Creative Web Content

A fascinating hour-long web cast is now archived where everyone can see it. It’s about cyborg anthropology, a way of understanding how we live as techno-socially connected citizens in the modern era.

It is presented by Amber Case, a Cyborg Anthropologist and User Experience Designer from Portland, Oregon. She studies the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way cultures think, act, and understand their worlds.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Austin is an article I wrote and published in the July/August 2010  issue of the Austin Sierran, the newsletter of the Lone Star Chapter of the Sierra Club.

I had the opportunity to show an advanced copy to a principal of Gowalla, an Austin start up mentioned in the article, and he proposed that we powwow to discuss how his company’s technology could be used to find a transportation solutions.

And recently, I found out that CapMetro is partnering with http://carshareaustin.org/. And in Paris, an electric vehicle-sharing system for 3000 cars will be in effect by September.

It’s happening.  Download The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Austin to learn more.

According to Google Trends, WordPress sites now have more traffic than either of the two rival applications, Drupal or Joomla. See the graph and find more details on
http://3nub.sl.pt

Some of my clients ask for advice on how to market their small and mid-sized businesses. I suggest that they can get a lot of good guidance by downloading this free e-book by Eric Gilboord. It’s filled with cases and check lists. Take the mystery out of marketing.

Just Tell Me What To Do – Easy Marketing Tips for Small Business

How can you get your business listed in the Google 7-pack (so it appears on the first page of search results on the map?

I recently attended a SEO/SEM Meetup where Tony Emerson of Apogee Results gave this informative presentation. He generously shared his slides:

My one big resolution for 2010 is to build all websites in the future using WordPress rather than Adobe Dreamweaver. Why? For several good reasons:

1. SEO Optimization
First, sites that are built with WordPress are way more likely to come up higher on Search Engine results than are sites built in plain XHTML and CSS. WordPress is a well optimized system that does a good job at allowing every single page to be indexed. Among the ways this can be done in WordPress is to use plugins to embed keywords and tag into every post and page, to use permalinks (which makes the URLs, or page addresses, more search-engine friendly), and it makes it easy to generate a site Map is where your visitors go to navigate and find specific articles and posts on your blog. It is also a place for search engines to find links to all your pages on your blog.

2. Easy Updating
The second reason I prefer working with WordPress, is that when the site is built, my clients can easily access, edit and update their own content. In about one hour, I can teach almost anyone how to administer the back end of their WordPress site. I’ll do so long distance, using the phone and a cross-platform desktop sharing program.

3. Lots of Support
There is a huge community available for WordPress support. If I build a site in WordPress, my clients are free to learn to manage it themselves or to find other WordPress developers who can support them.

4. Design Flexibility
Wordpress sites need not look like blogs. They can have horizontal menus with multiple layers of pages. There are many fine templates available for free or low cost, but I like to design original themes for my clients. In addition to this site, here are some samples of original themes I’ve recently built:

savewatersavemoney.com
mexicanmasterpieces.net
bpheatandair.com

At the Social Media Breakfast in Austin TX, 10 predictions are given for how SoMe will affect business in the new year.

My Father-in-law passed away this week. May he RIP.

With the family spread across the continent, my husband, the eldest, was the sole sibling who managed to cancel everything and hop on a plane to New York. So I used Net Ingenuity to create a safe place where everyone who had known my late in-law could comfortably communicate and participate in a tribute.

We invited all the relatives, the caregivers who had been with him in his final years and a few family friends to a tribute on Sunday morning via http://freeconferencecall.com.

At the appointed time, a dozen estranged people joined together to remember our dearly departed. Each of us was able to share our memories and feelings uninterrupted for up to 5 minutes. One of the spouses kept track of the time. Everyone voiced a unique perceptive on the man whom we eulogized. After an hour, when all had had their chance to share in this formal format, we shared a minute of silence in respect and then stayed on the line for another hour, brainstorming ideas for a more durable memorial and strategizing how to have a physical reunion next summer.

The eldest member of our tribe had never made a conference call in his 87 years. He and his wife were late in joining, but they couldn’t stop marveling at the discovery of many relatives about whom they knew little after decade of estrangement for now good reasons anyone could explain.

We easily recorded the call and can send playback and download instructions to all of those who were on it.

Net Ingenuity recently created an original, one-of-a-kind theme in  for a site that sells one-of-a-kind hand-crafted Mexican artifacts. We rewrote the copy of an earlier version of the site, moved the OSCommerce store to a new server and replaced a Flash front end (which was invisible to search engines) with a highly optimized WordPress site.

Visit the site Mexican Masterpieces.