Why marketing?

Facebook has caught the attention of marketing businesses because the number of visitors at any give moment of the day and night is huge. This way, the companies get round the clock advertising, potential customer live interaction, targeted ads and many other tools that I will provide in this article. The way a company can connect its products with the customers is by using a Facebook Fan Page that allows any “fan” to visit everything on the respective profile, add comments, connect to other fans of the respective business and these “fans” must click on “Become a fan” button in order to receive updates about the respective company profile.

These updates can be new products that hit the market and the company decided to put on Facebook, new marketing strategies, and even competitions as well as announcements regarding whatever the respective company decides to post.

Before any actual Facebook marketing takes place, one must understand exactly what would be the strategy that is to be used. The best thing is to develop a plan at least few months in advance.

What can Facebook do for me and my business?

Unfortunately this simple question doesn’t have a simple answer and this means the range of effects that using Facebook has is more than one can grasp.

Facebook can be used for business purposes if you find any of the things below needed:

1. Updated content means that you always can upload new content all the time and your fans will love it. This also means that you will have lots of fans incoming all the time.
2. Supervising all the activity means that you are in full control and can observe everything that happens on the fan page. You can see what the fans are interested in, reply to the comments and answer questions, delete comments that are inappropriate and so on.
3. Time control allows you to fully grasp the time you need to create that original and updated content every day; however, this is a tricky business as creating original content daily for a business that is rather static is very hard and time consuming.
4. Targeting is intended to make your business profitable by trying to attract only people that are interested or related to your business’ field of work and so avoiding any unnecessary fans that will never become customers and will just make your life harder by posting unnecessary comments and so on. This also allows you to target only people in an age range that you find suitable. This strategy is very important as your content may not be that suitable or attractive let’s say for older adults and young teenagers for example.
5. Future customers are the actual fans means that you have the possibility of turning fans into customers but you should also take into notice that many people, even if already interested in your company, will most probably buy nothing and will just remain fans.
6. Live support is something that is necessary as you have to answer all sort of questions and presumably in real time; this activity is a full time job and will most likely ‘eat’ lots of time because Facebook is international and people tend to use it all the time, day and night.

Starting the Facebook marketing

Once you have understood all the implications that derive from the above tags and after you found using Facebook as a marketing tool proper you can start the real Facebook marketing implementation.

Even if the only way you can use Facebook for your business is with a Fan Page this approach has three ways to take, depending on how you want to use the Facebook page.

1. Business only via a Fan Page – you use a Fan Page to interact with the customers and this option allows you to create a Fan Page even without the need of an existing personal profile. If you just want to keep your business professional and handle all the fan threads on a professional level on the Fan Page this is the best choice. This can be done very easily by simply clicking “Create a Page for a business” on the Facebook starting home screen. You can also add an advertising campaign and Facebook offers administration tools for it. Even so, the option of using only a Fan Page limits in some manner the use by fans.
2. Creating a Fan Page and a personal one – what this means is that you connect your personal page to the fan page of your business. A special aspect must be considered as you connect your personal profile page with your business Fan Page and that is privacy; you don’t want your potential customers to see photos of you smoking a large cigar in the most enjoyable way while selling anti-smoke remedies on the business Fan Page. For this matter, Facebook’s Profile Privacy Settings comes to help you with that. You can limit the visibility for your personal profile to any lists you may find fit and so keeping your personal life personal.
3. Using both Fan Page and Personal Page for the business – this is a rather common way to attract customers and fans alike as both pages are intended to provide information about the business in the most professional way ever. Keeping things professional on both pages should be top priority.

Setting up the Fan Page

There are literally thousand of Fan Pages on Facebook so the thing is the process is rather simple. There are 5 simple steps to make this journey easier for you:

1. Choose the name for the webpage: try to understand that this name should be the name that you used to advertise your business; if you used a name for offline merchandise and advertising, you should use the same name for the Fan Page as well. Many customers are also on Facebook and these will probably the first people that will like your page and ask about the products or services you provide. This is a very good reputation indicator along with a keyword for search engines so try to use exactly the same name.
2. Adding a link to Twitter: is the best thing you can do to grant yourself fast news deployment on a large network of fans and customers as that is the role of Twitter. By adding a link to a Twitter account, you grant all fans access to all updates such as photos, updates, messages and even links. What this thing implies is that you provide original fresh content all the time so that the fans are attracted every time they receive an update. Many people send old posts as updates and that way loose many fans.
3. Adding photos to your business is a very good marketing move as the fans love to see what they can have and thus become potential customers. By adding the business logo or motto that you used in advertising the business offline means that your business will get more awareness.
4. Useful information with the “About” section: must be provided as everyone that lands on the page should know what the business is all about and what you can offer. Here you can also provide other means of letting the potential customers reach the business such as blogs, live chat, main website and other social profiles.
5. Providing content is the main way you will attract fans and customers.

There are some aspects that you should know if you are new to Facebook and those are:

• Wall posts allow everyone that lands on the Fan Page to see al recent updates, posts, messages from you and the fans as well. You can control this by accessing the settings in Wall Settings but forcing fans to wait for confirmation as they post a comment may disconnect their current relation with the business as they want to see their comments posted.
• Using and managing Discussion Boards is a very powerful tool that allows you to control where the discussions between fans and your business head and so here you can be a trend setter.
• Posting links represents an easy way to share links that might be interesting for your fans such as newsletters and so on.
• Posting events allows the fans to know where you will hold a conference, what new promotion or products you have available and many other things that you might find fit.
• Uploading photos allows you to inscribe images in your fans’ minds as this is the best way to make your products and services known. This can be used as an advertising tool, update tool or whatever you might think usable in your marketing strategy. You can also upload videos to obtain any effects you want.
• Adding reviews is a powerful way to let fans know what your business is all about and allowing your fans to post feedback is the best way to have the best indicator of your business popularity.

Additional ways to create content

There are three main ways to add more content to your business page and those are enumerated below:

• Create your own content: this way you post content that you create in the events tab, on the wall and on Twitter. There’s a catch and that’s not to try and sale products and services but rather review them or offer interesting and intriguing facts about what you offer so that the fans won’t feel offended by your sales crusade and leave.
• Auto generate content is a good way to have updated content all the time but this is directly connected to the content you upload manually and so this can only go that far. You can do this by using a RSS feed system to connect to your blog and Twitter. By using that, you auto generate content for all the linked accounts and so attract new fans all the time.  You must be careful with this as having the same information on all pages might bring a general boredom to your fans and so displacing the central role of the Facebook Fan Page.
• Allow the fans to create content is the best way to receive feedback and reconsider the marketing strategy or keep doing whatever you were doing. This is a very good way to encourage fans to become customers and state your interest in the customer community.

Adding more applications

This option allows you extended control over the way the Fan Page looks and behaves as well as any apps you may want to add. Facebook offers HTML code support so any code you might want to add can be added without too much effort.

The actual marketing – bringing fans to your Page

Now that you have created the Fan Page and all the additional information that you needed to make your business comprehensible on the Fan Page you have to start considering what audience you need for your business. This marketing strategy includes both Facebook use but also external.
You can link the main website with the Facebook page and vice versa.
You can link all sent emails to the Facebook page in the signature.
Use the personal profile to send the link of your business to all your friends.
Make good use of Twitter.
Post newsletters on Facebook also.
Link the blogs and all external websites to the Facebook Fan page as many people have multiple accounts.

What Facebook offers is a Social Media Relations environment that is sure to make you reevaluate your marketing strategy all the time and deliver the best results both in advertising and marketing.

Tips and tricks to help you sell

• Behave responsibly and post content that is well thought and considered as offensive and disrespectful posts may be punished extremely as fan communities are the best friend but also the fiercest enemy.
• Let the fans roam free and say what they want to say as this is the best way to encourage sharing and this is the best feedback.
• Do not try to lure fans into becoming customers; this thing will happen anyway if your marketing strategy is good. By doing that you risk making them feel offended and leave.
• Let negative comments posted as many fans will “come to the rescue”. By deleting such comments you create a bad impression and fans will surely loose faith as you can’t stand a critic.

Conclusion

What you can achieve with Facebook is both extensive and successful if you learn and understand how to harness the full potential of this marketing tool. You have to understand the trends, the daily customer needs and make them think that what you offer is what they need and they can’t get it anywhere else. What you must emphasize on is a good reputation, good interaction and proper fan feedback.

By doing that, not only you get the fans to know you and trust you but also turn them all into potential and actual customers.

That is the real efficient way to use Facebook as a marketing tool.

• Setup information represents all the data that the user needs to enter when installing the plugin for the first time. This represents data that you want the users to enter before using the actual plugin. For example, if you use an online picture plugin you might want the user to enter an name for a Flickr account or other information that you might use for the auto-configuration of the plugin. This type of data is usually uploaded in the database by the options mechanism that WordPress features.
• Actual data represents data that is collected as a user makes use of the plugin and this can mean history, preferences, tags, bookmarks, statistics and page views or uploads or whatever the plugin might need in order to work properly. Also, this data can be also stored in a completely separate MySQL custom defined table that needs to be created but the recommended way to store all the data that the plugin uses is by using Post Meta featured by WordPress.

What this tutorial is made for is to allow you to understand the mechanism of embedding the possibility of automatically creating a MySQL table into your plugin so it has a table to store data in. However, you might want to make the user involve more and after installing the plugin it should also run an install script. This could be an option too but this is far the last one as a third one might include the user running a personal SQL query by using a PHP script to interact with the database but that’s not a real option as the user may scramble a step or run the whole setup process wrong and so make your plugin erratic.

I will start the tutorial by a three step process in which you can make you plugin generate the database tables automatically.

The first step involves you creating the PHP function that creates the table;

The second step requires that you ensure the WordPress platform is calling the function when the plugin is installed and acive.

The last step involves creating a function that upgrades the plugin table structure if you changed it to another type and you want the plugin already installed to change the structure also.

Creating the database tables

This step is the first step you need to take as your plugin must generate automatic database tables and then add them to the WordPress database. Let’s consider the name of the function plugin_install.

Table prefix

By editing the wp-config.php file the table prefix can be defined by any site owner and even if by default the table prefix is “wp_” you are recommended to see if the real value is the default one and then use it for defining the name for your database table. Where you should search for the value is in the prefix variable located in $wpdb (WordPress database). You must take into notice the fact that the 2.1 version of the WordPress platform does not use the $table_prefix variable and you must use it for defining the name of your database in any less than 2.1 version.

For example, creating a table called {prefix} search_query your code should look like this:

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<?php
function plugin_install () {
  global $wpdb;
  $table_name = $wpdb->prefix . "search_query";
}

While this only defines the name, the next step involves creating and / or updating the table by using a dedicated function for doing that rather than running a direct SQL query. The function that is used is dbDelta and as it’s located in a file that is not loaded by default you’ll have to load it manually; the file is upgrade.php (wp-admin/includes).

What the dbDelta function does is examining the default table structure and after comparing it to a known pattern that it needs it can alter the table as necessary either by adding or modifying it. This way, the table is prepared for updates as upgrade-schema.php explains very well.

Before starting to use dbDelta you should know three main things:

1. Each field must have its own line in the SQL statement
2. Between the keyword primary key and the actual key that you define you must place two spaces; this is a common error source
3. Instead of using index you must use key and also make sure that at least a key is included.

However, with all that taken into notice, the next lines in the function look like this:

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<?php
$sql = "CREATE TABLE " . $table_name . " (
    id mediumint(9) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
    time datetime DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00' NOT NULL,
    name tinytext NOT NULL,
    text text NOT NULL,
    url VARCHAR(55) DEFAULT '' NOT NULL,
    UNIQUE KEY id (id)
  );";
require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php');
dbDelta($sql);

You must replace the $sql variable with your own table structure.

Adding the first entries

A simple example of how to add data to the fresh table is provided below:

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<?php
$welcome_name = "Plugin Wordpress";
$welcome_text = "Congratulations, you just installed the plugin";
$rows_affected = $wpdb->insert( $table_name, array( 'time' => current_time('mysql'), 'name' => $welcome_name, 'text' => $welcome_text ) );

There is an avoidance measure that is recommended and that is to make sure that you use the $wpdb->escape function to run a variable before parsing it into the database. For further explanation, read the help for the class named wpdb.

When declaring the database structure, you can also include a version so that you know at any given point in time what version the database structure is and update it at any time, not forgetting to change the version of course:

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<?php
add_option("plugin_db_version", "1.4");

Once the version declared we can put together the whole function so that you understand exactly what the code structure is:

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<?php
global $plugin_db_version;
$jal_db_version = "1.4";
 
function plugin_install() {
  global $wpdb;
  global $plugin_db_version;
 
  $table_name = $wpdb->prefix . "search_query";
  $sql = "CREATE TABLE " . $table_name . " (
      id mediumint(9) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
      time datetime DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00' NOT NULL,
      name tinytext NOT NULL,
      text text NOT NULL,
      url VARCHAR(64) DEFAULT '' NOT NULL,
      UNIQUE KEY id (id)
    );";
  require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php');
  dbDelta($sql);
 
  add_option("plugin_db_version", $plugin_db_version);
}
 
function plugin_install_data() {
  global $wpdb;
 
  $welcome_name = "Plugin Wordpress";
  $welcome_text = " Congratulations, you just installed the plugin!";
  $rows_affected = $wpdb->insert( $table_name, array( 'time' => current_time('mysql'), 'name' => $welcome_name, 'text' => $welcome_text ) );
 
}

After customizing the function to suit your needs, you may want to learn how to create an upgrade function for the database structure as this is a very common action.

Let’s use the previous code to create a database, version 1.4 as I chose the variable. This version comes with a URL field of 128 characters compared to the previous version which only had 64. After all the defining of the function you must add the lines below to check the current function version and update if that is required:

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<?php
$installed_ver = get_option( "plugin_db_version" );
if ( $installed_ver != $plugin_db_version ) {
  $sql = "CREATE TABLE " . $table_name . " (
      id mediumint(9) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
      time datetime DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00' NOT NULL,
      name tinytext NOT NULL,
      text text NOT NULL,
      url VARCHAR(128) DEFAULT '' NOT NULL,
      UNIQUE KEY id (id)
    );";
 
  require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-admin/includes/upgrade.php');
 
  dbDelta($sql);
  update_option( "plugin_db_version", $plugin_db_version );
}

Conclusion

You now know how to define functions that will enable your WordPress plugin to create automatic SQL databases and the mechanisms under the whole update concept of such a plugin database structure.

Definition of structured data

In the last couple of years many search engines implemented in a fashion or another these rich snippets. These rich snippets represent additional information that a search places immediately below each search result. Structured data allows the creation of these rich snippets in an orderly manner, meaning that the web designer is empowered to choose what information the rich snippet for the respective site should be.

How can structured data be represented?

Even the world’s most used search engine, Google, is having trouble in using rich snippets as each web designer uses a different way to represent the markup based on the targeted search engine. There are numerous ways to represent markups, from Microformats, Microdata which is used by the HTML 5 fans, RDFa, Goodrelations ( based on RDF / XML ) but all of these are obsolete as all search engines have agreed to use the same markup language and this already standardized alliance has a name schema.org.

What does Schema.org bring?

Well, the best thing to describe schema.org is extensive. Extensive lists of types of data, all contained in the list provided here, on the official site. There are literally too many ‘schemas’ for all sorts of types of data and they are all arranged hierarchically based on the most common markups used nowadays and some that are used for even several times throughout history. What schema.org brings is innovation by unity.

How does it work?

It works by using the markup language from Microdata. For those that this term is unfamiliar, each type of data can be marked by a simple hierarchical vocabulary specified in the list previously provided. The way vocabularies are defined for example for an entity, let’s say a restaurant and you have a menu listing on your website, you have to use ‘Food Establishment: menu’ vocabulary in the schema.org listing.

There are many examples that you can find to get a hang of this new markup standard and one is provided on the main page of schema.org.

Some basic elements that have been suggested below:

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<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Place">
  <span itemprop="place">The Big Place</span>
  <img src="_PICTURE_URL_" itemprop="image" />
  <span itemprop="photos"> </span>
  <span itemprop="adress">actual adress</span>
</div>

This would tell the search engine that that “object” is a place and that _PICTURE_URL_ is a picture from it and the other photos are other photos from it and that that is the actual address of that place.

This markup standard is quite simple and easy to use as itemscope is used to declare the object and itemtype is used to declare the type of the object. Whatever you need after defining the markup as above you’ll be able to find at schema.org so the dictionary provides a powerful extended option palette.

Am I forced to give up old markup standards I know?

Search engines will still use the old markup standards such as RDFa and Microformats in compatibility mode for a while but after some time we will all be using the schema.org as the entire search engine community is slowly evolving towards a centralization that will take place in time. What this means is that your web developer abilities should concentrate on merging your old knowledge with this new standard that is soon to become universal. You can start converting the structured data on the websites that you manage to this markup language.

What does it all mean after all?

By standardizing the markup language for all the structured search engines means that you will have fewer worries when creating structured data for a website. It also means that your rich snippets visibility is universal for all search engines that accept the schema.org standard.

Check it out at http://mbe.ro/wp-content/uploads/mbe_slider_v1.0.0/ and the Google Code Page (to download the plugin).

Preview how to slider works:

The main objectives of this article are to learn about techniques to speed up load time, optimize the queries but also speed up cache query results.

Depending on each web site and elements, these objectives may pose big problems or quick solutions because there are simply too many parameters that count in this struggle for developing quality performance web sites.

One thing is certain: after reading this you will be able to understand how optimization techniques work and use them on your website.

Disable Debug Mode

The first thing to do in this quest for power is to turn off debugging. The default setting for Debug Mode is 2 and that is great for on going development but when the site is ready for launch it will only make you life harder so turning it to 0 is a good idea.

This is done by going to app\config\core.php and modifying the debug value to 0

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<?php
  Configure::write(`debug`, 0);
?>

After doing that, CakePHP will cache elements of your design and thus decreasing loading time; once the elements are cached, it will not check each structure defined in the model. This is a very simple and efficient way to speed your CakePHP site.

Using recursive queries settings

By changing the way CakePHP joins or not the tables queried when using the bakery you can also speed up behavior this time.

If you want to query models and create numerous join statements the “0″ setting in the $this->Model->recursive = 0; is perfect. Example: It will return all the user data presuming that there are numerous photo albums and they are all tied to the users but it will also slow down all behavior and that is not always wanted.

However, if you want to reduce the number of ties between these albums, if we are to follow the example, and thus speed up the process, you can set -1 as a parameter and so do exactly what you desire:

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<?php
  $this->Model->recursive = -1;
?>

Limiting requestAction();

A problem that is probably making lots of web developers curse daily is the requestAction issue that everyone wants to avoid but little know how. Basically what this does is that enables you to call other functions inside another view. This thing reduces considerably the amount of code that you have to rewrite just with several parameters changed but whenever you use it CakePHP adds a lot of data in the overhead as each request needs its own.

What many do is place in an element the views HTML code that needs using the requestAction() call. But this means that you have to load other elements from the two views and that means less time running but more time writing.

Query results caching

What many don’t know is that CakePHP requires processing queries and parsing the results in building a good sum of data arrays. But that is a lot of processing to do every time you search something and this can be avoided by caching the results in the caching system that CakePHP features.

What I will show you will, in most cases, speed up that process but I must warn you that if you cache incorrectly, the outcome will most surely be less pleasant and from that point on you might better start over again rather than finding the errors and correcting them.

Below I will provide the necessary steps in order to cache with the built-in caching system that CakePHP offers.

First you must create an application model (AppModel – if you don’t already have one) which should be located in the root folder of your app.

The below code example contains a find() function:

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<?php
  class AppModel extends Model {
    function find($conditions = null, $fields = array(), $order = null, $recursive = null) {
      $doQuery = true;
 
      //check if we want the cache
      if (!empty($fields['cache'])) {
        $cacheConfig = null;
 
        //check if we have specified a custom config, e.g. different expiry time
        if (!empty($fields['cacheConfig'])) {
          $cacheConfig = $fields['cacheConfig'];
        }
 
        $cacheName = $this->name . '-' . $fields['cache'];
 
        //if so, check if the cache exists
        if (($data = Cache::read($cacheName, $cacheConfig)) === false) {
          $data = parent::find($conditions, $fields, $order, $recursive);
          Cache::write($cacheName, $data, $cacheConfig);
        }
 
        $doQuery = false;
      }
 
      if ($doQuery) {
        $data = parent::find($conditions, $fields, $order, $recursive);
      }
 
      return $data;
    }
  }
?>

This example enables the override the default find() function and searches for a string “cache” which is the new key that you implement. Once this found, the “generation” of the cache name is required, in this case Name-cacheName. The model name must be annotated as well in order to eliminate the eventual twice use of the name which would end up in an error.

Then it searches for another key that if it exist, it can let you set a timeout for the cached data. The name here is cacheConfig, which in the default CakePHP is about a week or so. However this is not that important as you will most probably set your own period of time.

Reading the cache with that name is done and if the cache is not present, you run an automatic query and save the results cached so that it will be present next time.

Now everything is set up for use but you need to do one more thing before actually using it. Let’s say that the table that you’re querying contains a list of countries. Now, this table is not going to be updated too often so you can cache the results successfully for easy find.

Let’s presume that the “Country” model and “Countries” controller have already been created.

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<?php
  //get country list using default config
  $countries = $this->Country->find('list', array(
    'cache' => 'countryList'));
 
  //get country list using a custom config
  $countries = $this->Country->find('list', array(
    'cache' => 'countryList',
    'cacheConfig' => 'long'));
?>

The code above allows a find statement that once ran for the first time, CakePHP parses the results and stores the data retrieved in the cache but next time the query will be accessed the cached data will be opened and so no other search will be attended.

In order for the code above yo work you also need to add to your core.php file some lines of code:

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<?php
  Cache::config('long', array(
    'engine' => 'File',
    'duration'=> '+1 months',
    'probability'=> 100,
    'path' => CACHE . 'long' . DS));
?>

Another thing to do is create a folder named “long” in the “tmp/cache” folder.

For example you have a country_controller.php file that enables the administrator to do anything he may need to do to it including adding or deleting and you may want to update the cached queries; the following code allows you to understand and do just that, if it is added to any function such as add, edit or delete.

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<?php
  //we need to remove the status cache now
  Cache::delete('Country-countryList');
?>

This is all that can be done in this matter but if working with names and users you should place the name of the desired used in the cached key or you will get awkward results when opening the cached results.

Conclusion

If you can do these you can optimize your CakePHP website but you have to make sure that any other lame issues such as too many database queries, too many CSS files and others like these ones are solved.

Such a trick is the one that allows you to change the selection color when you select text or desired content.

Usually, what the browser color default is that you will use but maybe you don’t want that. But what if you want to make your selection yellow or pink or any other color you might think of?

The easiest way to do it is by using a CSS pseudo element, the selection that enables the easy way for choosing what color the selected background and content should have. The color options remain at the web developer’s choice.

After reading this tutorial you will be able to use the selection pseudo element so that you will be able to configure your selecting tool as you wish, regardless the “will of the browser”.

There are only some simple steps that any CSS web developer needs to follow in order to use this nice pseudo element.

The first thing to do is to create a HTML page and use the text below to create a page (or click here to view the example live):

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<h2>Selection changed</h2>
<div class="changed">
  <p>Aenean eu leo quam. Pellentesque ornare sem lacinia quam venenatis vestibulum. </p>
</div>
<h2>Selection normal</h2>
<div class="regular">
  <p>Praesent commodo cursus magna, vel scelerisque nisl consectetur et. Morbi leo risus</p>
</div>

Once you preview the page with the code provided attached you will step up and change the selection color with the second step of this tutorial which will do exactly that. You now have to use the pseudo element that I was talking about previously, selection.

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.changed p::selection {
  background:#FF0057;
  color: white;
}
.changed p::-webkit-selection {
  background:#FF0057;
  color: white;
}
.changed p::-moz-selection {
  background:#FF0057;
  color: white;
}

If you now preview the page after inserting the code above you will see the foreground color as white and the background pink (#FF0057). It’s that simple.

For those that really want to understand what are the inner workings I suggest don’t skip the next lines as the explanation of the process is written below.

In the first half of the selector (.changed p) you specify the rule application with the “p” which means that the “p” tags inside the div with the class .changed obey the rule.

The pseudo element that you want to use comes after the .changed p and the line will look like this: .changed p::selection { and this will enable the element to work in the .changed p tags and so relating the rule to the selection of content.

The next two lines in the code define the background color during selection of content (background: #whatever HEX color you may want) and the foreground color during selection and once selected (color:#hopefuly another color than that of the background in HEX).

Even if the pseudo element selection was a part in the W3C specifications it was removed but the support for most browsers (FF, Safari, Chrome, Opera, IE 9+) is still active so you will be able to use it wherever you want.

View the example

There has been some very interesting refining made to Doctype Declaration as in any web page the main way to let browsers know hot to read your web page is done by this declaration.

In almost any older HTML the Doctype Declaration was done as follows (I used the original W3C spec page that offers these explanations):

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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

With HTML5, your work has been reduced to a simple

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<!DOCTYPE html>

which I find awesome because they gave up the gibberish that many had problems defining before the html word.

Another change that HTML 5 brings is another simplification, this time of the Charset Meta Tag, as for the previous HTML web pages it looked like this:

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<meta content="text/html; charset=utf-8" http-equiv="Content-Type"/>

but in HTML 5 it was again reduced to

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<meta charset="utf-8"/>

For those that want more elaborate settings the old declaration is still available.

The Style Tag is another tag that has seen simplification with the elimination if the type attributes. This is not such a major simplification but it’s worth the time.

Older HTML:

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<style type="text/css">
  .fontModifier {
    font-family: Arial;
    font-size: 12px;
  }
</style>

Versus HTML5:

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<style>
  .fontModifier {
    font-family: Arial;
    font-size: 12px;
  }
</style>

The Script Tags also suffered simplification which is not bad at all as the previous HTML looked like this:

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<script type="text/javascript">
  doStuff();
</script>

In HTML5 the tag is a simple tag, without any other parameters:

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<script>
  doStuff();
</script>

If you want an external script file you just have to do the simple reference like below:

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<script src="my_script.js"></script>

HTML5 is going to change a lot of things and mainly it will make our life (the developers) much easier and better organized.

How can any entrepreneur do that? That question has yet another simple answer which underneath the simple shell hides a very complex and powerful strategy: online marketing.

Online marketing offers a great deal of options in terms of distributing the promotional advertising that an entrepreneur may want and need and also has many downright benefits compared to offline marketing strategies such as ads in newsletters, promotional videos on television broadcasting or flyers that make most people angry due to the fact that common sense obliges anyone to accept a gift from a smiling person only to throw it away in the next second just by looking at a wrong chosen title or introduction.

Why does online marketing have so much success?

Online marketing has so much success because people are offered the false feeling that they have many options, that each and every one of them has full control over what he sees or buys. In fact, that is the basic human need upon which online marketing is based: the basic human need of being in control.

The benefits of online marketing

In the next paragraphs you will be the witness of the real benefits that online marketing offers compared to the old fashioned offline marketing.

Real time content changing

Compared to the offline marketing solution, online marketing offers the possibility of changing the marketing content and variables in almost real time. If you would choose an offline marketing let’s say a newspaper advertising solution and the print that is already on the market is wrong in the sense of a wrong price for your services you can no longer change that and you have to spent a whole lot of money to correct that and people may not even take a second look at your second ad as the first created the most undesired impact. Online marketing makes monitoring marketing efforts easy by making available the change of chosen words and way of presentation at any given time just few clicks away.

Real time impact tracking

What makes online marketing the best selection is the fact that you can see right away how your advertising and efforts impact the selected market and so you can tweak the advertising content so that you get the wanted results in the least amount on time and budget. This is a real marker for the success or failure of your business. This means that you can rethink the first benefit listed previously and reconsider the strategy so that your business grows.

Demographic targeting

What demographic targeting offers as a general concept is the advertisement of certain products and services to certain people of a particular global location, age, gender, education and even income. Offline marketing offers a very limited set of demographic targeting options and usually the market you target is not reached in a satisfactory degree as you may want. Online marketing however, by using the two previous benefits listed above, allows you to successfully target the social groups that you want and really boost your business income by efficient marketing.

Multiple methods of marketing

This benefit is something that online marketing holds the record for. Offline marketing has been surpassed by the power and number of online marketing options since the new concept emerged. Regarding offline marketing methods, the most common ones include the keeping of many contracts with real physical media content distributors and television companies which is costly and painstaking. What online marketing offers represents multiple real time fully customizable demographic targeted content that is sure to make your business really emerge and successful.

Variety to the masses and full access to all products in few clicks

What offline marketing cannot offer is access to the full range of products and services of the company that decided to use that type of marketing solution. Online marketing allows with the use of several clicks full access to the entire range of products and services that your company offers so that the client may not be really interested in the service promoted on the ad but on another service or product that you have available. This benefit of online marketing is the best one of all the benefits listed here. It offers the power to convert a potential customer or site visitor into a sale and that means profit.

Conclusion

I hope I convinced you with this list of online marketing benefits and the main thing that you should understand from this is that online marketing not only can make your business and services known to the customer market but also can translate an investment into profit in the shortest time ever. Forget the costly offline marketing solution as the guy sitting on his sofa will most probably change the channel when your ad is broadcasted and go for online marketing so that when the guy on the sofa reads his mail he remembers thanks to your catchy advertisement that he needs a new pen, phone, furniture, back account, credit, car, house or estate. It’s up to you to offer services but it’s up to online marketing to sell it.

Well, there is something out there that can help us organize better and it is called LESS.

The LESS CSS preprocessor has been out for some time and is well known by only a few developers. It basically enlarges the limits imposed by CSS’s simplicity and allows the code to be compiled into “real CSS”. The coding style of LESS was thought to be a simplified but extensive variant of CSS so regular CSS code writers wouldn’t need too much time migrating to this tool.

Why the need?

As a regular CSS developer you might think why should anyone consider using this tool? Will it make my coding struggle easier? Will it really change CSS as I know it?

Actually yes; and … no. The LESS preprocessor makes you life easier by using simpler blocks but exactly the same syntax so that you will only give up writing unnecessary lines or curly braces for example.

In the following paragraphs, I guarantee that you will find it very useful. The article will explain the install process for LESS, using Nesting for simpler coding, how variables can be used for easier maintenance, how to reuse entire object classes so that you don’t repeat yourself but also operations and namespaces that will ease up your coder life.

Installing the LESS

While many of you are already acquainted with many installs, the LESS install is no different. I should begin by pointing out the structure of a CSS preprocessor; it has two components that are essential: the compiler and the language. Both are equally important and if one of them is broken your work is useless.

LESS language is almost identical in syntax to CSS with the addition of several features. What generates the browser ready code is called the compiler which literally compiles the code you write in a language that the browser understands and is able to process.

LESS is not tied to a single compiler compared to other CSS preprocessors but has a wide range of compilers that work with it: there is a PHP compiler, .NET, Javascript, Ruby Gem and even an OS X app. What I and many other web developers that use LESS recommend is the Javascript version as it’s the easiest version to comprehend.

Making the LESS Javascript Compiler available for use is simple and it’s done in two simple steps that anyone can do, even non-CSS programmers.

1. Step one requires the insertion of the LESS script in your HTML coding. This means that LESS will be processed in real time during page loading.
2. Step two involves including the LESS file in the code that you write.

The following example shows how to do that and even shows you how to include the script without even downloading it. You just use it from the official server. All you have to do is make sure that the style sheet link is placed before the script in order to guarantee the load and readiness for preprocessor use and the address to the .less file is correct in the href field.

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<link rel="stylesheet/less" href="/path-to-stylesheet/main.less" type="text/css" />
<script src="http://lesscss.googlecode.com/files/less-1.1.3.min.js"></script>

That’s all you have to do in order to use the CSS LESS preprocessor. In the following paragraphs I will show you how this tool makes your life easier.

The use of Nesting for a more transparent code

Even though the CSS has been around for some years, by now the rules must be written separately which mean you have to repeat using the same long selector again and again. The example below shows exactly what we all don’t like:

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.header {}
.header .navigation {}
.header .navigation ul {}
.header .navigation ul li {}
.header .navigation ul li a {}

How can LESS ease your burden? It allows nesting and that means you can create hierarchies and write less with more comprehension:

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.header {
  .navigation {
    ul {
      li {
        a {}
      }
    }
   }
}

I haven’t written any CSS properties so that you would understand better how the nesting works. With this option you eliminate CSS’s need for repeating the same selector on many lines. By nesting the rule inside the { } of a selector you also show the hierarchy and C++ programmers will understand what I am saying. Needless to say, nesting is a very efficient and useful option that LESS offers.
Another thing that the LESS offers in terms of nesting is the pseudo-classes nesting which allows you to embed things like :hover, :active or :visited just by using the “&“.

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a {
  &:hover{}
  &:active{}
  &:visited{}
}

You decide if this makes your work easier or not.

Easier maintenance by using Variables

On a normal basis, an entire website uses a palette of colors that the Web designer chooses. If you want to use a certain color for a header or footer or any other object you have to write the instruction to assign the respective color throughout the entire code for each and every object.

What happens when you want to change the color of a specific object? You can do that very easily by searching and replacing the color as you wish.

But what happens when you want to change the color of more objects fast and easy? Do you use the same tool as earlier to search through tens of thousands of code lines and replace 50-100 object colors?

If you don’t use LESS you probably do but as you will see in the following code, LESS allows the use of variables wherever you want and you can only use their name in the { } of the respective object so all colors can be changed automatically when the value of the variable is changed.

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@main-color: #195787;
.header { background-color: @main-color; }
.footer { color: @main-color; }
h3 { color: @main-color; }

The LESS compiler checks the local define of the variables when it needs to replace the name of a variable with the value and if it cannot find it, it goes up the hierarchy until the respective variable is found and replaced.

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@great-color: #195787;
.header {
  @great-color: #aacc22;
  color: @great-color;
}

Entire Class recycling

When it comes to variables, LESS makes using them easy but what do you do when entire classes need to be reused so that you don’t end up writing them many times?

You can create new classes for already defined properties and reuse them in other rule sets that you may find useful. The example below will show you how to create a new class for an already specified property and reuse it in another set of rules:

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div.block {
  -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
  -moz-border-radius: 5px;
  border-radius: 5px;
}

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.rounded-corners {
  -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
  -moz-border-radius: 5px;
  borders-radius: 5px;
}
div.block {
  .rounded-corners;
}

If you want even more control over a property, you can always use parameters to create a customized result. At first, you just have to initialize the parameter with the desired value.

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.rounded-corners(@radius: 5px) {
  -webkit-border-radius: @radius;
  -moz-border-radius: @radius;
  border-radius: @radius;
}

Here is the final result:

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div.block {
  .rounded-corners(3px);
}

Pretty cool.

Does LESS allow any kind of operations?

Yes, in fact LESS makes life way easier with their operations. Instead of defining numerous variables for all sorts of color grades that are similar and could be obtained from a single one by reducing brightness, you can perform operations on colors that are already defined in variables thus eliminating the need of using additional variables.

In conclusion, you can darken or light colors just by adding an operand followed by a value instead of tremendous variable defining.
The following example shows exactly that:

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@margin: 10px;
.header { margin-top: @margin + 10px; }

The best thing about it is that you can alter an entire web site color palette by using a single variable defined color and operations throughout the code.

Can I group variables and classes furthermore?

LESS allows that too. You can do that by using nesting under an id recognized by LESS. In the example below, classes are grouped underneath a #defaults.

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#defaults {
  @heading-color: #ff3300;
  .bordered { border: 1px solid #ccc; }
}

After grouping such variables and classes you can use

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h1 {
  color: #defaults[@heading-color];
  #defaults > .bordered;
}

to identify and use them wherever you need.

A thing that LESS imports from C++ code is that you can create single line comments with “//” and also import other LESS customized files by using @import in exactly the same way as if you would do that in CSS.

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@import 'fonts';
@import 'layout';

Conclusion

You can use SASS too as an alternative for LESS but SASS brings very different coding language as well as syntax compared to CSS. I think you will find what you want in time with the sole condition that you experiment all the time and let nothing escape the scrutiny.

Now, after reading this humble introduction to CSS preprocessing, I hope that you understood why LESS exists and why you can ease up your coding life just by using simple coding language no different from what you already know; just simpler and more logical.

You can use whatever compiler you may want as the list is long and the preferences vary from coder to coder. The tutorials for installing different compilers are available on the official sites of each one and I invite you to use whatever you want as long as you keep on coding and improving your skills in Web development.

But a question remains; why didn’t the CSS designers thought of it in the first place and additions such as LESS or SASS were needed after all these years?

Programmers’ Day is an international unofficial professional holiday that is also officially recognized in Russia, celebrated on the 256th (0x100th) day of each year

Happy Programmers Day to us and to every programmer out there!