Read the story behind this picture. Thanks to Wendy at the American Red Cross Flickr group.

Mission of the American Red Cross

Since its founding in 1881 by visionary leader Clara Barton, the American Red Cross has been the nation’s premier emergency response organization. As part of a worldwide movement that offers neutral humanitarian care to the victims of war, the American Red Cross distinguishes itself by also aiding victims of devastating natural disasters. Over the years, the organization has expanded its services, always with the aim of preventing and relieving suffering.

Donate to the American Red Cross.

Special thanks to Keith Weston.

See the photo on the WUNC/MySource page.

Portrait of racing legend Mario Andretti by Allen Weiss.

Energyville, is a well-executed piece of branded entertainment. Players create a town (like GoodtreeVille) and manage energy resources over a decades-long time period.

Each energy choice involves risks and rewards such as investment, security and the environment. By balancing the supply grid with different types of resources and accurately predicting future trends, players earn points.

The game is easy, fun and educational. It’s also wickedly clever marketing.

Energyville is a form of branded entertainment. Chevron’s message (we are wise stewards of your energy needs) is implied in the content but never overtly stated.

By engaging the consumer and capturing their attention, Chevron creates an opportunity to remake it’s brand image from smelly gas pumps and refineries to America’s clean energy company.

Can an online game do all that? Well, not by itself. But it’s a darn good start. And it demonstrates that someone gets it about entertaining and informing the public in a web 2.0 world.

Hats off to Chevron for a bold concept and a strong execution.

Play Energyville.

North Hills is focused on the development and management of retail and mixed-use properties of the highest quality where people will naturally want to live, work, shop, dine, play, stay and renew. - Kane Realty Corporation

A new website and internet features are planned.

We write a lot about WordPress and blogging. One important trick of the trade is installing a custom theme to give your blog a unique look. Here’s how it works:

1. When you install the WP blog engine, it loads up the default theme, a plain white page with a solid blue header.
2. To give your blog its own flavor, WP provides an ample tool set for using a custom theme.
3. Hundreds (if not thousands) of custom themes exist. Most themes are free or just involve a modest cost. One of the best places to search for themes is the WP Theme Viewer. You can narrow your search by selecting a color, number of columns and lots of other criteria.
4. Select the themes you like best, download them to your computer, then upload them to your server inside the WordPress directory, wp-content/themes subdirectory.
5. Surf up your blog and log in to the admin panel. In WP 2.5 or greater, navigate to the Design tab (in earlier versions, navigate to “presentation”). You’ll see thumbnails of all the themes you have uploaded. Click on the theme you fancy. Presto! Your blog has a new look.

Some themes include a picture in the header. To really jazz up your presentation, you can replace the header picture with one of your own design.

Find the header picture you want to replace. It’s usually in folder labeled “images” inside the theme directory. Sometimes the appropriate file is labeled “header,” other times not. Just have a quick look at the files in the images directory and the header picture should be self-evident.

Load up the header picture in any imaging program such as Photoshop or Fireworks. Design a new header to your own liking, but don’t change the overall dimensions of the picture.

Upload the new header to the appropriate directory on your server replacing the old header (use the same file name). Shazamm! Your new header is now active.

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For our pro bono client SmartGrowthGirl, we used a photo of the author and combined it with an illustration we purchased from iStockphoto. The resulting picture adds personality and uniqueness to the blog, plus tells the story of what the blog is all about. See it here.

We also re-themed our own blog to better match our new website.

For advanced blogging geeks, you can even change the color, typography and layout of the theme by editing the css file. But that’s fort another day.

Our theme for SmartGrowthGirl is adapted from a theme by Nathan Rice called RockinBizRed, available as a free download from Rockin Themes. For our own blog, we adapted a theme called Mushblue by Mukka-Mu.

For website owners and creators, it’s important to check for broken links. Here’s our favorite broken link checker.

A broken link, of course, is a link that goes nowhere. It’s usually caused by a spelling error or a web address that has moved.

But how to check an entire website for broken links? The easy way is to use a broken link checker.

Lots of link checkers exists on the internet courtesy of private companies and public organizations like the W3C. Our favorite is from Website Goodies:

Website Goodies - Broken Link Check

Just enter the web address of your home page and click on “Check Links.” In moments, you’ll have a complete report on the links in your website.

Even if you have tested your links in the past, it’s good to test again from time to time to ensure the integrity of your web site.

INTRO

Understanding search is easy. People want to find stuff using the internet - boats, doctors, facts. Seekers of information enter a search string, i.e “gigantic yacht” and the search engines display relevant results.

As a business person, you need to know how to get found.

ORGANIC AND PAID SEARCH

Search can be divided into two broad categories: organic and paid.

Organic search refers to the the results displayed by the search engines. Paid search are the sponsored listings which surround the organic results.

According to Forrester Report “U.S. Online Marketing Forecast: 2007-2012,” search engine marketing topped $8.05 billion in 2007 and is projected to grow to $25.3 billion within 5 years:

Organic search is determined by the search robots, complex programs that analyze your website for relevancy to a given search string. Here are a few basics to help your relevancy score in organic search:

1. Use the meta tags - these appear in the “head” section of your web page (visible when you select “view source code” in a browser). The tags that matter are KEYWORDS, TITLE AND DESCRIPTION. More than 50% of all websites leave the meta tags blank, depressing their results in search.
2. Be Honest, be Concise - imagine you have to explain your business to a robot (’cause that’s what you’re doing). Keep it simple; keep it focused.
3. Exact Word Matches Help - Remember, you’re talking to robots. “Doctor” does not equal “doctors.”

Paid search, also called pay-per-click, let’s you display your ad in response to keywords you select. You can define a geographic area, time of day, daily budget and test ad variations. You only pay when your ad is clicked. A good click-through rate is 10%.

The smaller the geography and the more narrow the keywords, the cheaper the cost of PPC advertising. Google AdWords includes a cost estimator and lots of other helpful tools to get started.

Every company should review its search strategy to make sure they are reaping the benefits of the Web 2.0 economy.

]]> http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/07/21/basics-of-search/feed/ http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/07/15/new-portfolio/ http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/2008/07/15/new-portfolio/#comments Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:47:27 +0000 Hal http://goodtreecompany.com/wordpress/?p=204 We’re testing a new online portfolio of our work. Give us a hand and check it out here. Let us know if you find anything wonky.