Daniel Shakhmundes is pleased to announce the signing of the Clickback Partner Program with Netstart eBusiness. Netstart is a Canadian Email Service Provider (ESP) that exclusively provides services to professional design firms across North America.

Daniel Shakhmundes now offers email marketing software and related services such as email template design to our customers. The software, Clickback MAIL has been on the market since 1999, providing companies with communication and retention solutions for their customers. Your customers are the most vital part of your business, and often it is hard to find the time to stay in touch, inform them or let them know about your business.

Clickback MAIL is simple to use and is self-managed. There is a LITE version for companies new to email marketing and a PRO version for marketers that want more powerful targeting features.

Click to learn more about Email Marketing.

Click to learn more about the Features of Clickback MAIL.

Call Daniel Shakhmundes at 905-321-9898 today to learn more and get started communicating with your customers cost effectively with email marketing.

WordPress version 2.6 was released just over a week ago. We made quick work of it today, thanks to the WordPress Automatic upgrade plug-in. We also upgraded the other plug-ins we use – it was all too easy!

We also added a new link to the Links page:

Searchme Visual Search

Another knock-off of an interface popularized by Apple/MacOS, this time with respect to the web and its various media.

A presentation by Marta Kagan

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Screenshot of Google News search: Google Viacom YouTube logs
Friday, July 4^th, 2008
http://w.shak.ws/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/google_viacom_20080704.png

We posted a video yesterday to this WordPress-based website, which prompted setting up the “Post to Blog” sharing option of YouTube, which makes it faster and easier to share content. In doing so, D.Shak felt that it would be appropriate to carry out an important maintenance task that has been due for a couple months – upgrade from WordPress 2.5 to 2.5.1 – so, he also tried the WordPress Automatic upgrade plug-in. Upgrades are important to keep up with, but they often result in issues to iron out. There were a couple burps (i.e. the process was repeated two or three times), getting through it error-free by the end, and it seems that all modifications have been preserved. Overall, today’s experience with WordPress and YouTube was impressively smooth and easy.

Considering the relative ease and success of upgrading this WordPress deployment, we were left motivated to also activate the Akismet plug-in, which checks comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. We needed to setup a WordPress.com API key to use it, which was quick & easy to do. Shak.WS is now showing off Akismet stats on the sidebar at the right! Hopefully the Akismet plug-in will save some time that was being lost to spam, of which I currently receive several per day.

D.Shak

With my 12 years of business on the World Wide Web (WWW AKA W3 AKA the Web), I have stayed rather quiet on the subject of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I have used Yahoo! and Google since their beginnings, and know full-well that the ranking properties/characteristics of search engines is generally proprietary and surrounded in secrecy. Even though best-practices and standards have been publicly published, technical aspects of quality in programming & design vary in importance to search engine ranking, and their relevance can change over time. Furthermore, there are other criteria factored in that are organic and otherwise. I have always designed & built to conform to the most obvious and expected elements, and the approach has evidently brought success to my endeavours & business.

Today, I began publishing a page on my own internal/proprietary trade-secret knowledge of SEO, starting with a couple points, and with many more to come.

D.Shak

Like Daniel Shakhmundes’ Links page, his Clients page went on vacation for a bit more than half-a-year, skipping the previous generation of his website.

For now, only a few of Shak’s many clients are listed…

Daniel Shakhmundes’ Links page went on vacation for a bit more than half-a-year. It skipped the previous generation of his website, which he wasn’t quite settled on keeping, unlike the fantastic new one built on WordPress.

The content is exactly the same as it was, aside from technical modification to comply with the coding & programming specifications (CSS & XHTML) set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Feel free to use the W3C CSS and W3C XHTML 1.0 buttons at the bottom-right corner of any page for validation substantiation.

More links and further-improved organization are sure to come, thanks to the robust functionality of WordPress and the excellent design & development capabilities of Daniel Shakhmundes and his team.

It’s been half-a-year since D.Shak launched a new website for himself. Back then, he moved to Netenberg’s Click Be! from a design he built from scratch during his early days at Brock University.

In March 2004 Daniel Shakhmundes launched his blog Inspiration, now called Decrypting Reality, using Blogger.com (BlogSpot.com) now owned by Google. He’s had his hand on the pulse of blogging and content management systems for over four years now, and all the while he has been seeking an elegantly-programmed standards-compliant open-source extensible web-based software-application that could be used for himself and clients too. That’s a tall order to fulfill, but WordPress has been doing it since 2003.

After five years, the WordPress “state-of-the-art publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability” has matured to a level of quality that is rarely matched, even by its commercial and proprietary counterparts.

That being said, welcome to Shak’s new website built on WordPress!

Shak’s clients love his website tools so much, even Shak couldn’t resist rebuilding his website with them. We hope you like the new design, along with it the new features.

Looking forward to a more effective website that eases management and saves time with sophisticated automation,

D.Shak