SOCIAL NETWORK ACCOUNT CREATOR
We have released the first version of our new SEO program that allows you to create multiple social networking accounts easily. All you need is Google Chrome and you can install this extension in to your browser. Once installed you fill out your account info one time and away you go. Submitting has never been easier. You can find out all the details here.
Just the other day I browsed across MSN's website and I couldn't believe what I was seeing. I am guessing this is some mix between graphic designers and marketing gurus coming up with a website.
You can see what I am talking about here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38053726/ns/business-stocks_and_economy/
The bottom half of the screen is taken up by a non scrolling DIV that is full of supposed social networking SEO garbage. Once again the method of not helping the user out, but interrupting the user to get
something from them, which they are going to ignore in most cases. The only thing this is going to do is drive their customers away. How can I be sure about this? Well check out these screenshots I made:
800×600 screen resolution
I love this one because you can't even see the navigation bar without scrolling or the article, only the stuff you aren't interested in. Forget being on a mobile device, ipad, or netbook.
1024×768 – standard web resolution.
So now we can see the navbar but we can barley see the article.
Middle of article
Once again we don't have the navigation menu but we have huge block to promote MSN. Instead of wasting their time with that, they should have implemented our fixed scrolling header or something similar. Why not just have some social networking icons at the bottom or top of the article to share it? What boggles my mind is the amount of money that was most likely spent developing this, only to be a total waste to users and MSN.
We had a team of people review one of the new sites (http://www.glenbridgepublishing.com/) that we had developed and one of the biggest complaints was scrolling. On most sites when you scroll the page you lose the menu bar and you find that you often have to scroll all the way back top of the page. Using jQuery it is very easy to lock the head of your document so that it re-appears when the user scrolls down the page.This is implemented on our site, so you are seeing a live example. What we wanted to do was share how this was done.
The first step is adding the javascript into the head of your webpage:
<script>
jQuery().ready(function() {
var $scrollingDiv = jQuery("#scrollingDiv");
jQuery(window).scroll(function(){
$scrollingDiv
.stop()
.animate({"marginTop": (jQuery(window).scrollTop() + 0) + "px"}, "slow" );
});
});
</script>
The next step is adding a div around the head div that contains your menu:
<div id="scrollingDiv" style="position:absolute;z-index:400;width:100%">
<div id="header">
<div class="container">
</div>
</div>
</div>
Finally you need to add padding to your content area so that there is room at the top of the page for your header div.
<div id="main" style="padding-top:165px">
So reading my morning daily sites while having coffee, I came across an small article poorly written on Mashable which was about Foursquare. It was written in such a way as to frustrate the hell out of me and this is a trend I have seen other places.
Basically as I was reading the article, I wanted to better understanding what Foursquare was and wanted to check it out and then come back and finish the article. This way I would have a deeper understanding about what I am reading. Yet here again we have an Internet site trying to horde all traffic coming into it and not sharing any traffic outside of it. When I come across sites like this, I tend to avoid them if at all possible. In most cases a regular author would link to the website, but sites like Mashable and hub pages don't allow outside linking except in certain situations. As with nofollow they attempt to get all traffic and keep all traffic at their site.
If memory serves About started this trend and in those days you actually got paid if you created pages that brought traffic. Now they use and abuse their customers and writers. All I can say is this is the primitive DRM mindset that serves no one, not even the company doing it. In the short term this might work, but int he long term it drives people away. The funny thing is that Mashable calls it's self a social network, but it really is the worst sense of that. You can only become apart of their network if you write articles for free. Mashable is really a big marketing machine that use other social networks to promote itself. The funny thing is that it doesn't work very well. I have only had to stumble across them a couple of time and their articles appear to mostly recycled from other content on the net.
In closing, sharing is the key to real community and for your own growth.
