Posted by Jeremy Bise on Monday, July 5 2010 | Comments
Google Places (formerly Google Local Business Center) is how the search giant presents local businesses to searchers who are looking for local establishments. Fortunately Google allows business owners to "claim" their business online, which gives you — the business owner — several tools to help make the Googler's experience with your listing the best it can be.
The first thing you'll want to do is head to http://www.google.com/maps and search to see if your business is already there. There's good reason for doing this first. We actually just worked with a client on getting their listing up to date and we found the business duplicated four different times, and three of those listings had 10 year old incorrect information! If you find that your listing has incorrect information, you can click on the listing and there will an option in the balloon (under "more") to Report A Problem so Google can correct it.
If your business is listed, but you haven't claimed it, you should certainly do so! Doing so will allow you ensure the information is correct. To claim your business, click on your listing and choose "more" in the balloon and click Edit Details. On the right hand column, there's an option to "Claim your business." You'll fill out a series of forms and you'll be asked to verify your business ownership. All of this is described in our Getting Set Up In Google Places resource.
Furthermore, if your business isn't listed at all in Google Places, you'll want to use the Getting Set Up In Google Places resource to get in there. The more places you can be found online, the better.
Here's a rundown of some of the great stuff you get when you claim your business on Google Places:
The ability to post store hours, contact information, website information, and other pertinent goodies Googlers will want to know
Statistics on the number of times a Googler requested driving directions to your business
The number of times your business showed up in searches (impressions)
A poster you can print out and display in your front window so smartphone users can quickly scan a barcode to find more information about you
The ability to add some multimedia flair (photos and video) to make your Google Places listing stand out
Get reviews which let others know how awesome you are or to help you improve business
Isn't it time you take control of your business presence on Google Places? We think so!
Posted by Jeremy Bise on Friday, July 2 2010 | Comments
We'd like to take a moment to wish you and your family a Happy Independence Day!
Do take the time to thank our Veterans for all they've done to ensure our country's independence and remember those who paid the ultimate price for our freedom. Also keep our very own Geek, Clint Harris, in your thoughts and prayers as he is now officially on the ground in Afghanistan.
In the spirit of patriotism, here's a phenomenal video of a group of young ladies called The Cactus Cuties singing our National Anthem. Now there's some talent!
Posted by Jeremy Bise on Friday, June 11 2010 | Comments
Sometimes stuff happens—that applies both in life and in business. But let’s talk about when stuff happens in business for a moment. Maybe your work or your service didn’t live up to customer expectations. Maybe something you said or did offended the other party. It could be that a strategic change didn’t please someone. Hell, sometimes you don’t even know what went wrong. The moral is: sometimes you lose.
The question is—do you take it personally? They say not to. As small business owners, we often can’t help but to take some things personally and I’m not so sure that we should. If something goes wrong with a client and we don’t take it to heart, what are we in business for? The truth is—the best small business owners out there care. A lot. Our business is what we do every day. We’re passionate about it. We do whatever it takes to make customers happy. We depend on it to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. We put our heart and soul into what we’re doing, and it hurts when we lose. And it should—because we care. It’s when we stop caring that we lose what makes us great to do business with in the first place.
That said, there’s no room to let it consume us. We can care, look at what went wrong (if it’s possible to tell) and learn how to make things go better next time. Dwelling on it and letting it get you down won’t improve a thing for anybody.
What do you think? Is your business personal or is it just business to you? How do you handle the situations where things go south?
Posted by Jeremy Bise on Friday, June 4 2010 | Comments
What is it?
Square is aiming to change the way we take payments forever. How are they doing it? By enabling anyone to be a merchant and enabling to take payments anywhere. The service, which is currently available for iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Android devices, allows merchants to accept payments on their mobile phone. The Square device plugs into your smart phone’s audio jack, allowing you to swipe a credit or debit card wherever you are. You enter an amount, a description, and you can optionally snap a photo of the product you’re selling. Once the transaction is approved, your receipts are archived on Square’s site and you can also opt to send the customer a receipt to their e-mail address—all right from your phone. Of course you’ll need a good data signal where you are for the service to work.
The rates are very reasonable, ranging from 2.75% + 15 cents for card swipes to 3.5% + 15 cents for card not present (keyed in) transactions. There is no monthly fee and the Square device is even free! There is a several week backlog on the device, so we haven’t received ours yet, but we’re looking forward to it.
How can I get it?
Just head to http://www.squareup.com and sign up. Be prepared to enter your organization’s details and bank account information so Square can deposit your funds for you.
What do you think about the Square concept? Do you think it will revolutionize the payment processing industry? Speak your mind in the comments below…
Posted by Jeremy Bise on Thursday, June 3 2010 | Comments
We’d like to welcome you to the new ThoseGeeks website. We thought we’d share our reasoning behind what we’ve done.
Focus On Design
On the previous site, we had all of our services kind of strewn across the top. That was great for some folks, but in realty the requests we get are mostly for website design. The new site puts the focus on what most visitors are looking for. We accomplished this in a couple of ways.
First, the largest section of the homepage serves as a design showcase. Each time the page is loaded a random featured design project is shown, complete with a screenshot, a description, and link to view more about the project. Second, the Project section shows a variety of our design projects, which can be filtered by category. The details of each project includes full screenshot and link to the site itself.
That said, we’ve compressed everything else into the Services page. We did this because services such as hosting are often the result of a design project, so it didn’t warrant an entire navigation item. E-commerce is really just a design project, so it didn’t need it’s own navigation tab either. You get the idea.
A New Platform
The new site is built on top of the ExpressionEngine (affiliate link) content management system. We chose to build the new site on this system because of its design flexibility as well as ease of administration. All the content is stored in a database and the various ways we can work with and present this data is pretty much limitless. The new platform also allows us to combine the site, the blog, and a forthcoming searchable support section under one roof. This will prove a valuable time saver for us and will allow us to do things with the site we’ve not been able to do before. We love the system so much we’ve actually even started quoting the system for some of our client projects!
A New Process
We all learn things every day. Over the years we’ve learned some of the hard points of the design process and some of the difficult points for both clients and us. As a result, we’ve also rolled out a new design process and have published a full guide on doing business with us. You can find the New Client Guide on the Our Approach page.
What Do You Think?
How do you feel about our new design and the reasoning behind it? Can we do anything to improve what we’ve done? Share your feelings in the comments.
Posted by Jeremy Bise on Sunday, May 23 2010 | Comments
In case you haven’t heard, ThoseGeeks partner Clint Harris is being deployed to Afghanistan early next month. It’s unfortunate, but we’re glad to have folks like Clint who risk theirs to make sure ours are safe. We pray he comes back safe and sound soon.
But on a lighter note, Clint’s going away party was last night and I though I’d share just how Geeks light bonfires. See…we have fun too. Enjoy!
Posted by Jeremy Bise on Tuesday, April 6 2010 | Comments
We’ve been very busy here the past couple of months and that’s a great thing. We’re growing the business and forming some great relationships, but I’ve also noticed how some things have been slipping. I’ve not had a chance to write on this blog nearly as much as I’d like to. We’ve not done a newsletter in a little while. I’ve not been engaging in social media as much as I would like to either. This is bad because those efforts are important to staying relevant and in folks’ eyes.
There are two solutions we’re working on…
Better tools
We’re working on automating some of the things which are a time drain and don’t pay, but are still necessary. For instance, we’ve researched and found an integration between our billing system and an accounting system. This is going to automate our accounting, which will reclaim several hours a week of my time.
We’ve invested further in our contact management/CRM system (Highrise – affiliate link) and our Project Management System (Basecamp – affiliate link) to get more time saving features out of the products. For instance, before we upgraded Basecamp to include time tracking, we used a very manual spreadsheet system to track billable hours. Now that is tracked in just a couple clicks, which will save more time.
Outsourcing
We’ve also started doing a little outsourcing of some tasks. For some design tasks, we have some partners we trust to help us out when we get a little covered up. We also have partners out in the field to whom we can outsource some initial client meetings to. That kind of outsourcing is all about trust and we’re very fortunate to have partners we can trust these things with. This frees up time for me to take care of things.
What do you do when you’re running out of time to do the important things? Can you get tools to help? Are there things you can outsource? Share your thoughts in the comments…
Posted by Jeremy Bise on Wednesday, March 10 2010 | Comments
Every now and then we get the request for Flash or animation on a client’s website.
What Is Flash?
Flash is a technology developed originally by Macromedia, which was acquired by Adobe, so now it’s Adobe Flash. It allows Flash designers (which we are not) to create animations, interactivity, video, and really rich user interfaces in a reasonably simple toolkit.
What Flash Is Good For
Video/audio streaming. Flash is (for now) the standard in delivering streaming video online. YouTube uses it, Vimeo uses it, Viddler uses it, we use it. It allows video and audio content creators to deliver their content to the masses without compatibility issues because nearly everyone has the Flash plugin installed.
Demonstrating concepts. Complex concepts may be better demonstrated by animation and audio. Lots of demo or training materials will use Flash to deliver a richer, more interactive learning experience.
Complex online user interfaces. Web applications which deal with large volumes of data requiring interactivity to manipulate and view that data may use Flash to accomplish this due to the vast user interface library which is available. Although most of this complex user interfaces are now moving toward out of Flash and into Javascript, which has been greatly pioneered by Google.
So what about everything else?
Most uses outside the areas listed above can really detract from a website’s effectiveness. For instance, animations looping in different places on your site, even if it’s subtle, will draw the eye. If those animations aren’t drawing the eye to a call to action (such as Buy Now or Get A Quote), the animations will take away from your site’s real message. Furthermore, using Flash all over the place for calls to action is really annoying. You’ve seen these sites. I don’t want every Buy Now button on the page to be blinking at me. If I see something like this, I’m heading to Amazon where I know the user experience won’t be obnoxious.
