SEO can be tricky. The search engines are doing their best to index your site’s relevant content, but there are things you can (and should) do to make sure they are successful.
Read MoreArchive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Tea Time with Sarah Rose
Tea always seemed like a peculiar concept to me: put some dried leafy stuff in hot water, add saccharin supplement, and be soothed.
Perhaps Starbucks enlisted me at too early an age with Grande Caramel Macchiatos and its many variations. How could I even compare leaf-flavored hot water to a caramel chocolaty caffeinated shake that my mom somehow allowed me to drink before school?
In the last year, though, I’ve voyaged out to discover what the big deal was, why my dad, who remembers nobody’s name remembers Earl Grey’s when he’s sick, why my roommate always makes a cup of chamomile before…
Read MoreDorothée Royal-Hedinger: Chicago’s Digital Tree Hugger
Dorothée Royal-Hedinger has been a force to be reckoned with in non-profit social media advertising since she started out at See3 Communications as a new media strategist. She moved on to co-found NobleTree Media where she has worked with non-profit causes like Minds Matter Chicago and the National Association of Working Women. She created OrganicNation.tv in May 2009 and has won numerous awards including Tree Hugger’s Best Food Twitter Feed (.treehugger.com/best-of-green-food-and-health) and the Do Something American Express Grant. In addition to being a top flight social media guru, her work with OrganicNation.tv has appeared on Current TV, The Huffington Post, GOOD and TreeHugger.com.…
Chicago Hot Glass: The Harley Davidson of Fine Arts
Just outside Chicago’s Humboldt Park at North Central Park and Potomac Avenue, I approached a somewhat clandestine warehouse where a burly man donning all the gear you’d a imagine a Hell’s Angel to have in his closet—plus the imperative lengthy grey beard—stood outside. He tugged on his golden retriever’s leash.
I’m not a dog person (you can blame my parents for never getting me one), so I instinctively took a step back for every one I took forward as the retriever leapt toward me with thick drool flinging from its mouth.
“Hot Glass?” the Hell’s Angel asked me.
“Uh…yeah!” I answered.
The Angel opened…
Read MoreAwesome Dev+Design Playground
Every so often I come across a company or community of developers (and designers) who put out great, inspiring, innovative work…for free.
I believe a big part of being an active member of any community, such as the “people who build websites community”, is to give back and provide people with the opportunity to learn and grow. On top of giving information and showing how things can be done and built, every now and then you come across work that is a notch above the rest.
Recently, I was browsing a popular design/dev website and came across this playground, built and maintained…
Read MoreThe importance of documentation and planning for user experience
User experience expert – John Yesko, gave this latest presentation and the topic was “Rich User Experience Documentation – Beyond Static Wireframes.”
Read MoreBillups Design is movin’ on up…
…to the 3rd floor!
Though we’ve only been in our new space here at Lake Street for one year, it’s time to grow and move into a larger studio that accommodates even better our creatives’ and programmers’ needs. Natural light. Ample space. Relaxing amenities. This is the place! Thank to everyone whose talent and dedication makes this exciting new chapter in our agency a reality. Thanks also to all of our valued clients – without you…well, you know. Come and visit us when we open the doors on August 1.
Read MoreAlternative to TinyURL – I prefer SnipURL
Everyone has their favorite little utilities, especially when it comes to taking long gangly links and shortening them for Twitter and other social apps. I like SnipURL.com best because it has a great cross-browser bookmarks bar button that converts links on-click (gotta love javascript). Here’s what else it does:
- it seems faster than TinyURL (although as of today I noticed 500,000+ snips, and their total is 28 million so they are getting lots of traffic suddenly too with the popularity of Twitter)
- it has tracking and management of snips
- the browser button is great
Google’s Quality Guidelines
Below are the first 5 “specific quality guidelines” in Google’s Help pages, which are an ideal guide for creating any SEO friendly web site:
- Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
- Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don’t send automated queries to Google.
- Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
- Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
I’m Doing Contract Work – Should I Incorporate?
There are many benefits and a few detriments to incorporating if you doing contract/freelance work. I’ve personally started at least 10 corporations of all types (C-Corp, S-Corp, LLP, LLC), so I possess a little bit of knowledge worth sharing.
The positives
First you are protected legally/financially by the corporate shroud once you are a corporation/propriety. Second, you can write off expenses through the corporation in ways that are well documented and easy to follow. Third, you can control your salary to yourself via dividends, which typically allows for better tax treatment. Fourth, many companies’ accounting departments will treat you a little more…
