To his credit, I couldn’t figure it out off the top of my head, so he hired my programming team to look into it, and he is kind enough to have given us permission to post the solution we came up with publicly so that if any of you need it it’s here…

Left sidebar page
wp-content\themes\THEME\l_sidebar.php

In left sidebar page we have changed div id from “desc” to “gallery_desc”.

Image Browser page
wp-content\plugins\nextgen-gallery\view\imagebrowser.php

In image browser page we added below mentioned code.

<div id="gal_title" style="display:none;"><b><?php echo ucfirst($image->alttext) ?></b></div>
<div id="gal_desc" style="display:none;"><p><?php echo ucfirst($image->description) ?></p></div>
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> document.getElementById('gallery_desc').innerHTML = document.getElementById('gal_title').innerHTML+document.getElementById('gal_desc').innerHTML;
</script>

In place of

<div class="ngg-imagebrowser-desc"><h6><?php echo $image->description ?></h6></div>

Here we are putting the title & description in hidden div tags, and after loading the page, we allocate these values to left panel div tag having id “gallery_desc”.

My intention is to rapidly and constantly add new features to the site – things that we all need as musicians. I know what I need (and I’ll share full upgrade plans as soon as they are ready), but I need to know what you need as well. Can you take a second right now to make a comment on this post with your feature requests? Be as detailed as you want, and don’t be afraid to dream. What would the ultimate management tool be for you that would help you book gigs, keep everything organized, get radio play, make sure all of your online profiles were up to date, etc..?

I want to turn GigTrak into the only booking and music career management tool that any musician ever needs – help me figure out what the community wants.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts – just scroll down and “Leave a Reply”

Book Review: Reverse Google Marketing by Wendy Stevens

One of my favorite WordPress plugins is Contact Form 7 – it is a powerful and extremely simple contact form that can be set up in a matter of seconds. Until recently, though, there was no good way to get it to use a custom thank you page – you had to go into the code and hack about, and they were releasing updates on a frequent enough basis that by the time you had your hack in place they were already asking you to upgrade the software.

Anyhow, this has now been fixed and the solution is ever so easy.

At the bottom of the settings page for Contact Form 7 is something called “Additional Settings”

Simply paste the code below into that box, edit the thank you page to reflect the URL that you want, and you are off!

on_sent_ok: "location.replace('http://www.mysite.com/mypage.html');"

Then simply paste the conversion code into your thank you page and you are ready to track contacts / signups on your site!

Note:
I found this solution on the comments at http://www.grapethinking.com/wordpress-contact-form-7-plugin-landing-pag – I will keep my eyes out for any further updates, just wanted to post this clearly as I had to dig around for hours to find it!!

I’ve found consistently better conversions with a rather large green square that turns red on mouse over. It isn’t that pretty, but who really cares about pretty in the race to make a bit of cash? I noticed quite a few of the “big name gurus” using buttons like this and figured that they were doing their homework and testing, so I gave it a shot and – lo and behold – it works.

So, in the interest of making sure everyone has a good shot at increasing their sales a bit, I’ve put together a web form that lets you create your own buttons for testing really quickly. Here it is. Enjoy!

The primary issue was that on the view of an album where it shows all of the thumbnails in a grid, I wanted to see the title and description of the picture.

The fix is actually fairly simple.

In the nextgen-gallery/view folder is a file called “gallery.php”.

In that file, there is a little block of code which displays the thumbnails.

<?php foreach ($images as $image) : ?>

</div>
</div>
<?php if ( $gallery->columns > 0 && ++$i % $gallery->columns == 0 ) { ?>
<br style="clear: both" />
<?php } ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>

What we need to do is add this bit of code:


<p align="left" style="margin-left:0px;">
<strong><?php echo $image->alttext ?></strong>
<br />
<?php echo $image->description ?>
</p>

Right below the image tag.

Which is fine. For my template, I also wanted the top of all captions to be at the same height, even though I don’t use cropping on my thumbnails so that images are different heights (by default, this will display the text right under your image). So, I also created a little css and put it in NextGen’s style sheet:

.ngg-gallery-imagewrap {
height:175px;
}

And then wrapped the image in a div with the class of ngg-gallery-imagewrap.

My final code looked like this:

<?php foreach ($images as $image) : ?>

</div>
</div>
<?php if ( $gallery->columns > 0 && ++$i % $gallery->columns == 0 ) { ?>
<br style="clear: both" />
<?php } ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>

And you can see the result here.

Post a comment if you have any questions – I’m happy to help!

Right now, anyone who wants to try out the power of a WordPress site on a host that they have complete control over can do it absolutely free for three months, and after that you only pay the hosting fee of $5.95 per month.  I’m not asking for credit info up front or anything, and I believe so firmly that you will love your site that I am confident I’ll end up with your business in three months time.

So, is it really generosity?  Aww.. who cares – claim you free wordpress blog today.

What many companies don’t realize is that the creation myth is equally important to the business world.  If you are an individual consultant, a professional services provider, or a Fortune 500, people still want to know where you came from, what you are doing here, and why.  If you don’t have the answers to this (and the right answers) you have nothing, so – unless you have your creation myth on paper, I suggest you start now.

Think about it.  There is the guy selling an herbal blood cleanser.  You don’t know who he is, and for that matter you don’t know what an herbal blood cleanser is and why you would need it.  If he just says “buy my herbs!” – do you?

But, if suddenly he is a man who was experiencing cronic fatigue, who just couldn’t keep his eyes open throughout the day, and in fact lost his job because of it..  And he know something was wrong.  He got plenty of sleep but couldn’t keep his energy levels up, and he was developing skin problems, achy joints, and all sorts of issues.  He tried everything – traditional Western doctors, accupuncture, he even went and saw a shaman in the rainforest of South America.  And it was there that he was given a special herb that has ancient properties of cleansing the blood.  Apparently his liver hadn’t been functioning at full tilt, but no one could figure it out until then, and this one miracle herb gave him new energy and a new lease on life.  With his new found passion he was not only able to get a new job back, he in fact had the spark to start his own company and bring this special herb to you… try it today risk free!

Get the idea?

When I was running a one man web design show a few years back, I wasn’t just another guy who had taught himself web design.  I was a young entrepeneur who had come upon some fantastic teachers who had given him the skills to never hold a real job in his entire adult life.  No, he had never reported to work, he had always run his own show and was doing quite well at it.  Not only that, but from his work with clients he had watched over 1,000 marketing tests in nearly 100 industries go to completion, and had unique knowledge about what made sales and what didn’t in the online world.  I wasn’t just another web designer, I was THE web designer that knew how to produce a site that would bring in the cash and help you move towards a free, wealthy lifestlyle of the self employed (my main target market was the self employed individual.)

You may be thinking – wait a minute, this sounds like a USP to me, but take a look.  There are significant differences, and important ones.  My USP would have been “Not Just Designed, Designed for Profit!”.  But my creation myth is much more complex than that – it gave my business a background, a personality, an ideology – even when I wasn’t the one doing the design any more.

So, go ahead – post your creation myths below – let’s see them!  If you don’t have one yet, don’t walk away from this blog post until you’ve at least sketched one out in the comments section…

WordPress is an amazing piece of software.  What started as a simple blogging platform has now turned into one of the most robust content management platforms available online today.  You can blog, but you can also build complex websites with functionality that you could never dream of without programming skills of your own at the click of a button.  Because of it’s long standing nature as an open source project, so many people have contributed amazing add ons that it is hard to find something these days that WordPress can’t do.

Uses?

WordPress as an SEO Tool

In the case of this blog, I am using WordPress as a SEO tool.  I have installed several plugins which make creating highly optimized pages easier, and I’ll review them in future posts.  When dimension5 Labs was created and Narasopa.com no longer needed to be used to market my services, I decided I would instead turn it into a lead generation site for high end consulting.  I’ll be doing that by.. you guessed it .. blogging.  By writing posts on topics that other professionals find important, and making sure they are optimized to end up in the search engines, I’ve created a new, more personal way, for people to find out about my thoughts and my services.

WordPress as a Content Management Service

WordPress, although handy as a blog used for SEO purposes, is also great for beginner’s who don’t know too much about web design but want to put a nice site online.  I recently put together Demon Frameworks website for a friend for Christmas.  He is an excellent, excellent bike builder, but not a web designer.  By using WordPress, I was able to create a really nice looking site in about five hours that gave him the ability to add and update pages, run his own blog about his bike building process (therefore generating more SEO traffic as well), easily update and create new photo galleries and flash slide shows, and have a contact form where people could easily get in touch.  To do this by hand would have taken days, but with the magic of  Wordpress it came off in one evening!

WordPress as A Social Platform

On LifeStyleZero.com I used a WordPress MU (multi-user) installation to create a social platform for other people interested in moving towards a zero carbon footprint / zero waste lifestyle.  Anyone on the planet who is interested can sign up and share their thoughts, ideas, and challenges on this topic, and can find and comment on other people’s posts to form a network of people and ideas around a topic.

These are only three of the hundreds of ways it is possible to use WordPress.  If you are interested in having a WordPress site of your own, right now I am running an offer to set up a basic WordPress installation for anyone who wants it absolutely free (the hosting costs $5.95 a month for a basic package that will support your blog until it grows out of control, but I can get you a three month free trial of that as well so you have plenty of time to see if it’s working for you).  I’ll also be posting tons of free information on this blog on how to start and grow a profit stream using a simple WordPress blog, so if you want to jump on the blogging bandwagon using what I think is the best software available today, post a comment below and I’ll set you up!

If you are in business today, it has become almost imperative that you have a website. If you are in business and are planning to make a significant long term income off of your business, it is an absolute must. And, most businesses have jumped on the website bandwagon, filling the internet with millions and millions of websites.

On the other end is the user. One person, often looking for just one thing. With so many options to choose from, how do you get them to focus in on you, on your product, your service, or your store location?

One of the most recent answers to this question is Social Networking. With all of the buzz around Social Networking and Web 2.0 you’ve probably had at least minimal exposure. You might even have a Myspace.com account. But, how does this help your business?

There are actually hundreds of ways, but today I’m only going to focus on one with concrete steps for you to take so that by the end of the day you will have a whole new lead and customer generation stream.

Although Myspace isn’t necessarily the absolute best social networking site, it is the biggest, so that is where we are going to start.

1. If you don’t have a myspace account, go to http://myspace.com and sign up for one. Use a name that is as close as possible to your business name for your account name, as it will show up in your URL as Myspace.com/YourBizName

2. Once you have an account, take ten minutes to fill in a profile. Load in a picture. If you are a consultant or individual service provider, put a picture of yourself. If you are a retail location, put a picture of your store. If you manufacture a product, put a picture of the product you make. Then fill out profile questions that match your business. Keep it professional, and fill out the questions from the standpoint of your business, and don’t be afraid to do a bit of promotion. If you have your own website, it should definitely be included in your About Me section.

3. Once you have a profile, you need friends. If you have a business email list, that is by far the easiest way. Simply write to them, tell them about your new myspace account, and ask them to be your friend! This is perfect because it then locates you in a social circle that is already targeted to the types of people who are your customers. If you have a retail store, make up little cards with your site on it, and give them to customers inviting them to become your online ‘friends’.

4. Joint venture with other users. Find people in myspace who are in your market, and ask them if they will post a bulletin introducing your site to their friends.

Once you have built up a small friends list, you can then truly start some promotional magic. Myspace allows you to post blogs and bulletins. The blog is on your Myspace page, and the bulletin actually gets posted to all of your friends ‘Bulletin Board’ area.

As often as you can, you want to come up with a creative little promotion, and post it to your blog and send it as a bulletin. If you were a restaurant, maybe you would send out daily meals specials. If you were a software company, maybe you’d post articles about the different cool points of your software.

Bulletins move quickly, as if anyone else posts a bulletin to one of your friends after yours was posted, yours will get moved down the board, and will eventually disappear. This is why it is important that you post regularly, and if you are only posting once a day, try to make it at a time when you think that the demographic of people who are your friends will be online.

Keep this up, and you will see growth in your business. You will be exposed to new potential customers, and if you are lucky you might just get big enough to be featured, which can generate a huge buzz for your business.

Estimated time: 20 min. Set Up, 4 minutes daily posting a bulletin