Thanks for your help!

Welcome to the final round of the Nova Ultimate All-in-One WordPress Theme thumbnail selection. The Theme Nova and iDreamDigital teams studied the responses to the first round carefully and have taken all opinions to heart. To that end, we’ve come up with this final round of thumbnails for your consideration.

This time, we’d like you to consider which thumbnails most appeal to you aesthetically. These thumbnails are displayed on pages containing many other thumbnails (example below) and so we want to capture not only your imagination, but your attention. Please pick your two favorite thumbnails then tell us why you picked, or did not pick, the ones that you did.

Theme Nova is revolutionizing how users manage their WordPress themes. With the imminent launch of their premier theme, Nova One – a premium all-in-one ultra flexible WordPress theme, we’re helping Theme Nova pick some of their sales peripherals. First up: The thumbnail.

This thumbnail appears along side other theme thumbnails — it is the initial representation of the theme. The options include images that focus on the Theme Nova brand, the Nova One theme name and the flexibility of the WordPress theme in highlighting that it is an All-in-One template.

Your mission is to pick up to three of the options above. Help us source which thumbnail is the most appealing to someone seeking out their own ultra flexible WordPress templates for their website. Pick with your heart, with your brain, or anyplace in between (your nose?). No answer is right or wrong, we want your opinion. Please feel free to leave a comment below if you have something to add!

First Impressions

As with many things, it begins with a first impression.

Once a website is built and launched, optimizing that website for search is undeniably valuable. With SEO the adage of better late than never is always apt. Still, developing the website from the ground up with it’s Search Engine Optimization Strategy in mind is ideal. Think of it as putting your best foot forward. We all know that in business or life making a good first impression is a strong step towards a successful relationship. Making a quality first impression with search crawlers can be an equally important step towards a successful SEO strategy.

Of course, all that is done wrong in the beginning can be undone later but at a cost. You can avoid spending additional time, money and resources on your Search Engine Optimization by ensuring that you and your developer follow a few key steps when developing your new website.

Involve a Developer Who Understands SEO

If you don’t understand the game and it’s rules, then how will you play?

There is no denying that SEO is a sort of digital alchemy where novice to expert Developers mix science with educated guesses, seeking ever higher rankings. Indeed, not every web design or development studio has extensive experience in Search Engine Optimization which is why the key is to commission a developer that can demonstrate success in the field. Request an example or two where your developer has, or has helped their client to, climbed to the first page of Google and Bing.

You need not hire a SEO-centric developer but your developer should be familiar with the intricacies and nuances of SEO. Ask your developer what their own key search terms are (excluding the words used in their own URL as those are the easiest to rank for), then search those terms yourself. Have they achieved a first-page ranking for their own search terms?

Search Optimized, by Design

Any developer worth their salt will consider the optimization of your website throughout the design process.

As your designer works their way through their creative process it is important that they consider how each element of your website will interact with search engines. Some of the key features or methods your designer should implement when appropriate are:

• Machine-readable Navigation (CSS, XHTML, etc.) and Graphic Content (Cufon – a function that replaces traditional web text with smooth machine-readable graphical text).
• Well-Structured Architecture (For example: Cars > Sports Cars > Porsche, Ferrari, Aston Martin).
• Heading Design (H1, H2, H3).
• Cufon Content Pieces Containing Key Words That You Would Like to Rank For.
• Image Search Optimization
• Avoid Overly Repetitive Content.
• Where Appropriate (such as in Blogs) Feature Date and Time Stamps.
• Consider Using an SEO-Friendly Platform (WordPress).

Your website design should be user-friendly to more than your users, it should be friendly to search engine crawlers, allowing it to be easily indexed.

Functional Search Engine Optimization (fSEO)

Take advantage of the content you already create.

Now that your website has been conceptualized with it’s search optimization in mind it is time to consider how you might further impress upon search engines that your website is not only relevant but regularly updated. Work with your developer to identify processes within your day-to-day that already or can potentially produce date-stamped content for your website.

For example, do you publish news or events to your website? Do you add products to your store regularly, or utilize social media to spread awareness for your brand or products? Do your day-to-day activities produce photos, videos or other visuals? Do you use a ticket system, email or a growing FAQ for customer support? Talk to your developer about how your business operates and identify processes that already do, or could easily, create valuable content.

Your Developer, if properly versed in Functional Search Engine Optimization (fSEO), can help you to take advantage of these existing processes of content creation to automate your website in such a way that search engines will identify you as an active and regularly updated resource without adding to your workload.

Traditional Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

A game of musical chairs in which the music rarely stops.

Search Engine Crawlers are automated pieces of functionality that crawl the web on behalf of Search Operators identifying quality, timely, and authoritative content on websites using a number of tools and variables. These variables are as varied as they are plentiful which is to say they are very varying and plenty plentiful. Some key traditional elements of Search Engine Optimization include:

• Your Domain Name (When your website address includes some or all of your search terms you have a head start on your competition who are not so fortunate).
• Link Building (Linking to well ranked websites, having websites link to you).
• Content Creation (Creating unique content relevant to, and including, your key search terms).
• Your Social Media Presence.
• Search Engine Submissions (Website, Location/Map, etc).

While not all sites are blessed with Top-level Domain (TLD) names, link building and content creation are two key areas your web developer can provide you with suggestions as to optimizing your new website for search ranking.

Beware of Shortcuts

Black-hat operators promise the moon but more often than not leave you banned from Google, Bing and others with a tedious path back to relevance which you will walk alone.

Both fSEO and traditional SEO take time to succeed. Search Engine operators want to provide their viewers with the most appropriate results and as such they look for a track record of reliability from your website. The key advantage in fSEO is that it is efficient. It saves you time and money by taking advantage of processes you already have. Consider the costs and benefits of each, discuss this with your developer then if at all possible: be prepared to execute before your website launches.

If you’ve been following the links in this article you may have noticed that iDreamDigital ranks on the first page of Google for our own key search terms, including Web Design in Victoria as well as Web Development in Victoria and many variations of the two (Victoria web design and development, Victoria web design, Victoria website design, etc). We’ve accomplished this using a combination of the methods above.

Unless it is a natural authority your website will require an on-going SEO or fSEO strategy consisting of some or all of the above. Discuss your expectations with your developer — help them to understand what your goals are. Once a strategy is settled-upon, be prepared for a fight. It’s been said that picking key words is picking a fight and when it comes to your business: you should never pick a fight that you are not prepared to win.

If you’ve followed these key steps and engaged a developer who understands SEO, fSEO, your business and your customers you will find that in time you will conqueror the ranks and that ultimately to the victor go the spoils.

From Dallas to Toronto, Saint John to Vancouver and Victoria — many have struggled through a turbulent 2010 and 2011. Businesses and other organizations have evolved through these difficult times, coming out leaner, meaner and more dedicated to efficient and productive operation than ever before. So what does this mean for your web strategies? Let’s take a look…

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Efficiency is King

In the past many businesses have treated their websites as glorified brochures. For many those days are a thing of the past. Today businesses are looking to streamline customer and employee processes, gaining an advantage over their competition, and cutting down on waste while providing superior customer service at the touch of a screen or click of a mouse.

How can your organization take advantage of this shift? Talk to your web developer — explain your processes and help them to define functions which will minimize your customer and employee workflows while maximizing the end results. Serve your customers from your website with secure semi or fully-automated systems. Put the power into their hands by providing processes which help them to streamline their own engagement with your organization. Make the interactions between your customers and you easier by providing user-friendly functionality at the point of contemplation or sale.

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Drive Traffic to Your Web Pages with Minimal Effort

Odds are you have talked internally or with your web developer about a ‘blog’. A contraction of the term ‘Web Log’, a blog is a content driven web property best integrated from within your website and featuring your branding and standards. The benefits of a blog are numerous but in the past many managers have been reluctant to adopt them for fear of adding to their already stretched workload. Times have changed.

With the advent of countless open-source utilities and tools, blogs have never been easier to manage. The new year provides you the perfect opportunity to discuss your organization’s needs with your web developer once again. They can help you to identify content that is being created by your organization today and provide direction on how you can maximize that content to drive traffic to your interactive web properties tomorrow with little or no additional impact on your day-to-day procedures.

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Be Attentive to Your Audience

Whether your audience is comprised of your customers, your partners, the greater public or all of the above: they demand to be recognized and served. Your web developer should help you to target these individuals, wherever they may be. From Facebook to Twitter, Flickr to mobile devices and main street, automated and efficient processes can be employed which aid you in identifying new markets and audiences as well as better exploiting those you already have.

Providing comprehensive customer service is a must in this new ultra-competitive market. Let your web developer help you to streamline these processes, minimize actions and ultimately serve your customers better while saving you time and money both in the short-term as well as over the long-haul.

It is easy to forget about that or those for which we toil throughout the year. Friends, family, life and liberty, justice, peace and good will — these are the things that are most important and the things for which we work so hard to enjoy.

This month we raise our collective glasses to a wonderful holiday season for everyone, everywhere. Thank you all for your patronage, partnership and kindness. We wish the same to you and yours.

We’ve tailored our holiday hours to best serve you. We will be operating for our regular hours until late in December taking time away from December 23rd through January 2nd for the Holidays.

We have a digital gift for you, a Holiday Icon Pack. We hope you enjoy it!

Wishing everyone a wonderful Holiday season and a Happy New Year,
- The iDreamDigital Team

Applicants must be comfortable and motivated while working on their own. The pay is extremely competitive, well qualified applicants can expect generous compensation.

Job description

We are looking for a Web Developer who can code quickly and complete projects on a deadline.

Your responsibilities

• Write clean, modular, robust code to implement the desired requirements with little or no supervision
• Contribute ideas for making the application better and easier to use

Your qualifications

• Programming languages: PHP, HTML/XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, MySQL (ASP would be nice too)
• WordPress experience is a must, development and updating of plugins and themes is a regular occurrence
• 3-5 years of programming experience
• A work style that is extremely detail oriented ability to quickly debug and solve problems.
• Strong communication skills

Send your resume or work samples to frank – at – idreamdigital.com with the subject Job Posting.

When it comes to simple and efficient user interface you will be hard-pressed to find functionality that is superior to that of drag-and-drop. Drag-and-drop functionality allows a user to grab an object from one location and then drop it in another, modifying the destination, original location or both with one simple action. WordPress v3.3 applies this functionality to the management of media such as image and video files.

Of course, this new media implementation of drag-and-drop in the WordPress environment is but one small piece of the latest version which notably includes — if you will allow us to lean towards the technical for a moment here — updates to jQuery (jQuery 1.7.1 and jQuery UI 1.8.16), a number of much improved API functions, Tumblr importing for micro-blogging enthusiasts, toolbar improvements and otherwise.

Long since shedding it’s reputation as simply a blog management system, a custom WordPress installation on your website remains a fantastic tool set for those seeking to avoid the costly development of wholly custom content management solutions — we suggest that ask your web developer how WordPress can help you save time and money, optimize for search results, streamline your processes and help convert your website patrons into customers today.

Here’s to to rum-spiked eggnog, mistletoe and snow shovels. Here’s to the tree, hot chocolate and warm apple cider, the decorations, the lights, candles and the big man in red. Here is to work parties, gift giving, kind tidings and of course the New Year. Here is to the Holidays!

Another year passes while yet another — full of potential — begins. As such, iDreamDigital brings you a pack of some of our favorite open license Holiday icons. From a terrified Santa to gift wrapped treats, bells and candy canes.

The holidays provide a fantastic time for whimsical design and decorations of casual websites, blogs and social media. Maybe this pack of our favorite open-use holiday icons with get your creative juices flowing. The best part: If you don’t need them, you can re-gift them guilt free!

Download your holiday icons here.
We Hope you enjoy them!

It’s an exciting concept for businesses seeking comparatively inexpensive methods of building their base audience or expanding on their already existing viewership.

Empire Avenue for Business

Expanding their offerings for businesses is key to the wider-spread adoption of the Empire Avenue platform by professionals and brands.

Recently Empire Avenue has kicked their effort to provide businesses with valuable features into high gear. Intuitive, common sense, functions that allow an individual or organization to appeal directly to the website’s audience in a number of ways stand along side an advertising module and a plethora of tastefully presented social media metrics — all wrapped up in a user-friendly UI and based around the virtual economy of this social stock market.

Empire Avenue and the close-knit team responsible for the platform has accomplished great things in the short time they have been in operation. With the expansion of their professional-centric features this seems an ideal time for any individual or organization to enter the realm of social gamification.

A Website by iDreamDigital

Introducing the limited edition Luxury Items and Achievement for Empire Avenue, by iDreamDigital.

Practicing what we preach, we have recently come to terms with Empire Avenue for the inclusion of an iDreamDigital sponsored Luxury Item. Items such as these are purchased by users on the website for added benefits within the context of the game and provide a cost-effective and fun way for professionals to direct attention towards a brand through highly-visible graphics and high-volume user-chatter.

Joining brands such as Microsoft XBOX in their sponsorship of branded Empire Avenue Luxury Items, users are now able to purchase a virtual Website by iDreamDigital in the Empire Avenue Store, which is in fact the first step towards a top-secret iDreamDigital achievement.

What is this top-secret achievement you ask? Well… if you are already a member of Empire Avenue why not stop by our Facebook page and try to figure that one out for yourself?

Of course as any good pitch-man knows the deal is always sweeter when one must wait so; Wait, there’s more! It has also been our pleasure to work with the outstanding Empire Avenue team to launch a second new Luxury Item, this one laying claim to the title of ‘most expensive in the game’ to date. For the low cost of 40-million eavs you can now join other intrepid and adventuring millionaires by taking your very own virtual trip into orbit!

Did we mention there would be tang?