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The Results of Project Icon

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The Results of Project Icon 7

The Results of Project Icon 8The community has voted, and the votes have been tallied. The winner of Project Icon, with 35% of the votes, is Entry ID “BD,” otherwise known as Ben Dunkle. Congratulations, Ben! The runner-up was VS, otherwise known as Verena Segert, so we’ll be attaching that set to the alternate color palette that is selectable from the profile screen. As we prepare for RC1, Ben and Verena will be revising a couple of their icons so that both sets will use the same metaphors, creating the colored “on” states, and creating the larger size of each icon for use in the h2 screen headers. We are very grateful to have had the opportunity to select from so many great options, and would like to express again our appreciation for all the designers who participated in the contest. Thanks also to the more than 3700 people who completed the voting survey and took the time to weigh on on the individual icon sets.

Q.18 Which one of the sets do you think we should use as a basis for the 2.7 icons?
Icon Set # of votes % of votes
BD 1285 35%
VS 1080 29%
GB2 424 11%
OSD 376 10%
LS 300 8%
GB1 235 6%

The wide lead of BD and VS made it clear that voters had a clear preference for these sets.

Q.20 If you could choose a runner-up, which would you choose?
Icon Set # of votes % of votes
VS 916 27%
BD 647 19%
LS 522 16%
OSD 488 14%
GB2 462 14%
GB1 331 10%

Question 20 was not mandatory, so a few hundred people skipped it, but the responses we did get (3366 of them) reinforced the fact that the two most popular sets were also the most popular 2nd choices, which made the decision of the judges to go with the popular vote an easy one (take that, electoral college!).

A few of the individual icon metaphors also had a significant lead over the other choices.
Dashboard: 1333 voters (40%) chose a house as the best metaphor. We agree, so both Ben and Verena will be replacing their Dashboard icons.

Media: 2097 voters (65%) chose the combination camera + musical note icon, which was part of Ben’s set. We also really loved it, and Verena will amend her media icon to incorporate this idea.

Plugins: 1682 voters (53%) selected the outlet plug metaphor, which both Ben and Verena used in their sets.

Tools: 1581 voters (49%) liked the combination of two tools better than anything else, so Ben and Verena will try this approach.

So those are the results, and soon you’ll see the new icons coming to a 2.7 installation near you.

Need another look at the entries to remember which one you liked best? Here are some reminder images, as well as the identity of each set’s creator.

Winning icon set by Ben DunkleBD was Ben Dunkle, a designer, professor and artist from upstate/western New York State. In case you’ve already forgotten, Ben’s icon set is the winner of Project Icon and will become the default icon set after a few minor changes. Verena Segert's blu iconsVS was Verena Segert, our runner-up, a designer from Germany who presented sets in both grayscale and blue. Her blue icons received more specific voter comments than the gray ones, so we’re planning the second color palette to be in shades of blue so that we can use the blue icon set.
Guillaume Berry's 1st setGuillaume Berry's 2nd setGB was Guillaume Berry, a designer from France who submitted two sets in the same style in order to propose a couple of different metaphors. One of his sets came in third while the other came in last, but whether you only look at the higher scoring set or you combine their votes, Guillaume had the next highest percentage of votes, and many people liked the metaphors he used for various icons. In fact, given the enthusiasm of the community for Guillaume’s icons, we think a great plugin would be one that would allow the user to upload the icon set of their choice. Any volunteers?
Menu icons by Open Source Design ClassOSD was the Open Source Design class at Parson’s in New york City, taught by Mushon Zer-Aviv and consisting of students Alexandra Zsigmond, Ed Nacional, Karen Messing, Khurram Bajwa, Leonie Leibenfrost. Teacher and students worked together to determine their metaphors and visual style. Luke Smith's menu iconsLS was Luke Smith, a designer from Iowa who specializes in icons among his other design pursuits.

If you need to hire an icon designer any time soon, we highly recommend our Project Icon contestants, who all delivered great work in a very short timeframe. It was great to work with all of them, even for such a short assignment.

So, to sum up:

  1. The winning icon sets by Ben Dunkle and Verena Segert will be incorporated into WordPress 2.7 RC1.
  2. Someone should write a plugin that would allow anyone to upload a custom icon set (I bet the other contestants could be convinced to release their icon sets for such a purpose).
  3. 2.7 is still trucking away, but we can always use help with patches, especially for IE6! (I know, that wasn’t in the main post, but it’s true, so hmph)

Thanks again to everyone who participated in this experiment, and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. And congratulations again to Ben and Verena!

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4 Super Easy Ways to Improve SEO

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SEO Improvements

Having a web presence is extremely important when it comes to marketing your business, and search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the best ways to improve your visibility and reach.

Some companies don’t have the time or resources to invest in an in-depth and thorough SEO strategy, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t reap the benefits of SEO. There are plenty of small things that you can do on your own to improve your SEO that does not take too much time or money to implement. If you want an easy way to improve your SEO, do the following.

SEO Improvements

1. Use keywords.

Take the time to change out your website copy and make sure that you’re using keywords that are relevant and popular among your industry and brand. Search engines will scan through your website or blog in search of these keywords, and the more often you use them, the more your site will improve. If you don’t have access to your website copy because it’s controlled by a third party, start a blog and ensure that your posts contain keywords and that you’re tagging your posts with relevant keywords.

2. Use images.

Images can be an easy and great help to your SEO efforts. Make sure that you add images to your content and that you are filling in the descriptions of these images with keywords. Search engines also crawl through images, and if your images contain keyword descriptions, it will help improve your SEO.

3. Use links.

Make sure that you are using backlinks and internal links within your website. Link to other blog posts or websites that are relevant to your industry, and make sure that you use internal links to help your web visitors easily move between pages. Both backlinks and internal links will help improve your SEO.

You should also reach out to other bloggers or partner companies and ask if they would put a link to your website or blog on their site. These links act as backlinks for your site or blog, and these too will improve your SEO.

You may also want to consider joining a professional online community or using social media and pushing out links to your website or blog through these channels. Not only do they add backlinks to your site, but they can easily help your site go viral and generate more traffic, and more traffic also increases SEO.

4. Use the right URL.

If you have a blog or a website, it’s very important that you make sure your URLs contain words instead of random letters, symbols, or numbers. Search engines crawl URLs and use this to determine where to rank your website or blog, so if your URL is www.mydomain.com/pumpkins, it will do more for your site than www.mydomain.com/14729dfljddfs.

If you want your audience to find you and if you want to compete with all the other websites in your industry, you need to use SEO. But if you don’t have the resources or time to implement a strong strategy, use these tips to help you get your feet wet. Once you’ve made these small improvements, you can then find the time and resources to invest in a more detailed strategy.

Jacob Smith is an SEO expert writing in tandem with SEOMap.  For more information about SEO and keyword analysis, check out SEOMap’s latest SEO book on keyword strategy.

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Understanding the Value of LinkedIn Social Link Sharing

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Understanding the Value of LinkedIn Social Link Sharing 12

Chances are you have a Facebook and Twitter account, but what about LinkedIn? Do you really need to add yet another social network to your to-do list? Yes. The truth is LinkedIn social link sharing can greatly increase readership and page views to your website. Let’s take a closer look at the value of LinkedIn social link sharing.

What Is LinkedIn Social Link Sharing?

LinkedIn social link sharing is simply the process of sharing links through LinkedIn. It’s very similar to Facebook, except with this social networking site, you have the ability for your links to be seen by professionals in your field. This can be huge for the freelance writer or any other online business. You can also choose for the links you share to be visible to everyone or just those that are in your contacts. Another great feature is the ability to share the message on Twitter at the same time.

Why Is It Important?

There are several reasons why LinkedIn social link sharing has become so important. First of all, as mentioned above, you’re connecting with professionals in your field. This means that people that actually want to see your content will see it. Another benefit is that the more people who like your content, the more shares you’ll receive. As more people share your links, the links appear on more websites. This means that there are more backlinks to your site. This is beneficial because it results in your website ranking higher on search engines.

How Can You Get Started?

Your first step is to set up an account with LinkedIn. You’ll be able to add contacts pulled from your email contacts and then you can link to other professionals once your account is set up. The key is to not flood your page with links to your own site. Actually, in the first few days, you want to work with sharing content that is related to your business and sharing the content of others. Once you do start to add your own links here and there, people will be more apt to share your links in return. The important part is to stay active on the site and create more and more connections, which will lead to more link shares.

LinkedIn may not have the same fun environment that Facebook does, but the professional atmosphere makes it a great place to build your business and connect with those in your field. In other words, you can’t afford to have a LinkedIn account and participate in social link sharing.

About the Author: Carey Peight loves to use sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn for sharing links and social listening projects. The more you pay attention to current trends, the easier it will be to create content your readers want and need.

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WordPress: Provides a Great Framework for Your Website

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WordPress: Provides a Great Framework for Your Website 13

It doesn’t really matter in what kind of business you are; it is human behavior to have an urge of standing out of the crowd, of its kind. The same story goes with online business and for an online venture, you need a blog or website of your own. The website you tend to own for your business is always customized from some other framework such as WordPress.

WordPress: Provides a Great Framework for Your Website 14

Although the foundation on which your website stands is not your framework, what you can try to do is customize it in such a way that it doesn’t shout for itself saying “I’m a WordPress driven website”. We have gathered a few facets of WordPress, and it would run you through a few tips to work with WordPress more efficiently.

Customize your sidebar:

When you open up your website, you find ads pouring on your website. Sometimes, it is the picture of your fans and at times, it is the tweets following you on your page. Somewhere on your page, you have a link that you want your visitors to click, when they visit your website. But how do you expect them to have a glimpse of it when your website is awfully crowded with other widgets? In such a case, go to ‘Appearance & Widgets’ and remove all the widgets, except those which will fetch you business.

As WordPress code is developer-friendly, little knowledge about PHP will help you to handle it.

Make files available in Media Library

Let us illustrate a regular physical library, suppose that you have books acquired by you in different months and years. Will you keep all the books in libraries of different buildings? Or, will you segregate the books into different cabinets, in the same library? Hopefully, the comfortable answer would be the latter one because it will make any book easily available to you, whereas going from one building to another will make you tired.

Media Library’ of WordPress provides you with a facility where you can organize your files in separate folders, according to the month or year you desire. It makes it feasible for the users to retrieve the required files, using a simple keyword.

Immaculate permalinks would do you good:

We understand that you have a hard time creating content so that Search Engines see it and rank you high in the listing. You have to try out a way to get recognized by the Search Engines easily. The next thought which would creep into your mind is: How can I make it happen? The most important thing you need to do is learn about ‘SEO Copywriting’, which is a time taking process.

If you want to get an instant solution, search for the permalink field at the top of the editing page of WordPress. Make sure, that you revise the links by putting them in this field, before publishing them online. Another thing that can be done is, try to remove unwanted words as far as possible and add keywords. Adding keywords doesn’t mean that the entire content would be occupied with keywords. Content will be said to be a ‘quality-content’, only when it is easily understood by humans.

To see how this actually works, you need to have certain activities following these tips. WordPress will let you use the “copy-paste” technique to the most, but you need to manipulate it to a great extent to make it look unique. Also, do not forget the ultimate goal is to gain business, so work with your WordPress according to the need of your business.

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-Authored by Sara Bruce. She is an SEO analyst and an avid blogger. If you come across any negative reviews about your Business/Services do visit our pages on ‘Remove negative reviews’ & ‘Remove rip-off reports’ to get rid of it.

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