Shakti Cove Cottages is a delightful cluster of cottages on a magical piece of property in Ocean Park, Washington.  This wonderful little motel has distinct cottages, a beautiful common yard area, footpath to the beach, and some of the nicest proprietors you’ll ever meet.  It shouldn’t surprise that their occupancy is one of the highest on the Long Beach Peninsula.

They’ve been sending out a postcard with a photo of the property when responding to inquiries from guests.  When they needed new address labels, we talked and decided to do a full-color return address label with a photo as the background.  Now they not only don’t have to do a print run of postcards, they have an image of the property going out on every piece of correspondence.  More exposure for less cash.  That’s one of our favorite combinations.

It’s true!  Mobile West is a mechanic service for auto, truck, marine and RV.  Give Ashlin a call and he’ll get you up and running again.  Then you can see the nifty 4-part invoice we made for him.

Are you heading to the Health Fair?  This is a super value; presentations by local health professionals, free lab screenings and even a coupon for $50 off a mammogram.  And, for the kids, free finger printing and ID kits.  You can even sign up to win a Bone Density Scan.

We’ve been delighted to work with Ocean Beach Hospital [OBH] on their advertising brochure for this event since it began.  It’s a great example of what CAN be done on a tight timeline.  After all, lining up all the details for an event like this simply doesn’t happen 4-6 weeks before the event, which is how much time we’d typically plan for this type of project.  There’s the intial meeting, followed by design concepts, proofs, more proofs, pre-press and, finally, press time, then there’s the trim and fold, packaging and shipping the completed product.

Alan Craft is on top of his game over at OBH.  He’s new to his position since the last fair, but not new to the job itself.  Knowing we had produced the piece in the past, he contacted us months ahead of the event to firm up pricing and timeline and even went over design changes so all that was left to do was insert the final details in text and photos.  We were able to set a ‘drop dead’ date for those details to be to us, fly through proofing, take it through press and have product to the Chinook Observer for distribution–in less than 2 weeks.  Whew!  Thanks to Alan’s planning, we were able to save the hospital rush fees in our shop, the printery and shipping and still make the deadlines needed.

Way to go, Alan!  We think son David doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Check out your standings in Bing and Yahoo!.  Wait, you say.  Yahoo! has been around for a long time and Bing is brand new.  Why do I need to care about them?

To make a long story short, after a long and bumpy courtship, Bing and Yahoo! recently became Mr. & Mrs. Binghoo.  And, while that wouldn’t necessarily mean bad things for Google, it surely stacks the deck in the newlyweds’ direction.

The search world has been watching with fascination as Microsoft  launched Bing and quickly grabbed market share.  In fact, recent data tells us that Bing is now the fastest growing search engine out there.  It still has a way to go before it eclipses Google.  Yet, at the rate it is growing, Google is going to have to do something significant to stop that from happening.

Why?  Mashable.com has an article out today that suggests some of the reasons Bing is so popular.  Frankly, it has some cool tools built into it that feel seamless to the search experience, a lot like FaceBook and MySpace do to their fans.  Power that with the Yahoo! tool box and database, and remove Yahoo! as a competitor, and you’ve got a strong contender in the fight.

Don’t count Google down for the count, however.  Google’s new Caffeine algorithm promises to whip up a froth.  It’s faster, relies more on key words and, most exciting to the internet-saavy, search is moving into real time.  Caffeine also expanded the amount of data:  searching for “dog”, Google found just under 52 million references in .25 seconds.  Caffeine’d Google found 360 million in half that time.

What does this mean to small business owners? It depends.  Here is a video of Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google, talking about what you need to know about the caffeine update:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU5cKDryjy0[/youtube]

Bottom Line:  If your site has been optimized for a strong organic result in Google, you’re probably going to be okay.  It would be smart to do some clicking to be sure.  Start at comparegoogle.com or cartercole.com, where you can compare Google vs Google Caffeine.

We checked just a few of our key words for funbeach.com to show you the good, the bad and the ugly of this change:

If your site looks like it is going to lose rank in this change, all is not lost.  Now is a good time to consider getting your feet wet with Google AdWords and AdSense, as well as Bing and Yahoo! sponsored results advertising.  It’s also important to consider the relative benefit of search results in your overall marketing campaign.  The vast majority of our customers enjoy a stronger return on investment from non-search techniques such as smart link partnerships, targeted social networking and more traditional, offline, marketing strategies.  If search is your only strategy for marketing your site, you don’t have a strategy.

Of course, if you want help turning Google’s Caffeine, Yahoo!, Bing and the rest more to your favor, or if you want help in creating and implementing a more holistic plan for marketing your site and/or your business, give us a call at 360.642.4431 or zap us an email.

We pride ourselves in meeting you where you want to be met and helping you create a plan to best use your resources to get you where you want to go.

Ekone Oyster Company of Bay Center, Washington recently updated their website.  The Jambor family was happy with the design of the site but wanted to upgrade from a table-driven, html-based site into WordPress, which allows them to easily keep their site updated themselves.   We were able to keep the look and feel while recreating the site in WordPress and added a PayPal function so they could have an online sales capability without the expense that goes with a full-blown e-commerce site.

You can now order the smoked oysters online, even the Hot Habenero Smoked variety.  You can even have fresh oysters shipped to you.  You’ve GOT to try the Smoked Sturgeon (Keleigh’s favorite).  Ekone also has a growing list of recipes.  Enjoy!