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This web development project, headed up by Karl, was a great example of taking an existing site and bringing it into the new era of what works.  The internet changes so quickly, both in terms of what ‘toys’ are available to a site owner to make their site attractive, functional, and ’sticky,’ and with what technologies and tactics work best to get your site found.

Pat came to us with a well-designed, html-based site that had gotten a little out-of-date from a technology perspective.  She was relying on a webmaster to make the majority of changes to the site, an effort which was, by nature, frequent.  Changes in that relationship left her unable to edit her site in the way she needed and she came to us for a solution.

Recreating her site using WordPress solved several of Pat’s challenges.  She was able to keep the look and feel that she liked, while giving the site a face lift.  She gained an easy-to-use interface that lets her edit most every aspect of the site herself, adding, changing, and deleting posts, pages, and pictures; it’s all in her hands.

Our hosting package gave Pat the email boxes she needed.

Kathy was also able to upgrade Pat’s search engine optimization, making the site “Google-friendly” so she will gain a strong, organic, search rank.  Because the site is blog-based, Pat should see a strong organic result quickly.

[Holtermann & Associates] focus is executive search of healthcare professionals: Administrators, Director of Operations, Director of Nursing, Finance Managers, Rehabilitation Services Professionals, Medical Insurance Professionals and other healthcare managers. Our clients include hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, clinics and Medical Insurance Organizations. Our specialty is finding the right person for your job and the right career move for the candidate. At H&A the recruitment staff knows how to find the right people for your openings … quickly, economically, and consistently. We recruit, screen, pre-qualify, and refer only those candidates who meet or exceed the qualifications that you require in your next employee.

http://hva-jobs.com

If you live in Pacific County, Washington, and don’t know about this group, you’re going to be so happy you read this!

Sunday Afteroon Live was originally founded to give senior residents quality musical entertainment during the fall and winter months.  Venues changed until the group grew and adopted the Raymond Theater as their permanent venue. Meanwhile, the group’s reputation soared as enthusiastic audiences of all ages packed the theater.  Performers coming through Raymond on their way to other venues made stopovers to perform on Sundays for grateful audiences.  Sunday Afternoon Live now attracts both residents and visitors from the Long Beach Peninsula, Grays Harbor area, Lewis County and Astoria, Oregon and includes educational programs in local schools.

The historic theater itself is magical, with great acoustics and comfortable seating.  Have we not tantalized you enough?  Take a look at this season’s schedule.  Keleigh is particularly excited that the Alley Cats are coming in March.  She first saw the doo-wop band at Disneyland, while in college and, about ten years later, in Las Vegas (regrettably, she missed the White House performance for President Clinton).  They’ll be doing Vegas with Jay Leno in September but you can see them in Raymond in March!

This is one of many stellar performances procured by Sunday Afternoon Live.  As a charitable non-profit, the group needed a website that offered them a lot of editing flexibility without incurring regular maintenance bills.  We set them up in WordPress, our blog software of choice, with a simple theme that echoes their existing promotional materials, and we provided some training to get them up and running to edit the site themselves. The site has easy-to-use PayPal buttons for making donations and buying tickets to shows.

Check out the Board of Directors and Sponsors pages and, when you see these fine people, give them a huge pat on the back.  This is what community volunteerism is all about!

Introducing the new Independent-Books.com!

Gayle Borchard has years of experience in the book industry and has taken her expertise online. She now offers online just shy of 10,000 books, as well as appraisal and research services to book collectors around the world.

Gayle wanted a clean look that was easy to navigate and included an advanced book search feature on each page. She also needed a powerful shopping cart platform to provide her customers with a full service shopping experience.

Having worked with Gayle on her business card design, Keleigh knew how important color was going to be to this project.  She designed the website to give a soft, sea feel while keeping the signature eggplant shade of purple that had been used in the cards.  The site has a lightly feminine touch, without being girly.  The strong lines evoke a craftsman feel without being too structured.  This site well-reflects its owner.

Because Gayle uses a specific book database program that is not readily compatible with online shopping carts, our web team wrote a custom import module so it would be easy for her to export her data from one database and import it into her cart, avoiding the drudgery of doing data entry twice.  Doing business here in Washington state, Gayle also needed a custom sales tax module which allows her cart to calculate sales tax based on the shipping destination.  We delight in providing custom solutions to meet our customers’ needs.

All of our web hounds worked on this project, along with a couple of our tried-and-true subcontractors, with Kathy as the team leader.  Book selling online is a competitive business, so we went a bit beyond step one of our three-step online marketing process.  Once we see how the site does organically, Kathy and Gayle will decide how to best move through steps two and three to meet Gayles’ objectives.

From Independent-Books.com:

“Our goal is to surprise and delight you with an eclectic selection of fine used, antiquarian, and rare collectable books. Our books are in great condition, and we frequently have one-of-a-kind collectibles in truly extraordinary shape. Our hallmark is customer satisfaction accomplished by adhering to the highest standards of service, by providing the greatest value for your investment, and by treating you the way we like to be treated.”

We can testify to that.  You can ensure a positive experience when dealing with Independent Books.  Gayle’s got a solid reputation with her customers and in the book selling community.  We kinda like her too.

We had so much fun recently, working with Cheri and Charlie Diehl as they launched their new real estate brokerage, Discovery Coast Real Estate.  Charlie came up with the logo concept and did all the prelminary design work.  We started by digitizing Charlie’s design and converting it to a few different formats.  This allows them to take their logo artwork to any advertising or print vendor and have the vendor use high-quality logo artwork.  This will keep their look consistent and crisp.

Cheri has always done a great job with her own real estate blog, so we made the new brokerage site blog-based.  This allows Cheri to edit the site herself, adding regular blog posts and keeping her page content current.  Google loves that!  Check out their new website, www.discoverycoastrealestate.com.

We gave Cheri a quick tutorial in her new online tools and she was off and running.  She had updated posts in the blog before it had officially launched to the public.  Way to go, Cheri!

Once the logo and site design were firmed up, the next projects were updating their broadcast email template, business cards and letterhead so that all used the same look and feel.  We did a couple of different sizes of web and advertising banners, again keeping the visual identity of the new brokerage consistent in the eye of their customers.

We love our cards, our signs, our blog, just  …everything!  Thanks to you guys….

Charlie and Cheri have done a great job of keeping their brand consistent and we’ve really enjoyed working with them to make it happen.  Congratulations on your new venture, Diehls!

We’re starting to hear the buzz:

“I can’t afford to advertise this year.”

“The economy is tough.”

“It was a rough season.”

Boy, do we feel the fear and pain of these small business owners.  Owning your own business is one of the hardest jobs out there.  You’re chief cook and bottle washer, jack of all trades, spending much of your day doing things you never knew even needed to be done, and you only meant to open a cute little shop and do the things you love to do, maybe gain some free time to spend with your family along the way.

And so, when times get tough, we all want to put a clamp on the ‘ole pocketbook, shaving off expenses, keeping overhead as low as possible, hoping to ride out the storm.  It’s exactly the kind of smart thinking and action that has saved our home budgets time and time again.

I’ve got bad news, friends.  The quickest road to business bankruptcy in a struggling economy is to sit on your hands, do nothing, and wait for things to improve.

We’re not advocating throwing a ton of money at a shotgun approach to marketing.  We’re certainly not suggesting that you ramp up your advertising efforts.  There are definitely marketing tools that work better in tough times and those that work better in a fat market.  Smart, targeted, research-supported marketing works.  Now is NOT the time to pull back on your marketing plan.  Now is the time to ratchet it up.

Whether business is good or business is slow, you’ve got to get your share of the business that is out there and that means telling the world why you’re different or special.  Your approach to telling the world might be more refined in tough economic times but if you stop putting yourself in front of your customer in a way that makes you stand out, the guy who does will earn your share of the pie.

So, my question to you is, “Are you the guy grabbing the pie or the guy who is giving his share away?”

We can’t say enough good things about the Small Business Management Program at Clatsop Community College.  Keith and Keleigh went through the 3-year program and have been in the alumni class for as long.  Not only is it a wonderful program for folks new to running their own business, it really fills in the gaps for those who fell into entrepreurship by passion for their product or service rather than business training.

At Clatsop, the instructor is an amazing human being by the name of Jim Entler.  The best part of the program, in our opinion, is the one-on-one time with Jim, right here in our office.  We got to visit with him monthly while we were in the 3-year program and now get him once a term.  While the coursework follows a pre-planned curriculum, the on-site visits allow instructors to meet business owners where they are and deal with real-world issues of the moment.  We’ve watched our friends and clients use the expertise of the program to build a business, sell one, retire completely, buy new, open new locations - you name it.  We’ve grown from a 1-1/2 person mom and pop shop to the outstanding staff and service offerings we have now, with help from the program every step of the way.

Jim invited us to speak at the North West Association of Small Business Management Instructors (NWASBMI) Fall Conference this past week and we were delighted to accommodate the request.  What a great group of people.  If you are in business, and we’re guessing you are if you’ve made it this far into reading this, please, give yourself the gift of checking out the program closest to you.  We don’t know a single business owner who has regretted the decision to enroll.

You can read the handout of our talk, Mom & Pops…& the internet. Can small business compete?: http://beachdog.com/downloads/NWASBMI-0908.pdf

Here is the Seaside Small Biz Development Center, where SBM classes are held once a month:

Thanks Karl, you are wonderful and fast!!!

Sharon - World Kite Museum

One last note, I can’t say enough good things about Sabrina. She’s been incredibly patient with this newsletter process, never makes me feel stupid (I do enough of that myself), is very very quick to respond to my email requests for help and always so cheerful and positive. In short, she is doing a great job of modeling herself after [the beachdog way]!

Ann Kischner, Bridgewater Bistro

The website is my #1 priority for the next couple of weeks and I told Sabrina that it would really help me with writing text if I had kind of a feel for how she was proceeding with the ‘tone’ of the design end.

She was amazing!  She told me that if it would help my process at all, she’d be happy to give me something interactive from the site to get the juices flowing, and to just give her a couple of days to shoot something off to me.  Now, for all I know, she was thinking, “My God, these people have no idea what goes into web design—doesn’t this crazy person know how hard it is to design a site without the tex?!”  If she was thinking any of that (or anything negative at all) I certainly didn’t know it.  She was sweet as pie, totally helpful, and in every little thing she said to me, all I heard was “Yes, of course” or “I’d love to help make that happen for you.”  Now THAT is great customer service.

Actually, all I ever get from you people is great customer service.  …it’s almost like people love their jobs and the ones they work with over there…don’t you know this is America?  We’re all supposed to vote <insert your party name here> and be miserable!  Get with it!

On a serious note—the last time you and I communicated, you wrote me some very good words …and look, it worked; here I am at summer’s end, still happy and prosperous with a staff and a good base of customers who seem equally pleased with things.  Who knew?

Lynette Dowty, Anchorage Cottages