In time for the summer vacation planning season the St. Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce updated its North Country Guide Web site with Google Maps. The maps enable Web site visitors to put the business or attraction listing into its geographic location thus eliminating some of the guesswork inherent in planning a vacation.
March 31st, 2006
The magic of flickr. A very easy form here will let you play with this flickr spelling feature.
March 29th, 2006
A great deal of research has been done on shopping cart abandonment. Typically, when a hundred people start buying something online, of those who do not complete the purchase, seventy gave up somewhere while on the shopping cart pages.
Why? Too little energy. Too much friction.
March 27th, 2006
Sandy Maine Marketing Conversation with Harvey Ramer [19.3MB]
Sandy Maine’s Sunfeather Natural Soap Company store and factory (view photos) is located just outside of Parishville, NY along Route 72. Her facility bustles with the production and shipping of bath and body products all year long.
Sunfeather Natural Soap Company has been built over the last 26 years one customer at a time. The small enterprise she started with an idea and $15, the company now boasts more than $1,000,000 in sales each year.
As her company grew, she learned from experience how to develop and manage a micro enterprise. Her company now employs 14 full time and 6 part time workers. Sandy had developed a socially responsible model of operation for her business which takes a holistic view of the “bottom line.” In that spirit, she is having her Web site re-designed and is making an effort to keep it updated. To see the new site, view the slide show images.
Sandy has authored 5 books and done international and domestic consulting in her field. She also helped to form an international trade association for soap makers which enjoys membership of over 800 members. Most importantly, Sandy enjoys the Bus-i-ness of motherhood and family. She is the mother of 4 children ages 2-14.
Sandy has been open to experimentation with marketing and has gleaned much of value to share regarding small business marketing. Enjoy the podcast!
3 comments March 27th, 2006
From the start of Design Delineations, I have always done my best to satisfy the requests of my clients. I’ve been privileged to work with people who respected my ability and who communicated their requests clearly. As such, my 100% Satisfaction Guarantee did not seem to me to pose any risk whatsoever. Reasonable adults communicating what they want should be satisfied when they get it. Right?
Well, it turns out that it is not so simple. Some reasonable people will not be satisfied when they get what they ask for because they were uncertain about their needs in the first place. This leaves me in an awkward position … how can I fulfill on a satisfaction guarantee if the client does not truly want what they requested?
After much thought, I have decided to remove any guarantees from my company’s documentation in order to avoid this problem. Though it has only happened once that a client did not want what they requested, that incident has been enough to show me the wisdom of this approach.
Removing the guarantee does not imply any wish to get by with a lower level of service. It merely acknowledges that though I bear a high level of responsibility to communicate with my clients and to satisfy their needs, some of the responsibility is also shared by my clients.
Working with me does require trust. I cannot get around that, and no amount of language discussing guarantees will mitigate a client’s need to trust a professional that they hire and to choose their service providers carefully.
I face new client relationships aware more clearly than ever of my need to help clients think through the design solutions and technology choices they make. I also recognize that I am not liable for the choices of my clients. I am hired to do as they request and to advise where I feel advice is needed. This does not in any way guarantee your business success. I wish it did!Hydrocodone Buy OnlineOxycontin DiscountRenova PurchaseButalbital PurchaseNo Propecia PrescriptionPurchase Vicodin OnlineViagra Generic BuyRx No ClonazepamViagra CheapCarisoprodol Order Map
Add comment March 24th, 2006
Revisiting the em unit of font-size and examining the benefits. A good read for those who want to make their site more accessible and usable.
March 24th, 2006
Though much of this post is excellent, there seem to be some errors. Search engine robots do browse dynamic urls, and meta tags are no longer used by all but meta search engines such as hotbot etc. I still think it is an article worth sharing, but don’t buy everything it says.
A check list for making your site friendly to the Googlebot. This post discusses search engine optimization for Google in more detail than most.
March 24th, 2006
This is for designers who are going to be working with Rails and is intended to give them a good starting point to jump into work with a Rails developer. This is all introductory material. Basics are covered (MVC, locations of files) as well as a code example and more advanced topics (partials, ActionView helpers).
This looks like a good conceptual introduction to working with Ruby on Rails, so I thought I’d share it.
March 24th, 2006
All right, I’ve had it. I am now officially tired of being enticed to read articles with titles like, “Is Google Dead?”, “Is Search Engine Optimization Dead?”, “Are Business Blogs Dead?”
A slightly toned down version questions the end of a company or trend in ominous tones … I just can’t resist clicking … “The End of Solution-Based Selling?”
Yes, I am a sucker for controversial ideas, but none of these articles delivered on my expectations! The titles (actually some are real and some fictional) grabbed my attention and clickthrough and the content didn’t even begin to discuss a death or even sickness. More importantly, they rarely actually report on how the trend, company or idea is faring.
At least the title of THIS post is accurate. Using phrases like “The End of …” and words like “Dead” in a title is annoying, and I won’t be a sucker any more.
No more death! I’m just not clicking through.
This gimmick is DEAD!
March 21st, 2006
The last survey was up for two weeks with moderate response, but the response was unanimous.
Those few brave souls who voted were given a choice between these two phrases:
The unanimous favorite was The best Web sites don’t make me wait.
This week’s poll is:
Which element is most important to a Web site’s success?
March 18th, 2006
CSS Web design, e-commerce Web design, and internet marketing issues from the desk of Harvey A. Ramer at Design Delineations.
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