I had something happen this morning that has never happened in the 10+ years I’ve been designing and developing websites.

I received a call from the client, of our client, to let us know how impressed and satisfied she was with their website.  Again, it wasn’t our client … it was the end-user of the website, a general consumer.

Wow. Of course this is one person’s opinion, but the fact they took the time to locate that we had designed the site and then picked up the phone to let us know their happiness is just plain cool.

Her name was Pam and she sure made our day start off great in the Five office.

Pam let me know that the combination of visual elegance and how easy the website was to use and navigate made her want to call and thank us.  The website she’s referring to is Simonson’s Salon & Spa, which we redesigned earlier this year.

With the end goal of our web designs always being user satisfaction, it was great to get a first hand account of this.

Sure analytics, conversions and all that user data goodness can let you know it’s a job well done, but having Pam take the time to call you is rock solid.

Great people make a small business tick.  Great people also help keep our freedom while the rest of us go about our small business.

Five Technology programmer Travis Neiderhiser will be leaving his desk later this month to head to Afghanistan with his Army Reserve Unit, the 407th Civil Affairs Battalion of Minnesota. Army Specialist Neiderhiser (soon to be Sergeant) will be leaving Five’s friendly confines for a 400 day tour as his unit operates in support of both conventional and special operations forces.

Just as many thousands of United States soldiers, both overseas and here on US soil, Travis is making a huge sacrifice to defend our freedom, protect our country and work for a better future.

While your opinion on the war may be for or against, the reality of what a soldier puts on the line to do their job is nothing less than incredible.

For Travis, this means leaving his wife, 4 year old daughter and son … a son that is scheduled to be born on July 19th, 2010.  If’ he’s lucky, he’ll get one week with his new son, before he has to endure a year without holding him.  These types of sacrifices make it easy for us around the office to pick up the slack in his absence.

In the office, we’ll miss the humor, the random outbursts, his YouTube finds and the energy that Travis brings to the day.  We’ll have far more Diet Coke available while he’s gone, but maybe we can care package some over there.  Travis has come along way in the last 2 years at Five in many aspects and many of us call him a friend more than an employee or co-worker.

While we throw him a few parties to send him off in style, we also look forward to the welcome back party in about 400 days.

I’m also not willing to let his service and sacrifice go unnoticed.  I invite you to comment with your thoughts or encouragement, it’s the least you can do for someone willing to put it all on the line for you.

Thank you Travis, thank you 407th and thank you to all US service members.

The title might mislead you to think I went to a wild party, but the shots are not of the adult beverage nature.  I did consume a few cheese steak sandwiches.

This week I had the opportunity to speak on search engine optimization at a conference put on by the Immunization Action Coalition out in Philadelphia.  The conference is called the Social Media Summit and focuses on helping the medical and health community bring awareness to vaccinations, immunizations and health using social media and Internet marketing.

My role was sitting down with many of the various organizations attending and conducting a review of their website and search engine optimization efforts.  In my hour sessions I focused on SEO best practices, establishing trust online and offered action items for their websites to improve their websites visibility to Google, Bing & Yahoo.

It was a fun challenge to work with medical and health organizations both large and small and discuss websites ranging from 15 pages to 50,000 pages and the  efforts needed to optimize content and spread their message online.  From building links to maximizing your meta page title, we covered a lot of ground.

Organizations I worked with over the 2 days included:

• American Academy of Family Physicians
• ECBT – Vaccinate Your Baby
• National Association of School Nurses
• Autism Science Foundation
• National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners
• National Network of Immunization Nurses and Associates

The conference also engaged some other social media professionals to launch a social campaign right from the conference for Real Guys Immunize.  A very cool idea for a conference.

The best news is that I didn’t have to get any shots to take part in this conference, but I did learn some valuable information on vaccines and children.  My thanks to all of the great attendees I met, the Immunization Action Coalition and Eventive Meetings.

The most recent web design project to hit the Five starting line-up is for the Minnesota Twin’s own Joe Mauer and his Quickswing baseball training product.  This e-commerce website sells the signature Joe Mauer baseball hitting aid and other batting tools to develop an All-Star swing.

A Focus On E-commerce Fundamentals
Mauer’s Quickswing has been selling their baseball training products online for years, but their former e-commerce site had holes in it.  We took the Joe Mauer approach and focused on the fundamentals:

• An engaging, unique and clean custom web design
• Clear navigation, content and links to view and buy products
• Well structured and simplified product detail pages
• Search engine friendly build-out leveraging SEO best practices
• Easy e-commerce check out steps
• Flexible and easy back-end management for the client (SMC)
• Secure shopping with SSL & Merchant account services

We’re pleased with the overall outcome of the website and look forward to driving an increase in sales online for the Quickswing.  We’re not mad about having the Mauer team in our dugout of great clients either.

Check out the website: http://www.mauersquickswing.com

I’m excited to have taken part of an incredible group of local search panelists for David Mihm’s 2010 Local Search Ranking Factors.

For the last three years, David has sough out, compiled and published his Local Search Ranking factors that are the read in local search.  In bringing together a great group of local search experts together you get more than one opinion, rating and thoughts on over 60 elements that are part of local search (good, neutral or bad).

Many of my favorite local search gurus are included in the panel including Mike Ramsey, Paul Jahn, Ed Reese, Mike Blumenthal, Andrew Shotland and more. Over 30 experts, all in 1 post.

Thanks again to David Mihm for this incredible resource and having myself and Five Technology be a part of it.