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My parents have been making me jealous updating their kitchen with new flooring, granite countertops, and tile back splashes. As they removed everything from the walls to paint, I thought to myself, I can’t let them put that old ugly shelf back on their wall. Their brand new kitchen deserves a new painting! I thought what a perfect Christmas present it would be.

I started the painting in my office before Thanksgiving and had my family over. I thought if I keep the door closed hopefully my mother will not peek in. But ofcourse, she had to give my aunt a tour of our new house. As they entered my office, I thought hopefully they will not turn around and see the painting. Sure enough, they did! I just held my breath and hoped I could keep a straight face and lie. As my mother examined the painting and said how she liked how I did the edging with the torn raised wallpaper, she asked “Where is this going?” As I laughed inside, I responded with a straight face “I’m not sure yet.” and she bought it! Then she said, “You know you could paint me a painting one of these days.” And she’s said that a couple times since then. I just think Christmas is almost here only a few more times to lie.

The other tricky part about this painting is I had to quickly guesstimate what size would look good in the space and my mother keeps changing the color of the wall! But I think I finally have her convinced that yellow on top and red below looks the best. It will also match the painting very well. I will post a picture of the finished painting on my parent’s wall after Christmas.

While I was in NoDA watching the Thunderoad Charlotte Marathon, I noticed these posters all over the Neighborhood Theater.  I was able to go the very last day. It was exciting getting to see local artists and their work. There were paintings, photographs, jewelery, arts and crafts for sale in many different styles.

I was able to get two Christmas presents, one for myself (my husband bought me a beautiful green scarf) and one for my brother. I found a display of flattened and melted down wine and beer bottles, for the use of clocks and nightlights. I thought this gift would be perfect for my almost-21-year-old brother who is still afraid of the dark! I was so excited and went to the conveniently located atm right inside of the the theater to withdraw cash. The $2.50 fee was worth it! I wish I had gone earlier in December and I would have purchased some jewelry and other items as gifts. I can’t wait for next year. I did email the NoDaRioty to ask if they could have the event more than once a year, then I could get gifts all year round.

I wish I would have taken my camera. But I was able to find some photos from the last year’s show.

I started using Amazon.com while I was in college to search for cheaper textbooks and sell them back. I continue to use the website to find cheaper books than the local book stores offer, but I have become addicted to shopping on it for everything now.

The reason for this new online shopping addiction? The new “Add to Wish List” button that Amazon.com has offered. I know Amazon.com does not offer every product I want to buy, so they made it so you can add products from other websites! Genius! And that is why I am addicted to Amazon’s wish list. It is very easy to do, I even showed my mother how to use it. Read how to use Amazon.com’s Wish List Toolbar or you can add a bookmark to any browser you use. And then you can notify your friends and family or they can search for your name for your wish list.

And of course, people will only buying me gifts a few times a year, but it is a great way to compare prices of different websites when you add the same product. Or just keep track of where I find things, so when I’m ready to buy it I know where to go. It’s so much fun because you feel like you are shopping without spending any money yet. I have 42 items and counting…

Baking is not something I typically take time to do. It usually takes a birthday or a holiday to get me in the baking mood. For some reason my family only tends to bake at Christmas time, it has been a long tradition to bake several different types of cookies for Christmas. As I have started helping more of the years the recipes become easier, and I think why do we only do this once a year? Oh yea.. time!

But I think my favorite part is getting to decorate the sugar cookies (besides eating them). Using cookie cutters to cut out angels, Christmas trees, snowmen, teddy bears, stars and candy canes. Then the best part comes the decorating, this could be one of the reason’s why I am an artist today. As far back as I can remember my brother and I would get to decorate the cookies with different colors of icing and sprinkles. I think my designs have gotten better over the years! I wish I could find pictures of some of the ones I did when I was little, I’ll have to try and dig them up.

As fewer people show up for Christmas, our amount of baking never seems to decrease like you would think. So it becomes what I take in to work potlucks, parties, and this year I have neighbors; so I’ll be making tin-fulls of cookies to give to them.

I’ve been gaining interest in learning more about how to better market business’s websites. Thought I would start with books I can find at the library first, after all they are free! I came across “Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websites” by Kevin Potts. It was a quick read because most of the information in the book was just review. But he did have a few quotes I liked on how he could explain situations to someone that does not have to know much about web design.

Avoiding Corporate speak - about writing better copy for the web

Imaging walking into a pastry shop, asking for a Boston cream doughnut, and getting the following response from the shopkeeper: “That particular confection, with its falsely historical nomenclature of alternate-desert elements and synergistic relationship with first light beverages…” You would probably leave. As you walked down the street looking for a Dunkin’ Donuts, you’d wonder how that bakery ever stayed in business.

The goal of copy should be to open dialog with your target audience with plain language to not intimidate them.

Reading Level
I thought it was interesting that most TV shows are written at an eighth-grade reading level to appeal to everyone. “TV is written by professionals who know how to speak to a board demographic in a common language.” It is common to assume your audience is more educated than they really are. People do not want to think too hard when reading, especially on the web where it’s easy to just click somewhere else.

Corporate Blogging
I did not realize how popular corporate blogging has become, he recommended a few books and websites on the issue:

Blogging for Business: Everything You Need to Know and Why You Should Care

buisinessblogconsulting.com - Advice, tips and best practices for corporate blogs

Technorati.com - Recognized hub of all things blogging; tracks millions of blogs

RSS for the website
There can be multiple RSS feeds on a website, which I did not think about before. Places where a RSS fed could be helpful would be on the careers page, corporate news, e-commerce (promotions, sales, new additions), support, and of course the blog. Keeping readers completely up to date will only generate more and more sales.

The Lowe’s design changes again ever so slightly. We’re getting closer to Christmas, it’s in the air!

Kim Myles from HGTV is even helping out this holiday season.

If you hover over and click the elf peaking around the top left corner, he'll take you to the Black Friday page.

I started reading another Sitepoint book, Online Marketing Inside Out. I always enjoy reading books and emails from Sitepoint.

Click to download an excerpt from the book “Online Marketing Inside Out” by Brandon Eley & Shayne Tilley.

Press Releases

I was intrigued to learn about press releases (on page 8). I wouldn’t have thought to send out press releases, I thought it was just a thing of the past. In the book it states, “Start now! You simply cannot write too many press releases.” There are many different opportunities to send out a press release, a new service/product to announce, case study on how you helped a client, won an award, customer testimonials, and many more. Adding hyperlinks, photos, audio, video and buttons to social media facilities will further take advantage of it being online and further attracting the audience.

Modern Monitoring of Press Coverage (page 27)

When other people are writing about your company, you would want to know about it right? Monitoring what is said on the web is like keyword research, things to consider tracking are: company name, key employees’ names and phrases you want to rank well in. You can use RSS feeds, Technorati (blog search engine), Google Alerts, Trackur (social media monitoring), Twitterverse (type a word and you’ll see every time it’s been mentioned) and many more mentioned in the book to monitor online press coverage.

To learn more about online marketing you will have to purchase the book on Sitepoint.

With some experience optimizing web pages for SEO under my belt, it was great to learn more about SEO from workshops at work at Lowe’s. A company called Resolution Media came in to share their knowledge and show us how to improve our site on many different types of pages.

Resolution Media gave us a list of tips for 10 Design Best Practices for SEO, I thought it would be helpful to share. I’m sure some of this will just be overview for some of you out there.

10 Design Best Practices for SEO

1. Avoid Splash Pages because of slow loading time and no crawable text
2. Avoid Flash/Javascript menus because links aren’t crawable and they don’t pass on link popularity
3. Don’t overuse Flash, images, etc.
4. Change generic Anchor Text to be more descriptive
   • Click Here for Kitchen Appliances instead of just Click Here
5. Write informative Title Tags
   • Lowe’s Home Improvement: Buy Kitchen Cabinets, Paint, Appliances and Flooring instead of just Lowe’s Home Improvement
6. Describe images with detailed ALT tags
7. Use CSS to give spider cleaner code to crawl
8. Avoid embedding CSS/Javascript
9. Use Header Tags for
10. If you use Flash/Javascript, utilize Progressive Enhancement

Lowe’s launched the new holiday design today. See images below of the design for the new homepage. (Click images to see a larger version.)

The homepage becomes interactive.

It’s almost a complete redesign of the entire site. Notice how the background is no longer blue? Just to remind you what it looked like before, see the image below:

The left navigation was removed to allow for more space in the design and I think it makes it less busy. There is definitely more of a warm homey feel to the new design with the warm tan background and subtle areas of red and other fall colors. It introduces Christmas, but without it being too overpowering since it is only October.

Check out the site for yourself before the design changes: www.lowes.com.