CT Biz Blogs

I’m doing some work for Valorie Luther, of Creative Concepts, helping her with a new blog for the Fairfield Orthodontic Center, in Fairfield, Connecticut.

We set this one up a bit differently, with a static front page, and not one, but TWO blogs, all done with WordPress. One blog, found on the We are talking page, is where Dr. Thomas Christie, his staff, and parents will be providing posts, and the other is a blog for the kids, where Dr. Christie’s patients will be chiming in with posts about their experiences.

The site was built and designed by the talented Geek Goddess. I’m taking care of the site maintenance stuff — tweaking WordPress, general admin, adding plugins and so on.

It’s just been up a few weeks, so there’s still lots I need to do.

This is my idea of fun, folks!

Update 10/15/06: Due to some problems we’re having with the site, it’s down for now. Lucky for us not too many people are reading it yet — just everyone who reads this blog.;-)

One of the banks in my area is merging with another bank (what a surprise!). As I was reading the local paper this morning I saw a big ad announcing the merger and asking people to “Tell us how we can make banking better.” It gave a web address (URL), where people could go to submit their comments about how TD Banknorth could build a better bank.

This is a great idea, except for one itty-bitty detail: it’s not a blog. Instead, people are given an smallish text box and a submit button.

Good idea: asking people for their suggestions and opinions.
Bad idea: sending that suggestion or opinion into a black hole, never to be seen again.

(more…)

If you’re in the central Connecticut area, here are two upcoming events you might be interested in.

Public speaking is something that we all need to be able to do, especially if you’ve got your own business. Well, Monday, May 15th, Eagle Toastmasters of Wallingford is going to have an open house, from 7:15 - 8:45 PM, at the Park & Recreation building, 6 Fairfield Boulevard, Wallingford. If you’ve ever wondered what happens at a Toastmasters meeting, this is a good time to find out. I’ve been in this club for a few years and it has a great bunch of folks. Guests are welcome, the event is free, and there’ll be refreshments (ok, we don’t usually have food at a meeting, thank goodness). A few months ago, Jeff Katz, of the Meriden Record-Journal, came to a meeting. Here’s what he wrote about us.

For women, there’s the next meeting of the Central CT Women’s Forum, on the 16th. (Going to be a busy week for me next week — out two nights in a row!) That’ll be at Aqua Terra Restaurant, 253 East St., (Rt. 10), Plainville, CT. Networking begins at 5:30 p.m. followed by dinner and a program: Abby Marks Beale-Beyond Overload: 10 Secrets to Get Back Control. The price for guests is $25. If you’re interested, you’ll need to register by this Friday, May 12th.

As much as I love to spend my days and evenings hunched over a computer, there are times when I just have to go out and have fun. I always have a blast with these two groups.

Valorie Luther, of Creative Concepts, is off and running with her latest adventure. She’s been busy organizing a blogging/new media conference!

I’m going to be there to help out, and it sounds like a lot of interesting people, such as David Pogue, of the New York Times, and David Parment, among others, will be speaking.

She told me she’ll have a press release ready in a few weeks, but you can read a bit of what she’s been doing with the New Media Conference, in her latest blog post.

On Friday, I mentioned that I’d found a new Connecticut small business blog (started in November, 2005), Hadley Spagna Photography.

I ended by saying that there were a few things that bugged me. This was a bit harsh; I didn’t mean to say I thought she was doing anything wrong, just that I believe there are some things she needs to think about doing better.

 One thing I noticed is that her main web site is in Flash. I don’t like a lot of Flash on web sites for several reasons, but the main one is: lack of opportunity to optimize your site for search engines.  Maybe this will change one day, but right now, search engine crawlers (spiders and ‘bots who go looking for text) can’t read what’s in Flash.

 That’s because a web page that has Flash is actually just a “wrapper,” a shell with a link to the Flash file itself, which is a special, proprietary Macromedia Shockwave Flash file. If your browser has the Flash plug-in, it can play the Flash file, but web crawlers can’t parse the text in a Flash file the way they do with regular web pages. Well, Google claims to be able to, to a limited extent. But for most search engines, the text in Hadley’s web site doesn’t exist. Yes, there are some keywords in the title of the page on her web site (up at the top), but basically, that’s it for keywords on her web site.

On the other hand, people can’t copy images, if they’re in Flash. This is a valid concern for photographers.

 My recommendation to people who want Flash, is to only have it in selected sections, such as the photo gallery.  There are non-Flash ways to get fancy effects, such as sliding text.

Here’s an article with more techy detail on Flash and its SEO limitations.

Of course, having a blog helps a lot with that search engine optimization (SEO) bit. One way to maximize your “findability” is to really work the blog, even more so when you have a web site that can’t help you much with SEO.

So for Hadley’s blog, I’d recommend something other than Blogger. Blogger is fine for experimenting, but to really get the most out of your blog, hosting your own is best, or using a blogging tool that has more features than Blogger, such as Wordpress.com or Typepad.

 One essential thing to implement in a more full-featured blog application is the use of categories or tags.  I’ll write more on what those are at a later date, but the important thing to know is that categories and/or tags will help readers by organizing the posts in a more contextual way, and will help bloggers by giving them more keywords which are repeated on each post (namely, the category titles).

If you want to use Blogger, there are some Blogger hacks to add categories. I haven’t tried them out myself, yet.  They’re not easy to implement for novices, though. You have to tweak the template a bit.

So, once again, blogging comes to the rescue!  Got a less than optimum web site? No problem! You just have to work that extra bit harder to maximize the search engine “juice” you can get from having a blog. 

In scouring the internet in search of example blogs for small businesses, I found Hadley Spagna Photography (Actually, I just searched through CT Weblogs site.)

Hadley is a photographer, specializing in maternity and children photos. She’s got a regular website (just re-vamped) and a blog on Blogger.

Her blog is very informal and while it does have some photography, it’s a combo of a lot of things:

• info about cameras
• example pictures of her children
• info on where you can see her photos (such as Border’s)
• writing about child-friendly local restaurants and getting a child’s hair cut

It may seem like the last item is off-target – a miscellany of writing about things that don’t have a lot to do with photography, but she’s not just showcasing her photographic skills. She’s also showing her relationship skills and the fact that she gets kids and knows what to do with them – she knows how to bring out the best.

She’s showing that she has both an artistic eye to capture the right moments well, and a parental eye to know what that moment would look like.

There’s nothing wrong with putting in as much personal commentary or detail as you feel comfortable sharing. It’s not unprofessional if done correctly.

Amy Gahran, a professional blogger and explorer of new media, has done a survey on the issue of bringing personal info into a business blog. Also check out the analysis of write-in responses to the survey.

In Hadley’s blog you get to see that she is a mom, that she understands kids, and that the experience of hiring her is going to be the complete opposite of the slap-the-kid-in-a-suit, prop-him-in-up-in-front-of-a-fake-background, and make funny “ooga-ooga, squidgy-squidgy-woo” noises until the kid stops screaming, and then snap the picture experience.

That’s a good thing!

That being said, there are a few things that bug me, or that I think could be done better. But I’ll have to postpone that analysis until Monday’s post – I’m out of time. See you then!

Valorie Luther, at Creative Concepts, LLC, has her new blog up and running. She’s got the blogging bug big-time, and has worked hard to understand and use blogs for herself and her clients.

She contacted me a few months ago (she found me because of this blog) and we’ve been working on offering blogging to clients who might benefit from having a business blog.

She’s had a blog for a while with her other company, White Linen Events . That blog is called Entertaining News, and it just got a beautiful make-over from The Geek Goddess (someone else Valorie found online).

Valorie started blogging the way a lot of people do — with a free blog from Blogger, for Entertaining News. She used it to learn the basics so that she could understand the issues involved in blogging.

Creative Concepts will be getting a make-over, as well, to move from the template look. Now that she understands blogging, she moved to the next level and got a Wordpress 2.0 blog on her own domain. Her web guys are working to get the main website up, but the blog is up now and she’s working on some great ideas, including offering a blogging workshop here in CT.

It’s about time things started happening here, instead of the west coast.

Your Voice is the blog of Kim Fawcett, who has declared her candidacy for state representative in Fairfield and Westport. She’s decided to use a blog as a way to help her reach out to people, and to hear what’s on their minds.

This Blog I hope will be about the issues. My plan is to run a grass roots campaign and talk to as many people as I can. I plan to use this Blog to share with you the issues that regular people in my community care about. If I am sucessful in reaching out to enough people my voice should over time truly become their voice in the process and that is my campaign slogan YOUR VOICE..FOR CHANGE!

Kim may be new to blogging, but she’s plunged right in. I think she’ll do well, because it fits right into her overall goal of meeting people and paying attention to what they have to say.

The first open house women’s networking event at Jitters Coffeehouse will be happening tonight. The coffeehouse is at 1273 Queen Street in Southington (RT10). This is put on by the Central Ct Women’s Forum group.

The cost is $5 and includes coffee or tea, and desserts. No reservation is required. They will meet twice a month on Wednesday nights — the next meeting is December 7th.

I’d be there tonight if I didn’t already have other plans — I’ve got the Dec 7th event on my calendar, though.

Also, check out their press release for more information on the radio show they’re putting together.

In the October 23rd issue of Northeast Magazine, a supplement of the Hartford Courant, Joel Lang wrote “Decoding the Blogosphere: Navigating Connecticut’s Expanding World Of Web Logs” (link is to online article).

It’s not an awful article; it does serve as an introduction, of sorts, to blogging. But, as is almost guaranteed in most mainstream media coverage of blogs, it concentrates on the personal journal variety. Apparently, Joel Lang discovered Connecticut Weblogs, talked to the folks behind that effort, and sampled some of the blogs listed on their site, focusing on the more off-beat ones. To be fair, I must say that most of the blogs listed on Connecticut Weblogs are the personal ones, and they are a very quirky lot. (more…)

Connecticut Windows on the Natural World is a beautiful weblog. In the header, it’s described like this:

There may be no place better than Connecticut to discover nature. This blog tells of local discoveries about geology, paleontology, ecology and fisheries over the past two centuries and connects them with events in the world today.

This site looks to be Brendan Hanrahan’s companion site to www.cttrips.com. Searching Google for “connecticut” and “geology” brings links to www.cttrips.com on the first page. While he doesn’t seem to need the blog to drive business to his main site, it does nicely augment it. (more…)

Andrew Ewalt is a solo attorney in the Greater Hartford area. His blog serves as a good example of sharing expertise.

He has articles on taxes, identity theft, and life insurance. He also has a list of links, to mostly legal blogs.

But those links make it less clear for whom these articles are intended. Reading the articles, I get the impression that they’re for clients and the general public. But if that’s the case, he might do better by having a list of links to sites that his intended audience would find more helpful, such as financial information, tax sites, or consumer information. I doubt that most clients are really interested in the site for the American Constitution Society.

However, he might also want to be a part of the growing network of legal bloggers, a perfectly valid goal, and one that adds to the fun of being in the blogging world. In that case, dividing the links into two segments could help: legal sites, and consumer information sites.

There are many decisions to make when shaping a blog. The good news is that you don’t have to make all of them at once. A weblog is something that grows over time, just like a business.

Here is a weblog from South Windsor, CT. Folks from Gerber Scientific Products created a blog using Blogger, the fastest, cheapest, and simplest way to start blogging.

They use it to showcase what their customers have done with their products, give tips, and explain features.

This is a great way to personalize a company, and connect with customers.

I passed by their building, going to and from work, for many years — never knew what they did. Now I do!