I’m very excited about tonight’s free webinar where I’ll be showing you how to add social media to your websites and blogs. With 5 demos, a resource page of links, downloadable starter files, and a preview of my new website product, it’s going to be a great webinar!

As an “Internet Marketer,” keeping up with the latest methods for attracting traffic is essential. That’s tough to do when you don’t really know how to work on your websites and blogs. After years of watching my clients struggle with their sites, (plus several painful episodes of my own) I created a website training course specifically designed for entrepreneurs. I start at the very beginning and take you all the way through installing social media, plus audio, video, and much more. I’ll be revealing the details of this product during the webinar tonight.

So click the big button on the right to sign up, and I’ll see you at 6 pm Pacific/9 pm Eastern!

Toolie®

Social Media has everyone’s attention these days — Facebook, Twitter, Social Bookmarking, and so on. There’s no doubt that you can benefit from participating in social media. You can even put icons, badges, and feeds on your websites and blogs to encourage your visitors to engage with you. Did you notice the new icon in the left column? That’s a Twitter badge.

On Tuesday night, November 17th at 9 pm Eastern/6 pm Pacific, I’m having a f~r~e~e webinar on HOW to install social media on your websites and blogs: how to decide what’s appropriate, where to put the information, and exactly how to install it.

Putting social media icons and feeds on your websites and blogs is not difficult, it just requires some attention to detail, and I can help you with that. I’ll explain the HTML that Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed are so eager to have you install, and we’ll make it happen right there, live!

I’ll also be previewing my new website training course that evening, so be sure not to miss this webinar.

Save the date: November 17th, 9 pm Eastern/6 pm Pacific, and click the button on the right to sign up! This webinar WILL be recorded and available to everyone who signs up for the webinar.

Toolie®

Remember when you were in grade school and your Mom or Dad checked your homework? Well, for website and blog owners, our automatic homework checker is the HTML Validator provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization that sets the standards for HTML and other Internet technologies. The best part of using the Validator is that it delivers its report in the privacy of your office, without Mom’s raised eyebrow!

Simply visit http://validator.w3.org, the page entitled Markup Validation Service. Markup refers to the fact that the text in your web pages and blog is “marked” with HTML or XML tags. Here you have 3 choices: point the tool to the URL of an existing page, upload a page to be validated, or copy and paste a block of HTML code into the page. The Validator will check that the tags are properly formatted and deliver a line by line report. You can print the report if you want to use to review and make changes to your pages.

The tool reads your page from top to bottom and makes its report accordingly. For example, if you’ve left the DOCTYPE declaration off the top of the page, the tool may flag items that would be acceptable if the DOCTYPE were in place. Most HTML editors automatically insert the DOCTYPE declaration at the top of the blank HTML pages; if yours  does not, then visit this URL http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html#faq-doctype to see an example of one, and add it to any pages where the validator reports it to be missing. Adding the DOCTYPE declaration may clear up a lot of errors on the page.

I’ll write more about the DOCTYPE declaration next time.

Toolie®

P.S. a special thanks to Rosie, one of my students, for reminding me about the validator and for providing the URL. She wrote about her encounter with the Validator in this post.

I’ve been using a color tool called Amiasoft Color Pro for several years now, but recently I found a free tool called Color Cop (www.colorcop.net) that I like very much. It’s a small tool that lets you drag an eyedropper to a color on a web page and find out the hex color value in use. This is great if there’s a color you like and would want in your web page or blog, but you don’t know what the exact color value is.

One of the reasons why I like Color Cop is because it displays a zoomed view so that you can zero in on the exact pixel of the color you want. This is especially useful if you’re working with a gradient, which is made up of several colors.

Color Cop is free, but I do encourage you to click on the Donate button to help support continued development on this delightful little tool.