Jeff's blog

I am very excited to announce that we have won a Silver ADDY Award for our work on i3 Strategies website!

ADDY Awards are given out yearly by the Mid-Michigan Creative Alliance as a way to recognize local designers and companies teams that are fueling the creative revolution in Michigan. There are a number of award categories for print, interactive, and audio/visual media, as well as a category for student work. This was GreenLite's very first ADDY - not bad for our second year in business!

This year's event was held at the Old Town Temple Club in Lansing, which is a really cool venue where IgniteLansing 2.0 was recently held. Jeff and Steve were in attendance along with our client, Julielyn Gibbons of i3 Strategies. We would like to extend a special thanks to Julielyn for allowing us to experiment creatively with her original vision. And let's not forget Chris, our lead developer who transformed the design into a live website at http://i3strategies.com.

We hope to see you at next year's event!

Last week Chris challenged me to try out a new web browser for a week. The browser is called Flock and it's available as a free download for Mac or PC.

Based on the popular Firefox browser, Flock takes the next step with keeping users constantly connected to their favorite social media. Whether you're into Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Hulu, MySpace (for real?), or any other social networking site, Flock has a way to keep it in your face at all times. To get started you just open Flock and enter your various usernames and passwords for sites you want to stay connected to. Flock adds these to a sidebar that displays updates from all of your friends, recently added pictures and video, or even just links to news stories. You'll also get a home page with a more detailed view of all this info (see the screenshot below).

There are a couple of things I really liked about Flock: it was really easy to connect to my various networks, eveyone's updates are aggregated into the same feed, and grabbing an RSS feed or media stream from a page was simple and quick. On the other side though, all of this constantly-updating information is a huge distraction. I'd log on to check my email and spend 30 minutes on Facebook, or I'd start to check my bank account only to find 10 new stories about a soon-to-be-released video game. While I wasn't particularly productive while on Flock, I always knew what everyone else was up to.

The one thing that really bugged me was that the default search was set to Yahoo. Now, I don't want to get into a "religious" discussion here, but let's just say that I generally prefer Google 100% of the time. However, a quick search (on Google) revealed that Flock is endorsed by Yahoo.

Long story short, Flock is great if you love social media. Why don't you take the challenge: try out Flock for a week and let me know what you think!

Last week I went to Michigan State University's WebDev Cafe with a few other GreenLiters. The Cafe is all about getting web-forward thinking in to the MSU community and promoting the university's web initiatives. As a recent MSU Telecommunications grad, I was excited to see that the event was being held in my old stomping grounds, the Comm Arts building.

One of the most interesting topics was the new design and branding of MSU.edu, the university's main website home page. Four years ago when the site was last redesigned, a big web trend was to have as many links as possible on any website's home page. Today, it's almost the opposite - you want to present a few clear link choices in order to not overwhelm the user.

Though not finished by any means, the new design concept has a clean navigation, lots of white space, a large branding photo, and links to social media. These are all great ideas that are in line with current web trends, and I really like their new focus on usability. I'm excited to see the final version of the new site, which will likely launch in the first half of 2010.

I also want to give a shout-out to our friends and business partners who presented: Adam Henige from Netvantage Marketing spoke about how Search Engine Optimization can improve your business, and Julielyn Gibbons from i3 Strategies discussed the impact of social media on the way we communicate.

A bunch of people from GreenLite and our parent company Artemis Solutions Group attended IgniteLansing 2.0 on Friday and it was a blast! The old Temple Club was decked out with dark lighting and looked amazing despite being under renovation.

Check out Steve Jencks's award-winning presentation about how to survive being in a B-movie:

Brian Azar also presented with a mixture of serious and humourous advice on surviving marriage:

We also want to congratulate Chris Bachelder from Artemis, who gave a presentation on the leadership of the creative class. All of the speakers' presentations are posted on IgniteLansing's YouTube channel.

We are pleased to announce that the Michigan Primary Care Consortium (MPCC) has been awarded a free GreenLite website for winning our "Win a Free Website" contest.

Of our three contest finalists, we believe that the MPCC has the potential to provide the greatest positive benefit to Michigan's economy with their clear and focused mission of helping Michigan residents and small businesses get affordable health care. The MPCC indicated in their contest entry that their mix of volunteer and paid staff will be cut short later this year when their state funding will be reduced due to Michigan's poor economic climate. They need thier website to encourage volunteers and showcase achievements while quickly delivering information - something that their current website "falls short of what is needed in this challenging time."

We're looking forward to working with the MPCC to improve their web presence, allowing them to carry their mission through troubled economic times to a better future for Michigan.

Thank you to everyone who voted and commented during our "Win a Free Website" contest. You can view the MPCC's original contest entry here: Michigan Primary Care Consortium contest entry.

There's been a big push over the last year for people and companies "going Green" and doing their part to help protect our environment. Along with being more Earth-friendly, there have been more and more people looking for healthy alternatives such as organic food, biking to work, and buying locally-made products.

MI Smart Commute is looking to promote these trends and help them carry Michigan's future. As part of the Michigan Fitness Foundation, MI Smart Commute promotes alternate forms of transportation including walking, biking, carpooling, and taking mass transit as a way to improve the health Michigan's people and environment.

Our clients at the Michigan Fitness Foundation wanted a design that was clean and modern, but also fun and motivating. Presented with these challenges, our designer Steve created one of his most unique designs to date.

We expect that there will be a lot of activity around MI Smart Commute in the coming years. Go Michigan!

We recently launched a new website for the Association of Medical Marijuana Caregivers (AoMMC) that is built to help authorized patients find the resources they need to obtain medical marijuana.

The AoMMC's mission is to help patients with chronic pain and illnesses find marijuana, which has been legalized in some states as a medicinal option for certain medical conditions. In order to get medical marijuana, a patient needs a physician who is willing to provide a medical marijuana recommendation (it can't be legally prescribed yet) and a caregiver who will provide the marijuana to them (since it can't be legally purchased from a pharmacy).

According to our client, the problem is that many medical marijuana-eligible patients face is that they can't get a recommendation. Even with a recommendation, where can a patient - often someone who is sick, elderly, or both - find a trusted local caregiver to get marijuana from?

When AoMMC first approached us about building a website to help connect medical marijuana patients with physicians and caregivers, we were understandably hesitant - after all, this is a pretty hot issue! We had something of a debate in the office: would it be legal? Ethical? Would we end up with ardent supporters or sign-bearing protestors?

In the end, we decided to help the AoMMC build the website. We believe that everybody has the right to free speech, and that's what the website is really all about. In keeping with that belief, we're inviting you to tell us your opinion about medical marijuana and the various issues surrounding it.

Something we've been hearing a lot during these difficult economic times is small business owners saying that they can't afford to create or improve their website.

I beg to differ - you can't afford to NOT have a well-designed professional website. It should be the cornerstone of all your small business marketing efforts! There are a plethora of online marketing tools - many of them free - that can be utilized to direct customers to your website, but getting customers to you is only half the battle. The other half is convincing them that you are legitimate, experienced, and professional, which is where your website needs to accel.

Your website is a representation of your business much like an actual physical storefront. Sloppy presentation, out-of-date information, and confusing placement of information will cause your potential customers to leave your site and find a better-looking business. This is especially true if you are trying to sell your products or services online.

A common misconception among small business owners is that it's difficult to find customers online when their target market is local. Let's face it: Google is the new Yellow Pages. And the old Yellow Pages, well, they've moved online too. If you provide a specific type of product or service to a specific area, you actually have an excellent opportunity to be listed for free in search engines!

So make your website the absolute best it can be - it might just be the investment that carries your small business through to the next economic boom.

While surfing the Internets today, I stumbled upon a fairly new website called Revocery.gov that's intended to show the American public how stimulus money from the economic stimulus bill is being used.

After browsing through the website for a few minutes, I noticed some interesting similarities between Recovery.gov and some of the website that we make here at GreenLite. I did some digging and found out that Recovery.gov is built with Drupal - the same Content Management System that we use to build websites for our clients!

I thought it was really cool that the Obama administration chose Drupal for this site. After all, that must mean that its features for security, usability, and accessibility provided the best options (and believe me, there are hundreds of CMSs to choose from)!

I'll be keeping an eye on the site to see how it develops over the next couple of weeks.

Since I'm waiting for over an hour to get a table at this fancy restaurant, I figured I would see if I could post to the blog from my Blackberry. The verdict? It works!

Enjoy your Valentine's Day tomorrow!