News - Google Engage

Google announced a new service to webmasters, an important tool to acquire new clients.  That new program is called Google Engage.

Use Adwords to help you and your clients

I applied for this program and was accepted, meaning I had at my disposal training on Google Adwords (online advertising) and a lot of Adword's coupons to divvy out to my clients ($2,000 worth!)  Why is this cool?  Diversity of services gives a competitive advantage.  Not only can you sell your client a website, but you can help them along with selling their product or services.  It is a sort of value-addition to my proposals ($100 coupon for Adwords seems like a nice gesture).

So, I applied for the program, the application was easy enough and they (Google) says they will call you, which they did.  I received a call from a nice woman who asked a couple questions and even said my Google Sites websites looked nice.

Ooooo, Google badge of honor

I took four 20 minute courses.  Now I can help setup my client's Adwords account and help them advertise.  It's like being an advertising consultant, pretty neat.  Now, it is obvious where Google is benefiting here; basically you're an informal salesman of Google.  They can even get you certified as their partner (that's a nice looking accreditation).

We hope Engage will help businesses that offer web services in attracting new clients and in adding value to existing clients. Check out Google Engage today and learn about the benefits the program can offer your business and the SMBs you support.

See links below for more information:
Google Engage for US Businesses
Google Engage for UK Businesses

Business - Drafting and Proposals

Remember quite a while ago when I posted about my small business, Kirksville Web Design?  Well, I laid low for awhile, not really searching for clients or anything.  Eventually, I received some phone calls of interested organizations.  First there was a waste management company, then someone called me on a proposal I made ages ago.  This all got me back in the mood for making websites! (Excitable, I know)

I wanted to write about two important business aspects of web design: proposals and drafting.  I also want to show you my new work so you can get inspired too.

Inspiration by MOblues.org

Proposals
In the procurement world you are providing a description of the products and services you plan to provide the client.  Make the proposal clear and concise, no need for legal contract lingo, just make it obvious.

Technical assistance (service) can put the client at ease.  Also, let them know you're available to make amendments to the website (service) like add pictures, announcements, videos, new content.  Your product is your creative work, the website itself and any bonuses you throw in there like email addresses (free with Google Apps) and the domain address.  Really, you're offering a quasi-product service package thingy.  Lay it all out on the table.  Speaking of a table, offer them a time-table, when you can have it all ready or in stages.

Inspiration by Weather.com

Drafting
The client will obvious want an example or draft of the website.  You can get the impression across all on the home page.  Design, text, navigation, pictures, graphics, make it the best you know how.

However, how do you get the inspiration you need to build the website.  Two ways: look at others work and look at the client's past website if they have one.  I went to Webcreme for some web design inspiration.  This is one I found: MoBlues.org.  I also looked closely at my most frequently visited websites.  I drew inspiration for Weather.com.  I am always looking to improve my graphics, it can set you apart from the amateurs.  Push yourself to get better at using GIMP or whatever application you use.

Try your best, advertise to new business or businesses that need new websites, and put on your salesperson hat.  Woo!

5 New Google Sites for Inspiration

1. Archer Properties - www.archerprop.com



Google Sites meets real estate, development and property management. We loved taking advantage of full width photos to advertise this company's properties.


2. Browder Law Firm, LLC - www.browderidlaw.com



Sophisticated and professional, that was the goal for this attorney's website. The firm's offerings are front and center, so the user-experience (UX) is plain and simple.


3. Carte Solutions - www.cartesyn.com

One of my favorite designs, especially because we got to create all the graphics for the site. Visual cues help people make sense of what this big data solutions company does. 

4. Foreman's Cleaning Service - www.foremanscleaningservice.com

Ever since Google's homepage, I loved a white background. All the text is Google web-font driven, so its responsive to a retina screen. Check out the contact us form too, all custom.

5. Firebird AST - www.firebirdast.com

Sometimes it's easy to come up with stylistic choices based on the type of business a company does. We went for technical, cool, modern and this consultant was very happy with the results.

Tips - Useful Gadgets

Gadgets are embeddable elements that can be tools, devices, games, or portals.  Google provides the a suite of useful gadgets related to Google Apps such as Calendar, Forms, Picasa Photos, Text Boxes, etc.  However, have you ever delved into the "more gadgets" option of your "insert" tab?  There's some great stuff, let's review.

Let's Explore More Gadgets...!

Google Checkout and Paypal Simple Storefront
These gadgets are wonderful for implementing e-commerce on your website.  Really, there are two options with Google Checkout, there's a little button for one-item purchasing and a whole store with cart option.

I have not tried out Paypal's Simple Storefront, but I can only assume they went with "simple" because it's straightforward.  Paypal is like the industry standard for online shopping, ever since E-bay, Paypal has been the pioneer of safe shopping.  Google Checkout is still rather obscure, but equally effective for credit card transactions.

Try Ecommerce with Paypal, You are credible in no time.

Conversation Element
This a new gadget that showed up in the "featured" category not to long ago.  It is quick and easy for people to leave feedback, question, comments, suggestions on your website using their Google Account.  I know I've seen demand for this type of a gadget time and again from the Google Sites Help Forum.  I had tried the Google Moderator gadget before this and found it too unmanageable.

Very Nice, not bulky at all and easy to use.

Code Wrapper
Type "code wrapper" into the search bar for public gadgets and this will come up.  I have used it when toying around with coding hover / mouse-over images per the tutorial of Mori79 (http://sites.google.com/site/mori79).  You can see where I tried that here: https://sites.google.com/site/foodsitedraft/.  The potential of this gadget is awesome since it works with javascript.

I'm plum out of time to explore more gadgets right now.  Hope this helps you add some nice elements to your website. 

Installing Xampp 1.8 on 32 bit and 64 bit linux and solve phpmyadmin Access error

What is Xammp ?
XAMMP is now become number one choice for web developer for its ease of use and stability. XAMPP is an easy way  to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl.
In this tutorial I am going to share how to install Xampp 1.8 on 32 bit and 64 bit linux and solve phpmyadmin Access error. In previous tutorial I already shared xampp 1.7 installation guide .

First Download Xampp 1.8 from apachefriends and copy it to home directory and rename it to xampp1.8.tar.gz. If you run 64 bit OS install Wine or ia32-libs otherwise you will not able to enjoy xampp as it is 32 bit application.

Installation guide of xampp 1.8 :

Run terminal and use following command
sudo tar xvfz xampp1.8.tar.gz -C /opt
if fails use
su tar xvfz xampp1.8.tar.gz -C /opt
Now xampp install successfully in /opt/ folder. we can start xampp by simply by command
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start

 launch the url in firefox localhost but when launching phpmyadmin you will get following error.

Don't worry We will soon solve this error . But first we have to make /opt/htdocs/ writable so we can easy create folders and files there by following command
 sudo chmod 777 -R /opt/lampp/htdocs
Now  we have to solve phpmyadmin Access error by simply editing httd-xampp.conf file.
Open terminal and run command
sudo kate
or sudo following by your favorite editor like gedit to open as root.
and open file httd-xampp.conf located at /opt/lampp/etc/extra/httd-xampp.conf
Look for following lines
<Directory "/opt/lampp/phpmyadmin">
    AllowOverride AuthConfig Limit
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>
and replace with following
<Directory "/opt/lampp/phpmyadmin">
    AllowOverride AuthConfig Limit
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all 
   Require all granted
</Directory>

After this , you will not able to open phpmyadmin same error will displayed on browser.
We have to restart Xampp in order to work. use following command
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp stop 
to stop xampp and
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start
to start xampp 1.8

or you can use simgle command to restart
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp restart

Open localhost/phpmyadmin , after changing default language to english
it will look like

This tutorial is tested on Linux Mint KDE 14 Nadia.
@https://plus.google.com/111215709458999120537

News - Google Science Fair Uses Google Sites

Google has its own science fair, who knew.  And that's great but, how does this relate to Google Sites?  Well, students, budding scientists, what have you, are submitting their projects via a Google Sites website...very cool.  Cool because I like when Google Sites receives exposure, it gives me that nice feeling of affirmation that just because upgrades are slow doesn't mean that Google Sites if off the radar.  This is a quote from the post, which I'll be adding the news archive:

"To enter, register online and create your project as a Google Site. Registration is open through April 4, 2011. Please note: you must get parental or guardian consent in order to compete. You can check out the complete rules here. After April 4, we’ll begin judging and will announce our semi-finalists in early May."

Google Sites as a vehicle for a project, this is a trend we've seen a lot, especially in the educational sphere.  I'll search "Google Sites" on twitter and see a whole bunch of teachers requiring students to submit projects as websites.  I think that's great that kids are not only thinking outside the box, but creating outside the box.  GS is just a great creative medium.  So here another snippet from the post:

"Here's an example of a great science fair project site to inspire you. We asked Tesca, a U.S. high school senior from Oregon, to create it for us based on an award-winning project she’s been working on for years. Tesca’s objective is to make hospitals more efficient using artificial intelligence—a world-changing goal, to be sure."

What can we learn from this Google Site example?  Not much really to be honest.  Here's my analysis:

• Extremely stark, simple background
• Good use of images as links
• Text links at the footer (good idea I plan to use)
• Blank Slate theme with left-side alignment, uses percentage width instead of set pixel site width.

Maybe next time I'll have a real news item, maybe.

Google Sites Case Study - America's Best Cleaners Intranet

Interview with Chris White, Executive Director at America’s Best Cleaners by Kyle Horst, Kirksville Web Design

Tell us a bit about America’s Best Cleaners and its Going Google.
America’s Best Cleaners is a nationally recognized independent certification mark for the drycleaning industry. Affiliates are certified on an annual basis and once certified work together to share the best business practices in the industry. Our affiliates make up the best of the best in the industry and represent over 92 million dollars in gross revenue. The affiliation is spread throughout the United States with several international affiliates and industry experts sharing information and in depth discussions.

With over 60 individual users at any one time and constantly growing we needed a platform that was universally accepted and easy to implement to share sensitive business data, discussions, images and all other forms of collaboration outlets with our affiliates


How is America’s Best Cleaners using Google Sites?
We previously used Windows SharePoint Servers which allowed us the document sharing, discussion threads and image catalogs but the cost to maintain this service continued to rise along with the change is user behaviors and software usage. Google Sites allowed us to reduce the overall cost to operate, ease the cost of support and allowed a much easier login and user interface. 

Since most of our users already had a Google accounts, implementation was very easy. The integration of all of the Google services offered such as Calendars, Drive, Groups, and Hangouts has allowed us great reach to our affiliates and drastically lowered our overall cost to maintain such a platform. We have witnessed a major uptick in user participation and collaboration. This platform has also allowed as the ability to make better graphically appealing postings that allows us to stand out from other messages in the end users in box.

"The integration of all of the Google services offered such as Calendars, Drive, Groups, and Hangouts...lowered our overall cost to maintain such a platform."

The administration aspect is terrific as we are able to manage and modify our site on the fly without any major support. We are now completely centralized with all of our internal management tools in Google as well external usage with our client base. We now simply create individual drive folders for each account, control all access to to the folders and files and simply drag and drop from our desktops to the end users drive folder and they have it as soon as they are synced. Its that easy.


How has your Google Sites intranet helped your organization? What has been the impact of the Intranet?
Our users love it. First off they love that they can simply reply to discussion through gmail without having to log in. This has increased the participation level and allowed for more timely replies to time sensitive materials as well more robust discussions. 

The integration of Drive has been profound, we no longer need to worry about large email attachments not being accepted by various mail services along with the collaboration tools paired with Google Hangout has allowed instant value to our clients that was just too clunky in SharePoint. Once a project is done it is safely housed on drive easy to access at any point. Our ability to customize the Site layout at anytime has allowed us to place current projects front page on the site where the information that is needed is easily accessed instead of being buried under layers of fixed templates.

Would you recommend other organizations consider leveraging Google Sites? Why?
Absolutely! We deal with Small Business and the offering Google Provides at such a reasonable price cannot be matched. Many of our clients are now seeing the benefit of how we use Google and are building similar systems for themselves. With all of the tools available the need for individual software licenses from the Windows is not necessary. 

If you are running a business that needs to communicate with your team in a centralized easy to use platform with a robust suite of tools you will be hard pressed to find a better solution than Google Sites. Sites is an easy to use, easy to implement business tool that is continually improving. Its a very smart business investment.

Google Sites News - Gadget Cleanup

The News

The following features are now available to domains following the Scheduled Release track:

Sites: Removal of some categories in the Gadget Directory with ‘Featured’ becoming the default category.

For Google Apps, Google Apps for Business, Government and Education.

The Google Sites Gadget Gallery got minimized.

The Effect

So does this have much of an effect on Google Sites? No, not really. In fact, it lumps all Google Sites gadgets into two categories: Public and Featured.

Featured gadgets are wonderful and are either made or endorsed by the Google Sites team. Steegle has some great gadgets for example. He is a Google Sites Help Forum top contributor.


My only inclination is to say that Google Sites gadgets have drawn some concern for being superfluous, buggy, and unreliable. Not to mention they are ill-categorized. An overhaul of the Google Sites Gadget Gallery is in my wish list. Some rankings and sorting options would be wonderful.

Don't you agree?


 

Video Tutorial - Domain Setup

So you are ready to buy a domain!  You've saved up your $10 or so, and you want to make the step from obscure subdomain to your own .com.

This video will show you how to use GoDaddy.com, the most popular domain registrar, to configure your domain.  It is daunting at first, and somewhat technical, but just run through the motions and you'll commit it to memory.





Enjoy the video, sorry I haven't been making them as of late, the busy time of the year is over. 

Please follow my blog as it raises my hopes that people like/respect the work I'm putting in to making Google Sites a more pleasant experience. Thanks to my current followers (all 9 of them) they're awesome! 

Tip - Get Inspiration Part II

So, I thought I'd make another mock up, since that seems to be my fancy for the month.  This one was a bit more difficult.  Take a look below or click to visit beanstalkapp.com.



Notice the centered horizontal navigation - that's not doable with Google Sites, only left orientation.  There's a nice color scheme here.  A three column followed by a four column format towards the bottom with little icons.  The image hugging the bottom of the brown header is a nice effect.  Let's see how I did below.

Here's what I did to make it:

• Background and Title are together one graphic, uploaded to background wrapper, aligned top-center.  Made with GIMP of a desaturated pattern and inverted pattern over brown and toggled for opacity.  The text is the Lobster font with light gradient from top to bottom of text and a focused drop-shadow.
• Navigation is a unique html color hex code set in content text color and link color.
• Subtitle text is yellow image of text over alpha-layer (transparent).
• Three column complex page layout.
• Content footer is the image cropped out to exact pixel height to be flush with end of brown background, it's a .png file with no saved background color and use of opacity toggle on layers.
• Content footer is manual spaced out with inserted icon images with deleted divide html.

I had a lot of fun with this one too.  Let me know if you want me to try another website.  Just no crazy flash websites plz =)

Awesome Free Font - Blanch

Here is another awesome font from the folks at the Lost Type Co-Op, called Blanch.

It's a beautiful, rounded, sans-serif font that I think is really beautiful. Can't wait to use it on our next project here at Kirksville Web Design.

Blanch, Our First Highlighted Font of 2012

2011 gave us some great free fonts. Top quality stuff. Keep an eye out for those lovely designers that provide some free goodies.

Tip - Get Inspiration

Here was my inspiration.  A website that was at the top of Webcreme.com.  I thought to myself, "I can totally make this with Google Sites!"

Here is the mock up.  I used just GIMP and Google Sites.  Visit the website and use it as a Google Sites template.

The power of Google Sites and decent graphics skill.  That was fun.

Tip - Create a TRUE Digital Signature

If you design a website, you know about a contact page. You know to list your name, number, email, all of that right? Well, its time we start taking control over that feature, and giving our viewers and clients, and more new and creative way of relaying that informatoin.

Digital Signatures

A Digital Signature can contain any information you want to have, that your clients or customers will be able to scan using their phone to relay the data stored. Its the barcode that you may see on the back of a item you buy, but instead of numbers, its information!

This is my personal digital signature. If scanned with a phone, it will display my name, email,

phone, and website. There are many websites out there that you can create one of these items. the best thing is that you can use them on business cards, or flyers, or for information on your site.

Microsoft Tag have a really nice and cool feature that you can make your digital sign. point to multiple things. The image below shows what a microsoft tag image will look like.

Using your smart phones (most of us have them now days) you can download the apps to make give a true upgrade to your style of design. give it a shot with the 2 images i posted to see how this really works.

Thanks for a Great Year!

2013 was a tremendous success for us here at Kirksville Web Design and we want to talk everyone who supported our little design firm. It's a new year and we're thinking hard on how to bring the next wave of innovation to Google Sites and our graphic design.

Here are some sites we've launched recently. Please take a look:


ACE CONSULTING www.consultace.biz
A financial women-owned consulting business


ARPDEFENDER www.arpdefender.com
A website for secure local area networks company.


ZEUSGARD www.zeusgard.com
Secure internet browsing products & software


DEPOT LOFTS www.depot-lofts.com
Website for new apartments in Boise, Idaho

DOTTRIO www.dottrio.com
A small business home inspection, appraisal and contracting site

NATIONS HOME REMODELERS www.nationshomeremodelers.net
Home remodeling construction company website.