Web Design, Development & Online Marketing - Serving the Central and North Texas Markets

If you haven't had a chance yet to learn about WSI's amazing Online Business console, WSI EFusion, I suggest you take a look at a quick demo here.

WSI EFusion is an amazing platform to enhance any online business and help you keep track of your leads, manage your own website, create custom modules, and much much more to help increase your internet marketing strategy.

July 2011 Enhancements

Modules within Modules

WSI EFusion has many different modules built-in including Blogs, Photo Galleries, Webforms, Custom Web App modules, and many others. Now we are bringing the ability to include a module within a different module. IE. the ability to include a photo gallery within a blog post, or insert ANY module into a Web App. This will allow for extreme customization of the tools built into WSI EFusion. We have also include a Module Manager into the WYZYWYG for easy access to add in modules.

Device Specific Templates

We continue to help enhance the ability to provide the best access to your website no matter what device your site is being viewed on whether it's a desktop/laptop, smart phone, or a tablet. WSI EFusion now includes a two extra versions of every sitewide template, one for smart phones and one for tablets. When EFusion detects what device you are on, you have the ability to have a mobile version of your site and tablet version of your site to direct them too. This will greatly enhance the user experience of your website.

SEO Friendly URLs for Web Apps

One of the most powerful tools of WSI EFusion is the ability to create your own custom web app. Web Apps are extremely powerful and let you create custom modules for your website with no additional programming charges. We are now excited to say that WSI EFusion has the ability to have a custom SEO friendly URL. For instance: http://www.yoursite.com/webapp-name/webapp-item-name This will let you have complete control of the URL. Let's say you use a Web App for a real estate website for homes located in Dallas Texas. Your Web App for each home can now be http://www.yoursite.com/Dallas-Texas/Homes-In-Plano and this can be modified however you see fit!

July 2011 release

The new update will be taking place on July 6th, 2011 at 11:00AM CST. The deployment time will take a few hours, but there will be no major disruptions to service during this time.

We'll keep you posted!

So you have your eFusion blog setup and posted your first blog, but you think to yourself “Wow this looks a little boring”.  The best part about eFusion blogs (well any part of eFusion really) is that you can customize virtually anything you can think of.  This can be really useful when you need to highly customize something for search engine optimization. 

But to jazz up our blog, we thought we would introduce adding a picture, website, and phone number to each of our authors.  I think this greatly enhances the blog and adds a personal touch to the readers, and all with very minimal coding involved.

Step 1

The first thing you need to do is login to the Admin section of your eFusion website (yourdomain.com/admin) and then go to ‘Admin > More Customization Options’ and then choose ‘Blog Layouts’

From here you can customize each type of blog layout that you have.  The one we are most concerned with is “Blog Post List Layout”.  This the overall layout of your blog, the view in which you have a list of ALL of your blog posts.  From here you will see the WYZYWYG with the generic blog information (Title, Author Name, Date, Post, etc.)

Step 2

The main thing we are trying to do is have eFusion load an image that is ‘dynamic’ so that it pulls the right picture for the right author.  Well since each author has their own name, that will be used as our unique identifier.  In screen shot you see that we already have a tag for {tag_blogpostauthor}.  This dynamically pulls the name for that author.  So it makes sense to reason that we can upload an image BlogAuthor.jpg and have their image be unique to each author.

Step 3

So we need to go in HTML view add the line of code:  <img alt="Blog Author" src="/images/authors/{tag_blogpostauthor}.jpg" />

Remember that your image path can be whatever you need it to be, as long as you use {tag_blogpostauthor}.jpg as the actual name of the image.   And of course you can style the image however you feel necessary. The best place to put this is just under:

<div class="post-details"> {tag_blogpostauthor} - {tag_blogpostdate} </div>

If you don’t have much coding experience, I suggest using something along these lines:

<div style="float: left; padding-right: 15px; padding-bottom: 10px; width: 148px;"><img alt="" src="/images/authors/{tag_blogpostauthor}.jpg" />

You will need to set your own padding or margins as you see fit as well as the width for the image.  Just remember you can always edit /StyleSheets/ModuleStyleSheets.css, if you need to change up how the default blog classes are handled.

While you’re in there feel free to add a phone number or anything else you’d like to use for your Blog Author mini profile.

P.S. You should definitely add a “Share this” widget to the end of each blog post.  So while your editing the Blog Post List Layout, copy and paste this at the end of your layout:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/250/addthis_widget.js"></script><a href="http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php" class="addthis_button" addthis:url="http://wsiwebsmart.com{tag_permalinkonly}" addthis:title="{tag_blogposttitle_nolink}"><img height="16" width="125" style="border: 0pt none;" alt="Bookmark and Share" src="http://s7.addthis.com/static/btn/v2/lg-share-en.gif" /></a>

Just make sure to change out wsiwebsmart.com do yourdomain.com

Enjoy!