However, this solution creates a new problem: If the member wants to meet a guest in the space, how does the guest get in?

Our solution was to create a special website to display on an I-Pad in the office lobby. The visitor walks up to the I-Pad decides what they want to do, selects the appropriate button, and fills out the form. If they want to learn more about the office space, the system collects their information, passes it to the appropriate people and then it calls either the attendant or the member that the visitor wants to see. The person the system calls will be at the door in short order.

Problem Solved.

To participate in the training, call 507-726-4248 at about 3:00 pm.  The passcode is 100567#.  There are no additional expenses for the call outside of your usual charges from your telephone carrier, which means it could be free.

If you would like us to look at your website and provide you help during the call, be one of the first to register by calling me at 615-479-7518.

Do You Want to Help Your Neighbors Recover?

Do You Want to Make Nashville a Great Place to Live?

Items being collected:

• diapers
• baby formula
• heavy trash bags
• bottled water
• masks, work gloves
• peanut butter
• fruit cups, bananas, apples
• small toiletries (tooth paste, soap, deodorant)
• mold retardants (green friendly only)

If there are any late breaking news items, you can check out the page www.asitethatworks.com/flood/  (As of noon today, this is the same content in both places.)

Thank you for your assistance.

The following news is based on some items I compiled in an email for some out-of-town family and friends. I hope my out of town followers find it interesting.  It is not meant to be all inclusive of all of the entire situation.  It is just one perspective.

Those of served by Nashville water have been asked to conserve water because they have closed a treatment facility until further notice due to the fact that they cannot operate it under the flooding conditions. (I really need a shower after 2 days without one and I have to go out in public today, so I will have to get a quick one.)

Sunday I had been surfing a few of the TV stations to get a sense of what is actually happening. Here are some things of interest from that evening–with some updates along the way:

• Sunday evening they evacuated Opryland Hotel as a “precautionary measure;” I thought they said they had 1500 guests at the moment. I also thought the spokesperson said most of the other hotels in Nashville were full. Water is in the parking lot and possibly in the Opry Mills mall (former Opryland) (The TV reported many of them McGavock High School) They said they were evacuating because of a power outage. I later heard that they have some concerns about a nearby levee. They ended up with 6-10 ft of water in the hotel. They had to do water rescues at the nearby Wyndham Resort. Briley Parkway near the hotel was flooded over as well as the subdivisions in the area.
• At dark on Sunday, the interstate(I-40) is covered by the Harpeth river (impassable) in at least two places. I watched video of them bringing a police helicopter in to rescue a pregnant woman stranded between these two points on Channel 5. The Channel 4 Website has a video of some of this stuff labeled “Flooding in Belleuve” (there spelling mistake). (This is not apparent on the TDOT smartway maps—they are listing everything as flooded—which is not technically accurate.) (I think this water has now gone down.)
• Sunday evening they were evacuating a subdivision near this area in Bellevue by boat; They expected to be doing this all night, but they stopped a couple of hours later presumably all people who wanted out have been evacuated. We have a church member who has an elderly family member in that part of the county that they cannot locate or contact.
• (My mother-in-law actually lives a block or two from an area just upstream in an area called river plantation. Her home is OK, but just a couple of blocks away, water was up to the tops of carports and one of her two exit points by road was flooded.)
• Kingston Springs was/is cut off on at least two sides (West of Nashville on the Harpeth River.)
• There are no businesses open in the tourist district below 4th next to the river Sunday night–in the confusion of things; I am not sure if this turned out to be accurate. Some first ground floors ended up flooding and many downtown basements flooded from water coming in from underground.
• The city has had to close parts of downtown to pedestrians at various times. (On Sunday evening the Corp of Engineers was insisting that they would be able to control the river stage and keep it from actually flooding.)
• Sunday night they reported that they were evacuating a low lying business district called Metro Center—where I levee was leaking. Monday morning a radio station in the area (WPLN) was off the air, but another business I know about–the owner was there. Monday night they were trying to figure out what to do with the food stored at the Second Harvest Food Bank in this area.
• A major quarry west of town near the Cumberland river has filled with flood waters from the Cumberland. (It was impressive to see on the TV—though it may not sound like it.)
• Many people have been told they could not/should not buy flood insurance because they are not in the 100 year flood plain—yet they are flooding.
• Franklin (or Williamson County) has a mandatory curfew from 6:00 pm Sunday until sometime Monday.
• The river going through Centerville (The Buffalo or the Duck) is cresting at least 5-10 ft higher than the previous record, set in the early part of the 1900’s.
• The commuter train depot (with the train present) is flooded. The adjoining lot holding MTA buses is also flooded.
• On Sunday the Red Cross spokes person was saying that they would not turn anyone away. Moments later the TV station was saying that at one of the shelters, there is absolutely no room for any more cars in the parking lot (and essentially saying they are turning folks away.)
• The garage under the Publix where Allison works has flooded, which shut off their electrical supply Sunday and another time or two. They have been operating on backup generator and evidently the freezers/refrigerators have not been working when they do that. They have lost a lot of food that they cannot sell. She has heard that they were taking a lot of extra food out of the Krogers just down the street. Saturday when the flooding began, they had to give customers a chance to get their cars out of the garage.–Yesterday they found an elderly man and woman–one behind the Publix and one behind the Krogers just up the street from the flooding that happened on Richland Creek. At one point it appears that Publix was the only Grocery in the immediate vicinity that was open. People were buying a lot of snack food and beer on Saturday and Sunday.
• The Natchez Trace Parkway is/was closed for part of the distance.
• One farm had to evacuate 100 horses (Between Nashville and Franklin)
• Saturday they had a house or a trailer float into I-24 in Antioch. In one of the videos, for a short while you could see cars literally bobbing in the interstate. There were possibly over 100 cars stranded. They had these removed by 6:00 pm Sunday.
• They have set new records for height of the pool for Old Hickory Lake (Just above downtown and Opry Hotel.)
• The GooGoo Dolls concert at the Ryman has been postponed at least one night.
• They reported 600 water rescues so far by Sunday Evening; I thought I heard 1,000 yesterday.
• Vanderbilt Childeren’s Hospital has been have trouble with flooding in its basement—which has caused then to cancel all elective surgeries. (I think they had to move some of their patients.)– (As of Sunday evening)
• They did a bunch impressive rescues on Richland Creek much earlier Sunday near Charlotte, fairly near our house.
• Some roads with damaged bridges could be closed for weeks (Including some important commuter routes).
• Our church canceled services Sunday morning (It is near an area called Richland Creek that had dramatic flooding early this morning.)
• The mayor has been asking people to not travel any more than they have to since Saturday–they would still prefer us to stay at home–but we want to get back to normal. The state offices are officially closed today. (They were open Monday).
• In Mount Pleasant (Southwest of Columbia) , a water main had broken that they cannot find. They are asking people to boil water. They now have a similar situation in Erin (Houston County between Waverly and Clarksville/Dover)
• I have seen several pictures of twisted rail roads. In Franklin a rail road bridge is supposedly damaged.
• All of this and the news crews have hardly gotten out of Davidson County.
• As another interesting logistic note—The city of Nashville provides everyone a huge trash can and a huge recycling bin so that they use special trucks with automatic arms to dump trash. Many of these have floated away. It took several months to unroll the project when they first did—many of these will need to be replaced.
• They just had a interesting report on Channel 4. George McIntyre was a head coach at Vanderbilt for at least 8 years. He lives in a part of River Plantation (in Bellevue) that was flooding. He has MS. His son lives in Green Hills, which is normally a 15-20 minute drive. His son took 2 hours to drive to his Dad’s home from Green Hills. Once he got to River Plantation he had to swim to get to his parents house. Since his Dad could not walk he no idea how to get him out. He said a prayer and a photographer for The Tennessean came by. They then floated Coach George McIntyre out on an air mattress. (This is evidently what he sleeps on.)
• The bridge that connects downtown Centerville (Hickman County) to the rest of the world went under water Sunday Evening; so I am told the town is cut-off.
• They tell us that the Cumberland River has now crested in Nashville. However, they sandbagged the remaining water treatment plant last night. We are still at half capacity. We won’t be back to full capacity until the additional treatment plant in Donelson is out of the flood and they can assess it. Since this flooded before the old Opryland complex flooded and since both are near Donelson–I imagine it will be a few days.

One of the big concerns of the publishing industry is that they cannot ignore the huge efficiency gains of publishing electronically to devices like Kindles and IPads.  However, many books are sold via knowledgeable store clerks at bricks and mortar stores.  These clerks do a lot of reading and generally have an idea of what books they think people will buy.  They are major purchasing influencers.

Nevertheless, the competition to be efficient has gotten so stiff that truly local, independent books stores are hard to find.  Publishers are in a significant quandary.  Their sales model depends on bricks and mortar, and their profits will likely depend on electronic delivery.

I think the only way out is to use Social Media.  I cannot say exactly what form it will take since Social Media is still evolving.  However, if sales is about getting people to talk, and you cannot afford a store, what other option is there?  So my advice to publishers is to start experimenting with social media.  (BTW, if any publishers stumble this far, A Site that Works, can build custom social networks for you to try.)  Create sites where people can share their book experiences, what they liked and what they did not, what other books they also read (with more links, some buy buttons etc.)

Some other pieces of information that I thought were interesting: Evidently, the Kindle and IPad are built around the notion that the author/publishing house have to agree to publish the book through the device and make specific contracts.  If I understand this plan correctly, it is a departure for Apple from the very successful model for ITunes. In another odd twist, Google is thinking of entering the market with a device that will not be tied to specific contract.  (Seems like that is what Apple did with ITunes and the IPod.)

In a race there is only one person who crosses the finish line first.  (OK, there are a couple of exceptions every so often in a short race.)  Most of the racers finish in the pack somewhere; there is always someone better than them.

The typical racer has to take satisfaction in doing their personal best on a given day and occasionally setting a personal record.  It takes daily hard work to reach these types of goals.

Likewise the typical blogger is not going to demonstrate that he or she is the absolute leader in service or advancement in their profession.  In nearly all cases someone does some aspect of our business better than we do.

But that is why we small businesses carve out market niches.

Few of us can compete against the Wal-Marts of the world on price; we do not have the bargaining power to purchase goods that cheap.  We have to offer better quality, more unique items, personal service, or outstanding knowledge or intuitive sense about part of an industry.

If you blog honestly and repeatedly and focus on how you serve your customers, your blog will get recognition and it will demonstrate what it is that you do uniquely well.  While you may not “come in first,” you will likely become more “real” to your clients and potential clients than a static web page ever could.  In the end after working at it consistently, you may set your own personal bests for your business goals.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 13th, 2010 at 10:02 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.

Traditional web developers create slideshows in flash because it is very reliable, looks great, and almost everyone has the flash player.

However, people who specialize in how to make sites that rank well in the search engines tell that the search engines do not reliably find content in flash files, in spite of eager announcements by Google and Adobe.  So the captions on your website and the words in the pictures will not necessarily be read and catalogued by search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.  So the content could actually hurt your search engine rankings.

The solution is to use a javascript library like JQuery to produce the slide show.  The individual pictures and any key word rich captions that you want to use will be in the regular text flow of the page, which means there will be no confusion about whether the search engines will find the information.

Another advantage of using a library like JQuery is that it is designed to work across multiple browsers, unlike hand-coded javascript, which may not work in all browsers unless you include a lot of “hacks” for individual browsers.

You can see samples of projects coded by A Site that Works using JQuery at http://arenalawfirm.com, http://factoryatfranklin.com, http://asitethatworks.com/design-samples-2/

I find it interesting how some events in my life seem to add meaning to news stories and color how I interpret things. Once such event was a week to 10 days that I spent in Haiti as part of a mission trip sponsored by the Tennessee Region of the Disciples of Christ some years ago.

I will never forget visiting in a church in Port-Au-Prince. My arm was braced across the short aisle to my right, feeling the pressure of many small children pressing as hard as they could to be the first on in line to receive a dime store toy from the bag my wife had on my left. I am just glad they were small children, otherwise, the mass of humanity would have swarmed our bag and no toys could have been distributed. The elders of the church were so embarrassed by the actions of these children, desperate for a little toy.

I also remember riding in a van which often had to slow down to probably 5 or 10 miles an hour just to ease past huge potholes in roads that varied from passable to nearly impassible several times in a few miles. I remember learning that we had to drink bottled water for everything, even though there was a formerly properly functioning water main in most places we visited. In so many places there wer unfinished buildings with rebar sticking up so that construction of the next story could resume when money became available again. There were the squatters taking up residences in “nice” homes that were partially finished. The owner’s being forced to give up their property unless they forced people out by gun point.

In my opinion, many of these problems are an outgrowth of several things:

• Haiti is one of the only countries to be established by a slave revolt
• Haiti has been racked with historic racism and hatred between whites, blacks, and mulatoes.
• Many, if not most of the powerful people in Haiti’s government have historically only been interested in lining their own pockets.

I am so glad to live in America where the corruption is much less.

Against this backdrop, I met some amazing Haitians who lead church services nightly, lead an ecumenical church group, had real jobs during the day, and were creating programs to educate and train their fellow Haitians. These amazing, amazing men probably get by on just a few hours of sleep a night.

Tonight when I look at the news about the reported 7.0 earthquake, I do not wonder about whether Port-Au-Prince is devastated; I know there will be rubble in the streets. The news says hundreds are feared dead. I fear thousands are dead. The news media reports that over 90% are Roman Catholic, but I wonder how many of them will ask which Voodoo incarnated spirit caused this terrible crisis and who will use that knowledge to their benefit.

I also wonder what is happening to those amazing leaders I met. Are they alive? Did their houses and churches survive? What about the Disciples of Christ missionaries stationed there? What about the makeshift markets and bazaars in the various parts of town? What about the churches that served us bottled cokes with straws? What about the guesthouse where we stayed with the huge fig tree out back and the neighborhood kindergarten classes? What about…

• Low Cost Provider (i.e. Walmart, Amazon)
• Brand Leader (i.e. Bose, BMW)
• Service Provider (i.e. Disney, Nordstrom)

The Low Cost Provider is someone who competes primarily on price for a particular level of quality. The Brand Leader is the company that delivers the latest innovations in their market space first. The customers may be buying the “latest and greatest” or a brand that gives them status. The Service Provider understands their customers’ needs and desires before the customer does and treats them appropriately. The customers of this type of company are willing to invest their money in someone who will truly take care of them or guide them in their selection.

Your website copy should reflect your primary business style. Otherwise, it may confuse visitors or attract the wrong customers to you. For instance,

• A Low Cost Provider could have price and product comparisons and statements on the home page as well as featured product specials.
• The Brand Leader may want to use the best graphics and special effects throughout their site. The look must speak to their core audience. Does it explain what the “latest and greatest” is?
• The Service Provider may want to include a blog about what they do for their clients on a regular basis. Great site navigation and ease of use should be paramount.

Does your website reflect one of these core competencies?

These situations are not pretty.

As I mentioned in the last blog entry, it can make good sense to have someone handle your domain name registration. If this situation represents you, then do the next best thing. Make sure you are listed as the official the owner of all your domains.

Your first step is to do a “whois” lookup. One good way to do this is to go to http://whois.domaintools.com/.

As of 11/11/09 there was a single text box on the page for you to enter the domain name you are interested in. Enter a domain name in that box; then press the “Lookup” Button.

The page that comes up has several tabs. You are most interested in the “Whois Record” tab.

As you scroll down you will see a line that says “Registrant” followed by a name and an address. (Not to be confused with the “Registrant Search” line above.) This section shows the owner. The email address of the admin or technical contact receives important emails regarding changes to the account. For instance, transferring the domain name to a new registrar is a multi-step process that involves a series of emails to the email address of the administrative or technical contacts for purposes of approving or disapproving certain steps.

If you are not listed as the domain owner, then work with your webhost while you are still on good terms to ensure that you are listed as the owner of the domain name.