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Helping our local South Florida bloggers

Vote for Florida Keys Girl at sunsentinel.com's Best of Blog Awards.

We are always excited to help out or local South Florida individuals and business that are willing to put in the hard work and effort necessary to create a successful online website. Fellow Greater Hollywood, Florida Chamber of Commerce member and local blogger, FloridaKeysGirl.com has been nominated in the Sun Sentinel's Best of Blogs (BOB) Awards.

She has been nominated in 3 categories: Travel/Tourism, Foodies & Neighborhood.
And of course best overall. You can vote for each of the 4 sections each day, so get started today.

www.floridakeysgirl.com is all about Life in, around and on the way to Key West. Which includes all the fun, the sun and the craziness of it all.

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Drupal Case Study - Technical Overview of Aquatic Systems

Aquatic Systems is one of the leading Lake and Wetland Management companies in the state of Florida. They restore and maintain private, commercial and public lakes, waterways, wetlands and preserves from overgrowth of algae and exotic species, poor water quality, and fish kills. Their former site was a 10-page static HTML site. Their goal was to not only update the look of their website, but to be able to add press releases, articles, and case studies in order to become the online resource for their industry.

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CiviCRM and Drupal Diary - Prologue

civicrm+drupal_logoThis multi-part story is presented for those parties that are contemplating using CiviCRM with Drupal for an online project. The information provided will apply particularly well if you are looking to utilize CiviCRM for running an association or membership group.

Background

It all starts with an idea...

We were approached by a client to build a membership website for their constituents to utilize and assist in marketing the association, to attract new members, and ease the administrative burdens on the association staff. Our team has many years of experience with membership and association websites and this was the primary reason we were chosen for the project. After reviewing the requirements, we quickly realized that the systems we had used in past projects were not going to be adequate for this one without heavy customization and custom coding. After much deliberation, research, discussion and testing we decided that CiviCRM running on Drupal would be our best approach. What follows is the story of our process and our project.

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Will Google Favorite Places make an impact on local search?

qrcode for www.soflaweb.com Late last year, Google announced that it was sending traditional brick and mortar businesses bar code decals to put on their windows, with these QR barcodes (a two-dimensional barcode that represents the URL of the company’s local listing) people can scan them outside with their phones and bring up business listings with all kinds of information like, reviews, menus, contact info, etc...

These codes have been made available to the businesses Google deemed "favorite places". It began with over 10,000 businesses in the US that received them right off the bat, and Google will eventually expand that number in the future.

While the intent is to place these decals outside of your physical business the real implications could be used on advertising in all media. Since the barcode can be scanned from just about any type of media including billboards, business cards, computer monitors (try the example above), TVs, and possibly even movie theater screens as well the opportunities for advertisers to use these codes is endless.

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Does your business really need to be on Twitter?

A statement that we have pondered over and over throughout 2009...

Does your business need to be on twitter?  Should you be spending time on Facebook and other Social Media?

Marketers always seem to think so, but at what cost? Just like any marketing initiative, you cant just approach your social media strategy without a plan.  Social Media is the new kid on the block when it comes to online marketing. And yes there are opportunities, especially for niche industries (hospitality?). But many businesses approach it because they feel they "have to" or they can "do it themselves" or "it's free".

First off, Social Media, whether twitter, facebook, youtube or any of the other hundreds of sites and tools available is not free for business. Unless your personal time has no value whatsoever, then the cost of this marketing is the cost of your own time (if you are doing it yourself). And Social Media takes time! By its nature, Social Media is time consuming in that it is social. You cant speed through your social interactions and you wont be able to successfully automate your social media tasks either.

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