Fox Web Company. Smarter.

We have our niche. Do you?

'Tis the season for strategic planning - or at least its getting there for the Smarter Fox team. For me, I usually start ramping up to analyze the business, where we've been and where we want to go in the coming year on or about November 1. By December 1, I'm so obsessed with the planning and anticipation of the year to come that I can hardly stand it.

This year, the bug seems to have bitten earlier than usual. Here at FoxWebco we are planning a crazy dive that's deeper into a narrower niche than ever before. And we can hardly wait. In fact, the new toys are already coming out of the closet as we test market them with some existing customers and contacts and get all the "kinks" worked out of our work process.

Things are coming along handsomely. So I thought I'd give you a sneak peak...

It looks like our big buzz going into 2009 will likely to have something to do with empowering small businesses to use their technology better - to make using technology not only much more affordable - but much more efficient and simple.

We are wrapping up our first few projects with our new FoxyEdit System. And it is incredible. I'm just a project manager around here - I can't tell you anything about how to create a style sheet or code a shopping cart - but I can tell you that my business consulting web site is so freaking easy to update now that its hooked up to the "oh so very affordable and no time spent to learn" FoxyEdit System.

Basically, if you have a site that you need to update (text, photos, links to documents, etc.), we "hook up your site" and then give you a link, userid and password. When you login from any Internet connected computer, you'll see all of your pages and all of the editable regions. It's like editing a Word document.

Every web site should be updated frequently in order to gain any benefit at all. Search engines like to see those frequent updates. In turn, they reward you by making it easier for your customers to see those frequent updates when they search for your site. Finally, frequent updates correlate directly to increased sales. Who doesn't want that?

So, our niche: helping you, small business owner of the world, be able to update your own web site whenever and whereever you want. Just grab and Internet connection and you can update all you want. No special software. No special computer. No special training. You hold the steering wheel on your business - and a key business marketing tool. As it should be.

That's our niche. Equipping and empowering YOU to be successful using technology. What's yours?

P.S. Not a Fox customer? It doesn't matter. This service is equal opportunity. Just ask us about whether your site is a fit or not.

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New Sites, New Brands and a New FoxyEdit(or) System

What good is a blog, if you don’t use it? Well not much, and we have been remiss in updating ours as much as we’ve wanted to. It’s been a busy few months, and we’ve launched some great projects, and been involved with some social networking sites that are going to be launched soon.

So let’s discuss some of the things we’ve been working on… Well first of all, some branding projects. Including the new Fox brand, yep, it’s up, what do you think? We’ve had so many of you to keep up with that we’ve hardly had time to work on our own sites. But that’s a good problem to have, and we love staying busy.

A fixture in the Mississippi Delta is The Crown Restaurant. We helped the Roughton's get that site up in time for the B.B. King Museum Grand Opening in Indianola a few weeks ago, and theirs was one of our first sites to use our new FoxyEdit system which allows our clients to make changes to their site without having any software, or any computer skills. If you can write and email, or email a picture, we bet you can update your site, too. We are even doing this for customers who don’t host their site with us. It’s helping many clients be able to give their site an affordable facelift before the holiday season - and market better and smarter during these economic times.

In other news, we’ve got some super cool projects that are going live in the next two weeks - one is an establishment in the historic Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson, Miss. We’ll be launching a new brand for them, along with a sleek new web site in coming weeks. Stay tuned for that unveiling and more.

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7 Killer Applications for BlackBerry

In this day and age, a BlackBerry (as well as other "smartphones", such as iPhone, Palm, etc.) is an essential tool for those of us who are constantly on the go, but need to always stay connected.

If you're one of the lucky who own and love a BlackBerry, I've come across a great article on Web Worker Daily (on of my absolute favorite blogs), which tells us about 7 applications that can allow you to accomplish even more while you're on the go. Check it out here!

Here are three applications mentioned in the article that I thought were especially nifty:

Jott for BlackBerry

In a previous article, I covered tips for getting more from BlackBerry email. One application I didn’t mention is Jott for BlackBerry, which is an extension of its main service that lets you reply to messages using your voice. Jott transcribes your verbal message to text before sending it on to the recipient and includes a link in the email to hear the voice recording in case of transcription errors. The Jott voice recognition engine is amazing - even my laid-back Aussie drawl, which is usually a challenge for anyone out of the country to understand, let alone a machine, was transcribed with 100% accuracy.

eOffice

eOffice is the only document editor for BlackBerry currently available, but its real killer feature is integration with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Using this program, you can open and edit files in your online account, as well as save files you’ve created on the BlackBerry directly to your Google account. But it still needs work: in my testing, the connection would time out more times than not, or throw up errors that the document I was trying to open was empty or invalid.

BlackBerry Call Screener

Finally, I’ve found BlackBerry Call Screener indispensable for managing my calls. When I’m ‘in the zone’, I don’t like being interrupted with phone calls, and rather than turn my BlackBerry off altogether, I can set up Antair CallScreener to block all calls save for people on my ‘whitelist’ (mainly my partner and family) – anyone else can send me an email or leave a voicemail! Other options in the program include blocking all calls, blocking all calls save for people in your address book, and allowing all calls except for people on your blacklist.

Click here to read the entire article.

10 Tools to Get Blogging Done

Last week, I posted an article about increasing your SEO - that's search engine optimization - in which, I mentioned how great a marketing tool blogging can be.

However, blogging isn't something that just comes naturally for all of us - we're all very busy, lacking in the idea department, we aren't the most gifted writers, etc.

I'm sure you all have already deducted this, but I'm a huge fan of the blog! I read tons and tons of blogs (and if you do, too, I STRONGLY, STRONGLY recommend trying Google Reader to keep track of them all, it's A-MAZING) and am always on the lookout for helpful tips and tricks for making websites, designing, getting the most out of the Web, and just life in general, too. :) And whenever I find something really good, I like to share.

Today, one of my all-time favorite blogs Lifehacker posted 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done.

Here are a couple highlights that I think would be the most helpful for you Fox bloggers out there. Or, you may click here to read whole article.

7. Live-blog from your phone with Jott

Free voicemail-to-text service Jott can help you nail down post material while you're on the go with a phone call, but you can also use the service directly with a number of blogging platforms, including Blogger, Typepad, LiveJournal, Tumblr, and WordPress. If you're hosting your own blog, you can still use Jott's voice-to-email service in conjunction with your platform's email-to-post function to indirectly get your thoughts up online, even while you're miles from your keyboard.

5. Get topic-based post ideas sent to your inbox every day with Google Alerts

Whether you write about a team, a certain topic, or a broad trend, Google Alerts brings your post material to you. Use the same kind of advanced search operators you use on Google's main search site to laser-focus on a particular kind of web site, blog post, news story, or group post you're looking for. Decide if it gets sent as fast as Google's servers find it, or in a daily or weekly email digest. Using Alerts exposes you to a wider array of information than you'd get from a defined list of RSS feeds, and it's an easy way to keep your eyes on the web without really being at the search box all day.

4. Spend less time resizing images

Few blogs can get by with just words alone, but finding the perfect image to illustrate a post—and then making it fit right—can take more time than the post itself. If you're not committed to Photoshop or its open-source alternative, GIMP, free online image editing site Picnik is a good bet, both for its right-click Firefox extension and its integration with Flickr. If you've got a whole set of pictures you're ready to post up, you can try the Windows-only ImageResizer, or for an elegant solution, use the export-and-resize functionality of . (For more on finding reusable images, see our six ways to find reusable media.

Click here for the other seven ideas from Lifehacker's "10 Tools to Get Blogging Done".

Increase your site's traffic.

1. Keywords

Keywords are what people browsing the Web use to find what they want.

For example, whenever you go to Google or Yahoo! and search for a good Thai restaurant in the Jackson, MS area, chances are, you'd type in "Thai food Jackson Mississippi" or "Thai restaurant Jackson MS". Each of those words you'd type is a keyword.

In order for crawler-based search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, to display your website among the first ten results, the content on your site needs to be rich in keywords that potential customers would use to search for your website.  It can also be helpful to make keywords within your content bold, used as headings, linked to more relevant content, italicized, etc.

2. Links to your site

Search engines not only look at what's on YOUR website when someone searches for it! They also look for  other sites that have links to your site, and analyze whether or not the link descriptions are relevant to the content on your site. The more links there are to your site, and the more relevant your site's content are to those links, the better your search engine rankings will be!

So... how do you get people to link to your site? Here are a few suggestions...

Networking on the Web:
Surely by now you've become aware of how the advent of social networking has affected the ways and reasons we use the Internet. Sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn connect not only teenagers and college students, but professionals as well.  These social networking sites are all free to join & use, and provide a great platform for marketing your site to a practically limitless audience of potential customers.

Advertise:
If your website features an e-commerce system, or another system by which you are intending to make your website make YOU money directly, then advertising could be a fruitful investment. Lots of websites with big audiences (news, weather, etc.) offer ad affiliate programs. Some websites offer banner or other graphical ads, or text-only ads, or both, priced depending on how much space they'd take up - very similar to how newspaper ads work!

There are free options out there for advertising as well: Google AdSense is a good affiliate program. The way it works is, you'd display some small, non-invasive text ads on your website, and, in return, other websites will display text ads that link to you.

Blogging:
What's a blog, you say? You're reading one right now!

A blog is kind of like an online diary or journal, that's great for personal use, but can also be a great marketing tool. You don't have to be a great writer to have a blog, either! (Hey, I'm writing this, and I'm just a graphic designer.) Just write about what your business is doing, exciting new products or services you may be launching, post pictures, etc. Most blog platforms have spell check if you're not a great speller. And, of course, to increase your site's linkage, post links to your site, and use those keywords we talked about! Example: Fox Web Company  - Smarter web design and web hosting.

Also, having a blog makes it easier to network with other bloggers. For example, the FoxWebCo blog you're reading now uses Typepad (I also recommend Blogger and Wordpress), and the Typepad interface allows us to customize our blog to link to blogs we like, and other folks who like our blog can link to it, etc. All these links out there will add up & have a positive effect to your website's traffic!

3. Frequent updates

Search engines also work by looking for websites which have been updated recently. That's why it's a good idea to keep up-to-date information posted on your site.  Here's some ways FoxWebCo can help you with this:

We'll update your site for you.
For a reasonable hourly rate, we can post any updated text, photos, etc. you send us to your website. For more information about our rates, contact Andy (andy@foxwebco.com or 228-493-6555), and he will work with you to come up with a solution that's best for your website (and your wallet!)

We'll set up your site so it's easy to update yourself.
There are couple of ways we can do this: We can outfit your website with a Content Management System (or CMS), or, if you purchase the program Adobe Contribute and install it on your computer, we'd be happy to train you on how to use it to update your site.

If you choose to try out a CMS, there are practically limitless options out there, and MANY of them are open-source (that means they're free, but donations are encouraged)! Here's some of our favorites, but feel free to dig deeper & find one that works for your site, and we'll help install it.
- Mambo
- Joomla (these first two are very similar, you may notice)
- Drupal
- CMS Made Simple
- Wordpress (technically, Wordpress is a blogging system, but its format is so flexible, that it can be modified as a CMS)

4. Good, clean XHTML/CSS

Good, clean what?

XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) is what's called a markup language - a set of codes used to tell a web browser what to display on a website.  It's what FoxWebCo web designers & developers such as myself use to make your website display what your business needs it to.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is used to make your website have the look it does - it's used to define fonts used, font sizes, background colors, borders, widths, heights, etc.

To make a long story short, XHTML & CSS, when properly written & implemented, work together to tell the web browser to display a website that has all its content in the right place, looks good, etc.

If your site was designed by FoxWebCo, you can probably guarantee its XHTML and CSS are compliant. However, if we designed a a site for you several years or so ago, you may want to check with us to make sure it's compliant with Web standards - no, we were never bad web designers! It's just that the standards and the most efficient ways of making websites IS constantly changing, and to make sure your website is keeping up, its design and layout should be updated once every year or two, in my opinion.

XHTML & CSS are constantly evolving to use less and less code. A website designed in 2000 probably has a lot more code in it than one designed in 2007. The more code a search engine has to dig through, the less desirable your rankings will be. Also, this ties in with keeping a site's content up-to-date, as well.

So, in conclusion, if your website isn't showing up where you'd like it in the Google or Yahoo! search results, please use this article as a checklist to see what may need to be done. Also, feel free to contact us for more information on how we can help get your website up there in the Top Ten. :)

 

More Savvy Web Browsing - Are You Up-To-Date?

Are you using the most up-to-date version of your favorite web browser? If not, you could be missing out on some cool new features, or seeing some funny stuff on some of the websites you visit.

A while back, I introduced you to some popular browsers out there that, for many, are a refreshing alternative to the big blue "e" for Windows users. Perhaps you don't have the 5 or 10 minutes to spare to try a new browser out, or you're just not that interested, or you fear change, and hey, that's OK. But you should definitely at least be on the lookout for Internet Explorer updates as they become available.

Why? Because the Web is always changing, improving, and evolving. And most reputable web design firms, like FoxWebCo, will continue to change, improve, and evolve with it.

I'm going to share a dirty secret with you about Internet Explorer, the most popular web browser: it has kind of a bad reputation with Web Design people such as myself, due to some problems adhering to World Wide Web Consortium standards. But they're getting better at it. (Microsoft even promises that Internet Explorer version 8.0 will pass the Acid 2 Test for standards compatibility.)

What is the World Wide Web Consortium (or, W3C for short) and what does it mean to you? To make a long story short, the W3C is organization that seeks, among other things, to make the entire Web accessible, no matter what kind of computer, browser, or whatever you're using. The W3C defines how the codes designers like me use to make Web pages should work, and how browsers should interpret those codes. But Internet Explorer is notorious for not playing by the rules.

Since the release of Internet Explorer version 7.0 in October 2006, things have been a little better. IE 7 even has tabbed browsing, a nifty feature that was previously only found on Firefox and other browsers that many may not have known about. But the problem is, many of you are still using Internet Explorer version 6.0.

Some website designs that look AWESOME in IE 7 and other browsers, in IE 6, will appear distorted. Things that should float beside another element may get pushed up under that element, text and content may "bleed over" into the background, etc. It's kind of a tough job sometimes to make a website look good in the latest browsers, and IE 6, too.

So - in conclusion, I urge you strongly to upgrade! Not just for the sanity of myself and other Web designers, but so YOU can be a savvy Web surfer and use a browser that does a much better job of what it's supposed to do by being smarter about standards, has cool new features, and is also more secure.

If you don't know if you NEED to upgrade or not, in your browser, go to Help and click About Internet Explorer. If the logo doesn't say "Windows Internet Explorer 7", you should upgrade!

Click here to get started upgrading to IE 7!

And after you've finished upgrading to 7, be on the lookout for version 8.0 to be released!  Whenever Internet Explorer asks you to install any browsing or security updates, do it!

Polishing a HALO...

Hi, everyone. Here's another update from Foxland!

We're very excited about the recent launch of the re-design of halobusiness.com, the business advising company of our very own Strategic Planning Assistant and Marketing Diva, Marianna Hayes.

HALO Business Advisors (aka Team HALO), famous for revamping small businesses and communities to help them thrive, recently underwent a drastic marketing and branding facelift of its very own. After community branding expert extraordinaire Ben Muldrow  presented an awesome new logo, I was honored to have the opportunity to revamp the website to match!

Old Logo:

New Logo:

Old Site:

New Site:

Click here to visit the new live site at halobusiness.com

We had a lot of fun re-working the site design and layout to match not only the new logo, but lots of other changes HALO has undergone as well. (I'm sure you Fox Web clients recognize one of those smiling faces on the new site.)

Design-wise, one of my challenges in this site was working with a logo that had a very warm color scheme - reds, golds, yellows, maroons. To add a little more interest to the color scheme, I brought in a dusty teal blue to the mix to cool off all those warm colors a bit. I also used that color to emphasize the "halo" shape in the circular abstract shapes moving across the warm golden background.

Also, since blogging and e-mail marketing are such a big part of how HALO presents itself, I made the links to the HALO blog and to sign up for its e-mail newsletter much more emphasized.

We think the re-design has been a huge success, and adds a little more "fun" to Team HALO's look than the old logo & website did, since they were mostly brown, and almost too corporate and official-looking.

In other words, it's OK for a very successful, serious business to at least look like they can have a good time, too. :)

---

So... has it been a while since your website had a face-lift? Is it looking a little dusty or dated, perhaps?

If so, send an e-mail to support@foxwebco.com and we'll be glad to give your site a makeover! Never underestimate what giving your business a fresh new look can do to attract more customers or clients. That's what our specialty is!

If you think you're ready for a website or branding overhaul, but you're not sure you can afford it, please e-mail us anyway - we also specialize in finding creative ways to work within even the most limited of budgets.

Can't wait to hear from you!

- Amanda
Fox Web Designer

A New Look for an Old Store

FoxWebCo is very proud to announce the launch of oldhardwarestore.com - the online home of Kaffie-Frederick General Mercantile. Kaffie-Frederick is the oldest store in the state of Louisiana, located in historic downtown Natchitoches, and we're very excited about the new branding & website we've come up with for them!

This site really shows not just our creativity, Photoshop prowess, and our top-notch XHTML/CSS compliance, but also how resilient we are and quick to respond to a challenge!

Only days before the launch of this site, our creative team and the client had a Category-5 brainstorm to make oldhardwarestore.com even better at meeting the needs of Kaffie-Frederick.

Here's the original first draft of the home page:

Looks good, but doesn't say much about this store other than, "Well, they must sell children's items, kitchen goods, hardware, tools, and home & garden accessories. And apparently, they have been around a while!"

So we decided to kick it up a notch, by...

• Bringing some News & Upcoming Event information to the home page
• Showing off their upcoming appearance on the Fine Living TV Network, and bragging about what's been said about them.
• Adding a button that'll quickly enable interested viewers to sign up to receive e-mail updates from the store.
• Using attention-grabbing badge shapes to direct the eye to important places on the page.
• On the subordinate pages, in the place of the News & Events on the left side, we put testimonials from adoring customers!
• We cleaned up the edges of the photos. We originally thought that the distressed-effect on the above photos would add interest in tie in the theme of the "oldest store in Louisiana", but in the end, we decided just having a plain white border around the photos provided much more visual impact.
• We added a keyword-rich paragraph of introductory text on the home page. This will help search engines bring it to the top of the listings, and get the site more visitors!

Here's the final home page layout:

To see oldhardwarestore.com in live action, click here!

DIY Spam & E-mail Management!

Good afternoon and Happy Thursday!

I'm very proud to release a document that I think all our clients will find very helpful. This document explains how to access a top-secret area of your website that allows you to manage your e-mail accounts and streamline how they work to best suit your needs. With this info, you'll be able to..

1. Reset someone's forgotten e-mail password.

2. Access Spam Filter settings & training, so you can take an active role in keeping your inbox clean & junk-free.

3. Set up e-mail autoresponders, have an e-mail address redirect mail to a different address, etc.

Click the link below to download the 4-page PDF:
Download Domain_Email_Administration.pdf
(You'll need Adobe Reader installed to open this file, if you don't already have it.)

NOTE: Before you can follow the instructions in the document, you'll need a Domain Administrator login. If you don't have one, or don't know if you have one or not, e-mail me (amanda@foxwebco.com) and I will set you up with one! (There are no extra charges for this feature.)

I hope y'all enjoy it! As always, e-mail me if there's something you'd like to be able to do that the document doesn't cover, and I'll do my best to help!

Oh, and don't forget - after March 1 (this Saturday), rush charges will apply for updates requested less than 3 business days in advance.  Click here for more information on this new policy. If you have any additional questions, e-mail andy@foxwebco.com.

What kind of vehicle do you use to navigate the Web?

Picture this:

You need a new car. You go the car lot, and all the cars you see are the same make, model, color, transmission type, etc. (Same price, too.)They're all carbon copies of one another.

What if I told you there are several other kinds of cars that are up for grabs offering different colors, standards, stick shifts, leather interior upgrades, GPS systems, even optional fun racing stripes? What if I told you all these cost the same as the carbon copies you saw in that lot? The only difference is, these are hidden in a back room, but guess what? I know the way.

Not all of you, but MOST of you are reading this via Windows, and Internet Explorer.

Maybe you thought Internet Explorer, that big, blue "e" on your Desktop, was just where you have to go if you want to browse the Web. It's OK, I thought that way for many years myself.

But guess what?

In the same way you can go to a car lot and choose either a Toyota Corolla or a Ford Focus, you can choose your web browser! You have OPTIONS when it comes to the vehicle you use to navigate the Internet!

Chances are, you've at least heard someone in the background talking about one or more of these really cool alternative Web browsers.... They're all free for download, just like the big blue "e" that likely came with your computer... :)

Firefox
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
This is my personal favorite. It's much better than IE (that's short for Internet Explorer) at blocking annoying pop-ups, and at rendering the websites we Fox folks work so hard on according to World Wide Web Consortium standards. There's also a whole community of developers creating Add-Ons for Firefox that can make your time spent on the Web more productive and fun! Firefox also had tabbed browsing before IE ever thought about it. (Only version 7.0 of IE has tabbed browsing.)

Safari
http://www.apple.com/safari/
Chances are, you or someone you know may already be using a Mac. If you're a Mac user, you already know about Safari - Safari's blue compass is the "big blue e" of the Apple world. Mac computers come with Safari pre-installed, the way Windows computers come with Internet Explorer. But did you know that you can use Safari on Windows, too? You sure can, go try it out! Windows users, in Safari, you may notice that the text you read is a lot easier on the eyes. That's because Safari has a little trick called "anti-aliasing" up its sleeve, that smooths out the rough edges of text at a sub-pixel level. This is one of my favorite things about Safari.

Opera
http://www.opera.com/
Opera is what I'd like to call the cult classic of the Web-browsing world. You're much more likely to have heard of Firefox and Safari than Opera, but I assure you, it's one of the Web's best-kept secrets! Opera has cool tabbed browsing like Safari, Firefox, and IE 7, but it has one feature I like none of the others have: Speed-Dial. Speed-Dial lets you customize your home page to show thumbnails of lots of your favorite websites right on one page! Then you can click the thumbnails to actually open the site and have a closer look.

And those are just the top 3 web browsers used, besides Internet Explorer! There are many more where those came from. If you know of a cool web browser I didn't mention here, please tell me all about it in the comments!

So, now that you are a smarter, savvy-er Web user and know that you can pick your own car, which are you going to drive? Or which are you driving now?