Super Ginormous

Category: Work

I spend most of my day at PowerServe. These posts touch on life around the office.

  • Educate Customers

    It is our responsibility – as designers, developers, salespeople, etc. – to educate customers as we build a relationship with them. Setting expectations as early on as possible and explaining deliverables is key to creating and sustaining a healthy client/company relationship.

    Failing to educate a client can cost you money.

    Search Engines

    With all of the sites we create at PowerServe we do an initial site submission to Yahoo!, Google and MSN upon completion of a project. We explain to clients that it may take several weeks before spiders start crawling their site. The initial submission is not a magic bullet. It does not guarantee inclusion in any of the engines, nor does it guarantee placement. If this is not explained to clients, they might assume we haven’t done our jobs.

    Search Engine Optimization takes a lot of time and effort. It’s a combination of optimizing TITLEs, META keywords, META descriptions, and CONTENT among other things! In order to improve placement on search engines, you have to keep your content fresh and relevant to your keywords, descriptions and titles. The time and effort involved in successfully optimizing a site for search engines can be costly. SEO can be a crap shoot most of the time, and tweaks you make to any of the elements of your site can positively or negatively effect your placement on search engines. You’ve constantly got to educate yourself on the latest strategies. Customers need to understand all the work that is involved in Search Engine Optimization.

    Design

    Design takes time. Design isn’t easy. Just because tools are readily available to allow home users to publish websites or to create basic graphics, does not mean that it is easy to do graphic design or web design. Paying a professional to design a website or an ad or a brochure, etc. for you buys their expertise and their ideas, which are things no program can buy you.

    Sites made by Front Page or Publisher, for instance, look unprofessional.

  • Problems with the Iomega 250Gb Network Hard Drive

    PowerServe just bought an Iomega 250Gb Network Hard Drive to store our creative projects on. The way this drive is supposed to work is you 1) plug in all the cords; 2) plug the NetHDD into a switch/router; 3) the blue light comes on and the drive is ready for use; and finally 4) run the Iomega Discovery software or find the drive through your Network Places to map a share to the drive.

    Here’s the problem though, once i completed Step 4, I couldn’t copy files to the drive. I kept getting Access Denied errors when I tried to move files over to the new drive.

    >>> Insert Frustration Here

    So, to resolve this problem I start digging around. I check out the Disk Properties via Windows. The drive is a part of WORKGROUP. Hmm… possible problem? (I’m part of a Domain) User permissions… Admin has full access. Everyone has no access. Root has no access. I can’t figure it out. I then run Iomega Discovery to modify the device settings. Can’t change the workgroup. I can change the IP and the device name … but none of that resolves my problem. Still can’t add files to the drive.

    I try contacting Iomega live support (which sucks hardcore btw) through their website, and I got no help.

    So, I finally just reformatted the drive (via the Device Setting control panel).

    Guess what, the drive works now.

    I don’t know why. Maybe the drive was just misconfigured out of the box. Who knows. It’s working now, though. Hopefully it will turn out to be a pretty nice storage solution for us. Right now, I’m beyond the point of aggravation and just glad that it’s finally working…

  • The Longest Day

    I struggle to write this given the late hour… It’s been one helluva day. I woke up at 7am to take my truck to get it checked out, and it’s been non-stop ever since. Kim and I (with the help of her family) made amazing progress on our yard and in our house (we’re remodeling our guest bathroom). While I was away at the Addy’s tonight, my brother- and father-in-law demolished our entire bathroom — sink, vanity, toilet, floor and all. It looks like downtown Baghdad in there. While they were in there having their “fun” I was downtown at The Pinnacle Club for the 2003 Augusta Advertising Federation’s Addy’s Ceremony. The Alison Group had an amazing night. We won ALL THREE Best of Show Awards, FIVEGold Addy’s, and I can’t tell you how many Silver Addys. I even won two Silver Addy’s for two websites I had worked on:

    Needless to say, I’m extremely please with how well we did. This was the second year in a row that we brought home all of the Best of Show awards. We took home a lot of awards… I’m more glad than ever to be apart of such an amazing company.

  • i told ya’ll i’d be busy…

    hehe… i said “ya’ll”. shoot me, please. ) the past week has been pretty hectic. i’ve got a few projects that are finally getting wrapped up and i’ll be glad to get them out of the way. i really need to spend some more time with my girlfriend. i’ve been neglecting her as of late. but i am getting better. work is good. my freelance stuff is picking up. designed a few logos with linda last night for a snowboard company. got a few other things underway as well. it’s lookin good ) i could use the cash, as always. anyways, i’ll update later. stay tuned.

  • more i told ya’ll i’d be busy…

    just performed a major hardware upgrade on my computer. i worked out a deal with some friends of mine to do some design work for a new hard drive. it’ll be nice to have some extra room on my system to play with. (my mp3 collection tends to stretch the limits of my main hard drive far too often.) i’ve been pretty busy working on several site designs and logos lately. keeps me busy at work. that’s for sure. i’ve got a meeting tomorrow morning with a music production company about doing some designs for some cds they are producing. will be a good opportunity for me i think. i’m looking forward to the work, if they take me on as a freelancer. today i finally finished the brochure for a technology conference being held here in augusta in the not too distant future. the client was highly impressed with my work, and i’ve gotten great comments on the work i did on the publication. if possible, i may put a copy of it online in pdf format in the not to distant future for you all to check out. it’s not overly complex. the design is simple and straight- forward. i like simplicity. too much on a page can be very distasteful to the eye. anyways, i’ll post more later. gotta wrap things up on the sga site. it’s due tomorrow. ttfn.

  • I went home.

    i got fed up with the lack of a reliable host at work, so i left t come home. i figured that i would be able to get more work done here because my connection would be more reliable. since the tech came and fixed my cable modem service yesterday things have been groovy, but for some reason, in just the past few moments, the damn modem keeps losing signal. comcast keeps losing signal or something. i dunno. it’s just been a little weird i suppose. i can deal with this though. at least it comes back on and i’m not losing bandwidth, like what has been happening at work. anyways, enough for now. i’m feeling a lot better now that i’m not at work )

  • it’s gonna be one of those days

    great, now the internet is screwed up here at work. i hate peachnet. why must we be on a state-run pipeline? in case i hadn’t mentioned it before, the company i work for is located just outside of augusta technical college. actually, we’re in a building that is managed by atc, so technically, i guess you could say we’re on the campus of atc. anyways, i digress. because of that affiliation with the school, our building receives internet access from the state through the atc servers. usually, we get a pretty reliable signal. since yesterday afternoon though, it’s been unbearable. i’d rather have dialup right now. at least i could get some freaking work done. as a matter of fact, i’m typing this at work right now, but i probably won’t be able to upload it until later on tonight. sucks, huh? anyways, i’ll stop bitching. it’s not very becoming of me, is it? all i know is: if this isn’t fixed soon, i’m going home to get some work done. i can’t deal with this crap all day long.

  • busy, busy, busy

    ooh… i should be like destiny’s child and make a song about that. that would really suck huh? well, prolly not nearly as much as they uck, but that’s just my opinion. sorry for the lack of updates. the past two days have been pretty damn busy for me. aside from trying to revamp a client’s site at work (partridgeinn.com), i’m also trying to finish up the revamp of the sga site, spend time with my girl and playing some diablo 2: lords of destruction. aside from that i’ve so had so very little time to spend on the site ) okay, i admit it, if i didn’t play any d2 i’d have plenty of time ) shaddup ) will update more later. gotta get back to work.

  • another long day

    damn… it really sucks to be busy all damn day long. i’m tired. but not to the point where i can go to sleep just yet. it’s kinda like what happened to me yesterday. i was tired as hell when i got home, but i stayed up. and then when it came time for me to actually go to bed, i couldn’t sleep. perhaps, it was because i was just too unbelievably tired to fall asleep. who knows? anyways… i stayed up rather late last night working on a few websites. the first was a redesign i’ve been working on for asu’s student government association. i designed last school year’s site (http://www.aug.edu/sga), and was approached by the new president to update the look a bit. you can find the new work in progress at: http://www.aug.edu/sga/v2/. it’s got a much different look and i’m really excited about the possibilities. i’ve run into a few roadblocks hosting wise. i may need to host the site through my companies’ web server if i can’t get server-sides enabled on the school servers… I was also working on sites for some clients of ours at ddcom. the first was sandy springs internal medicine… you can view the concept for that site at: http://www.double-dot.com/dev/ssim/. i’m still kinda iffy on the design for this one, and i may tweak it before the project is wrapped up, but it’s a good start nonetheless. the other site i worked on was one for a local restaurant in town called villa europa. their site is in dire need of a revamp, so i’ve been working on updating the look. their old site can be viewed at: http://www.villaeuropa.com. my new work in progress is up at http://www.villaeuropa.com/v2. i was still working on some finishing touches for the concept up until 5:30 this evening. so far so good. it’s definitely an improvement over the original (and another concept i did at http://www.villaeuropa.com/new/. anyways, that’s all for now. i’ve rambled enough. i’ll try and post again before night’s end. ttfn.

  • late update

    wow… it’s just a few moments past 7pm and i’m just now updating my site. what the hell is wrong with me? ) could it be that i was busier then hell today? nah… course not! actually though, i was pretty busy. had a meeting at first baptist church regarding their website. the meeting went pretty well. i was amazed by the interior of the office component of the church… and the seminary was breathtaking. the meeting ran long… nearly two hours… i was hoping the day would fly after we got back to the office. but time came to damn near a stop-still after that point. the day dragged ass like a no-legged leper. s’ok though. i’m home now. experimented in the kitchen a little bit. (i made some weird cider lime chicken… was kinda good… tasted somewhat bitter though… can definitely improve on the taste of the dish.) my bro was even brave enough to eat what i made. he didn’t have any major complaints other then it needed more flavor. maybe next time i’ll make it better. i didn’t know what the fock i was doing this time anyways ) hehe… experimentation is dangerous!