The following is a pretty good presentation that gives insights into what is involved in a web presence. Vestals Gap has known for some time that a web presence is more than just a website.

Specifically the presentation puts numbers to the following for best in class, average, and "laggard":

• Social media adoption
• Web content managment
• Marketing personalization
• Integrated marketing tools
• Web analytics

Hope you find it interesting.

Matt Cutts from the Web Spam team at Google showcases the good and the bad of WordPress as seen through the eyes of Google, including basics on how Google search works and how you can boost your blog’s results in Google searches.  This offers good information regardless of whether you use wordpress or not!

Our family has an awesome dog named Peyton, who came to us from a courageous young man named Philip that left to go overseas to Afghanistan. Philip was single so Peyton led a very good life full of training and activities. He is a Chesapeake Bay retriever whose breed is great for hunting and fetching.

While we do not have ducks, Peyton’s preferred object to fetch, my wife and kids do throw tennis balls for him several times a day. Lately he has wanted to chew them until they are completely torn apart. Sometimes he will even swallow parts of the tennis ball which eventually work their way back up onto our floor … great fun.

I still run into a lot of sites that use their website as a brochure rather than a marketing tool. Sometimes companies don’t have the technical expertise to implement a solution to turn it into a sales funnel or they don’t have the time to dedicate to it. I’m often guilty of the latter; I’m usually doing work for others well into the night and by the time I get around to my tasks I’m pretty well spent.

Children are amazing; they look at life with such a simplistic perspective. Around two and a half years ago, my family was in our [almost] new Quest van traveling down the Capital of Texas Highway in Austin. I looked back at the kids and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the door panel on my youngest son’s side was a dull gray color, instead of black. I asked what was wrong with the door to make it look that way and he replied that he didn’t know.

Just about every website owner wants to get more traffic to their site. You might hire a SEO company to “optimize” your site or you might spend money on advertising, whether its pay-per-click (PPC) or other mediums. Like many others, I routinely look at my Google Analytics to see how these things affect my traffic, hoping for that upward trend line that lets me feel like my website is doing something for my business (umm, especially since my business is web design).

Business Contact Manager for Outlook is a lightweight CRM application that lets you manage customers, accounts, projects, opportunities, and marketing campaigns. By deploying the BCM database on a server your entire team can have access critical data. This screencast will show you how to perform the installation.

Here is a presentation I came across on SlideShare that discusses the basics of customer relationship management (CRM) systems.