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In our never-ending quest for all things ‘Net-nostalgic — and because the ‘Net isn’t that old, a lot of them refer to AOL — here is the latest: Verizon has agreed to purchase AOL lock, stock, and 5-bazillion-CD-cache, for $4.4 billion.

Sounds like a ton of money, but maybe not so much when you consider AOL was at one time valued at well over $200 billion. Then again, for a company almost no one under the age of 25 actually knew still existed, maybe that’s not such chump change after all.

In any case, here’s a terrifc “chat history” of AOL’s up/down/up again timeline from Mashable.com:

Like jazz pianist Bud Powell, the latest release of WordPress (4.2) adds a bit of impressionistic flair to the old standard melodies. Upgrades to the Press This app and added ability to embed external media make writing and publishing so seamless and smooth, it’s like having a self-playing jazz piano at your fingertips. Watch the promo vid here:

You haven’t seen nothin’ until you’ve seen this! “Chops Sawyer” by RicKy Syers — going viral as we speak. Seriously, this is incredible, and man, that little guy’s fingers are flyin’!

Starting up a new quasi-reoccurring post category here on Diamond Mind, for “local viewing” only, not dissemination. “Working Music”, which will be exactly what it says — tunes listened to while working away at doing the terrific things we do. Been delaying it for a while as I pondered where to begin, and it finally hit me that “Working Man” by Rush would be uber-fitting for a first selection.

So, here you go — a 1974 performance by Geddy, Alex, and then-drummer John Rutsey at Laura Secord Secondary School in St. Catharines, Ontario. I’ll even dedicate this first post to a “young” man by the name of Jim Weatherford, wherever he may be. Jim was a junior-high buddy and the first person to introduce me to Rush, though it was a couple of years later, when “All The World’s A Stage” came out. Man, we were young then! As are these guys — I swear Geddy is wearing braces in this vid! Enjoy.

And all credit goes to the YouTube uploader, Concordbeltcreation2. You should check out his channel — he has some awesome vids going all the way back to Danny & The Juniors. I’m sure I will be reposting some of them in the future…

If not, now would probably be a good time! Use this link to find out how Google sees your site:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Simply put in your website address, and you’ll get a return page after a few moment’s analysis. If your site is good, it will look like ours. After yesterday’s “Armagoogle” deadline (okay, I stole that), if your site is NOT mobile-friendly, you may have already lost ground in your company’s page rank.  And if you haven’t yet, it’s only a matter of time — the web is a big place, and Google is determined to serve mobile search users only pages that can be accessed and used by mobile devices.

Wondering why this change is happening? It’s not exactly sudden, as Google has been marking pages as mobile friendly, or not, for a few months, but this news out of the wireless cellphone service world, coming just one day later, seems like it might be the first dot in a much larger picture.

According to the article from Business Insider, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, Google will now be offering a “pay-for-use-only” data service for cell phones.  And while it may be limited at first, if there’s one thing that has proven true over the past 20 years, it’s that Google sees the big picture better than anyone. It’s not that difficult to speculate that more dots will be coming.

In the meantime, if you need help with your website’s mobile-friendly status, call Diamond Mind Web Design at (417) 496-9905, or fill out our brief Contact Form.  We will be glad to assist you!

Like it or not, it had better be, and soon. Google is making a major change to their ranking algorithm, beginning next week on April 21st, that will strongly affect mobile search results. If your website is already mobile-friendly, great! You’re ahead of the curve. If it’s not, though, what will this algorithm change mean for you?

Well, let’s say you’re pulling Page 1 search result rankings for “brown barbaloots”, but your website is not mobile-friendly. After April 21st, if a search for “brown barbaloots” is made from a desktop computer, you’re likely (but not guaranteed) to still be in the same position. But if the search is made from a mobile device, expect a significant drop in your search rankings.

According to Google, “Starting April 21, we will be expanding our use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. This change will affect mobile searches in all languages worldwide and will have a significant impact in our search results. Consequently, users will find it easier to get relevant, high quality search results that are optimized for their devices.” What this boils down to is left unsaid: Users won’t be getting non-mobile-friendly-website results.

Don’t let that be you! If you are unsure about your website’s mobile-friendly status, use this handy tool provided by Google for that exact purpose. Simply put in your URL and Google will analyze your site and return its verdict. If it turns out to be a thumbs-down, what next? Depends on the site, as there are several possible options, including a redesign, a retrofit, and a new mobile-only site. If you need professional advice or help with moving ahead, call us at (417) 496-9905, or fill out our Contact Form.

It’s a thrilling new feature film — fun for the whole family! Yes, it’s “X-Wings”!

If you don’t laugh at the Darth Vader song, then you must be dead. Or never had kids. Or are already on the Dark side.

Head over to the actual video page on Youtube for credits and more from this creative team.

Word from the Internet world — and very welcome word, I might add — is that Microsoft is finally doing away with Internet Explorer, and replacing it with “Project Spartan”.  The new browser is rumored to be something along the lines of Firefox or Chrome; in other words, a piece of software that actually works as it should!

Of course, nothing so widely in use as IE will ever really be dead, or at least not for a long while. But I can heartily say that I look forward to the day when I will no longer have to program a website to look and work right on every other browser in the world, and then re-program it all to work on IE alone. So you could look at the end of IE as a mercy killing — with the mercy going to we web professionals!

In keeping with our recent them of AOL-related posts, here is a funny article from Today.com’s Money division titled “Goodbye, Internet Explorer: 7 tech things we miss from the ’90s“. Don’t forget to watch (or listen) to the included video on dialing up AOL from a 56k modem. Ah, the sweet old sound of Internet surfin’ freedom!

Straight from the horse’s mouth — actually from Cyrus Shephard at The Moz Blog, which is even better — comes this article, titled “10 SEO Myths That Friggin’ Tick Me Off“.  Definitely worth a read, whether you are a purveyor of search engine optimization or a recipient of its decidedly NOT mythic results.

Here is the entirety of #8, “SEO is all tricks”, because of all the myths listed herein, this is the one I have to deal with most routinely. I have added some real-world translations after each:

“Tricks” is what professionals call bad, manipulative SEO that gets you penalized. The problem, I believe, is the first thing any developer or marketing manager hears about SEO is something close to “put more keywords in the title tag.”

If that’s all SEO is, it does sound like tricks.

Real SEO makes every part of content organization and the browsing experience better. This includes:

1. Creating content that reverse engineers user needs (in other words, figuring out what your users want from you and giving them more of that)
   
2. Making content more discoverable, both for humans and search engine crawlers (yes, you still need to use search terms within your content)
   
3. Improving accessibility through site architecture and user experience (making sure your users can actually find what they are looking for on your site)
   
4. Structuring data for unambiguous understanding (don’t have a page titled “Fruit” that talks about cars)
   
5. Optimizing for social sharing standards
   
6. Improving search presence by understanding how search engines generate snippets
   (putting succinct summaries where they need to go)
7. Technical standards to help search engines categorize and serve content to the right audience (making your meta tags do what they need to do)
   
8. Improving website performance through optimizations such as site speed (exactly as said)
   
9. Sharing content with the right audiences, increasing exposure and traffic through links and mentions (getting your stuff listed and linked to from other places)
   

Each of these actions is valuable by itself. By optimizing your web content from every angle, you may not even realize you’re doing SEO, but you’ll reap many times the rewards.

To sum up, search engine optimization isn’t rocket science, but it does require some technical knowledge of how the Web works, some marketing skills, and some plain old common sense.  At Diamond Mind, we have all that stuff in spades, so give us a call when you need help with your SEO!

 

Here at Diamond Mind, we love The Oatmeal, NSFW words and all. Here’s a recent article that tickled our funny bone immensely, titled “8 Websites You Need To Stop Building“. We have thoughtfully excerpted #5 for you, as follows:

Funny stuff! Now excuse us – we have to go open a Twitter account so we can add “Social Media Expert” to our bio…

Facebook now lets you assign someone to take over your Facebook page in the event you pass away or otherwise become incapacitated.  This is actually some useful news from FB — a change from the usual, certainly.  Read more about this addition in this article from CNN, (inaccurately and over-sensationally) titled “Facebook Now Lets You Post When You’re Dead.”

Your legacy contact will be able to write a pinned memorial post, update your profile and cover photos, respond to friend requests, and even download all of your prior posts and photos if you so choose. They cannot log in as you, remove any prior posts, photos, or friends, or read any of your messages. And Facebook will require them to verify you are dead, if that is the case.

A morbid subject, yes, but one that several of my friends have already had to deal with.  I would suggest you take advantage of this option now, rather than make your loved ones do it later.  To read more about memorializing Facebook accounts and legacy contacts, click here.  BTW, you can also do the same for your Google+ accounts, not that anyone cares… 🙂

 

Yes, another data breach, from another big company. In case you haven’t figured this out by now, your personal identity data is no longer safe online. Think that’s an overstatement?  Try this list on for size:

• Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield
• Target
• Niemann Marcus
• Michaels
• Dairy Queen
• UPS
• Home Depot
• Goodwill
• JP Morgan Chase
• Jimmy John’s
• KMart
• Staples
• Sony
• The list could go on and on

All of these companies have suffered data breaches recently, in each case losing thousands, if not millions, of customer data sets to hackers. That data, depending on the case, could include your name, address, SSN, credit card number, birth date, telephone, email, and so on. With so many hacks occurring, odds are your information was included in one.

One of the most interesting things in the news about Anthem is that insurers aren’t required to encrypt consumers’ data under a 1990s federal law that remains the foundation for health care privacy in the Internet age.  This seems kind of strange at first, but consider that any law dated from the 1990s is as outdated as AOL dialup, and REALLY needs to be updated.

Regardless of who is at fault, Anthem is at least attempting to give aid to the 2,000,000+ Missourians affected (and those in other states as well), by providing 2 years of free credit monitoring and identity theft repair through AllClearID. To read more about the hack from Anthem, click here to visit AnthemFacts.com. I highly suggest you sign up!

 

This article from my web host, titled “CyberLynk Discontinues Dialup/ISDN Internet Service After 20 Years“, got me to thinking about the old days of 56k and whether or not anyone still uses a phone line and a modem to access the Internet.  Turns out, they do!

Although I couldn’t find accurate statistics on current-day usage, a poll taken back in 2012 by the Pew Research Center found that 3% of Americans still used dialup. That may not sound like much, but it still means millions of people have to wait for that scratchy buzz and hum before surfing the ‘Net.

Believe it or not, some 2+ million folks still subscribe to AOL’s dialup service!! I have to wonder how many of those are not even aware that they’re still paying for said service.  Boy, thinking about the days when the only way onto the Web was through AOL sends chills of horror up my spine.

Most (though not all) of dialup usage is typically found in rural areas, where broadband is only available if you can afford satellite access. Of course, we’re talking about the U.S. here — I’m sure the figures are much, much higher in other parts of the world, if there is even Internet access at all.

The one thing I believe that will finally kill off dialup, even in rural areas, will be the overarching presence of smart phones — once everyone can get on the Web via their cell phone provider, even the small screen sizes won’t be as much of a hindrance as the achingly slow “speed” of dialup…

 

Interested in where SEO (search engine optimization) will be heading this year? Well, the good news is that Google (and one would assume Bing and Yahoo, as well) continues to put more and more emphasis on actual, real, and useful content. Useful  being the key word here (pun intended),

The object that web designers and business owners need to keep in mind is providing a good user experience, and apparently that now includes what content is being served to your users. Does it dovetail with your business? Does it impart some worthwhile knowledge?

Not sure what kind of content you need to be adding to improve your SEO? Why not just ask your users? Use surveys and/or social media to find out what they want, then give them more of that. (Or so said The Kinks, anyway.) For more on this subject, see this article titled “What You Need To Know About SEO Going Into 2015” by Sujan Patel. For help with your SEO, call Diamond Mind Web Design!

 

Let’s face it, SEO (search engine optimization) isn’t the most exciting subject, and it can be very technical in nature. Add those two together and you come up with something that isn’t easy to explain to clients! Still, most semi-savvy business owners know that Google Analytics is the best way to examine your website’s traffic, and have at least heard the term “bounce rate“. But what is it, really, and why does it matter?

This article, titled “What Is Bounce Rate, Is It Important, And How Do You Lower It?” does an outstanding job of putting the subject into layman’s terms. Fellow web designer Ariel Rule over at the Elegant Themes Blog breaks bounce rate down into those three methods of examining it, and gives readable, succinct answers to each. And in case you are wondering, the answers are: 1) “Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page sessions (i.e. sessions in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page).” (as defined by Google), 2) yes, and 3) you’ll have to read the article, and/or call us, to find out!

If you are a Facebook user, you’ve probably experienced this more than once: Facebook announces they are making changes to (some/any) policy, and suddenly a spate of posts pop up everywhere with folks announcing that they hereby declare they aren’t putting up with this $#&%!  By God, Facebook can’t do this, and they can’t do that!  Well, guess what? Facebook is making another policy change, so you can expect yet another round of nonsense to begin.

Why do I call it “nonsense”? Well, firstly, to expect Facebook to make changes to anything that are not to Facebook’s advantage in some way, shape or form is just ridiculous.  Facebook is a business, not a gift from Mark Zuckerberg to all of us wonderful people out here, and as such, is in business to earn money. Every policy change they have ever made is a step towards making more money, and every change they ever will make will be the same.

Secondly, by signing up for an account on Facebook, you agree to their Terms & Conditions, and no amount of “I hereby declare…” legalese, no matter how many times you post it, is going to override the fact that you agreed to abide by their rules. Period.  Next time you’re in the grocery store, try this: Pick up a loaf of bread, state “I hereby declare that I will not pay for this bread!”, and walk out.  Okay, so it’s not a perfect metaphor, but the end result is the same — you’re wasting your time and breath.

You, and only you, are in charge of how much you share on Facebook, and with whom you share it. If you don’t like what Facebook does with your information/posts/photos/whatever, then don’t share that information! Again, you are given the tools by Facebook to be “social”, but only on their terms, whether you read them or not. In any case, I highly suggest that you carefully review all of your privacy and security settings. If you need more information, you can start here: Facebook Privacy Basics. Or, if you have specific questions, we are always glad to help!

Heard about this “net neutrality” stuff? Assuming you are like the other seven hundred million Americans (or so) who use the Internet, if you haven’t, you should probably make a point to familiarize yourself with it, lest you end up like Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), embarrassing yourself publicly by comparing Net Neutrality to Obamacare.

Rather than go too in-depth here, we’ll let this article from The Oatmeal help out Senator Cruz (and you) get a handle on why we need it. Titled “Dear Senator Ted Cruz, I’m Going To Explain To You How Net Neutrality ACTUALLY Works“, that’s exactly what it does, in typical The Oatmeal fashion, a small bit of which is excerpted here:

Personally speaking, I think one of the reasons I love stuff like this from The Oatmeal is the Pink-Floyd-The-Wall-ishness of their illustrations. Now go call your Senator and tell them to read this blog post!

OK, maybe there aren’t that many reasons, but there is one that counts, and that is: Wordfence is the best security plugin for WordPress out there, period.  Here’s an excellent article on one of the ways Wordfence keeps our sites secure, titled “Remote Scanning vs Source Code Scanning“. Without getting too technical, source code scans cover everything that makes your site what it is, including images, while remote scans can only cover, by their nature, the end result your source code produces.  Here’s a great metaphor (and you know how we love metaphors) taken directly from the article:

“Imagine you ask someone to check your home for a rat infestation. They arrive at your house, but they don’t get out of their car. They’re parked on the other side of the street and they’re examining your front door, front garden, porch, the walls on the front of your home, parts of the basement windows that they can see. Once they don’t find anything they honk the horn, shout out the car window “Yo, your home is clean” and drive off. Doesn’t sound very effective does it?”

No, it does not! So, if you want to keep your WordPress site “rat-free”, you need Wordfence.  If you need help installing or using it, be sure to call us!

The latest issue of “In The Loop”, from Sanford, Lea & Associates, has a terrific article on tips for keeping your family safe online.  Everyone is a computer user these days, from your child playing online games to grandma learning to use Facebook.  There are security and privacy concerns with any type of online activity, so be sure to read up and familiarize yourself with what you can do to be more secure.  (And if you need accounting services, you can’t go wrong with Sanford, Lea & Associates!)

Read the entire article here.

WordPress — our CMS of choice here at Diamond Mind Web Design — has just released the newest version of their core software, version 4.0, otherwise known as “Benny” (for jazz great Benny Goodman).  What does this mean for you? Not much if you’re a viewer-only of WP blogs and websites, but quite a bit if you are a user of same.

Like Benny Goodman’s sweet jazz, the new WordPress gives a much smoother experience for creating and posting.  New (and much needed) features like a visual plug-in browser, and the ability to view embedded media right in your post draft without the need to preview or publish, make for a much more seamless experience.

Watch the video if you are interested in further details about the new upgrade.  And if you’re interested in starting your own WordPress-based blog, or converting a non-content-manageable site over to WP, give us a shout!