Raw Sports Performance and Center for Strength is the latest addition to my web design portfolio. The Sports performance gym is located in Walnut Creek, CA and is the premier fitness training center for many high school and college athletes in the East Bay. Trainer, Tom Pete, focuses on “function” first – meaning they increase the body’s natural function and flexibility while increasing strength.

I have the pleasure of working out at Raw and can say I’ve never felt stronger pulling tires across a room and doing roman squats. With their personal training and one-on-one approach I feel like I have learned more than my years at the big box fitness place. Grrrrr.

Raw Sports Performance and Center For Strength

Here is the new website I recently launched for them using WordPress.

Here are two great tips for optimizing Google AdWords campaigns. Many small businesses who use AdWords also manage them on their own. Problem is, they’re usually they are too busy maintaining operations to truly dive into the world of optimizing their AdWord account, a task which can be a full time job in its own right. Unless you hire a Google AdWords Specialist, you’re on your own. So in that spirit, here are two of my favorite quick tips to optimize your AdWord campaigns: Identifying and eliminating negative keywords, and using dynamic keyword insertion in ad copy.

Between these two quick AdWords optimizing tips, you can expect more qualified leads coming to your site by eliminating negative search terms that aren’t relevant to what you are marketing. And you’ll increase your Click Through Rate (CTR) by making your ad stand out by using dynamic keyword insertion, which will lead to a better quality score and thus a lower Cost Per Click (CPC). If it’s too much consider hiring an AdWords Specialist, such as myself.

I am proud to announce the launch of Captain Morgan’s Dive Shop’s beautiful website! Jonah and I have been working hard to building it for the dive shop down in Utila, Honduras which we both stayed at and Jonah went on to get his divemasters from.

The website is rich in information, so we didn’t want to bombard the visitor with information; we wanted to make it easier to get to the info they need and keep design orderly by utilizing a dropdown main menu, along with a top menu and a differently worded footer menu. Along with detailed information on dive courses and fun dive information, the website also features some great dive videos that will no doubt make you want to go diving, or learn how!

Captain Morgan’s Dive Shop

I’ve come across a bunch of people looking to hide or remove page titles from specific pages in WordPress. All the posts and tutorials I’ve seen involve changing the code in page.php, which I don’t think is a very good idea because then you remove it on every page and you have no control over individual pages. There is a simple way to do it without changing the code and you will be able to control which pages you want to remove the title from being shown. Plus, its easy!

It’s Real Simple

To remove or hide WordPress page titles from showing above your content, you simply don’t give the page a title. When you remove or leave the title blank, it also removes it from your menus and from the browser tab, because your meta data is now blank too.

But what about my meta data?

To make sure it will still show in meta data and in your browser tab, all part of social media optimization (SMO), You will need a plugin that allows you to add SEO data.

I use a plugin called “All in One SEO” which allows me to insert a custom SEO title and description. I am still able to have my title in my meta data and I can still see what page is what in the backend (any pages that don’t have a title will be be called “(no title)“. In the page manager, you will be able to see their SEO description, so use that as a reference). If you have the page in any menus, make sure you go to your menus and make sure they didn’t change, if they did you’ll be able to manually enter the page title there.

Plugin: All in One SEO

See it’s that easy, no need to change page.php.

If you’re like me and bought a netbook, you likely don’t have all those great programs that you had on your laptop or desktop pc. Assuming you’re not a pirate (yharr) and you don’t have any copies of those programs and add in the fact that you need an external hard drive to install a program (unless you have it on a thumb drive), then you might find that your netbook is running a little bare.

That’s okay, there are a bunch of great free programs, many of them open source free software projects that are available to you. Here’s what I like and use.

App For Working with Code. . .

Notepad ++
http://notepad-plus-plus.org

Notepad ++ (plus plus) is a free source code editor built with C++ that allows you to happily work in code without jumbling up your work. It was build as a replacement to MS Windows Notepad, and works absolutely great. I mainly use it for working in css, but it also handles a wide range of code.

App For Batch Photo Resizing. . .

FastStone Photo Resizer
http://www.faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm

If you’ve ever needed to upload a bunch a photos to the web, you have probably come to the conclusion that you either need to start shooting in a lower resolution or you need to resize your photos. Instead of sacrificing your large images, try this batch photo resizer. It allows you to easily group your photos and reduce their size to one the web can handle. There are a bunch of batch photo resizers out there, but this one has worked great for me.

App For Graphic Design. . .

Gimp
http://www.gimp.org

Photoshop, Illustrator, and Fireworks are great for design, but if you need an alternative, consider Gimp. Gimp has many of the basic features of the other programs but is available as free software. Gimp has a bit of a learning curve, but if you are familiar with any of these other design programs then you’ll pick it up quickly. There is also a manual that will can help (Gimp 2.6 Cookbook).

App For Documents and Spreadsheets. . .

Open Office
http://www.openoffice.org

Open Office is giving Microsoft Office a run for it’s money, and it’s free. This full suite of programs does basically everything you need it to do, but if you’re expecting it to be as polished as Microsoft’s, then you’re going to be a bit disappointed. I know I’m still waiting for Calc to run a little smoother, but hey, it’s free!

Google Docs
https://docs.google.com

If you have a Gmail account or a Google Apps account then you have access to Google Docs, another challenger to Microsoft’s Office. While it only works when you’re online, unless you are running the upcoming Chrome OS, it is polished and works very well. Plus, you also have the option to easily share documents.

App For Playing Video and Media. . .

VLC Media Player
http://www.videolan.org/vlc

An open source media player that can handle a wide range of media, and it will play just about anything. It is available across platforms and is again… a free player. I really only use it for video, but supposedly it handles music as well.

Have any others?

Do use an free open source programs for anything that are not listed here? Good or bad, let me know in the comments.