At an all-hands meeting for the Yahoo product team following a round of layoffs yesterday that significantly impacted that group, EVP of Americas Ross Levinsohn and Chief Product Officer Blake Irving announced plans to “sunset” eight products and consolidate others.

Products to be shut down include MyBlogLog, Yahoo Picks, AltaVista, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz and Delicious. Some of those came from acquisitions and others were internally generated.

The news first came out via a screenshot of the webcast posted on Twitter by Eric Marcoullier that includes a slide with a list of impacted products next to an image of Levinsohn and Irving announcing the news. Marcoullier was founder of MyBlogLog, which created one of the products being shut down. (MyBlogLog was bought by Yahoo in 2007 and pretty much neglected ever since.)

The slide also shows plans to merge additional products, including Fire Eagle and Yahoo People Search, and make features out of many others, including Yahoo Alerts and Yahoo Calendar. (If you have better eyes than I, please help identify some of those logos in the comments.)

Marcoullier is no longer at Yahoo, though the validity of his webcast screenshot was confirmed when he was quickly criticized on Twitter by various current Yahoo employees who didn’t appreciate it getting out, including Irving himself. Irving insinuated he would fire whoever leaked the webcast.

While the layoffs and shutdowns obviously indicate a deemphasis of technology products by Yahoo, they aren’t necessarily unwarranted. Some of these products were the same as those mentioned on then-SVP Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter Memo way back in 2006 as candidates for streamlining.

The web has seen massive changes in the past few years from new technology, social networking sites, blogging, RSS feeds, and more.  Along with these new innovations, new design trends have been popping up.  One of the most notable trends is the web 2.0 style where designs were friendly, inviting, clean, yet filled with personality.

It’s now 2010 and it’s time to change your old web design and suit your websites up with new designs.  There are many trends that have started and are completely different from the designs many of us are used to.  In fact, many of these designs go against the grain of conventional design templates where the whole point was to focus on the message and the message alone.  Now there is growing trend on focusing on the overall presentation.

As a designer and marketer, it’s important to try new designs, approach your business from a different angle, and stay creative.  This allows you to find things that surprisingly work even though you wouldn’t have imagined that it would make such an impact.

So here are some new web design trends of 2010 that you can try out

1. More White Space – Most websites on the Internet try to make use of every single space that’s available on the page.  There’s the left hand navigation bar, the right hand navigation bar, the footer, the header, and of course the main content.

But many websites are now taking another approach.  They are trying to put in more white space and focusing on their main message.  It’s a great way to get your visitors to relax and listen to what you’re trying to say.

It’s easy on the eyes and also gives your visitor the opportunity to learn more.

2. Big Header or Leading Images – Images definitely stand out more than words.  While it’s your words that help you communicate with your visitors, the images allow the viewer to really take in the whole experience.

They can immediately get what kind of idea you’re trying to present to them and it will help them focus in on finding what they’re looking for on your site.

3. The Magazine Layout – All of us are used to reading magazines.  They’re filled with interesting articles with beautiful images, lots of sub headings, and lots of quotations set under a sleek, glossy page.  Many websites are using the magazine approach to present their content.

Since we are accustomed to the magazine layout, it is more inviting to read and dig into the content and website.  The format also stands out from the other websites devoted to delivering content in the standard format.

4. Social Media Sites and Icons – By now, all your favorite blogs and content sites have icons where you can follow them on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and MySpace.  Although most of us are already familiar with this trend, it’s still becoming more popular.  Many more sites are adding social media sites and icons to help connect with their readers.

It’s not uncommon to see icons that allow you to digg content, subscribe to RSS feeds, add them to your social bookmarking profile, and more.  There are even icons to add them to sites that are not as popular as the big social networking sites we’re familiar with.

5. Big Introduction Blocks – Rather than leave the visitors to figure out what you’re about, why not tell them in one big paragraph?  That is what many websites are doing.  They either state what their site is about or what kind of services they offer in a few short sentences in the header or right below the header.

If you’ve gotten a lot of criticism from your visitors about not being able to figure out what you’re about, then maybe it’s time you try this web design format to see how it works.

6. Hand Drawn Style Illustrations and Sketches – These types of graphics really stand out and catch attention.  Your visitors will really appreciate the artwork and it will set you apart from every other site in your industry.

7. Websites Designed for Mobile Phones – Smart phones are becoming more and more popular.  So it’s important for you to make sure that your site is compatible for smart phones to cater to your demographic that use these phones to browse the Internet.

This will give you another way to connect with your visitors and build a relationship with them.  It will also help you stand out in your industry if competing websites are not designing their sites for compatibility with smart phones.

These are some of the web design trends of 2010.  Try incorporating several of the ideas to your website to see if it works with your site and audience.  You might even be astonished at the results .

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Since Twitter has taken the world by storm over the past few years, both for personal and business usage, there is now an abundance of Twitter tools that are available to help you get even more from the service.

With the help of many of these great tools and services you’ll be more productive and efficient and you’ll be able to connect with your followers in any number of new ways.

Here are the 10 most useful Twitter tools to add to your collection:

1. TweetDeck – TweetDeck is the best of the best as far as Twitter tools go. You can install it on your desktop, iPhone or iPad, and what it does is display all of the most recent posts by all of the people you follow. You can also have these sorted by @ replies to you, direct messages, search terms and a variety of other features and functions as well, making your Twitter time far more productive and efficient.

2. Twhirl – Twhirl is a Twitter tool that is continuing to grow more powerful and capable as it intergrates with more services. A desktop client based on Adobe AIR software, this service alerts you to new Tweets, lets you monitor for replies to our account and also lets you search for specific terms, connect to multiple accounts and more. Post and share photos and videos, cross post on multiple platforms, shorten URLs and more.

3. CoTweet – CoTweet is another all-in-one Twitter tool that provides a huge range of different services. It’s perfect for the business with a strong social media presence, because you can manage six accounts at once. You can also tag certain messages or Tweets to be followed up with, you can schedule posts, track and view old conversation history, monitor keywords and trends and more.

4. Tweet Later – renamed Socialoomph, is a great tool for scheduling and planning Tweets so that you can go out of town and not worry about inactivity. Or you can plan all of your Tweets for a week or two and then not have to worry about it all the time, each day. You’ll be able to hook it up with RSS feeds from your blog, monitor for keyword alerts, automatically reply to messages and new followers and much more.

5. TwitterFeed -  is one of the Twitter tools that will help you share your blog and website content automatically with followers, free of charge. You can set it up with an RSS feed or multiple feeds and then have your post directly Tweeted, with a set of controls and specifications that you can adjust to your liking in terms of frequency, text and more.

6. TwitterHawk – this is the perfect tool for a local business looking to gain a quick and effective presence. Instead of trying to reach everyone across the world, this tool will help you quickly narrow down to a local group of people and those who are already talking about a specific message, and reach out to them directly and efficiently.

7. TweetScan – TweetScan is a very simple and easy to work with tool that lets you monitor for a variety of terms, keywords and phrases. Anytime they pop up in a new Tweet, you get an email alert about it, so you always immediately know when somebody mentions your company, website or new product for example.

8. GroupTweet – GroupTweet is a great tool for Twitter, particularly for marketers with a variety of different clients. You can create private groups where Tweets are only distributed to the group members, which is really handy. Additionall, you can create groups and have direct messages shared as Tweets to all in the group, which is great for business discussions and other uses as well.

9. Twittercal – This is a very simple and easy to use Twitter tool that will enable you to hook it up to your Google Calendar. Now you can add events from Twitter to your calendar and display and be reminded of others that are already marked down and saved.

10. Tweetburner – Tweetburner is a great link shortening tool that will also help you track all of the data for your links and clicks. It’s a great way to keep track of all of your links and to see what methods are working the best, what gets the most clicks and where you can improve. The service website also shows you the most popular links that have been sent out recently for anybody.

WordPress is quite the impressive and simplistic CMS. Whether you’re just a blogger or an entrepreneur with a startup looking to extend your site’s functionality, everyone can benefit from WordPress and its available plugins. You can find plugins that will allow auto updates to your Twitter accounts, your Facebook fan pages and even implement an account such as Feed Burner which automatically emails new posts to reader’s email accounts. Staying ahead of the game, Salesforce has recently released a plug-in that can add great functionality to your business’s contact form.

Even though a contact form is what people generally install into their WordPress blogs, the capabilities of WordPress-to-lead will totally knock your old contact form out of the water. You can not only gather the information, but it actually puts it into the Salesforce CRM (that works hand-in-hand with it) so you don’t have to copy and paste it yourself. In true WordPress fashion, you just need to install the plugin, activate it, and start basking in its glory.

WordPress-to-lead

The typical contact form works in such a way that the user will fill out the information- and it will then get sent to your inbox. What WordPress-to-lead can do for you, when integrated with the Salesforce CRM, is pull data right out of the contact forms- allowing you to track all interactions, sync with Yahoo!, Gmail, Outlook and many others, as well as organize all your contacts and lead information in one place. With the functionality of the plugin, you will no longer need to go through the extra step from inbox to CRM in order to keep track of your leads.

All Things CRM talks with a colleague who inspired this particular plugin. He speaks about what he finds to be a problem with the average contact form-to-email system.

“When I was researching contact form plugins for my WordPress site, I uncovered a laundry list of choices, such as cforms II, Contact Form 7, Enhanced WP Contact Form, SimpleModal Contact Form, Clean Contact, the list goes on… I installed at least 5 of them. A lot of them didn’t work, actually, it was more like I couldn’t get them to work – I’m not a WordPress developer.

But the thing that annoyed me the most is that I couldn’t keep track of all the messages coming from my website. I get so much spam, so important consulting inquiries would get buried in my inbox. I asked myself, surely there’s got to be a WordPress CRM plugin?”

It’s pretty amazing that this one plugin, combined with Salesforce, can take care of all your business leads without you lifting a finger. You won’t have to worry about losing your contact forms in spam (which happens to me all the time) and it even cuts out some time when organizing and entering customers and leads into your CRM.

If you’re curious about seeing WordPress-to-lead in action, you can watch the following video:

WordPress-to-lead

If you’re interested in trying this out, you can sign up for a Salesforce CRM free trial to familiarize yourself and take advantage of this great plugin.

Social media websites are ones such as StumbleUpon and Digg that can send considerable amounts of traffic to your site. A front page on Digg, for example, could result in as much as 20-30 thousand people coming to your site in the matter of a day or two. StumbleUpon can send thousands of hits over the course of a few weeks and then continue sending people for the duration of your website. However, the problem many people have is that they don’t understand how to leverage that traffic to really result in the growth of your site. All of those people coming to your site is great, but if you don’t somehow convince them to come back, they’re not going to ever return.

The first way to ensure that the traffic becomes consistent traffic is to ensure that the content that they are viewing is good content. If the content isn’t good, why would anyone want to stick around? Imagine if you were the reader. If you are going to devote a portion of your day to reading that article, don’t you want the article to actually be good? Therefore, make sure that you give your readers something that is honestly important and provides some information.

Now that they have stayed on the site long enough to read the article, give them ways to subscribe to the site. Whether that means that they sign up for an account on the site or signs up to some sort of a RSS feed is entirely up to you. However, the more ways you offer, the better. For example, give them the chance to follow you on Twitter, to subscribe to your RSS feed and also to sign up for your newsletter. The more ways that they can get a reminder that you exist, the more likely this social media traffic is going to turn into consistent traffic.

Open up a method in which they can comment on the content that you publish. By allowing them to comment, suddenly they are given another reason to come back to their even if it is as basic as the selfish reason of wanting a reply. They’ll come back often to check and see if someone replied to their comment. Give them a reason to check back. Reply to their comment. Try and find something to say other than, “Thanks for the comment.” Really provide some information that they will want to reply back to.

Social media is a fantastic method in which you can get traffic to your site. However, the biggest mistake that people make is they don’t convert that traffic into consistent traffic. With thousands of people coming to your site, getting even some of them to become consistent traffic is a great way to really develop your site. The more methods you give them to be reminded of your site, the more successful you’re going to be.