This week was a very exciting one for us here at T&S Web Design! We’ve launched three new websites this week. Check them out and let us know what you think.
Avanti Skin Care Center of Norman
Associate Medical Professionals
Different Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace Workshops
T&S is offering workshops for Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. There are a couple of things that differentiate us from others offering similar workshops:
Hands-on training
Our workshops are set in actual computer labs. You’ll actually set up your social networking website accounts right then and there during the workshops, if you haven’t already. Rather than taking notes and wondering later exactly we did everything, you can try it out and ask us questions immediately.
Spend less time
As with many of our endeavors, we’re focusing on small business owners. And if you’re a small business owner, you don’t have a lot of spare time. You may have seen your children or grandchildren spending hours and hours weekly (or even daily) on MySpace or Facebook.
Well, the good news is that you can get a lot of cheap marketing out of those websites without spending tons of time on them. We’ll teach you how to spend just an hour or two a week on the social networking websites and get some great use out of them.
Published in General, Social Networking, Workshops
Tags: facebook, linkedin, myspace, Social Networking, workshop —
Tags: facebook, linkedin, myspace, Social Networking, workshop —
Tire Change Extravaganza
My name is Hanna Roach and I am the Marketing Director here at T&S Web Design and this is my first blog experience ever.
For my first blog I’m just going to let people know why T&S had no one at the EYP luncheon today. Tim and I were on our way to the luncheon, and we stopped to help a guy (named Randy) who had a flat tire. I contributed by sitting in the car while Tim actually changed the tire. Go Tim! Here’s some actual documentation of the event:
This is the kind of great service you can expect from T&S Web Design.
P.S. If you are from the Edmond Chamber of Commerce, you shouldn’t charge us for not going to the luncheon, we were doing a good thing.
Note from Tim - Of course, we don’t really want or need our money back from the Chamber, Hanna was just kidding. We are sorry we had to miss a great Chamber event that had a packed house, but are grateful we were able to help Randy out.
Day at the T&S Office (time lapse)
This is February 23, 2009, at the T&S office. We thought it would be fun to record the entire day, but condense it down to a little over a minute, so you can see everything in time-lapsed format.
Embed a YouTube Video in a Wordpress Blog, part 1
There’s a couple of ways to embed videos in a Wordpress blog. The first is a simple copying and pasting of code. The second actually allows you to post them directly from YouTube’s website, but it’s slightly more complicated to setup initially.
Copying code from YouTube’s site
First, watch the video you want to put on your blog. For our example, we’ve picked the video we did on linking to your Facebook profile.
In the screenshot above, you can see an area highlighted to the top right of the video. Simply copy the code in the Embed field.
Next, visit your blog and create a new post or page.
In the screenshot above, you can see a couple of highlighted areas. To the top right of the post’s content area, click on the HTML tab. Then, paste the code into the content area. Click the publish button, and you’re good to go.
Next time I blog, we’ll take a look at the slightly more complicated (but better in the long run) way to post videos to your blog directly from YouTube.
Congratulations to our February Non-Profit Winner
We will be working with Diabetes Solutions of Oklahoma, the February winner of our free non-profit website. We are looking forward to helping Casey Bottoms and Kim Wilson in the overhauling of their current website.
We’ll be giving away another website in March. You can fill out an entry form on the details page.
Which social networking site is right for my business?
Here at T&S, we’ve been beefing up recently on our expertise in social networking websites. Specifically, we’ve been focusing on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Wikipedia’s list of “popular” social networking sites lists well over fifty different websites. So why did we choose those four to focus on?
Let’s take a look at a graph comparing three of the top social networking sites that are intended for a general audience. In other words, these are not aimed at business professionals or any other niche.
So here we’re looking at MySpace, Facebook and Friendster. You can see from the graph that while MySpace has declined in popularity quite a bit in the past six months and Facebook has skyrocketed (It was actually April 2008 when the lines crossed), Friendster is barely on the radar.
Let’s take a look a couple of social networking websites geared towards business professionals.
Here we’re comparing LinkedIn and Plaxo. You can see that while LinkedIn’s traffic looks relatively volatile, it’s still consistently well above Plaxo.
Within these individual groups, the relative popularity is what led us to choose the websites we did. Facebook is obviously much more popular, so it’s been our primary focus. While MySpace has far less reach than Facebook currently, Their Alexa.com rating still has them right below Facebook in the list of all sites on the internet. Not only that, but they currently have about twice the registered users as Facebook.
With LinkedIn and Plaxo as the two most popular and well-known networking sites for professionals, you can see that LinkedIn is the most popular of the two. However, it pays not to totally ignore Plaxo, so we recommend getting an account on there as well.
Although the focus of Twitter is very different than these other sites, let’s take a look at a graph comparing Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
You can see there that compared to Facebook, the other two barely register. However, that’s like comparing the traffic through a mall to the traffic through a chamber of commerce. The goals and target markets of the two are completely different.
Twitter is even further removed from the others, with the sole purpose of what’s referred to micro-blogging. While the impact of your business using Twitter generally isn’t huge, the time investment is so small that it’s well worth using.
So which social networking websites should you use for marketing? The most popular and the easiest to use. Everyone should be using Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. If you are in a professional or business to business industry, you should use LinkedIn, and, to a lesser degree, Plaxo.
Published in Social Networking
Tags: facebook, friendster, linkedin, marketing, myspace, plaxo, Social Networking, twitter —
Tags: facebook, friendster, linkedin, marketing, myspace, plaxo, Social Networking, twitter —
Labels in OSX Make Life Easier
When dealing with hundreds of different clients who have different websites, designs, logos, documents, pictures, worksheets, etc. things must be organized. I have found that an excellent way to organize files via Finder is to use the colorful labels. Yes the labels are pretty and colorful, but they can be used to organize things beyond just their color.
First off the labels can be, well, labeled. If you go up to your Finder preferences, you can click on ‘Labels’ which will allow you to name your labels whatever you want. This comes in handy when you are in need of categorizing different items that may be in the same genre, but differ in name. Since I’m a designer, I use my labels for different types of design material.
As you can see, ‘other print material’ could fall under a broad category, but I know that anything orange is print, but not a business card, because business cards are green. If you forget what you named your labels, you can easily find out when you go to label something! If you right click a file/folder and hover over a color, the name of that label will appear below it, so there is no confusion as to what color goes with what label.
I took the color labels a bit further and named a folder that contained the described items. For instance, I would make a folder named Postcards, which would be labeled orange, and everything pertaining to the design of that postcard would be contained inside of that Postcard folder. This is much easier than trying to label individual files themselves, although in some cases I’m sure that would be necessary as well.
One last trick with labels. Lets say I have a root directory that somewhere nested in it has 52 folders that are labeled orange for ‘other print material’. If the names of the folders were all the same, I could just search in spotlight the name of the folder and be shown a list of all of them. But, since ‘other print material’ could have folders named letterhead, postcard, envelope and more, I have to index these files by their color label. This is done by typing into spotlight label:1, where 1 specifies a color (gray in this case). The numbers are out of order, so here is a list for reference:
label:1 Gray
label:2 Green
label:3 Purple
label:4 Blue
label:5 Yellow
label:6 Red
label:7 Orange
By typing in one of these commands, you will index only the files and/or folders that have that color label associated with it.
When used correctly, labels can be a great help for organization of files, and can help prevent files from getting lost. Having files organzed well can help you become more efficient at your work by helping you find things faster, and also just looks good!
Workshops, new office, free websites, oh my!
When we’re in the website planning stage with a new client and they ask us about a blog, we always tell them to only get one if they can commit to blog at least weekly. Of course, it’s been over a week since we here at T&S have blogged. Shame on us. But we have had some exciting things going on lately.
First off, we just finished our first Webifiable workshop this past week. We turned the first two thirds of my book into an interactive workshop, and conducted this first experimental version of the workshop. The feedback was great. We even met with our partners in crime, PMS, earlier today to discuss the minor tweaks we are making before our next workshop on March 26. So if you’re interested in the next one, contact us.
Second, we’re moving T&S out of my home office and into its own office. Starting just as soon as we can get internet up and running, we’ll be in downtown Edmond on Broadway across from the post office. We’ll be at 247 N Broadway, suite #104. It’s not much bigger than our current office, but we’ll be able to get a lot more work done without the distractions that come with a home office.
Third, after getting our feet wet by starting our Webifiable workshop, we’re getting ready to offer workshops for MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. There will be an hour and a half workshop for each of those three sites, and the sessions will have hands-on setting up of accounts for the sites, as well as guidelines for businesses to make the most use of the sites without spending hours and hours on them every week. We are days away from setting a date for these workshops, but if you are interested, go ahead and contact us.
Finally, we’re giving away a free custom website to a different non-profit group every month in 2009. The lucky January recipient was Edmond Mobile Meals, and we’re continuing to look in the Edmond and Oklahoma City area for additional non-profits to help. If you are involved in or know of a non-profit group that could benefit, fill out our form and let us know.
It’s been an exciting first month of the year, and it’s only getting better from here!
Published in General
Tags: facebook, linkedin, myspace, non-profit, nonprofit, office, webifiable, workshop —
Tags: facebook, linkedin, myspace, non-profit, nonprofit, office, webifiable, workshop —