Summersault Weblog

No matter whether you have a huge advertising budget or you’re a one-person marketing department, viral marketing can play a significant role in helping you get the word out about your company or organization.

Viral marketing…
1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

What are some examples of viral marketing? Blogs, e-newsletters, files that can be downloaded and YouTube videos are just a few examples of current viral marketing vehicles. Be creative, be useful and be interesting and your message will be shared - free of charge.

Why should you sign a contract with your web developer before they begin work on developing your web site? In a world where expectations are often fluid, it’s a simple way to prevent misunderstandings. Contracts protect both you and the developer by stating, succinctly and clearly, what work will be performed.

In his article “Web Design Contracts: Why Bother”, Nick Gould expands upon six items that should be detailed in that contract. Those include:

• an overview of the services that will be provided,
• a process description of those services,
• deliverables,
• ownership,
• pricing
• payment terms

It’s best for both parties if everyone is clear about what is and what is not included in the proposal. If you don’t understand something in the contract - ask!

Writer and prolific blogger Dave Pollard has a post up about when not to use e-mail, in response to people asking him how to reduce inappropriate use of e-mail in their organizations. I don’t agree with all of his rules (for example, I think it’s fine to send a group of people a link to a document/policy/site update instead of waiting for them to be notified via RSS or regular browsing), but find Dave’s points useful to consider.

What do you think?

Today, the Palladium-Item published Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter’s recently released “safe online shopping tips.” I thought I would comment and expand on these tips, especially as they relate to Summersault’s experiences with online commerce.
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When Summersault first started out, one of our goals was to try to help not-for-profit organizations take advantage of the technologies of the Internet when they might not otherwise be able to do so. Of course, we were thinking about all of the cool things we could do for them on their sites to help level the playing field and get their image and message out to the wider world…we weren’t always thinking about the fact that this goal doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a good business model for a tech startup. Many of the groups we wanted to help didn’t have the budget for even the simplest web presence, and on the other hand, there were a good number of non-profits out there with plenty of funds but with technical problems we had no interest in working on solving.
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It’s a pretty common problem: you have an image on your website that’s attractive or useful to someone else - a logo, a photo, a cool piece of art. They build a web page hosted somewhere out there that makes a reference to your image. Now every time a user visits that person’s site, the user’s web browser loads up the image from your site, using up your bandwidth and, in many cases, displaying it for purposes you hadn’t really intended - sometimes called “hotlinking”. The other day I found someone who was using a 6MB image from my personal site as a background image for theirs - and they were apparently pretty popular, so it created a lot of large requests on our webserver. Recently one of our hosting clients and longtime friend of Summersault, Justin Simoni, was having this happen so much that he was regularly exceeding his bandwidth quota and incurring all sorts of hassle. So, we tackled the problem head-on, and even though there are lots of references around the net on how to limit this problem, none quite seemed to document the particular method we used. I’ll do that here in case anyone else finds it useful.
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If you’re going to be a true Mac fanatic, you have to spend at least a few hours a week reading the Mac rumor sites that churn with gossip about forthcoming products and business decisions from everyone’s favorite technology underdog. The current rumors a-flurry are all about Apple’s forthcoming September 7th press conference, and the possibility that they’ll announce an iPod / Mobile phone combo. Drool.
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At this very moment, hundreds of people around the country seem to be flocking to the Summersault-hosted website belonging to Dancing Rabbit, an ecovillage located in Missouri. Why? Their intentional community was featured in tonight’s episode of the FX show “30 Days“, hosted by Morgan Spurlock (of “Supersize Me” fame). We at Summersault have had professional and personal ties to Dancing Rabbit since 1999, and we’re happy to be hosting their site (even with the onslaught of traffic!), especially given our own mission of working to build and sustain communities. We hope the national spotlight is favorable to them, and is an educational opportunity for those wanting to learn more about community building and living off the grid.

A few of us were recently having a conversation with some colleagues about how effectively our respective staffs spend the time we’re present in the office. There’s a new related study out that shows U.S. workers “waste” up to 2 hours a day, with the important distinction that older workers (55+) only wasted an average of 30 minutes per day, while the younger whipper-snappers are the ones who apparently can’t stay focused.
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Welcome to the weblog for Summersault, LLC. This is a place where our staff, and sometimes our clients and colleagues, can share bits and pieces of knowledge, opinion, and humor related to our work in the world of website development. Enjoy!