This Week in Marketing and Web Development

The creators of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash have purchased a company that makes fonts ‘friendly’ for the web. The company is called Typekit, and now that an established company (Adobe) is backing it, you’ll see us using this service more often.

Here’s how it used to be – Our clients requested a font such as Century Gothic for their website. Purchasing a font for a client is expensive, and embedding it into the website has its issues as well, such as making the site load slowly. The affordable and simple solution was to convert it to an image in Photoshop. The problem is that Google and the visually impaired have a difficult time reading images.

Now, with Typekit, we ‘lease’ the fonts and embed them into the site. They will perform well across many different browsers, are easy to read for the visually impaired, are search engine friendly, and save development time when updating the site. It’s a win-win for both our clients and the font creators. As for the lease, this will add a small additional fee to your regular monthly fees. Then again, your competition is or will be using it, so it’s a needed addition to any new website.
Read the press release from Adobe.

(NOTE: Typekit is now Adobe Fonts – 4/29/20)

Facebook has begun to notify Page admins that it will be removing the Discussion tab application from all Pages on October 31st, 2011. Facebook says, ‘The best way to encourage conversation and feedback is through posts and comments on your wall.’ We have not seen many clients utilize the Discussion tab but noticed that it was active on our clients’ wall. For those, we recommend disabling the app so other tabs can become more apparent.

As of Saturday, October 1, 2011, Facebook will require ALL applications and page tabs to support HTTPS secure hosting, to ‘ensure that users browsing Facebook over HTTPS will have a great experience over a secure connection.’ At this time we don’t know exactly what will happen with the Page tabs that are not secure except that visitors will be thrown a warning – which might scare them away. Any wisnet.com clients using our Facebook Apps have nothing to worry about – we have you covered! If you’re using 3rd party apps, now would be the time to see if they work with HTTPs.

Is your Facebook Page using an app to provide a welcoming or landing page to visitors? If you’re not sure, log into your Facebook Page, click Edit Page, then click Apps on the left. Look for Welcome – FBML. If there, it’s a good possibility that you are. This app will be discontinued later this year, and when removed your visitors will be directed to the news feed. And this means you have a high chance of losing out on thousands of potential ‘Likes’. The good news is, we created our own custom landing page app that you can use. Give us a call to get started.
Read what Facebook has to say about it here.

That’s right! Currently only a select few users get to enjoy the new feature, and if you’re one of them, you’ll have the opportunity to see what is happening on your site…now! In the past you would have to wait until the next day to see the results. Now, with real-time data being delivered to your monitor instantly, you’ll be able to watch traffic while, let’s say, an ad is being played on the local radio. It’s a great tool to see how your marketing dollars are being put to work…and it’s FREE!
Read what Google has to say about the new feature.