I was thinking today on the importance of community involvement and realized that our management team is involved in a ton of community and civic-related activities. We are involved with our local chambers of commerce, school boards, economic development, small business development centers, community theater, main street associations, Kiwanis, Key Club, and various other activities throughout our community.

Why is it so important for us to be involved in our local communities? We stay really busy at work, but we find time to be involved because the communities in our area support us. It is right for us to give back to them our time and our talents.

Being involved in the community is more than just “our job.” Being involved means providing our communities with the necessary things they need to grow. Growing communities mean more business, more business means more jobs in IT in our small towns and more employees for us. Being involved is reciprocal. You get back what you put into it.

Our team and our company are dedicated to the communities in which we live and work and to that end I hope that everyone becomes involved in their communities. It is a much better place to live when you have had a hand in making it a great place.

I talk about programming a lot. I can’t help it. It is my life. But now I feel obligated to talk about something of a non-programming topic. Like puppies. No, not puppies. It’s about writing. If you can’t tell by my writing here, I do enjoy writing and when I am not programming, I am always reading or writing short stories. It’s a great release that exercises the other part of my brain. Plus it gets my eyes off a computer screen for a while (and my eyes definately need the break). So there you have it. I do other things than programming. Next blog: probably something about programming again.

Well, I have talked about good programming practices before, and when I did, I talked about understanding error messages and learning to fix your code’s problems to become a better programmer. Well, now I’m talking about another type of error: your own. Understanding your own limitations and being able to accept other people’s help is the sign of a great programmer (and a great person). Know that you can’t do everything, and there are people out there who are better than you in certain regards. So don’t feel bad if you ask for someone’s help in developing a better layout or something computer-related that you THINK you should know. The sooner you realize that you don’t know everything the less time you’ll fake that you do and slow down the completion of any project you do.

My one and only complaint about my WACOM is the inability to fully mimic traditional art techniques with the stylus. Once the line is down the textures that are applied in the program of your choice is sufficient enough to get the idea across but not enough to sell the concept to an experienced artist (or a perfectionist like me).

At least three quarters of traditional art technique involves how one holds the pen, brush, etc. and the how one moves it to make the desired mark. The WACOM allows you to do the movements, to a degree, but allows no tolerance for how the stylus is held. I cannot hold the stylus like I would a block of charcoal but rather it forces me to hold it like a no. 2 pencil. The way the stylus fails in movement recognition is that it does not register the rotation or the stylus while drawing a line. During my days in architecture classes I developed the habit of spinning the pencil while drawing my lines. Doing this keeps the point of the graphite from being warn on only one side, thereby distorting your line. The act of spinning the pencil wears the graphite more uniformly and keeps you from having to re-sharpen more than is absolutely necessary. There are a few techniques in painting that call for you to rotate your brush while performing a certain length of pull to create different effects as well. This is where the WACOM and stylus fail in their mimicry of traditional art.

It could be related to the fact that I have not experimented with different nubs. WACOM does distribute 5 different nub styles that fit specific stylus types. These nubs may allow for the ability to spin the stylus and get that effect to translate to the computer, but I do not know. I know no one who has these nubs and have not found any reviews on their performance either positive or negative.

For several months we have been receiving Website Magazine (The Magazine for Website Success) in our office. I’m not sure how we originally started to receive it… although I assume somebody signed up for it. Anyway, I’m mentioning it today as the current issue (which we received this week) encourages readers to recommend the magazine to others.

This magazine provides a great deal of information on tools for web success. This month’s articles including topics such as blogging, search engine strategy, local search tools, building natural links, and site security. They also have several regular columns and news briefs.

As you work to grow the success of your online venture, I encourage you to check out Website Magazine. Reading the magazine will give you insights to consider as you continue to evolve your website.

Oh, and the best news??? If you qualify (basically meaning that you really are in the business), they will provide your subscription for free (they make their money from their advertisers).

Click the following link to apply for a free subscription:

Free Website Trade Publication >> Website Magazine

Cheers,

Andrew

Here is some more information on the upgrade that I’m sure that you were waiting for:

1. When can you upgrade your account?
You can either login into your account and you can request for an early upgrade or you can either wait for Yahoo to upgrade it for you.
2. How long does it take to upgrade your account?
It takes 8 hours to upgrade. Your ads will still be active, but you just can’t make any changes until the upgrade has been made.
3. What should you do once the upgrade has been completed?
You should make yourself familiar with all of the new features and check on your bids to make sure that everything looks correct.

Click on the link below for more information on the sponsored search upgrade:
Upgrade Center

OK we get this question a lot and occassionally our customers look at their stats, but many don’t really know how useful they can be. If you aren’t doing a lot of promotion or advertising of your site then we are looking at statistics for what we call “natural progression.” What does this mean? Well it means are you getting more users month to month? Are they going up and where are they coming from? One of the things users need to understand is that stats can be confusing, but there are things we can do to make them more useful and readable:

1. We can group categories of items into one block – like your images so instead of seeings stats on hundreds of images (which noone cares about) we can group these so that hits on the images show as one whole item instead of 100 individual ones
2. We can hide or eliminate groups of items – for instance noone cares how many hits their style sheet got
3. We can really adjust and group just about any part of your stats system – we use webalizer (www.webalizer.com) which is a great tool and very customizable.

If you ARE doing a lot of advertising and online ad placement etc. – even newspaper or magazine ads we can help their too:

1. We can use false URLs that showup in your stats, but really just take your users to an existing page. What does this do?
2. It really helps you see what your ads are doing and how they are doing – take for example Ford Motor company – you occassionally see ads on TV where they list a url like: www.ford.com/newcars07 or something like that. If you go out to their site you see the url is actually www.ford.com/newcars.asp or something like that. Why do they do that? To see how many users come from their TV commercials compared to other advertising.

So what’s the point? The point is if you want to know how effective your advertising is we can help, whether that be TV ads, magazine ads, etc. AND we can assist you in reading your statistical information and making it an important part of your advertising and sales analysis tools.

If you don’t currently use your website to gather statistical information about your adveritsing then you should get in touch with our website success department today!

Visionary Web and Visionary Computers have closed their doors today due to the awful weather ravaging the midwest. At this time we have somewhat like 6 inches of snow on the ground and are expected to get another 6 -10 inches before tomorrow morning.

Visionary would like to wish everyone well during the storm. Stay in and stay warm.

Are you ready for the yahoo upgrade? Here are just a few things you should do before you do the upgrade:

1. Create categories for your keywords in your campaign
2. Create a title and a description for each category

For example if you are selling specific books you may want to put that into the “Books” category. The reason in doing this is because you will then have a separate campaign for each of your keywords that you have associated with those categories. If you don’t associate the keywords with a category then it will just be put into a single campaign and you might like the way it is organized.

More to come…

Our economic development friends in Cass County have recently announced this years Youth Entrepreneurial Fair and the annual Business Planning Contest.

SUCCEED: Stimulating Unlimited Cass County Entrepreneurs & Economic Development is a program sponsored by several Cass County area economic development related organizations including: Area Five Agency, Logansport/Cass County Chamber of Commerce, Cass County, City of Logansport, Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana, Logansport-Cass County Economic Development Foundation, Small Business Development Center, and SCORE Chapter 615.

The winner of this year’s Business Planning Contest will win a new website developed by Visionary Web in addition to a range of other prizes. We are looking forward to working with the winning business.

To get involved in the Fair or the Contest, visit the SUCCEED website: http://www.succeedcc.com