At TEDGlobal in London, Tim Brown talks about how design got small—and why it’s becoming big again. Design is moving beyond the sculptural object displayed in lifestyle magazines or on pedestals in museums of modern art. It’s returning to its roots, when design thinkers like Isambard Brunel created innovative breakthroughs.
It’s time to begin thinking of design as a process for problem-solving, rather than merely for the creation of products.
Well, it’s finally out! Social media rockstar, Gary Vaynerchuk, has just released his long-awaited book entitled, Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion. If you rely on the Internet in any way for your livelihood, or if you’ve got plans to build an online business, then this book is a must-read.
Nobody has succeeded at utilizing social media to create a personal brand like Gary Vaynerchuk. After primarily utilizing traditional advertising techniques to promote his family’s local wine business, Gary rapidly adopted and leveraged social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to promote Wine Library TV, his video blog about wine.
As his viewership swelled to over 80,000 a day, doors opened to a book deal, several national TV appearances, and a flurry of speaking engagements around the world. Gary’s dual identity as both a business guru and wine guy has made him the “Social Media Sommelier.”
About the book…This book is a 90-minute read, and weighs in at just 140 pages. The tone and pace of the book is not unlike listening to Gary speak, and it’s simply loaded with practical advice, step-by-step instructions, and real-world examples. In addition to a complete, 21-step outline for building your personal brand online, Gary even “threw in” about half a dozen phenomenal business ideas for anyone with the ambition to go for it!
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It is one of the most important elements in your website… your contact form. So why is it that WordPress doesn’t have a built-in feature that enables you to create custom contact forms? Thankfully, the creative folks at RocketGenius have stepped up to the plate and filled this much-needed void with an amazing new plugin called Gravity Forms.
Over the past several years, I’ve tried just about every contact form plugin out there, including cforms and Contact Form 7. I was frustrated with the apparent trade-off between functionality and usability. It seemed that the more flexible the plugin, the more confusing the UI. This is where Gravity Forms simply blows away the competition! They’ve managed to create an incredibly flexible plugin, adding innovative features while still maintaining a drop-dead-simple AJAX interface that feels more like a desktop app than a web plugin.
In fact, this plugin is so good, you’ll wonder why it doesn’t just come standard in WordPress! (hint, hint)
Gravity Forms also sends automatic emails to users in response to a submission, enabling you to create professional and personalized messages.
If you’ve been searching for a simple way to create custom forms for your WordPress pages and posts, look no further than this plugin! Honestly, Gravity Forms is unrivaled when it comes to creating custom forms for WordPress.
Ready to learn more? Why not jump over to their site and take a look at the video tour?
Thanks to the good folks over at WooThemes, you can use the coupon code: WOOFORM20 when you purchase Gravity Forms, and they’ll give you a nice 20% discount. So what you waiting for? Go check it out already!
CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT GRAVITY FORMS FOR YOURSELF!
More and more businesses are recognizing the potential of social media for building their brand and connecting with an even broader audience. There are dozens of articles written every day about how to use Twitter for business, but it seems there are a growing number of articles that claim to expose the “fundamental flaws of Twitter,” or proudly announce the “10 reasons Twitter will fail.”
During a recent conversation with one of my clients, he raised these concerns and asked me if I thought Twitter was just an “overhyped trend” that would soon disappear. “Why is it,” he asked, “that so many businesses have had poor results using Twitter to promote their products or services?”
In my opinion, the majority of these negative articles reveal either poor practices, a gross misunderstanding of the purpose of social media, or both. One may as well write an article about the fundamental flaws of a hammer when used to brush one’s hair. You’re either using the tool incorrectly, or for the wrong purpose! Read the rest of this article »
Those now-famous words were first spoken by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, in the following context:
“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”
Or, as Chris Anderson puts it in his latest book, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business…
“Abundant information wants to be free. Scarce information wants to be expensive.”
Such is the premise of the compelling new book by Wired Magazine’s Editor In Chief, Chris Anderson. But tell that to the poor CIO who just shelled out six figures to buy another rack of servers. And what of the notion that “anybody can make money on the web?”
Today, the underlying technologies that power the Web are fast becoming too cheap to meter. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero. Read the rest of this article »
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