The art of constructive criticism is a talent that you don’t find on anybody’s resume, but this specific skill is very useful where design work is involved and specifically design work with a multitude of parties each having the correct solution to the problem. Maybe Constructive criticism is not quite the right fit, more a doctorate in Spin, were you need to explain to a client that there idea is like looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

If you pull this off and everyone agrees on a solution, say for example that you need 5 categories in your website architecture for a particular product and then create a website design around this new menu and then hold everything…wait… now after seeing it they decide they need 8 categories and another whole section, because that is what xyzproducts.com is doing, “I saw their site over the weekend.” So now you have to explain to them how wrong “mistaken” they are all over again, subtly of course…. Unless by some freak event you yourself are wrong on this one??!??

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”
Winston Churchill

Now I am thinking about multi-colored spandex and a black-tiled room full of overweight men working out… ah the 1980s… All Olivia Newton-John song references aside (although I am sure you are singing it in your head), Google Analytics is a free website analysis tool that generates detailed traffic reports for websites. These traffic reports “talk” to us in a sense, by listing important website statistics that are useful in many ways.

DDA, a search engine marketing company, uses Google Analytics on websites that we are not hosting, but are enrolled in the SureThing Optimization Program. By adding a piece of tracking code to each page, we are then able to track our progress of website optimization by viewing the improved traffic to the site.

We find that being able to view traffic reports is an important part of website optimization. We can see which keywords potential customers are using to search for a website’s services and can then point out which terms need focused optimization to improve rankings. This software can show how visitors find a website and how they interact with the website’s content.

Being a search engine optimization specialist, I find it important to be able to view a website’s visits and pageviews, new and returning visitors, and also which search engine the visitor is coming from.

My mind is racing a mile a minute and I am unsure as to why. I am trying to get everything as organized a possible so that while I am out of the office next week everything runs smoothly. I have composed a rather detailed email that explains everything that is going on from my perspective and someone has been assigned to check my email and handle my responsibilities for me.

Every time I take a moment to stop and think of what I may have missed I realize how silly this seems. Here at DDA, we have a system in place that keeps everyone who is involved with a project in the loop as to what stage that project is on and everyone here is more than capable to assume someone else’s responsibilities with ease.

Every evening after leaving DDA, I pull into my driveway at 6:20 p.m., give or take a few minutes, and the first words out of my mouth are “What’s for dinner?”

Usually I receive a blank stare from my fiancee and a “I don’t know, what are you making?” It may seem silly but condsidering that he is usually home 2-3 hours before me I don’t think it would hurt for him to cook some dinner. When I have to make dinner after getting in from DDA we are lucky if we eat by 7:30 p.m.

On one hand it bothers me that we eat dinner so late, on the other there are days where I wish I got home earlier. Don’t get me wrong I wouldn’t want to give up our 4-day work week and having off on Fridays.

I get the majority of the house chores out of the way on Fridays. Without having off on Fridays my home would be very chaotic. Four days is just enough to handle a weeks worth of production coordination, print production, SEO reports, SEM campaigns, and invoicing.

I was reading an article the other day about what to look for in a Search Engine Optimization Specialist. I found the paragraph below interesting :

“Most so-called Search Engine Optimization Specialists are people who slap keywords and keyword phrases inside of HTML tags without considering an overall online marketing strategy. On the other hand, there are people who can write for the search engines, analyze site statistics, have a thorough knowledge of spider-friendly HTML, have considerable experience with SEO in multiple industries, and stay up-to-date on search engine happenings. These are the true search engine experts.”

At first I took offense to the initial sentence thinking. “Hey, that is not true about me!” Then I continued to read and calmed down and thought “OK, that’s much better.”

So I guess working at DDA, a search engine marketing company, has turned me into a search engine expert. Working with websites in varying industries, from medical to plastic injection molding, means that each websites needs its own focused optimization. I do not just slap keywords into the meta tags, thank you very much, but rather integrate them into all meta tags, content development, and focus each page on each word specifically. And you could say that 12 years could be looked at as “considerable experience.”

At DDA, we stay ahead of the game on search engine happenings and are truly search engine optimization and marketing experts.

Google has just launched (in Beta and made available to a limited number of site owners) Google Friend Connect.

This came out of Google’s Open Social Project, which is the idea of Spreading Social Applications over the web and ‘unlocked’ closed-wall Social network sites.

What Google Friend Connect does for you is allow you to easily add social features to your site — from comments, ratings and reviews, to photo uploaders, etc.

Normally adding this functionality is time consuming and difficult, and therefore expensive and beyond the reach of most. Plus, visitors would have to create a username and password just for your site.

With Google Friend Connect, you can add these types of community features, but the big payoff comes from leveraging visitors’ existing social ties. By simply copying and pasting a few lines of JavaScript, visitors can connect their network of friends on Facebook, hi5, orkut, linkedin and other friends, directly onto your website.

Once a member of your site, there are two ways they can share your site with their friends:

• Invitations. Clicking on the invite link presents your visitors with all their contacts and friends from their social networks. Invitations are delivered to friends within their respective social networks.
• Activity feeds. Your visitors may also opt-in to publishing activities to their social networks. A post to your message board, for example, can instantly be visible to people in multiple social networks, along with links leading to your site.

This could be another huge shift in the Internet or maybe not. Only time will tell, but I think it is a definite game changer for small to medium business owners.

“I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.”
Winston Churchill

In this fast paced, always connected, and everything-happening-at-once world we live in, there are layer upon layer of trends that permeate our lives, dictate our future, and continually challenge the things that we know and understand.

Of course the big picture trends include such things as outsourcing, globalization, and connectivity. The reality is that everything and everyone is caught up in a whirlwind of ever-moving, ever-changing, ever-increasing trends. There are fashion trends, medical trends, manufacturing trends, religious trends, educational trends, the much feared economic trends, the much criticized dietary trends, and of course the sometimes frivolous and often amusing celebrity trends. In advertising, there are website design trends, video production trends, custom programming trends, animation trends, graphic design trends, copy writing style trends, and even color trends.

There is one trend that has been engaged and evolving since man first walked the Earth. Innovation! It is the granddaddy of all other trends, the foundation of all civilizations, and both the savior and perhaps ultimately the destroyer of mankind itself.

I hold the belief that modern civilization is focused on measuring the wrong things. We measure countries, wealth, gross national product, population, the number of sick, the starving, the oppressed, the free, opinions, viewers, visitors, customers, travelers, manufacturing numbers, consumer indexes, etc. We even spend a great deal of time measuring trends - where they started, where they are today, where they are going.

Perhaps we should measure innovation. Innovation determines which individuals prosper, which companies succeed, which countries grow, what groups become healthier, and ultimately, which civilizations rise and fall.

At DDA, we focus on innovation and intuitively understand that everything else follows, because everything else is just a trend.

DDA does a great job at interweaving the various internal departments with each other. The advertising copywriters, website designers, programmers, search engine optimization specialists, and graphic design artists all collaborate throughout the project(s) so as to make sure that each portion correctly fits into place and to not displace other portions of the project. Communication as well as collaboration are what this advertising company does well. In my opinion, this is why more prospects choose DDA over its competitors.

I will be out of the office next week, which means I am spending this week getting everything in order to make sure that all goes smoothly in my absence.

Print Production. We have projects that are in the proofing stage. I need to make sure that any proofs that come in next week are forwarded to the client promptly. Also, if approval is received on any proofs, I need to ensure that production is notified promptly to proceed.

SureThing Ranking Reports. I am checking and double checking on what optimization reviews may be coming up. I need to make sure that their ranking reports are completed and sent to our SEO team to be posted for the review. I also have web updates to complete for clients that need to be live before the week’s end.

Production Coordination. I am reorganizing my notes to assure that everything is up to date and clear so that I can pass the responsibilities over while I am away. Everything is fairly straight forward and any questions can be addressed to the project coordinator.

I feel as though I have a good handle on everything at the current moment and that nothing catastrophic can happen. No one will even know that I am not here next week!

Even though it may sound like it, Silverlight is not a 1980s cartoon series but in fact a new website browser plugin from Microsoft.

Silver light is in direct competition with Adobe Flash. Like Flash, Silverlight is used to add animation and interactivity to web pages using its own vector graphics engine. It can also be used to integrate video into web pages and to develop rich Internet applications. A Key feature is that it supports playback of WMV, WMA, and MP3 media content across all supported browsers without requiring Windows Media Player, the Windows Media Player ActiveX control, or Windows Media browser plugins.

One advantage Silverlight claims over Flash is that Text content within it is more searchable and indexable than that created with Flash as it is not compiled, but represented as text (XAML).

Both Silverlight or Flash technologies require a plug-in to allow, and once installed, both are invisible to the user. Although that said, you have to embed flash a special way to avoid the “click to activate this plugin” message. I presume that in the future version of Microsoft Internet Explorer that it will come with Silverlight pre-installed, and while IE is the dominate browser this could be a advantage over Flash.

Could this be a real threat to Flash and Adobe and End their dominance in this field? We will have to wait and see, I think it is best put like this:

“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Winston Churchill