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AH Digital FX Studios Featured in River City Weekly

Recently AH Digital FX Studios was featured in River City Weekly's article about businesses in Idaho that have succeeded on the web. (Full Article (535 K pdf) )

Kevin Keefe remembers answering the phone in Idaho Falls late one night, and on the other end was a voice with a unique accent. “Hi, I’m calling from Liverpool, and I want to buy a ski hat.” That’s just one of the stories he has to tell after retailing his custommade ski hats since 2001 on the Internet from his Web site www.getaKLU.com.

Keefe’s business, KLU Mountain Outerwear, is just one of many locally owned businesses that have taken advantage of the Internet. Some are custom-designed, some are variations of a ready-made site, but all bring customers easy access to their information and products.

Keefe and his wife sew the hats after customers place their orders online with their own head measurements and choices of colors and patterns. It only takes about a day to sew it up before they ship them out to all parts of the world.

“We don’t do any advertising,” said Keefe. “It’s all about search engines. The person who figures out how to get number one in search engines makes a million bucks.” Keefe for several years had a Web site that simply told about their products but didn’t have a way to order. He did a redesign of his site in 2001, then started taking credit cards as a form of payment and put in metatags so that his site was the first one found if someone searched for the key words “ski hats.”

“Our business went up five-fold,” he said. Last year was their best year ever, grossing about $12,000 in sales. In December he took two weeks off of his day job at the site; KLU mountain outerwear took 176 orders that month and each Monday shipped out about 32 orders.

“That’s our busy season. We don’t take vacations or visit family in the winter. By about March it slows down, and we have summers off, which is what we want,” Keefe said. “I thought about adding a summer line, but I’d rather go rock climbing and kayaking.”

Kent Frecker never really advertised his custom saddle-making business in its 18-year span. But when Frecker Saddlery went online (www.freckersaddlery. com), he doubled his business and hired two more employees.

“We did it for convenience,” Frecker said. “Our goal wasn’t to expand any; it’s easier to refer people to that Web site than keep making copies of pictures or try to make a catalog. Then we got bombarded with phone calls and more people wanting saddles. Now and then we’d put extra saddles on the Web site, and they would sell. Then those customers would come back and have orders lined up. It kind of surprised us. Now we get phone calls from all across the country.”

The Web site is essentially Frecker’s store, which allows added flexibility. “We don’t have a storefront per se. The shop is here at my house and we don’t keep business hours. If I want to go for a horse ride today I can close the shop, let the answering machine answer the phone or let the emails come in. It gives us a lot of freedom,” he said.

Convenience was the main reason for Melissa and Jim Barnard of Rigby to put Landmark Development and Silver Creek Construction online (www. landmarkdevelopment.org and www.silvercreekconstruction. com). It’s easy to list lots for sale and house plan descriptions online.

“It’s convenient for customers. They go to the site at their leisure and don’t feel sales pressure. It’s technology that everybody uses. It’s a way to find us and for the Web site the more information the better,” Melissa said. “We have protective covenants listed and any plots or house amenities. If I had to send out a mass mailing it would be very expensive, and I’d probably miss my market. Online it’s specific. They’re the customer you want because they’re looking.”

Adam Hayes started his Web design business in 2002. He does everything from the initial concept, design and branding to the coding, back-end administration and search engine optimization.

With several local and national clients, including Keefe, Frecker and Barnard, he has a few tips for those thinking of starting out on the Web.

He has helped individuals develop a small side business and helped large companies get noticed online.

“The most important thing that anyone can do when starting a Web-based business is understand their customer. You’ve got seven seconds when they find your site for them to decide this is where they want to be. Otherwise they’ll click ‘back’ and never come back to your site. You have to know what they want so they can say ‘yes, I finally found where I want to be,’” Hayes said. Hayes’ clients come mostly from referrals. He was recommended to Keefe by his father-in-law and was recommended to Barnard by a satisfied client. You can find his site at www.ahfx.net.

Fix Your Dell 3100cn Streaking Issue

Well after owning my Dell 3100cn for a very very very long time, I've finally found out how to get rid of streaks that were running down the middle of the page on color prints.

Well today, I found an answer that immediately fixed the problem within about 2 minutes. I found a great article that shows that the culprit is bad design of the imaging drum inside the 3100cn. Here are the instructions on how to fix it: (This will void your warranty with Dell so DON'T DO THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT YOUR WARRANTY VOIDED. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGE THAT OCCURS FROM THESE STEPS:)

Well I am now very happy that my Dell 3100cn prints without any streaks. A little background will help you figure out why I'm so happy.

I got a Dell 3100cn printer a couple of years ago. I had a friend that had one and I loved the way it printed and everything about it, so I decided to get one of my own. After setting it up, I printed a few sheets and all of the color prints had streaks or lines that ran down the middle of the page at extremely regular intervals on every print. I called Dell and they shipped me a new printer drum. It didn't fix the problem. They had me ship the printer back and they sent me a used printer. (I was upset because I figured I'd get a new printer... but that is a different story.) This one wouldn't even fire up. It kept giving an error about temperature. They sent out a tech and he replaced some controller. It didn't fix the problem with the error message. So I sent that printer back to Dell.

Finally they sent me another printer that streaked again. I was fed up by then and found that if I printed enough pages the printer would "warm up" and the streaks would go away. So any time we wanted to print anything in color, we'd just print about 150 black and white pages of whatever and then print our color pages.

Adobe Stock Photo Royalty-Free Image Service Discontinued

Adobe is ending its Stock Photography Service.

I received the following email from Adobe just the other day:

As of April 1, 2008, the Adobe(R) Stock Photos royalty-free image
service will be discontinued. We made this decision in order to focus our efforts in other areas, and we want to share this news with you and let you know how it affects you.

Over the next few months we will be making changes to Adobe Stock
Photos. On March 4, 2008, search functionality will be disabled. You will be able to purchase images through our service until March
31, 2008.

To finalize your transactions with us, please follow these steps:
1. Complete your image searches by March 4, 2008.
2. Make final image purchases by March 31, 2008.
3. If necessary, re-download past purchases and print your
purchase history by March 31, 2008.
4. When you're ready, uninstall Adobe Stock Photos from Adobe(R)
Bridge in your Creative Suite(R) applications.

For a long time I really wondered why Adobe would offer a stock photography service. It just seemed like a big hassle for them to get information from the big stock photography sites, organize it, etc. I really doubt that they were making very much off of each purchase. Now it looks like I was correct because they are shutting down the service.

So from now on you'll have to go search for your images the good ol' fashioned way. At least this way everyone that uses the Adobe suite won't be presented exactly the same images any more.

Search Engine Usage for 2007

Nielson/Net Ratings has released new search engine statistics for Nov 2007. Google has really increased market share over the Feb 2006 search engine results we posted last year. Google jumped from 48.5 to 57.7 for a 9.2% increase in market share. Google captured just over 4.2 billion searches in Nov alone. There were over 7.1 billion searches performed in November.

With that many searches happening in a month, I hope you understand the importance of good Search Engine Optimization.

2007 Website Browser Stats Review

2007 Website Statistics from multiple websites show that the top three website browsers are still IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox.

Here are some browser statistics for 2007.

It looks like more and more people are installing IE 7 although more people are still using IE 6. Firefox is still a bit hit in the tech sector as seen from Site 2. Overall it looks like Firefox lost a little ground to the IE 7 movement compared to last years browser statistics .

Fresh Content Will Bring Spiders and People Back For More

Fresh content will bring spiders (and people) back to your site more often.

How often you update your website is extremely critical to your success on the web. First and foremost, search engines loves fresh content. Let's take two sites that cover the same topic. Site A who updates their site every month and Site B who hasn't updated their site since they created it. The search engines only have "so much time" to index sites.

If the spider comes back and finds that information has changed, it will normally decrease the time between now and its next indexing (to see if there were even more updates that have happened between crawlings.) If the content hasn't changed it might increase the time between its last crawl and its next crawl (assuming that if it wasn't updated lately it probably won't be updated next time either). Regularly updated content will bring spiders back more often which leads to faster indexing.

Now, what if both sites decide to run Christmas specials and both update their sites. Which Christmas special will be seen sooner and thus have a better chance of being effective?

Besides being great for search engines, fresh content is great for real life humans. People love getting the latest information about everything. Updated content also builds trust in the information you provide. If you haven't updated, people might think that you have gone out of business, or don't care about keeping your customers updated, or don't carry the latest product that the competition has on their site.

Another benefit of new, fresh content is that it builds authority into your site. As you add new pages about your products, services, or frequently asked questions, you further strengthen your authority of that subject. You show that you really know your stuff. More people will be willing to link to you because you have the answers that they are searching for. It also creates extra miniwebs or natural doorways into your website which will help your clients find you from even more keywords.

With the popularity of blogs and other mechanisms for publishing content quickly on the web, the importance of updating your site has increased exponentially.

What Every Website Owner Should Know about Headlines

Writing great, compelling headlines is one of the most important skills of a copywriter.

On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. This is the secret to the power of the headline, and why it so highly determines the effectiveness of the entire piece.

While many of us want to create headlines that grab people's attention, most do not know how to write great headlines. After reading a couple of articles from A List Apart and CopyBlogger , we've gathered some simple, "premade" headlines for your use. We gave you a number of "ready to use" headline keywords , but here are some sample phrases and concepts that will get your creative juices flowing:

• Who Else Wants ...
• The Secret of ...
• Here is a Method that is helping ... to ...
• Little Known Ways to ...
• Get Rid of ... Once and for All
• Here's a Quick Way to ...
• Now You Can Have ...
• What Everybody Should Know about ...
• Give Me ... and I'll Give You ...
• Do You Recognize the ... Early Warning Signs of ...

Once you are past the need for "premade" headings, use some of these concepts to get people to read more than just your headline.

• Reveal Facts
• Use a Quote
• Give a Direct Command
• Focus on Your Unique Selling Position
• Announce Something New
• Be Controversial
• Break Expectations