Visit Frankfort Chiropractic Center in Frankfort, KY today! http://frankfortchiro.com

We’re excited about creating a web presence for this sure-to-be-successful landscape design company.

DistinctLandscapeDesign.com

This could probably be considered an experimental site. We are testing whether we can use a community web site/blog as a way to drive traffic to Greg’s real estate business.

Check out livingincarvercounty.com. And if you fall in love with what you see on the site, call Greg, buy and house and maybe you can be on one of his videos saying “Why I Love Living In Carver County, MN.” Simple.

There are several fixes.  One I’ve seen uses Javascript.  The other I’ve seen uses PHP. 

I prefer the PHP solution because the transparency is fixed before it is even served to the visitor’s browser (PHP is server side scripting).  The Javascript method fails if the visitor has Javascript turned off.

We worked, and are still working, with a realtor in Chaska, Minnesota, Greg Anderson, on a blog. We found the project on Guru.com that was posted by Greg’s Virtual Asistant, Evy Williams, who is based in Georgia (see her blog at evyw.wordpress.com).

Working with people in two states whom we have never met through guru.com. Without the internet we would have never found this gig.

What started out as just a project we low-balled in order to fill some dead project time has turned into something with potential for more work. Gotta love that!

Well, Owen Winkler has come to the rescue.  His “I Like Your Colors” tool available at redalt.com, http://www.redalt.com/Tools/ilyc.php, let’s you see the color scheme of any web site.

Great tool, Owen!

Read more about BusinessBlogHive.com…

In conjunction with the creation of BusinessBlogHive.com, NewDrone will also be creating a fork of EditBEE, our proprietary Content Management System. We’ll be creating EditBEE 4 Blogs, a packaged, documented and tested solution for small business blogging.

For those of you within the Central Kentucky area, please stop by Midway this Saturday, July 8, and join Susie Quick for the Grand Opening of Honest Farm.

We are proud of this site. We really enjoy working with start-ups. The money is not even close to large corporate clients, but the work is satisfying. Big Business clients pay extremely, insanely, almost pornographically well, but they are also secretive. We can’t blog about them like we can our small business clients (oops, let me run and check the confidentiality agreements of our corporate clients and see if I just violated one of them, ha ha).
Honest Farm was our first official Non-Blog Blogs. Huh? Say What?

Susie wanted a blog. She had seen many small organic/sustainable farms use a blog to tell their story. But, she also wanted the standard elements of a web site, like a splash/landing page, and regular/static pages that didn’t have the typical feel of a “blog.” In essence, she wanted a blog, but didn’t.

What is even scarier is that we understood exactly what she meant.

So, check out http://honestfarm.org, and see a small business web site that is a blog, but doesn’t look “bloggy.”

Good luck Susie. We hope the farm is a success.

She brought a video segment she did on Good Morning America last year.  She’ll be adding it to her blog, along with lots of other recipes.  Susei has a unique take on organic food, as Susie says “Think of organic food as your grandparents food, honest food.” 

While we are getting her design set up we thought we’d test a plugin we found to do streaming video with WordPress.  So, lights, camera, action.

GMA Video

Susie Quick on GMA

We are not totally satisfied with how crisp the video is, we still need to do some tweeking.  We’ll play around with it and make it better for the launch of her site, HonestFarm.org.

She is the latest small business looking to do a blog for a web site.  This should be a fun project, and Susie has promised to bring us some some vegetables from her farm – now if we can just line up a butcher shop that will drop off some choice ribeye.

Seriously, Susie describes her honest farm in the following way:

“In the heart of Kentucky’s bluegrass country near the historic village of Midway, noted cookbook author Susie Quick has founded a nonprofit sustainable farm. The mission of Honest Farm is to raise community awareness of holistic farming practices by creating a children’s garden and farm stand offering fresh produce to residents and visitors to the Midway area.”

We are wanting to get the web site launched when she opens, which is in July. 

This summer take a leisurely drive down Old Frankfort Pike and stop by the Honest Farm at 484 Spring Station Road in Midway.  Oh, and don’t forget to check out her web site from time to time for organic farming information and recipes.

We go one step further than the canned solutions that are out there.  We customize it to the specific needs of the client.  With Searcy Monument Company, we added the ability to easily manage their 20+ product galleries of over 260 photos.  Editing their textual content and photo galleries is wrapped into one simple, intuitive interface.

KWWOA needed the ability to easily edit and manage the training hours earned (CEUs) of their members.  So we added a nice little database tool to their EditBEE implementation that made updating the training hours a snap. 

In the words of Melissa at KWWOA:

“Oh my gosh, I sooooo love the training updates setup [in the EditBEE CMS].  Even I can do it!  Great, Great Job Guys! ” 

Thanks, Melissa.

Advantages of EditBEE^™

• Manage your own content.  No waiting on your web design company to get around to it.
• Affordable.  Most small business web sites can be set up for as little as $500.
• Because it is a custom application that we built, we can easily extend it and make it work no matter the uniqueness or complexity of your site.  No canned solution here.

If you have a web site and would like to make your own changes when you want to make them, contact us today!

We just finished adding the Membership section that lets people add, edit and upgrade property listings. Whoo-Hoo!  Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy!

The property search that has been up since May 16 has been well spidered by the major search engines.

We’ve had 284 visits doing 5,875 page views, and over 11,971 property listings have been seen.

The table here shows some of the keyword searches done by real people who found SitesBuildings.com on the major search engines.  So, I guess our initial experiements in search engine optimization are working pretty well.  Cool….

SitesBuildings.com is an industrial and commercial real estate search engine and listing service.  Property can be listed for free.  Searching for propertry is easy and free.  SitesBuildings.com makes money off online real estate advertising in the form of premium, paid listings, data sheet generator fees, and banner ads.

We were glad to help.

Visit www.kwwoa.org.

We only have ten state shown at this time: Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, West Virginia.

For the next several days, we’ll be testing then uploading the membership section that will allow people to add listings.

Stay tuned as we move forward…

Well, we were researching it as a way to refresh a drop-down of metro areas after a user picks 1 or many states from a drop-down.  We need this for our search form that we are building for www.SitesBuildings.com (more on www.SitesBuildings.com in another post). 

It never hurts to see if there are some new widgets to help you get the job done.

Well, in poking around, we found this wonderful post by Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=php-general&m=112198633625636&w=2

Parsimony in code and explanation is indeed an art!  Check it out.

For another example of how Rasmus cuts through the hype of the current wave of Mapping Web Services offered by the Yahoo Map API, check out:

http://toys.lerdorf.com/archives/35-GeoCool!.html

Parsimony - add it to your list of wayward and underused words (**smile**).  Also see, Ockham’s razor.

http://www.newdrone.com/demo/maps/

If you are an economic development agency or realtor, call us today.  We’d be happy to implement something similar for you.

We had a good discussion about Economic Development and how we could partner to build an economic development project tracking system for state, local and regional economic development agencies and utilities to use.

It was also refreshing to comisserate with another web designer/developer about the state of the industry in Central Kentucky and the expectations of small businesses.