Renaming this series, if you can get it done in 5 minutes or less it’s a quickie.
Ever seen those links at the top of sites like:?

Home > Products > Hardware > Hammers

or

The Apple Store uses it...

or

it's good enough for Billionaire Richard Branson...

Then you’ve seen what is called Breadcrumb Navigation (wiki).  It’s good for users, good for SEO and good for you and quick to get on your site. So why don’t you have it?

Bread Crumb navigation (sometimes wrongly called cooke crumb)  greatly reduces confusion in deeply nested pages or categories, both for end-users and search engine bots, and if you’ve got WordPress and Thesis it can be yours in less than 5 minutes. (you can probably do it without Thesis in the same time, you just have to be geekier)

How To add bread crumbs navigation in 10 steps.

1. make sure you have Wordpress and Thesis 1.5 or higher installed.
2. make sure you have the plugins Thesis OpenHook and Breadcrumb-navxt installed.
3. create a few pages, in the right side of each page, choose from the attributes panel what parent page you want, this will form the heirarchy for the trail.
4. In the Wordpress Admin section open  Appearance Panel>Thesis OpenHook.
5. Take a look at this visual guide to which slot you want to place the bread crumb. I recommend the After Title hook, find the matching slot in ThesisOpenHook’s dropdown.
6. Paste the code in the installation section here
   

   Using OpenHook to place Breadcrumb-navxt into the Thesis After Title hook

7. Checkmark “Execute Php on this Hook”
8. Click the blue “Little Ass Save Button” below it.
9. Preview the site, you should see it below the Title.
10. Think about ways to clean up the hierarchy or style it better with CSS+graphics (which is how we got the breadcrumb above).

UPDATE The excellent developer of that breadcrumb plugin sent me to these pages, which cover how to do it (with graphics).  I turns out that the original of this style of graphics was Apple.com

http://mtekk.weblogs.us/archives/guides/quick-and-easy-apple-com-style-breadcrumb-trail-for-wordpress/

http://www.jankoatwarpspeed.com/post/2008/08/14/Create-applecom-like-breadcrumb-using-simple-CSS.aspx

There are several tweaks that have to happen to get the rich graphics and CSS to work with Thesis, which is what shows up above.   Once we figure out some compatibility issues with Thesis 1.6, I’ll look into making it available.

Put a splash image before your video

In the prior post we showed you how to get video onto S3 and onto your webpage using free tools in under 5 minutes.  That was so fast, we didn’t cover a great feature that gets more clicks on your video.

With and without splash image, which would you rather click on?

To show an image before your video loads (aka a splash image)  is great to get more clicks by helping users know what the video is about, the result is more people will click to watch the video and that is the point of putting them up on the web in the first place!  The alternative is a rather unattractive black box.

Of the various free media players, there is several that support splash images. Note this is built into a few different media players, but the following code only works with  FlowPlayer (an open source and free player), which we covered in the first episode.

FlowPlayer makes adding images in front easy..it actually supports whole playlists in it’s configuration!, basically a splash image will be just a playlist of 2 items,  the splash image and then your video.  The first will autoplay, the second will not, so it will pause on the image.  FlowControl has a nice fade effect to add polish.

If you’re using wordpress formatting it with the Visual Editor, can make it slightly finicky, your best bet is to copy the code below (stripped of whitespace) update it with the values you need and paste it instead where the 2nd “<script” block begins.  If you’re doing a normal webpage this step is optional.

<script language=”JavaScript”>flowplayer(“player”, “YOUR_PATH_TO_FLOWPLAYER_SWF”, {playlist:[{url:"YOUR_IMAGE_URL", scaling:"orig",autoPlay: true},{url:"YOUR_VIDEO_URL",autoPlay:false}]});</script

To Get an splash image here are a few options.

1. Use any image you have lying around…I like ones of dead relatives, they always get attention.
2. Create a title slide using PowerPoint, or a simple text editor and
3. Open up your video in a media player and capture a frame from it using a screen capture utility (built in to most Operating System with the “prt sc” button.
4. Create it from scratch to be all fancy pants.

TIPS

It’s a good idea to get your splash image like your video on the CDN,to keep it from clogging up your webserver.

To be safe, once up on the CDN, test the url to the image in the browser directly (to make sure the ACL is setup) then try it in the playlist.

If it doesn’t work in wordpress, create a simple text file and paste the flowplayer embed code into it ,save that text file as *.html, and test that in a browser till that’s working.  Then strip out any unnecessary whitespace to put it into the wordpress blog.

Save that working code into a place you won’t forget, odds are you’ll use it over and over again…especially if your successful.

Coming soon, what CDN’s are, the pros and cons of S3 as a video provider, higher end alteratives. Be sure to subscribe to hear about those and future episodes.

You want video on your site, and are confused by all the options, jargon, technical issues and shady expensive stuff.    I feel your pain, I get a LOT of questions about video from my clients with the same questions and confusion…especially when they are getting charged for things that are free.   So I created this short video to clear things up.

Video can be easy, 5-10 minutes is all it takes, and in this video I’ll show you how to take a video on your desktop and get it onto your S3/Cloudfront and then into your website or blog in under 5 minutes.

Here’s what you need to get started

• A website or blog (duh!)
• A video you want to get up…(make it good else noone will watch it)
• To be signed up with Amazon S3 and CloudFront (the latter is especially important for video..both free signup)
• A tool for uploading to S3 (e.g. S3Fox, CloudBerry (windows only))
• About 10 minutes

Note: this video was uploaded in the exact same way as shown in the video. One thing we didn’t cover in this is how to get that pretty image at the very beginning, that’s covered in part 2.

NOTE: if this is your first video, and you play the video from a media player somewhere else, you’ll need to upload a crossdomain.xml file, you’ll only have to do that one time per ‘bucket’ (where you can have more than one bucket per your amazon account, for different companies). The one I use is here (but becareful, this is “wide open” access).

There’s lots more to know about doing high quality video that streams nicely and cheaply.  Be sure to opt-in on the right to get notified on new episodes.

Oh and Mr. Pine says hi.

In 5 minutes how to video blog with Amazon S3

In this post we’ll show you how to get your first video off your camera onto your wordpress blog, amazon s3 or cloudfront in less than5 minutes, with free tools.

I’ve been using Amazon Services for quite some time, and haven’t ever needed services like EzS3 as most features can be done pretty easily for free.  The video players also are typically available for free and pretty easy to configure.

1. Get a wordpress compatible blog (comes with most providers) free.
2. Get the pb-embedFlash wordpress plugin which allows you to quickly embed any flash or flash video with a single line, in a standards compliant way.
3. Sign up for Amazon s3 with Amazon Web Services (free signup, reasonable costs for hosting)
   

   Click to signup for Amazon S3

4. Use S3Fox that can be installed into FireFox (free) to upload the files to your bucket. S3Fox is like a FTP for your webserver that works with S3 instead.

5. 

   IMPORTANT Click the Everyone has Read access, else they won't be able to see the video

   Once uploaded, set the permissions to these as public so that they can be visible to the open net, by default Amazon makes them only available to you.

6. Decide on S3 or CloudFront for delivery of the file. I recommend CloudFront for more consistent access across the world.
7. 

   Copy the URL and Paste it into your embed code.

   Right click to Copy the url.

8. Paste that url into the embed code of your wordpress post (see the top video for an explanation)
9. Preview and that’s it!

You may also be interested in this post, comparision of Amazon vs Ooyala etc.

NOTE: if this is your first video, and you play the video from a media player somewhere else, you’ll need to upload a crossdomain.xml file, you’ll only have to do that one time per ‘bucket’ (where you can have more than one bucket per your amazon account, for different companies). The one I use is here (but becareful, this is “wide open” access).

Be sure to opt-in to the right to gain access to more great tips.

The video that we used in the example, starring Mr. Pine.  Enjoy!

1) P2 is a very twitter like Theme for Word Press.

Word Press now supports a twitter like theme for micro blogging, very intriguing, watch the video.

http://ma.tt/2009/05/how-p2-changed-automattic/

It could be really useful in some niches and QA and the like, or internally with outsourcers to get things done.

2) Use Word Press as a Social Network

Also word press mu is a viable social network platform for word press (a brother to the word press).

http://mu.wordpress.org/ + http://buddypress.org/ ==  social network for cheap.

I wonder how this can be used for membership sites.  I realize there are a ton of forums but many of them suck.

List building is at the heart of any successful online business. Even affiliates without products of their own can benefit from having lists and it allows you to keep in touch with your community. Opt-in forms are the gateway to that community.

Adding an opt-in form with Wordpress is very easy, the whole process only takes about 20 minutes. While there are many ways to add opt-ins: pop-ups, pop-unders, on the footer. Most of these plug-ins cost money are annoying to users, and exit pop-ups are hated by Google so avoid them if you are using PPC traffic or affiliates.   In this case we’ll be using the widgets area, which is generally liked by users and by Google, and included in Wordpress.

Widgets are the elements you see on the side columns, e.g. categories, search and the like. Recent versions of Wordpress allow a freeform ‘text’ widget that you can place arbitrary html text into.  This can be used for anything:  videos, images, ads, or opt-ins. It doesn’t matter what theme (e.g. Thesis) you are using as it’s built into Wordpress.

What you need to add an Opt-In Widget to Wordpress

• A version of Wordpress that support widgets (all recent ones do).
• An email marketing provider (e.g. aWeber, and private labeled versions: profollow), these aren’t free, but if your serious about connecting with your users highly recommended. They offer sequenced auto responders, list segmentation, and tracking.
• If you want to be notified, an email account to send subscription notifications (e.g. new_subcriber@yourdomain.com).
• You should have a privacy policy on the site. Google will reward you for this in your PPC.

How to add an Opt-In with a Text Widget

1. Most decent vendors have a web form creator, to make this easy. Just follow the steps they provide and you’ll get some raw code to cut and paste into the text widget.
2. In your Wordpress Admin, you can see “Appearance” on the left, click on that, then click on “widgets”, then click “add” button, like so:

3 clicks to get a text widget added to Wordpress

At this point you’ll have a text widget in your widgets column.

4. Click on the new text widget and edit it like so:

Pasting the Code from Adwebber into the Wordpress Text Widget

8. Click save changes.

9. Check that it works by viewing the site, and testing the optin page with one of the  emails you own.

10.  That’s it!

Go do it!

Follow the steps in this.  It only took me about 20 minutes to get this done and the rewards of having a list are huge!

If you have a suggestion on how to do it better please leave a comment below, also subscribe to stay in touch and get special reports.

Upgraded the theme…now SOOO Much better. I was using the butt ugly default wordpress theme which of course is fine out of the box if you want to look like a newb, but we here professionals have standards.

It’s been over a year since I’ve checked out WordPress themes. My goodness, there’s a ton of great ones out there! After checking around from those who do SEO for a living, Thesis was highly recommended. I upgraded all my sites and I can now easily manage them on my own.

THESIS PROs & CONs

PROS:

• GUI based themeing
• SEO packed
• threaded discussion
• won’t break on the inevitable updates to wordpress

CONS:

• Can’t fully answer as I’ve only used it for a bit.
• Not free. $84 single/$164 multi-site.   But are Free templates really that free?

Given I paid $200 for a person to crappily design a theme (they have their names all over the footers…to get SEO). that was easy to break this isn’t so bad.  There is also a channel of support where ..I’m not sure if the company that did my last blog still exist *poof*.

Now to figure out how to integrate Affiliate Prophets Wordpress plugin…I’ll do a review on how that goes shortly.

http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2009/04/seo-wordpress-plugins/