November 16, 2011
Small Business Saturday Nov 26th!
Welcome to the official Small Business Saturday Facebook page where small is BIG! Join us and support small business!
First there was Black Friday, then Cyber Monday. November 27, 2010 was the first ever Small Business Saturday. Small Business Saturday is the day we celebrate the Shop Small movement to drive shoppers to local merchants across the U.S.
More than 200 organizations have already joined American Express OPEN, the company’s small business unit, in declaring the Saturday after Thanksgiving as Small Business Saturday.
For more info: http://www.smallbusinesssaturday.com/
http://facebook.com/smallbusinesssaturday
For those who like unique gifts I urge you to go to Jay Street in Schenectady to visit Bliss Gifts and Home Decor, The Katbird Shop and Downtown Designs!
November 15, 2011
New Design for Willow Designz
One of the great things about using Joomla as your content manager is the fact that you can change the layout of your website with an upload and just a few tweaks to your content layout.
While working on a client I was going through templates and I found one that I liked and it had been a couple of years since I had changed my site.
For those of you who are still unsure about Joomla and/or content management systems the experience of changing layouts would have sealed the deal. It seriously only took me two hours to update my site to a new format. If that does not help you decided about a content management system I don’t know what would!
October 26, 2011
New Client – Bliss Gifts and Home Decor
Willow Designz’s is proud to announce their new client Bliss Gifts and Home Decor.
Bliss Gifts and Home Decor is located on Jay Street in Schenectady, NY. Amy sells beautiful hand painted furniture and vintage home goods.
April 7, 2011
New Client Launched – Celtic Faire
I’m proud to announce that my client Celtic Faire AOH has been launched. To go to visit the site go to www.celticfaireaoh.com.
The Celtic Faire is presented by Schenectady’s AOH and held every year. It is a lovely Irish festival with live music, good food and lots of fun for friends and family.
The Celtic Faire is using Joomla for their content management. This is my first client to be launched with the Joomla software.
I hope to see you there this summer!
February 9, 2011
New Client – Touropoly
Willow Designz’s is proud to announce their new client Touropoly. Touropoly is a board game based on the music scene. It is local produced and created by Amy Fischer.
What is Touropoly?
Touropoly is a board game based around the jam band live music parking lot scene. There are Karma and Luck cards, a “Ground Score” space, and 6 different game pieces resembling different characters you would expect to see “on lot.” Instead of properties, you purchase music venue parking lots and set up pop-up vending tents, charging a vendors fee to anyone that lands there. The game only takes two hours or less… not until all but one go bankrupt… no matter how sketchy the town, cops ALWAYS eventually shut lot down. After a two hour time limit, the game is OVER! Count your money and assets, and whoever has the most wins!
January 25, 2011
Joomla and CSS
One of the challenges that I am facing is creating a website that is designed outside of a content management system and then importing the CSS into the CMS. Currently, I am using Joomla since it is an open source product, free, and once explained it is easy for non-techie users to use it.
I have looked at other CMS and like Adobe’s product but my small businesses do not have the ability to afford the price tag associated with Adobe’s CMS software.
Right now I am struggling with Joomla’s templates vs the CSS that I have developed in Dreamweaver. I have found a template that I was then able to add or edit my CSS into but it only populated a small portion of the page.
What I would like to know is how to other web designers handle CMS and CSS? Why must this be so difficult?
January 13, 2011
Software Security
Recently, I changed jobs at my work. I went from Customer Support to Quality Assurance. A part of that change is to learn about Software Security. Since I do not have much experience with that besides the generic information I know about hackers I have been reading up on it.
Today, I am reading about XSS ( Cross-Site Scripting).
December 16, 2010
Happy Holidays
I just wanted to send out a happy holidays to everyone. I know this is a busy time of year for people, myself included. I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season and tries to stay warm!
June 23, 2010
Happy Summer!
I just wanted to send a quick shout out to everyone and say that I hope you are enjoying your summer now that it has officially begun! Have fun in the sun!
April 6, 2010
What does your email address say about you?
When you look at an email address what can it say about the person who uses it? For my job, I communicate via phone and email address. One of the first things that I think of when I see an email address is if it is for business or personal. How can you tell, you might wonder. One of the ways that might clue you in is the domain that is associated with the email address.
The domain is the @willowdesignz.com area of the email. If you are using google, yahoo, and/or hotmail for your email address, is it work work related issues or personal ones? In a previous post I talked about how many email addresses you could have associated with your host. The reason I look at this when deciding a host because I feel that when you use your business domain in your email address you are establishing a professional appearance. If you have a business, why would you use yahoo as your email provider when your website can provide you with an email client?
Another way that your email can say about you is the front of the email address. willow@ this will show you the user you are talking to. When establishing your email addresses you may want to set up a few different accounts for yourself. I have established an info@ as well as just recently amanda@. I connected the info email address to my website. I am just starting to use the amanda@ when it comes to business. By having your name in the user area of the email you are reminding the receiver of the email who they are talking to.
That is not to say you should never have an email address at yahoo or google. I have many different email addresses that are associated with many different avenues of my life, some of which are used in all areas and others are just used for the applications that the provider may include such as the google calendar or google groups.
So the next time you need to create an email address, think about who is going to be viewing it and how you want you or your company promoted. Remember, by having your company name apart of your email address you are using free promotion.
