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☟ Click-to-Play Embeds As an option, we now offer Embedded Pens in a preview state. It looks like this: Why use it? Previews are lightweight. Yay performance! Previews are benign. Anything that might happen in an Embed will only happen after it is explicitly run (i.e. make sound). ☺ Best Pen of the Month There are three fun and interesting community-launched creative challenges going on in CodePen-land. The Pens these challenges inspired are eye poppingly good! CodeVember is a bit like NaNoWriMo. The idea is "30 Days, 30 Creative experiments". Anything goes! Get those creative juices flowing. The TenLines Challenge: What can you do with just 10 CSS properties and the given set of 10 HTML elements? CSSHaiku is more restrictive with CSS (only 3 properties) but any markup is fair game.     Topping all categories! Yuzmeister's Pen, "Particle Links",  got the nod for all 3 categories! Check out our exclusive interview with the "Thieveng Dev" in the next issue! Yuzmeister's Pen, "Particle Links",  got the nod for all 3 categories! Check out our exclusive interview with the "Thieveng Dev" in the next issue! More New Stuff We added RSS feeds for collections. And, we're cooking up another new thing for collections — stay tuned! Dave DeSandro made a much-requested tweak to editor resizing, not to mention the layouts now instantly change. Full Page View now has a more full-featured header, meaning you can heart the Pen, fork it, see the title and creator, switch back to other views, etc. So Much Talent ❤ Some Pens that have been dropping jaws around the CodePen office: jagarikin's "Garuda", a soaring bird of fire Noah Blon's dynamic image colorizing. nsayenko's beautiful "particles snow" with particle.js Nikolay Talanov's skewed one-page scroll Speaking of amazing Pens, did you see Georgiana Blantin's CSS background change on scroll? Now you can read her personal story about how the development community helped her grow as a developer. We love this quote: "[P]ut yourselves out there. Don’t doubt, don’t be shy, don’t second-guess, don’t give up. Ask questions, ask for help, reach out, and you’ll find people reaching back." The Job Board Our Job Board is cool because it can both help you find a job, or help you hire the help you need at your current job. If you're looking for a new job, come check out opportunities from: Senior Front End Developer IBM Design Front End Developer Happy Medium Front End Designer at WaterFurnace Software Engineer at Clock and many more! Until next time, Welcome to the team Tim Holman and Jake Albaugh! Stay tuned to our CodePen Radio podcast where we'll speak with both of them soon. You're receiving this email because you are a member of CodePen. You can instantly opt out any time.

Groundwork For The Modern SEO

By now, you should have figured out that traditional marketing methods are becoming both ineffective and expensive, an that neglecting to market your business online, or at least do social media marketing, you’re missing out on the powerful business results that an effective internet marketing strategy can bring about.

Whether your business is a startup or is just getting started with web marketing, you need a foundation to implement and in turn, create a successful internet or web marketing strategy, step by step.

If you really want to attract visitors and potential customers to your business’s website, you need to do more than simply build it, you need to optimize it. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the key to getting your website discovered via search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

The traditional approach to SEO involves two sets of tactics, called on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page SEO is the strategic implementation of keywords on your website, including in page titles, headers, meta descriptions, and more. Off-page SEO, in comparison, refers to improving your website’s overall authority on the web, which is determined by what other websites are linking to you. The goal with off-page SEO is to attract inbound links or backlinks from relevant, authoritative websites.

While on-page and off-page SEO are helpful concepts, they are rooted in an approach that is going by the wayside. In the past, the goal of SEO was to impress, or trick to some, the search engines so that they’d give you higher rankings, with the ultimate goal being to achieve the coveted number 1 spot in the search results for one of your target keywords.

Today, search engines are smarter. They can tell the difference between spammy websites that are designed to game the system, and legitimate websites that are providing, relevant high quality content. Modern SEO is about optimizing for the searchers, not the search engines.

Personalization Generates Leads

Today’s prospects independently research products and services before making a purchase, which creates numerous interaction touch points. Now, organizations are starting to realize the importance of personalizing those touch-points and providing an engaging, valuable experience for each visitor. But realizing the importance is different than actually implementing a personalized experience. You need to build a successful branding or personalization strategy.

Personalization can be obtained by finding out who your key audiences are, and what the defining characteristics are of your target audiences. And you also need determine which content assets are most valuable to your ideal persona, such as blog posts or case studies and which channel you are focusing on.

If you’re looking to generate new leads or nurture existing leads and further educate them, start by choosing only two or three use cases that make the most sense or will have the most impact on your business. If you’re B2B, you can consider employing account based web marketing to target specific companies, industries, or even personas that are what is considered, of higher-value.

After you’ve selected a few use cases to focus on, go one step further by detailing the specifics. For instance, for some companies this may entail listing account names or regions that are most valuable to your business. For others, you can zoom in on a particular behavior or specific product interest.

But before starting to run any campaigns, determine what you’re going to measure and how, so establish analytics. This can help you understand how each key audience interacts with you. Set up your measurements to determine baseline metrics for the different verticals and audiences and start testing personalization campaign or brand marketing results to measure uplift. And track performance by checking how many visitors from each specific segment visit your website, how they behave on-site, and what type of content they prefer.

Personalization is an excellent way to push prospects down the funnel, but once they turn into leads, it’s a marketer’s responsibility to turn them over to sales. Use the same segmentation capabilities to provide your sales teams with real time sales intelligence about their target customers.

Drive Customer Satisfaction With CRM's

To drive customer satisfaction, organizations deploying CRM solutions must think about the customer relationship in an integrated and comprehensive way. In today’s multichannel world, this is particularly important. Customer interactions take place everywhere. From sales, support, service, finance and on the web. Beyond traditional sales and support management, companies need to be able to see real time, cross channel views of all interactions to deliver superior customer service, whether the interaction occurred on the web just seconds ago or in person with a sales rep yesterday. This enables every customer interaction to be based on a holistic view of a customer’s history.

Self-service has also become a critical driver of customer satisfaction. Many organizations are deploying customer self-service portals to meet their customers’ expectations around the ease of doing digital marketing business with the company on the web. Customer portals enable customers to view outstanding quotes or orders, or even request returns, improving service while reducing the cost to serve. 

On the call center side, the support team can benefit from cross departmental customer visibility, with a detailed order history allowing the support team to check service level subscriptions. This also gives the team an opportunity to deliver customized up sell and cross sell offers that both anticipate customer needs and drive revenue.

For organizations whose business model requires delivering ongoing service for their customers, project management is a critical but often forgotten component of CRM. This includes the tactical aspects of creating jobs and linking them to specific customers, as well as tracking estimated end dates, percentage of work completed, actual end dates and the income and expenses associated with each project. Project management is particularly important for businesses whose models are predicated on customer renewals or subscription revenue.

The final area of customer satisfaction is billing. Billing errors can create significant customer attrition, and in many cases, billing errors may stem from manual processes in the original sale, project management issues or simply duplicate or out of date customer data.

The Role Of Landing Pages

A solid web marketing plan and great web design are critical elements to your success in a global online marketplace. Having a website with content that provides quality information should be one of your main focuses for capturing the interest of your visitors.

                                 

A landing page is basically a single web page whose purpose is to guide your users or customers to a specific action, like providing their email address for further communication, to offer other information about themselves that helps you do a better job of serving their needs, or to purchase a product directly.

The focus and simplicity of a good landing page is why it works so well in a cluttered and noisy web world. Directing users from search engines or social media marketing links to your homepage usually means they jump through a series of hoops in order to get to where they want to be. Redirecting a person to a landing page gives them the opportunity to take an immediate action, ease of use is everything.

Landing pages are optimized with that specific purpose in mind, reducing the number of steps between the point of searching, to the point of landing on your page and purchasing, commonly referred to as maximizing the page conversion rate. Think of landing pages as action pages, delivering one strong message and compelling one clear action, such as signing up to your mailing list or downloading a discount voucher.

One of the reasons landing pages are so important is their unique capability to optimize conversion rates. It may sound very technical, but it’s really simple, the percentage of visitors that go to your landing page and perform a specific action, such as filling in a form.

If you’re a marketing agency, small business owner, affiliate marketer, corporate motivator or professional marketer, this is a big help for you to generate more sales without increasing your expenses on purchasing additional web traffic. For online marketers it means increasing their return on investment, or ROI, without continuously searching for cheaper traffic sources.

CRM Integration Into The Basic Platform

Ever since marketing technology has been created, it has been a protocol pattern that when a challenge emerges, software providers rush to deliver a solution. Then, with time, that solution becomes part of a more powerful, integrated experience.

Take the web browser, as an example. It was once a standalone solution and has now been absorbed into the modern operating system, which incorporates a wide range of other tools that were also previously sold as standalone products.

As we look to the next evolution in technology, there is a clear case to be made that customer relationship management, or CRM systems, will logically converge with the ecommerce platform. As it seems inherently obvious that a company would want to have a single system of record for customer information and interactions as well as the customer’s commerce transactions.

In B2C ecommerce, the next generation convergence of CRM and the ecommerce platform introduces a wealth of new possibilities to monitor and measure everything that happens online and capture every interaction with a customer or prospect, and both automatically and on a massive scale. Main reason would be combining interaction and order data in a single repository will enable the ability to drive dynamic and personalized merchandising and offers online.

Despite the undeniable value of capturing and analyzing as much customer information as possible, the traditionally separate worlds of ecommerce and CRM have made integration economically unviable. Even most companies, according to official research, agree that recording all customer actions on an ecommerce site is useful, yet few are willing to make the investment to replicate that data into a separate CRM system. The only way to achieve this goal is to build CRM and ecommerce directly on the same platform, creating a single data source.

Another factor that is driving towards integrated CRM and ecommerce is increasing awareness that the traditional linear transaction funnel is obsolete. In today’s digital, mobile and social world, customer interactions with a brand leading up to a sale are far too frequent, haphazard and variable to fit that old school, linear model.

Introduction To API

Business executives are under increasing pressure to improve efficiency, increase profitability, and transform their value proposition in order to thrive in today’s hyper connected world. Having a viable digital strategy can make the difference between transforming your business and watching your competition capitalize on previously inconceivable opportunities. Application Programming Interfaces, or API’s, play a foundational role in realizing that strategy.

Today, every business is a digital business. Companies that successfully navigate this digital world will make both a technology and a mindset shift. The technology is less important than understanding that APIs are the fuel powering the apps and processes that represent digital business platforms.

The mindset change leads to wins in today’s digital world, rewarding those who make it with accelerated time to market, improved agility and the ability to leverage new channels and extend their brand as never before.

An API connects your business processes, services, content and data to channel partners, internal teams and independent developers in an easy and secure way. API’s are quickly becoming the de facto standard by which companies exchange data and build consistent inter channel customer experiences.

For example, Best Buy makes a Deal of the Day pricing special available through its website. This same data is in its mobile application, or mobile app. So the app doesn’t need to worry about internal pricing systems as it can simply call the Deal of the Day API and ask for the current pricing special. Then, the Best Buy API responds with the requested information in a standard format that the app displays to the end user.

Businesses are organized into units and departments. These entities often have different leadership and budgets, so it’s easy to see how a brand can become fractured. This fracturing leads to inconsistent employee, partner and customer experiences.

The important thing to understand about APIs is that they help you leapfrog your competition, accelerating and competing in the digital economy even if you aren’t a digital native.

How To Use Robots

Your Robots.txt file is what tells search engines which pages to access and index on your website on which pages not to. So if you specify in your Robots.txt file that you don’t want the search engines to be able to access your forum page, as an example, that page won’t be able to show up in the search results and web users won’t be able to find it. Keeping the search engines from accessing certain pages on your site is essential for both the privacy of your site and for your SEO strategy. 

Search engines send out tiny programs called spiders or robots to search your site and bring information back to the search engines so that the pages of your site can be indexed in the search results and found by web users. Your Robots.txt file instructs these programs not to search pages on your site which you designate using a “disallow” command.

To demonstrate, the following Robots.txt command:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /forum

It would block all search engine robots from visiting the following page on your website:

http://www.yoursite.com/donotcomeinhere

Notice that before the disallow command, you have the command:

User-agent: *

The “User-agent:” part specifies which robot you want to block and could also read as follows:

User-agent: Googlebot

This command would only block the Google robots, while other robots would still have access to the page:

http://www.yoursite.com/donotcomeinhere

However, by using the “*” character, you’re specifying that the commands below it refer to all robots. Your Robots.txt file would be located in the main directory of your site.

For example:

http://www.yoursite.com/robots.txt

There are three reasons why you might want to block a page using the Robots.txt file. First, if you have a page on your site which is a duplicate of another page, you don’t want the robots to index it because that would result in duplicate content which can hurt your SEO.

Second, if you have a page on your site which you don’t want users to be able to access unless they take a specific action, like if you have a forum page where users get access to specific information because of the fact that they gave you their email address, you wouldn’t want people being able to find that page by doing a Google search.

And most important, you’ll want to block pages or files is when you want to protect private files in your site such as your cgi-bin.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

In all of these cases, you’ll need to include a command in your Robots.txt file that tells the search engine spiders not to access that page, not to index it in search results and not to send visitors.

Basic Debugging Of Web Apps

Debugging is one of the most painful parts of developing web apps or web applications. You have to deal with browser inconsistencies with HTML, CSS and Javascript, let alone the scalp burning process of debugging Javascript itself. Now, for those starting out in web development, here is a pretty basic process that can help you out in debugging. And we’ll just be simply using Firefox.

Debugging CSS can be really frustrating. Good thing us kids in the digital network now have things like the Web Developer Toolbar that lets you inspect and edit, in real-time too, the HTML and CSS of your page, so you can see what’s happening when things don’t line up. It can do a heck of a lot more, but for our topic’s purpose, we’ll use it for this specific role.

Ctrl + Shift + F: Display element information.

This puts a red box under your mouse. Move the mouse over an element and its attributes appear in a pop-up, like the name, class, pixel sizes, fonts, everything. Here, you can figure out what classes are creating the styles you see, get the div’s id for use with Firebug and also get the pixel measurements of an image.

Ctrl + Shift + E: Edit CSS. 

This pops open a sidebar tab with the current stylesheets. You can edit any attributes and see the effect in real-time. But don’t have too much fun in giving like the Google logo all sorts of backgrounds. I lost several hours in that cave myself.

Tip toing along the boarders can be tricky too. So your logical step to take here would be to first, find a div with your mouse. Just do Ctrl + Shift + F. Once you find one, get its id. Edit CSS, press Ctrl + Shift +E. Then, put a border on the div. Play around with it until you get it to line up as you want it to be. Then, remove the border.

A trick here is, instead of deleting the border, put an “x” in front, as in “xborder: …”. Reason being, the CSS won’t be valid so the border is ignored, but it still keeps the style around in case you want to enable it later.

Next, select all the text in your edited CSS file and paste it into the real CSS file. And there you go, your changes are now live. You did it smoothly and like a pro.

Developing Without A Degree

With Web Development, being the subject in this context, the key to saving a lot of time, money, and stress is simply learning to code. I know how it may sound, contradictory of course to the term used to pertain to it, especially for those like me who don’t have a computer science degree. But chances are that your business has a website and that website will need lots of updates and maintenance.

Investing the time to gain even a basic knowledge of coding will be extremely beneficial. Not only will you be able to communicate your needs more effectively to developers and get better and more efficient results, but you’ll be more self sufficient. Plus, being able to make small tweaks on your own, rather than having to hire a developer will save you a lot of money in the long run.

Of course, we are all different. Wired differently in the head, see and process things different from each other and there’s a lot more factors to consider, so I wouldn’t even push my personal process on how I got to point B. But, by general logic and common sense, there are ways that you can be a developer too, even with consideration to the general issues of time and money. Here are some great online programs thaat you can get into and soon enough you’ll be churning out expert code and start making those quotes on html.

First, Coursera. Courses here are taught by professors from 62 top universities, and are offered in five different languages. And it’s free. 

Second, Codecademy. A simple platform that uses relevant examples so you can easily apply what you learn. Perfect for those type of people who absorb information better by experience. And of course, those who want to learn the basics in a hurry.

Third, Khan Academy. This learning hub’s tutorials are actually based on learning through exploration, rather than guided lessons. So you need to communicate with other users to learn even more from their discoveries and mistakes.

And you can always do drag and drop type of site builders. And learn bit by bit as you go.