YIKES Newsletter

What's New at YIKES

It's a busy Fall at YIKES — awards, a food drive, a new column written by the programming team and YIKES is now on Twitter! Follow us on Twitter to keep up-to-date on the latest goings on at YIKES.

YIKES will be running an end-of-the-year food drive for Philabundance. Next time you're at the grocery store consider picking up an extra item for someone in need.

We will be collecting items until January 4, 2010. If you are coming in for a meeting, please think about bringing a donation, or just stop by.

Mia and Tracy Levesque, YIKES co-owners, were finalists for the 2009 NGLCC's Wells Fargo Business Owner of the Year Award. To learn more read our full Press Release

WordPress - Overall Winner of the 2009 Open Source CMS Award

We were happy to find out that WordPress won the Overall Best Open Source CMS Award in the 2009 Open Source CMS Awards. We love WordPress and it's good to see it being awarded for its awesomeness.

WordPress is Open Source sofware originally designed for blogging. While it remains a great blogging tool, we like to use it to create entire Websites because of its complete and easy to use content management system. Managing content in WordPress has been compared to using a social networking platform like Myspace or Facebook because of how user-friendly it is.

We love the easy-to-add features via free WordPress "plugins" (over 7,300 and counting), its SEO (Search Engine Optimization) readiness and the ability to unleash our creativity on it's customizable themes.

To find out more about getting a WordPress Website or upgrading your site to a WordPress site, contact Becky at 215-238-8801 or becky@yikes.biz.

Pearson: Winter is coming and the word on the street is it will be knocking on our doors like a hungry yeti looking for its next meal. The Yikes programmers say why not embrace the cold and warm up to a nice bowl of Program Soup, filled with the latest and greatest in the world of programming without all the techie jargon!

Sean: It sure sounds delicious to me!

Pearson: What's in the soup you ask? Well let's dig in!

New ColdFusion 9 was released from Adobe Labs! Wow, that's exciting, but what does that mean for you the client? Quite a bit actually. ColdFusion is a programming language based on standard HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) used to write dynamic Web pages. It lets you create pages on the fly that differ depending on user input, database lookups, time of day or whatever other criteria you dream up! This new version of ColdFusion allows us to rapidly build, deploy and maintain your Website applications. Pretty cool.

Sean: Speaking of new versions, more information on PHP 6 was just released. This is going to be a HUGE upgrade as it adds further support for Object Oriented programming within PHP. Essentially what this means is we PHP programmers will be able to reuse code more often. It will improve the work flow of projects and bugs will be easier to track down!

Pearson: In the "how do they do that" department you may ask yourself, while surfing the giant tsunamis of the internet, what makes a Website tick? Magic? Especially sites such as Facebook that contain great dynamic functionality. Most of that is accomplished by the use of AJAX technology. AJAX? The stuff I use to clean my bathroom? AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a Web development technique used to create interactive Web features. It allows content on a page to be updated without reloading the entire page. For people without lightning fast Internet connections, AJAX is a huge benefit. It allows one section of page to stay up to date by retrieving new information regularly at a set frequency without needing to refresh the entire page.

Sean: For instance, Facebook just rolled out its new Live Feed option! This allows you to see all of your friend's newest posts by updating at a set interval instead of requiring you to refresh the page when you become curious. You could leave the page open, walk away for an hour or two and come back and it will have added all the new content while you were gone. The only thing required is that your internet connection is active the whole time.

SEO (That's short for Search Engine Optimization) can benefit your site in many ways. YIKES offers SEO packages starting at just $200 per page.

Money spent on SEO can earn a higher return on investment than many traditional forms of advertising plus it brings visitors to your site that are looking for your exact product or service.

Considering that 83% of users go straight to search engines to look for products and services and 97% of users don't click past the first 3 pages, SEO should be a top priority for any Web site's marketing plan.

Contact Becky at 215-238-8801 or becky@yikes.biz to find out how to add SEO to your Website!