Billy Fire LLC

I just launched a new Web site for the Corporate Finance Council in San Diego. I liked their old one that I also designed, but this new site is more contemporary in feel which is aligned to the current membership. The site is based on the Etomite content management system which means that the client will be able to easily make changes itself. Plus Etomite is probably the only CMS that is not so utterly bloated with code, that you can actually go in and add new or different functionality without requiring a PhD in computer science.
the site may be … Continue Reading

Working on SEO project for Poolside Portable Pumps, based in Poway near San Diego,  a provider of portable fire pumps that pump water from a swimming pool or other volumes of water.

As you probably know, on Facebook you can create a personal page or you can create pages for businesses, celebrities etc. The two are different.
I created a couple of business pages for Billy Fire LLC. Creating them was easy, and they apparently (at least doing this the way I did it) were ‘under’ my personal page, but then when I tried to edit them I could not, for the life of me, find where to find them. I must have searched through every menu item on my personal page without finding what I was looking for.
Finally I hit upon a … Continue Reading

People visiting Web sites have different screen sizes and resolutions. http://viewlike.us is a great way of showing what a Web site will look like at several different resolutions, including for the iPhone and Wii. Resolutions include: 800 x 600, 1024 x 768, 1280 x 800, 1920 x 1200. If you have a smaller resolution then you will need to scroll, but this tool gives you a great insight as to hwat the site will look like at high resolutions.
If you are a Web designer it is also a good tool to use with clients to … Continue Reading

One of my children bought an Asus EEE 900A. Its a very attractive little machine. 9 inch screen that is surprisingly easy to view, a small but ergonomic keyboard, and, because this device uses solid state storage, it is silent and has excellent battery life.

The downside, the disk drive is only 4 Gb.

Before we bought it 4 Gb seemed small, but after all, it wasn’t that long ago that I paid about $500 for a 120Mb drive for my IBM desktop, and 4Gb still holds a lot of word processing documents. Or so we thought…

When the Asus arrived it included … Continue Reading

An introduction to Internet marketing and planning

After several months of work I finally finished my book and put out a press release through PRWeb. The book described Internet marketing in a way which should be of interest to small businesses wanting to explore how they can market their businesses using the Web.

The book can be purchased here.

I orginally wrote the book using OpenOffice and then transferred it to Quark Xpress where I created each chapter as a separate file. By … Continue Reading

I read two really good direct marketing magazines: Direct and Target Marketing. The magazines’ coverage includes e-mail marketing and many other marketing related issues. What really makes them good is that they are so well written, as, I suppose, you might expect from a group of people who make a living writing copy.

Denny Hatch (in Target Marketing) and Hershell Gordon Lewis (in Direct) always write very entertaining columns that always pack a thought provoking punch. There are always several other articles that are worthy of clipping.

So, whatever sort of marketing you are in, I highly recommend … Continue Reading

I recently decided to create a popup on our home page to promote our monthly newsletter.

The industry seems to be divided on whether popups are a good idea. I suspect this is because they have been misused and abused by some sites. This has lead to the creation of popup blockers.

In our case we decided to use a popup (written using jQuery) but to restrict it (using a cookie) to make sure that it does not reappear for a site visitor for 20 days. In other words, if a new visitor came to billyfire.com today, and then visited every day … Continue Reading

I recently started using Tweetlater to automatically respond to Tweeters who follow me; and to schedule future tweets.

I read an article about someone who scheduled, way in advance, a whole bunch of Tweets, and did so using Tweetlater. It seems like a good idea, if not really in the spirit of Twitter. In the process I set up an automated response to those who follow me. I had already tied it into my blog and so all my welcome to #dafsfj and #tytewty appeared as blog posts.

In retrospect , I think this is a bad idea. My blog … Continue Reading

I just set up an account with BudURL. Like some similar services it takes a long URL and shortens it.

The twist with BudURL is that is includes analytics behind each link that you create. So, for example, you could include a BudURL link in a Twitter Tweet and then see analytics on any clicks on that link.

I will post more when I have examples of the analytics.

BudURL includes free and paid services based on the number of links you create.