Google Asks US Government For Permission To Report FISA Data Requests + MORE

  

Guess what? The Smashing Conference is coming! 2 single-track conference days, 3 full-day workshops, 16 excellent speakers, and only 300 available seats. We’d be honoured to welcome you in our home town Freiburg, on September 9–11th 2013, at the foot of the legendary, beautiful Black Forest in Southern Germany…

Although regarded by many business owners as a negative, there is something wonderful about competition in the marketplace.

It motivates us to raise our standards.
It encourages us to differentiate ourselves.
It inspires innovation.
It creates better products and services for the marketplace.

Innovate, differentiate and set higher standards
The decision we face is this: Do we wait for a competitor to take the lead and find ourselves playing catch up – or do we initiate?
PS: Here’s how to compete against the best in the world…

Customer service best practices require a lot more than a smile, although that’s certainly a good start. Happy customers lead to repeat business, increased positive reviews (which boosts local SEO), and increased social signals with positive sentiment (which boots overall organic search visibility), and no company can exist without their customers…

For sites that are publishing frequently and working to acquire traffic immediately through trending data, real-time statistics platforms like Chartbeat can help provide the insight your business needs.

Key Benefits for Chartbeat Publishers include

Knowing the stories that your readers dedicate their time and attention to so you can strategize your high-engagement content…

Localytics provides a real-time mobile application analytics service for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7 and HTML5 applications. Their cloud-based solution provides a closed-loop personalization platform which enables clients to segment users based on genuine in-app activity and deliver targeted and predictive marketing campaigns…

By now you’ve probably seen the unbelievable video making the rounds on the internet of a woman demanding her money back at a Dunkin’ Donuts store. If you haven’t, you can see it on Gawker where I first discovered it, or below where we’ve embedded the YouTube video.
The video is eight minutes long (you’ll get the gist of it in the first minute or less), but believe me when I say it’s worth eight minutes of your life to watch…

It happens to all of us.
We’ve developed a new product. We’ve worked hard to get the product right. We’ve slaved for hours to get the launch prepared. A new brochure has been designed and a web page is almost ready to be published.
And now we only have to write the product description. It’s the last thing we want to do…

When trying to improve Quality Score across the board, it would seem intuitive that eliminating keywords with low Quality Scores would be a step in the right direction. However, blindly deleting all low-quality keywords in your account is not always the best solution.  Think about improving Quality Score the way you would think about eliminating a pest infestation…

Google has asked the U.S. government for permission to include data requests made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in its Google Transparency Report. During the whirlwind of news about the PRISM/NSA scandal, news circulated that Google was not including those FISA requests in…..

It’s time for the June edition of Emails That Do Work, the blog series where we dissect some of our favorite user emails, and talk tips on how to optimize our own.Related Articles
Emails That Do WorkHTML Email Tips for Web DesignersNewsletters That Sparkle with Prosperity!

Yet another reason why we love hosting our WordPress instances on WPEngine is the easy access to PHP logs to provide us with information on errors in our clients’ themes and plugins we’re developing in. While that’s great for WordPress development, many hosts don’t provide easy access to log files and errors on other hosting platforms…

I will not levitate my pen in class.
There’s an episode of the Brady Bunch where Peter gets a job fixing bikes… and swiftly loses it.
His boss, Mr. Martinelli, explains what Peter did wrong. It seems Peter knows what to do to fix the bikes – but, when he’s actually doing the work, his great ideas get lost on the journey from his head to his hands…

First, a confession. I don’t use Yelp. It’s not because there is anything wrong with it, it’s just that I am not the right demographic. I am not an urban dweller who is constantly on the lookout for something to do. As a result, reviews of places don’t apply to me in most cases…