I’m looking to help a Charleston area non-profit get 2009 started with a gift of 8 hours of professional web design, development and consulting.

Anticipating a positive response to this offer, I’ll be accepting submissions only until midnight Saturday, Jan 3rd—only about one day!

To be considered for this pro bono web work:

1. Be a non-profit organization with a direct impact on the Charleston, SC area
2. Be a direct contact at the non-profit requesting consideration
3. Be available for an introductory conversation by the close of business this Monday, January the 5th.
4. Submit your organization

That’s it! I look forward to speaking with the winning organizations this Monday.

A mentor early in my business career impressed upon me that personal pride has no place in business—I couldn’t agree more. But when does pride and defending your hard earned reputation cross paths?

I’m writing this post after recently being served some unsolicited criticism. Naturally, the first reaction is defensive. Recognizing this knee jerk reaction from a sensitive pride, I set the email aside and read it again later to hopefully learn something from my ‘e-lashing’ by the anonymous critic.

From this person’s perspective, the missing or misplaced website elements from particular portfolio projects appeared to be poor workmanship and a general lack of skill and knowledge. Of course, what is anything without proper perspective? Well, it’s your own reality.

So after digesting the feedback, I thought it better to give my critic a better understanding of my work and that scope and budget, among many other project factors, can influence a final product . . . not to mention the natural aging and evolution of a live website.

I replied, not as a mater of pride, but in an effort to correct a misperception of the services and quality that I deliver.

Everyone receives negative feedback. Most often it’s an opportunity to learn and improve. On other occasions it’s a chance to be humble. But some times, it’s a case where the record needs to be set straight.

Dominic Taverniti is the owner of Applied Web Vitals, a web design and development company specializing Dreamweaver templates and the Adobe Contribute CMS. Please feel free to contact us any time to explore your next web design or development project.

Dear Client:

Following are steps and corresponding documentation for setting up Google tracking links for your website. The specific example that we discussed was to set up tracking links from Clear Channel radio station websites, but this method will work for any inbound links where you can provide the custom tracking link to the source – website, email, or anywhere a link can be displayed.

Google Tracking Link Documentation:

How does campaign tracking work?

How do I track my Links?

Understanding campaign variable: The five dimensions of campaign tracking.

Tool: URL Builder.

Back-end Google Tracking Link Setup:

• Go to the Google Tracking Link URL Builder
• Enter the destination URL – for the radio stations we discussed using the splash page (http://www.yourwebsite.com/welcome.html)
• Fill in the five campaign variables (source, medium, term, content, name)
  • The variable “Campaign Name” will be used to group the traffic data together for reporting. So enter a single name for the traffic that you want to group together. For example: if you would like to group all radio station traffic into a single campaign, use something like “Clear Channel Radio” for all links
  • “Campaign Source” could simply be “Clear Channel”
  • “Campaign Medium” could be used to separate different types of source links. For example: if you will have both text links and a banner ads being displayed on their site, you could provide tracking links specifying “text link” or “banner” as the medium.
  • “Campaign Content” will let you differentiate between two different graphical banner ads that you may rotate on the same site. This will allow you to see if the yellow ad with brown text was more effective than the image of the smiling business people . . . for example.
  • “Campaign Term” is something you may or may not want to use. This refers to which term or “keyword” you’re paying to have the ad display for. Your Clear Channel ads are not keyword or term specified.
• Provide special tracking links to the source (Clear Channel).
  • If you’re going to provide multiple links for multiple banners, it can be helpful to do so in a consolidated spreadsheet, with each ad on a single row, with respective info – i.e. | name | link | graphics | description |. It can also be helpful to use a date in the file name so that updated files are easy to identified.

Google Tracking Link Reporting and Analysis:

• Log into you Google Analytics account
• In the left-hand menu, go to Traffic Sources > Campaigns
• In the main body, all traffic sources will be presented.
  • Those that haven’t been set up under a campaign will be presented as (not set) – for now it represents almost all of your site traffic
  • I had set up a test campaign link under the Campaign Name “test promo”
• If you change the “Dimension:” from the dropdown menu in the header row of the table, you can see the various tracking link variables (source, medium, campaign, keyword (term), and content). Under dimension, you can also separate traffic by city, region (state in U.S.) and more.

If you have any questions about the process, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thanks,

Dominic

Dominic Taverniti is the owner of Applied Web Vitals, a web design and development company specializing Dreamweaver templates and the Adobe Contribute CMS. Please feel free to contact us any time to explore your next web design or development project.

I’m working remotely today from cafes in Charleston, SC—a needed change from the home office. In search of a free wi-fi connection, I left a Starbucks for another cafe down the road. From a business owner’s perspective, I couldn’t help thinking about the customers that Starbucks looses by offering a pay wi-fi service while others give it away.

Surely it’s not because the mega franchise can’t afford to give it away. Which begs the question, do they charge just because they can? Or are there other considerations involved. Maybe it serves as a way to shew away squatters that plant themselves for hours on end. But the squatters at cafes are generally caffeine addicts that chain drink. I’m on my third cup now, not to mention the breakfast sandwich, bottled water and 1 lb. bag of coffee beans that I purchased.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not bashing Starbucks. I’m actually a fan of franchises and admire their finely tuned business model. So I’m left to think that the free vs. paid wi-fi decision must have been run through “the formula” and the pay service option came up the winner.

On a side note, didn’t the company just announce the closing of over 600 stores due to changes in in-store traffic? …changes in traffic just like my relocation to another local cafe for free wi-fi? Perhaps not, but you have wonder.

So how does this example apply to your business? What is the relative cost of providing a service or feature that would keep customers at your store or on your website, vs. the added revenues gained by simply keeping that customer around a while longer?

To be sure, there are cost-benefit considerations to any and every service that you offer. A recent example with my business was discontinuing our email marketing service. The time and cost of maintaining the back-end applications outweighed the return we were getting. Now I refer clients to third-party email marketing services. While I can’t help thinking that I’m sending business elsewhere, I know that I made a business focus decision that made sense for my business at the time.

From a consumer’s point of view, the Starbucks paid wi-fi decision seems like a poor one. But is it?

I turn the question to you. What are some cost-benefit decisions that you’ve made recently with your business?

The day has come that search engines edge out Yellow Pages for local business searches. According to a study by TMP Directional Marketing, search engines have taken over Yellow Pages as the more popular way for people to look for local businesses, 31 to 30% respectively.

Worth noting however, the decline in Yellow Pages use from 33% in 2007 to 30% in 2008, resulted in an increase in Internet Yellow Pages use from 17% to 19%. So with that, the 3% lose in Yellow Page use went online with 2% going to going to Internet Yellow Pages and 1% converting to search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Also interesting, despite the advancements in mobile technology, handset functionality and mobile broadband speeds, local search on mobile devices did not see an increase from 2007 to 2008. Curious! I’m not a mobile Internet user, so when I watch TV advertisements and read tech articles, I’m convinced that more and more people are going that direction.

The Take-Away: Local businesses can no longer rely on print alone to get in front of customers. A web presence is increasingly more important as local business search trends migrate to online resources.

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

Even great things come to an end. We’re sad to announce that the long running Myrtle Beach Web Technology Discussion Group has come to an end. With my relocation to Charleston, so goes the group.

Over the course of the past year and a half, I’ve had the great privilege of consulting a number of Myrtle Beach small business owners. And in such a turbulent business climate, the value of our discussions were worth their weight in gold . . . for everyone involved. As a web specialist and small business consultant, my continual education is the value that I pass along . Well, this past year spent with local Myrtle Beach businesses—discussing their website needs, marketing campaigns and branding efforts (among many other topics)—has been a great leap forward in my professional education.

In the next chapter of my career, aptly named “Charleston,” I’ll be firing up a new web discussion group in the Charleston area for small business owners and non-profit organizations. A continuation of the Myrtle Beach incarnation, the Charleston Web Technology Discussion Group will be free and open to everyone, with discussions on topics such as: building and maintaining websites; search engine optimization; Internet marketing and measurement; business blogging; graphic design & do-it-yourself advertising; or wherever the discussion leads…

As always, bring your curiosity and any unanswered web design questions.

The Charleston Web Technology Discussion Group is led by Dominic Taverniti, owner of Applied Web Vitals.

Applied Web Vitals’ latest nonprofit client website is now live. Protect The Human, an Amnesty International special project, was another collaborative effort with Citizen Group, a premier branding and design firm located in San Francisco, California.

We were hired to write and implement the XHTML, CSS and Java Script for this one page special purpose website. The website incorporates the latest standards in usability and web semantics as well as clean, light, search engine optimized code.

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

Quick announcement to Applied Web Vitals’ clients and others using the latest version of WordPress, version 2.6—the plugin PodPress, used for podcasting and video casting, is not working with the latest versions of WordPress. This issue has been outstanding for several weeks now and a resolutions does not appear to be available in the near future. For those interested, I can suggest an alternative to keep going. One that actually offers great advantages in media management, including sideshows, video and audio.

While on the topic of freeware though, some other thoughts have come to mind…

The reality of open and free technology catches up with us eventually. PodPress was developed and is maintained by a gracious individual who doesn’t profit from his work and offers it free to the public. Thousands (141,380 to be exact) have benefited and profited from this great tool. And at the same time, when it stops working, the same number of users come to a screeching halt. While some users like myself are occasional to frequent users, I know that others include large news syndications. What a great deal of faith and operating efficiencies we put into freeware!

Man, it hurts when your tools stop working! But if I tallied up the potential cost of all the freeware tools that I use, my business wouldn’t be able to afford them and wouldn’t be anywhere near where it is now.

…And so we appreciate the great benefits of the latest information revolution

Applied Web Vitals is a web design and development company. Please feel free to contact us to explore your next design, redesign or site enhancement project.

If you didn’t know, the accessibility of flash is (or has thus far been) significantly less than that of standard HTML. If you knew that, did you know that there have been some advancement in the ability for search engines (Google) to read and index flash?

Well, don’t take this news as the definitive green light to go 100% flash just yet. There are quite a few considerations before replacing your HTML with flash and the “advancements” are just that—steps in the right direction. We’re not there yet and I suspect in the end, there will always be some limitations.

Google recently reported on the progress that they’ve made in crawling flash files – “Now that we’ve launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results…” Continue Reading »

Assuming that my web guy died is actually giving him the benefit of the doubt; I have no idea where his is. Falling off the face of the earth is always a plausible explanation. Emails aren’t bouncing and voice mail isn’t full so it’s probably more likely that he’s made a conscious decision to hang me out to dry.

Situations like this call into question the professional ethics and reliability of the virtual web professional. Being a web designer and developer myself, I know that we shouldn’t all be painted with the same brush. Perhaps it’s my business background or the value that I place on my reputation that makes me push to please, complete, improve, excel . . . or to simply do what it is that I say I’m going to do.

The inspiration for this post came from a recent personal experience involving hiring and working with another web designer. The “incident” was painful, costly and (in retrospect) avoidable, or one where the damages could have at least been mitigated. Continue Reading »