Curtis Carmichael

Here are ten of the best business review sites on the Internet — both regional and national (no particular order):

1. enetez.com
2. Yahoo Local
3. Local Businesses on Local.com
4. YellowPages.com
5. WhitePages.com Business Search
6. New Hampshire Business Review
7. NH.com (Business and Consumer Info Search)
8. Manta.com
9. Business.com
10. Hoovers.com

Google Local is another great site but users are initially greeted with a map which may be confusing to many people (they may believe they landed on Google Maps instead).

If you’re looking for customer service numbers fast, ContactHelp.com is an excellent directory.

If you’re like me and am trying the free Beta edition of Windows 7 and had a printer driver issue, this may help.  I have an HP LaserJet 1000 printer which is now 8-10 years old but still runs great and is a solid printer.

Since this printer is discontinued and a formal official driver has not been created by HP yet, you’ll want to download the latest printing solution for Windows XP.  From there, you’ll want to download the “HP LaserJet 1000 Printing Software Solution” item (when you click the download button, the filename of the download should be lj1488en.exe.

Once you download this file, you’ll want to extract the files from the archive (the file you download is an archive file).  Afterwards, find the files you extracted (i.e. c:/lj1488/) and right click on the setup.exe file, selecting “Properties”.  From there, click on the Compatibility tab, check the “Run this program in compatibility mode for” checkbox and select “Windows XP (Service Pack 3).  Click OK and run that file.  You may get a few error box windows and you may have to click on the “Skip” button when it asks you to power your printer or connect the USB cord but it should install the driver and the printer solution software.

Its that easy — the trick is to run the setup file in compatibility mode.  The same trick works for installing on Windows Vista.

Drupal Design Camp Boston was a 2-day event held between June 13-14, 2009 at the Stata Center on MIT’s campus. This was the first event focusing exclusively on how to design/create themes for Drupal. Drupal conferences/events in the past were primarily geared for ‘techies’ vs. those who have more of a creative/design background. Admission, lunch and coffee were free courtesy of the event sponsors.

Overall, I felt this was a great event. The speakers were primarily from the ‘techie’ side of the Drupal spectrum so it was a bit difficult to follow theming/design advice being more of a web marketing and design type and not presently having a solid understanding of Drupal’s terminology, but they provided an excellent overview/foundation for me and others like myself to grow upon.

I learned designing for Drupal can become easier by utilizing grid design tools and other utilities such as Blueprint CSS, NineSixty, Skinr, Studio, Yahoo CSS etc. Using a grid system/CSS framework can significantly reduce development time, address browser compatibility issues via built-in functions/code and allow you to be on the ’same page’ as other developers in creating web sites and thus set yourself up to get more support by utilizing well-known development tools.

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These days, domain name parking services are abound — a quick Google search indicates 5-10 popular services and many other web sites offering the service.  Upon further research (and my own experience), I determined not many people have luck parking their domain names with a service.  Others, and myself are lucky to get more than 25-50 cents per day.  And I have over 100 domain names.  Not to complain because the earnings definitely rival most US-based savings accounts but one can do better and the cost/benefit doesn’t weigh out with each domain name costing somewhere in the range of $7-10 USD.

Of all the services, you’ll have the most luck with one allowing you to optimize the content/ads displayed on your domains.  Traditionally, the most successful domains are B2B related so you’ll want to concentrate on these ones as they will pay out better — in most cases, again, with my own experience and reading feedback from others on domain parking.  Some of the best domain parking services are GoDaddy’s domain parking service, RevenueDirect.com, Google’s new domain parking service (through AdSense), Sedo.com and SEOparking.com.  The later is setup in an interesting format — it takes more time to setup the domains but the end result allows you to display blog entries of your choosing on your web site on a WordPress blog.  Clever format but as a rule of thumb, I always like to have original content on my web site.  WordPress blogs do have excellent SEO capabilities however, as long as you don’t abuse SEO principles, etc.

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Web marketers must constantly keep themself updated with technology and marketing know-how in today’s ever-changing (and very competitive) Internet publishing landscape.  You can no longer ‘follow the lead’ and simply consider yourself a pure ‘marketing wizard’, IT professional or graphics pro.  On the contrary, one must wear many hats and ‘choose the path untaken’ to be 110% successful in this competitive arena.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to share a lesser-known web marketing tactic revolving around using RSS to automatically dump content into e-mails.  This is particularly useful if your business operation has limited time and resources.

A respected and very popular (but expensive) e-mail broadcast program called Lyris ListManager has this capability built-in, as does an alternative service at MailChimp.  Lyris ListManager can run as a hosted software solution on your own server or you can subscribe to have access to the software on a SaaS (software as a service) model with Lyris.  MailChimp functions as a powerful web-based software solution running off of mailchimp.com.

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I tend to use the analogy of e-newsletters, when used properly being comparable to modern day stealth fighters with relationship to web marketing campaigns.

E-newsletters tend to be either heavily bogged down with marketing/advertisements, swamped with articles and other non-marketing content or somewhere in the middle.  You’ll need to find the happy medium through A/V and multivariate testing and definitely want to make sure you don’t deter potential prospects by littering your content with too many ads and marketing ‘junk’ — emphasis on the later because no matter how well designed your campaign might be from a marketing content perspective, if it looks like spam/junk mail, no one will read it and/or no one will enable images to be viewed if applicable, disallowing accurate open rates from being tracked, etc.

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WordPress (www.wordpress.com), a popular open-source blogging platform written in PHP/MySQL has a plethora of built-in search engine optimization features built-in, making the software desirable to independent web entrepreneurs and established businesses alike.

I particularly like WordPress’s built-in SEO system utilizing Apache’s mod_rewrite capabilities (URL rewriting). I’ve evaluated various open source CMS products and noticed (based on my experience alone, working on very targeted, niche-centric sites) that search engines such as Google tend to favor content delivered WordPress over other platforms such as Joomla. To clarify, I am speaking of the CMS’s default, build-in SEO features. There are certainly many plug-ins – both free/open source and commercial – you can install for popular CMS products such as Joomla that are designed to enhance the default SEO functionality.

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Tasked with creating a web page from an Adobe Photoshop (.PSD) file with pixel perfect precision? Here are a few links you may find beneficial, to either introduce you to this topic and/or possibly enhance your skills:

• http://aloestudios.com/2008/08/pixel-precision-with-diagnostic-css/
• http://code.google.com/p/shepherd-interactive/wiki/OverlayComp (tool)
• http://www.pixelperfectplugin.com/ (tool)

Did you know China currently has the most amount of bloggers than any other country? 42,000,000+ people blog in China according to a report from Universal McCann. Asia as a whole is also generating the most content for the web than any other geographic area.