New to hosting? If so, you probably have a lot of questions about everything from domains to the ins and outs of the hosting packages we offer. Don’t be discouraged! We’ve got you covered. To help get you up to speed on what hosting actually entails and the best strategies about how to approach it, check out the resources below.

To get you started with the basics, W3Schools offers a great directory of hosting topics that breaks down every technical word and phrase into bite-sized pieces, ensuring comprehensive understanding. Check them out here.

Additionally, we have many great resources for you right here from A Small Orange! Have a look at these great resources:

An extensive list of video tutorials.

The ASO forums have a whole section dedicated to getting started-  click here!  

The ASO Wiki – an index of all things ASO.

Click here for the ASO support portal, which offers help on many hosting related topics.

Still stumped? Ask our folks on live chat, available on asmallorange.com.

Curious about the different plans ASO offers? Check them out here.

Welcome to the ASO Customer Spotlight, where we take a closer look at a specific site that hosts with ASO. If you’re hosting with A Small Orange and want to show off your website in our Customer Spotlight, fill out this short form. We’ll be in touch!

This month, we’re looking at the food-focused website Good. Food. Stories.

Who are you?
Casey Barber is the editor of Good. Food. Stories., a freelance writer and recipe developer whose work has appeared in ReadyMade, Gourmet Live, Time Out New York, iVillage, and other print/online publications, and the author of the forthcoming cookbook Homemade Junk Food, featuring 70 from-scratch recipes for classic snacks.

What is your website?
http://www.goodfoodstories.com

Why do people care about your site?
Everyone has a memory to share about food. Whether it’s eating a mind-blowing (and wallet-emptying) once-in-a-lifetime dinner, finding the best and cheapest hamburger in a hole-in-the-wall dive, successfully cooking a meal for the first time, or remembering childhood moments through family recipes, it’s easy to connect emotionally to the stories we tell. Our readers see themselves in our stories and jump at the chance to share their own.

What does your site look like?
Here’s a few posts to peruse:

Neighborhood Guide: The Mission District, San Francisco

Ask Casey: Hanger, Skirt, Flank, and Flatiron Steaks

Buddy The Elf’s Spaghetti Pie

Thanks for sharing your site with us, Casey! 

Hi Everyone! It’s the weekend and time for the Weekly Digest. We’ve made a small change that we hope you’ll like; instead of links to our blog posts from the week, we’re going to list a group of new links that follow a particular theme. This week, we have five links for building your content strategy. Happy Friday!

Want us to cover a certain topic in next week’s digest? Tell us in the comments, and we’ll get on it.

ASO Links From The Week

How to Speed Up Your Website
[WEB DESIGNER DEPOT]

Backup Your Gmail Account with Gmvault
[WEBMONKEY]

CSS/HTML Tools and Resources Worth Checking Out
[IMPRESSIVE WEBS]

How To Build A Real-Time Commenting System
[SMASHING MAGAZINE]

Five Links On Content Strategy

Why an Optimized Content Strategy is Crucial for Social and Search
[SEARCH ENGINE WATCH]

Krista LaRiviere gives some great points here about how to adapt your content to be optimized for the latest Google updates including Panda and Search Plus Your World.

9 Hard Hitting Content Strategies for Small Business Blogging
[QUICKSPROUT]

These 9 points have been used by many major blogs to ramp up their traffic. Neil Patel walks you through them in detail. 

Tinker, Tailor, Content Strategist
[A LIST APART]

This great post offers tips for developing a holistic strategy for effective content from engaging a broad spectrum of readers to search engine optimization.

Content Modelling: A Master Skill
[A LIST APART]

You can optimize your content for search engines all you want, but without proper arrangement of your content, people will leave your site in confusion or boredom. Maximize your content’s potential by using these effective tactics. 

Sneaking More Strategy Into Your Content Marketing Operation 
[BUSINESS 2 COMMUNITY]

This post from Gigi Griffis features tips on keeping your content relevant and on-target with your overall strategy for optimizing your online presence. 

ASO Social Outposts

Join ASO on Facebook.
Follow us on Twitter.
Visit us on Google+.

Your Weekly Moment of Frivolity:

See you on Monday!

If you’re a web designer, you’ve probably heard the hype about CSS3. The latest version of CSS, CSS3 combines light code requirements which produce stunningly rich and clean web pages that load incredibly fast. If you’re new to CSS3 and want to explore its possibilities, we’ve compiled some great resources for you to explore below. Let us know what you think of these tools in the comment section!

Here are four tutorials that cover the bare-bones basics of CSS3 if you are just starting out with CSS:

Probably the best way to learn the (updated) basics of HTML and CSS for free. Tuts+ gives you a fantastic set of helpful videos to orient yourself with HTML and CSS in only 30 days.

Speckyboy offers some great tutorials here on how to get some specific looks for your site. Check out these awesome designs that use lightbox, slideshow and image panel effects, and learn how to employ these designs on your site.

Check out these seven fun tutorials which include “Slopy” elements and 3D slideshow effects.

For an overall overview of what CSS3 can do for you and your site, check out this Net Tuts+ tutorial. Get caught up on all your CSS3 needs in one place!

These three tutorials from A List Apart are perfect for those with CSS experience, but want to learn how to better work with this particular version:

This post features some tips on how to create a floating box of content that is surrounded by text on your site.

This article similarly expands your toolset through teaching you how to have greater command over where things are exactly positioned on your site.

Finally, this post shows you how to program elements on your page to transfer from one color to another when that element is hovered over or clicked on.

What resources have you used to boost your CSS3 skills? Let us know in the comment section!

Although HTML5 isn’t yet an official recommendation, it’s still evolving at a brisk pace, helping to push the web forward- but it’s not always easy to maintain awareness of the latest developments. We at A Small Orange have compiled some resources for you so you can stay on top of your HTML5 game. Know of any resources we missed? Tell us in the comments!

HTML Goodies

HTML Goodies has been helping developing developers being their journey into programming since 1994. The site is consistently updated with programming “goodies” and has an entire section devoted to an HTML5 Development Center.

HTML5 Rocks

Want some support while honing your HTML5 skills? Check out this online community of mobile, game and business devs, all brought together by the awesomeness of HTML5.

Onehundredfortywords

Onehundredfortywords contains a well-stocked, no-nonsense list of HTML5 resources.

DZone – HTML5 Microzone

DZone’s HTML5 Microzone has loads of up-to-date articles on all the various aspects of the language.

And last, but not least…

Cheats! DZone has also created 2 incredibly popular HTML5-focused cheat sheets. Check out the one for HTML5 and the one for HTML5 Canvas (to access, you must create a free account).

Hello Class of 2012; good news! No doubt you are well aware of the challenging job market you will face head-on after graduation, but there are reasons to be optimistic. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), companies plan to hire about 9.5 percent more graduates from the Class of 2012 than last year. Additionally, the same study showed that this year’s graduates will earn on average 6 percent more than last year’s. Sound good to you? Read on!

Are you a senior that has yet to start your job search? Are you looking for employment but need some direction? Try out these resources and let us know how they work for you.

One Day, One Job
One Day, One Job was founded by a recent Cornell grad who was frustrated with the difficulties of finding entry-level work right out of school. Just type in your email address on the website and receive a job posting every day for entry level positions that match your professional qualifications and goals.

Experience
Experience is an amazing resource for those who graduated recently or will soon graduate. The folks at Experience specialize and work only with people crossing the bridge between graduation and launching their career, and they have had loads of experience working with people just like you. Their website also has a host of great resources from resume to interview tips that will make you stand out from you competition.

After College
After College probably takes the most social networking approach when connecting recent grads with employment. After College encourages you to create a profile and connect with employers and other people from your school. You can thus become searchable to employers while you yourself search job postings by expertise and region.

Your school’s career services center
Almost every college campus in America has a career services center to help you get to where you want to be professionally. By doing everything from organizing job fairs to giving you resume advice, the people at your school’s career services want nothing more than to see you succeed professionally. Why would anyone pass up the offer of free and sound professional advice?

Your personal network
Remember, job search sites and career centers are only part of the equation. Don’t get stuck in front of your computer all day!  The people you know (and the people they know) can prove to be helpful resources. Talk to your friends, family, and teachers. Who do they know that you could chat with?

Find out the people in your personal network that have similar career interests. How are they planning to transition from the academic ivory tower to real-world responsibility? Prepare a specific list of questions, and dive in. A long talk with an established professional in the field you are pursuing can go a long way.

Not sure where to start? Check out this post on training yourself to ask better questions.

Do you have any job hunting advice for this years grads? Tell us in the comments.

Last week, we published a how-to article on how to get started with your free $75 Google Adwords Credits. This week, we’ll go a little more in-depth, and discuss a strategy that will help you spread out your $75 AdWords credits, with the goal of getting you more traffic for less credits.

Step 1: Research & and Starting Line Prep
Coming up with a proper strategy to kick off your Google Adwords campaign can be hard. You have a finite amount you want to spend, and you want to account for everything so you don’t waste your money.

Here are some exercises  to get you started:

a. How specialized is my site, business, product or service? Write down some words that come to mind.

b. Out of those words or phrases, rate them on how popular you believe them to be. For example, the word “software” would probably be at the top of the list, while the phrase “Beekeeping Management Software” is probably less popular.

Come up with three words or phrases that you want to target.

Step 2: Keyword Testing-  What works?
After you have your designated keywords, let’s do a little playing around to see what works for your search terms. For example, let’s say you have a website that teaches people how to get started with beekeeping, and sells beekeeping tools and supplies.

1)First, I would go to Google’s Keyword Research tool, and based on the exercise above, type in the three phrases I want to go after.

As you can see, there’s a lot of choices. There are words with high competition and others with lower competition.

2) Decide on the words you would like to use. A good strategy might be to pick a combination of terms that are still relevant to your site, but are not quite as competitive in the AdWords market.

3) Go to the Traffic Estimator Tool (top left hand corner of the keyword research dashboard). 

The Traffic Estimator Tool will allow you to test how much you are willing to pay per click and set your maximum daily budget. A good tip to use: Start with the highest amount you are willing to pay for one person to click on your ad, and how many clicks you’d be willing to have per day and then go down from there.

In our beekeeping example, I started with $1.50 and $5 as my top amount to try to get the top spot for “beekeeping tools”:

After completing this step, start bidding low, (about .25 cents CPC with a $3 daily ad budget) and slowly increase your price. You want to reach the point where you are comfortable with the ad spend per day and the CPC.

Step 3: Monitoring & Making Changes
Competition and CPC rates change daily, so you will want to make sure to check in on your campaign frequently to see how you are doing. By optimizing and making adjustments, you will be able to get the most out of your Google Adwords Credits.

Need additional resources for keyword research? Check out this post on the subject from SEO Web Hosting, or use SEM Rush for competitor, industry, and term analysis.

Earlier this week, we announced that we had two extra WordCamp Austin 2012 tickets burning a hole in our pocket. We held a drawing to give them away this week. We asked for answers to two simple trivia questions, and the names of those who answered correctly were put into a hat, and the winners were drawn at random.

The questions:

1) Where was the first WordCamp held, and on what date?
2) What was Austin, Texas called before it was named Austin in the 1830s? 

First, the answers:

1)  San Francisco, CA.  August 5, 2006
2) Waterloo

Second, the winners!

1) Jennifer Ross
2) Joel Farris

Congrats, folks! We’ll be contacting you today via email.

Thanks to everyone for their participation!

WordCamp Austin 2012 will be held in Austin, TX on May 16th. Click here for more information.

Hello readers! It’s Friday and time for the Weekly Digest. Check out all of this week’s blog posts and social links below!

However, we’d like to thank everyone for participating in the ASO Content Survey. We’d still love to hear any suggestions you may have- click here, and sound off on what you’d like to see more/less of in this blog! Also, we’ve taken some of your survey suggestions to heart- watch for changes in the ASO digest next week!

This Week’s ASO Blog Posts

A Small Orange Community Newsletter: Volume 2, Issue 4
How to Get Started with Your A Small Orange Google AdWords Credits
Pros and Cons of Using a VPS
Web Development Sites For The Amateur

ASO Links From The Week

6 Ways to Turn Your iPad Into a Laptop
[INFORMATION WEEK]

15 Great HTML5 and CSS Generators
[WEB DESIGNER DEPOT]

WP Theme Generator: Create WordPress Themes Without Coding
[WEB DESIGNER DEPOT]

The Best Backup Solutions, Azure vs. EC2, Cloud Management Tools, and More
[SITEPOINT]

ASO Social Outposts

Join ASO on Facebook.
Follow us on Twitter.
Visit us on Google+.

Your Weekly Moment Of Frivolity:
 

Have a Good Weekend!

Do you want to learn the basics of programming, but find yourself intimidated by many of the resources you find? You’re not alone. There are plenty of user-friendly web development  sites out there.  These sites are just a sampling of those resources. Take a look at these and see what you think! If you’ve had success in the past with similar sites that aren’t listed, post links to them in the comments:

Google: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript From The Ground Up
Part of Google’s Code University, this site takes users through the basics and best practices of modern web development. Recommended!

Don’t Fear the Internet

Specifically geared for non-web designers, Don’t Fear the Internet gives basic tutorials of HTML and CSS in  well-executed, easy-to-understand videos.

WebDesignTuts

WebDesignTuts is another site that has resources for everyone from the beginner to the advanced programmer. This site puts you in charge by categorizing tutorials by topics, difficulty, estimated completion, and in some cases, additional requirements. This is a good resource since it is organized in such a way as to maximize your time and by allowing you to advance quickly through HTML and CSS and on to more advanced topics.

Some of you who really want to dive in might enjoy this article from WebDesignTuts that highlights some of the current trends in web design. The article does a great job to catch you up on when is currently hot in web development.

Lynda

Lynda provides a great service to the beginning developer through a paid subscription. While this may deter some newcomers, the site is a wonderful resource that is very well-organized and presented. The service prides itself on giving you control over your own learning experience. By constructing itself as a virtual library, Lynda allows you to do anything from looking up a complex answer to a question on its database to diving into tutorials that are 8+ hours long. Each tutorial also gives its duration time, letting you plan and manage your time effectively. It should also be noted that Lynda not only offers tutorials on web development, but also topics ranging from Photoshop to 3D and animation.

Tutorial Guide

Tutorial Guide is a massive database for self-teaching materials. Like Lynda, it features a slew of different topics other than HTML and CSS. Unlike Lynda, however, the site is free of charge. The catch is that the information on the site is not very well organized, and you may find yourself looking longer than you would like for certain tutorials. For the patient and frugal however, look no further than Tutorial Guide.