I’ve used many other CMS over the years. I agree. Wordpress is fabulous! But don’t take my word for it. The Open Source CMS Awards received over 12,000 nominations and more than 23,000 votes across five categories. This is significant because we weren’t even in the top 5 last year, and now we’re ahead of Joomla!

Every member of the WordPress community, from core developer to beginning user, should be proud to be part of this momentum: congratulations to us all!

Adapted from a post by Matt   

http://wordpress.org/development/2009/11/wordpress-wins-cms-award/

or not…

some of us are trying to stuff the bellies of the homeless. These  days, the homelss are increasing in numbers, and are not the typical ”bum” or  “hobo” types.

Most of the current homeless  people or homeless families have full time jobs, unlike the bums of the past. The homeless may be your neighbor, who lived paycheck to paypaycheck and came across hard times.

The face of the homeless is harder to find and yet so much more common, if we just open our eyes to their need. Then, we truly can help others.

Come on…. Just DO IT!

Scholarships are a form of student financial aid that does not need to be repaid. Scholarships are awarded by foundations, philanthropists, non-profit organizations, businesses and colleges to help students pay for college. Some scholarships are awarded for academic merit, while others may focus on artistic or athletic talent or other personal characteristics. There are even a variety of unusual scholarships based on more esoteric talent such as duck calling or knitting with wool.

Students can discover the scholarships for which they are eligible by searching one of several large scholarship matching sites, such as the FastWeb scholarship database.

There are several free scholarship databases available online. With more than 1.5 million scholarships worth more than $3.4 billion! Check out: FastWeb scholarship search 

Don’t waste your money on fee-based scholarship matching services. You won’t get any better information than you can get from the free services available on the Web. 

Another great resource for students is “Scholarships 101: The Real World Guide to Getting Cash For College” by the Scholarship Lady, Kim Stezala. Visit the site and learn all about how to apply for and win scholarships.

Average students often ask whether there are any scholarships available to students who don’t have a 4.0 GPA. There are many scholarships for average students that focus on qualities besides academic merit. There are also many community service scholarships and scholarships for hispanic and latino students.

Most scholarship search sites do not allow children under age 13 to register because of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Unfortunately, this prevents parents from finding out about scholarships for students under age 13. FinAid has compiled a comprehensive list of college scholarships for students under age 13 and in grades K-8.

The fact that most scholarship sites don’t allow chilldren under 18 to register is very good in many ways. However, children need proactive parents, in order to apply for and get scholarships.

The fact is, most middle-school and intermediate school students are not thinking about how to finance college or how their grades, choices and decisions will affect them… for the rest of their lives. Having  their parents help, can make a big difference.

Can you imagine logging on to your computer to find that every web page loads instantly? This may become reality as webmasters and organizations around the world are coming up with solutions to make the web faster.

There are many things that affect page load time: connection speed of the end user, the browser, the hosting environment and different elements of a web page. Google’s recent initiative to “Make the Web Faster” showcases several optimization techniques that can be applied to your web site to improve load time.

Each time a web page is requested, the browser makes several HTTP requests to the server to fetch HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images and other elements. A good rule of thumb to make a web page load faster is to reduce the number of browser requests. When you reduce the number of requests, the user’s browser spends less time downloading and rendering these elements, thus greatly improving the load time of your web site. One easy way to do this is to combine all your scripts into a single file. 

There is a great tool to measure page load time and HTTP requests at: webpagetest.org. It allows you to choose the location you’d like the test run from, and you can also to configure it to emulate different connection speeds such as dialup and DSL.

Recently, we had the opportunity to redesign a web site for one of our clients. Their main complaint was the page load times, which were at 45 seconds. Using these optimization techniques, we reduced the page load time to just 3 seconds!

I love web development but… sometimes it can get a lttle boring. So, I am very happy to announce that Beyond-Studio has just partnered Web-Site-Solutions.net for their new web development project and we’re looking forward to this wonderfully creative project! They are using state of the art technology to create amazing giclee reproductions.

PR News’ Platinum PR Awards & Best Places to Work in PR Luncheon
Wednesday, October 21| Noon – 2 p.m.
Grand Hyatt, New York City

Nearly 200 finalists from top PR companies and agencies will be recognized at the event along with the winners of the Best Places to Work in PR, where “The Best of Show” winner will also be announced. The Digital PR Next Practices Summit will take place the day after the awards luncheon, October 22, at the Grand Hyatt in NYC.

Their Best Places to Work in PR Winners Include:

Corporate
Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Best Buy
Chesapeake Energy Corporation
Cisco
Discovery Communications
First Horizon National Corp
Pfizer
State Farm Insurance
Symantec
Turner Broadcasting Systems

Agency
APCO
Carmichael Lynch Spong
CJP Communications
Cohn Marketing
Marina Maher Communications
MWW
Sterling Communications
Text 100
Waggener Edstrom
Weber Shandwick

Nonprofit
American Red Cross
Children’s Home Society of Florida
Cleveland Metropolitan School District
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Kaiser Permanente

Congratulations to all those who have been nominated!

Well, it’s been a very long time since I have been blogging. Too many projects going on… I sympathize with the shoemaker!
So I had a little downtime today and decided to check on my blog. It has been so long that I think I still had the original wordpress version!!! LOL

Well, I upgraded and decided to use one of the wordpress themes. There are so many beautiful themes to choose from, maybe I’ll change my theme every month : )

Well, must get to checking the 15,785 comments awaiting moderation! I’m hoping to get back to blogging on a regular basis (like once a week) so check back soon and thanks for visiting!

SEO Explained -
When talking to clients about marketing their business online I am often asked “How do you get to #1 on Google?” This article is not specially geared to how to become #1 – but I’ll explain what the process is and what is involved.

Despite our widespread acceptance and use of the internet – I am surprised by how many people really have no idea what search engine optimization (SEO) is all about. They instinctively know WHY they like to click on a listing in the search results; but they don’t have a clue how it got there. That’s okay, we can help.

I ask clients WHY they click on a specific listing. Most believe it’s the “best result” for the phrase they typed into the search box -and- it’s usually one of the first results or at least on the first page. However, they do not have a clue as to how or why it got there.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of configuring a web site so that it has a chance to show up in a search result for a “particular phrase”. Using a particular phrase is our way of telling Google, Yahoo, or MSN what we think our site is about. Many of the search engines have a slightly different formula for how they determine these results. But the short version is that they look at different factors of each web site page, rank them and then give those results to you.

Why is SEO Important?

One word sums it up – competition. Depending on what study you read, there are as many as 20 billion web pages being indexed at any given time. The major search engines do their best to go through these pages and index them so that they can tell you about it if you use their web site to search. With so many web site pages out there competing for similar phrases it is absolutely critical to make sure you are using every tool at your disposal to make sure your customers can find you when they are looking.

What Should I Be Doing for SEO On My Site?

People often ask, “Why doesn’t my site show up for this specific search term?” Usually, it is due to the fact that they never mention that term or phrase on their site, in their page titles, in their descriptions or keywords. Please understand, when considering content for your site and researching keywords and terms for SEO – it is crucial to use the terms you and your clients use! No one knows your business better than you, so your input during this time is of utmost importance.

The good news is that doing SEO correctly is not complicated. The bad news is that it takes time and requires regular attention in order to maintain those results.

We follow these simple guidelines for best long-term results:

Good site structure -
As simple as this sounds many people overlook this. Every day we see sites with heavy flash animation, dated frame designs, pages that don’t work and broken links. The bottom line is that if you can’t easily navigate a site without problems chances are the search engines can’t either. And if a search engine can’t go through your site – you have absolutely no chance of showing up for a key phrase – no matter how pretty the flash.

Good meta-data -
Clients often draw a blank with this one. Meta-data is geek for the page titles, page descriptions and keywords that you enter for each page. Each page on your web site should have a unique title, description and keywords that summarizes what that page is about.

We often see 2 problems with meta-data. The first is that it is simply overlooked. I am stunned at how many sites have “Home Page” as the page title or www.yoursite.com for every page – that’s wasting prime online real estate.

The 2nd problem is spam. Putting in a page title or description that does not accurately match what the page is about is considered “spamming” a search engine. Doing this will get your page thrown out of the index and ruin any chance of showing up for a key phrase.

Relevant Content -
People seem to understand that good content is really what they are looking for when they search for something. By “relevant” we mean that the content is specific to the topic in question. Plus – we are seeing sites that have regular updates or blogs that show up higher in the search results than sites which have larger quantities of older or stale content.

Our recommendation is to add well-written, grammatically correct and spell-checked content to your web site on a regular basis. This ensures that, over time, your site will become a “resource” to those searching for the phrases related to your business.

Responsible link building -
This is perhaps the least understood part of SEO. In a nutshell search engines consider a link from another web site to your web site as a popularity vote. Think of it as power rankings for web sites. In general the more sites which link to yours, the better; as this shows your site is relevant to the given topic.

Link building, just like keywords and meta-data, have been abused by many site owners with schemes including link farms where sites are setup simply to link to other sites. We encourage careful and responsible link building with sites that are related to yours and through appropriate directories and articles.

So there you have it – SEO explained. Like most things it’s not really that hard, but it does require discipline, careful consideration and maintenance. If you would like help with SEO for your web site, or other online business needs we would love to hear from you.

Many of you have probably seen the commercial where the entrepeneurs push “publish” for their web site and immediately, orders start coming in and then quickly skyrocket out of control. That may work well for a commercial, but that is not real life scenerio. Just as placing an “open” sign in your store window will not automatically create a flood of customers into your store.

Many new sites with new domains appear at the top of Google’s (SERPs) but none seem to remain there, since about mid 2004. I’ve consulted with other web developers, studied the trends and tracked my clients’ sites. Despite the fact that they have #1 positions in Yahoo, Alta Vista, AllTheWeb & MSN for their keyword phrases, I haven’t seen any lasting results in Google until the end of a 6 – 8 month period. This is called the Google Sandbox Theory. New sites gain listings on Google quickly, then disappear just as quickly.

This trend suggests that new sites are initially indexed; ranked accordingly in Google’s SERPs for a week or so and then vanish from the SERPs for several months. In some cases, they can’t even be found with the most unique search terms including their own name and location.

If you’ve just launched a new site don’t panic. You’ve registered your domain name, configured the hosting and published your optimized site. I recommend launching a site that facilitates the requirements for directory listings right from the start. Follow Google’s Webmaster’s guidelines to give you a ballpark indication of where Google will rank your site after the aging delay, then just be patient.

While you are waiting, obtain links from other sites in Google’s index through publishing press releases, advertisements and articles on other sites that your target audience may visit. The sooner Google is aware of your domain the better. The more opportunities (links) created, the better chance they have to find you. Just don’t hold your breath waiting to see results or have the expectation that early listings will remain indefinately. It could be as long as 6 – 8 months.

At first, gauge your optimization efforts by where your site ranks in the other search engines. It does not help to keep tweaking and changing your pages, source code and trying to manipulate your rankings until your site has been in Google’s index for at least 6 – 8 months. In other words, it doesn’t seem to matter what you do, your site will still be delayed.

Initially, it is best to use less common, more targeted phrases, to find your listing such as; the business name and/or location. As your listings increase through links from other sites, use your main keyword phrase in the title, and as text that links to your site. Do not be repetative, vary the text slightly or use a combination of unique keyword phrases relating to your business.