jQuery Hover State

So to show you how to do this I am going to use my site under my main post on the homepage I have some of my recent post. Now I want to have the full post area to have a jQuery hover state that changes the background. So I would do this.

$(document).ready(function() {
    //call the jQuery Hover Over and Out
    $('#YOURID').hover(over, out);
    //Tell the browser to change the background when hovered over
    function over(event) {
        $(this).css("background", "url('Path To Your Image')");
	$(this).css("cursor", "pointer");
    }
    //tell the browser to change the background to nothing when 
    //going outside the object area
    function out(event) {
	    $(this).css("background", "");
	}
});

jQuery Hover with a click event

If you want jQuery to do a hover state only then that will work for you but if you want to get the a tags href, so that when you click on the object area it will take you to that page. You would have to add this after your jQuery hover code. So now your jQuery code should be.

$(document).ready(function() {
    //call the jQuery Hover Over and Out
    $('#YOURID').hover(over, out);
    //Tell the browser to change the background when hovered over
    function over(event) {
        $(this).css("background", "url('Path To Your Image')");
	$(this).css("cursor", "pointer");
    }
    //tell the browser to change the background to nothing 
    //when going outside the object area
    function out(event) {
	$(this).css("background", "");
    }
    //This adds the click event to your object and tells it where to go
    $('#YOURID').click(function() {
	window.location=$(this).find("a").attr("href");
    });
});

This is very useful to get around the IE problem and if someone checks your site they can see that you know jQuery. If you need any help with this just let me know. I would be more than willing to help.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If you by chance need web design, web development, search engine optimization, or marketing done to one of your sites you can get in contact with me or you can contact Chosen. Chosen is a Lansing based Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing firm. We are a small business but are growing in the Lansing Area for our Web Design and Development skills. We have done work for clients and companies. We prefer client work but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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Traffic Meta Breakdown

Back in the day all traffic came from your meta tags and your keywords. Don’t get me wrong these are still very useful but they don’t build you as much traffic because of the millions of website out there. To give you an example I would love to be the number 1 site on Google for web design well that really isn’t practical it is possible but when you search web design you get 343,000,000 that is how many pages are being crawled with the words web design. Now I am not saying don’t try to get to the top of the list. Defiantly try but try for something a little smaller like for instance I am from Michigan and so I am trying to get top for Lansing Web Design and Michigan Web Design. If you search Lansing Web Design I am close to the top. Now if I use keywords like that and try to focus on a smaller scale my site will rise on the bigger scale.
Your keyword meta tag is important but you have two other tags that are even more important your title meta tag and description meta tag. Your title meta tag is different from your normal title tag because it is what the browsers look at first and way a lot of their decisions on. The regular title tag is also very important it should be used everywhere that it is possible.

Best Ways To Produce Traffic

Here is a list of some really good ways to build traffic to your site.
1) Submitting – You must submit your site to search engines.
2) Use a favicon.ico
3) Depending on what your site is about submit it to other sites with that kind of material.
4) Have a lot of content. This still has to be good content. Pictures really bring in lots of traffic.
5) Use your META tags effectively. META help
6) Advertise with google or other advertising companies.
7) Use Social Media by talking about your site.

Probably the fastest way to get traffic to your site is pay per click. Yes it is going to cost you but in the long run of things it will be worth it. Some people think that after doing these things your site will just magically appear at the top of Google or Yahoo but it won’t. Building a vast amount of traffic takes time and some times money.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If you by change need web design, web development, search engine optimization, or marketing done to one of your sites you can get in contact with me or you can contact Chosen. Chosen is a Lansing based Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing firm. We are a small business but are growing in the Lansing Area for our Web Design and Development skills. We have done work for clients and companies. We prefer client work but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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What is it that you are looking for in your site? What would you like your site to do? How often are you planning on updating your site? Would you like to have the ability to change your site? Well these are some of the questions that we ask a client that comes to us wanting a site. Most people don’t understand that their is much more to a site then just having a idea of “I need a site” or “my company needs a site.” With these questions that I have asked it starts me thinking would it be better for my client to have a CMS or not. A CMS is a Content Management System it is used to give the buyer the ability to make small changes to the site pages in case they may need to change some text or something little. Once I find out that my client may need a CMS then comes the point of giving the client a CMS that will work with their needs. For instance if a client came to me and said that they would like a site that has a blog area that they could update daily. The first thing that comes to my mind is WordPress. Let alone WordPress is very user friendly it has so many capabilities and plugins that are free. If my client came to me and said that they would like a site that they would only have to change about every 6 months or more. I would probably look at either building the site with static information or using a smaller CMS. My personal preference would be Frog CMS. It is easy to learn and is easy to customize because of its small size. Their are a lot of different opinions on what is the best CMS. I don’t really think their is a “best” I feel that it really depends on the situation and the developers preference. A short list of some of the free CMS’s out their:

Most Known

• WordPress
• Drupal
• Joomla

Not So Known

• Frog CMS
• Media Wiki
• Typo3 CMS
• Moodle
• Dolphin
• Pligg CMS
• Movable Type
• Xoops
• Geeklog
• e107
• Mambo
• Nucleus CMS

My Opinion

This is just a few of the vast amount of CMS’s out their that you can choose from. Note that all of these are free open source CMS’s. I have mt own opinion about these CMS’s and I believe even though Drupal and Joomla are two of the biggest CMS’s they are two of the most complicated. I personally would stick with WordPress for blog sites and for smaller sites I would go with Frog CMS but this is my personal opinion. I would say defiantly try out multiple CMS’s to see what you build a preference to. If you have tried out any of the CMS’s on the list or any that are not on the list please feel free to leave a comment about them.

Web Design And Development

If you by change need web design or web development done to one of your sites you can get in contact with me or you can contact Chosen. Chosen is a Lansing based Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing firm. We are small but are growing in the Lansing Area for our Web Design and Development skills. We have done work for clients and companies. We prefer client work but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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Most Valuable Function

I am going to start off this functions post talking about probably the most heavily used WordPress function called bloginfo. This is a really useful function if you can understand it. It is quite easy to start the function because it is built in to WordPress all you have to do is call the function and give it what parameters you would like it to have. The code to call this function looks something like this < ?php bloginfo(‘YOUR PARAMETERS’); ?>. As you can see it is quite easy to call this function but in order to understand what you can do with this function is another hurdle.

List of the Parameters

• admin_email
• atom_url
• charset
• comments_atom_url
• comments_rss2_url
• description
• home
• html_type
• language
• name
• pingback_url
• rdf_url

• rss2_url
• rss_url
• siteurl
• stylesheet_directory
• stylesheet_url
• template_directory
• template_url
• text_direction
• url
• version
• wpurl

Well that looks like a long list of stuff but a lot of those come in handy quite often. I am not going to go into what they all do but I will talk to you about a couple of them so that you have some idea of what you can do with them.

Most Common Parameters

The first one that I am going to talk about is the url. Well to me this one is self explanatory what this does for your site is echos out the url of the site. So if your site is http://www.example.com then the bloginfo function for url would echo out your url. So if you needed to do an a tag and you wanted to echo out your url all you would have to do is say now a lot of people would look at that and say why wouldn’t I just write my url in their instead. Well if you write your url in there it will only work for your url and so if you are creating a theme then you wouldn’t be able to sell this theme. now I am going to move on to another parameter known as name. All that this does is echos out what you called your blog and you can change this inside the admin section of WordPress. So a practical use for this would be putting it inside of the a tag that we just used so it would look like this <?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?>. That way if you named your blog EXAMPLE the link would say EXAMPLE. The last parameter that I am going to talk about is description this is also known as your tag line. You can also set this up inside of the admin section of your blog. This comes in handy quite often in the header and footer sections of a site. Mainly because almost every company has a tag line or MATO that they try to emphasize on. So by saying <?php bloginfo(‘description’); ?> you can plaster your MATO all over your site. Well that is my last example for you I really hope that you start messing around with the other parameters because they can come in really great use to you and your site.

Additional Help – Chosen LLC

If you are in need of some help with your WordPress site or any other web related issues you can either contact me or you can go to the Chosen Development site for more help. We are based out of Saint Johns, Michigan and we specialize in Design and Development we do seminars in the Lansing Area on all different types of web information. Chosen is a growing company of about 8 people 4 full time and 4 part time. We would love to hear from you about possible Design or Development work and if you are from the Lansing Area we would be willing to meet with you.

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I grew up in a little town called Olivet this town is about 30 min south west from Lansing Michigan. I went to school there all my life. I was that kid that everyone was friends with but I didn’t really have all to many good friend. Maybe this was because I only wanted two of three close friends. All through out school I was really good at math and science but I was not the greatest when it came to reading, spelling, or history. I started playing a lot of sports in 7th grade and found that I liked them quite a bit. I was playing basketball, track, and golf. Most of my child hood I was set that I would become a electrical engineer and build up to be a nuclear engineer.

Then high school happened. I was still into sports trying out for Golf, Basketball, and Baseball. Most of my school time was set to getting better at sports. I was really fixed on golf. It was a sport that my grandpa taught me before he died and I guess it was because of him that I became such a great golfer. I player basketball for my freshmen ans sophomore years in high school but couldn’t make the cut my junior or senior year. I played baseball my freshmen, sophomore, and senior years. Took off the junior year so I could get better at golf. That was my real charge in high school. I became a Varsity player my sophomore year playing almost every game and if I wasn’t playing on Varsity I was number 1 on JV. My Junior year of golf I dropped 2 strokes on my game and was driving the ball about 310 yards. Ending the season the number 1 player on the team and getting awarded all-conference 1st class. That means I was in the top ten of all the players in our league. My senior year rolled around and I was pumped ready to become the number one player in our league. I started the year up one stroke from the year before but driving the ball about 315 yards still not bad but that one stroke would kill me. I finished the year out in 5th place still getting all-conference first class and MVP of the Olivet team and Captain award. Both Junior and Senior year for some reason I would choke at the regional round and not make it to state. Not the worst thing ever but no one had ever went to state in golf for Olivet and I could of been the first. I really feel that my biggest set back was that I wanted the Olivet golf team to get bigger than just me and didn’t focus quite enough on my personal game. Well of all my high school year my senior year was the best I broke up with my horrid girl friend that was holding me back from quite a few thing. I took 2 college classes Calculus 2 and Intro to Information Systems. Then it was time to graduate and I really was still stuck wondering what am I going to do next. Of the two Colleges I submitted my application to three contacted me back. Michigan Tech and Ferris State University. Oh yeah the third Olivet College they wanted me to go there because of what I did in the two classes well I was there. I actually had the opportunity to take a course that wasn’t offered there and I would have my own personal teacher. I ended up choosing Ferris why that was I couldn’t tell you but that is for another day.

Well that was the start of my life in a quick nut shell. I will inform you next time how I became a Web Developer and owning a business.

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• Web Directories
• Friends and Colleagues
• Personal Interest
• Blogging

Most people would look at this list and think what does that mean well I am going to tell you. Web Directories are places that you can submit your website and have it on display inside that companies database of sites. A lot of times these places have a paid and non-paid submission process. This means that if you take the free non-paid one you will be put on a list of maybe hundreds of sites that have to go through a inspection process to see if your site is a fit for the directory. This could take somewhere from 1 to 6 months. The reason it takes so long is because most of these places only charge like $5 to $25 for the paid submission and anyone who pays gets put at the front of the list.

Friends and Colleagues this is kind of self explanatory you meet someone and enjoy what they have so you put a link on your site to there stuff. This creates a backlink for them. If you look at the top of my site I have some of my colleagues and companies most of them are broken down into multiple links to more than just there home page. This will create a back link for more than just the main page.
Personal Interest this is one that you might say what does that mean. Well I give it this name because it means sites that you personally like. If you find a site that you enjoy give them a back link weather it be in a post or somewhere out of site. This will boost there rating and sometimes if you contact that specific person and ask them to put one on there site they might just because you did.

The last way that I create backlinks is blogging this is probably one of the best ways to create backlinks but also one of the less profitable. How you make backlinks is start posting on specific peoples site just with little comments like feedback and or other creative criticism. Once that person sees that you have been commenting on there site so much they will end up checking your site out and either you will get some great feedback or they might talk to you about backlinks.

Well I am just throwing this out there if there is anyone who has a site and would like a backlink send me a email or comment here I will check out your site and see what I can do about giving you a backlink somewhere on my site.

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One of the aspects that I am going to have this do is make it so that you can register possible client and actual clients. With the actual clients this will allow you to register client and keep track of money that has been received from them and money that is still in the waiting. I felt that something that would be useful is a emailing system that sends you a email that a client needs to make a payment and it also sends a email to the client so that they know.

Another aspect that I am going to have this do is calculate the taxes on money received. Also a place for you to input expenses. I have a lot to do with this and would love input on the subject I would like to have this out to the public by this summer. I am at first building this to my needs and then building it to everyone’s needs. If you would like to send me any helpful info you can send it to accounting[at]shanestrong.com or you can write a comment about it.

In order for me to fund this project I need some help. Donations would be great you can send the via paypal to shanestrong05[at]gmail.com. Or if you have any web design or web development work you can contact Chosen Development.

I am currently looking for a full time job in the web design industry. Preferably somewhere in the Lansing Area. I consider myself highly skilled in XHTML, CSS, and WordPress other skills are MySQL, PHP, Java, VB, and currently learning ASP.net and ASP. If possible I would like to become a Lansing Web Developer somewhere in the Lansing Area. I feel that the Lansing Web Industry is going up even though it is a little slow right now.

Thanks You For Your Help

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