You’re Making Us Blush! A Raleighwood Review from Carmon’s Curl Up & Dye Salon

Thanks to Beth and Carmon from Carmon’s Curl Up & Dye Salon in Garner for the kind words:

Review of Raleighwood Media Group

It’s always nice to hear from old friends, but it’s a shame when they come calling because their former website designer is holding them hostage! Unfortunately, there are some less than stellar designers out there who give the rest of us a bad name. Luckily, we were able to work with the salon’s prior web designer to reclaim the domain name and create a new WordPress website based around the concept of a “content management system” (CMS). The big benefit of using a CMS is that Beth and Carmon are now able up post updates to their blog and update their website in just a few clicks – almost instantly! And when they need some help with the “heavy lifting” they know we’ll be around to help.

This model doesn’t work for every design firm, but we love giving our clients the ability to have a little freedom with their websites. Check out our website packages and let us know if we can help you out, too. And if you find yourself in Garner, NC and in need of a cut and color, visit the gang at Carmon’s Curl Up & Dye!

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Link Shorteners

I posted this update to my twitter/facebook profiles this morning, but thought it was relevant enough for a blog post.

Pet Peeve: Email & other publications using shortened links. It’s fine for twitter, but otherwise, I want to know where you’re sending me.

Here are my views on using link shorteners/url shorteners in your marcoms (marketing communications).

The Good: URL shortening is used to reduce the number of characters in any web link – most commonly used to fit a link and its related commentary/description within Twitter’s 140 character limit. TweetDeck, a popular desktop Twitter application previews the link’s actual destination when clicked. TinyURL (a free url shortening service) offers a preview so you can decide whether to continue to the link’s destination or not (although it does require enabling and the use of cookies).

The Bad: Bit.ly, another popular link shortener, does not appear to have a prominent preview tool. From a professional standpoint, it does look appealing though because you can create an account and track the number of clicks your links get, etc.

The Ugly: The smart computer user needs to know where they are being directed on the internet! A lot of nasty viruses and malware are running around out there – and no one wants to deal with that.

While I appreciate the value of link shortening for twitter updates, I prefer not to see them on facebook, in emails, and even more so in online publications, blog posts, and articles. If not for the safety factor, there’s the other reason that when I’m reading real estate updates or marketing updates, I’ve probably already read the article on Realtor.org or Mashable.com that you are linking to. There’s no reason for me to click though to something I’ve already read!

So please – don’t waste my time or leave me exposed to security risks when you’re publishing links online 🙂

If anyone has any tips on best practices you’ve experienced for using and sharing web links using link shortening, please pass them along! I’d love to share them here.

Details: Print-Ready vs. Ready for End Consumer

I just posted this to my twitter account – and then immediately felt it was too important not to share in a more “permanent” fixture, like my blog.

@ncsulilwolf Pet Peeves from the Advertising/Publishing Industries: Print-ready PDFs (complete with cut marks) being posted to end consumer websites! UGH
I’ll call the offending party out by name, because I know they are much too large to care. I was on the GE consumer products website tonight looking for a manual for a universal remote control (so I can watch Dirty Dancing on the TV here in the office while I work, DUH!).

Now, while the mission was ultimately successful, and I did find the manual, the manual that I found was actually not the one intended for end consumer use.

What I found instead was the print-ready PDF of the manual that had probably been originally sent to the printer. It had all sorts of margins, cut marks, directions, and more. And it wasn’t 100% correctly formatted, so I kept getting all sorts of errors when trying to scroll through the pages. Unfortunately, this document should have simply been passed through Adobe Professional and cropped – at a minimum – before being published to the consumer website.

I see this happen way too often… in all sorts of industries and businesses! In 2010, we all need to take a few more minutes to focus on the details and ensure we’re always offering QUALITY.

Adobe Acrobat Pro is a fully featured version of the Adobe Reader free software and is TOTALLY worth the price. If for no other reason than to make changes like this in case your ad or production agency sends it to you in a format not appropriate for consumers.

And no, this post was in no way sponsored by Adobe… but I do find Acrobat Pro more and more useful each day. (That also goes for Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc.)

Free Advice: Don’t Freak Out Over Keywords

…at least not the keywords meta tags on your website.

From the Official Google blog:

Q: Why doesn’t Google use the keywords meta tag?
A: About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.
Click here to watch a short video from Google on this topic.

Now writing effective copy for each page of your website – utilizing keywords, links, and more – well that, is another story.

{Rave} Oh Thank Heavens!

It took a few tries, but I finally found someone at GoDaddy who knew what I was trying to explain to them about my blog and helped me get back online (and that person was a girl, too)!

{If you’ve been too busy to notice, by entire blog was lost in the internet wonderland for a few days. Thank goodness you can rarely actually “delete” things from the internet!}

So, here I am… publishing to Blog.RaleighwoodMedia.com… finally! Be sure to update your links. The previous blog address will re-direct, but you can never be too safe.

YAY!

ShareThis

ShareThis is a cool tool for enabling social bookmarking and sharing on any of your sites, blogs, etc.

Just this past January they launched a newsletter for publishers who use their tools that included some interesting usage data.My first thought is, looking at ShareThis usage and growth statistics for January 2009 – might facebook overtake email in the realm of sharing online content one day?

PS: The browser plug-in for Firefox kicks butt. You’ll love it. It makes it SO easy to share content from the web on like 8418382 different platforms.

(Image: Sharethis.com)