Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Wait just a minute for the page to load then use your arrow keys to send the simple character flying into the clouds. Stay close to Earth and you’ll encounter various other flying objects and individuals, or head straight up into outer space. Hours of Friday Fun for those dreaming of being somewhere else!
.
I originally heard about Zazzle when I read that they partnered with MySpace to provide the ability for members to sell items with their own original artwork imprinted on them.
I have been watching them for a while now and they seem to be growing by leaps and bounds. Their technology seems to be very easy to use even for a beginner and they have hundreds of items that you can personalize to sell on your site.
If you have been thinking about selling almost anything with your artwork on them from your site you should
.
After yesterday’s post about my poor experience with Blockbuster’s customer service I got into a pretty good discussion with my friends as to whether any company should (or need) to care about what I write here in this blog.
Most of my friends thought that Blockbuster would do best by just ignoring my complaints and they will just go away. Only a couple agree with me that even a big company should keep track of all that’s being said about them and try to insert their point of view into the discussion. From a quick glance it seems that the ones who agree have MySpace pages (or similar) and are more familiar with how fast this kind of problem can get out of hand.
I still believe that I’m right (big surprise there) and it’s always worth at least trying to manage what’s being said about your company on the web. What do you think?
Maybe I’m just being stubborn, but here’s another post by Mack Collier that supports my point of view called
I love movies and have been a customer of Blockbuster’s mail order movie rental service for quite a while. When they introduced their Total Access service where you could exchange your mail order movies for in-store rentals I thought it was a great deal and I knew that the price of $18/month was an introductory offer and would go up.
It increased to $25 a month and recently $35 a month. I felt that was just too much money and so I switched to a less expensive plan with only 5 free movie exchanges a month. Before my switch took effect I tried to find out how they kept track of the free rentals. I sent an email and asked several times at the store. No one knew for sure.
Right after my account changed I tried to get a movie exchange at the store and was told I used all of my free rentals for the month. Since my account had just changed I thought it was a mistake, so I wrote the company. It turns out that free rentals are counted by the calender month and not by your billing date so the free rentals I got on my old plan counted against my new one. Even though I had not used any free exchanges under the new plan.
I wrote them that I tried to find out how this worked and no one could tell me and I thought this was a horrible policy and I was going to blog about. I didn’t get a reply to that one, I guess they don’t care about a small time blogger like me. There’s no chance that someone will pick up on this and it will get passed around the web.
The fact that I tried to find out what the policy was and couldn’t find it anywhere makes me believe that it’s not on their site or is very well hidden. They could have easily offered me a free exchange or two and I would have been fine with that.
I have always been a fan of Blockbuster and have recommended them, but to have them say “Sorry that’s just our policy and you’re screwed for the rest of the month” makes me wonder about keeping my account with them at all.
.
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Stemilt Creek Winery.
It’s a rustic looking site that is about wine. Is there any doubt? It could be in any language and you would know that right away. I love the look of the grapes growing right out of the picture. The navigation is easy to find and I like that they let you know what page that you are on
I also like that they ask you to sign up for their newsletter right on the navigation bar and have a simple to use form.
.
Here’s something just for some fun on a Friday. (Not responsible if you get caught playing at work)
Having been in the plumbing business this may be more funny for me. A cute babe pretending to be a plumber invites you to flush all kinds of things.
.
I wrote yesterday about how my customer Old Timer & Lily decided to move their blog to their own site from Blogger. I have always believed that your own original content content should be posted on your site first. I originally wrote this about publishing articles, but it applies just as well to blogs.
I have never moved a blog from Blogger before, but I saw the “import from Blogger” button in my control panel so I told my customer it was probably pretty easy. Was I wrong.
It seemed easy enough you click the import button and login, but after trying many times from home and work my customer wrote me that she couldn’t do it. I tried for her and kept getting an error that said
“Could not connect to https://www.google.com. There was a problem opening a secure connection to Google. This is what went wrong:”
Then nothing.
I did some research on the Word Press help site and found there were plenty of folks with this problem, but no good solutions. The suggestions were copying each individual post or using a plug-in for Firefox called ScrapBook and to copy the entire blog, but these ideas seemed like they would take too much time.
Finally I found a solution that worked well. Here’s what I did.
All in all it was just a little work around and was much better and easier than trying to copy each of the 157 posts (and who knows how many comments) individually.
I wanted to say thanks to the WordPress.com site for allowing me to do that and thanks to TechCounter for the tip.
.
My customer at Old Timer & Lily has been keeping a blog on Blogger for quite a while now. She posts quite often and I read them regularly.
When we were setting up her site she decided to have another different blog and posting to that has been almost nonexistent. I kept seeing new posts to her Blogger site and I realized that’s what she should have on her site. I advised her I think that she was wrong about keeping the Blogger content off of the Oldtimer site.
Her Old Timer blog should be exactly like her Blogger blog. Personal, fun, educational and not trying to sell you. Blogs that try to sell stuff never seem to to a good job.
In her personal blog she writes about things that makes her happy & sad and that’s what people want to read about. I believe it’s exactly what a company like O&L’s blog should be. So I advised her to do it all on O&L.
Nothing on Blogger counts as your content because it’s not on your site. If you are writing (any) original content you might as well have it on your site to bring you the traffic. Even if you are a big business it can be seen in a more personal way by your visitors. Your current readers will follow you if you tell them what you are doing. I believe it can’t hurt business it can only help.
You have optimized your site and gotten very good natural rankings for the keywords that you have targeted. Now What?
My customer All America Roadside Assistance is now #3 on Google for “roadside assistance” (their most popular keyword).
While there is no guarantee that they will stay there, I was thinking that they are at a point where they could stop paying for that keyword and find new keywords that they don’t rank as well naturally for.
They could also consider many other choices including to stop paying for keywords completely.
The worst that can happen is that it doesn’t work and you go back to where you are now.
Let me know what you think.
I have a page on my site with some of my favorite new sites that are showing up on the web. These are not my sites, but they are the kinds of things that I like in a website. There are different reasons that I picked these sites, they all look good and are clear and easy to use. The graphics are good, but not overpowering. Sometimes I just like a picture or the name. Some of them are not in English and I still know what they are about.
The newest one is called Estepona Rental. Looks like a beautiful place to live. Sun, fun, and the beach! It’s fitting for a post card. It makes me want to travel to Spain to see it in person.
The navigation is right at the top, but is a bit hidden. I might make it stand out a bit more, but overall the site looks great.
.
Powered by WordPress
