What is Prosepoint ?

ProsePoint is a free open source software package that lets you quickly and easily publish your own newspaper or magazine online. You can upload stories, edit stories online, and organize stories into editions, all through the user-friendly and convenient web interface. You do not need to know any programming or html to use ProsePoint.


How is it different anyway ?

There are many content management systems (CMS) available, all of which allow you to publish and manage the content of your website. This means that they are necessarily general in nature, and can only offer general capabilities. Using a general CMS to build a website often requires further configuration and custom functionality to be added.

ProsePoint is different from these general CMS's because ProsePoint specifically aims to meet the needs of those people who wish to publish newspapers or magazines online. ProsePoint has inbuilt features to support this objective out of the box. This dramatically reduces the amount of customization and extra functionality that would be required to build your newspaper or magazine website. ProsePoint has already done most of that work, so you don't have to.


About the Platform

Prosepoint is solely built upon DRUPAL, one of the most popular content management systems around. This makes it possible that, most of the Drupal-native extensions (modules) could be integrated into Prosepoint as well. Built on Drupal, Prosepoint directly inherits all its features and advantages. Security, search engine friendliness and scalability being some of the prominent features, Prosepoint is undoubtedly on the right platform.


A tight Zoom into the Technicality

The following screenshot shows the interesting areas of a ProsePoint web page.



Channels
ProsePoint uses the concept of Channels to categorize editions and stories sharing a common topic or feature. A dedicated page for Sports, Business or Current Affairs, are all examples of a channel. In a different angle, Channel is nothing but a placeholder for Editions.

Edition
An edition is a specific issue or version of a Channel. It is an aggregation of individual contents like Stories, Images or Advertisements. ‘Business on 12-01-2009’ shall be taken as example of an edition. A Channel may hold several Editions, but the Edition which is chronologically current is shown up as latest.

Story
A story is a piece of content. It could be anything like News articles, Press releases, Site announcements and informal blog-like entries etc. Stories are the building blocks of Editions.

Chaining them together
Making sense out of these technical jargons is simple. Several hand-picked Stories or News articles are aggregated into Editions, and Editions are made to show up in a Channel. This is the basic scenario of Prosepoint Newspaper Content Management System.


System Requirements

The minimum server configuration you would require to install and run Prosepoint is :


Apache 2.0.x or 2.2.x with mod_rewrite extension enabled. MySQL 5.x PHP 5.2 or higher
As of writing, the latest version of ProsePoint is ProsePoint 0.20. You may download the latest version at this link : http://www.prosepoint.org/

Tags: Prosepoint | Newspaper | CMS | Open source | Drupal

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25th April 2009 saw the much awaited launch of digital marketing & advertising expertise of Aufait Technologies under a new brand Greenlemon. The event took place at Kadavu Resorts, witnessed by prominent business dignitaries in the region. The event was inaugurated by the Hon. Minister of Industries Mr. Elamaram Kareem, which ended with a relishing and sumptuous dinner at Kadavu cuisine.

With its regional offices located in Calicut-Kerala, India, and Dubai, UAE, Greenlemon will provide end to end online marketing solution to small and medium companies worldwide. Greenlemon's range of services include online advertising, digital marketing & branding, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, B2B solutions, web design, consulting and web strategy solutions.

At the event, Dr. Anandakuttan B. Unnithan, Professor, IIM Kozhikode gave his valuable insights on leveraging internet as a marketing medium for small and medium businesses. Digital marketing is the buzz of today's business world. With more users seeking information and relying on the internet for various personal and commercial needs, the scope and reach of internet as a marketing channel is far beyond predictable for even diverse demographics. And with the financial recession gripping the world economy, businesses have come to realise the potential of internet as a far reaching and cost effective marketing medium. 

Greenlemon has already put its first foot forward with the client “Jai Ho-A.R. Rahman Live in Concert” organized by Keraleeyam to be held on May 3, handling online publicity and advertising for the mega event. The professional and enthusiastic skill set at Greenlemon is all set to add spark to the marketing efforts of global businesses in meeting its strategic objectives.

Tags: Greenlemon launch | Greenlemon | Inaugral event | Calicut events | events

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Everybody wants to make it to the top of SERP, with so much effort, time and dedication invested to make it happen. But you either keep the search engines or the humans from coming to your website. Optimization begins from your website, from the most trivial (seemingly) factors, before you move for the social media and link building campaign. There are a few things you need to ensure before you leap to getting your website out to others, out to search engines. Are your web pages well optimized? For the search engines? For the humans? Check out a few important factors.




Keyword(s) / Phrases

A keyword is one that best describes your page. Aptly you must choose keyword phrases so that you are neither being very specific nor too broad. The one you choose must be on the grounds of an extensive research so that you get relevant and targeted traffic to your website. Don't bombard your web page with any number of keyword phrases you wish like. Concentrate on just a couple of them used in different variations. This is the most important step towards optimizing your web pages for the search engines.



Meta Tags

While the major search engines like Google do not consider the keyword meta tags for search engine relevance, the others do, including Yahoo. So you may as well want to use meta tags in optimizing your web pages not wanting to miss out the share from smaller search engines. Importantly, do not stuff keywords in the meta tag. Use a distinct list of keywords that relate to the specific page on your website instead of using one broad set of keywords for every page. Meta descriptions should also be optimized to be unique to each page aptly describing the page content and using the targeted keywords. Google and Yahoo use meta description to display as snippets in the search engine results. Description should be ideally less than 200 characters. Even if you extended it to be so lengthy to stuff in the keywords, the search engines are only going to display a limited number of characters.



Alt Text

To fully optimize your web pages with graphics, use relevant and appropriate keywords as the alt text. I would suggest you read my blog on alt text optimization where I have explained the subject.



Title Tags and Headers

For a well optimized web page with effective page title, it should be carrying relevant and targeted keywords/phrases of not more than 65 characters. Circumstances being permissive, avoid non-indexing filler words such as an, and, the etc. Likewise, the page heading tags used to separate the topics, should carry the most important keyword phrase. Though not all search engines place relevance on header tags, some do and it's well worth the effort.



Body Text

Your web page should contain a good amount of text with each of your targeted keywords/phrases distributed appropriately. The keyword density is ideally kept at 3-5% (no hard and fast rules as long as you follow a sound judgement and do not spam). While it's a known fact that keyword frequency adds relevance to search engines, it shouldn't be spammed. The keywords/phrases should be integrated to fit into the context with the right frequency and prominence given. Prominence is best given at the start of a web page, sentence, title etc.



Content Positioning

Search engines read your web pages just as how we humans do; from top left to bottom right on a general case. The content to the top of the page receives more prominence and weightage from the spiders compared to the text towards the bottom. And that's just why it is advisable to shift less important content, say, certain navigational links from the sidebar menu, to the bottom of your web page only to add space to your more relevant content that you want your spiders to see first.



Website Architecture

Following that the spiders read the content from top left to bottom right, the website architecture should be one that stands compatible to the same. You do not want your spiders to read all those links and resources first that you've placed on the left column and then come back to reading your main content to the right only to lose the prominence of your content keywords. Shift your side column to the right, if appropriate, or make any other changes to your website architecture and get the spiders to reading more important ones first. Be smart at designing your website.



Set the Navigations Right

Be careful with the navigation URLs. It helps the search engines and real users alike. Make sure the links on your web pages use the keywords that are mapped to them. Use the keywords/phrases of the linking page in the anchor text as well. Use breadcrumbs to add to the ease and user friendly experience of the visitor. Breadcrumbs facilitate easy navigation throughout your website and aids movement between different levels of pages within the website.



Sitemaps

Sitemaps help Search Engine Saturation. Sitemaps are of two types: one which is created within a website (.html) and the other is Google sitemap (.xml). The .html page sitemap will have only the links of all the inner pages of the website listed. The xml based sitemap can be generated using an online sitemap generating tool. Sitemaps are especially useful when you have a large website and want to guide the search bots.




Above all, do not get so much obsessed with the above factors while optimizing your web pages. While onpage optimization may not bring dramatic results to your ranking, it is defenitely the first step forward in ensuring a successful online visibility. Each search engine is different and has different sets of guidelines in helping you rank well. The guidelines are of course not static; so you may want to keep up with them. While this may be difficult, the best advise is to optimize your web pages ethically and to the best of your ability. Once you're confident you meet the general guidelines of optimizing web pages, you are ready to mark your go on the big front. Again, remember, moderation is the key to SEO. Do not forget that all your efforts are to get the real people to your website and search engine is only being used as the medium. So be real. You are presenting yourself to real humans.

Tags: Website Optimization | Web Page Optimization | SEO | Search Engine Optimization

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