Have to admit that I was less than impressed with my own online image from 2007. Forget how it ended up being slapped together this quickly, though it’s likely the same reason that I haven’t done much with it since. Been busy investing my time into other projects. So I’ve decided that June will be the month to publish the overhaul in the making promoting more green values, offering more free value through tips and tricks to easily promote your business, and implement simple automation.

If you are just finding this site then please leave a comment regarding anything you would like additional details about regarding my services, past projects, and/or ideas that you would like me to explore in future blog posts. Since I’ve been writing to several different blogs for the past couple years while practically ignoring this one it seems time to provide more value here.

I appreciate your patience during this time and look forward to serving you.

An e-commerce web-site has 2 main factors to determine it’s success1) Traffic – how many qualified people are finding your site2) Conversion Rate – of the people that find your site how many will become customers. Running an e-commerce web-site holds a great deal of opportunity if enough research and planning it put into those 2 areas. If you are targeting a small niche of people then you will likely find it easier to promote your site, partially due to lower competition and partially to the value of a niche itself. If you are looking to buy a new chair for your office, do you want to buy from WeCarryEverythingUnderTheSun.com or from OfficeFurnitureDirect.com? Where do you think you will find better selection and support?
If you are working with an ez-build web-site company where you create everything using a form builder within your browser your ability to tweak how someone goes from finding your site to filling in their payment information is a bit limited. You will likely have less control over tweaking the layout and process. What you can control is the information that is on your site, without getting too in-depth using positive imagery to describe individual products and anything that sets your company apart from others (you do have a Unique Selling Point don’t you?).
My greatest advise to anyone getting started is to ensure that you have access to quality analytics information such as Google Analytics so you can keep on top of how many people are finding your site, how they got there, and what they are doing once they arrive.
Unless you have a fairly large ad budget it is best not to expect to be selling in large quantity right away, though starting small and practicing continual improvement with focus on the 2 items listed above you can create a great new business or additional income stream.

A new plugin has been released that will soon be included with most sites I and others create. Chrome Frame. When visited by an Internet Explorer browser it will spawn a full screen frame with a copy of Google Chrome running inside it. If you are a developer of any sort you will recognize the time this will save, no more creating 4 different versions of a site to support all the different “features” of different versions of IE. If you’ve never heard of this then this news will likely mean very little to you, one day you will be asked to install a plugin to properly view a web-site and it will go from looking rather funky to a correct layout.

Google THANK YOU!!

Very brief background on the joys of this new plugin: IE 6 displays web-pages different than most every other browser on the market, unless you do one of 3 things:

1. use a very limited and ineffecient method of structure code
2. make a version of the page that will load ONLY for IE 6 users
3. use a hack such as IE-7.js to make it behave a little more like others

Now rinse and repeat for IE7, and if you want to use a new technology such as the HTML5 tag Canvas (which make very cool eye candy & interfaces possible) IE8

Since all other browsers draw their base from one of 2 sources Webkit (think Apple Safari & Google Chrome) and Gecko (think Firefox). That makes a potential of 5 different versions of a web-site being built so that it will display properly for everyone. There are standards that have been established by the World Wide Web Consortium which both Webkit & Gecko follow fairly well, including keeping up with new standards as they are released. IE…. well they pick and choose, and sometimes just play their own way, so chances are you are building 4 versions of a site to be displayed properly.

Now enter Google Chromeframe which you will be asked to install once through a single click and BAM… instant standards compatible displayed web-pages without the need to build 3 extra versions. For Web Developers the world over this is a happy day indeed, if you are looking to have a new web-site built then you can share the joy as the costs to build and maintain a site will be reduced to anyone that wants to use this new tool.

———

Original Post by Seth Godin:

What should not-so-busy real estate brokers do?

Why not start a local newspaper?

Here’s how I would do it. Assume you’ve got six people in your office. Each person is responsible to do two things each day:

• Interview a local business, a local student or a local political activist. You can do it by phone, it can be very short and it might take you ten minutes.
• Get 20 households to ’subscribe’ by giving you their email address and asking for a free subscription. You can use direct contact or flyers or speeches to get your list.

Twice a week, send out the ‘newspaper’ by email. After one week, it will have more than 500 subscribers and contain more than 20 interesting short articles or quotes about people in the neighborhood. Within a month, (if it’s any good) every single person in town who matters will be reading it and forwarding it along to others.

It will cost you nothing. It will become your gift to the community. And it will be a long lasting asset that belongs to you, not to the competition. (And yes, you can do this if you’re a plumber or a chiropractor. And yes, you can do this if ‘local’ isn’t geographic for you, but vertical).

Own your Zip code. The next frontier is local, and this is a great way to start.

For several months now Mitesdesign.com and a number of affiliated web-sites have been hosted by 130% green carbon credits. Meaning that every month the power used by our server is carbon neutral and 30% of the power is credited back to the grid.

This is a simple beginning of a number of changes that have been discussed recently when we asked what is our story? Personally I have been a supporter of sustainable energy since 5th grade when I first played with solar panels in my school science fair. It took many years before I came to realize how those panels hooked up to a motor could reshape the world. We live at a time when “global warming” has gone from a myth of the extremists, to a responsibility hot potatoe being tossed around, “well it may exist, but it’s not our fault”. This while the World Bank held their first conference on how to deal with climate change over 2 years ago.

Sustainability is a rather big word when you first hear it, in a nutshell it means that what we do now, our grandchildren and their grandchildren will be able to do. I’m not here to harp on anyone, however over the next several weeks I will be happy to show a new face, and look forward to sharing tips on how to green up your own business. Most things are rather simple, and the beauty of it is that most things that are green save green.

GO GREEN!

Welcome to our little spot on the great world wide web. World wide web, quite a concept isn’t it, the entire world connected strand by strand.

Chances are you’ve met me in passing, or perhaps I am lucky enough to call you a friend, as I don’t invest time into promoting this website through any SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I plan on using this as my platform to help you make my job easier. The way I’m going to do that is give you lot’s of ideas and methods for how to achieve results online. Introducing strategies that work while tracking the results of my own experiements and giving away the occasional peak.

My goal is to help you, the business owner, whether your business is to sell a product, supply the best service, or change the world in some way, if I’m working with you it is because I believe I can help you reach your goal. For beginners I’d like to talk about the power of the local internet. I live in a rather small city named Casselberry. This small city held a 2000 census count of 22,629, now compare that to 3,435 that searched for “Casselberry” last month through Yahoo. This is a city which is referenced as a section of Orlando, which has 149,759 searches last month. The power of the local internet is that those that are searching are looking for something specific. If I am looking up the address of the nearest family diner then I am going to search for “Casselberry Diner”. Your neighbors are local, your customers are local, you are local.

Do you have a listing in the yellow pages?

How many customers have walked in, or called referring to it?

How much does that listing cost you every year?

How much would not having it cost you?