Archive for May, 2010
Authors and artists need to promote their brand (usually their own name) and their product. FSI started with a free template and designed a boutique site with significant design changes and a custom Flash slider to show off published writings.
Some custom changes included new “logo,” colors and fonts, a new shadow container built in Photoshop, and list bullet design.
FSI started with a free template for Rosemary Serluca’s site, and designed a boutique site with significant design changes and a custom Flash slider for her published writings.
Michael Meyerowitz helped design the logo in the header.
Click HERE to see before and after with the original template
After my latest WordPress update (manually exporting mysql) I ended up with all my apostrophes appearing as “â€TM” –stupid junk characters. I finally figured out the solution, even though I don’t know exactly why it happened.
It was quite simple, jump in my wp-config, and comment out two lines.
# define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
# define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);
It worked like a charm.
It would be nice for SQL Server to copy rows like Excel. It is a pain to include all the fields. Below is dynamic SQL to copy the entire row based on the auto id number:
[code]
declare @sql varchar(8000)
DECLARE @TableName varchar(100)
SELECT @tableName = 'tblMyTable' --put urTableName Here
SELECT @SQL = COALESCE(@sql+',','')+ COLUMN_NAME
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS
WHERE TABLE_NAME = @tableName AND COLUMNPROPERTY(OBJECT_ID(@tableName),COLUMN_NAME, 'IsIdentity') = 0
EXEC( 'INSERT INTO '+@tableName+' SELECT '+@SQL+' FROM '+@TableName +' WHERE auto_id = theIDNum') -- put auto id fieldname and id num
[/code]
Floats field types have their perils. It is the field type that often defaults on an import from Excel, where the field type has to be guessed.
If you try to change the field type to VarChar you get something like “4.00309e+006″
You can first convert from float to bigint and then to VarChar, or create a new VarChar field and use the following SQL. This is for SQL Server.
update tblMyTable set VarCharField = cast(CONVERT(bigint, floatField) as varchar(10))
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are all the rage, though both systems are merely new approaches to age-old marketing principles that successful companies have always benefited from.
Wikipedia defines SEO as the process of:
…improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from
search engines via ‘natural’ (‘organic’ or ‘algorithmic’) search results.
On the other hand, SEM includes a broader online marketing approach that includes paid placements.
Many companies claim they offer SEO as one of their premerie services.
We do too.
But FSI take is a step further and applies its wide and varied marketing experience to current web and SEO/SEM standards. We apply the following basic principles to help build a successful site:
- Positioning – Analyzing your target audience and competition to best position your site with the equivalent of a
“unique selling proposition”. This includes:- Analyze the competition, finding their strengths and also gaps/opportunities your site can provide.
- Optimizing website content and structure to differentiate your site from the competition
- Conducting a key-word analysis to see how prospects are searching for similar products/services
- Findability – It doesn’t matter how good your site is if prospects can’t find it:
- Making sure search engines know where to find your site.
- Building inbound links to your site to increase your site’s search ranking and generate more traffic.
- Attracting local traffic to your site through free and paid sources
- “Stickiness” – You can rank #1 everywhere and drive thousands of visitors to your site, but if it is poorly written, and lacks a compelling message or “call to action”, people will “slip away” as quickly as they arrived. We have professional writing experience, so that your site isn’t a
mish-mash of key words and phrases, but tells a cohesive and compelling story.
Suzanne Barclay has 25 years as a professional planner. She has worked as lead staff on many planning and economic development projects.
Her CV is below:
Town of Orangetown, New York, 2001-2009
Executive Assistant to the Supervisor
- Assumed lead role for Supervisor’s Office on major public policy issues and planning initiatives including redevelopment process for 130 acres at Rockland Psychiatric Center; implementation of NYS Dept. of Transportation Route 303 Sustainable Development Study
- Designed and administered Town’s Affordable Housing Program for Active Adults
- Monitored planning process for Tappan Zee Bridge replacement project
- Assisted in budgeting process for $63 million budget, labor contract negotiations
- Organized Town’s first Recycling Fair, chaired Recycling Committee
- Represented Town Supervisor to businesses, agencies, community groups, constituents
Town of Orangetown Planning Board, 2000-2007 Board Member
Housing Action Council, 1998-2001
Associate
- Advised non-profit organizatio ns and prepared grant applications for private financing and public funding to develop affordable housing in Westchester and
Rockland counties
Rockland Family Shelter, 1995-1998
Assistant Director
- Oversaw daily operations and management of nonprofit agency serving victims of domestic violence and sexual assault.
- Managed grants, property; supervised finance office and fundraising efforts.
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Department of Mental Health (DMH), 1991-1994
Consultant
- Facilitated 15-member inter-agency Governor’s Task Force on Mixed Population Housing mandated to analyze problems and formulate policy regarding housing for elderly, physically disabled and mentally ill tenants
- Designed participatory process for DMH Area Offices to prepare Housing Plans stating area housing principles, goals and strategies
- Administered DMH Rental Assistance Program, a $2.6m state-funded rental
subsidy program serving 870 mentally ill tenants living in residential programs
modeled on federal Section 8 Program
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Executive Office of Communities and
Development, 1985 – 1991
Senior Regional Manager, Family Housing Coordinator
- Supervised team of project managers providing technical assistance to public housing authorities in developing family, elderly and special-needs housing
- Monitored projects from initial siting through occupancy
- Reviewed architectural design programs, contracts, schedule and budget
- Collaborated with local officials, abutters and state agencies to resolve siting issues, contract disputes
Volunteer Work
- Board Member, Rockland Municipal Planning Federation (2008-present)
- Member, Rockland Farm Alliance (2009-present)
- Member, Orangetown Environmental Committee (2008- present)
- Founding member, Rockland Riverfront Communities Council (2003 – present)
- Co-President, Tappan Zee High School PTSA (2004- 2006)
- Chair, Citizens Advisory Comm., NYS DOT Route 303 Sustainable Development Study (2000-01) Study designed to integrate land use and transportation improvements.
- Board Member, Nyack Center, Nyack, NY (1995-2000); Vice Chair (1997). Oversaw major renovation of historic 1850s church that is home to the Center.
- Co-Facilitator, Citizens Task Force for the Disposition of Rockland Psychiatric
- Center, (1997). Developed public participation process for future of 400 acres.
Education and Training
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, Master in City Planning
- Conway School of Landscape Design, Conway, MA, Certificate
- Washington University, St. Louis, MO, B.A., Sociology
- Greenway Community Alliance, Leadership Training Program, Glynwood, NY
- Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, Introductory G.I.S. Workshop, Palisades, NY
If you want to create a clickable area right over the logo background image, here is what you do.
You can’t just copy the #header div, position it over the logo, make the content invisible and enclose it in an anchor-tag. That would be broken HTML, because you can’t place block-level elements like div inside anchor tags.
You can however enclose a stretched, one-pixel, transparent GIF image in anchor tags (see below) if you have to support old browsers. Otherwise you can simply turn the anchor itself into an inline-block using CSS 2.1.
<div id=”header”>
<a href=”http://mysite.com”><img src=”pixel.gif” id=”home-link” alt=”" /></a></div>
———— CSS ——–
#home-link {
/* this is to create the link area over the bg image logo */
position: absolute;
width: 230px; /* width of the logo */
height: 70px; /* height of the logo */
top: 40px; left: 440px; /* top-left corner of logo */
border: 0;
float: left;
}#header {
width: 970px;
height:114px;
background:url(images/logo_head.gif) no-repeat left;
background-position: 110px 50px;
}
Villa Tron Mioni is a beautiful bed and breakfast in the Venice area of Italy. The owners wanted a USA presence and .com domain.
FSI acquired the domain, set up the hosting environment, ported their PHP site to WordPress, and set up the basic SEO package.
Every system or framework has its idiosyncrasies. One for WordPress is embedding Flash files. It doesn’t happen easily.
Usually you could just embed an object right in the header.php or template file and it will work. But for some reason nothing happens when you try it in WP.
Apparently the swf file needs to be in the root directory, and even then the standard embed code won’t work. There is a plugin called Kimili Flash Embed that resolves this issue. Just install the plugin and put the following code in your php file:
[kml_flashembed movie="fileswf" height="380" width="730"/]
Here is an example embed code that WILL NOT work in WordPress
<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0" WIDTH="730" HEIGHT="380">
<PARAM NAME=movie VALUE="/home.swf">
<PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=high>
<PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#FFFFFF>
<EMBED href="/home.swf" quality=high bgcolor=#FFFFFF WIDTH="730" HEIGHT="380" ALIGN="l" TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">
</EMBED>
</OBJECT>