Wordpress and Magento Development

Aug 12

Google’s New Sandbox Search – Caffeine

It seems the search engine market is becoming competitive again. In response to the recent release of Microsoft’s ‘decision engine’ Bing, Google is stepping up their game.

Competition breeds innovation, proof that capitalism works.

This week, Google released their new sandbox search engine, nicknamed ‘Caffeine’. In my initial tests, it seems Caffeine results are focused more on articles and web pages, not video or news results. Youtube and news items are typically still on the first page, but they are further down instead of always sticking to the top.

It seems you can’t saturate your Youtube video description with keywords anymore. Content is king.

Jun 29

Create a New Email Template in Magento

Emails are a big part of the online world, so it follows that a professional ecommerce site should have professional email templates. A full-featured ecommerce solution is what you’ll find with Magento, an open source solution for selling products online. Magento provides a system to keep the more basic contact times with your visitors smooth and carefree. With open source comes great customization (and complexity).

This tutorial will guide you through the steps to create a new email template in Magento. Specifically, you’ll create the email that your visitors will receive when they sign up for your newsletter.

Mar 25

Here’s a Quick Way to Add a Custom Date Graphic to your WordPress Blog

You may have noticed the spiffy new calendar icon here at Mesmer Lab. Well I created the graphic purely in Photoshop and have made it available at Graphic River. A future article will explain how I made it, but this article is about how to implement it into your WordPress blog.

The goal is to get rid of the generic-looking display of each article’s date. The visitor to most sites would want to know when the article is written to see how relevant the ideas, data or techniques are. A bold display of the date lets the user quickly scan and find the publish date.