I’ve gone back and forth in terms of who I suggest my clients go to for email marketing. I keep coming back to Constant Contact. They seem like the industry standard and a lot of my clients have been very happy with them.

I’m interested in this new site I found today - iContact.com. There prices are a little better, but I can’t seem to find an important piece of info - for the $9.95 they currently charge at the time of this writing, how many people can you send to?

I know constant contact has huge amounts - I think it’s $30 to send to 2,500 people. For the average small business - that’s a lot of darn emails. Let us know if you’ve used this company and what you think!

Here is a book I came across today - haven’t had a chance to skim through it. If you are looking to take the plunge into building your own blog using Wordpress, it’ll help to start with a book like this. Then you can increase your knowledge by visiting blogs like ours!

WordPress Complete: set up, customize, and market your blog

Here is another website I did for Golden Gate Industries. The site is focused on finding customers that need to have emergency gas valves installed in their home. The design is still going back and forth a little, but it is pretty much wrapped up at this point. If you live in the Bay Area and own a home - it’s a good idea to check out this website and get some more information on the subject.

Bay Area Gas Valve Installation

Here’s a good article on creating a dark, sleek website. Often a client will require their page to have a lot more information than what’s seen on this website, not just for the benefit of the user, but also for search engines. But this is a still a good tutorial on creating a nice sleek website.

Sleek Web Design Tutorial

Pretty neat little plug in - keeps graphical changes after an upgrade to the screen you see here (I think!). I’ll have to test it and post an update.

Custom Wordpress Log in Screen

PNG is obviously the best choice for images when designing websites. This can be argued of course, but the file size is small, and most importantly, there is true transparency available. If you ever see a cool little badge floating around on a website, chances are that it’s PNG. That said, I don’t use them.

Why? Because IE 6 does not support them. And IE 6 is still on my list of browsers I make a site look good for. I’ll probably have to debug in IE 6 for atleast another year while people migrate over to IE 7, then IE 8. So, I guess I can’t use PNG’s - unless I found a super smart work around - which I did! Check out this guys PNG fix for IE 5.5 (which is dead to me) and IE 6:

IE PNG Fix

I haven’t implemented it yet, but will in the very next site that I build. The solution is clean and non intrusive - please let me know if you have used this and what you think in the comments below.

The Happy Viking in Yuba City has officially launched their new website promoting this Yuba City sports bar and pizza parlor! The owners wanted a website with a whimsical feel, and The Site Smiths delivered! The website uses a flash animated header on the front page, a scrolling news area, java script menus, and best of all - it’s all managed by Wordpress! That’s right, The Site Smiths can make ANY website powered by Wordpress, even one as far removed from the common design trends as The Happy Viking website!

Check out this Yuba City Sports Bar & Pizza parlor to see what the excitement is all about!

If this is something you must do, here is a plug in to make it happen.

http://bluesome.net/post/2005/08/18/50/

There are a lot of ways to make money with a website. One of the most obvious is to become an affiliate marketer for a site such as eBay or Amazon. Here are a few tools to facilitate that using Wordpress:

http://bayrss2.com/

$37.Bayrss2 is pretty simple, and allows different auctions to appear on each page. For example, if I wrote a page on tablet PC’s, I could easily use this script to pop in a few tablet computers on eBay.

http://www.phpbay.com/products.html

$49. This looks to be more advanced than the above, with more layout options and a supplemental piece of software allowing you to tap into the eBay API, which would allow you to create a website with nearly every feature as eBay itself.

http://www.thewebsiteprofessionals.com/twp-auctions/

Free. I didn’t have much luck with this one. You must also download and install Exec-php I think it’s called to facilitate adding PHP code to your Wordpress posts or pages. I only attempted it’s use for 15 minutes or so, but that’s about all I give a new plug in.

I’ll be going with phpbay my self.

There is good reason to discontinue support of older browsers, and Microsoft even now recommends to quit building sites for Internet Explorer 5.

Here is what they say

Basically, they can’t build there own websites to work with such an old browser. While there is benefit in making sure your website looks good across all browsers, there is always a line you must stop at, for fear of not being able to implement cutting edge technologies that otherwise could not be utilized.

The Site Smiths, for the record, builds sites that degrade nicely down to Internet Explorer version 5. We follow a philosophy of offering the nifty bells, whistles and interactive components to users with modern browsers, but not leaving those using outdated software in the dark.

The best of both worlds. I learned about this general theory from…Jeffery Zeldman maybe? I’ll have to research and post an amazon link here. When you start dealing in the world of CSS design the same names keep coming up, and Zeldman is definitely one of them.