Press Publisher - Magazine Publishing Software

As publishers, we are all familiar with the importance of advertising: traditionally, the companies who paid to put their name in a periodical were the main way to cover publication costs. The Internet’s changed that by reducing the costs and increasing relative revenue. But do online publishers still need to do the leg-work to find advertisers? And is it worth it?

In the last blog entry, we mentioned that online advertising expenditure has overtaken its television equivalent. This isn’t a passing trend – it was reported by Spiegel-Online for the United States in 2008 and this year by the IAB for the United Kingdom (along with several other, smaller economies in the interim). Those figures have yet to surpass the spending on print advertising, which means that – as an online publisher – you benefit from the best of both worlds.

That answers the second of our opening questions: is it worth it? The figures show there’s an enormous amount of money circulating in the virtual world – and some of it could be headed to your bank account if you include ads on your site.

But what about the leg-work? Thankfully, the big advertisers make it very easy to place banners or ad blocks on the published page. Systems like Google’s Ad Manager - which not only links to AdSense, as one would expect, but to other providers as well – give you the tools to simply decide where you would like the ads to appear, and leave the rest to them.

The advantage of this is that the provider will find appropriate clients and feed their adverts to your site. Their systems analyze your page content and figure out what subjects you cover, then match those with keywords the advertisers use. Only those ads that match will be sent to your site and, for every click, some extra revenue comes your way.

Combine this with PressPublisher’s built-in support and it couldn’t be easier. If you’d like to start including some advertising on your publications, we suggest starting with the three video tutorials available from the home page (or follow these links to Part 1 and Part 2 for banners, and Part 3 for blocks).

We heard the cries and we now have a new text editor.  The main issue that we were facing with the previous on is the usage on FireFox and Copy/Pasting from MS Word.  The Paste From Word feature only worked in Internet Explorer. This meant when you copy and pasted from MS Word in FireFox, along came a nightmare of ridiculous code that only a Microsoft application could produce.  Don’t get me wrong, I use MS Word, but the code still produced major, ongoing formatting problems for users.

After trying dozens of different WYSIWYG text editors, we finally chose an open source application.  This was not just about cost.  The previous text editor not open source and required a license to use.  We wanted a simple, efficient and versatile application that would integrated well with our application.

So, all users should now keep this in mind when copy and pasting from MS Word.  There is a new Icon in the Text Editor, it looks like  a little “Broom”  This will “Clean” the code that is pasted into the editor.  You will first HIGHLIGHT ALL THE TEXT in the editor and then click the “Broom Icon” or “Clean HTML” Icon. The next screen will look like this below and give you several options (you can just leave the default check boxes as they are).  Just click OK and you are done.  This will clean up the text/html and you will see perfect results in both Internet Explorer and FireFox. Enjoy!