I think that most of us are perfectly aware of the current situation in the economy and how so many companies (and people) are suffering greatly as a result. As such, several companies have started to tighten down their budgets, looking for places where they can cut costs in order to maintain the long-term viability of the business. They may have to lay off some staff, for instance. Other companies are clamping down on their marketing and advertising, seeing these as costs that can be cut.

While you may want to reduce some of your spending on advertising, it would not be appropriate to cut out too much. That is because marketing is not an expense, per se. It is better perceived as an investment. With each marketing dollar that you put out, there is a certain expectation that the dollar will come back to you in the form of new or continued business with new or existing customers. That’s why you advertise in the first place, right?

To ride out this recession and to see your company survive through to the other side, you may have to make some adjustments in how your business is run. You may need to revamp your product line to better suit the reduced budgets of your customers. These lower-priced solutions can keep them attached to your company as a supplier and these solutions may even attract customers away from your competitors. I’m not saying that you should compete on price, but you should be thinking about how you can compete on value.

In this way, you want to maintain most of your marketing efforts, although in a slightly different form. Even if the advertising dollars do not result in immediate sales, they will help with maintaining your brand’s presence in the marketplace. When the economy takes an upswing and more people are in a spending mood again, your name will be one of the first that they’ll remember, because it’s been there all along.

As we discussed last week, planning your database structure ahead of time has many benefits. Today we’ll be going over (in a general sense) how to create a database plan.

Let’s start out with tables. A table contains a structure made up of fields. Conforming to the structure are rows of data. Think of a table like a spreadsheet, where fields are the “headers” at the top of a column, and data is separated into rows.

The best way of deciding what tables you want to create is relatively simple. Within your database, you’ll probably need to store a few different types of data. If we take the example of a blogging platform, you’ll need to store (at minimum) posts, comments and options. These are three different types of data. As these data types will require different fields, we will create a table for each data type. Generally, this is a good way of determining what tables you will need to create.

In this example you could possibly store posts and comments within the same table (as they have similar field requires). However, I would recommend against this. Because there is a potential to have thousands of comments and thousands of posts, combining these two data sets will only slow things down. This is another thing to consider when planning out your tables. If you have two types of data that could conform into one table, will one (or both) of these data types potentially end up with thousands of rows. If so, you should separate them.

There is a caveat on that last point. If those two similar data types are directly related to each other, and you will always need the other within your application, you may want to keep them within the same data row. This is because performing a query to retrieve this data involves less load on the server if they’re in the same row, than if they were in separate queries. For instance, you’ll always need the comment author and the comment body together, so it makes sense to keep them within the same row, and not in separate tables (not a good example, since they both fall under the “comment type”, but you should get the point).

Onto fields, which are much simpler to plan out. Basically, you’ll need a field for each type of data within a general type of data. For the example of a post table, you would need a field for when the post was created, the title of the post, the body of the post and any other features the blogging platform might have (categories, tags, etc).

The expandability of a database structure comes from making your tables general enough to support additional fields within in the future. Keeping your data types general, while not making them too general, is the basis of a good database structure. While still trying to make your data types general, you should follow the above guidelines that I have set out in this post and not make them too general.

Because I like you guys (although really because I feel like I’m writing to myself… and I like myself), I’ve made an visual (incomplete) database structure for the example we used throughout this post. Obviously you don’t need to make a plan this “formal” (a few notes jotted on a piece of paper, in a text editor or, if you have a good memory, in your head will work just fine.

We are leading an increasingly mobile lifestyle. At the same time, we are also leading an increasingly connected lifestyle. From the iPhone to the BlackBerry, Windows Mobile to every other smartphone on the market, we want to have a strong connection to the Internet no matter where we find ourselves over the course of the day. The trouble is that many websites don’t render very well in the mobile environment.

You may already know about some of the solutions that make your WordPress blog a little more friendly for mobile devices like smartphones. That’s for the convenience and usability of your readers, but what about your mobile experience with your WordPress blog? The admin area, also known as the WordPress dashboard, is incredibly robust and can appear to be very cluttered on the smaller screen of an iPhone or BlackBerry. This is where the WPhone plug-in can come into play.

This plug-in does not create a mobile version of your blog for readers. Instead, it creates a mobile version of your blog’s dashboard for you. Rather than fight through the regular WordPress dashboard, you are presented with a mobile-optimized version that still gives you access to all the key functions. These include the ability to write new posts, manage old ones, go through the comments, and check the latest activity. The page is simplified, so you may have to go through more screens to achieve the same thing, but that sure beats zooming and scrolling to get anywhere.

Check out the the official page for more information and to download WPhone. It is a plug-in that you install on your WordPress blog and not an application that you install on your phone.

Last week we asked how much would you pay for a Twitter Direct Message spam removal tool and 88% said nothing. Those that would buy it you can get the script here. This weeks question is…

In Javascript, you may be familiar with event triggers such as onClick. jQuery is able to do something similar, where you can bind functions to an event on an element.

While in Javascript event triggers are generally used as attributes on HTML objects, jQuery does it differently. jQuery has functions for events, that you branch onto a selector. You then bind your own function to the event function, and you end up with a very powerful event trigger.

Event functions are simply a function that you branch onto a selector and then bind a function to. Let’s look at an example of a click event. Let’s say that everytime that somebody clicks on a link, an alert box appears.

[code language="js"]$("a").click(function(){
alert("You just clicked a link!");
});[/code]

It’s as simple as that. jQuery supports all the standard event types, which you can see a list of over here.

Two of the most important things that you can offer your customers are convenience and ease of use. They want to be able to receive your product or service in a timely fashion and they want the process to be as painless as possible. One of the ways you can do this is to offer some sort of self-service utility on your website.

Let’s face it. Most of us live, breathe, eat and sleep on the Internet, so for many customers, it can be much more useful to place an order or adjust account details online rather than over the phone with a customer service representative. While there are certainly initial costs in setting up your online utility, these are quickly recouped through the savings you’ll gain through the reduced need for phone- and mail-based customer service.

Many different industries and types of businesses can benefit from the practice of online self-serve. Courier companies, for instance, can allow customers to book pickups and dropoffs via an online tool. Similarly, some pizza places let you order your dinner online, possibly even pre-paying via credit card so you don’t have to pay the delivery person when they arrive.

If you are looking for a way to improve your customer service experience, one of the better (albeit somewhat ironic) ways to do this is to offer an online alternative to your standard phone-based interaction. Just make sure your online tool is intuitive and easy to use.