A key performance metric when evaluating a marketing campaign is return on investment (ROI). There are many misconceptions about how this metric is calculated. Some might think that if you spend $25,000 on a campaign and it brings in $50,000 in revenue, that they have gotten a 100 percent ROI.

However, this method doesn’t account for things like the cost of goods, your business’ expenses and other overhead factors. You want to calculate your ROI based on gross profit on the product/service you are selling, not simply revenue. Continue Reading

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If you’re as meticulous a developer as I am, you’ll appreciate what I’m talking about today. If your development style is more along the lines of “Ehhh … that looks about right” you’re going to think that I’m out of my ever-loving mind.

The problem is simple. When cutting up a design, I check it to make sure that I’m getting all the font sizes correct. Since Photoshop has an annoying habit of setting font sizes to figures like 18.39px, I round to the nearest even number.

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If you are familiar with the WordPress admin, you probably noticed the “Help” tab at the top right of nearly every screen. Clicking this little gem reveals a series of helpful topics related to the current page. For example, on the Dashboard, the tab offers an overview of what’s currently displayed, how to navigate the admin in general and what the different boxes on the screen do. This information is invaluable to a new user of WordPress and stays politely out of the way for the more experienced.

Wouldn’t it be neat if your plugin admin or custom post type screens implemented their own help tabs? Of course it would! And it’s rather simple too. Let’s jump in with a simple implementation! If you’re antsy and just want to skip ahead, check out the gist. Continue Reading

There is a common, though citation-less, expression that many developers are quite familiar with, and it goes something like this: 20 percent  of my time is spent writing the code, the other 80 percent is spent debugging it. Depending on where you look, I would argue that it varies widely, but the fact still stands: debugging is a major portion of the development process, and it doesn’t end when a site goes live, either.  

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Happy Labor Day from your friends at CNP!

And don’t forget – if all the cars in the United States were placed end to end, it would probably be Labor Day weekend.

Be safe and have fun!

Unfortunately, the research component, which is arguably the most significant, is often omitted when developing a message.  And it’s understandable.  This portion of the process takes time, commitment at multiple levels, and sometimes dollars — difficult things to find for most of us.  But, turning the magnifying glass inward and taking a hard and realistic look at how your business is viewed by internal and external audiences, what elevates it above its rivals, and where there are opportunities for improvement is essential.

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The Pupil Barf

The type chosen for the name is inappropriate for the nature of the company, product or place. For example, choosing a fancy script for a steel manufacturer or a builder.
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Landing pages are an important part of most online marketing campaigns. They are pages designed to present users with information relevant to the ad that brought them to your site and then convert them into a lead/signup/sale.

If your company sells construction equipment, for example, and you are running ads about bulldozers, you don’t want to just send users to your home page. Ideally you’ll want to send them to a landing page that discusses bulldozers specifically. Perhaps include a video of a bulldozer bursting through a house (OK, may be that’s not a good idea, but it would totally work on me). When creating a landing page keep the following in mind:

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Chris Coyier pointed out a problem that a lot of us in the web community experience but few of us probably notice: Spacing the Bottom of Modules or, rather, dealing with too much space at the bottom of a content module.

While Chris uses margin-bottom and :last-child to get rid of excess space at the bottom of a module, I think using margin-top and :first-child (if you need it) might be a better approach. Here’s a Fork of Chris’ original Codepen example.

Like commenter Allan said on the CSS-Tricks post, you generally know what’s going to be at the top of a module, and it’s a lot easier to plan for what comes first rather than what comes last.  And if you do need to make specific changes to the first item in a module, :first-child has support back to IE7, while last-child isn’t even supported in IE8.

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