Blogging, Web, and E-Commerce Hands-on Workshop

All DigitalFilipino.com Club members are invited to attend the forthcoming Blogging, Web, and E-Commerce Hands-on Workshop series this January 31, February 1, 2, 5, and 11 at the Alfox Internet Cafe (beside Chowking), Kamuning Road, corner Edsa, Quezon City.

DigitalFilipino.com Club SME members can send 1 representative while Corporate members can send 2 representatives.

Individual club members can attend a one-day (or two half-day) session. Please confirm for food count purposes.

The training program shall be as follows:

January 31: Blogging Workshop

• 9:00 - 12:00 Blogging 101 and Set-Up
  
• Introduction to Blogging
• Type of blogs highlighting the popular ones
• Content plan and posting
• Exercise: Blog Critic
  
• Set-up your blog
• Blog creation
  
• Widgets
  
• Feedburner
• Analytics
  
• Technorati
• 1:00 - 5:00 Blog Promotion and Marketing
• Promote your blog
• Ratified
  
• MyBlogLog
• Facebook
• Entrecard
• Self-created programs
  

February 1: Internet Marketing Workshop

• 9:00 - 12:00 E-Mail / Newsletter Marketing
  
• Introduction to E-Mail Marketing
• Components of an E-Mail Marketing Campaign
• Hands-on exercise
• Introduction to Newsletter Creation
• Creating a newsletter
• Hands-on exercise
  
• 1:00 - 5:00 Search Engine Marketing
  
• Search engine optimization
• Keyword research
• Keyword placement in web site or blog
• Content is key
• Writing good titles, description, and articles
• Re-directing pages
• Sitemap creation
• RSS creation
• Submission to Web Directories
• Internet Advertising (paid placements)
  
• Monitoring Web Site Traffic

February 2: Accepting Payments Online

• 9:00 - 12:00 Introduction to Online Payments
  
• Ways to accept payments online
• Demo of online payment systems (email billing, web-based payment, mobile payments)
• 1:00 - 5:00
  
• Evaluating online and mobile payment providers (comparative analysis)
• Fraud detection

February 5: Web 2.0 Applications

• 9:00 - 12:00 Overview of Web 2.0 Applications
  
• Introduction to Machine Learning
  
• Applications
• product / content recommendations
• group clustering
• search engine
• needs matching
• decision predictions
  
• price models
• independent content matching
• Hands-on exercises
• 1:00 - 5:00 Building Web 2.0 applications
  
• Using Open Web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
• Facebook Application Platform
• Google OpenSocial
  
• Hands-on exercises

February 11: Improving Website Performance and Navigation

• 9:00 - 12:00 Improving Web Site Performance
  
• Factors that cause slow-loading Web Sites
• 14 rules for fast website performance
• Hands-on exercises
• 1:00 - 5:00 Improving Web Navigation
  
• Web navigation problems
• Mechanisms and type of web navigation
• Improving web navigation design
• Hands-on exercises
  

Interested non-members are requested to sign up as an Individual, SME, or Corporate member prior to the workshop and confirm attendance for food count purposes.

Improving Website Performance

This November 12, I will be holding a technical session on Improving Website Performance that was heavily inspired by Steve Souders' book, High Performance Web Sites. His book is known for sharing 14 rules that can contribute to the improvement of websites and make it faster. Here's a video that runs us through it. You can also start learning this ahead today.



I'm currently tinkering with the performance analysis tool, YSlow, an extension to the Firebug web development tool and encourage club members attending the session to download it as well. Other tools you can check includes:

• IBM Page Detailer
• Pingdom
  

What makes me excited about this session is that I'm in the process of finetuning my site (and of clients) and look forward in sharing what I learned during this session.

YSlow analyzes web pages and tells you why they're slow. Listen to Steve Souders to know more about it.