April 19th, 2012

Join our social media support Groups!

by MaryFrances

We’re now offering a new low cost and convenient way to grown your companies social media and internet marketing presence!  

The 1 hour monthly group sessions are available online for your convenience!

Within each 1 hour session there will be ½ an hour of education and ½ an hour of “sharing” and questions using Anymeeting.com (instructions will be emailed to you before the group begins).

Over the 6 months, we’ll welcome expert guest speakers in different areas of social media and blogging and cover all basic forms of social media including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Foursquare, Yelp, multiple blogging platforms and anything else the group feels we need to touch on.

Groups are limited to 8 members in each Internet marketing “support group”.

Bonus! – Each participant also receives an hour of my time individually via phone or Anymeeting.com to cover their own personal challenges and strategies! We can follow up on topics covered in the class or deal specifically with the challenges of your company.

We’re starting with two Groups to cater to different people:

  • Beginning – Are you a beginner? Do you know where to start on how to set up a Facebook page? Do you have a basic one set up and 1-5 followers? Twitter is a mystery? Well then you’re probably a beginner!
  • Intermediate – If you have your Facebook and Twitter pages set up and have some followers, but now need to know how to safely and profitably expand. If you’d like to know more about blogging, Pintrest and other “hot” social media platforms, then the Intermediate is for you.

As soon as we have 5 members we’ll begin (approximately mid-May). The sessions will run for 6 months with the option to renew at the end of the period.


Please email me if you have any questions about what will be covered, what level you should sign up for or any other questions.

January 31st, 2012

Pinterest – visual blogging

by MaryFrances

If you’re a visual person, you’ll love Pinterest. But more than that, it’s a place to gather ideas, network with other people with similar interests and even generate publicity for a website/blog/eCommerce store.

Off the Pinterest website:

“Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests. To get started, request an invite.”

According to “Readwriteweb” Pinterest is growing fast, and 80% of the site’s users are women ages 25-44.

Go check it out! Yes, you need an invite – but just request one and you’ll be on it soon!

December 13th, 2011

When is a website like a car?

by MaryFrances

Courtesy of Phillip C

This past week we’ve had car troubles, or as I got fond of saying “mechanic troubles”.  To make a long and painful story short, we had one car in the shop 3 times and the other one one time in the space of two weeks. This wasn’t including the 3 tows to get the car to the mechanic.

So, how does this relate to your website?

We felt vulnerable.

I’m not totally stupid about cars – I know enough to usually know when it’s electrical or cooling or when I need new tires. However, cars have gotten more complicated and I’ve gotten so I just want mine to run.

November 30th, 2011

What’s a hashtag? Use it to get in the twitterstream!

by MaryFrances

If you’re new to Twitter, you may have NO idea how to approach it, but one of the best ways to focus and find a “home” on Twitter is by using and searching for hastags. Hashtags make sense of the “cocktail party” that is Twitter!

Imagine being at a cocktail party where everyone is talking at once (sounds like a typical party, eh?) – it’s confusing and overwhelming.

However, if you could zone in on all of the people talking about a subject that interests you it might be more interesting and you would meet and connect with interesting people. Make sense? That’s a hashtag! Your way of organizing the chaos!

So, how do I use a hashtag?

July 6th, 2011

The Untapped Internet

by Roger L. Main

Since the Internet first went public in the early 1990’s the growth has been incredible. Recent statistics estimate that there are over two billion Internet users or 30 percent of the world’s population. One report suggests that there are around 156 million websites. The recent boom in smartphone technology and sales further demonstrates that the Internet is not going to go away soon.

So when I say that 90 percent of the potential of the Internet has not been realized it doesn’t seem to make sense. But think about it. The Internet didn’t exist for the public twenty years ago (it was still in development and limited to universities and governments). The smartphone has only been available for eight years and has only really taken off in popularity in the last four or so.

June 28th, 2011

Introducing Injammies © Technology.

by Roger L. Main

The advent of ASP.NET has made a whole new world open up. Over the last ten years we, the programmers – particularly us “old school” programmers – can now look at the World Wide Web not in design terms, as we used to when the the Internet first went public, but in terms of developing an application. And the term “web application” came into being.

But the particular advantage of ASP.NET is the clear and definitive separation of presentation and code. Developers who used Delphi, Visual Basic (yes, the old Visual Basic) and other visual languages for applications development can appreciate this. A form is a form and is never confused with the code that affects the form’s behavior. Perhaps this was because the form was developed “visually” – one painted a form (remember Powerbuilder? It actually called its different components “painters”) and it would be inconceivable to confuse this in any way, shape or form, with the code.

April 7th, 2011

How to handle a negative online review

by MaryFrances
by Mary-Frances Main

Until just recently, unhappy customers had two options to complain formally: send a written letter/email, or ask to speak to a manager. Of course, this was in addition to personally telling all their friends about their experience.

Along comes social media and now unhappy customers can now announce their complaints to a much larger audience: not only to their friends, but to anyone who’s listening. One statistic says that more than 93% of people shop via the internet, and online reviews are big factors in decision making.

The bottom line: online reviews matter.

So, someone posted a bad review, now what?

February 3rd, 2011

Where were you in 1994? Did you know about the internet?

by MaryFrances

This is really really funny! Amazing only a short time ago the media was this clueless.

January 5th, 2011

My Blackberry is not working

by Roger L. Main

And now for something a little more frivolous – a very good friend of mine send me this. Enjoy!

January 5th, 2011

Easy Image Mapping

by Roger L. Main

Again, I’m writing this down so that I don’t forget it. The question is this: how can you easily get the coordinates for a complex polygon image map area? The way I used to to it was to take the image and, painstakingly, copy down coordinate after coordinate. There must be a better way – and there is.

If you have the full version of the Adobe Creative Suite then it comes with a program called “Fireworks” which is helpful in situations like this. All you need to do is select the part of the image that you want to map (by whatever means you care to do so – this is only for getting coordinates so erasing parts of the image and doing a magic wand selection works nicely. Then, right-click the selected area and choose, from the popup menu:

Modify Marqee -> Convert to Path

And then, right-click on the vectored object that is created and select:

Insert Hotspot

From the main menu, select:

File -> Export

And choose from the Export drop-down “HTML and Images”. Give your exported file(s) a name (just like saving anything else) and you’re done. When you open the HTML file that is created (with the name you gave it) you will find and image map defined with the area you selected.

Pretty cool, huh?