It is a very big day for Pandora as they are launching the new version of their site.
Some of our new features include:
Simplified Station Creation – Enhanced auto-complete choices and personalized suggestions make creating new stations and discovering new music or comedy more intuitive and personal.
Discovery of Music with Friends – Enhanced listener profiles and a new music feed offer a centralized place to find, like and comment on what friends and like-minded listeners are discovering and enjoying on Pandora. The music feed will roll out slowly over the course of the coming days. In addition to the prominent new “share” button, stations now have their own URLs, making it super easy for listeners to share favorite stations via Twitter, Facebook, or email.
Improved Control – Prominent and ubiquitous access to familiar player control buttons including Play, Pause, Thumbs-Up and Thumbs-Down icons helps listeners to easily personalize their music and comedy stations. A new shuffle feature also allows listeners to shuffle any collection of stations to add variety to their listening experience.
Enhanced Artist Information – An option to learn more about the music, find lyrics, read artists’ biographies and expand the album art size.
Unlimited listening – We’ve removed the 40 hours listening cap – you can now listen as much as you want for free.
via – Pandora
Today I wanted to see how our site looked on all different screen resolutions. I didnt really know how to do this, but I came across a great service called Viewlike.us.
ViewLike.us allows users to quickly see what their websites look like in different screen resolutions, even including Wii and iPhone.
If your a Google Analytics users you can head to your Visitors tab and check out what screen resolutions you users are using and the try to adjust your layout accordingly.
When a new visitor clicks on a business’ website, that business only has a few briefs moments to turn that visitor into a convert. If a visitor doesn’t immediately receive the impression they desire from a business website at first glance, they will be quick to move on to a competing site. To ensure that your web site has the highest conversion rate possible it needs to incorporate the following five key components:
Professional Web Design
The quality of a business’ web site often indicates its credibility and financial viability. If potential clients have difficulty navigating your website, or believe the site’s design looks unprofessional, they will most likely move along. Business owners should always pay the extra expense to have their website professionally designed. A captivating web design will increase potential customer confidence in your professionalism.
Sing Your Praises
Business owners should never be afraid to place any positive press or awards on their website. Top name sponsors are also a good idea to have visible on a website as they encourage visitors to trust the products and/or services. Visitors recognize organizations, such as the Better Business Bureau, and if they see these affiliations prominently on a website they are more likely to trust the business.
Promote Social Networking
Give visitors the option to promote your business through social networking sites, such as Facebook, by “friending” them. It makes the customer feel as though they are a part of your business, and also gives your business a free advertisement. The access social networking gives to communities outside of your reach with open the door to clients who might not ordinarily have known about your business.
Post the Physical Address
A physical address should always be listed on a business website as it makes a business appear more viable. Businesses without physical addresses posted on their websites often create uncertainty in visitors as they don’t have any evidence proving that the company actually exists. If a visitor is left questioning a business’ existence, they will most likely skip on to the next business listing.
State Your Security
If a company’s website doesn’t appear secure, a visitor will not want to conduct business through the site. Although secure sites have the prefix “https,” most visitors don’t look for this. The best way to for a business to advertise their site’s security is by visibly posting it on its web pages.
The more trustworthy a company’s website the more quickly a company will be able to turn website visitors into clients. To create a quality and trustworthy website, many companies choose to employ an online marketing agency. An agency will not only help a company save precious time and money, but they will also be able to help companies turn their websites into profitable assets that will increase business and gain the company greater national and global recognition.
When a new visitor clicks on a business’ website, that business only has a few briefs moments to turn that visitor into a convert. If a visitor doesn’t immediately receive the impression they desire from a business website at first glance, they will be quick to move on to a competing site. To ensure that your web site has the highest conversion rate possible it needs to incorporate the following five key components:
How do we design our website is the key factor to achieve popularity, there’s no point on having a lot of great content if we are designing a complex site which it is extremely expensive to maintain it. W3tableless is a simple web app which will show us if the website design follows some of the best practices.
Even though there’s no golden rule about how to correctly design your website, there are several best practices that should not be avoid. One of them is “tableless”: A design technique for dividing the architecture of our site separating content and design. Therefore the maintenance costs of the website are reduced.
W3tableless will show you with just one click and completely free if your website is using this best practices. Just enter the URL and click on “CHECK”.
We will receive also a complete report about the website: Number of DIV tags, TABLE tags, Encoding, XML Prolog, etc.
Web design used to be only for those savvy enough to code and design original graphics. Not to take away from the skill it takes to do good web design, many of us are simply looking for a way to display content: video, photos, and text. We’ve come a long way since the days of Geocities, and are now able to do so much more with the web apps that have been developed for the everyman.
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Real estate, whether it’s hot or not, one this is true, it’s all about the location. With that in mind, for those of us that are seeking a place to hang our hat, to call our home, there’s lots of apps out there that can help us find that dwelling. Whether your single, married, roomates, there are apps out there that can help you find the right place for you. In the UK there is one specific app that we had a chance to play with, and that’s MousePrice.
MousePrice is an extremely web and mobile app that can share pricing of real estate, provide you quotes, and some basic information based on your needs. The web app is a very simple website that asks you three questions before you submit and move onto your information. In an effort to increase transparency in the industry MousePrice puts as few roadblocks between you and the results. Finding the properties available in the area you selected then makes it easy for you to find the place that best fits your budget.
Alternatively the mobile app for the iPhone works just as effectivly. After inserting some basic information on the location you want, or using your specific location at the moment, it will map out, using GPS, the entire area providing you drop pins to click on in order to get your information. Once the information is displayed, properties in green mean the value has gone up, property in pink means it’s gone down, and yellow properties simply mean that there is not enough information to accurately give you the most recent information.
Interested? Well if you’re in the UK looking for a bit of real estate, I’d be curious to hear if you’ve used this and if you like it. If you’re a real estate agent, do you find this effective for what you do? Leave a comment and let us know.
Ever fancied building a website but wouldn’t know the first thing about design or hosting. Now, there is a FREE website tool that will allow you to do it – BlueVoda. I downloaded BlueVoda expecting another knockoff that the minute you start it up it will be asking for your credit card number so you can upgrade or only giving you access to some of the features – I was wrong.
You get the whole shebang for free. The file itself is only 4Mb and you’ll have it installed and started up in under twenty minutes. Within an 20 minutes of using the software I had a homepage made up with a video player, banner, text and images all working well together.
It’s incredibly simple to use. All the tools are along the top and to the left. If you want to say… insert a flash application all you do is click on the button with the ‘flash’ icon, select where on the webpage you want it to be, adjust the size and then just click to position it there. What’s more, everything is interchangeable. When building a small website to try out the software, I felt more like I was playing with Lego blocks because you can just drag and drop things until you have it looking the way to want it to.
Other features include inserting in-line frames, galleries, lines, page breaks, Windows Media Players and literally hundreds of other features.
Then, all you do is copy and paste the HTML to your server, upload the files you used like images etc… and you’re up and running! There are tons of articles on the BlueVoda website to show you how to use the software and how to get your site on the internet.
For anyone looking to build a basic personal or business website this is the one for you. It’s simple to use, fast, effective and free. I can hardly think of a bad aspect (except maybe those annoying monthly e-mails you get from BlueVoda asking if everything is going okay or do you need hosting services). 8/10
We at Crenk scour the net for stories, apps, humor pieces, and useful additions for your productivity and websites. Here’s a quick something that a lot of us on Twitter have been looking for, a classy badge.
Lots of sites out there offer Twitter badges that you install and more often than not they can take up valuable real estate on your site, so here’s a nice SITE that can help you instantly create a very unobtrusive “Follow” badge for your site that users can click on, while saving space on your site.
It’s not an issue for everyone, but I thought it would be useful for some.
Ten years ago, who would have thought that most of our work would depend on the internet? The internet allows us to have easy access to our files, anywhere, anytime. We chat face to face with friends, meet clients virtually, process payments in a flash and much more. The internet is huge and you can’t get enough of it. It has no end.
While on the topic of the internet, you can call the current scenario, the Web 2.0 revolution, the next dot com boom. Web apps are torrenting the internet with their numbers and new ones pop-up everyday.
Today, I will talk about the latest additions to the pool, of course; the ones you probably don’t know about.
So, without further ado…
With TinyChat you can create your own chatroom and invite people through one simple link. Chat rooms are disposable and can be created within seconds.
With KeepHD, you can download the high defintion version of youtube videos and also fetch the FLVs and 3GPs for your mobiles.
With the help of Prezi you can create maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings and present in a nonlinear way. Move beyond the slide, it only takes 5 minutes to learn how to use Prezi.
With Wix, you can create stunning flash websites for free, all from your internet browser! It offers you a simple powerful online platform to make flash websites, MySpace layouts and more. No downloads or programming needed.
NiceTranslator is a fast, easy to use online translator designed with simplicity and functionality in mind. It is ajax powered, so you get the translations on the fly!
A to-do list with a twist. It streamlines tasks in an elegant calendar view
Pizap is a fun free photo editor that lets people easily create wacky images with their digital pictures. You get a very easy to use photo editor that lets you add photo effects, custom text or speech bubbles and much more.
Need to receive a message by email, but can’t (or don’t want to) give out your email address? whspr! gives you a URL to share instead.
WobZip is an online tool which lets you uncompress compressed files online. It supports many formats including the major ones as Zip, RAR, 7Z, Gzip, TAR, ISO etc…
Create an invitation in seconds, add entries from mobile, twitter, email, iCal, gCal or Outlooks. And of course, send them with ease from withing the app.
Fliggo is an out-of-the-box, all-in-one, solution for creating your own video website. It can be a video blog, a YouTube-like community or a private site for your company or family.
Yidio combines over 200 million videos and offers one of the largest video search engines on the Web.
SlideRocket is an online, flash based tool for creating slides and presentations. It brings together a complete package of online slide making with features such as an intuitive interface, themes, flickr integration and much more
Ziddu is a new free file hosting solution with features such as unlimited storage space, fast uploads and downloads, file management, a sharing community a referral program and the ability to earn money with your downloads.
Mufin is your music discovery engine, that will let you easily discover new music among millions of tracks. With the sound that you dig!
YoutubeReloaded creates an embeddable playlist of YouTube videos that can be added to any website. Simply choose a playlist type to create your free youtube playlist.
FriendPaste is a an online tool where you can paste code snippets of many different languages to share with friends. It sports and intuitive interface with support for syntax highlighting.
Survs is a collaborative tool that allows you to build, deploy and analyze online surveys. With a great user interface, Survs is currently in private beta, though a single request fetched us an invitation.
With SendPhotos Mobile, Web and PC you can upload photos, edit them, create photos albums and share them online with whoever you want. Also available for Android, iPhone and BlackBerry.
BackupURL creates instant cached copies of web pages. The content of a web page stays the same while you share the link provided. The cached page can also be used for referencing or even mirroring data. The cached page will always be online (html,css,images) no matter whether the original site is up or down.
Rapidstack is a realtime Rapidshare link searcher. It scans the links before they are displayed as results and only working links are displayed.
CC Betty organizes your message and its contents – photos, addresses, documents, links – and create a mailspace where everyone can track replies, view and add content. You just CC your messages to her!
Make your emails pop with signatures that reflect your personality and change with every email you send! Create signatures with your twitter status, flickr photos, blog entries, youtube stream and much more, all realtime.
Create your own RSS feed by combiningRSS feeds from your favorite websites, and use filters to choose what you want in it!
Twe2 is a service which sends you your twitter replies, direct messages and custom searches that you specify free to your mobile as SMS. Available in more than 230 countries.
Markkit is a web2.0 text highlighter. Drag’n’Drop the markkit yellow pen into your browser toolbar. Whenever you want to highlight text in a web page, click on the markkit bookmarklet.
So which ones are your favorites? Discuss in the comments, and dont forget to give it a digg 
(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.
