So you have multiple Gmail or Google App accounts and you want to combine them all into one. There are a two main parts to doing this — getting and sending email — and, we believe, there is a “bad way” and a “good way” to do each part.

The issue is this. You have 1 primary email, we’re going to call that “primary@gmail.com”, that you want to use all the time. You also have “secondary@gmail.com” and “tertiary@gmail.com” as well. You don’t want to have to login to those accounts, but you want to 1) get emails instantly from those accounts and 2) send as if you’re sending from those accounts.

Getting email from other accounts…

The Bad Way
Go enable “POP” email on the account you want to get email from. To do it that way you go into “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” section of settings on the “secondary@gmail.com” and “tertiary@gmail.com” emails and enable “POP” email. Then you go into the “Accounts” section of settings on the “primary@gmail.com” email and click the “Add a POP3 mail account you own”.

The problem with this is that Gmail has a set time that they run their POP3 mail checking scripts. So it can be over an hour before you get an email. You can go into the “Accounts” section of settings of your “primary@gmail.com” address and click “Check mail now.” But that’s annoying. And there is no way to change how often Gmail checks the POP3 account.

The Good Way
Go to the “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” section of settings on the “secondary@gmail.com” and “tertiary@gmail.com” emails and click “Add a forwarding address” button. Add your “primary@gmail.com” account as the address… get the confirmation code (this is easier with two browsers open at once, btw)… input it… and then set your “secondary@gmail.com” and “tertiary@gmail.com” emails to forward to your “primary@gmail.com” email. We suggest going so far as to setting the “secondary@gmail.com” and “tertiary@gmail.com” emails to delete their copy once it’s forwarded. This truly keeps you from ever having to “get in there” again.

Now when someone sends you an email you get it as quickly as you normally would. No more waiting on the POP3 script to run.

Sending email from other accounts…

First off, if you’ve set up a POP3 account on your “primary@gmail.com” email then you’ll already have a new “Send mail as” email added to that account as well. If not you’ll need to add one under the “Accounts” section of settings. The “default” way Gmail sets this up is for this email to be treated as an alias. Gmail’s description of what an alias is and does can be a bit confusing. Basically if you want to send email as “someone else” that is NOT you then you want to uncheck that box. If you want it to be sent as you then leave it checked.

The Bad Way
The next part (after you click the “Next Step” button) you’re given the option to send through the “primary@gmail.com” account, or to send through the other account. The default is to send it through the “primary@gmail.com” email account. The problem with this is that people who get the email will see a “via gmail.com” (where “gmail” is your domain is you’re using Google Apps).

The Good Way
Some people don’t mind “the bad way” but if you want it to truly send AS your “secondary@gmail.com” or “tertiary@gmail.com” emails you want to check the the other option. If your other emails are something other than Gmail or Google Apps then you’ll need to check with your email host to find out what the outgoing SMTP settings are. Otherwise, if you are using Gmail or Google Apps for your “secondary” and “tertiary” emails then you can use the following settings.

You’re all set!

That’s it! Now when someone sends an email to either your “secondary@gmail.com” or “tertiary@gmail.com” you’ll get it on your “primary@gmail.com” account right away… and, when you reply, you’ll be replying as that account and actually sending as that account. The great thing is that you only have to login to one account.

Addendum

If you have a lot of emails on your “secondary@gmail.com” or “tertiary@gmail.com” emails that you want to actually move to your “primary@gmail.com” account then you should first set up the POP3 for past emails and set up the POP3 account to check them. It will download them all to your “primary” account. The one issue with this is that it can take a very long time depending on how many emails you have.

So, you have a small business and you’ve created a “Facebook Page“. Great job!
You still have one, tiny, little, irritating question buzzing around in your head… “What now?”

Facebook pages can be a very powerful way to get your name out there. The internet of today is a conversation and, whether you like it or not, Facebook is one of the main “hubs” of that conversation.  Using a page can be tricky and sometimes a bit frustrating but, if done correctly, the amount of “Likes” (“Fans” or “Followers”) your page can get can be astounding and suddenly you’re the “EF Hutton” of the internet conversation because everyone is listening to you.

Here are a few FREE tips to getting more “Likes” on your Facebook page.

Stay Relevant

If you have a Facebook page about your computer repair business posting pictures of kittens may get you a few likes but, in the long run, it’s not really helping your business. Keeping posts relevant to not only what you do but to the audience you want to attract is crucial. So, obviously, if you want cat lovers as a primary client for your computer repair business than MEEOW! to your heart’s desire.

Why So Serious?

Try being “funny” and using something current to reel people in. For example, if you have a Facebook page for your restaurant you could’ve used the end of 2012 to reference the Mayan calendar with a post about something like, “where will you have your last meal?” Again, making posts relevant to what you do and who you want as customers is key… but keeping it light hearted is always a good way of bringing in more “Likes.”

Use Current Events

Staying current doesn’t mean simply posting every day it means keeping up with current events and posting — again relevant — posts based on those events. One great example of using current events to gain a following is from Dr. Beth Robinson — who deals with adoption related issues among other things — created a post about the “adoption joke” that was made in the superhero movie, “The Avengers” last year and then shared that post on her Facebook page.

No Religion. No Politics.

Unless you’re specifically running a page for a church or religious or political organization posting your personal views on religion or politics is probably going to do you more harm than good. Facebook is notorious for being a breeding ground for “bad press” and if you’re going to go viral you’d like to try and make it for something people “Like.”

Stay off the Bandwagons

As tempting as it is don’t simply re-share or re-post something that has already gone viral. Making a comment about something that is very topical is one thing but simply jumping on a bandwagon is another. Your goal should be to build your own bandwagon and get everyone else to jump on with you.

Use Facebook AS Your Business

Once you have a Facebook page you can use Facebook AS that page. That means you can search Facebook for other pages and posts that are relevant to your business and then either “Like” them, share them, or even comment on some of them. Doing this will mean that people see your page as “part of the conversation” and will have that many more ways to find you.

Invite Your Friends

If you’re not on Facebook with a personal profile this may be an irrelevant tip, but if you are — and most are — then this is something so simple that many people never do. Once you’re administrator of a Facebook page you have the ability to invite friends to “Like” the page.  This means when they “Like” it their friends will see they’ve “Liked” it and then will hopefully like it as well.

“Like” It Again, Sam

One final tip… something few people know is if you “unlike” and then “like” something again it will show on your personal timeline again as you having “liked” it.  That means people who might have missed it in their feed the first time have a 2nd chance of seeing it.

Those are just a few of the FREE ways you can turn Facebook into a real advantage for your small business. Of course, if you want to spend some money as well there are other ways — such as “Promoting” a post — that are built into the Facebook system as well. These are fantastic, affordable tricks that you can easily read about on Facebook’s help pages.

There are some great sites out there that tell you how to write a great blog entry. But the question still remains… why should you even have a blog?

A “blog” is — simply put — a “web log”. It’s an online journal. A way of keeping thoughts, sharing ideas, writing down daily (weekly, monthly, how-ever-often) bits of information that are relevant to you at the time and may benefit others later.

Before Facebook and Twitter “blogging” was a great way for people to keep up with one another. Checking someone’s blog was what you did if you were online and wanted to follow someone’s daily ins and outs. There wasn’t really any use for a business to have a blog attached to their website. It wouldn’t “do” anything for them because no one was likely to read it anyway. Blogging was for being “personal” — and in that way it hasn’t changed. It’s still a way for people (even businesses) to relate in a more “personal” way with their audience, users, clients and customers. The thing that has changed is that now blogging can become a viable tool.

Used correctly a blog can help search engines such as Google find you. It also gives your site the possibility of becoming “viral.” If just one person shares one of your posts with two of their friends and each of them continue on that same path before you know it you have tens of thousands of hits on your site.

There are a few things to remember when you’re trying to write a blog for your business…

1. Use the news to be current.  If there’s something going on in the world today, write about it. The more you do this the more Google and other search engines will learn to “trust” your blog as something current and up-to-date.
2. Keep it relevant to you.  While using the news is great to stay relevant to the world you need to stay relevant to your industry / niche as well.  Simply put, if you’re a shoe company you don’t need to be blogging about anything but shoes. That doesn’t, however, mean that you can’t take a “hot topic” and make it relevant to shoes. What shoes was the President wearing when he appeared on David Letterman? Where can you get boots like “The Avengers?”
3. Key in keywords. While meta tags and other tricks used for “SEO” (search engine optimization) is going the way of the DoDo “keywords” in the text of a site are going to be more and more important. Learning to type something that is current to the world, relevant to you, and filled with great keywords and phrases you want to be found by is an art. Something some people do much better than others.
4. Don’t Panic. Keeping a blog up-to-date is important, but don’t stress about it. If you’re blogging once a year maybe you shouldn’t have one. But if you’re blogging once a month you’re doing great! And making it easy to post by using tools such as being able to post from your cell phone — something Park East offers — takes away some of the excuses as to why not to blog.

So if you’re a person or a person in a business or a business with people there may be a good reason not to have a blog, but there are many good reasons to blog.

If you’re doing any sort of forms for your website you’re going to want to check out Gravity Forms. Their WordPress plugin makes creating complex forms a snap. With things such as conditional logic built in you can easily create forms that have fields which show based on what people have chosen in other fields.  Check out the “Choose Your Amp” form on TKProductsLLC.com to see this conditional logic in action.

The basics of Gravity Forms are pretty straight forward and quite usable by most WordPress developers but Gravity Forms is built with the power to go far ”beyond” its basic programing. That’s where we come in.

Park East has been developing with Gravity Forms since its beginning and are experts in taking your forms to the next step. While things like integration, conditional logic, and posting to custom taxonomies may take you weeks to learn they are all old hat to us. So if you’re a Gravity Forms developer  and need help with getting a form to do what it needs to do contact us and let us help!

If you’re like me you have your domain names mapped to Gmail using Google Apps.  This is a really cool thing to do if you’ve not done it btw.  If you’re like me two times over you’ve noticed that the “Offline” feature in Gmail has quit working as of late… or isn’t working at all if you’re just now trying to activate it.

Sure, you can go into “Labs” and enable it just fine, but the little offline link in the top right hand corner doesn’t show up.  I kept thinking, and searching for, “I don’t see the offline link.”  Well, here’s how to fix it…

NOTE: You’ll need to be the administrator of the domain to do this.  If you are not, point them here and let them do it for you.

1. Login to your domain name Google Apps administration panel.  ex: https://www.google.com/a/cpanel/YOURDOMAIN.com/
2. Go to the “Domain Settings” tab.
3. Scroll down until you see the “New Services and Pre-release Features” section.
4. Check BOTH boxes in that section.
5. Save your changes.

Now you just have to wait about 10 minutes, reload your Google Apps Gmail page, and you should see the little “Offline” link at the top!

We recently had a client who was trying to post a poll into their web site using a snippet of code provided by the poll web site. This was fine to do, in theory, but every time they added the code their site would “break” and everything would look out of place. Images would go on top of each other and columns wouldn’t be in the right places. After looking at the provided code snippet for the poll I quickly recognized the problem… the code snippet contained a superfluous </div> tag.

Most modern web sites, unless made from Flash, are made up of CSS (cascading style sheets) and HTML. CSS is code that tells the HTML what to look like. It’s as if you have a box of white crayons to begin with and the CSS says, “crayon #1 = green” and so on.

This is done mostly through “classes.” A class is simply a set of definitions for an object in the HTML. So, again with the crayons, you can have a class called “green crayon” and it will say that crayon is green.

The class can also tell the position, height, size, and all other things about the object.
To let the web site know what thing is in what class you wrap it in a <div> tag.

So, for example, you might have.

<div class=”green crayon”>crayon</div>

The <div> starts it and the </div>  ends it. Everything between that is going to be considered the “green crayon.” Every class has a starting one and an ending one. If you have a <div> anywhere to start something you have to end it later with a </div>.

A web site will have a lot of classes. You have classes for the photos, boxes, the header, the links, the text, the columns. Along with this is the fact that every class is dependent, to some degree, on the other classes surrounding it. For example the “right column” can only be as wide as the total width of the site minus the left column width. Right? Otherwise it won’t fit and the site will look funny.

Well, the “POLL” code our client was copying and pasting into their site had an extra </div> tag in it. This is what was causing the site to “break.” Essentially it was telling the site to “end” a class before it should really be ending. Then the new class was taking over too soon and everything was goofing up.

Look at this example.

Here’s what the example crayon box should be doing…

<div class=”crayon box”>
<div class=”green crayon”>Crayon</div>
<!– end green crayon –>
<div class=”red crayon”>Crayon</div>
<!– end red crayon –></div>
<!– end crayon box –>

When the poll snippet was added this was happening…

<div class=”crayon box”>
<div class=”green crayon”>Crayon
INSERTED POLL</div>
<!– added poll div tag –></div>
<!– end green crayon –>
<div class=”red crayon”>Crayon</div>
<!– end red crayon –>
<!– end crayon box –>

See, the tag the poll is adding is essentially CLOSING the “crayon box” class. The first <div class=”crayon box”> starts it… (that’s 1 div) then the <div class=”green crayon”> starts a 2nd one… (that’s 2 divs). The first </div> closes the most recent <div>… which is the “green crayon”… THEN — and here’s where things go awry — the</div> tag that is added by the POLL code closes the “crayon box” class.

If something is breaking your layout you can click on the HTML view mode in WordPress and make sure there are no <div> or <span> tags whatsoever. If there are, remove them and see if it works then.

Hope this helps understand.