SEO, SEM, web design, coding, iPhone, iPad, Android 

Great little tip for keeping on top of your overflowing inbox.

I absolutely love the creativity and flair that Larry Lars demonstrates in his custom Lego creations. This is the Avatar AMP Suit. Wow.

Great article explaining how Microdata works in HTML5

Regular readers of Think Vitamin will know that we have been in the process of redesigning and rebuilding this site over the last few weeks. Quite a bit has changed from the previous version so we thought it would be a good idea to let you know about the new features and the thought process behind some of them.

It started out some months ago with my simple wireframe created in Mockingbird.

What’s Changed?

A lot has changed since the current theme went live in the summer of 2010, the main one being the launch of Think Vitamin Membership complete with a whole new look and feel. One of our main objectives was to bring the two sites in line with each other.

I also wanted to be able to introduce shorter form content into the site. The Tumblr approach to “blogging” is both popular and a great way of digesting content. The previous theme was really designed around long form articles and features. Posting a short link or referencing a tweet just didn’t look or feel right. This has been addressed in the new theme.

You will notice a massive difference to our home page. The main one being a 10 fold increase in the number of items available to you, from 3 to 30. You will also be able to (JavaScript permitting) load more content into the stream by clicking the “More Posts” button at the bottom of the stream.

Content Types

As well as streamlining the categories for our posts (we are in the process of recategorising over 800 posts – this might take some time) every content item now also has a designated “type” denoted by an icon to the left of the post title.

Our types are “Features”, “Articles”, “Links”, “Images”, “Tweets”, “Videos”, “Audio”, “Interviews” and “Events”

We will be pulling in content from a variety of places including the @thinkvitamin Twitter Favourites feed, Delicious and Google Reader.

Content Filtering

The types really come into their own in our archives. If you look at the screenshot below you will see a strip of checkboxes in the top right of the sidebar. This shows you all the available types available in the archive (or category).

To show and hide different types just you simply uncheck or check the relevant type and the feed will change. As our archives are quite lengthy we thought this was a good way of helping you find the content you want.

New Sections

At the beginning of 2010 we launched our bi-weekly podcast Think Vitamin Radio. Up to now there was no central page to access the previous episodes or listen to our latest release. This is now remedied with the Podcast Page. It’s a central place to listen online to the latest episode as well as have direct access to our feeds and older episodes. We hope you find it useful.

We have also introduced a “Write for Us” page. Think Vitamin thrives on great content from a huge variety of talented writers, some you will have heard of and others who are contributing for the first time. If you are interested in writing about the web do get in touch.

Talking of great writers check out our growing advisory board at the bottom of the sidebar. We are privileged to have met and work with many amazing web professionals. Many have written for the site since it launched in 2006.

Whilst we like to think we keep up to date on the world of web it never hurts to ask the opinions of those at the forefront. Our advisory board exists to help guide the content on the site, keep it current, keep it topical and keep it challenging. Thanks to all of you who agreed to be part of the board. Currently the board comprises Aarron Walter, Ethan Marcotte, Molly E. Holzschlag, Paul Boag and Jeff Veen.

A Word on the Design

With the amount of people in the web industry consuming content on mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad we thought Think Vitamin was the perfect place to try out our first “responsive design”.

Drawing heavily on Ethan’s article on A List Apart Mike has come up with a fluid design that responds to different device widths and adheres to Ethan’s three distinct parts of “responsive design”.

• A flexible grid
• Flexible images. Or more specifically, images that work in a flexible context (whether fluid themselves, or perhaps controlled via overflow).
• Media queries. The final layer of a responsive design, media queries optimize the design for different viewing contexts, and spot-fix bugs that occur at different resolution ranges.

We Hope you Enjoy It

Some posts might look a bit funny for a while but bear with us whilst we get it all in shape. Above all we really hope you like the new site. As always you can let us know your thoughts by dropping me an email to editor@thinkvitamin.com.

NB: If you are one of the < 2% of visitors using IE7 we know things don’t look quite right, we are looking into the fixes and they will be live soon.

It’s Wednesday, so this mid-week roundup is devoted to all things business and development, and a little focused on news around TechCrunch Disrupt. Some links are newsworthy, some retweeted across Twitter, and others just meet our “awesomeness” requirement, and regardless we hope you’ll enjoy them. Without further delay:

• From TechCrunch Disrupt, on the Angel v. VC panel, Mark Suster cogently recaps and writes, “What I *Would Have* Said at TechCrunch Disrupt.
• This one is for javascript API lovers The Tech Behind New Twitter (via Twitter’s Engineering blog, which I only just found by attending TC Disrupt!)
• Brilliant business or just bizarre? Groupon Launched “Grouspawn” a dating service for users who meet on Groupon Dates & have a baby later (announced by ceo Andrew Mason at TC Disrupt) hint: for a javascript Easter egg – scroll to the bottom and hover over the image in the lower left.
• Malcolm Gladwell writes, Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted
• Mailchimp on going Freemium “One Year later”

Wildcard: Thank goodness for @oatmeal, “Why You Don’t Like Changes to Your Design”

Please shoot me links to projects your working on or awesome things you’ve released! news@thinkvitamin.com

Handpicked by,

Chrissie (@tenaciouscb)

Editor’s Note: We continue our “Conversion Tip” series from Charles Nicholls, founder and chief strategy officer of SeeWhy, a conversion and abandonment-recovery firm. For this week’s installment, Nicholls addresses the timing of email campaigns to site-visitor habits. Most marketers will be emailing customers more than ever in the run up to Black Friday. So how can you increase the chances that your email will be opened and read? Marketers know, from experience and testing, that there are better days and times than others for email campaigns. But individual customers are creatures of habit as well. A customer who opens your email at 6:00 p.m. is giving you a useful piece of data: He or she is more likely to open other emails from you ...

Editor’s Note: We continue our “Conversion Tip” series from Charles Nicholls, founder and chief strategy officer of SeeWhy, a conversion and abandonment-recovery firm. For this week’s installment, Nicholls addresses the timing of email campaigns to site-visitor habits. Most marketers will be emailing customers more than ever in the run up to Black Friday. So how can you increase the chances that your email will be opened and read? Marketers know, from experience and testing, that there are better days and times than others for email campaigns. But individual customers are creatures of habit as well. A customer who opens your email at 6:00 p.m. is giving you a useful piece of data: He or she is more likely to open other emails from you ...

Paul Marsden is a market researcher and communications specialist in digital marketing. He assists organizations to communicate effectively online by helping them understand digital culture. He is social media strategist at Syzygy, a European-based advertising and branding agency. His recent clients include Nokia, BBC, Publicis, T-Mobile, WPP, The Economist and the U.K. government. Marsden holds a PhD in psychology and led the research team at the London School of Economics that validated the link between word of mouth reputation and growth. He has also authored a number of publications including the business book Connected Marketing: The Viral, Buzz and Word of Mouth Revolution. Based in Miami, Marsden works with marketing and public ...

Paul Marsden is a market researcher and communications specialist in digital marketing. He assists organizations to communicate effectively online by helping them understand digital culture. He is social media strategist at Syzygy, a European-based advertising and branding agency. His recent clients include Nokia, BBC, Publicis, T-Mobile, WPP, The Economist and the U.K. government. Marsden holds a PhD in psychology and led the research team at the London School of Economics that validated the link between word of mouth reputation and growth. He has also authored a number of publications including the business book Connected Marketing: The Viral, Buzz and Word of Mouth Revolution. Based in Miami, Marsden works with marketing and public ...

Forum: Google Optimization Posted By: JVRudnick Post Time: September 29th, 2010 at 10:11:15 am

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