For the last few years, John Rowell has carried around a business card that reads “John Rowell, retired. No phone. No Fax. No email. No Worries” … No joke, he really printed a handful of those out.

In no way does this mean he’s been spending retirement fishing and playing the StarTribune’s daily Sudoku. Well – those are both pretty accurate – but much of John’s retired days are spent sawing, varnishing and wood-burning away at his lake home in Outing, MN. This has become the studio of Nature Enhanced, John’s creative outlet for all wood products. Handmade.

Just over 5 years ago, when I was writing my first lines of html, I told my Dad that someday I’d make him a website for Nature Enhanced. And just recently, I decided it was time to make up for the long wait. In the end, Nature Enhanced received an entire handcrafted package, including …

Full Re-Branding and Logo Design

It was time to replace the old clip-art logo with a fresh, logo that played off of the wood theme and the fact that all products are branded, literally, with “HANDCRAFTED BY JOHN E. ROWELL“.

Handcrafted Business Cards

The cards were printed on 13pt, Uncoated 2″ x 2″ cards, using UPrinting. They were designed to double as a product hang tag, and each was given a hole punch and a string. I decided that the cards also needed to embody the ‘Handcrafted’ theme of company. To accomplish this, I first gathered sticks during a late night stroll along Nicollet Island. The sticks were then broken into approximately 2″ pieces and laboriously super glued to the bottom of the cards. I prepared about 100 of these to get my Dad started, and gave him a hole-punch, string and super glue to finish the remaining 400 on days that Sudoku only takes him a few minutes.

Website Design, Development and Admin Area

The site was also designed closely around the wood and handcrafted themes – using wood background textures and brown tones. The navigation was kept simple: –
HOME – a very brief intro to the company.
PRODUCTS – sample products and descriptions, with a ‘lightbox’ javascript effect for viewing product photos.
OUTLETS – locations where Nature Enhanced products can be found, using embedded google maps
CONTACT – Office and studio info and a simple contact form.

I also set up a basic admin area that walks through accessing the new nature-enhanced.com email accounts, working with the online store, and cut-and-paste code to allow using the Nature Enhanced logo on Craigslist ads and other websites.

Product Photography

Using white foam board, masking tape and some flood lights, I created a makeshift photo lightbox to allow for isolated product photography.

E-Commerce Solution

I set up a Free account at Big Cartel to get John started with an online store. The free account allows for 5 products, 1 photo per product and basic stats. The Big Cartel admin area is very well designed and easy to work with – and, because they allow for custom CSS on all accounts, I was able to fully style the store to match the look of the Nature Enhanced website.

Hopefully all of this was worth the 5 year wait… In fact, I hope it’s so good that John has to fire up that phone, fax and email a bit more often.

One of the greatest things about the Internet is that it’s allowed people to share information and impressions with each other at an absolutely unprecedented rate. Review sites for different products, vendors, and services are popping up all over the Internet. If you run across something you’re interested in buying, but haven’t heard of before, or using a company you’ve never heard of, it usually only takes a few mouse clicks to figure out what others’ impressions have been, which is a great thing…

As long as it’s being done honestly and legitimately.
Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. There is a growing trend among some unscrupulous businesses to go online and post negative reviews about their competitors. Because these review sites carry a lot of weight with search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, it only takes one or two bad comments to put a major dent in your sales – online and off. Here are four things you can do to stop review sites from killing your online reputation:

Encourage reviews.
Of course, the best thing you can do is make sure every customer you have is happy with you, and telling the world about it. Just as bad reviews can kill your business, good ones can push it over the top and help you gather more customers than ever. In fact, a steady stream of strong reviews will usually drown out one or two instances of average or poor feedback, so do what you can to encourage happy customers to speak out.

Monitor the sites yourself.
You don’t want to find out you’ve gotten a bad review weeks or months after it has been posted. Take a bit of time every couple of weeks – marking your calendar if that’s what it takes to remember – and look through what customers are saying. It should only take you a minute, but the information you’ll get is invaluable. Use tools like Google Alerts to monitor your reputation. Create alerts for your business name, key personnel or products.

Dispute malicious or incorrect information.
If someone has posted information about your company that just isn’t true, then make sure to find it. Most review sites have set policies for challenging entries, and it’s usually easy to have one removed if it’s obviously been posted by a competitor or someone who hasn’t done business with you. Again, a keen eye is your best weapon.

Take feedback to heart.
There are going to be times, of course, when you get a poor review and it’s your fault. There isn’t much you can do in that situation except trying to remedy the situation with the customer (who might in turn remove or edit their review), or vowing to do better in the future. Over time, your reviews will likely show a positive or negative trend, depending on how hard you’re willing to work to improve your product or service.

Want to keep closer tabs on your online reputation? Ask us about ArcStone’s Reputation Management Services, which scans all major websites, and the web in general, for feedback and information provided about your company. It’s the ultimate tool for any company that wants to make a positive impression on their next customer.

We’re excited to be working with tap|QA – a highly experienced software QA and testing consultancy based here in the Twin Cities.  One of their fundamental business tenets is the importance of looking locally first, finding and training smart people to do QA right (QA stands for Quality Assurance, the sometimes under appreciated “red-headed step child” of software development).  Their tap|LAKSHORE software testing service competes very well against comparable offshore testing services.

We enjoyed working with two of the firm’s partners, Don Peterson and Tim Guilfoil and we’re happy to have had the chance to help them develop their new site.  Good luck tap|QA!

Let’s Answer The Question: What is Cloud Computing?
Buzzwords and acronyms are a mixed blessing.  On one hand, they are a very useful shorthand for those who are ‘in the know’.  However, for those who have no idea what it means, a phrase like “Web 2.0″ or an acronym like “SEO” can be a barrier to understanding, and for those who are too ashamed of their ignorance to ask, they risk using these terms incorrectly.

One of the newer phrases being bandied about is “Cloud Computing”.  In order to take the mystery out of the term (and allow us to use the term correctly), let’s answer that question:  What is Cloud Computing?

Getting Virtual With Your Servers
To understand Cloud Computing, first you have to understand the concept of Virtualization. Virtualization is the ability to run several standalone disk images on the same server.  Being able to create an image of your machine is technology that we’ve been using for years.  A typical machine backup involves making an image of the machine and pushing it to another server.  Then, when you need to restore your data, you can simply load the disk image onto your new hard drive.

Virtualization is just like this, except you take this disk image and you run it.  It’s like having an OS inside of another OS.  So you might have a Linux machine that is running several different Virtual machines, disk images that were created and loaded onto the server and assigned an IP address so that you can hit that virtual machine directly.

A Traditional Server Is A Great Big Desktop Computer On Steroids
A traditional server is a great big desktop computer on steroids, with hundreds or even thousands of different websites running on it.  They usually will share a single SQL server, run under the same OS, and everything on the server rises and falls together.  So if Site A has a big day and receives a hundred thousand requests, it can impact the performance of Site B because Site B resides on the same server and shares resources with Site A (and about a hundred other sites).

There are notable downsides to this traditional approach, namely:

• Hardware Expense- When hardware breaks or gets old and obsolete, you’re going to reinvest in the server that’s been purchased.
• Inefficiency- Of the 100 sites on a server, do all of them really need access to 16GB of RAM?  You’re usually increasing your server resources to account for 1 or 2 very busy/intensive sites on a server.
• Shared Risk- When the hard drive of your server fails, every site on the server is going to suffer.  When the OS encounters a “blue screen of death” sort of error, it’s going to bring down the entire server.  Why should 99 sites suffer for the failure caused by a single site?

There Is A Better Way Up In The Clouds
“There’s got to be a better way!” cries our paid sponsor, and there is.  Virtualization offers us the ability to grant every site its very own server, at a fraction of the cost.  The hardware doesn’t really matter, because you’re only going to allocate a small portion of system resources to each virtual machine.  So even though the server might have 16GB of RAM available, “Bob and Jo’s Kitty Cat Site” might only need a max of 256MB of RAM to run smoothly.  If we need to ’scale up’ and provide extra system resources for Bob and Jo’s Kitty Cat Site, we can do that easily and tell our server to allocate 512MB of RAM to the server instead.

This resolves the issue of shared risk, since if Bob and Jo’s Kitty Cat Site encounters a horrible error that requires a restart, you’re only restarting the Virtual Machine that runs on the server, rather than the entire server itself.  Service Interruption for a single client, rather than everyone on the server.

This also resolves the issues of efficiency and hardware expense, because at a more granular level you can assess the resource requirements of a site and limit a site to only using the resources it needs, rather than infringing on the resources needed by a more resource-intensive site.

With these advantages, it is no wonder so many companies are moving apps into “the cloud”.  Cloud providers like Amazon EC2 and Rackspace offer a very tempting proposal:  Create as many servers as you want for a fraction of the cost of doing things “the old way”.  Backups and maintenance on the hardware are handled already by the cloud providers, all that a web hosting company has to do is make sure that everything is running smoothly within the virtual machine itself.

Cloud Computing Offers An Inexpensive & Hassle-free Solution
Hopefully this has de-mystified some of the questions regarding Cloud Computing.  ArcStone has been using this capability for some time in managing our own servers, and after all of the advantages provided to using this method, it’s hard for us to imagine ever going back.

Of course, this solution is not the right one for all situations, and you should first evaluate the pros and cons of hosting a physical server of your own versus utilizing a cloud computing strategy.  In most web apps, however, cloud computing offers an inexpensive and hassle-free solution for your hosting needs.

If you’re interested in learning more about ArcStone’s hosting options see our email and web hosting services page.

The Internet has come a long way since the days of chirping modems and painfully slow download speeds. The modern web is a multimedia marvel filled with audio, video, and interactive content. One of the most exciting trends is the explosive growth of online video. Billions of videos are watched everyday, and the technology to make high quality video content is accessible to anyone.

Since not everyone has the talent of Spielberg, or the budget of Pixar, here are some tips I’ve picked up while doing video projects for ArcStone:

1) Keep It Short & Sweet

Even if your video is well made and compelling viewers can only handle so much at a time. The sweet spot seams to be two minutes or less. Audience attention starts to wain after one minute, and sharply decrease after two. Keep the pacing quick and your script concise to help viewers make it to the end, and have enough attention left to visit your other videos or website.

YouTube has some great tools for measuring your videos effectiveness and audience attention.

2) Make It Your Own

Adding your company’s unique style and branding to your videos will help viewers make a connection between your video content and overall web presence. Also, take advantage of the customizing options many video sharing sites have. YouTube, for instance, offers a custom channel page that can help you brand and promote your videos.

With some tweaking you can make your YouTube page look much like your website.

3) Say Hello & Goodbye

Including intro and exit screens help frame up the video, and will benefit your marketing efforts if you include your logo, website address, phone numbers and other information. Having consistent intro screens will also create continuity between your videos.

4) Capture Every Detail

Now that HD (high definition) video technology has come down in price it’s worth filming, editing, and saving all your content in HD format. Many of the most popular video sharing sites are also making HD their preferred format. HD or not, upload the highest quality version of your video to sites like YouTube, as they will handle scaling down the quality for users with slower connections.

If you can produce videos in HD, viewers will enjoy more lifelike images and crisp, easily readable text.

5) Do Your Homework & Planning

Before embarking on your first video production check and see what else is out there. It should be easy to find a wealth of videos pertaining to your industry. Notice what you like and dislike about them, which ones keep your attention, and how well the audience has responded.

Usually the most costly aspect of producing video content is the actual shooting itself. You can minimize this cost, and end up with a better product, if you do the proper planning. Make sure the talent is well prepared, the location ready, and the shoot well thought out.

6) Have Some Fun

Online video is a great way to show your company’s personality, culture, and unique way of doing business. The most successful videos not only communicate key marketing messages, they also have a little fun doing it.

If you would like more information about how ArcStone can help you produce high quality web video check out our video production services page. To see some of our work visit ArcStone’s YouTube Channel.

I’ve been thinking about writing a post on Google Caffeine since Google announced their search engine upgrade back in August (and then again in November). Yes, there was a little hype – Matt Cutts, (a software engineer at Google – can you say nerd celebrity?) said it would be rolling out in early January 2010. This was big news in the SEO world. There was a lot of buzz and speculation. Mostly, SEOs were anxious about how this new upgrade would change the way we search.

Why was it such big news for SEO? Easy – Google Caffeine was going to revolutionize search by adding a live search component. Basically live search allows up to the minute announcements from Social Media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, and news feeds. Interesting.

I started seeing live search results a few weeks ago. My first reaction was lukewarm as I was afraid that the organic search results would be diluted by a bunch of useless tweets. In fact, several industry experts speculated that adding the live search results would change the way people search.

How did they think it would change search? Consider this – A typical Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) may contain all of these elements – sponsored listings, organic links, GoogleBase links, video links, news links and now social media links. That’s a pretty big page with lots of stuff on it!

What does this mean? Slowly, pages two and three may become more significant in search results. People will get used to clicking on “next results.” They will search deeper – similar to the way they search through images.

Fast Forward 3 Weeks

I noticed this when i was working on one of my new search engine optimization accounts – ICE-Qube.com. They make these fantastic emergency preparedness kits.

I was searching for “emergency survival kits” and this nice little image, description and link showed up from “My Social Circle” on the 1st page of Google. “My Social Circle” has the potential to turn search marketing upside down. Basically it could mean the more connected, the wider your social circle grows, the more we utilize social media – in this case Twitter – the more likely it is that we will be in Google’s 1st page of results. Wow, this is incredibly powerful stuff!!

ArcStone client Ice-Qube.com on 1st page of Google search.

If you weren’t on the social media bandwagon before, it’s time to rethink your strategy.

Incidentally, here comes my pitch – if you need help setting up a social media strategy, feel free to contact me. Yes, that’s a shameless plug.

I’ve been noticing a trend for larger projects that have been coming to us lately. A surprising number of long term clients as well as new customers want to formally partner and work together to build web applications. I’ve had several conversations turn to creating a joint venture LLC or a cooperative agreement early on. We regularly get 3-4 of these a year but in the last 6 months, I’ve had at least 8 joint venture opportunities of one kind or another pass my desk.

What does this kind of arrangement do?

For our clients a joint venture can:

1. Reduce financial risk by lowering up front development costs – ArcStone bears a proportionate amount of the expense.
2. Give the project a jump start – sometimes we can we inject proprietary software into the partnership.
3. Eliminate the need for our clients to hire any initial, dedicated technical employees.

Joint ventures benefit ArcStone by:

1. Providing an additional revenue stream and an avenue for discovering new consulting opportunities.
2. Enables us to harvest some of the potential upside as the application becomes more successful.
3. Allows us to exercise our entrepreneurial muscles (which is a ton of fun) – having started three other online spin-offs, AssociationsOnline, HOAWeb, and Wonderfile – we love the start-up!

Is this a sign of the times – are other web developers seeing this trend?

Thank you, thank you, thank you … your business and support enable us to do what we love. We’re looking forward to another great year of Service, Craftsmanship, Evolution and Happiness.

Season’s Greetings from all of us at ArcStone!

View our Holiday Card >

Recently I was working on a client’s search marketing campaign. Within a few clicks it became apparent just how important monitoring and managing your reputation online can be.

Contributor sites like Yelp, CitySearch & Google Maps / Local make it very easy for anyone on the web to write and publish a review about your business. You might be thinking, “That’s great! We really strive to provide great service, an awesome product (fill in the blank).”

But what about the dangerous cocktail of that one customer who received bad service, slipped through the cracks and likes to talk? You may provide great service 99.9% of the time but one negative review or comment can spread like a nasty virus. You’ve worked for months – even years to build your brand – don’t let one disgruntled person wipe it all away.

Fortunately my client’s online reputation was all very positive but one of their main competitors had numerous scathing, negative reviews and comments that I would guess they know nothing about.

Monitor what people are saying about you

First of all, in order to take action against negative comments about your business you need to know that they exist. If you don’t know they’re out there how can you possibly respond quickly and effectively?

Is the buzz about your business good or bad?

Tools to help you manage your reputation online

One free tool that I like is WhosTalkin. This site lets you search social media conversations. Their search and sorting algorithm uses data from over 60 social media websites like Twitter and WordPress.

WhosTalkin for Reputation Management

Another essential tool for managing your online reputation is Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is an extremely useful tool when you want to know what both consumers and the press are saying about a brand, company, issue or event, or, if you want to know how the public feels about something.

Setting up Alerts is easy. Simply go to Google News and click on the ‘Alerts’ button in the left hand column, choose the word or phrase you wish to monitor, what kind of alerts you want and how often. You can edit and add new ones whenever you like but remember to use quotations to designate an “exact search” if you are monitoring a phrase rather than a single word or you’ll get a lot of irrelevant results.

Google Alerts for Managing Your Reputation Online

Google Alerts can be useful to track the evolution of a news story such as the H1-N1 virus or follow an industry trend. I use it to track SEO trends and product news. It can also be very useful to track the competition and as a reputation management tool. For example, if a disgruntled employee bashes your business on a blog site you will be notified and you can take action.

What should you do if you find a bad review?

Find out who wrote the comment. Who are they? Who do they work for? Is it a competitor? Try to determine what their comment will mean for your business? Is the comment posted on a well-respected, heavily trafficked site? What is their audience reach?

Determine whether the comment is factually incorrect. If it is, request removal or retraction of the comment. Offer to keep the person who wrote the comment up to date on your business via email. If you receive no response leave a comment in your defense at the site. Keep in mind that this should be your last resort. You really want the comment removed.

What if the comment is negative but true?

Try to share your side of the story. Were there extenuating circumstances that kept your business from performing well that day? Note – Don’t make excuses. Show how you are resolving the issue. Did you make an additional hire to help assist customers? Did you change a policy or procedure? Indicate that you are willing to take additional questions or comments via email. Doing so will make the public conversation private.

What can positive review do for you?

Other than giving you a nice stroke and ego boost, a positive comment can have a positive effect in your local search rankings. Local search rankings are influenced by the number of reviews and citations the business has. Citations are “mentions” of your website (may not have a link).

How can you get more positive reviews?

Writing a review for your business may not be on the top of your customer’s list. Let’s face it – It’s a pain. Make it as easy as possible for them to give you good feedback. At ArcStone we use RRR (Ratings, Reviews & Recommendations) pages to help facilitate gathering reviews. The RRR page provides links to the local search sites and explains the process.

Good luck managing your online reputation! Remember if it’s too daunting or you’re just too busy doing what you do – reputation management is a service we specialize in at ArcStone Technologies. Please contact me at lisa@arcstone.com if you’d like details on our SEO & Search Marketing Services.

Any web developer will tell you that they love Firefox and we are no different. Firefox is an open-sourced web browser, that has promoted innovation and creativity in the web development community for the last five years. As we invent better ways of doing things, Firefox molds and evolves to keep up with us. Today, Firefox officially celebrates its 5th birthday.

Mmmmm, Firefox cake…

We would like to wish the folks of Mozilla a happy Firefox birthday because it has been a favorite platform for us to make our award-winning websites. Here is to the next 5 years and beyond… Cheers!

Firefox, currently at version 3.5, is a free web browser that can be downloaded at http://www.firefox.com.