We (illuminea) are so excited that we could be part of the creation of a shiny new plugin: Official Mad Mimi Sign Up Forms! for Mad Mimi, the email marketing service.

Mad Mimi is all about making their users life simple. With WordPress being the winner in terms of market share for CMSs, they wanted to serve that market.

When Mad Mimi asked us to work with them to develop their official WordPress plugin, we were super excited, since we love WordPress and urge all our clients to offer newsletters!  This plugin does what many of our clients will need, which is to easily integrate Mad Mimi sign up forms into their site.

How does it work?

Well… it pretty much does what it says. It makes sure that WordPress peeps have an easy way to display sign up forms on any WordPress site and don’t have to mess around with form embed code.

The way the plugin works is that first you create some forms in Mad Mimi, so that people can, let’s say, get updates about all the yummy cupcakes you’re baking (only organic, sugar-free, fat-free of course), and then head on over to the WordPress plugin, and validate your API key.

Once you’re connected, you’ll see all of your lists displayed and you can insert any of your Mad Mimi forms into your site by using a widget, shortcode, or template tag.

Behind the Scenes

As part of the development team, I got to be involved in the whole creation process for the Mad Mimi plugin. After talking to Mad Mimi about what features they want and don’t want, we understood that they are really in tune with their customers and know exactly what functionality they would find helpful (easy-to-use widgets) and what functionality their customers wouldn’t want (tons of configuration and options).

Once we had a list of the features, we created a mockup wireframe in my fave program Mockflow (drag and drop heaven) to create a preview of how the settings page and widget could look in WordPress.

Mockup preview:

After some back and forth discussion, we agreed on the final version and coded the mockup into a reality.  After a series of tests and minor changes, and writing up the documentation, it launched on June 3, 2013!

The real deal in a WordPress installation:

The settings page in the WordPress Dashboard

The widget

Despite their name, the Mad Mimi team is so nice and fun to work with, and at one point, they even said “You guys are friggin’ pro”. Does life get any better?

You can download the Official Mad Mimi plugin here

Miriam Schwab gives a monthly lecture series ”Web trends roundup in 1 hour” with an overview of the most important web trends for marketing professionals.

The next free webinar will be on Monday, June 25, 2012 at 10am. Signup and details here.

Topics covered in May’s webinar

Here is an overview of the social media and SEO news that Miriam discussed. Click here to watch the recorded video.

Google+ Hangouts - a business tool?

Google

• Google+ Hangouts: features, test drive, business applications
• Consumer surveys: pay per response
• Knowledge Graph
• Penguin updates
• Google Analytics – backlinks

Facebook

• Updated ad creator
• Google ads vs. Facebook ads
• Close friends
• Facebook marketing classroom
• Social Readers on the fritz – yay!
• New group file sharing feature
• App store

Comprehensive SEO for WordPress guide from SEOMoz

So.cl:  Microsoft’s attempt at being part of the social networking scene.
Twitter:  New Twitter email design, same measly content
YouTube: How to increase your video upload limit by verifying your account
Pinterest: Flickr integration and Pin via Email.  Pinterest is a success in e-Commerce
WordPress: Comprehensive guide to SEO for WordPress; New plugins for managing unlimited WordPress sites.
and much, much more!

watch the May 2012 video

May 2012 slideshow

Join us on June 25

We invite you to join us in-person at illuminea Headquarters in Jerusalem or online via live streaming for our next webinar on  Monday, June 25, 2012 at 10am. Signup and details here.

Recently, we launched a new monthly lecture series to present the most important web trends for marketing professionals.

Please join us at our next free WEBINAR: ”Latest Web Trends in 1 Hour” on Wednesday, May 30, 2012 at 10am.  Signup and details here.

At the April 2012 Web Trends Webinar, Miriam Schwab, the Friendly CEO of illuminea, spoke about:

Love the Sociabell graphic!

Google:

• Google Webmaster tools keeping data for 90 days
• Keep a close on your Google account with activity reports
• Need more space in your inbox? Sort emails by size with a Google Spreadsheet script
• How Google Penguin updates affecting sites
• Google Drive finally launching but not with iPhone access
• Google+ gets a new design, as if that’ll make more people join…

Facebook:

Fancy graphs to show user's engagement with the Facebook timeline

• You can now email people’s message box based on their profile URL. Good for stalkers…
• Download IP addresses to see who’s been logged into your account
• Timeline Checklist – a list with useful tools for optimizing your timeline
• Fancy graphs for Facebook engagement since the launch of timelines
• Facebook ads that link to internal Facebook pages perform better, and are cheaper.

Linkedin:

LinkedIn's People You May Know feature

• People You May Know feature
• Targeted updates
• Follower stats
• iPad app which represents a general trend of people moving away from apps and more toward specialized mobile and tablet sites

YouTube:

• Overview of ad options and prices
• Partner program allows you to put ads on your videos and do revenue share with YouTube

We also discussed: Pinterest, WordPress stats – over 72.4 million sites built on WP, Klout, Wajam, Sociabell,  joliprint, and secure.me.

We invite you to join us in-person at illuminea Headquarters in Jerusalem or online via live straming for our next 1-hour Webinar on Wednesday, May 30, 2012 at 10am. Signup and details here.

Watch the April 2012 web trends lecture video
We apologize for the quality of the video. To see the accompanying presentation, go here

April 2012 Slideshow on Slideshare.

About a year ago, WordPress added a feature that made it ridiculously easy to embed content from various sites (like YouTube, Slideshare, Vimeo) into WordPress sites.

How to embed media in WordPress in a second

If you want to embed, for example, a YouTube video in a post, all you do is paste the URL of the video into the editor, unlink it and save/publish. See our ultimate guide to embedding HTML and iframes in WordPress on WPGarage for more info on how this works.

The problem is that it doesn’t seem to work 100% of the time. Luckily, there’s usually a reason for this. So if you’re having trouble embedding media in your WordPress site, see if the following tips help you out.

1. Your WordPress site isn’t set to enable embeds of this kind.

Whenever you set up a WordPress site, you have the option to allow embeds or not. Make sure you’ve chosen this option.

1. Go to Settings > Media.
2. Under Embeds check the option: “When possible, embed the media content from a URL directly onto the page. For example: links to Flickr and YouTube.”
3. Save changes.

2. You aren’t using the right link

It’s possible you aren’t using the right link. For example, maybe you copied the link of a channel instead of an individual video.

Here is an example of a URL that won’t work:

http://www.youtube.com/illuminea#p/u/1/LlSeZIHroNw

Instead, the URL should look something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlSeZIHroNw

Lets see it work (all I did was un-hyperlink the above link to get the embedded video below):

Man, it’s so easy I could spit!

3. Extra code is messing things up

Maybe extra code is being added to the WordPress editor without you realizing. Try embedding the link into the HTML editor instead of the Visual one. If you see any extra code aside from the link itself, remove it.

4. The YouTube user isn’t allowing embeddings of their media

When someone uploads a video to YouTube, they can choose whether or not others will be able to embed their video around the web. If they chose not to allow it, no matter what you do, you won’t be able to embed it into your site.

Want to know how to change the embedding settings on one of your YouTube videos? Here’s how:

1. Make sure you’re logged into YouTube (with your Google account).
2. Click on the arrow next to your username in the top right-hand corner.
3. Click on My Videos.
4. Click Edit info on the video you want to edit.
5. Scroll down to Embedding and click the arrow next to it in order to see the two options.
6. Choose whether or not external sites will be able to embed your video.
7. Click Save Changes.

Anything else?

These are the problems we’ve found that prevent the awesome WordPress embed function from working. Have you found any other issues that don’t allow you to embed using links in WordPress?

illuminea college is offering an amazing course through which you’ll learn all the basics you need to know in order to get a website up and running using WordPress.

Why WordPress?

WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS). Basically this means that regular people like you and me can, relatively very easily, build and tweak websites that are cool, clear, professional and unique.

What is the course exactly?

When: Starts Feb. 15, 2011. 9:30am-1:30pm Tuesdays for 8 weeks.

Where: Our office in Jerusalem

What: Here is the course outline:

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. How do websites and internet work? (And how to get mine to work)
4. Familiarizing yourself with WordPress part 1
5. Familiarizing yourself with WordPress part 2
6. Working with template files
7. Programming 101
8. Social networks, SEO, RSS…

Who’s teaching? Us, the illuminea team, will be teaching the course. We are the ones who work with WordPress every day and are very excited to share our knowledge with others!

Price: The course is 4,300 NIS though you’ll get a 10% discount if you sign up before January 13 and a 15% discount if you’re already an illuminea client. You will receive three months free hosting of your website and a certificate at the end.

Language

We decided that we’ll first offer the course in Hebrew. You can see our landing page for the course here.

Please let us know if you have any questions and/or if you may be interested in attending this or a different course later on in English.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress and WordPress.com has taken a new direction in its activity with the announcement of a new website called FoodPress.com. FoodPress features blog posts aggregated from food blogs sitting on WordPress.com, and that’s what makes it so interesting. It’s a new venture into the world of verticals, sites that concentrate on a certain topic, with posts sucked in from other sources. The potential for these sites is huge and almost limitless: sites could be about fashion, dating, parenthood, startups, web development, etc. etc. But one of the things that makes this source interesting is that it’s not machine-made: posts are chosen by the FoodPress editor Jane Maynard who is scanning tag pages related to food like food, recipes and baking.

This venture is win-win for Automattic and for the bloggers on WordPress.com. Automattic is showing the love to its bloggers, by giving them the opportunity to get more exposure for their posts. This encourages bloggers to open blogs on WordPress.com and stay there, which is good for Automattic since many of those bloggers are or may become paying customers.

Darnell Clayton over at the Blog Herald wonders whether Automattic will open up the site to self-hosted WordPress users. I can’t see that happening since I think the point of this is to support the WordPress.com community. However, maybe there’s an opportunity here for someone to start a site like this for WordPress.org users…

Read part one here in order to learn how to buy a domain name.

Step II: Time to start mapping

You own your dream domain! Don’t leave the domain provider site yet. Here is how to change the Nameservers in name.com.

Click on the cute “Account” man button at the top of the page:

You’ll arrive at a page like this:

Click on the info button of the domain you want to map to. You’ll get a pop up page and on the right it says Nameservers with a list under it.

To the right of Nameservers it says “edit.” Click on that button.

Insert the code from wordpress.com:

NS1.WORDPRESS.COM
NS2.WORDPRESS.COM
NS3.WORDPRESS.COM

And remove the code that was there before.

Click Update and now lets move into the wordpress.com site.

Step III: Make changes in wordpress.

Make sure you’re logged into wordpress.com. Also make sure you’re in the the dashboard of the correct blog!!!

In the dashboard of the blog, along the left run a bunch of buttons. At the bottom is Settings and inside Settings is Domains. Click on that.

You’ll be prompted to add a domain. Write in the one you just purchased:

After you click Add domain to blog, you’ll be prompted to purchase the credits needed to pay for the mapping. Once you finish with that purchase, go back to Settings –> Domains. Click on the new domain which you want to act as your primary domain.

Step IV: Check out your new domain!

Go to the new address of your site, make sure it works, feel very proud and then tell the world!

Good job!

Who is this tutorial for?

This tutorial is helpful to someone who has decided to have a wordpress.com blog but wants to look cooler or more professional by using a custom domain like deenascreations.com instead of the standard wordpress.com domain like deenascreations.wordpress.com. Notice that both of those links go to the same place? Once you map your domain, you’ll be able to tell everyone your more impressive URL without the .wordpress.com part.

This is relatively easy to accomplish (just follow the instructions in this post) and then you will look oh so impressive and no one needs to know that it cost oh so little.

So, how much will it cost?

According to the current prices, around $10US per year will go to wordpress.com for the mapping and another amount will go to your domain provider of choice (the price depends on a few factors but the price of a “regular” domain is around $10US/year). You will need an American/Canadian or international credit card in order to fill these transactions.

Step I: Purchase a domain name

I am assuming you already signed up to wordpress.com and own a domain name there. It will look something like: iamwonderful.wordpress.com.

Now you need to purchase a custom domain. We currently recommend using name.com for this. Generally the way it works is that you own the domain name for a year and then have an option to pay for another year. When signing up to name.com, make sure to use an email address that you check regularly so you will get the notification when it’s time to renew the domain. Either that or you can set it up for automatic renewal.

So now, search for the domain name of your dreams. Enter any name in the space. Remember that:

1. It’s nice though unnecessary that both your .wordpress.com domain and your .com domain have the same name.
2. Don’t write any ending. So, for example, just write “iwishiweredeena” without .com.

Click enter and you’ll get results telling you which domains are available for that name. Here is an example:

Of course most people will agree that a .com domain is preferable over any of the other endings but on the other hand, sometimes it’s just too difficult to find an appropriate domain name with .com. You need to decide which one best fits your goals. (I personally think .co is also a cool option that recently came out but all endings are second to .com.)

Now check off the domain you want and click the checkout button.

Now you get to this page:

It’s a good idea to purchase the Whois Privacy so that not just anyone can have access to the information regarding who owns this domain. I recommend unclicking Google Apps for now. Google Apps is the way to host your email address on Google but that’s a whole other story.

Now create an account with name.com.

Pay for the domain.

Continue to the second and final part of this tutorial.

It’s a month since WordCamp Jerusalem which is basically how long it took us to organize the whole thing. And it’s taken about a month to regroup, between the aftermath and all the holidays.

But all the hard work was worth it since we’ve gotten great feedback on the event which took place on September 5, 2010. Thanks so much guys – you motivate me to think about the next event…

There is lots of stuff for you to check out following the first WordCamp in Jerusalem:

1. Presentations and videos of some of the lectures.
2. Photographs and mentions around the web of WordCamp Jerusalem.

See the video below of my panel where we discussed whether we still need blogs in the era of facebook (short answer: yes!) with Hanan Cohen, Jacob Share and me.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIMYwysGxZ0[/youtube]

The highlight of the day was undoubtedly the fact that Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of WordPress flew from the USA for the conference. Here is his Q&A session which took place at the end of the day:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYgEVTqkHEo\[/youtube]

What I learned organizing WordCamp

Would you like to get a glimpse into the huge amount of preparations that go into an event that has three simultaneous lecture tracks, cool hand-outs and a delicious lunch? Read my articles Behind the Scenes of WordCamp Jerusalem 2010 and WordCamp Jerusalem: Tips for Producing a WordCamp.

[iframe http://www.flickr.com/slideShow/index.gne?group_id=&user_id=&set_id=72157624938528178&tags=wordcamp,wordpress,wordcampjerusalem 500 500]
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR. Photos by Deena Levenstein.

See you next year at WordCamp Jerusalem/Tel Aviv/Israel 2011! Be sure to fill out this form in order to receive updates about it as things start to come together. Woohoo!