Malik-Moosa-Soomar Archives - Page 2 of 3

Cow tipping or Smart car tipping?

Thursday May 7, 2009

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A tipped cow. Taken near the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Traditionally you would hear stories of people going cow-tipping at night when they are bored. Cow tipping is simply tipping over a cow (some view it as animal abuse). Some think its best to do this activity when the cow is sleeping but the fact is, cows do not sleep standing up to begin with. It is possible to tip over a cow with two to four people using their pressure at the same time.

A New trend began in 2005, smart-car-tipping in Canada where someone began tipping over smart cars in urban areas. I found it too funny so I took the liberty of creating this image below:

What are your thoughts on this new ‘trend’?

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I hate to take out my own food and am very lazy when it comes to it. I love to eat but find it a big waste of time to prepare it, cook it, eat it, and then clean up. I just don’t find it being productive really.

Last night, my wife (still getting use to calling her that) and I went grocery shopping for ingredients to make tacos. I help clean up the house and she feeds me, that’s our deal. =) So last night after we got home from the grocery store Zaheen started emptying out the bags. I was really hungry so I decided to give her a helping hand in the kitchen thinking it would get the food prepared faster. Zaheen is a vegetarian and I have never cooked meat before so it was a first time for both of us to make ground beef. You would not believe how easy it really is. It literally is as easy as boiling water. After about 30 minutes of preparation (which went by really fast) we had a delicious dinner.

What did we have?
Ground Beef
Spanish Rice
Beans
Cheese
Lettuce
Onions
Salsa
Avocado
All inside a flour tortilla

mm mmm good

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Would you pay money to place a bid? We are all familiar with Ebay for online auctioning websites which work the traditional way. You place a bid, and the winner pays and takes the item. Swoopo works a little different.

Here is how Swoopo works. The price you see is not the actual price you pay. It’s simply for cosmetics and attraction such as an Apple iPhone for $15.00. Each bid placed goes up from a penny to 20 cents. Each bid also costs $.75 to place. After placing the bid, the timer on the auction will jump up by 5, 10, 15, or 20 seconds. Its genious how the concept works for the business because there will only be one winner and those that did not win, looks like they gave their money for donation to the company. The person that won, probably paid a fraction of the cost of the item itself. The winner probably did not pay just $15.00 for the ipod, instead he probably had about 50-100 bids or so placed and a dollar for each bid. So in the end, the winner probably paid less than $125 + shipping and handling which is still a third of the cost of the phone.

It’s quite interesting how it works and to win, I assume takes strategy for when to bid at the right time ot win with the lowest bids placed, saving you money.

What do you think about this site and would you use it?

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I missed my blog post last week because of wedding celebrations in Austin, TX. It was last Saturday on April 11th, 2009, when Zaheen and I had our wedding reception. The wedding went great and it was probably the first in our culture that everything went on time! Usually food is not served until 11pm or even 12am but at our reception it was served before 9pm.

We had guests fly in from all over including Dick, his spouse Francene, Dennis, and Judy from our Webconsuls team. It meant a lot to me that they came and experienced two out of the five days of an Indian/Pakistani wedding. From Zaheen’s side we had family from India and Canada fly in. Friends from Oklahoma drove and others from California, Arizona, and Atlanta had flown in to join us in celebrating our journey in a new life together.

I will have pictures to post in next month’s blog once I get them from the photographer but I do have portraits that we took at Zilker Botanical Garden. My brother-in-law, Nooruddin Gheewala, took it for us at no charge and did an EXCELLENT job with his Nikon D-60 D-SLR.

Everyone told us that the wedding week will end very fast and you will think to yourself, “I can’t believe I spent that much time and money in executing the events when each is all over in few hours”. I am proud to say Zaheen and I don’t feel that way at all. Instead of greeting the guests the entire night and sitting up on a stage to take photos with the family and friends we danced the night away. We made it our night to remember and had the time of our lives.

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On February 26, 2009, our team member, Malik Moosa-Soomar, wrote about the traditions of an Indian / Pakistani wedding. Well, this is the big week for Malik and Zaheen. Their April Wedding in Austin!

Yesterday April 10, 2009, Dick and Francene Fay and Dennis and I were honored to be invited to day two of Malik and Zaheen’s wedding celebration. Day two is the Pithi and Sangeet event.

Enjoy the photo of Malik and Zaheen taken last evening.

I would write more today, but I am having computer problems. Tonight we will be attending the day three of the celebration wedding dinner and reception.

“There is no long distance about love, it always finds a way to bring hearts together no matter how many miles there are between them.”

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When you book a flight, you get the option to chose a seat but how many people actually know what a good seat is compared to a bad seat? For some time, I always thought sitting near the airplane wings would be loud but turns out the end of the plane is louder.

www.seatguru.com lets you select your airlines and the airplane you are traveling on and shows you which seats are good and which are not. They forget to mention that the DC Adapter on some seats is a 2 prong (which was useless for me since my laptop has a 3 prong adapter).

The one thing this site does not have which I was told had is seating for infants. I personally do not like to be seated near infants primarily because they get cranky and loud so your flight for 3 hours (or however many hours) will be of a baby crying.

Check it out, was it helpful for you?

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Most Universities use Blackboard to allow students to access their course information from any computer. It allows students to check their grades, message students and professors, download material for the class, view your grades, and stay involved with online forums for a particular class.

Blackboard announced this morning the release of a free application, Blackboard Learn, for the iPhone and iPod touch which allows students to access their accounts on the go. Students can now receive updates and alerts on grades, assignments, tests and other information when they are not at their desk.

I remember using Blackboard at Cal-State Long Beach before I graduated and found it very useful. It was actually mandatory in most of my classes that we use it in order to receive classroom material such as the syllabus or assignments. I look back and can only imagine how much this iPhone application would have helped me. With the growing community of iPhone users, this FREE application will help student’s achieve academic success.

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I recently had a Hernia Surgery 2 weeks ago and found it to be a very painful experience. I went in the operating room with no fear (thinking the Vicodin would take care of me after the surgery). Sad to say, the Vicodin worked but not as effectively as I had imagined.

I went in on March 4th, 2009 at 8AM and came out by 11AM. I was feeling great thinking everything was fine ‘n’ dandy but as I got off the bed to change out of the hospital gown into my clothes I fell next to the bed. The anesthesia was still in my system and my left leg was numb (they forgot to mention this to me). After waiting an hour, I was able to change in to my clothes and leave the hospital. They had given me a pain pump which had a pipe going in to my skin near my abdominal area to provide numbing medicine in the incision area.

Came home got the rest I needed and later that evening I started taking my prescription pain reliever medicine, Vicodin. 10PM as I slowly walked to the bathroom like an ape with my hunched back and legs spread open I fell again. This was supposedly the anesthesia leaving my system and mixing Vicodin causing my blood pressure to drop dramatically. Lucky for me my sister is a nurse and was nearby to help and give me salt water and Gatorade to bring it back up a little. Then at 12AM, my second attempt to go to the bathroom ended up the same way with me laying beside the toilette wanting to vomit but no energy to do so and when something did come out, it was just water since I had not ate all day.

After that first day, the next four or five days were probably the most painful days of my life (thus far). Very painful to move or walk at all and sleeping was an obstacle of its own. Was only allowed to sleep on my back (couldn’t turn even if I wanted to because of the pain). Vicodin would keep me constipated and drowsy and didn’t feel like it was easing the pain until I stopped taking it and realized how bad the pain got without it.

After struggling the first few days, I was told by my Doctor’s office I had to force myself to walk (even if it hurt) otherwise I would not heal fast. Keeping in mind that I am getting married on April 11th, 2009 I had to speed up this healing process. So I walked around the house back and forward after the few days as much as I could and the fifth day, it was time for me to remove my pain pump. I can’t believe they expect a patient to do this himself at home. It was a five inch catheter (pipe/tube) that went inside me which I had to pull out on my own. As I mentioned earlier, lucky for me my sister was a nurse or I would be freaking out.

Pain felt worse after that was removed since there was no more numbing medicine being applied. After the first week had passed, I was able to walk more and became more tolerant to pain. It has been two weeks now and I’m feeling much better. I still have my sterry strips over the incision area and waiting for them to come off. They did not use any stitches to close the open area so I’m waiting to see what it will look like once these fall off (suppose to take two weeks so any day now).

So if you are ever have to get a Hernia Surgery then take my advice, WALK! Build that pain tolerance and walk as much as you can, it really does help heal faster.

Have you had a Hernia Surgery before? What was your experience like?

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The New iPod shuffle seems to be smaller and has a sleek look to it.Quite thin in size and can holdup to 4GB of songs (up to 1000 songs). Like the previous shuffle, it does not have a display on it and comes with a clip. This shuffle comes with additional features which the previous version did not have…

Now you can have your iPod shuffle talk to you as you listen to your song. It has the capability to tell you the name of the artist and the song name by the push of a button by a new feature called VoiceOver. It also tells you the name of the playlist since this iPod lets you have multiple playlists for your songs.

One of the negative features I find is the location of the control buttons. The play, pause, next/previous buttons are location on the wire of the earplugs which means you have to use Apple’s earplugs in order to use this iPod. Everything is controled from there except the on and off switch which is on the shuffle itself. Apple did say they would provide an adapter for 3rd Party headphones so lets see what that looks like.

Overall I’m not a big fan of the shuffle since I would like to see the song I am listening to rather than hear a VoiceOver tell me about it so that I can shuffle through them. Seems to have a very sleek look to it and is tiny compared to the previous version.

What do you think of the new iPod shuffle?

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Technology changes very often and same goes with the standards of web design. Traditionally, a website would have the foundation of the template built off of tables where as now, we have changed that to CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) driven div tags.

What’s CSS? CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) is a simple mechanism for adding style to web documents. These styles implement the look and formatting of a website. Div tags allow us to link styles to CSS which can benefit your website more than you know.

How does CSS benefit you?

– Great for SEO. Improve website speed. The speed will be noticed by search engines that crawl to your. It’s simply a difference of milliseconds which is a big deal for crawlers. Loading time can change from .25 seconds for tables compared to .1 for CSS-based layout.

– Easy to maintain. Global site wide changes for the look and feel. Changing the fonts, colors, borders, and navigation can all be done from one location rather than each page individually. This saves time and money to eliminate the tedious process. This also gives your website a visual consistency throughout your website such as the same header, font size/color, etc.

– Cross-browser compatibility. Having your website be W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) compliant makes your website friendly to different browsers. If some of your clients use Mozilla Firefox and others IE (Internet Explorer) or Google Chrome, a website that is W3C compliant will display the same all browsers.

How does your website look?

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Growing up in the states you see that every little girl dreams of her wedding of how it will be and all the details in her head as she grows up. In India or Pakistan, traditionally, the parents would plan their children’s weddings and back in the days arranged marriages were more common. Today, majority of the weddings are love marriages where the bride and groom find each other (the normal way).

A wedding from my culture is a bit more of a headache that will push you to go for a drive-thru wedding in Vegas. Our weddings last for several days. After reading Dick’s post on the cost break-down of his and Fran’s wedding, I almost felt like crying realizing the difference in his wedding and my traditional wedding. Let me give you the breakdown of what how I have come to see a semi-traditional wedding in my culture.

Mehndi (Henna Tattoo)

Day 1 – Mehndi. The Mehndi (known as Henna) is a temporary tattoo that the bride, family, and friends put on their hands and some on their feet on special occasions (particularly at weddings). I personally hate the smell of it, some people actually like it.

Day 2 – Pithi. The Pithi ceremony is the day before the wedding. It involves rubbing a paste made of chickpea flour, turmeric, or rose water on the bride and groom. This is great for the skin and evens out the skin tone the day before the wedding. The family takes turns in putting some of it on and over the years this tradition has evolved to friends coming together towards the end and egging the groom and messing him up with all sorts of different grocery items such as eggs, flour, syrup, ketchup, mustard, etc… Sad to say only the groom goes through this un-eventful process =/. After all this mess is done, we dance away and in some weddings play Dandiya which is done so with two sticks hitting each other (sounds ridiculous but is quite fun).

Day 3a – Nikah (Nikkah). The Nikah ceremony is simply a contract between the bride and groom in the Muslim religion. I find it to be equivalent to the marriage license from a judge or justice of peace. This ceremony is only for those within the religion and close family and takes place before the reception itself.

Day 3b – Reception. This is similar to how white weddings (traditional western wedding) are celebrated with dinner and dance party. We have the cake cutting ceremony followed by the first dance and a traditional father daughter dance (taken from the American culture) leading to a night to remember (so they say).

Day 4 – Satada (Rukhsati) – Just when you thought it was over there is one final day. This day is for close family only where the bride is acknowledged to have left her family to go in to the groom’s side of the family. This day has a lot of crying as the parents of the bride realize her daughter is going away. It’s also viewed as the first lunch/dinner with the two families together and the bride and groom have consummated their marriage.

One day I left out which is the court ceremony. We have decided to do our court ceremony on the same week as our reception so that Zaheen (my fiance) could wear a close to traditional white dress at the court room.

So this sums up my interpretation for a five day wedding. I’ll be going through this process this April and will write about my experience afterwards.

What are some traditions you follow for weddings?

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While surfing the web doing some research on the next phone I want to get my hands on I came across some news on the new HTC Magic (what some rumors say is the Android G2), codename Sapphire 2.0 which was just released couple of days ago on February 17th, 2009 to Vodafone customers outside of United States. Every HTC device has a codename that is given before the release of the device.

HTC and Google have made great improvements from the first release of T-Mobile G1 by. The HTC Magic has followed other phones such as the HTC Touch Diamond 2 and Touch HD in taking off the slide out keyboard and having an on screen keypad like the iPhone or HTC Diamond.

A cool feature I noticed on some of the videos is a wide screen keyboard. The traditional camera which was on the T-Mobile G1 now has capability to record videos as well as take pictures. It’s not clear whether or not the T-Mobile version which will be released sometime this summer in the states will have the same features or not but we’ll have to wait and find out.

This phone is slightly thicker than the iPhone but feels like the same size. Great improvement in design since the G1. The only flaw most tech journalists found was the keyboard was a bit cramped but 3rd party keyboards will probably be available soon.

For those that are wondering, the HTC Magic is running on the Google Android Cupcake, incase you want to try implementing it on a Windows Mobile device as was done with the first release of Android. Click here for Google Android for WM found on XDA Developers =)

Do you think the HTC Magic has anything on the iPhone? What are your thoughts on the new HTC Magic?

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So if you’re like me and have problems sleeping and want to avoid OTC (over the counter) sleeping pills then you should read this post. I did some research since I’ve been having trouble falling asleep for a few weeks now.

Below is a list of steps, try a few and see what works for you.

1) Exercise regularly at least six hours before going to bed. If you have an office job you are more likely to have insomnia than someone who does physical work.

2) Sleep and wake up at the same time every day. Doing this will allow your body to get use to sleeping and waking up at a certain time and your body will adjust to that routine.

3) Drink a warm glass of milk 15-20min before going to bed. The calcium in milk relaxes your nerves.

4) Eat a bed time snack before going to bed. Something small with low protein and high carbs such as cookies and juice.

5) Avoid Caffeine, Alcohol, and Tobacco. Alcohol may get you tired and ‘buzzed’ but research has shown that it prevents deep rest.

6) Sleep on your back. This is the best position for relaxing as it allows all your internal organs to rest properly. Try to avoid sleeping on your stomach because it causes pressure on your internal organs which results in shallow breathing.

7) Count backwards. Although this is something I read online and does not seem to work for me, it has worked for some people. Start counting backwards from 1,000 and hopefully you’ll fall asleep before you get to zero. Don’t continue counting to negative numbers. If you did not fall asleep by the time you got to zero, it’s probably not working for you.

8) Earplugs. I’m a very light sleeper and can lose my sleep from someone walking outside my bedroom door. Earplugs can give you a good night’s rest if noise is an issue.

9) Wiggle your toes. A friend of my told me about this and it comes from some yoga techniques. Wiggling your toes up and down 12 times can relax your entire body and help you fall asleep.

10) Sleep with your head facing north. Aligning your body with the magnetic field of the planet to bring your energy in sync with the planet. (I myself did not even bother trying this one)

Share your thoughts and keep this list growing.

What remedies do you have for falling asleep?

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Reiki is a Japanese technique used for healing, relieving stress and relaxation. It is done using ones ‘life force energy’ to raise another persons ‘life force energy’. If someone is feeling stressed or un-happy, then their ‘life force energy’ is low.

Reiki is a natural and safe spiritual healing and self-improvement method that anyone can use. It has also shown to heal wounds not just moods (not scientifically of course).

I have been thinking about going to see someone that practices Reiki. I’ve been told this lady has helped decrease the size of a brain tumor. She also has helped with sports injuries such as sprained ankles and such.

My brother had suggested this to me since I need a hernia surgery and after talking to her on the phone, she said she can cure it but I’m just a bit skeptical on the idea of it working. I’ve never been to one but have been reading up on it and what they do is they hover their hands over the part that hurts and as Obi-Wan said it in Star Wars “Use the Force” to heal you.

Have you ever heard of Reiki or another form of herbal/spiritual healing that works?
If you have, have you tried it yourself?

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If you have not heard yesterday’s news then you should read this.

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 5 a.m. two vehicles on the eastbound lane on the I-10 (Santa Monica Freeway) just west of National Boulevard went into flames after a devastating collision. Two men were killed; one was driving on the wrong side of the freeway at more than 65 mph. One was a Culver City police officer and the other was a 21-year-old Van Nuys man. Not sure if the officer was on duty at the time of the accident or not.

The accident happened less than two blocks away from my house, I was sleeping at this time but had woken up because of the helicopters around the accident. Traffic was backed up till 1 p.m. for miles. My brother was on his way to school at 11 a.m. and said all the local roads were jam packed since the I-10 going eastbound was closed.

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Google launched their G1 phone last year with the Android OS. Now you can get the Android OS on you Windows Mobile device without having to switch phones. XDA Developers, an online community that promotes tweaks and upgrades for your Windows Mobile device.

This isn’t a hack of any sort. Its simply a Linux image running on Windows allowing you to launch Android. Best part is, unlike a ROM update from XDA Forums which replaces your Windows Mobile OS, you do not need to flash your device to run Google Android. A simple soft reset of your device (re-boot) will launch the Linux application.

Have you tried running Android on you Windows Mobile yet?

Learn how you can run Android on your Kaiser (ATT Tilt/8925)

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Do you drink enough water?

Drinking enough watever every day is a key in maintaining good health. Your body is made up of mostly water, it only makes sense to keep replenishing it instead of filling up on other forms of liquid such as soda or fruit juices which contain a lot of sugar.

Here are some facts about H20 and your body:

Blood is 83% water

Muscles are 75% water

The brain is 74% water

Bone is 22% water

With just 8 glasses of water per day, you can improve your energy, increase mental and physical performance, reduce headaches, remove toxins from your body, lose weight, and provides proper digestion just to name a few. It is recommended that men drink 13 glasses of water and women nine glasses. It has been said in the past to drink eight ounces of water eight times a day but no one really does.

Most people mistake thirst for hunger. Next time you feel that you’re hungry, drink a few glasses of water, wait 20 minutes and see if you are still hungry. This is a great way to lose weight as well.

If you don’t like the taste of water, adding lemon wedge can bring a hint of sweetness to the falvor.

How many glasses of water do you drink a day?

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Borrowing from a Ray Barone quote in an episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond”: “I think I know one thing that can make this year all better…editing. When all is said and done we will only remember the good stuff. I think you’re gonna remember about 2008 what you want to remember.” And so today Webconsuls wants to wish all of our clients a healthy and joyous holiday season and take a few minutes to remind you about some of the “good stuff” that our clients and we have enjoyed this year. We hope you will enjoy the memories…

Client side…

UCLA Division of Interventional Neuroradilogy is featured on NBC Nightly News
On November 28, 2008, NBC Nightly News aired a segment that featured Dr. Gary Duckwiler as he discussed the new scan technology available to target aneurysms, allowing doctors to find the problems and fix them before they cause major problems. If you visit their site you can watch the NBC video.

Visions Adolescent Treatment Center featured on the Today Show
Dr. Nancy Snyderman, Chief Medical Editor for NBC News, talked with Matt Laurer on December 11, 2008, regarding “Teens Abusing Prescription Drugs”. This segment featured Visions Teen Adolescent Treatment Center, their Medical Director Dr. David Lewis and three Visions’ clients who are in recovery from prescription drug abuse. While the statistics on this problem are alarming, the segment offers valuable advice for parents and teens. You can view the video here.

Lodge at Moosehead Lake receives Four Star Diamond Award
In July 2008, Linda and Dennis Bortis, Lodge at Moosehead Lake innkeepers, were notified by the Automobile Club of America that once again their beautiful inn has been designated with the Four Star Diamond Award. According to AAA: “The 1,915 AAA Four Diamond Award winners include 1,159 lodgings and 756 restaurants throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Only 3.2 percent of the 60,000 AAA Diamond rated lodgings and restaurants received the prestigious designation.” This is the 14th year that the Lodge at Moosehead Lake has received this award and we offer our congratulations to Linda and Dennis.

Lou Ursone, Executive Director of Curtain Call, Inc, Awarded Fellowship
This past January “the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism (CCT) announced that Lou Ursone has been awarded the Elizabeth L. Mahaffey Arts Administration Fellowship for 2008, in recognition of his outstanding arts management abilities as executive director of Curtain Call, Inc., a community theater in Stamford. The annual Mahaffey Fellowship of $2,500 acknowledges the important role administrators play in Connecticut’s arts industry and is to be used for professional development activities. The fellowship is named in honor of Elizabeth Mahaffey, who contributed significantly to the development of arts administrators in the state during her 23-year career with the Commission.” Congratulations to Lou.

Leah Di Bernardo, chef and owner of Delyte’s Catering, featured in Press Enterprise Cooking Video Delyte’s Catering is located in the beautiful wine country of California’s Temecula Valley. Leah is an active member of “Slow Food” Nation and is the president of the Slow Food Temecula Valley. So it is not surprising that the Press Enterprise invited Leah to be featured on one of their cooking videos, “Chef Leah Di Bernardo cooks Chicken Cacciatore on Chinese black rice.”

And just in case you have not heard of the “Slow Food” movement, you can read Time Magazine’s Article, “Can Slow Food Feed the World?” to learn more.

Olive Crest, Homes and Services for Abused Children, Gets $1 Million Grant to Finish Coachella Center December 8, 2008, The Desert Sun reported that our client, Olive Crest, received long awaited funds to complete their Coachella Valley Children’s Center. This is good news for the children and for Olive Crest, an organization that has since 1973 provided loving care for over 40,000 children and families.

The good news stories continue: Seaward Inn will open for their 65th Season this coming spring; Susan Slaughter, FACHE, Director of Business Development at Pine Grove Behavioral Health Services, recently became a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives, the nation’s leading professional society for healthcare leaders and Pine Grove and Forrest General hosted a ceremony at the Pine Grove campus this past October to celebrate an inspiring project. Officials unveiled The Paul McMullan Circle of Healing Plaza and sculpture as a part of the Pine Grove Spiritual Grounds project, representing the organizations’ promise to positively affect lives; The Whalewalk Inn & Spa was featured in the August 2008 Travel and Leisure’s article about “The Best of Cape Cod”; and Cottonwood de Tucson received a mention in Showtime’s popular television series Weeds!

Webconsuls’ side…

Working with and for our clients over that past year has been both fulfilling and challenging for Webconsuls’ team. We strive to keep you abreast of new SEO and SMO ideas, teaching many of you about the efficacy of blogging about your business and even committing to post to our own blog on a daily basis. We hope you will take a few minutes to read our blog regularly, as we are sure you will find good tips and stories. We worked with many of you in redesigning your websites and we updated our website homepage to include a rotating “thumbnail” of new site designs. This rotation serves to give new exposure for many of you.

Some members of our team reached milestones in their own lives… Malik Moosa completed his BS Degree in Business Administration at California State University Long Beach in Spring 2008. His major course of study was Information Systems, E-Commerce Track. Malik began assisting Webconsuls in early 2006, by updating current web-sites and designing new sites for Webconsuls’ clients. Malik’s skill set includes, Macro-media Dreamweaver, Swish MAX, Advance HTML, DHTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Actionscript, MySQL Database, Adobe – Photoshop CS2, PageMaker 6, Illustrator 8, Premiere, and Acrobat. Malik also became engaged and plans an April 2009 wedding.

Keith Hansen our Pay Per Click specialist announced this month that he and his wife are expecting their first baby in April 2009. In the meantime, Keith continues to work closely with many of our clients guiding them through the every changing world of pay-per-click.

Looking ahead

2009 promises to be an interesting year for all of us. We look forward to working with you and we welcome your comments, questions, and suggestions. We would love to hear from you when you have exciting and interesting news about your business. We will include this news in our Webconsuls’ blog.

Happy Holidays,
Dick, Dennis and Judy

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How do you decide on what colors to use for your website?

This is the question you start with when designing a website and could determine how the website will look based on your decision. Webconsuls has recently designed Affirmations website which gives a soothing yet bright feeling. Located in Scottsdale, AZ the website’s colors catch the user’s eyes and yet still hold the peace of mind that it is a recovery center. The colors were easier to play with given that the company logo is a simple yellow logo which gives me room to play with a wide range of colors.

To give you an idea of how to relate a theme of the website with the company it belongs to, let’s take a look at some of the sites Webconsuls has designed. Hardhat Presentations has a blueprint in the background since it is a construction business. La Fuente Restaurant gives off a feeling of an authentic Mexican restaurant. Click here to see a partial listing of the sites designed by Webconsuls.

Websites should give the feeling of the company when entering a site. Two things that always help a designer is the logo which is initially the first thing we look at when designing a website and the pictures provided. What you write about your company and the pictures you chose to present your company are what the people see. Therefore, having a professional photographer take photos of your business/facility and your staff is a great investment.

The simple the logo, the more flexibility a designer has to work with. The more complex the logo, the less options you may have depending on the color scheme you are going for.

Websites such as Colors on the Web and ColorScheme are great tools to help you decide on color contrasts that are appealing and catch your eye.

How does your site look?

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Webconsuls’ SMO team works hard to keep our clients and us up to date on all of the latest “gadgets” that seem to offer some benefit either for our website marketing or general business tools. I will admit that I am not always the first one to try out or sign up for the latest and greatest, but I do try to glean from my co-workers their reviews of these new tools. So today I want to talk about Yammer. To Yammer or not to Yammer, that is the question.

I first learned about Yammer on November 5, 2008. I received an email from Lisa inviting me to join the Webconsuls.com network. This email arrived at 7:53AM, then at 8:56AM I received an additional invitation from Malik Moosa. On November 5 I had a very good reason for not responding to these invitations, as I was flying from Tucson to Albany, NY, and the laptop was not accessible for most of the day. Five weeks went by. I was busy with many client’s projects and I waited to see if any other team member would invite me to join webconsuls.com yammer network.

December 8, 2008, the wait was over. I received another invitation from Dick Fay. Now this impressed me. Dick is not only my co-worker he is also one of my business partners, and I decided that Dick’s invitation offered some validity to yammer.com. So, I signed up!

It was easy to do, I followed the steps and what do you know there I was part of the TEAM. On the home page you can easily see “posts” or “updates” from your team or group members. But what startled me was that, aside from the automatic post showing that Dick Fay had joined the “network”, all other updates were from Darin, our SMO director. Hmmmm! What does this mean? Where were Lisa’s updates and Malik’s updates? I didn’t understand.

If, as the Yammer.com “about us” page says: “Yammer is a tool for making companies and organizations more productive through the exchange of short frequent answers to one simple question: ‘What are you working on?’ As employees answer that question, a feed is created in one central location enabling co-workers to discuss ideas, post news, ask questions, and share links and other information. Yammer also serves as a company directory in which every employee has a profile and as a knowledge base where past conversations can be easily accessed and referenced.”; then why is only Darin posting updates? And for that matter, is anyone listening?

I am reminded of a winter day in 1989, when I was the co-owner and innkeeper of Cranmore Mountain Lodge. Our chef at the time was a colorful fellow named John Littlefield. (Picture Ignatius J. Reilly, the main character in the Pulitzer Prize winning fiction novel, A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole.) John was a superb chef, but let’s just say he had some idiosyncrasies and someday when I write my expose about innkeeping I will devote an entire chapter to John.

But back to my story. I was in the laundry room with my youngest son Daniel

Aaron & Dan 1989

(he had just turned five years old). The laundry room had a doorway to the country kitchen and John was in the kitchen busying himself and talking. Daniel watched John for a few minutes and then turned to me and in a soft voice inquired: “Momma, who is John talking to?” To which I responded: “He is talking to himself.” Daniel considered my answer and then in turn responded: “But who is listening?” I didn’t have an answer, except a knowing smile.

Now almost 20 years later, I find myself asking the same question when it comes to all of the new-age technology. I know that people read blogs, I know that the Internet and SMO can be very powerful on so many levels. But I also know that I can write this blog every Saturday and I don’t really have any idea who is listening. So should I Yammer?

I would like to invite all of my readers to learn more about yammer.com, but at the same time I worry about even the name of “yammer.” According to Websters’, yammer means to utter repeated cries of distress or sorrow, to utter consistent complaints, to talk persistently or volubly and often loudly. So why would Yammer.com founders choose such a name? I don’t know.

What I do know is that I am going to give it a try, but I am going to use it strictly for business questions. I am going to try to solicit input from my team members about business questions regarding SEO, SMO, web design, etc. I will let you know how this works out. In the meantime, here is a video that gives you a pretty good overview of YAMMER. And if you are looking for a good read, try A Confederacy of Dunces, you will laugh yourself silly.

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Category: Malik-Moosa-Soomar

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