Published March 17, 2011 | 
Two popular social networking sites that are most relevant today for businesses and organizations are Facebook and LinkedIn.com. The latter is lesser known by some people but it is very valuable as a “professional” networking site. Individuals and business owners can create a profile and create a company profile, listing services or products, or specials. This is similar to having a “page” on Facebook.
Of course, the most important thing about having a page or company profile is to provide some useful content or information on that page that will allow you to share information, inform people and perhaps have special offerings. A great way to kill two birds with one stone, as it were, is to have a WordPress blog setup with the Network Publisher plugin that will allow blog posts to automatically appear on your Facebook and LinkedIn profile as well as on your Facebook Page. It just means finding something to write about from time to time. This is all very important because it also helps your site with the search engines… bringing more people to your website, and learning about your company, for example, and becoming clients/customers.
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
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facebook, Linkedin.com, search engines, social networking sites | 
Leave a commentPublished March 15, 2011 | More and more, these days, people are realizing that for their websites, what they need are Content Management Systems and the old static websites are not meeting their needs. There are many reasons for this. One reason being that the search engines like fresh recently published up to date content. Another reason is the flexibility and the maintainability of these websites.
In the past, all websites were what we would call static sites. The web designer would create a layout with links to all the pages so that the visitors could navigate to all the pages in the site. The site content never really changed and that is why the name “static” is used. Once the site is published, in the case of a static website, it does not change until a new pages are published or existing pages are edited and re-published.
These are contrasted with Content Management Systems, or dynamic database driven websites, as they are called. Take the example of the blog or weblog as an example of a dynamic website, that is technically a Content Management System also. When you come to a blog, the first thing you see is the most recent article followed by any comments and then the next most recent article. This is all driven by software and a database.
A Content Management System can be even more versatile than a blog. It can incorporate basic pages, a blog, a forum, a photo gallery, e-commerce (a shopping cart, for example) and much more. The clients only need a web browser to maintain the site and no advanced web design, html or other coding skills are required. Content Management Systems make it very easy to incorporate these and other Web 2.0 features into a website. An article on Wikipedia about Content Management Systems is here and a very popular Content Management System is Drupal, which is described here.
Summary of Benefits
- Makes it possible for the client to update, maintain website
- Updates and changes to the website do not require skills in HTML or other Web Coding
- Many Extensions are available to incorporate various Web 2.0 features
- Flexibility
- New and “Fresh content helps with ranking in the search engines.
Two very popular and open source (think free) Content Management Systems are Drupal and Joomla!
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Posted in Uncategorized | facebook, Linkedin.com, search engines, social networking sites | Leave a commentPublished March 13, 2011 | I just started viewing this great title on Lynda.com called Web Site Strategy and Planning, by Jen Kramer. I’ve enjoyed her other titles on Lynda.com that relate to Joomla – the Content Management System. I just got a new client recent and this will come in handy. In the first chapter she describes some example questions to begin asking a client. That’s so important. Sometimes, I get a job and we have our initial conversation, where I get an “overview” of the client’s company or whatever. Then, after that discussion and I get the job, I show the client a few design layouts, templates as it were – custom templates, of course. Anyway, with my questions, or interview of the client, I come away with a paragraph or two of text about what the client does. This is the extent of what I have to produce an entire website.
Obviously, as the Web Designer or Web Developer, I don’t know anything about Industry XYZ, or Field XYZ or Business XYZ. So, what am I to do? I can go look for the client’s competitors to get an idea or ideas. I cannot know, though, that such and such company does exactly the same thing as my client. There are always differences. In addition, we wouldn’t want to copy the competitor’s copy text.
From Jen Kramer’s title, mentioned above, “Web Site Strategy and Planning, I now have a list of questions that can help with the process.
The questions are as follows:
What product or service are you selling? Or what products and services are you selling?
Who are your competitors?
What is your competitive advantage in offering these products or services?
Why are you better than your competitors? Or in what ways?
Who are your customers or clients?
Does your company have a mission or vision statement, or do you have a statement of company values?
How are you marketing your business? Do you have brochures? Ad copy?
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Posted in Uncategorized | facebook, Linkedin.com, search engines, social networking sites | Leave a commentPublished October 15, 2010 | In this video I discuss how to edit a wiki. A wiki is a site that uses the same software that runs Wikipedia. This wiki is available on the Word Salad website at: http://wordsaladpoetrymagazine.com/wiki/
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Posted in Uncategorized | facebook, Linkedin.com, search engines, social networking sites | Leave a commentPublished October 5, 2010 | 
I just downloaded this tool from Microsoft’s website. It is called Live Writer. I can add various blogs to the application and publish from my desktop. This is a pretty useful tool.
I started adding some of the different plug-ins that Microsoft has for the tool. This feature allowed me to post a map from Bing on my blog. I added a push-pin that showed my home/business location. I can zoom to different levels from street level to a wider view that shows more of the surrounding cities and even more.
There are a large number of useful plug-ins that extend the functionality of the software. These let you include a number of different things in your blog, from video to website images, to content from the various photo sharing sites.
I’ll have to share more when I learn more about the features.
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Posted in Uncategorized | facebook, Linkedin.com, search engines, social networking sites | Leave a commentPublished September 24, 2010 | Future Wave Designs has just added a member to the team. His name is Philip Khristian Uy Perez, from the Philippines. I met him on Facebook.com and was impressed with his talents in programming, rich internet application development, graphics, web design and other related skills.
I look forward to working with Philip and learning more about his skills in this exciting field.
Bruce Whealton
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Posted in Uncategorized | facebook, Linkedin.com, search engines, social networking sites | Leave a commentPublished September 6, 2010 | Digg.com is a social news and bookmarking site. It is a great way to share what one is doing on the web.
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Posted in Uncategorized | facebook, Linkedin.com, search engines, social networking sites | Leave a commentPublished September 5, 2010 | Importance of the semantic web for dealing with overwhelming quantity information, data, etc.
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Posted in Uncategorized | facebook, Linkedin.com, search engines, social networking sites | Leave a commentPublished September 5, 2010 | Let’s start with a definition of Semantics. Semantics is closely related to syntax. The syntax is how we say something and the semantics is the meaning behind what we say. Take a sentence in English as an example. The sentence is made up of punctuation, spelling, and the letters. The semantics is what the sentence means.
When we talk about syntax and semantics we are talking about communication. The Internet gave a way for computers to communicate with one another. It gave them a voice so that they could talk to one another. However, just as a parrot can mimic human speech, a computer on the web can only mimic human information. It does not understand what the information means.
The web is made up of web pages that use a syntax that tells how to display or present documents or information for us. The need for the semantic web is because computers and the web were not designed to understand the meaning of what is contained on a web page. Computers can recognize the syntax of web pages, i.e. how to display the information on a web page but not the semantics of what is contained on a web page.
The semantic web is about things, people, events, places and any concept you can think about. The semantic web is not only about understanding the meaning of what is contained on a web page but how these things are related to one another. Two technologies for embedding semantic information in web pages are microformats and RDFa. So, this is not about something that will happen in the future, it is about technologies that exist now… and are happening now.
Once a computer and the web can understand what a person, a place and an event is, it can start helping you interact with these things. A good example is in semantic web searches. Search engines would be more accurate. You could tell the search engines whether you are searching for a person, a place or a song. They wouldn’t only depend on keywords but also the semantics contained within web pages. It is about helping computers get us what we want.
See http://microformats.org/about and http://rdfa.info/about by the web consortium.
Post by Bruce Whealton
http://futurewavedesigns.com
http://brucewhealton.com
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Posted in Uncategorized | facebook, Linkedin.com, search engines, social networking sites | Leave a commentPublished August 25, 2010 | This is what I have been writing about lately… web 3.0, the semantic web.
This blog is published by Bruce Whealton, more information about Bruce Whealton is here… Bruce Whealton is the owner of Future Wave Designs, a North Carolina Company providing Web Design and Web Development. Visit:
NC Web Design:Future Wave Designs
Posted in Uncategorized | facebook, Linkedin.com, search engines, social networking sites | Leave a comment