February 2008 Archives
Earlier this morning, Ian sent me an email saying that the Portent Website code was great. Near perfect, even! But one thing was weighing on his mind. We weren’t passing the W3 Markup Validation. That giant red “THIS SITE ISN’T XHTML TRANSITIONAL!” message was searing into his poor SMX-addled eyeballs and I was the closest thing to Visine he could find. I coded this website myself, so I was set on the task of figuring out what exactly was wrong with the code and how I could fix it. But does validation even matter? The page displays correctly for the
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Continue reading The Struggle for Validation
All soccer moms are not created equal. Copyblogger makes this point in a recent post, and I totally agree. Until we go beyond perfunctory profiling and start creating vivid, charismatic, three-dimensional characters, personas will be of no use except to perpetuate stereotypes. Marketers need to go further in their persona development if they are actually going to enrich our ad campaigns. PI Pearl of Wisdom: Write personas like personal ads, not police reports. Let’s consider the difference between the two persona possibilities. Here’s an example: Exhibit A: Target Audience: 48-year-old Man, Drives Chevy, Some College. Exhibit B: Lila, the
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I gave a talk about personas in search engine marketing today at SMX West, and then participated in a panel discussion on the topic. You can grab the slides, and find links to others’ feelings on the presentation, here.
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Continue reading Personas and Search Marketing: Talk at SMX Today
Or maybe I should say, the best linkbait never gets stale. Basically, my goal is to assault your blogging worldview and contradict everything you’ve ever heard on the subject-all for a good cause, of course. In this post, I am going to tell you how to have a decent little blogging career, and even earn some industry panache, all without caving to the industry pressure to eat, sleep and dream in Movable Type. It is possible, and here’s how I know. When I first started my career as Senior Blogger at Portent’s site Bridezilla.com in May of 2007, I wrote
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I loathe the term “web 2.0”. I think catch phrases are easy and unimaginative, and calling the recent boom of easy to use and engaging websites “web 2.0” seems to cheapen them. It sounds too trendy. It sounds like there will be a “web 3.0” and that “web 2.0” will become obsolete once we get bored of it. There’s a lot of new ideas on this old Internet, and they will keep coming as we continue to collaborate and refine the process in which we disseminate our data. Innovation: Separate style from content One brilliant revelation in coding for the
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Continue reading Class up your link icons with CSS background images
(A quick note: If you don’t know World of Warcraft, skip about 4 paragraphs down. If you do know it, it’s thoroughly worth reading and pertinent. We at Portent love to geek out now and then.) My best friend and her boyfriend recently started playing World of Warcraft, so I’ve reactivated my account after a year hiatus. While I’m an old timer with massively multiplayer roleplaying games, this is my friends’ first foray. I’ve been trying to teach them the internet gaming lingo and nuances to playing in a group (aggro management and the like). I’m playing a priest because
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Continue reading QA is Like being a Priest in World of Warcraft
The father loves to brag about his kids (as I do). The CEO loves to brag about his team. I’ll spare you the kids. But I do want to introduce some of the team, and brag about their accomplishments. Tracy Beach is our COO and one of our creative leaders. He’s been with Portent since 2000, starting as an HTML developer and designer. On his first day here he had to help move the office. He stayed anyway, and has masterminded projects like GOIAM.ORG, the Tour of California web site and momAgenda. Really, though, he influences every design we
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Continue reading Bragging About My Kids, er, Team
Oh! A blog! How quaint, you say. There’s most likely millions of blogs out there (I haven’t counted recently) so why would you want to read yet another blog? Especially yet another Internet Marketing blog! Here at Portent, we always strive to do something different. When most people hear “Search Engine Optimization” or “Internet Marketing” it conjures images of snake oil salesmen; black hat firms with shallow guarantees of top search engine rankings for three easy payments of $29.95 (cheap!). We change the face of Internet Marketing on a daily basis using tried and true methods, uniquely developed by our
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Continue reading Welcome to the new Portent Interactive blog.
