Blog

A while back my team of some really awesome people got together to figure out what our "mission" in life was for our company. Sure, we're in the business of creating and developing successful online marketing plans for our clients but is that really the purpose of our business. So, I started to do some studying and research and came across my friend, Peter Drucker. Well, Peter and I don't have a personal relationship but I do respect him although he doesn't know me from Adam. Drucker states that the purpose of any business is to "create customers", and that struck a cord in me. After all, if a business doesn't have customers than it's not much of a business. And, if a business wants to grow and succeed, it needs to constantly "create new customers". All makes sense.

I've read a good deal on the topic of "emotionomics" and it has continued to make an impression on me. Emotionomics in general is the confluence of the products and services with the customer's emotional experience using those products and services. For someone who operates an internet marketing agency, I think of emotionomics as the experience our customers have during a project...a web development project, an seo project, etc. In other words, if we produce great seo results but the process the customer experienced during the project is painful, then the customer thinks poorly of us even though we might achieve awesome results.

As much as I am impressed by the moxy of Donald Trump, I don't normally watch shows like the Celebrity Apprentice. This season's episodes caught my attention though because of how Poison's lead singer Bret Michaels handled himself. Kind of a weird topic to bring up in a Web Development blog - perhaps, but I felt there was a lesson to be learned.

You can make a difference even just by making Google code available on your site On January 12, 2010, a 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti. It's easy to sit back and almost ignore the news reports. In most cases neither you nor people you know have been directly affected, however, as of this moment, estimates of the numbers killed in the Haitian earthquake range from 50,000 to 200,000. Did you know that's about the population of Richmond, VA? It might be a cliche at this stage but even $1 can help and might be the difference in saving another Life. You can join recovery efforts mobilizing around the world to assist earthquake victims and your donation will help disaster victims rebuild their lives and their communities.

So much of our work these days is conducted by remote that it is very useful to be able to capture an image from a computer screen, make annotations, then send it to a client or colleague. TechSmith recently released Snagit in beta for the Mac. This tool is already available for those on Windows platforms, and it is quite useful in doing these tasks. Those using Macs probably are familiar with the built in screen capture using the Cmd-Shift-4 key combination, but I have found Snagit to have a couple of advantages. For one, it allows you to capture all of a window, not just what is showing on the screen. This is useful for long web pages that extend past the confines of your screen, for example. The other advantage is the variety of annotations available. You can use speech bubbles in addition to more standard fare such as lines and arrows, and easily adjust sizes, arc contours, etc. When trying to convey an idea to a client, or get markups out to a project team, the old adage of a picture being worth a thousand words is true. Perhaps even more important, it takes time to write those thousand words, so being able to convey your thoughts efficiently can result in improved project deliveries and economics.

We go to great lengths to provide products that fulfill the needs of our clients, meeting with them to understand their business models and needs before we even propose building a website or providing other Internet Marketing solutions. In fact, we won't propose something unless we truly believe it will benefit their business. Over the years, this has resulted in a high degree of client loyalty and a large proportion of new business generated through referrals.