Summersault Blog

6,500 animal shelters come together for national signature campaign to support Obama adopting a dog at a shelter and “Pardoning a Pooch”- www.Presidential-Pooch-Pardon.com

RICHMOND, IN – Summersault LLC, a website development firm based here, and Adopt-a-Pet.com, the nation’s largest non-profit pet adoption website, are spearheading a national campaign and website called “Presidential-Pooch-Pardon.com”, using a Barack Obama-themed campaign website and messages such as “Yes We Can ADOPT” to gather signatures in support of the new President-Elect adopting a shelter puppy.  The website, created and hosted in Richmond by Summersault, already has gathered thousands of signatures from around the country in just its first few hours. Read the rest of this entry »

Content that you create for your website is critical, and the way that text is presented is equally as important. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently found a neat little application that has been useful both at work and in my at-home computing. It is called Prism, and what it does is allow you to run your favorite web applications (Remember the Milk, Facebook, Google Calendar, etc.) as if they were desktop applications. Because it was built on the Firefox engine, it will run any web applications you can run in your Firefox browser.
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I’ve been waiting for a while now to see what Google was going to do with their acquisition of JotSpot, the collaborative wiki site that a number of non-profit organizations I’m involved in has used to organize our internal information. In my opinion, the long wait was a big risk to take on Google’s part…I used to send people to JotSpot all the time. when Google acquired it and stopped accepting new accounts, I still sent people there, saying “I’m sure it will reopen soon, it’s worth it.” Eventually I stopped sending people there at all, and encouraged them to use other tools or to go to the trouble to set up their own intranet with software like Mediawiki, the tool that powers Wikipedia.

Well, as of today, I’m pretty sure I know where to send people for creating free, powerful internal websites: Google Sites, the new incarnation of what was JotSpot.
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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.

Creating an engaging website that keeps your users coming back over time can be an exciting challenge. One way to take on the challenge is to add a feature that encourages real-time human connection: a live chat room. Assuming that meeting in person isn’t possible or logistically easy, a chat room on your website can help bring your community of users together, allows you to be more efficient in your conversations, and creates a sense of freshness and relevance on the site itself.

This weblog entry will help you get a chat room installed on your site for free. Getting a feel for how to best manage a chat room once it is up and running…well, that’s a weblog entry for another day.

There are three main technical approaches to putting a chat room on your website:
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As the Internet continues to grow and change at a rapid pace, new and innovative website design possibilities become a reality everyday. For our company that means keeping up with the newest innovations in website design and programming, and for our customers it means a broader spectrum of opportunities to reach their target audience.

But more than that, this is a crucial time to understand and support Net Neutrality. Without the guiding principals of Net Neutrality to protect us and our customers from crippling restrictions imposed by large telecoms and Internet Service Providers (ISPs), today’s innovations in web technology may soon be out of reach for companies and individuals without industry connections or deep pockets.
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We received a bit of mail today from the organization “StoresOnline.com”, which is hosting two marketing events in Richmond, Indiana on December 11th at the Holiday Inn. Their pitch is that if you attend their 90-minute “conference” presentation about how to make money on the Internet, you’ll get a free meal, a free personal organizer, and priceless knowledge. It seems that the reality behind the free offers is a bait and switch scheme, which has been documented extensively on sites like TheRipOffReport.com. The reports include some heart-wrenching stories from people who invested quite a bit in StoresOnline.com (Aka Imergent Inc Aka Inetseminars.com) thinking they were going into a legitimate business, only to find that the promises made to them were empty ones, and that when they asked for a refund, they were referred to lawyers or not even called back at all. Yikes!

In general, even though the popular narrative about the Internet boom is that lots of people are making money overnight, remember that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and so on. Never hand over your money to anyone promising you big bucks through Internet commerce just because they’ve got a flashy presentation and give you free food. Using the technologies of the Internet to build your business takes good planning, solid partnerships, and technical expertise - there’s no substitute, and especially not in the form of a 90-minute sales pitch.

Kelly Jackson Higgins has written a great article on Seven Ways to be Mistaken for a Spammer, first noticed from a Slashdot post. Kelly’s advice and observations are very much in line with our experiences as a company that hosts e-mail accounts and tries to fight the ever-rising surge of spam, and as developers who are often creating software that sends legitimate e-mail to users all over the Internet. The main don’ts from the article:

1. Ignoring “unsubscribe” requests.
2. List “repurposing.”
3. Providing unclear privacy checkbox instructions, and ignoring users’ responses.
4. Losing track of internal desktop and server machines that can be used against you.
5. Not keeping databases and address lists up to date.
6. Having vulnerable mailer forms on your Website.
7. Working with non-reputable third-party mailers.

Whether you take Kelly’s word for it or ours or someone else’s, these items are SO important to pay attention to.

Though not just applicable for website development, Rob Swan has written a great article over at A List Apart that takes a deeper look at interacting with clients, knowing the reasoning behind your methods as well as questioning whether or not your methods are truly worthwhile.

In Defense of Difficult Clients

From the article:
"It’s only by being forced to question our beliefs that we can be certain they’re right. The web is an ever-changing medium, we need to be prepared to accept that there’s a possibility that some of our practices are no longer best. Or that—and it happens—they may never have been best in the first place, but no one thought to question them with enough force when they were first mentioned."