Posted: November 13th, 2008 | Author: Bryan | Filed under: General | 7 Comments »
It’s no secret, the yellow pages (and all other brands) are on their dieing breath when it comes to delivered, paper based telephone books. You may or may not know that they still charge for ad placements in a medium that is all but forgotten in the internet generation. Simply ask anyone under the age of 30 when the last time they used a phone book. You’ll either hear an “I have no idea” or a “probably 5 or 6 years ago”.
If they can’t Google you and find your website, you simply don’t exist to those prospective customers, to say the least.
The impact on local marketing:
This shift away from mediums like the telephone book and to online search has had significant impact on local marketing. Gone are the days when college students bust out their Yellow Book to find a pizza place or local hair salon. They simply Google it, the results with phone numbers and addresses are up top, and away they go.
In short, for the younger generation, Google is the new Yellow Book.
Don’t worry, this is good news.
This puts you, the reader, in a unique position to utilize this new found knowledge. Let’s list a couple reasons on why this is good news for you.
- You’re early to the party.
You get to hop on the bandwagon early and position yourself competitively in an emerging market. We both know how saturated the yellow pages are.
- Fast results, instantaneous adjustments.
Not only will Google pick up your site within a day or two, you can make adjustments that affect your site’s performance instantaneously and see their results in a day or two. No more waiting around on the next edition of the yellow pages.
- More affordable, more effective.
Again, it’s no secret that the yellow pages ads are extremely expensive and are becoming less and less effective as every day goes past. Online marketing is cheaper (by 2 fold, on average), more effective and infinitely expandable.
Telephone books waste an outrageous amount of paper, a website wastes none. Why not save a tree while you’re saving and making a buck?
Don’t wait, act.
We can help you succeed online. Because we’re local, just like you, we equate our success with your success. Contact us today and let’s talk a little bit about it. The sooner you act, the sooner your business will flourish.
Sources: 1, 2, 3
Posted: November 2nd, 2008 | Author: Bryan | Filed under: Analytics, General, Open Source, Tutorial | 74 Comments »
If you’d like some customization done on the theme, I highly recommend going to our sister site GazelleThemes.com for an awesome and affordable Pro Package for Clean Home. Right off the bat, this has blurb customizations, new color schemes and an improved design (not to mention full customization support)! Unfortunately, due to time constraints, we cannot help users with the free-use GPL theme you’ll find on Wordpress.org.
Today marks a big day for us, we’ve released the same custom theme that cloaks this very site! Well, it is a very heavily modified version of this theme, but it retains the style that we’ve got going on. I am rather partial to my minimalism themes (just check out my personal site) but this way it remains clean and sparkly.
Without further ado, I present Clean Home (v 1.2.1), our house theme. You can download it for free now right here. So what’s special about this theme? Let me list the ways:
- Lightweight - A grand total of two images, both 2×6. The rest is XHTML and CSS.
- Minimalistic - No more distracting of your users, with our theme, your content stays king.
- Attention Grabbing - With a semi-customizable (1.1.3) blurb, you can say something right away that people just have to read.
- Full Widget Support - I even took care of some all (1.1.3) of the standard widgets’ CSS for you.
- Valid XHTML and CSS - As long as you stay valid on your end…
- GPL License – New! – Do what you will with the theme!
- Multiple Widget – Now with three sidebars (1.1.4) for maximum customization: top navigation, blurb, and sidebar.
- (Pro) Fully customizable blurb - select between hidden, random phrase, image, and per-post assigned text.
- (Pro) Adsense - three separate locations for Adsense integration.
- (Pro) Color selection - Over 7 color schemes.
- (Pro) Style selection - 2 distinct styles, selectable from inside the options.
- (Pro) Feedburner integration - an email subscribe button plus automatic feed redirection.
- (Pro) Fully customizable Home Page - select different categories and how many articles to showcase!
If you’d like some common custom options, visit our sister site Gazelle Themes for cheap purchasing options for the Pro Package. Otherwise, this is just our way of giving back to the wonderful open source community that makes our business possible.
Go ahead and download it now! Feel free to let us know what you think in the comments! Enjoy!
Check out our home page for any Missouri Web Design help you may need!
Posted: October 6th, 2008 | Author: Josh | Filed under: General | 3 Comments »
The small business world is rapidly changing as more people enter and competition gets tougher and small business owners have to be more forward thinking now than ever before just to keep up with their competition.
One of the best ways to move your business forward and increase your revenue is by getting your own small business website.A custom and functional website is not as expensive as you think and when done properly can give you more return on your investment than almost any other form of advertising and promotion you can find.
The following are the The Top 10 Reasons Your Business Needs A Website TODAY! I think you will find that some if not all of these can apply to your company!
1. A website can help you generate a professional image
A professionally designed website is one of the best ways to instill confidence in your new customers who are not familiar with your company already or even increase the confidence of your existing customer base. It gives the customer the impression that they are dealing with a firm they can trust and will generate a sense of respectability with your service and/or product.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: September 22nd, 2008 | Author: Bryan | Filed under: General | 1 Comment »
After what feels like a long time coming, I’ve finally got a couple hours to finish up the site and I am pretty excited about how it turned out. I spend approximately 5 hours designing this theme. Another hour or so was spent converting it to theme the wonderful open source CMS/blogging software Wordpress. All in all, I am pretty satisfied with how it turned out but I think I may add the commenting system back into it soon and now we have comments available for all!
A little bit about this site I built here:
The community that surrounds Wordpress makes it a great devolopment tool. Using open source code to built customized projects is fast and efficient. It’s why we’re a popular choice for local businesses.