I’m meeting a client in a few minutes. They just called and let me know that they were running late.

So, here I am, sitting in CoolBeans with my espresso and Clapton playing in the background.

I’ve just shown 56 pictures of my granddaughter to the hostess, checked my email, updated my calendar and downloaded “I got a Rock and Roll Heart”, all on my “phone”. Remember when phones were attached to a wall with a six foot chain cord? If you were rich you had two, with the same number. As a kid we still had a party line out in the country. Talk about a lack of privacy.

If I finish this with time, I’m heading out to the web to read more reviews on the iPad. It looks like all of my magazines will be electronic before I know it and I can check them out in the coffee shop also.

As a web designer, I’ve seen all of this occur over a very short period of time and I’d be hard pressed to name the catalyst of it all on my own. But if asked I’d have to say running water.

My Grandfather was born in 1895, I asked him once what the greatest invention of his time was?  He said hot running water. He fought in World War I, delivered mail by a horse drawn cart, saw the advent of flight, moving pictures, radio, TV, man walking on the moon and Poptarts. But the most significant thing for him was running water.

As I’ve moved ahead in time I understand that better, he and his siblings carried water to the house from from a hand pump in all kinds of weather. Cooking and cleaning were tasks that took all day.

Baths were on Saturday, more water from the pump, heated over the wood stove and poured into a tub with the parents going first and the kids being last.

Did I mention that he was the 10th of 12 children?

Running water freed us up to focus on the inventions of the day. I admit electricity is a big part of the equation, but if you’ve ever cold shaved in the morning as the sun is coming up, you get the idea.

He passed away the same year that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak announced the Apple computer. The first usable “personal” computer. If I could ask him the same question today, the answer would be the same.

Today I’m sitting here contemplating the world from my phone, drinking espresso, and realizing that all of this would be a lot harder without hot running water.

So in honor of my Grandfather, “Here’s to the little things we take for granted.”

Recently I had a client ask why I’d stopped Blogging? I hadn’t realized that I had, but when I checked the dates on my last posts I discovered that I had.

If I was one of my customers, I would gently mention that this is a bad practice that needs to be addressed.

Even though I’ll claim the “cobbler’s children have no shoes” excuse, I’ve been working on client sites, and blogging for DiscoverAdel.com, the fact is that I forgot the readers of this blog.

You have my apologies, expect to see updates on a regular basis.

: )

Everyone has a site these days, from businesses, organizations to my sister-in-law’s vacation photos. I make a living building sites for these occasions and more.

When I introduce myself I’m always asked, “Do I really need a website?”. You’d think that my first response might be. “Yes, and I’d be happy to build you one!”  Although I would be happy to do it, the answer may not be yes.

I have a friend who builds fine furniture, no yellow page ads, no website, no business cards. He is booked three years ahead and has no desire to grow his business beyond what he does. All of his work is from word of mouth and reputation alone. Not your typical business, but one that wouldn’t benefit from a site since he has no desire to advertise or expand.

Another friend runs an auto repair business, he is is also booked months ahead, but he would like his customers to be able to find him, especially since 7 out of 10 people under the age of 40 do an online search before buying a product. He’d like to expand his operation as the business grows, but doesn’t have a lot of advertising budget. All of his business is at the shop, no need to have an online store at this time. A simple one page site, a billboard, fits his needs.

There are other options, such as a Robust site, an Online store, and a BLOG, but I’ll go into more details about those in future posts.

Back to the billboard site. His billboard site lists the company name, address, hours, email, phone, an interactive map, and a short detailed description of the business and his services. It’s also employs SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which means we’ve made it easier to be found by the Search engines. As  his business grows we can easily expand his site to fit  those needs.

So in answer to the original question, it depends, do you have all of the customers you want? Do you want to expand your business? If you answered Yes, then it’s a good chance that you need a site. One of the side benefits to a site is the fact that web marketing is one of the least expensive and most effective forms of advertising.

So, until next time, Happy Surfing!

As I promised in my last post, I said that I would cover the different types of sites and the benefits of each. Although there are many classifications, for our discussion they fall into four main groups.

Billboards – A Billboard site is a one page site that lists the company name, address, hours, email, phone, an interactive map, and a short detailed description of the business. It is the most basic online presence, similar to a business card.

Robust or Classic – Sometimes called a five page design, it is used to build on the online presence. The site normally includes a homepage, a services and products page, a contact page, an information page that may include pricing or rates. 

Blog - Unlike the above sites which are usually  static, a blog can have interactive content where users can post comments. They’re designed so that the site owner can update content such as, photos, text, and other information. They are very good at offering a personal touch and can be updated quickly. Due to their news like quality, they have a higher return rate than a static site. Many sites are built as a Robust site and have a link to a Blog to keep things current and interesting. 

Online Store – This can be a standalone site, but is usually incorporated into one of  the above sites. This is site or section that allows purchasing of items that can be shipped or downloaded. Payment options range from check, bank cards, credit cards, vouchers to PayPal accounts.

• Checks – These require that the customer purchases something, recieves an invoice, mails in the check, you wait for verification of funds, then have the item ships or is downloaded. usually a process that takes several weeks to complete.
• Bank or Credit Card - The purchaser pays for the item(s) at the time the item is selected. This requires a merchant account (from a bank or similar entity) that does a quick verification and then gives either an approval or a denial of the purchase. A small fee is required on every transaction.
• PayPal - Similar to a credit card, but is handled through PayPal. PayPal is connected to the customers bank and withdraws the money for the purchased item and then deposits the money into the seller’s account. The process is slightly slower than a credit card, but the fees are less than a credit card and are easier to set up.
• Voucher/Gift Card - The customer purchases from the site or a third part vendor a predetermined amount of credit that they can use as cash to buy from your site. The iTunes store is a good example of a voucher. Sometimes a voucher will allow a customer a discount on items since the money has already been paid up front. 

Most sites use a combination of the above since it allows for a greater number of purchases.

As you can see from the descriptions above and your own visits to the web, most sites are a combination of the above. Determining what type of a site is needed requires a good web designer will ask you:

• Who are you as a business or organization?
• What do you want the site to do?
• Who are your customers?
• Where you want to go?
• When do you want to get there. 
• Budget
• Do you have a site, if so, is it successful?

So I have a site, now what?

Your site has been up a month but is it really working? Unlike other forms of advertising, visits to your site and how long they stay and what they look at are all accurately obtained through stats that your web designer should provide you on a timely basis. These stats, also called Metrics, track a myriad of information that will help when streamlining your site. These stats combined with a good SEO strategy can greatly increase your visits and ultimately your sales.

SEO - Search engine optimization is simply the practice of making your website or blog more accessible to both search engines and search engine users; in other words, you’re making it easier for them to find you.

Why do I need it?

• 80 percent of all website traffic originates from the search engines, with the majority coming from a select few.
• 4.6 billion searches were conducted on the internet last month. 
• If your company has an online presence but doesn’t have top 10 on the major search engines for your targeted phrases then you’re losing money to your competition. 

An SEO specialist - They highlight your websites most valuable contents and help you find new customers through cutting-edge research and analysis. They refine everything to help make your site rank higher in a search engine result page. They consider many factors and tactical plans in order to obtain a higher ranking from the search engine spiders.

What is a Spider? – Spiders are robots that crawl web pages and rank your site. 

SEO is continually changing, but trackable - Statistics provide the number of site visits, the pages visited, the length of stay, where they came from, and what search phrase was used. I usually meet with the client 30 days after the site has launched and we go over the stats, review results, and answer any questions. We provide stats to our clients on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, dependent upon their need. This data is used to assess the effectiveness of the site and to troubleshoot any issues or weak spots. 

Things to avoid when using SEO:

• Lack of targeted Keywords and Phrases - When a searcher goes to a search engine or directory and types in a keyword or keyword phrase that you would like to be found for – but you don’t have these particular keywords and phrases on your site – then that searcher will most likely not be able to find you.
• Poorly written Content - Site content is the absolute number one draw for both search engine spiders and search engine/directory users. If your content is badly written, is never updated, or is not relevant to what you want to be found for, your site is neither search engine friendly or user-friendly. In addition, your content absolutely must have targeted keywords and phrases (see mistake number 1). Well-written content is what search engine spiders feed on, and content is the key to high rankings.
• Black Hat SEO Techniques - Black Hat web site optimization includes techniques that are unethical and frowned upon by search engine spiders. These techniques include keyword stuffing, doorway pages*, invisible text, and more. These practices actually do raise your site ranking. However, search engine spiders have become very aware of Black Hat SEO techniques and can spot them pretty easily (and ban your site, which is almost impossible to reinstate).
• A Poorly Designed Site - Ineffective site design includes lack of clear navigation, poorly designed frames, and large, load-intensive graphics. Search engine spiders can actually be blocked from crawling sites that are not well-designed, so it’s a major part of Web site optimization; plus, if users can’t find what they want on your site quickly, they’ll find another site.

*Doorway pages are web pages that spam a Search engine’s index by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending visitors to a different page. Doorway pages that redirect visitors without their knowledge use some form of cloaking.

Ten years ago I got a promotional CD with shareware games. My kids played them as far as the levels would go, but I was two years into being self employed and we didn’t have the money to purchase them. My oldest daughter couldn’t get enough of Barrack: A popular Mac OS shareware game from Ambrosia Software. 

I’m not a big computer game player, maybe an occasional game of solitaire, and I never got into the RPG’s like my brothers did. But this game drove me nuts. It was a simple game with a grid and bouncing balls. You had to remove sections of the grid/background with lasers that fired horizontally or vertically. If a ball hit the line before it was drawn you lost a life. You had to keep going until a large percentage of the background was removed. Simple, but it grew more difficult as each level added more balls. A shark swam around and trash talked you while you were trying to concentrate.

I played it for hours, never able to purchase the game. Today I was looking through the new App store, I just got an iTunes card as a gift. I came across iJezzball, it looked like the original JezzBall that Barrack was based on. But iTunes doesn’t offer a demo, which based on my past experience I have to understand. So I took the plunge and bought it. it’s not Barrack, no sharks and no trash talking, but the same game only now on my phone.

Photos courtesy of iTunes

Apple has a good thing going with the AppStore, I’ve owned Palm pilots and cell phones for over a decade, but just never played games on them. When iTunes came out I found myself downloading songs and buying CD’s to add to iTunes. Amazing due to the fact that until them I had bought less then ten albums. There’s something addictive to the Apple GUI’s that make them simple and fun to use.

So, now I’m addicted to another Apple service and I have no regrets. Hopefully they’ll wait a year before they roll out a 3D Operating system, I’ve got pennies to save up.

Happy Surfing!

As I’ve said before, I’m a techie married to a Geek. We watched expectantly while the new iPhone software was rolled out. Apple has improved the delete feature in mail, and a few other nice things, but the one we were waiting for was the Ap Store. 

We weren’t disappointed. It’s amazing the options that are offered. Everything from to do lists, flash lights, books and enterprise programs. Many are free or free as light versions to get you hooked. 

I downloaded a program that turns my iPhone into a wireless remote. Very nice if when you’re in the next room and  Bob Marley is playing at the top of the audio scale. That’s when the phone rings, always. Previously I had to rush into the other room, search for the remote, give up on that and mute my tunes and then answer the phone. Now I simply turn it down and pick up the phone. The wireless part works from anywhere in the house. I don’t even need line of site. 

I’ve tried a few To do lists and even got a medical card, all for free. Lori has downloaded the Word Press ap and a few calculators. We’ve even purchased a couple of things. All in all, the Ap store makes for a nice addition to an already stunning phone.

I’m eagerly awaiting more.

Happy Surfing!

I had one of those weeks. 

The storms last Sunday night took out the city power until late Monday. That’s when I discovered that my internet was gone. I went through the checklist. I rebooted the modem, reset my wireless hub, tried three different Cat cables, all to no avail. I called my service provider an hour on hold and thirty minutes redoing everything I had previously done, they scheduled for a service call Thursday somewhere between 1-4, the “first available spot”. 

Did I mention that I make my living on the web? That I had a week of work that would just have to sit in que until I could once again connect to the internet?

So, I made the calls to my customers, explained about the storm and got everything ready to post Thursday sometime after 1-4. 

The service guy arrived at 1 on Thursday, replaced the modem and got me back online. Well, almost. my main computer still wouldn’t connect, but the others did. I ended up transferring all of the files to alternate systems and uploading them from there.

Everything went well and I was then able to refocus my energy on the one that wouldn’t connect. I scoured the Apple help files and tried everything short of sacrificing a small animal. For some reason it wouldn’t reassign me a new DHCP license.

I don’t know if it was out of desperation or the fact that it was two in the morning, but I tried reinstalling my OS. This is a sledge hammer approach to cracking walnuts, but it worked. I keep pretty good back ups, so little was lost and I was back to snuff in a short time. I’m now able to connect from the main system.

So, my advice is to keep those backups current, if doing it manually is a drag, use the off the shelf programs that will do it automatically, or in my case I use Time machine, which is part of the Leopard OS.

Happy Surfing!

My youngest daughter and her husband were out to the house Sunday. I was in the studio reading a newsletter on PHP. My wife was surfing sites for fixes to a code issue. My daughter comes up, kisses me on top of the head, looks at my three displays and says, “Geek”. I look at her and say “techie” then she smiles at me and gives me a hug.

My brother and wife are the real geeks. They both learned Fortran in High School. In those days every school had a computer lab. The lab consisted of one mainframe computer that was programmed with little punch cards. You needed to be in the top 2% of your class to take computer classes. I was an art nerd who was told to “step away from the computer lab, your future isn’t  in computers”.  I thought they were right, I was an artist, what did computers have for me? Ironically I’ve paid my bills for the last 25 years using computers, who knew. Still that doesn’t make me a geek.

Now my younger brother, he thought in code. He wrote his notes in binary and had the required high water pants. He looked normal most of the time, but talked at a level that baffled most people. He dungeon mastered eight ongoing games. He played so much that he had a standing order at the Game shop to replace his dice on a bi-monthly basis. If you know who Spencer Reid is on Criminal Minds, you’d recognize my brother.

My wife is also a geek, but passes as normal. She spends her free time geeking out on tech manuals and technical blogs talking about programming code as if it were a long time friend that’s visiting. She and my younger brother would sit up and discuss the universe into the morning. I would sit there smiling, nodding, while I experienced something close to brain freeze. Why she chose me as her life partner still baffles me, I’m positive that I got the better end of the deal.

I went to art school and became a Designer. Computers by then were “personal” and a required part of my schooling. I started tinkering with them out of necessity. At my first job, the IT guy left two months after I started. For some reason the owner thought I’d be perfect to take over his duties in addition to the ones he hired me for.

Never underestimate the power of prayer.

This led to “how to” books that had “Dummies” in the title. It also led to the discovery that there was more to computers than just driving software, with the right programming and hardware you can make them sing. That is a “Techie”. That and surfing the web on your 25th anniversary to see the latest hardware announcements from your favorite computer company.

With a title like that you’d expect to see a black and white comic by Antonio Prohías with one computer setting a trap for the other. He silently showed the world his view of the cold war in simple black and white. 

In the Mac vs. PC argument, many people have taken sides defending one or the other to a similar level of extremism. Occasionally there are “switchers” those who cross enemy lines for one reason or another. I guess I’ve been one of those, but really I think of myself as an agnostic where OS’s are concerned.

I started out on a mainframe using some form of Unix to enter daily reports for my “real” job. My wife started out programming Fortran and punching little holes into little cards to make the computer do functions.

When I went back to college, my first intro to a “personal” computer was an IBM clone with DOS. We actually outputted “Art” on them. Not that anyone in the art community was believing that. While at college my department got a grant for an official computer lab with Macs. Suddenly the art process came to the fore front of my computing and the days of DOS were hopefully behind me. 

My first job was for a printer who used an antiquated PC system to produce screens for printing. They hired me because I could talk both languages and maybe be able to translate what the “Mac” guys were bringing in. I found that I could and dove deeply into the world of Windows 3.1 and DOS. I discovered that real art could be done on a PC and at that time cheaper than on a Mac. I did miss the ease of use of the Mac and colorsync, which had been licensed to Apple. Colorsync and the rest of the printing world kept the Mac alive through it’s dark years.

In my off hours I had a college buddy who set me up with about $20,000.00 of used Mac hardware and software to freelance for him. I would pick up my assignments on the way home from my day job, finish the assignments early in the morning and drop them off on my way back to work. I discovered that I could make more in one night on my Mac then in one week ay the printer. G.Rafics was born. 

During this time my wife was running an underwriting office for an insurance agency. She was using Unix and Windows, I never mentioned the Mac to her since she seemed comfortable in what she was using. What I didn’t know was that she was using the Mac behind my back. She announced one night that the Mac was a superior product and that she had finally seen the light. I was stunned.

About this time I picked up a large bank as a customer. They were just getting into the internet and enlisted me to translate what the “PC” guys were trying to do. In those days the web was controlled by the IT department and everything looked very drab. The art department was given the responsibility to liven it up. Unfortunately neither department knew how to make sense of what the other was asking for. My buddy was a freelance consultant for them and suggested that they give me a try. I did that for eight years, not bad for a freelance consulting gig. I had both Macs and PC s in my office and my home at all times, testing layouts on both and producing on both. In those eight years I only went to work once. I would put in 20 hour days at their office and we created some industry defining items, but I never thought of it as work. 

Then OS X for Mac, was released. That’s  ”Oh ES Ten” not “Oh Es Ex”. It utilized a Unix language and was the next step in the evolutionary chain of the Mac platform. My wife ordered the public version of it and paid extra to have it the first day it went public. I came home that night to find her hugging the Mac and rocking it back and forth. “They’ve finally made an operating system that I can truly love!” Once again I was stunned, but she was right. During all of this I would get emails from her on the latest updates from Apple on a the woes of Windows. 

Eventually I ended up at a company that did work for the DOD and other government agencies. Once again it was in part due to my ability to speak both Mac and PC. During this time Apple made the leap from Motorola to Intel processors. This led to being able to install Windows on the Mac natively. Now we were able to run both at the same time, my wife was beside herself.

Now I’m back out on my own. I use one Mac running a Parallels version of Windows XP for everything. I still have computers sitting everywhere, but they’re mostly for show. I find myself doing a majority of my work on the Mac and testing sites on the PC. The things that only the PC could do are almost gone.

So, twenty years later I look back at the journey and I can’t help but think about Spy vs. Spy. I imagine they’re still fighting some where, but in the back of my mind I think they’ve probably made up. They’re sitting together somewhere on a remote beach sharing drinks in the sun. In unison they take out their iPhones and text the “Home office” that they once again foiled the enemy. Then they both switch over to YouTube and watch old episodes of their exploits while they check their bank accounts online.