Featured Website: Six 10 Building
- Friday, March 27, 2009
For the design of six10building.com the client wanted a clean modern design to showcase their 3D renderings. The site also features a flash intro.
Featured Website: Rentprovo.com
-
RentProvo.com is a vacation rental website for booking a rental property in the Turks and Caicos Islands. The website features database driven advertising module with credit card processing.
Great SEOMoz Video About Getting Awesome Links
- Sunday, March 22, 2009
I found this video to be a nice concise explanation of how to get some good links. This also applies to small business websites.
E. Sue Huff & Associates, Inc. selected to Coordinate Nationally Recognized FastTrac™ Summer Program for Southwest Florida
(March 12, 2009 – Naples, Florida) Sue Huff, owner of E. Sue Huff & Associates, Inc., a marketing and management consulting firm located in Naples, Florida, has been selected as the coordinator for the FastTrac™ Growth Venture summer program. Huff founded her consulting firm in 1996, after gaining extensive business experience through work in management, offset printing, newspapers, advertising, and the visual arts. E. Sue Huff & Associates assists small to mid-size businesses in developing, administering, and planning their marketing strategies, as well as, providing gap management services for those companies who find themselves with too few senior managers. The firm’s clients vary from computer software developers, aviation repair stations, banks, real estate, transportation, medical and accounting practices to educational, governmental and non-profit organizations.
Huff says, “We are honored to be chosen to help market and coordinate such an important educational opportunity for business owners. This program specifically targets entrepreneurs who have experience running their businesses. In this tough economic atmosphere, it is a privilege to offer them a framework to improve the performance of their business.”
FastTrac Growth Venture® is a ten-week, three hour per week opportunity to focus on improving and growing all aspects of a participant’s business. In today’s economy where many businesses are facing financial difficulties, the program offers guidance on ways to focus, bootstrap, plan and strategize to improve profits and grow sales.
The summer program begins on Monday, June 8th at the Hyatt Place in Bonita Springs. This season is being sponsored by KeyBank and BriersCPA. Two people from the same business may attend for a single tuition of $650. Fifty percent scholarships are available to anyone making the request. FastTrac has graduated 650 businesses in this area and 300,000 nationwide. For additional information, interested parties may contact Sue Huff at 239-596-7990 or master facilitator, Dr. Beth Hagan at 239-947-8085 or online at Visit www.FastTrac.org and www.FastTracOfFlorida.com. The FastTrac Growth Venture Program® is an initiative of the nationally recognized Kauffman Foundation. Ewing Kauffman, the late entrepreneur and philanthropist, established the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation as the first foundation to focus on entrepreneurship as one of its primary areas of interest. The foundation is devoted to advancing entrepreneurship by focusing on research, education, technical assistance, and policy. It’s goal is to increase the number and success rate of individuals engaged in the process of starting or growing their own business or idea. The Foundation is based in Kansas City, Mo. and has around $2 billion in assets. For more information, visit: www.kauffman.org. For more information about E. Sue Huff & Associates, Inc., visit online at www.esuehuff.com or call 239-596-7790. -end-
Blogger Is Broken Ugh
-
So I woke up this morning to my home page being down. I have a script that reads my rss.xml from blogger and displays links to five of the latest posts. For some reason blogger is generating empty xml files. So I've commented out my code for now and put a straight link to my blog. Meanwhile I've found a bunch of blog posts about this and so I am definitely not the only one having the problem.
Just in case you are having the same problem here are what some people have found out. Google is still working on it.
I guess I really should stop being lazy and get my Wordpress blog off the ground. I just don't have a lot of time for my own little projects right now. Oh well hopefully it will be fixed soon.
Symantec Warns of Worm's Return
- Monday, March 9, 2009
A third version of Downadup has been identified by Symantec, which says the new variant gives infected machines more powerful instructions to disable antivirus software and analysis tools, among other actions.
Five Super Simple Link Baiting Steps for Mom and Pop
-
I have decided to start writing some super simple and short guides for mom and pop. Mainly since the vast majority of the SEO blogs out there are addressing people in the web development & SEO business.
First, since this article is for mom and pop, let me define Link Bait. Link Bait is any content on your website that is so useful that other websites link to it. As you probably know (or maybe you don’t), links from other websites help with search engine rankings. So how does a local small business develop content that others will want to link to? Here is just one simple strategy.
1. Start a Blog (visit blogger.com for a super simple and FREE place to do this). The blog audience doesn’t always have to be your potential customers. In addition to customer focused posts, I suggest blogging about topics your colleagues might be interested in too. Maybe you are in the printing business and you write an article aimed at other printing businesses. For example, this could be a top 10 list of favorite tools. Maybe there is a printing business in another town that finds the article useful and they mention your blog post on THEIR blog and they link back to your post. That is a link. Not only is that a link. It is a link from another printing business which is even better, because it is on topic.
2. Identify Your Linkerati (audience from whom you would like a link). Let me define that term for mom and pop. Linkerati = potential linkers. So in the example mentioned in #1 the linkerati would be other printing businesses. Whoever your linkerati turns out to be, that is who you need to write for at least some of the time. Not every blog post is Link Bait. You will still write for your current customers, potential customers, the community at large and now your linkerati.
3. Join Twitter.com Start following colleagues in your industry. You can find them by going to Twellow.com which is an organized directory of twitter profiles. Hopefully they will follow you back. Have meaningful conversations with them. This can’t just be about spamming them with blog posts. Setup your blog to post to your twitter automatically using the easy and free tool offered at twitterfeed.com. There are similar tools for other social networks.
4. Join a Few Message Boards and Social Networks These would be communities where your linkerati hang out. Again the interaction here should be genuine. Some social networks allow you to feed your blog posts to your profile. For message boards you can include your blog link in your signature. Let me caution you that this can be a tremendous time waster if you are not methodical. Join just a handful of communities that you genuinely want to participate in related to your industry. Then once a day or every other day, visit and participate for a set amount of time (or else you will find yourself compulsively being there all day). Again, the goal here is not to spam them with your blog posts, but to network with others in your industry and in the process you can make them aware of your blog and any good posts that you write.
5. DIGG.com, StumbleUpon.com, Del.icio.us and Reddit.com These are all places to submit to that can potentially get your post in front of the people who might link to it. If your post is really good, it will be voted up and more people will see it. The people who see it who find it useful will talk about it in their own blogs and link back.
That’s it for now. I’m hoping to keep doing these super simple and short guides for mom and pop in the future.
Google taught my kid to read. Can I hire her now?
- Sunday, March 8, 2009
My daughter taught herself to read using Google at roughly 3.5 years of age. I noticed she would search for the few sight words she knew and then find them on the page of results. She would click through the websites shown in the results one by one until she found what she was looking for (usually pictures of dogs). She continued to improve her repertoire of sight words that way and eventually was actually reading and comprehending the content she would pull up. Later, at about 5 years of age, she started searching for information about her favorite video game, Petz 5, and read tutorials on how to download and install hacks to customize her Petz. She started using paint to draw new background scenes for the game and would browse to the appropriate program files and deploy the design. She is 7 now and has at least 10 blogs, regularly creates and edits her own videos and continues to research via Google. She's passionate about the computer much the way her father and I are.
So the question is do I continue to foster that by giving her some of my real design projects? Certainly, she can batch resize a group of photographs in Photoshop or enter new products into a shopping cart. I suppose one could look at it this way: This is our family business. She is expected to contribute to the family by doing chores whether it is washing dishes or writing a SQL stored procedure (wishful thinking!). Many kids (usually older) work in their family business. I suppose this is no different and she would love the chores assigned to her.
There is also the question of balance. Lately hubby and I have made it our mission to get our entire family outdoors more and to enjoy low-tech activities such as camping. My daughter enjoyed a short stint taking dance classes, but found it wasn't her thing. She is also enjoying girl scouts. Maybe she is on the computer enough and needs to broaden her horizons. It is really a tough call. I don’t want to squelch her natural passion for technology, but I want her to learn balance.
Alternatives to Photoshop
-
I had a client recently ask me if I knew of other programs she could use besides Photoshop. The biggest drawback to Photoshop is the price and learning curve. Many of my clients have a need to resize and save their photographs for use on the web. I came across this post by Daniel Shain this morning on Six Revisions:
Featured Website: NaplesBayResortVacation.com
- Wednesday, March 4, 2009
One of our favorite web design clients, Todd Kendall, had us build this website for his Naples Bay Resort rental condominium. He wanted the website to really capture the essence of Naples Bay Resort's many amenities while showcasing his unit's unique features and what sets it apart from the standard units there.
Our Web Design Process
- Tuesday, March 3, 2009
When you hire IntegrityNETworx this is how you can expect your web design project to go:
1. Initial Telephone Call and In-Person Consultation The initial consultation may be held at our office or on the telephone and this is when we will discuss the details of your web design project in order for us to give you a quote or formal proposal. For this conversation you will want to think about the pages and functionality that your website will have. The size and complexity of the website determine how many hours will be required to build it. We need to understand in as much detail as possible how the website will function so we can give you an accurate quote. Generally our first conversation will be done over the telephone and we will give you a rough estimate based on that conversation. This is to let you know what a starting point might be for the website cost. If that is within your desired range then we will usually setup an in-person meeting at our office to explore the details further.
2. Formal Proposal We will prepare a proposal based the project described in our Initial Consultation. The proposal will list all of the pages and functionality to be built. The payment schedule and project timeline will be listed in the project. We require an initial deposit and a signed proposal in order to move forward.
3. Design Consultation The design consultation is where we discuss colors and layout. Ideally you will come to our office prepared with a list of websites you like, any advertising and branding materials that you currently use and any other ideas you may have about color and layout.
4. Mockup Design After the design consultation, the first week of the project is spent creating a mockup design. A mockup design is a picture of a proposed web page template for your website. You will give us feedback so that the mockup can be revised to your liking. When you are satisfied with the mockup design we will use it to build the HTML template. We will ask you to sign-off on the mockup giving us final approval of the design. It is important that all major layout revisions are done DURING the mockup revision process instead of later on in the project.
5. HTML Template When you have approved the mockup design we will slice it up and build an HTML template. This template will be duplicated to build pages for your website.
6. Temporary Link You will now receive a temporary link that will enable you to watch the progress of your web design project.
7. Content At this point you will want to begin providing us with content (text, photographs and documents that will be used to build the pages of your website). We will begin creating your static web pages from content you provide.
8. Programming We will also begin working on any programming that is required by your project. Programming is used anytime there is special functionality required such as a shopping cart, updateable pages and password protected areas etc. We will continuously show your progress and ask for feedback as we complete various sections of the website.
9. Punch Out Near the end of the project we like to have the client go through the website page by page and provide us with a punch-out list of things to fix. We will complete these items prior to the website launch.
10. Training If your website contains special functionality such as an administrative backend, we will train you either in-person or remotely (depending on the project). During this training we will demonstrate how all of the functionality operates and how you will use it to maintain your website.
11. Website Launch At this point we will point your domain to our web server and in 24 to 72 hours the website will be launched. If you owned your domain name prior to hiring us, you will need to provide us with the registrar username and password so that we can login and change the nameservers. Once the nameservers are changed it takes 24 to 72 hours for the new dns information to propogate around the world.
