Author Archive

Today I started brainstorming concepts for a new corporate website.  The current website is a few years old and is in need of some modernization.  It is also time to update  because frankly we have learned a lot in a few years about eye tracking, usability and marketing.

The current website has performed well and drives a high percentage of visitors to the contact page. The contact page in turn sends in a few monthly quote requests and an undetermined number of phone calls.  This is one of the areas I want to improve upon.  To do a better job of demonstrating the importance of the website, we need a better way of capturing all of the information from the contact page including phone calls. Another key goal is to differentiate the contacts from people who came directly to looking for a phone number and those who found us organically.  Those organic numbers are the key to how effective our search engine marketing strategies are.

Purpose is the concept for the new site.  There are really only a few reasons for someone to be on a printing company website.  I plan on leveraging that knowledge to provide a clear path to the information visitors are looking for, hopefully in a clever and memorable way. I’ll follow up more on that in part 2.  The conclusion to part one is stating my desire to protect the website visitors once again, from flash intros, auto playing video, sound and all other sorts of ideas people want to add to the website, yet hate it when they see them on a website.

What is the purpose for the new website?  The purpose is sales.

I made a post a couple of years ago about how frustrating my experience was when trying to cancel my XBox Live subscription.  The post still gets hundreds of visitors a month so I thought I would update it with some new information from a comment at the end of the post.  Thanks to David for his comment!

You can cancel the auto renew of the Xbox live gold if you go to xbox.com and login to your live account, click you gamertag, click contact information, click membership level, and where it says automatic renewel, click where it says on. You will then have to click through a few screens where they are trying to keep you but then you will finally be able to set it to off!!!

Let me get this straight. A top 10 list of websites with the best top 10 lists. I believe top 10 lists have officially jumped the shark.

I just noticed one of my sites dragging when trying to load and it seems the link to jquery-latest.pack.js was the culprit. After some quick research I see code.jquery.com has been redirected to Googles AJAX Libraries API. If you have links to code.jquery.com in your websites, now would be a good time to change them.

Here is a blog post from jquery discussing the move to Google’s API.

One of the big stories going around now is about VP candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account being “hacked”.  As it turns out though her email account wasn’t really hacked.  The person who broke into her account used social engineering to reset her password so they could access it.

This is a perfect example of the problem I blogged about back in January with using real information for your security questions. If Sarah Palin had not used real information when answering the Yahoo email security questions her email would not have been compromised by someone guessing her security questions.  Also keep in mind, Yahoo gives the same secuirty question challenges to everyone.  So if I want to social engineer my way into your email account I already know which security questions to start researching.

We just got back from a week at the lake recently so I am now starting to get back in the swing of things.  As you can see in the picture, coming back to work wasn’t high on my priority list.

Every year we go with some friends to a cabin on probably the cleanest lake I have ever been in. The only way to get to the cabin is by boat.  We have to ferry all of our supplies over on the boat and carry the trash off each day by boat.  You have to do the trash daily or you may wake up with a bear eating you or your food.  It is a small price to pay for the relaxing atmosphere.

My free Gmail account allows me to have a 64 bit password.  If you can crack it, you deserve to be able to read my email.

Well what about the important stuff, like my online bank accounts?  My banking account you say, funny you should ask.  My bank limits my password to 20 characters.

One of the smartest things I have done was to decide to try and listen to books on CD during my commute back and forth from work. I absolutely love it. I love it for several reasons and I am about to tell you why.

The first reason is taking the pressure and stress off traffic. I live south of Atlanta, the asshole of the world, and I have to commute into the city every day. Atlanta traffic is horrid and you would do better to ask a homeless man to cure cancer than ask everyone using the interstates heading into or out of Atlanta to pay attention and JUST DRIVE STRAIGHT! There is however, no better feeling than being stuck in traffic and not giving caring because you are so wrapped up in a book you can’t wait to hear what happens.

Another reason is it allows you to listen to books that improve you. You can listen to books that help your career, make you a better parent, or any number of topics you would like to improve. Anything is better than listening to absolute crap ( IE The regular FM stations that pollute the radio dial. If you are in Atlanta fire up star 94 for a taste of the biggest idiots to ever pollute the airwaves. Those people make Howard Stern seem like a good counselor). Cut the FM cord. It is worthless and will never help you.

Just sit back and look closely at the amount of time you spend in a car. An hour a day is a lot of time that could be better spent either entertaining yourself or improving yourself.

UPDATED: Canceling My XBox Live Gold Membership

It came time to cancel my Xbox 360 Live Gold Membership tonight.  I have no problems with the service or the cost of it, but I just don’t use it.  I haven’t played my Xbox 360 in months much less logged on to play someone else.

So, I log into my game console and look around for the cancel button.  I went through every screen on the account management tab but nothing.  I couldn’t find it anywhere.  Me being a naive Internet user ( 16 years and counting) I assumed Microsoft would make canceling the service as easy as it was to start.  I mean it took me 2 minutes and a credit card to start my account right on my Xbox 360.  Why should canceling be so hard?  We know why they make it so hard, but damnit I am ranting here.

So anyway, I hit Google with “how do i cancel my xbox live subscription” and about the second one down was the number I had to call to cancel my membership.  So I dialed it up and after 4 Indians, 3 Holds, and 2 reference numbers I finally got it canceled.  If I gave out a weekly you suck ass award, Microsoft would get this weeks.

Need to repair your Xbox?

In the middle of my redesign, I decided to go in a new direction. I came across WP Remix and decided to buy it. It is really more of a content management theme than specifically for a blog. The versatility of it is why I purchased it. It is a great base to build upon and includes several different homepage options. The design you see here is completely stock for the blog. I haven’t gotten around to customizing it yet. The profitable projects get priority.

The funny part is, after finding and buying WP Remix, I found WP Premium which is a free theme offered by the same author. I downloaded it and have it running on my music blog. After some customization, I am really pleased with the way it looks. It is exactly what I wanted, 1 main column and 2 sidebars together on the right. Excellent theme and you can get WP Premium here.