Social sharing has soared over the  past couple years and if you haven’t already joining Twitter can add a valuable boost to your customer base.
A few Twitter tips to get you started

1.  Join – pick your social name wisely and don’t forget to upload your brand image
2. Start building your network – Listen before you join in a conversation. Check the “Who to Follow” link or use the search box to find people.
3. Start Tweeting – Type your message and send it to your followers. Make sure your post offers something – information, a product/service discount that drives people to your web site. Be conversational and interesting.

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Any designer who has ever sent their beautifully marked up newsletter to a variety of email clients knows the pain that is email marketing.  Things just don’t display quite the same in Gmail and Outlook as they do in a browser window. The industry rule of thumb is to go back to the 90s in terms of your code which means markup should be in tables and inline css. But that doesn’t mean that your newsletter has to look like it came out of the 90s.

With a few key tips and tricks you can code beautiful email newsletters that display well with and without your images and in all email clients. Ready? Here we go.

Late last year our development team worked on a project that had Rob all a twitter. We’ve been seeing more and more websites with content in their flyout menus. Images, calls to action and the like are placed to one side or the other of a flyout when the visitor hovers over a top level menu item. To do this as a developer or web designer who has full control over layout and code is one thing but to do it in a content managed environment is another. Well we’ve pulled it off with the use of one of our most used components, Content Blocks.

Once again our fantastic partners have asked us to push the boundaries of what SiteCM is capable of and today I am excited to bring you pure css user managed content image rollovers. I know I know it’s exciting so read on…

Pre-requisite: Your client needs to have code snippets in order for this to be user friendly. Otherwise we are asking them to copy and or write their own divs and html and that is just not any fun for the average content user.

However if your client does have snippets (any client above a Solo or who has a Content Block add-on has them) then we are off to the races. All you need to do now is copy and paste this html into your snippet window and a little piece of css into structure and tada! A user managed image rollover.

Would you believe that there is a CMS that lets your user apply a background on a per page basis?
Not only that.  It can scale to fit the browser window.

Pretty shiny huh?

The SiteCM header image control lets your client select an image to use in a predefined area on a per page basis. It has a default value so that if you don’t select an image it will fall back to your default.  It also has a ‘use parent’ value so that all of the child pages will inherit their parents background or header image. In the past this has strictly been used for banner type images in the header (hence the name).

The latest version of SiteCM now has a built in mobile detector. Which means all you have to do is design a mobile template and it will auto-magically be applied to your website when it’s viewed on a mobile device. Sounds simple right?

Well sort of. We’ve done the hard half of it for you.

Now it’s all about the content. A content owners job is to now tweak their content for the mobile device. Simplified content and probably a condensed navigation are going to be key. The faster your site loads the better particularly on a mobile device where idle time is often limited and comes in spurts. Less is more.

Most SiteCM sites, if their content is well formed, will scale nicely and flow without even touching it.