Just Launched!!! We’ve been working hard on the new site for Tyler Mason Salon and Spa. Tyler Mason has worked hard to earn a reputation for great customer service. They’ve put their emphasis on the experience every client has at their salon and spa.

In addition to great service, Tyler Mason is also a proud supporter of the Indianapolis Colts as well as being the official salon and spa for the Colts cheerleaders.

For their new design, we created a design the brought in elements of simplicity. With a clean design and easy to use navigation and information, we helped take their site to the next level. Plus the site is 100% Wordpress powered. That means that as they grow and change, their website will be able to grow with them very easily.

Click here to visit Tyler Mason.

We’ve just put the finishing touches on the new website for Meridian Floral Design and Events. Owners Chuck Eaglin and Deborah Coons had a vision to create a business that brings unparalleled expertise in the wedding and entertaining industry to their clients.  They create weddings and special occasions that reflect their clients’ personality and style.

For their new website, we created a new custom design that incorporated photos and colors from their previous events. We utilized jquery to give them a custom photo gallery and a rotating gallery on their home page.

Click here to visit their website.

We recently put the finishing touches on a new front-end website for Beach Bum Vacation. Beach Bum Vacation is an award-winning travel agency. They’ve not only continuously received top awards for exemplary customer service and sales, but have also been named one of the Top 10 Sandals reps in the world!

Right now, we’re working on the back-end of their site which will be a great business tool for their agents, but the front end is exceptional and features a custom contact form, individual agent profiles, jQuery image rotators, tons of information and more.

Recently we put the finishing touches on our first site for a minitstry. Hellno.me is a new site for Resurrection Outreach in Indianapolis. They came to us with a goal to have a website where they could present their information to viewers of every walk of life and to have a place where existing believers could learn and be encouraged.

The site was built with a Wordpress backbone which gives them the ability to add new content. Their site also featured a video CDN powered by Kaltura (a free extensible video platform built for integration with Wordpress).

We’ve been very excited about this brand new website for Employment Source. Not only have we provided them with a brand new design that will propel their business to new heights, but we also have added some slick functionality that will help them to integrate their new website with their job board service for a seamless solution. Check it out:

http://www.employmentsource.net

We’ve just finished up the bulk of the new site for Kristie Blankenhorn, a Realtor with the F.C. Tucker Company here in Indianapolis. Kristie came to us wanting to something unique that would showcase the wide variety of homes she sells as well as the diverse array of areas she can serve. For Kristie, we created a unique design that focused on the Carmel Arts and Design District, but showcased community information for the entire surrounding areas, including Carmel, Westfield, Zionsville, Fishers and Indianapolis. In additon to an embedded IDX property search, custom featured property section and testimonials rotator on the home page, we also did some custom development work including a custom mortgage calculator.

You can view her new website at http://www.kristieblankenhorn.com.

Muddie Puttie is a revolutionary product that helps floral and plant designers and train enthusiasts create reslistic landscapes and potted plants using a formula based product that dries to a hard crust. We created a design for Muddie Puttie based off of the design they had previously for their promotional peices. We programmed the site with a gallery of images provided by Erin Hession and a basic shopping cart powered by Paypal. You can view their new website at http://www.muddieputtie.com

Big news today from Adobe. They’ve announced that they are releasing technology to Google and Yahoo to enable the indexing of flash files (swf files). This effectively enables the visibility of content inside of flash files.

Nothing yet is known on how the content in flash websites will compete with other websites in the search results, but this is the first step.

Read the full story here.

For weeks now, Mozilla, makers of the popular Firefox browser have been involved in a grassroots campaign to fulfill a goal. Their focus, was to set a record for the most downloads of a software in 24 hours. Marketing to the masses of users who utilize their software, Mozilla set the date for this past Tuesday afternoon and pulled the trigger. Aside from some early problems getting to the site due to the masses of people attempting to download the software, the event known by many as Download Day went off successfully. In fact, some eager users were posting the download link well in advance of the wide availability of the download page.

In the end, the folks at Mozilla did an impressive job promoting the event and surpassed even their own goals. They wrapped up the 24 hours with an impressive 8.3 million downloads of Firefox 3. Their original goal was 5 million. As of right now, they’ve reached 11.7 million downloads of the software. That’s impressive by any measure!

For those unfamiliar with the popular browser, Firefox is quite possibly the best browser out there. It’s faster, it can be improved upon with the addition of third-party plug-ins, skins and add-ons, because of it’s open-source nature, it can be utilized on a number of different operating systems and platforms including Mac and Linux distributions, and it creates a better browsing experience.

Here’s the link to the download page…

I just ran across a post on Search Engine Watch that does a great job of highlighting the different types of social media content. Since there is a little confusion with most businesses and consumers as to what is really classified as “social media” here’s a quick reference.

Wikipedia probably defines the term “social media” the best:

Social media is an umbrella term that defines the various activities that integrate technology, social interaction, and the construction of words and pictures. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and “building” of shared meaning, as people share their stories, and understandings.

See often we mistake social media as just one thing or concept when it is really a whole lot more. Social media mainly thrives on the social interaction between users. A few years ago the most widely adapted concept was to add a forum or a chat to a website to enable the communication between users, giving the user control over some of the content that was added to a website as well as facilitating the social interaction between users.

More recently social media has been embodied in “social networks” like Facebook, Myspace, Bebo, Orkut, LinkedIn and more. The idea of creating connections between friends, co-workers, colleagues and more creating what’s been called the social graph. Social media is those networks and more.

I say more because it seems that almost all new websites that have launched in the last two and a half years have had some form of social media. Delicious exists to allow “social bookmarking”: a website bookmark list that is public and accessible to consumers and tracks the general trends and popularity between new stories, websites, blog posts and more.

In fact, a major push behind Web 2.0 is the idea of social media. Web 2.0 embraces the concept that the internet has matured into something that can be utilized as a platform. Social media takes center stage in embracing this new era by enabling user generated content or UGC. User generated content puts the user in control of the content that appears on a website rather than just one or two webmasters. This is the principal concept behind many of today’s popular social media websites.

In general, here are the types of social media as defined by Search Engine Watch:

1. News Content – Time sensitive events and news stories. Through the proliferation of social bookmarking websites and RSS syndication technology, news stories are distributed, blogged, bookmarked and rated in a rapid pace. Businesses looking to track and monitor the daily flow of information that can affect marketing and online business can use a service like online reputation monitoring to help manage their reputation based on this information online.
2. Sensational/Entertainment Content – This includes things that are aimed at attracting attention to something online. This category is most like to include “viral marketing” – where an ordinary video, blog post, or story can be proliferate through many thousands of people in a very short amount of time. YouTube videos are a perfect illustration of this category. Often people will blog, email or forward a link to a YouTube video they find entertaining or interesting making the video popularity increase immensely in a short amount of time.
3. Resource/Educational Content -You noticed that I pulled something from Wikipedia. If you’ve done a Google search researching information in the past, you’ve most likely come across this website. Wikipedia exists to give the consumer the ability to create the authoritative content on a topic. This type of social media is a perfect example of user generated content and social media.

Social media can seem like a complex topic, but it’s more than likely that in the past you’ve engaged in some form of social media. Whether it be commenting on a blog or news article, asking a question or responding on a forum, creating a social network account, or even just creating an online account to share pictures with your family. It all is considered social media!