Improving the search engine raking for the Needmore website has long been on my to-do list. But when you’re keeping quite busy with projects, it tends to fall by the wayside. It’s hard to set aside time for something that doesn’t actually seem necessary, and that’s probably a good thing.

Last week, Google sent us a $100 coupon for AdWords. I’ve been meaning to run a campaign, so I decided to give it a try, putting in some keywords I thought would bring interested folks to Needmore. My first choices were “modern websites” and “modern web design,” so I added those keywords first and started doing some searches to see what else might be helpful.

The only trouble is that we already show up on the first page of search results for both of those terms. This came as quite a surprise to me because I had not yet taken any time to worry about our search engine raking. I know Kandace has done a bit of work on that in the past, but neither of us has looked into it recently.

So I went ahead and set up the campaign. But it doesn’t appear that it’s going to do us any good, since we’re already showing up for free in the places we really want to.

The lesson? Make sure your content is interesting, topical, and up to date, and you won’t have to worry too much about SEO.

After every holiday or family gathering, I become a bit reflective about the digital lives we’re leading. Very often, half of the folks at these gathering have photo or video cameras, and are going to great pains to get picture after picture. And despite promises to the contrary, I usually never see those photos again. In fact, I’ve become concerned about what happens to them at all.

Most people run Windows, and I’m not sure but I would imagine that most people use whatever software comes with Windows to handle their pictures and movies. They might also use whatever happened to come with a recent camera purchase, if they installed software off the CD. And therefore each person may have a slightly different configuration. But since most people are what I would call “novice” with their computers, when their computer inevitably fails, I would imagine that the chances are very good that they’ve lost all of their media. I consider the state of affairs on Windows to almost be a sort of “media prison,” and I don’t think most folks have much of a grasp on the situation.

It’s a little easier on a Mac, if only because there’s really only one commonly used application for managing your pictures: iPhoto. The same is true for your videos, with iMovie. The format is standard, and with iPhoto it appears as a single folder on your computer. This is so convenient it’s hard to understate, because I can move a pocket-sized hard drive from computer to computer, and keep everything with me. I can sit at any Mac in the world, and open my iPhoto library, complete with information like photo locations and which faces belong to which person. That also makes it a snap to back up.

Some people seem inclined to keep every photo they’ve ever taken on their memory card, but this can’t end much better. I just recently had a memory card fail on me, and lost a day’s worth of video. Very disappointing, but it could have been a lot worse. Although storage has gotten pretty good, I think it’s still safe to say that’s not a good way to keep your pictures.

For me, a bigger fear is just losing the media I have right now. Keeping my iPhoto library on a single hard drive is not a safe bet. You need to think about keeping a backup in at least one place, which I do. But I’m still a bit paranoid because both the hard drive and the backup are often in the same physical location, which is usually my house. So if there was a fire or even vandalism, I could well lose it all. This isn’t likely to happen to a box of old photos, which may or may not survive a fire, but are highly unlikely to be stolen.

So where does this leave me? With the same advice I give everyone: keep backups. No matter who you are, you should keep at least one full backup of your computer. I can’t recommend software for Windows because I don’t use it, but for my Mac I’ve been extremely happy with SuperDuper. There are plenty of good online solutions, though at the moment we’ve settled on DropBox because it not only backs up, but keeps several computers in sync.

Whatever method you choose, follow it well. It will save you one day, and believe me, your media is worth it.

All this month, Maria Kalman’s blog art about Benjamin Franklin at the New York Times has been making the rounds. So you may well have already seen it, but even so, it’s well worth taking more than one look at.

Our friend Mitch loaned me this box, because I thought it was just too cute, and wanted to scan it.

Hello and happy Monday. We will be out of the studio today and tomorrow, enjoying the last couple days of a long, relaxing Needmore family weekend on the Oregon coast. Tonight, we will be spending a quite evening with our friends at Heceta Head Lighthouse listening to the ocean waves. We will be back in the studio this Wednesday.

A simple redesigned site for Classic Body Restoration. Our goals for this redesign for fairly modest: create a simple, uncluttered, easy-to-navigate website that would be a breeze to update as well. We hope you enjoy and consider setting up a time to visit Stephanie (your body will thank you).

Redesign

Original Website

So I’m a big fan of Twitter, but not necessarily a fan of every service out there that integrates with it - and there are a lot. One of my least favorites is Twitlonger.

I think this is a decent idea, and I really do want to say that it can be useful. I appreciate that this service exists and that it is free. But I can’t actually think of a case in which I would recommend that our clients make use of it.

Read more…

The other day, a family member offered to run to Subway, and Kandace was excited. She didn’t have time to go herself, and while it might not be her favorite, it would certainly have been nice to have lunch.

The only problem is that Subway does not have a “default configuration” of their sandwiches. Let’s say that you want the “Cold Cut Combo.” This sandwich features turkey, bologna, “turkey ham” and “turkey salami” - strange enough already - but as for the vegetables and toppings, nothing is specified. If you go in and ask for that sandwich, you’ll be hammered with at least a dozen more questions. Do you want onion? Do you want tomato? What kind of bread? Mayo?

Now most folks evidently feel drawn to a plethora of choices. That is a big part of Subway’s advertising campaigns - you can have it your way. But Kandace never did get her sandwich. It was just too painful to figure out what to order, since there are no defaults at Subway. You simply cannot specify the “Cold Cut Combo” and be done with it!

For lunch today, we went to a local sandwich shop called Bunk. I ordered their “Italian Cured Meats with Provolone Picante and Hot Peppers.” This sandwich is amazing, and there is not a single choice. I think probably you CAN ask for changes or substitutions, but why would you? The way they prepare this sandwich is the way it SHOULD be prepared. They are the experts, they’re using wonderful ingredients, and it would be stupid of me to change things around for no good reason.

That’s the problem with not having a “default configuration,” in sandwich choices or most anywhere else. In our choice-filled society, we often forget the value of having the expert choose the configuration. But why? They’re the expert. They’re the chefs, the designers, the curators. These people spend an immense amount of time studying the choices, experimenting with the options, and coming up with the best of all possible worlds.

Trust them.

Uptime is a measure of the time a computer system has been “up” and running. It came into use to describe the opposite of downtime, times when a system was not operational. The uptime and reliability of computer and communications facilities is sometimes measured in nines (similar to the unit of metallic purity). “Five nines” means 99.999% availability, which translates to a total downtime of approximately five minutes and fifteen seconds per year. [Wikipedia]

Uptime is increasingly important. For some sites that we’ve developed and that we maintain, there are “incidents” with uptime. We host a recipe site, and every so often something pops up that needs to be dealt with right now. That’s just the nature of high traffic websites. You come to expect it.

We now use a lot of services on the web, and those often require a ton of work to keep up and running at top performance. Some folks do a great job of it, like Google and 37signals. Some companies fall flat on their face, despite running a service that you’re paying good money for, and that you expect to just work.

Like GoFaxer.

About a month ago, we signed up for this promising service. They are one of a number of companies that will provide you with a fax number, and let you send and receive faxes via email or the web. It’s a great idea, because I hate fax machines with a passion. The problem is, as you might be able to see from the above link, is that they’ve been down for 23 days now. The service has not functioned almost the entire time we’ve been paying for it. The same vague message has been shown this whole time.

All of us are working hard to quickly resolve this issue so that we can bring our services back online. However this process may take some time and we apologize for any inconvenience that this unforeseeable issue has caused you.

Maybe we just don’t need a fax service after all.

We’ve mentioned to you how over the moon we are about Amy Tavern’s jewelry. That’s no secret - the girl is a metal artist (we’re especially excited about her June jewelry of the month, East Meets West). This week, we’re equally impressed with Amy’s online presence. After taking a self imposed month off from online activities, Amy is back with unparalleled enthusiasm. Whether she is putting out here summer newsletter, Twittering up a storm, or organizing her links page – Amy is completely present and enthusiastic about her online presence. And, from her summer news, it is obvious that she is plenty busy offline as well. Kudos, Amy.