Her site was “rebuilt” to look as it did but on a WordPress / Genesis platform.

FSI is also consulting on a strategy to work with online publishing and social media.

This can be a formidable task for the developer/consultant as well as the client to understand how the platforms all tie into a marketing strategy.

Except for large project, we develop exclusively on WordPress for websites, and fortunately there are some great plugins to easily (almost) set up a way to PUSH or PULL content between your website and FaceBook Page and Twitter account.  The client may want to post their content on all platforms separately, but this is burdensome for most.  It is more likely they will want to post on one platform primarily and have it disseminate to the others automatically.

The first question is to ask where the client feels most comfortable publishing content.  If the spend their day on Facebook, then the solution is better to pull content from Facebook to the website.  A good plugin for this is Facebook Like Box.  This will add a like button, photo gallery and the posts as a widget.

To pull tweets I depend on Genesis – Latest Tweets.  We develop all our sites on the Genesis Framework and this is one of many great plugins included.

If the client wants to publish on their website, they will want to PUSH their data to both FB and Twitter.  I recommend WP-To-Twitter and Facebook-page-publish for these tasks (also Wordbooker).  To accomplish both of these tasks, you will need to establish an application.

Gravity will create a couple tables and allows you to easily view all form submissions and export to Excel.  You can very quickly build forms with pull down menus, radio buttons, CAPTCHA, auto responders and many other advanced features.

The developer’s version will cost you $199, which is a bit pricey, but allows you to use it on unlimited sites.

A media item is “attached” to a post if it has a value in the post_parent field.  It can only be attached to one post. 

If you have a gallery in a post and need to move them the only way to do it is via sql in the MySQL db. 

Here is the sql to update in bulk media records to a new “parent.”  You need the post ID for both the post you are moving from to the one you are moving to….

update wp_posts t1 set t1.post_parent = 713 where post_parent = 444 and post_type = ‘attachment’

…improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from
search engines via ‘natural’ (‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results.

On the other hand, SEM includes a broader online marketing approach that includes paid placements.

Many companies claim they offer SEO as one of their premerie services.

We do too.

But FSI take is a step further and applies its wide and varied marketing experience to current web and SEO/SEM standards. We apply the following basic principles to help build a successful site:

• Positioning – Analyzing your target audience and competition to best position your site with the equivalent of a
  “unique selling proposition”. This includes:
  • Analyze the competition, finding their strengths and also gaps/opportunities your site can provide.
  • Optimizing website content and structure to differentiate your site from the competition
  • Conducting a key-word analysis to see how prospects are searching for similar products/services
• Findability – It doesn’t matter how good your site is if prospects can’t find it:
  • Making sure search engines know where to find your site.
  • Building inbound links to your site to increase your site’s search ranking and generate more traffic.
  • Attracting local traffic to your site through free and paid sources
• “Stickiness” – You can rank #1 everywhere and drive thousands of visitors to your site, but if it is poorly written, and lacks a compelling message or “call to action”, people will “slip away” as quickly as they arrived. We have professional writing experience, so that your site isn’t a
  mish-mash of key words and phrases, but tells a cohesive and compelling story.

Working with PowerPoint in VBA is never fun, because managing slides and the objects on the slides is limited, and can not be seen from the interface (like naming a slide or object).

Usually a major new release makes life easier, but in this case, not so.  Read the following from PPTFAQ:

If you need to automate charts in PowerPoint 2007, it’d be best if you change your name and move to another town where nobody knows that you do PowerPoint programming.

The chart objects you get in PowerPoint 2007 when you add a new chart expose no methods or properties to VBA. In short, you can’t do anything with them in code.

When you install Office 2007, you have the option of including MSGraph, the application PowerPoint used for charts in previous versions. You’ll want this if you need to work with charts from previous PowerPoint versions and/or to create new charts via automation.

These are not encouraging words. I hoped that SP2 of Office 2007 would solve the answers, but it appears that even though we now have access to the chartdata object in PowerPoint and Word, there is virtually nothing we can do with it.

One would think with a major upgrade like 2007, that automation would get easier.  Unfortunately as far as automating graphs in PowerPoint, which is a common need, we are worse off.  So there are several choices, none good:

1. Configure PP 2007 to default to use MS Graph (see article).  This involves using regedit, and obviously is a poor choice if it will be used by other people since they will all have to do the same configurations.
2. Use Excel to contain all the graphs and then push them to PP with copy and paste as enhanced metafile.  This is probably the best choice, but pasting into a PP file is always difficult since it is so difficult to manage the objects/shapes in the PP slides.
3. Use linked graphs in PP to an Excel file as the data source, and then edit the Excel file.  This seems to be buggy, and graphs disappear and act in an unstable way.

So item 2 is the best way, to manage the charts in Excel and push them by copying/pasting them into the slides and locating them.

The trick is that pastespecial returns a shape range, not a shape, so the item(1) at the end returns the first item in the range.  At least I KNOW it will be the first item since I am pasting my object into the slide.

Set oPPTSlide = oPPTFile.Slides(iSlideNum)

Set oPPTShape = oPPTSlide.Shapes.PasteSpecial(ppPasteEnhancedMetafile).Item(1)
oPPTShape.Left = -6
oPPTShape.Top = 164.25

We are unable to edit data underlying the charts.  Check out the posting on an MSDN blog.

Key Differences Between the Chart object in Word 2007 SP2/PowerPoint 2007 SP2 and ChartObject object in Excel 2007 SP2

The Chart object in Word 2007 SP2 and PowerPoint 2007 SP2 does have a few differences from the Excel 2007 SP2 implementation.

* Programmatically creating or manipulating a ChartData object in Word 2007 SP2 or PowerPoint 2007 SP2 will cause Excel 2007 SP2 to run.

* Chart properties and methods for manipulating the chart sheet aren’t implemented.

The concept of a chart sheet is specific to Excel 2007. Chart sheets aren’t used in Word 2007 or PowerPoint 2007, so methods and properties used to reference or manipulate a chart sheet have been disabled for those applications.

* Properties and methods that, in Excel 2007 SP2 normally take a Range object reference now take a range address in Word 2007 SP2/PowerPoint 2007 SP2.

The Range object in Word 2007 SP2 and PowerPoint 2007 SP2 is different than the Range object in Excel 2007 SP2. To prevent confusion, the charting object model in Word 2007 SP2 and PowerPoint 2007 SP2 accepts range address strings, such as “=’Sheet1′!$A$1:$D$5″, in those properties and methods (such as the SetSourceData method of the Chart object) that accept Range objects in Excel 2007 SP2.

* A new object, ChartData, has been added to the VBA object models for Word 2007 SP2 and PowerPoint 2007 SP2 to provide access to the underlying linked or embedded data for a chart.

Each chart has, associated with it, the data used to draw the chart in Word 2007 SP2 or PowerPoint 2007 SP2. The chart data can either be linked from an external Excel workbook, or embedded as part of the chart itself. The ChartData object encapsulates access to the data for a given chart in Word 2007 SP2 or PowerPoint 2007 SP2. For example, the following VBA code displays, then minimizes, the chart data for each chart contained by the active document in Word 2007 SP2:

The analyst has the overwhelming job of populating the 300 graphs, 70 tables and hundreds of variables embedded in the text for each PowerPoint file. Not only does this take a huge amount of time but is prone to human error.

The challenge was to find a process that was flexible enough to handle the changing environment as graphs/tables were modified at the client’s request. The automation process was complicated, since of all the Microsoft Office applications, VBA is rarely used to automate PowerPoint.

FSI built an innovative system using Excel and PowerPoint to manage the automatic population of the thousands of variables in each of the seven reports. It was the best solution for this challenging situation.

FSI found just this situation when it was asked to help some managers in two divisions of JP Morgan Chase. They created several detailed reports in Excel that were updated on a weekly or monthly basis. The reports had several data sources, including corporate data (Oracle) and several external data exports as text files.

Staff had to update these reports with a dozen metrics down to the bank branch level. IT had already conducted a formal analysis and said it would be much too expensive to duplicate the reports in the enterprise reporting system.

FSI kept the reports as is, which were quite complex and elegant, and used VBA to automate the update process. The managers had pull down menus or buttons to easily update or manipulate the data.

The time for each update was reduced from a full FTE day to fifteen minutes.