I apologize to all zero of my faithful readers and to the two or three that may run across this occasionally. I know this is sort of a marketing centered blog but since I have put some personal info on here I will follow up with that. My Dad did indeed pass away on Oct. 23th. He is very missed. The memorial service was awesome but it just doesnt seem like enough. Maybe a statue and an LCD constantly running photos and video of him and of people talking about how great he was. Anyway I have been engulfed in family problems so my blog has been the last thing on my mind. Im sorry again and if this continues I will do something else with this page.

A friend of mine who is a long time web developer took it upon himself to critique a website that I manage. He instantly went for the obvious insults. I see you have a left side navigation but the site is centered. Is that table layouts??? It was just so dang obvious. Of coarse I know that CSS layout is cooler and more versatile. I realize I could be serving a layout based on the users browser and screen resolution. But here the thing. Im from the old school. If you are ranking well in the search engines and almost all of your new business is based on those rankings then you DONT MESS WITH IT!!!!!! When I started working on this site a few years ago they had just lost 70% of their traffic in a botched full site redesign. I came aboard and optimized the site and even went back and put up some 301 redirects where the old pages were. Traffic came back with our new high rankings. It was also more qualified traffic. The old site was very text rich and they got plenty of traffic from people searching for very general consumer products which we didnt sell. So here we are a coupla years later. Uniques are higher than ever. I realize one day that I will come in one morning and traffic will be low and I will find out that Google has changed its algorithm in an unfavorable way for us and I will once again be stalking the top spots. Maybe at that point I will be willing to take a chance on a site redesign so I can escape the ridicule of my techie friend.

I wonder if Twitter is going to regulate itself at any point. So many bots out there just trying to follow everyone. Its free marketing to use and abuse. I pay attention to who follows me so when that “How to Make Millions” twitter account suddenly starts to follow me it gets some attention from me. Of coarse being the sophisticated user I would never check them out and click on their link (but I probably have just to see what happened). I signed up for a service that would have me follow anyone who had a certain word in their tweets. I ended up with like 450 people I was following and 130 that were following me. 97% of both the followed and following were spam garbage but I probably picked up 10 actual people followers who were interested in my stuff. Now imagine if I had a bot joining everyone it could to the tune of millions. How many suckers are there per million? Just like email spam is a numbers game so is twitter bots. Im sure twitter bots are seeing way better results than email spammers right now.

Are you quick to run out an sign up for the newest thing. Twitter, facebook, myspace, 43places, blogger, etc……We. get attached to these little accounts even when they become clearly useless and neglected. Let’s make a concerted effort to weed out the clutter in our online presence. Make a commitment to simplicity. Kill what you dont really need and possibly use some collaborative tools to help manage the rest. Use forwarding so we only have to check one email account. Use widgets so you can check you twitter from your facebook. Use notifications so you dont have to login to an account to see if anything has happened. Im sure one day there will be a killer app to mash the many online tools and social medias together but right now I dont see one. I see some contenders but not the real deal.

I added a Q5 to my prioritization list. Its a list of areas in which I need to learn. I realize I could put this in Q2 but I dont think of Q2 as skills development but rather core business development. Anyway one of those on the Q5 list is interacting with MySQL with ASP. Man its hard to find some cut and paste scripts. Im probably not looking in the right places. I realize that the future of my company website will have to be database driven product searches. I would like to pull a Zack Morris time out and go take a class or two about ASP/SQL. This is one of the only things regarding web design I havent been able to wing or fake or cut/paste my way through it. Javascripting is on my Q5 list but Ive always been albe to find and implement the things I needed javascript to do. The other thing is graphic design. Not that I dont know graphic design but there are many nuances of the software I use which I have no clue about how to use. I would like to know everything there is to know about Photoshop. So Ive been doing effects tutorials even though most of them have a pre-made effects filters.

I love instant gratification. I put out a press release yesterday to a niche news and directory and it got posted within 24 hours. Usually this site has taken weeks to run a press release. The good news is that we get more actual direct response from these than any other press release site. I may do a new release every day now until they start to decline them.

Well I guess Dad’s in worse shape than I thought. It seems an ulcer that was giving him problems months ago which almost caused him to bleed to death is back and worse. They think it may be a growing tumor pushing it from the other side. They are gonna talk about surgery options today. I cant imagine what they will do if surgery isn’t an option. I doubt they will pump 2 pints of blood a day into him. I hate this. There no other way to say it. Im sure Im supposed to find reasons to be grateful. He has outlived most of the people in our family who get colon cancer. I wonder, if God came to me and said I could live to be 63 for sure or I could take my chances, what I would say.

Made myself a fancy Q1,Q2,Q3,Q4 priority task list today (ala 7 habits). Its always good to map out what you need to do. Unless of coarse that’s all you do.

Summer is going ok so far for the boys. Dad is having a bad week which sucks because he should be feeling great since he hasnt had any chemo in a while. But complications from his non functioning liver are kicking his butt.

At work the poop storm is coming. All new products. Possible a database driven website. At the very least a new site architecture. I could use a part time intern so any of you LSU students want to work for free let me know.

Im very glad schools almost over. Griff had his best and worst year. His grades were great because of the extra dedication of his parents BUT he had a rough second half of the year fitting into a new school. He loved his school from the first half of the year but they went belly up at Christmas.