Electric Easel Steps Up To The Plate

We are underway with another custom website for Crystal Lake Baseball (CLB). Website design mockups have been created and programming is in development. CLB was founded in 2010 by members of Crystal Lake National with the goal of providing a premier youth baseball organization in Crystal Lake, Illinois.

Check back soon.

Get $100.00 off a 3-day registration CMS Expo by using the electric easel coupon code: EE2012

Go to the registration page, select the number of registrations you would like to purchase, and then enter the coupon code on the next page for your discount!

Hope to see you there!

Instant Care Medical Group is a workers compensation medical facility specializing in the care and treatment of patients injured at work. What sets Instant Care apart from other surgery facilities is our coordinating of patient care to ensure that they get the medical care necessary for their particular injury. Our expert case managers will assist the patients with all of their medical needs from scheduling all necessary appointments, which includes referrals to the proper specialist, diagnostic testing and physical therapy, and just ensuring they understand and are comfortable with the process. Instant Care will coordinate with the patients attorney so they are aware of all ongoing medical treatment and issues that arise with the worker’s compensation insurance carriers.

We’re busy at work with a new project – a fully custom mobile website for LOOK Trailers. Here at Electric Easel we’re very excited about mobile websites and creating a satisfying experience for people browsing on-the-go. With millions of people in the United States having smartphones and relying on them for information when away from home, dedicated mobile sites are very important if you want customers to reach you.

LOOK Trailers is a cargo trailer company headquartered in Bristol, IN, opened for business in early February 2010. Matt Arnold, President of LOOK Trailers, grew up in the trailer business working for his father Mike Arnold founder of Haulmark Industries. With manufacturing facilities in Bristol, IN, Fitzgerald, GA, Phoenix, AZ, and Springville, UT, LOOK is a national trailer company with a local feel. The company produces enclosed cargo, utility and car trailers ranging in length from 4′x6′ to a 53′ gooseneck model as well as any size custom-built trailer to meet individual needs.

As I mentioned earlier, our mobile site for LOOK Trailers is a custom coded solution, built on FuelPHP and jQuery Mobile. The mobile site also includes an easy-to-use custom admin panel, which makes adding pages, products, categories and locations a breeze. Some features of the site include a swipe image gallery, embedded video, google maps integration, click to call and dynamically pre-populated contact / quote forms. In addition to this we are employing a QR code landing page strategy to take advantage of QR code scanning smartphones.

About ARMA:

As an award-winning provider of public and private sector personnel solutions since 1990, ARMA is uniquely positioned to support government agencies with dependable professionals who deliver a positive experience in all customer-facing environments. We assemble and deliver the high-caliber talent you need to maximize productivity and ensure that your next federal initiative defies your usual project expectations.

What is ‘Sweet Air’? Tuf-tite’s Sweet Air system is an inexpensive carbon ‘scrubber’ for your homes vent stack.

Offensive odors including hydrogen suflide gas are produced in residential & commercial drain pipes and septic systems. The Sweet Air™ vent filter is your answer to eliminate plumbing or septic odors. Sweet Air™ can be easily installed on existing vent stacks. Activated carbon “scrubs” the vent discharge putting an end to unpleasant odors from house, septic, and portable toilet vents.

Instant Care Medical Group is an ambulatory surgery center specializing in the care and treatment of patients injured at work. What sets Instant Care apart from other surgery facilities is their coordinating of patient care to ensure that they get the medical care necessary for their particular injury. Their expert case managers will assist patients with all of their medical needs-from scheduling all necessary appointments (which includes referrals to the proper specialist), diagnostic testing and physical therapy, and just ensuring they understand and are comfortable with the process. Instant Care will coordinate with the patients attorney so they are aware of all ongoing medical treatment and issues that arise with the worker’s compensation insurance carriers.

Look for this site online in the near future!

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page^[1] and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references. The numerical weight that it assigns to any given element E is referred to as the PageRank of E and denoted by PR(E). – Wikipedia

If that quote from the Wikipedia article about PageRank doesn’t make any sense to you, then this article is for you. (And if you did understand it, I think that this article will benefit you as well – but in a different way. :P )

In it’s simplest form, Google PageRank is a lot like democracy. Websites are both the candidates AND the voters, and he who gets the most votes wins; in the form of top placements within SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). To put it more simply – if a lot of other sites have a link to your site, you have a good chance of showing up within the top ten results of a Google search. Now, that is a VERY basic way of putting it, and there are a lot of gotcha‘s in there to trip you up – but that is what it all boils down to.

How is PageRank calculated?

PageRank is calculated using a patented algorithm that is constantly being tweaked, so no one can really say for sure how, but there are a lot of good ideas out there about it. What we as webmasters DO know is this – the more sites with relevant content and PageRank that link to your site, and the more relevant sites that your site links out to, the better your site’s PageRank will be. However, remember I said there were some gotcha’s?

So what are some of the gotcha’s with PageRank

PageRank can be manipulated. It used to be VERY easy to do, but Google has consistently improved their algorithm to combat some of the common tactics that people use.

1. Bad links – Years ago – when I first got into SEO, PageRank, and all that jazz – I used to think that bad links were just dead links on your site that didn’t go anywhere. While those should be avoided at all costs, since they effect text to code ratio with no benefit to your site, there is an even more sinister side to bad links than that. You as a webmaster need to be careful what sites your website chooses to link to. If you knowingly link to a bad site that has nothing to do with the gist and content of your site, Google knows this, and will ding your PageRank a little. To follow the political reference – if you vote for a crooked candidate, it makes you look bad. Resolution? Avoid linking to websites that do not offer valuable content that is related to the purpose of your website.

2. Spamdexing – Spamdexing is a complicated subject – and has caused a lot of controversy in the past. There was even a lawsuit about it. It consists of automated “link generation” tools, hidden text, keyword stuffing, cloaking, and page hijacking for the sole purpose of increasing a sites PageRank, among other things. It’s kind of like stuffing the ballot box or rigging the election. You might win, but once you’re found out, it ain’t pretty. Resolution? Don’t do it! Use legitimate methods to build your sites PageRank – the long-term results are MUCH greater than the short-term rewards.

3. Duplicate Content – Duplicate content is a big problem these days. There are content farms galore feeding the same or highly similar articles to autoblogs all over the internet for the sole purpose of increasing their advertising revenue and amount of content on their site. Google is smart enough to know if your site consists of nothing but content scraped from other websites, and will adjust your PageRank accordingly, or simply drop you from search results all together. Resolution? Focus on creating unique, relevant content for your readers that they think is good enough to share or bookmark, and Google will see your site as increasingly more relevant for your topic of choice and reward you accordingly.

There are many more facets to PageRank that could be covered, and will be covered in the future here on this blog, but I think you’re starting to get the picture. While relevant, PageRank isn’t the be-all end-all factor when it comes to a successful website. Creating unique, engaging content that interests readers and offers value is what the web and Google is all about. Follow that, and you’re site will get ranked in no time.

For over 15 years, the Crystal Lake Golf Learning Center has been a premier golf facility for professional golfers and fun-seekers alike. Set on over 20 acres surrounded by wooded areas, the range is as beautiful as it is functional. Crystal Lake Golf Center offers year round golf with, 25 mat stations, 15 grass stations, 12 heated indoor stations, and 2 indoor golf simulators. Be sure to check it out!

New for ECHO –  QR codes to mobile optimized landing pages. Using HTML5 and CSS3, we were able to deliver a very fast and reliable solution for ECHO. We also integrated a JavaScript platform detection script into the main site, to allow for easy access to the mobile version for mobile users. Scan the QR code above and see for yourself.