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Here you’ll find articles about website development, WordPress, and other topics that I’m interested in. I hope you enjoy them and find them useful. Comments and feedback are always welcome!

Set Up Your Opt-In Freebie with MailChimp: A Step-by-Step Guide

26 May 2016 / 59 Comments

Your email list is absolutely critical to your online business.

The bigger your list, the easier it is for you to sell your products and services. So it’s a great idea to grow your list quickly! One of the best ways to build your list is with an opt-in freebie.

When I say “opt-in freebie”, I’m talking about a free downloadable file — such as a useful PDF report, guide, eBook, or video — that acts as an incentive to get people to sign up to your list. Once someone becomes a subscriber, they automatically receive a link to download your freebie.
Hopefully you’ve thought of — or even made — a gorgeous freebie or two already! (If you haven’t, here are some great ideas.)

Once you have your freebie, the next step is to put it somewhere on the web so that your subscribers can download it. But this process can seem a little daunting. How exactly do you put your freebie up for download? And how do you link it up with your subscription process?

If you’re using MailChimp then I have some good news for you: You can do the whole thing in MailChimp. You don’t even need a website!

In this article I’ll show you exactly how to do it, in four simple steps. By the time you’ve worked through to the end, you’ll have uploaded your freebie to MailChimp; linked to it from your thank-you page and welcome email; and tested the whole thing to make sure it all works beautifully.

Sell Your eBook on Gumroad: How to Do It in 30 Minutes

12 May 2016 / 7 Comments

Does the idea of selling eBooks online freak you out at all?

You know that eBooks can be a great source of passive income for your business. Perhaps you already have some awesome ideas for an eBook, or even have a finished eBook ready to sell.

But getting that eBook out there can seem daunting. How do you take online payments for the book? Do you need to set up a PayPal account? An internet merchant account? How do you keep people’s card details safe? How do you deal with accounting, tax, and credit card fraud issues? And once shoppers have paid for your book, how do you deliver it to them automatically?

So many headaches. And a few years ago, you would have had to deal with them all yourself. But not any more!

Thanks to amazing internet tools like Gumroad, you no longer have to worry about any of these issues. In fact, with Gumroad, you can make your eBook available for purchasing and downloading in just 30 minutes!

What Are People Saying about Your Business? Here Are 3 Easy Ways to Find Out

22 April 2016 / 2 Comments

Would you like to know what your customers really think about you?

If someone has a bad time using your product or service, they might tell you about it. But often, they’ll tell their friends instead. Wouldn’t you love to be able to eavesdrop on those conversations, so you can find ways to improve your offering?

Or perhaps you’d like to know when people are saying good things about you. Then you could thank them directly, or maybe even invite them to write a testimonial or review about your products or services.

Gathering honest feedback about your business can be incredibly useful. But how do you find out where these people are talking, or what they’re saying? The internet is a big place!

Fortunately, there are some handy tools and tricks that can help you keep an ear to the ground — with very little effort. In this article, you’ll learn three easy ways to keep tabs on what your customers are saying about your business.

How Google Analytics Can Answer These 11 Burning Questions about Your Website

17 March 2016 / 12 Comments

Do you sometimes struggle to get useful information from Google Analytics?

You’ve installed Analytics on your site. You know it could give you lots of useful information about your site, your visitors, and your business. But you just don’t know where to begin with it! Its sheer number of reports, options and settings can be overwhelming.

How can you simply use Google Analytics to answer those really important questions about your site? Questions like:

How popular is my site?
Are my visitors really interested in my content?
Which are my most popular pages?
What are my visitors searching for?
How do people reach my site?

That’s what this article is all about! In it, you’ll cut through Google Analytics’ forest of submenus, options and reports, and you’ll learn how to use Analytics to answer 11 of the most important questions you can ever ask about your website.

Once you’ve read through the article, you’ll be able to find exactly the stats you need, quickly and confidently. You’ll end up with a ton of useful, actionable data that you can use to improve your site, attract more visitors, and even make more sales.

Sound good? Let’s get started!

How to Make Gorgeous Social Media Images (Even If You’re Not a Photoshop Guru)

3 March 2016 / 5 Comments

You see them everywhere!

Posts on Facebook with lovely images and quotes that inspire you. Tweets with gorgeous photos that make you itching to share them. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could easily create those images for your own social media posts?

Even better: What if you could create them for free, in just a couple of minutes?

Maybe you’re currently making your social media images using an image editor, such as Photoshop. If so, you’ve probably found the process to be fiddly and slow — and the learning curve to be steep.

If that’s the case, I’ve some great news for you. Using some fantastic, free tools — along with the tips and tricks you’ll discover in this article — you can effortlessly turn out social media posts with beautiful, captivating images that your audience will love to share.

The result? More fans, more audience engagement, and more traffic for you!

In this article you’ll discover inspiring ways to write quotes for your images. You’ll learn which image sizes each social network loves to use, and you’ll find out how to create a shareable image with text in just 30 seconds!

You’ll also learn how to use a free online tool to create amazing images that used to only be possible with Photoshop; and you’ll discover how to find fantastic free images online that are perfect for social media.

By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll be a confident expert at making great-looking social media images!

The Future of Elated

7 July 2014 / 18 Comments

If you’re a regular subscriber to Elated, you may have noticed a distinct lack of updates for the last few months. Here’s why.

In 2011 and 2012, elated.com was badly affected by Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates. The result was that traffic to our site dropped to less than one quarter of its original level. You can see the effect of these updates in the graph below:

[Read more…] about The Future of Elated

jQuery Mobile 1.4: Cleaner, Faster and More Powerful

13 January 2014 / 2 Comments

jQuery Mobile is a great JavaScript framework that’s designed to help you build mobile web apps and mobile-friendly websites quickly and easily. The latest version, 1.4, came out last month, and it represents a big step forward for the framework.

In this article you’ll get an overview of the changes and improvements in 1.4, and learn how to apply some of these techniques to your own websites and web apps. You’ll look at:

The performance improvements in 1.4 that result in a smoother, faster experience for users
The new, simpler theming system
The new default theme and simplified swatches
1.4’s brand-new SVG-based icon set
The new flipswitch widget for smoother, more flexible flip switches
The filterable widget that lets you filter anything from listviews to tables and paragraphs of text
A new tabs widget for separating your page content into tabbed sections, and
A brief summary of the API changes and deprecations that are new to 1.4.

Let’s start with a quick look at how the jQuery Mobile team has improved performance in 1.4.

7 Exciting Up-and-Coming Web Technologies

1 October 2013 / 4 Comments

The world of building websites is always a fast-moving one. It seems like some amazing new framework or design app comes out every day! In this article you’ll get a rundown of 7 exciting new developments in the web design and development arena. These technologies promise to make it easier than ever to create beautiful, functional websites and web apps. Enjoy!

Ruby Tutorial for Absolute Beginners

11 June 2013 / Leave a Comment

The Ruby programming language is becoming increasingly popular, thanks to its clean syntax, its object-oriented features, and its range of high-quality libraries and frameworks.

In this tutorial, you get a gentle introduction to programming in Ruby. You learn:

How Ruby works, and what it’s used for
How to install Ruby on your Mac, Windows PC, or Linux PC
How to create — and run — your first Ruby script
Some of Ruby’s object-oriented programming features
How to create and use classes and objects, and
How to use Interactive Ruby to explore the Ruby language.

At the end of the tutorial, you also explore some resources for taking your Ruby skills further.

Let’s start with a brief introduction to Ruby, and take a look at the language’s features and benefits.

jQuery Mobile 1.3: What’s New?

1 March 2013 / Leave a Comment

jQuery Mobile is a handy JavaScript framework that makes it easy for you to build mobile web apps and mobile-friendly websites. jQuery Mobile 1.3 came out last week, and it has all sorts of lovely new features and improvements over 1.2. In this article you’ll get an overview of these changes, and see how to use jQuery Mobile 1.3 to enhance your websites and web apps even further.

You’ll look at:

Responsive web design improvements
Responsive grids
Two types of responsive tables for displaying data
A new panel widget
Improvements to range sliders and other form fields
A new navigate method and event for easy history manipulation
A new easy way to build autocomplete listviews
New options for dialogs and popups
Two new icons, as well as other icon improvements, and
A few miscellaneous enhancements to the framework and documentation.

We’ll start by taking a look at the concept of responsive web design, and see how jQuery Mobile 1.3 makes it easier than ever to build responsive webpages.

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