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June 09, 2008
So we are giving Chitika a try. This is a company that has had a lot of success with their "mini-malls" and is now branching out and geting into more kinds of web advertising. Currently on our main site(s) we run a mix of Google AdSense ads, banners from Travel Ad Network, and now we are throwing some of this Chitika | Premium in to see how it performs. They describe this new program as:
"A smart, personalized targeting ad solution that provides premium content. This ad unit is CPC and is designed to be your highest performing ad unit (eCPM)."
 Basecamp - we use it.. We love it. I don't know how we would manage the few clients we have without it. What is it? I would call it a project collaboration system. Why is it good? It's web based, it's inexpensive, it works, it's simple, it makes us more productive, it makes us look more professional. It lets you share ideas, files, notes, messages, etc. with your clients. It has RSS feeds and built in chat. It JUST WORKS! Check it out.
May 20, 2008
Does Network Solutions "Front Run" domain names? Yes - they did it to me recently. I searched for a domain for client, using the Network Solutions site out of habit. A couple of days later, when the client indicated they did want the name, I tried to register it at GoDaddy, but it was listed as taken. I was sort of shocked, because the name was very specific to their business and contained many dashes "-".
So I went back to Network Solutions, and there I was able to register the name - at three times the price. I think this practice is wrong on a lot of levels, but the main one is that contrary to what Netsol CEO Champ Mitchell is saying to the media lately ("After the search ends, we will put the domain name on reserve. During this reservation period, the name is not active. If a customer searches for the domain again during the next four days at networksolutions.com, the domain will be available to register. If the domain name is not purchased within four days, it will be released back to the registry and will be generally available for registration."), it is bad for the consumer. Their pricing is prohibitive to other registrars, and just because someone searched on a name, doesn't mean it should be temporarily taken off the market, in effect giving Netsol a monopoly on that name for several days. This issue needs to be addressed by ICANN or someone who has the regulatory powers to ban such practices.
May 16, 2008
Wow - sort of surprising to see a generic Apache error page from someone like PayPal:
This was about 5:30 AM EST - I guess they are working on something.
March 17, 2008
 We finally finished a new website for Coral World St. Thomas. This was a difficult project - the client had a strong sense of what they wanted the site to look like, and a lot of time was spent making their vision fit into the new site. Once the look and feel were decided upon, we finalized a template and were able to make it work with the existing content. There are still tables at use, but we used as much CSS as we felt comfortable with. It looks great across all browsers and platforms. The most important thing on our end was that it delivered a brand new CMS (the whole site is built on Movable Type) system to the client. It is always bittersweet doing a job like this for an established client - we gain a one time design job, but then lose on the recurring revenue of maintenance work - but - honestly, who wants to copy and paste Word docs into new HTML, hand code links, and maintain a site map? We also gave them a lot of new functionality (posting new articles/press releases, email alerts, site search, automated site map, RSS feed) that was mostly made possible by using MT, as well as a couple of small touches (like the favorite icon) that I really like and think are important and give the site some polish.
February 14, 2008
We use the Google calendar on some of our sites and for clients - it is easy, can be remotely managed by various users, has an RSS feed and myriads of other options. We had an issue that seemed simple enough (displaying events in chronological or date order) but had a tough time finding help on. So here is the answer: in the feed URL, after /public/basic append ?orderby=starttime&sortorder=ascending&futureevents=true&singleevents=true
This will then order things by date (be default they display in the order entered - which doesn't make much sense to me). We use this currently in a couple of spots, like the course calendar for the Cordon Bleu cooking school of Florece, and our own Virgin Islands On Line member travel calendar. This is used in conjunction with FeedBurner (another highly recommended free service) and their BuzzBoost feature. Give it a try -
January 23, 2008
 We really believe in leveraging third party (read FREE) tools into our projects. Google is really great at providing applications that can be integrated with websites - like their calendar. As we develop the new site for the Cordon Bleu Cooking School of Florence (old site!), we are utilizing blogger.com, feedburner.com, and the Google Calendar. One issue we had was being able to display the daily course schedule in English and Italian to end users, but to have the admin(s) only maintain one calendar.
After some searching we found a post on the Google Calendar Help group that solved our problem: you can append to the end of the iframe tag (used to embed your calendar into an html page) a language parameter that will force the calendar to display in the specified language. The code is &hl=(2 letter code) - or for example for German the code would be: &hl=de There are also some additional variables.
Continue reading "Google Calendar published in different languages" »
January 19, 2008
 We finally have live a jewelry store we did for a client in Italy. The store is called The Gold Market, but unfortunately the URL is not the same - that name was hijacked sometime ago (the client had it registered but lost it - like millions of other small businesses have). You can find the site at: http://aurumitaliangold.com/.
We tried to do this job as inexpensively as we could for the client. I will try to give you an idea of what the means from a web designer/developers prospective.
First, since the client is in Italy, we had to find an e-commerce solution that would work with their banks, etc. I did a pretty thorough search and came to a lot of dead ends. I finally decided that Zen Cart could give us what we needed in a shopping cart (too much really) and decided to use PayPal for all forms of payment (Zen Cart has a pretty straight forward integration with Pay Pal).
One of the reasons I went with Zen Cart was that I found a pretty decent template for a jewelry store that I planned to adapt to fit our clients needs. In hindsight this may not have been the best way to start with Zen Cart - I may have learned more about their templates and page creation options, etc. if I started with their default template (which is so ugly though it may scare you away from the solution altogether).
Anyway - we ended up changing the template quite a bit. You can change most of the layout of the page from the control panel (where things show up, when they show, etc.) and you can change fonts, colors, and other elements from the style sheet. We now have a custom header in place, and have changed most of the colors.
The most time consuming part of this project was getting the photos of the jewelry. We went through a couple of fits and starts, and once we did finally get the images, we did spend some time doing some extra editing. Then you have to upload the images, put all the products info in, etc. Zen Cart handles this all pretty well - but it does take time when you create 50 new items.
So the site is now live, but we have yet to do any promotion. Depending on what the client wants to spend we will take some time to submit the URL to search engines, make some blog posts about it, and look for directories and other places where it is appropriate to list it. On their end they need to figure out who is going to be in charge of filling the orders!
This project came in at about $5,000 US. That included registering the domain and finding the host, installing the shopping cart, designing the cart and site, inventory upload, and PayPal integration. If you need an on-line shopping solution, give us a shout.
September 21, 2007
SEOmoz is a Seattle based search engine optimization company and online community that provides SEO, web marketing, web design and development services to companies around the world, and also serves as a community and educational resource for those in the search marketing industry.
They have a pretty cool page strength tool that every webmaster should probably check out from time to time. They use a proprietary blend of factors from publicly available sources (Yahoo!, Google, Alexa, etc.) to come up with an overall "Page Strength" score that shows you how "strong" your site is on the web.
June 08, 2007
Here is a pretty interesting discussion with some SEO pros. They all seem to admit to doing "shady" things from time to time - which I thought was pretty funny.
My advice is always to never do anything "black hat" - it just isn't worth it. If your business plan/model doesn't allow some time for natural search engine growth, and a marketing budget to get off the ground, then you probably need to rework it. I will be writing more soon with some specifics on what you can do to help a new site get found.
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