Adding images to posts quickly using Google
Sometimes you need to put a post up quickly and you don’t really have an image to go with it even though the page would look better if you did add one. A great solution at these times is to use google.com and search using their Image function. This way you can find a published image and you can filter not only on content but file size as well. Here’s how:
1. First go to Google and click on the Images link. (more…)
Lanark County Tourism
Lanark County Tourism wanted a site that incorporated their new Corporate image as well as provide user-friendliness and functionality. (more…)
Downloading and installing Irfanview free photo editing software
Irfanview is free photo editing software that is excellent for the user who needs to make simple modifications to images (crop, re-size, re-format…) either individually or in batches.
Here is how to download and install it:
1. Visit the Irfanview website and download the software from one of the mirror sites listed (I like to use Tucows, they are reliable and fast). http://www.irfanview.ca/ (more…)
Create a New Post in WordPress
A post in WordPress is a news item. Often these get pulled/teased to the front page of your site and get stored in a news archive on your site. It is most helpful to create frequent, short posts about topics of interest to your visitors as it keeps your content fresh and is quite appealing to the search engines.
Here are the steps involved in creating a new post:
1. Go to Posts / Add New (more…)
Add an image to a WordPress post or page
The web is a multi-media tool and images are an important part of that. It is simple to add an image to a post or page in WordPress. Just follow these steps:
1. Open your page or post for editing. (more…)
Kayak Fishing Movie
Heliconia Press wanted a blog site they could use to promote their new kayak fishing video, Game On.
Ballygiblin’s Restaurant
Ballygiblin’s Restaurant wanted to take an existing, static design and turn it into a dynamic, social media powered site that they could maintain and update themselves.
Tell Mama Band
Tell Mama band wanted a website that would extend the band identity online. They also wanted a place that could be a home base for all of their online activity including facebook, twitter, myspace and Reverbnation.
Perth Chamber of Commerce
The Perth and District Chamber of Commerce needed a new website that could incorporate a professional look and feel with new social media technology and an advanced business management extranet.
Great to see that facebook pages are letting band page owners cross-reference their events to their group
Tell Mama has some gigs coming up in April that we’re really excited about and I finally took the time on the weekend to create a facebook event to promote the first one on April 7th at The Supermarket in Toronto. I wasn’t looking forward to doing it because, at this point, it seemed that I have to create a new event for my group page and another for my band page just to get the word out to everybody. I created the group event as per usual (sure would be nice to be able to “select all” for invitations or filter the names somehow by region) and then I got quite frustrated when I tried to create a new event to post to my band page – the event function was nowhere to be found. Of course, the moment I complained on a facebook forum I immediately found the feature as an addition to the tabs at the top of the page – how embarrassing is that?
Facebook mobile photo album has room for improvement but is still very cool
I recently decided that I needed to find a more efficient way to take photos from my gigs and post them to my website because, to be perfectly honest, I just wasn’t finding the time to do it and considering that web promotion is my business that just makes me look really bad! I figured that there had to be some kind of widget out there that would let me at least only post them in one place while feeding them everywhere else. I have been playing around in facebook lately comparing groups to pages and exploring the nuances of integrating facebook into my marketing strategy so that seemed like a good place to start.
Facebook has a great photo album feature that lets you upload photos into as many albums as you like and integrates a very nice tagging system which is excellent for the viral marketing end of the equation. In fact, they even have a mobile upload feature that lets you take pictures with your MMS enabled phone and upload them in real time to your facebook page – nice! All you have to do is send a photo email to facebook mobile, receive an activation code back by email and voila, you have an active mobile photo account. I followed all the instructions over and over and constantly received the message that my phone or provider was not able to provide this function and that no photo was received. I have a brand new Palm Treo 700p and would be pretty surprised if it didn’t have the capacity to perform this function.
Long story short I had many conversations with Palm and with Telus who both blamed each other. I finally contacted facebook support and a great thing happened – I actually got to communicate with some real people who not only understood my problem and appreciated it, but ones who were able to and did fix it! Hooray for facebook customer support especially Carter, Lawrence and most notably, Mark Slee http://www.facebook.com/people/Mark_Slee/204686 .
Mark actually took a good look at the problem and ascertained that:
1/ Your mobile email provider doesn’t send via a normal Telus MMS (multimedia messaging service) gateway. Rather, it seems to use a service provided by a 3rd party called VistoMobile, which we’ve just added support for.
2/ Email messages use MIME types to specify what type of data they are sending. Standard webpages have a MIME type of text/html, and normal pictures are sent with a MIME type of image/jpg or image/gif. However, my email provider (Telus) sends the image with a MIME type application/octet-stream. We modified our software to detect when there’s an image being sent as this type — but perhaps not surprisingly this MIME type wasn’t something we initially thought to add support for over the far more standard "image" MIME types.
Now that’s what I call service! Along the way I did try some third-party facebook apps to deal with my mobile photo uploads and they all worked but they didn’t enter the facebook news feed the way the native plugin does and they didn’t offer an option for me to pull those photos directly into my web page/blog.
So, now I have a facebook mobile photo album which can be seen on my personal profile and, thanks to the Fotobook WordPress plugin (http://www.aaronharp.com/dev/wp-fotobook/) I can pull any or all of my photo albums onto my wordpress site (http://www.tellmama.net/blog/photos/mobile-uploads/)
Now all I need is the ability to also pull those photos onto my facebook band page (which is taking a long time to populate because, well, I don’t have any spare time) and the functionality for fotobook to automatically populate my blog site photo section with my mobile uploads. Apparently, facebook pages are unable to share photos with personal facebook sites automatically (I find this strange and hope that somebody will design a solution soon). Oh yes, one more thing, I would really like to be able to upload mobile photos to more than one photo album or site. At this time you can only register your cell number to one personal facebook mobile album.
I have to say that even though there are some gaps, the facebook mobile photo upload tool is a great addition to the facebook portfolio of tools and gizmos and the actual customer support by real people is a genuine welcome surprise. Tell your friends!
OnCouRSS offers low-cost ways to unleash the power of new web media
Helping organizations maximize the power of new web technologies – at a fraction of the usual cost – is the mission of OnCouRSS, a new local business.
Co-founded by local entrepreneurs James McBeath and Shelley Montreuil, OnCourRSS helps small and home-based businesses, artists, social groups and not-for-profit organizations take their websites and marketing to the next level through a range of new web technologies known as social media.
“Our goal is to help people walk through the jungle that is social media,” says McBeath. “Our technology provides the maximum functionality and flexibility at the lowest cost.”
Social media is the term used to describe two-way communications on the web, such as blogs, podcasts, networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, and photo sharing and video sharing sites like YouTube. Many websites also use Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds to automatically let others know when they have posted new content and to share that content in real time.
“The Internet is now the world’s largest source of information,” McBeath says. “Most people today don’t make decisions about what to buy or where to travel without visiting a website. If you’re not on the web, you have no chance at getting their business, because your competitors are probably already online grabbing their attention first.”
Blogging and podcasting can enhance your website by permitting you to establish yourself as an expert in your field. “Blogging and other new media permit you to really show people that you know what you are talking about,” says Montreuil. “Podcasting, especially, allows web visitors to get a much more real sense of who you are as a person and that can be the extra something that will help a potential customer to choose you instead of the competition.”
OnCouRSS uses WordPress, a web publishing tool that can put people completely in control of their website content, quickly and inexpensively.
“With WordPress you can change your site whenever you want to, without contacting a programmer,” says Montreuil. “OnCouRSS can help you manage social media, make sure everything is working properly and keep you apprised of new technologies.”
OnCouRSS services include assessing your existing marketing plan and developing a realistic, cost-effective online strategy that will use the power of social media to leverage your business.
Using WordPress templates, which can also be customized, OnCouRSS can quickly design and develop a website that includes traditional functionality, plus a full range of additional features, including social media technologies and e-commerce. The company also provides website hosting services and can develop content for and maintain your website if you don’t have the time to do it yourself.
Current OnCouRSS clients include S4Potential (s4potential.com), Acorn Custom Homes (acorncustomhomes.com), Reith Financial (reithfinancial.ca) and Puppets Up! (puppetsup.ca). The company has also designed a multi-user site for the World Kayak Blogging Network (worldkayakblogs.com).
In addition to launching OnCouRSS, McBeath and Montreuil continue to operate their own separate companies, Breathe Productions and Strategic Media Solutions, respectively.
Breathe focuses on traditional website development for medium to large companies and Strategic Media Solutions designs and develops marketing strategies.
“Neither company was focused on social media, so OnCouRSS was born,” says McBeath.
“OnCouRSS is a way for both of us to step into the fast lane of social media,” says Montreuil “It lets us take our experience and passion for new media and use it to help clients develop a high quality product at a much lower cost.”
Jungle Fever – Our First Podcast
Well, this is it, our first OnCouRSS podcast – Jungle Fever, helping you to navigate the jungle that is social media. This is a good intro to OnCouRSS and what we do, it’s also a great way for you to get to know us a little better. So, sit back and enjoy the ride!
Show Notes:
0:37 Doing it with each other
0:50 Keeping you OnCouRSS…what does that mean?
2:00 where to spend your energy, are there too many opportunities on line?
2:30 could Facebook be a waste of time?
3:00 the Nemo moment
4:45 what makes OnCouRSS unique
5:35 can you use social media to help make money
6:15 do I need a “traditional” web site?
6:38 the difference between a blog and a web page
7:50 blogs as conversations
8:27 ground zero
10:35 get their heads nodding
11:27 social media for both website and blog?
13:23 what is WordPress
14:50 where do “we” come in?
15:15 personality of the year
16:10 customization
Create an animated header with Flashfader
When OnCouRSS client, Homesol Building Solutions, requested a simple animated header that would be eye-catching and easy to view for rural users, Flashfader fit the bill. This plugin boasts the following features:
- No loading time. The flash file is 2 KB, the images are loaded dynamically one by one
- Can be integrated into template files, not in post and pages (maybe with the php code plugin)
- No limitation in size of the flash movie
- Option for valid xhtml flash code
By finding a small stock video and taking five still images from it we gathered enough content to allow Flashfader to create the illusion of a video while reducing the the necessary download time for Homesol’s rural visitors.
Modifying the size, repeat and interval parameters allowed us to scroll through the five images fast enough to get the desired end result. The appropriate code is placed into the header file and, voila, an animated header that only needs to download to the visitor’s machine once in order to function properly on every page.
Podcasting – good, bad or ugly?
Shelley interviews podcast specialist, Leesa Barnes, on the value of podcasting as a method of propelling your business forward and drawing traffic to your website.
[display_podcast]
The cart before the horse, the chicken before the egg?
Getting started with a web site is always a really big job – gathering content, designing look and feel, managing navigation – knowing when the time is right to start driving traffic to it is an important question. WordPress blog sites make this concern almost a non-issue. It is still important to get information on the site but, with RSS feeds and sites that exist solely to provide content for other sites, populating a brand new site can happen in days instead of months and by selecting a pre-existing template and modifying it slightly, you can have a clean, attractive site up in days.
Of course, there is still the matter of ensuring that the content is quality and appropriate for your anticipated audience so a little sifting can be required but once you find a few authors whose work you like the process becomes easier. With a bit of formatting and tags for search engine optimization, guest-written content is a great way to get started.
It is important to remember what the purpose of your web site is, are you promoting a business, service or product? Then what you are trying to do is to get more customers and generate sales, spending all of your time writing content may not be a good use of your time – hiring a ghost writer might make things move a little more smoothly, or perhaps writing short, succinct entries would work better for you than longer, more extensive ones. In fact, readers often prefer to read less while getting more. This approach would allow you to spend less time managing your site and more time managing all your new customers.
It is a very difficult balance. I am not a fan of driving visitors to a site that isn’t ready for guests. First impressions are lasting but when is the right time for a first impression?
On that note I ask, are you ready to launch your web site? to drive traffic to it? to add new content? Is this all putting the cart before the horse or clients in your coffer?
Tell Mama combines WordPress and HTML to create an effective marketing tool
Eastern Ontario band Tell Mama ~ Kick Ass Jass used the OnCouRSS resources to create an HTML /WordPress combination site to promote their original music and performance schedule.
With a custom design, integrated Flash audio and video, a secure member’s area and a WordPress blog, this site makes the best use of all the internet has to offer
Is a WordPress website right for you?
Do you need a website quickly and inexpensively? Do you want your site visitors to be able to interact with you through your site? purchase products or services? complete surveys or provide feedback? Do you want to be able to take control of your website and add new content often? If the answer to any of these questions is yes then WordPress is the platform for you and at OnCouRSS, we can show you how.
Choose from our library of design templates or get a customized theme, add a few widgets for functionality and populate it with some content and you’re good to go.
Welcome to OnCouRSS
OnCouRSS helps you to use Web 2.0 technologies to bring your website & marketing plan to new levels – without having to feel overwhelmed with or lost in coding and terminology.
We are able to do this at a fraction of the cost of traditional web publishing methods which rely heavily on developers and programmers to not only build, but to maintain sites. At OnCouRSS, we employ a cleaner, more user-friendly interface which allows our clients to take control of their site’s maintenance and direction with ease – it’s as simple as sending an email.
At OnCouRSS, we develop Web 2.0 strategy and build social media web sites, we integrate these with traditional marketing strategies and help you to reach your market without draining your pocket-book.