Our latest client website has gone live. For the last month I’ve been working with Darrin Selking from Lanscape Illumination- a landscape lighting firm based in Valparaiso, Indiana - to develop a new Wordpress based dynamic website for them.

The site has turned out great and I think it looks great. Darrin and his team do beautiful work in landscape lighting all over the country and early on we decided that their work needed to be the center of the site – so on every page on the site you’ll see images and videos of their awesome work.

Our work for them included:

• Wordpress Theme Customization
• Site Installation and setup
• Moved Content from Old Site
• Created Custom Image Gallery system to show off their work
• Custom Contact Form Creation (Two lead forms – one with 50 fields!)
• Content Consultation
• Page formatting and setup
• Google Analytics Installation and setup
• Basic Site Search Engine Optimization and Google Search Submission

Check out the site here: Landscape Illumination, LLC

Thanks Darrin! I hope your new website brings you much success!

Two Words:

Permission Marketing

SPAM Blockers generally do a pretty good job of filtering out e-mail that people don’t want. So, they just don’t see the typical e-mails soliciting interest in Viagra or helping out a Nigerian prince anymore. No, instead, their e-mail box is full of e-mail that they WANT.

If someone signs up for your newsletter, they want to hear from you. They are asking to hear from your company again – to hear your latest deals, news and announcements.

You need to leverage that willingness. Many small business owners don’t think of using direct e-mail marketing – they don’t think it can have a good ROI on a small scale.

Of course it can!

Even if your e-mail list has 100 people on it – those are 100 people who want to hear your message! It only take one read for it turn into new business.

E-mail marketing is cheap these days. You can use a service like Mailchimp that will handle your e-mail list, provide e-mail templates and give you awesome analytics – all for free! You only have to pay if you run really large e-mail campaigns – which most people won’t need to.

So, what are you waiting for? Start gathering your customer e-mail addresses, ask for them, add a subscribe form to your website. You have nothing to use.

If you’re interested in developing an effective e-mail marketing campaign in Northwest Indiana, Valparaiso, Chesterton, Portage or Lake County – then contact us and see if we can help you.

I was quite taken aback by this. I was charging her substantially less than $3000 but I was charging what I thought the work was worth. The client was a small insurance company near our base in Valparaiso and I could not see how anyone could justify charging so much money for something as small as a website for a small business.

Many small business owners are intimidated by the prospect of creating a website and will settle for someone that says that they’ll just take care of it all for them. My advice to small business owners looking for web development is – don’t fall for that.

Think of your website as an extension of your normal marketing efforts. It acts as a way for people to find you. Your website needs to explain who you are, show off your work, where you’re located and how they can get in touch with you. The amount of work involved in creating a website of that size, in my mind, is not worth $3,000.

As a corollary to this topic – don’t also fall for services that promise a cheap website, quickly and set up in a hour. Services from people like Inuit come to mind where they promise ‘to build a website tonight’ for little to no money.

The problem with services like this is that you are getting what you paid for. Your website is being built with a template that is being used by thousands of other websites. Chances are the interface is not as simple to use as it says and you also lose a lot of control of your site. Many of these services are so cumbersome to use that many small business owners build the site and forget about it – leaving it unchanged for years.

To stay competitive on the web in your market – your website needs to be updated often and kept fresh.

That’s why we build websites with Wordpress. Wordpress gives you complete control after we’ve handed the site over to you. Wordpress has a simple interface that allows you to edit and update your site that’s as simple as editing a Word document. Rubber Duck and Company uses a set of premium Wordpress templates that we’ve had to pay for a license to use. The templates work for a variety of applications and what sets us apart from the ‘website tonight’ folks is that we’ll customize the template so it doesn’t look like every other small business website out there.

So, if you’re looking to redevelop your existing website or build it for the first time – it shouldn’t cost you a fortune.

Don’t believe me? Then contact us first.

One of our recent projects was a small website for a local DJ based in the Chicagoland area. Patrick wanted a simple website that he would be able to update himself. He was on a budget and didn’t want expensive ongoing website management fees.

So, we built him a small website using the Wordpress content management platoform using a Studuiopress template we had a license for.

He was very pleased with the result.

The website features:

Homepage that featured pictures
Video Page
Blog About His Business
Social Media Integration
Review/Guestbook system where customers could leave a review
Details about his Equipment and Music
Contact Form
Google Analytics Tracking
Basic Search Engine Optimization

The whole project was quick – we had the site done for him in a week – and it was a pleasure to build. Patrick is a great guy to work with and we highly recommend using him as a DJ!

Check out the site here.

You need a website because while your operations may not be online, your customers ARE online.

Google has changed the way people search for local business – the yellow pages are an irrelevant door stopper these days. It’s no longer worth it to invest in a yellow pages ad when your customers aren’t looking at it. Your customers are looking online and it’s time you got there.

Now, most business owners are intimidated by the thought of being online. You don’t need to be – running a website has never been easier and more low maintenance. We specialize in developing websites with Wordpress and Drupal – two systems that make running feature rich and impressive websites a breeze.

Think of your website as an online brochure.

It needs to do 4 simple things:

Tell What You Do
Tell Who You Are
Tell Where You Are
Tell How to Contact

Your site can certainly do more than that with a website – but those basic principles are enough for a successful website. Those are the principles we use when we develop our client website – keep things simple and provide the information that consumers are looking for.

A friend came to me with an interesting project a few months ago. James K. Barath (Twitter: myCMPS) wanted me to transfer his content from a free blogging service to a self hosted blog and then turn it into a fully featured real estate website for Northwest Indiana.

The overall goal of the site was to make it so that if you search for ‘home values valparaiso’ or ‘mortgage chesterton’ that somewhere in the top 10 will be Welcome Home NWI – since the site is still new that hasn’t happened yet, but it will soon.

The key feature of the site is real time real estate data for several communities in Northwest Indiana from Altos Research. The graphs and real time data is dynamically generated every time the page is loaded.

The site is built upon Wordpress. We’re using it as a basic content management system and also as a blog. We heavily modified the Studiopress Agent theme in order to fit it into what we’re doing.

Several things the site needed: customized contact forms to generate leads, social media integration since James is a prolific tweeter and SEO to target our geographic area.

The result, we think, is stunning. For the first time, Northwest Indiana now has a website completely dedicated to real estate data and home searching.

Check it out here.

If you’re interested in developing a fully featured and dynamic website, contact us for a free estimate.

We recently put up a massive post about London iPhone apps and it caught the attention of a reporter across the pond. The spike in traffic was very nice.

The newspapers was the London free sheet, London Lite. Free sheets are London newspapers that are distributed for free on the London Underground and supported by ad revenue. It also happens to be the sister publication of my favorite London Newspaper, the Evening Standard.

We’re very chuffed to have been featured in a true and blue London newspaper and hope that this isn’t the only time!

Here’s a screencap of the mention – click for a bigger version:

Read the featured blog posts here.

1. Follow People Yourself

Oftentimes, when you follow someone with a lot of followers, people will go through their followers and follow them. It’s the ‘cool by association’ prinicple of networking. People think that if you follow someone interesting, you must be interesting as well.

2. Guest Post on a Popular Website

This one takes a bit more work, but a good way to gain followers is to write a quest post on a popular blog and user your Twitter handle in your byline. If people like what you have to say, they’ll want to follow on Twitter.

3. SEO Optimize Your User name

If you want to build followers in a certain demographic, consider putting key search phrases in your username. For example, if you speciality is Search Engine Optimization then make your name “SEOJon.” If you’re into social media you could be SocialMediaGuru. When people search Google or are browsing usernames, yours will pop out.

4. Put a Link to your Twitter Stream Everywhere

If you’re active on other social media platforms, put links to your Twitter stream in as many places as you can. That includes your own websites, Facebook profile pages, My Space, Linked In and much more. Also, you can integrate your Twitter stream with Facebook so that Twitter acts as your status updates. This will encourage people that find you to follow you on Twitter. Also never hurts to put your twitter profile on your business card as well.

5. Fill in your Profile Details

Don’t leave your profile empty. Twitter is about connecting with people and people won’t be interested in you if they can’t find anything out about you. Fill in your profile with a little information about yourself, where your from and a link to your website. Also, a picture is a great thing to have so people can put a face to a name.

This is just a sampling of great ways to get followers on Twitter. Be sure so follow me on Twitter: @jonathanwthomas! Contact us for more information on how Twitter can change the way you do business!

Great news!

We finished up a project for one of our latest clients – the Evelyn Bay Coffee Company located in Valparaiso, Indiana.

Tia Hoffman, the owner wanted a nice website that allowed them to post blog articles, post their menus, have an event calendar and connect with their clients.

After reviewing their needs, I recommend that we develop a Wordpress based website for them. Wordpress would allow them to do everything they wanted to do, while providing for them an easy way to update the site themselves.

Wordpress is great for small websites like this, even if the blog element is not front and center. Wordpress makes a great little content management system and it’s very flexible. The client is also very active in social media and wanted an easy way to integrate them into the site.

What all did we do for them?

• Wordpress Installation
• Wordpress Theme Customization
• Site Layout
• Content Plan
• Content writing/insertion
• Develop Contact Form System
• Search Engine Optimization
• and more!

The site only took a few weeks to develop and Evelyn Bay is very happy with the result.

If you’re in the Valparaiso area – be sure to stop by Evelyn Bay Coffee Company. It’s a much nicer place than the local Starbucks.

Evelyn Bay Coffee Company

How wrong I was.

It appears that Twitter is not going anywhere. So, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. I’ve discovered that Twitter is actually a useful tool that can be used in a multitude of ways. It’s perfect for building your own direct audience for your content. The quality of traffic you can get from your twitter followers is better than you can find almost anywhere else.

So, I’ve experimented with Twitter with gusto over the past year. I’ve learned a few things along the way and there are many things that people do on Twitter, that they wouldn’t or shouldn’t do in real life, that infuriate me. There needs to be come standard Twitter Etiquette. I’ve put together a list, modeled after the “Fight Club” rules that I’ll call the 8 Rules of Twitter Club.

The 8 Rules of Twitter Club – Twitter Etiquette for the Rest of Us

1. The First rule of Twitter Club is that you Don’t Spam

Look, we all know you have exciting content for all of us to share. But stop constantly bugging your followers about it.

2. The Second rule of Twitter Club is that you DO NOT Spam.

Let’s not turn this amazing medium into another venue for people to peddle their affiliate marketing products and latest MLM scams. The best way to get people to read your stuff is to create REAL compelling content for them to read, and sorry, they’re just not buying the latest get rich quick scheme that you’ve been duped into. Merely providing an RSS feed onto your twitter feed (check out TwitterFeed) is enough to let your network know about your latest posts.

3. The Third Rule of Twitter Club is to Provide Something People Want – Which means you shouldn’t have to spam

The theory behind Twitter is that you will connect and communicate with friends and people who share your interests or career fields. So, by default they are generally, if they’ve followed you they are already interested in what you have to say. Don’t abuse this trust. Provide them something they want, which is why they are following you to begin with.

4. The Fourth Rule of Twitter Club is Don’t use Bots and Tools to do all your interaction – actually interact

There’s a rash of Twitter zombies out there. The people using tools and bots to manage their massive feeds. This destroys the whole point of Twitter. It just creates more noise that people have to filter out. If you have 2000 followers or are following 2000 people, and you’ve had 10 updates, you’re not taking full advantage of the medium. The point of social networking is to participate. Engage your followers and they will engage you with mutual benefit in the long run. Don’t ever think for one minute that your followers are resources to be mined for revenue. It’s kind of annoying to follow someone and get the same canned DM response over and over. The worst offenders are the ones that try to sell you something or offer you a special deal simply for following you.

5. The Fifth Rule of Twitter Club is concentrate on One Account at a time

No one likes a schizophrenic. Unless your starting a separate twitter feed for a website or separate project (like I did for Webinar Central – @webinarcentral), there is no reason to have more than one personal twitter feed. You’ll just annoy your followers if you are obliging them to keep track of your multiple personalities. I suppose separate business and personal feeds would be all right, but with the lines between personal life and work life being blurred in the Web 2.0 realm, it may be a good idea to focus on one, your personal brand.

6. The Sixth rule of Twitter Club is to Speak as if you are in a public venue – not like you are with your closest friends.

Generally fellow tweeps are work colleagues or people you haven’t met in person in addition to your normal friends. They really don’t want to know about your morning dump or your wife’s monthly cycle. If you would talk about it with your boss or in a television interview, then that’s what is advisable for Twitter. There is such a thing as too much disclosure.

7. The Seventh Rule of Twitter Club is to Tiny URL Your Links but tell us what they are first

Tiny URL is a great tool to save characters and put links to share in your feed. But keep in mind you must actually tell people what they are clicking. Sorry, but “Check it out ____link” is not going to cut it. Who the heck knows what we are clicking and we have to be careful since a lot of people Tweet while at work.

8. And the Eighth Rule of Twitter Club is if this is your first time Twittering – you have to Tweet – consistently.

Zombie Twitterers suck. You’ve seen ‘em, they sign up and acquire a few followers and then disappear from the face of the Earth. Participate in the ‘great conversation’ don’t just fill it with more noise and then abandon it. Twitter can be great for networking with people in your field and help to build your career. I can also help you develop web projects you want to share with the world. Make use of it, don’t just say “Yeah, I’m Web 2.0 hip and understand social media, I’m on Twitter” but actually not participate.

Happy Tweeting!

If you’d like advice on how your company should make use of Twitter, feel free to contact us for a Social Media Consultation!