Period Three Blog

Jul172008

Capitalism at its worst

Posted by Gene in Random Stuff

This just hurts my head: Converse Chuck Taylor ‘Kurt Cobain’ Sneaker

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Jul142008

Another Client Website Launch

Posted by Gene in Our Clients

Interstate Transportation has been around since 1947, they are probably the oldest establishment in North & South Carolina to sell and still selling buses. We are proud of this website, we think it will help catch Interstate Transportation up competitively with other Bus Sales companies in the South East. Go check out the site.

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Jul102008

Client Website Launch

Posted by Gene in Uncategorized, Our Clients

We are happy to let everyone know about our newest client website launch: The South Carolina National Heritage Corridor.

The South Carolina National Heritage Corridor extends 240 miles across South Carolina, stretching from the mountains of Oconee County, along the Savannah River, to the port city of Charleston. It is divided into four regions and contains the following counties: Abbeville, Aiken, Anderson, Bamberg, Barnwell, Charleston, Colleton, Dorchester, Edgefield, Greenwood, McCormick, Oconee, Orangeburg and Pickens. The 14 counties of the Heritage Corridor offer a cross-section of the state’s historical, cultural, and natural resources that tell the vibrant story of South Carolina’s centuries-long evolution and culture.

Check it out: sc-heritagecorridor.org

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Jul032008

Colamovies.com reboot

Posted by Gene in Period Three News

The time has finally come. We’ve relaunched Colamovies.com, we’ve been working on it for a long while in between client projects. This is truly a labor of love for us.

It features:
Movie times (as always)
Membership sign up
User reviews
More content on the movie details (trailers)
A Blog
An email newsletter
and some other cool stuff…

Now go and review some movies!

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Jul022008

Flash can now be indexed by Google/Yahoo, insert sarcasm, Yipee!

Posted by Gene in Marketing, Web Development

Adobe announced yesterday that they have helped Google and Yahoo to index flash files on the web and it’s gotten a lot of coverage.

Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.

As Jay says, “let’s keep this under wraps“. I agree.

I understand why Flash is so tempting, it’s neat after all. But I still fail to understand why your “rich Internet applications” need indexing? Please advise…

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Jun302008

Congress in a Wordle

Posted by Gene in Random Stuff

This “word cloud” is an easily comprehensible overview of the words that have been used most often so far in this session of Congress. The bigger the word, the more frequently it has been spoken in the House and Senate:

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Jun252008

12 Rules for Success From Tiger Woods

Posted by Gene in Business

I don’t care if you like Tiger Woods or not, if you hate Golf or not or simply don’t think he can be motivational because he is young or plays golf or whatever… If you’ve ever tried to play the game of Golf in even a remotely serious manner you will find that it takes a great deal of focus and you actually need to practice to get good at it. This list that Alex Shalman has put together on Tiger’s rule book for success inspired me. You can directly apply this to business and life in general.
1. Constant and Never Ending Improvement
2. A Bigger Plan
3. Embrace Defeat
4. Take Life Lightly
5. Don’t Stop
6. Live Your Own Expectations
7. Do What You Love
8. Focus
9. Pay It Forward
10. Learn From All Mistakes
11. Celebrate Your Victories
12. Pay No Attention To Naysayers
You can read the full post here.

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Jun042008

Newsletters and Spam

Posted by Gene in Email Marketing

The Neilson/Normal Group released a report on email newsletters, they reviewed just about every aspect of email newsletters and how we use them as marketers and recipients alike. One thing they did have to say is that you should keep it brief (people scan not read in detail) and only send one when you have something to say. The big detractor is Spam in the wild. Here’s what they had to say:

There’s a little good news (but mostly bad news) about the impact of spam on email newsletters. The good news is that users in our recent studies were better able to differentiate legitimate opt-in newsletters from unsolicited messages than they could in the past. In our earlier newsletter usability studies, users sometimes confused the two. Now, spam has a very prominent profile in terms of popular awareness, press coverage, and the sheer amount of it hitting inboxes. Users have thus developed a reasonable understanding of the spam phenomenon as opposed to simply being baffled about unexpected messages.

The bad news is that the increased burden on email users has caused people to become even more stressed and impatient when processing their inbox. Users have less tolerance for newsletters that waste their time.

We have also found that people often use their spam filters as a shortcut to eliminating newsletters they no longer want. Instead of unsubscribing, which users often view as too cumbersome, they simply tell their spam-blocker that the newsletter is spam. Voila, that newsletter no longer shows up in the inbox.
The fact that many users will declare a newsletter to be spam when they tire of it has terrifying implications: legitimate newsletters might get blacklisted and thus be undeliverable to other subscribers who still welcome new issues. This is a compelling reason to increase the usability of the unsubscribe process: better to lose a subscriber than to be listed as spam.

So, before you just “blast” out that next newsletter, make sure it has relevant, timely content and make sure it works (test it)…

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May272008

NES Controller Coffee Table - it actually works!

Posted by Gene in Random Stuff

This guy went all out on his Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) game controller coffee table. Very nice work my friend, I’d buy one if you sold them. Turns out you can even play your NES with the dang thing.

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May212008

Webmonkey is back

Posted by Gene in Web Development

I remember first starting out designing and coding websites like over 10 years ago, webmonkey was a great resource for me at the time. It’s pretty much sat stagnant since then without much improvement. Now it’s been relaunched and rebooted.

What Is Webmonkey?

is an online resource for web developers. Here, you’ll find tutorials, tips and advice for designing and building websites and programming web applications. We have articles for beginners, professionals, students, grandparents, bloggers and programmers of all skill levels.

We’ve been around since 1996, when the site was launched by the staff of Wired Digital, the online home of Wired magazine, Wired News and the search engine Hotbot. After being run by different entities for a number of years, Webmonkey rejoined the Wired.com family in April 2008.

What happened to the old site?

Webmonkey.com has been completely redesigned. We’ve taken many of the features of the old Webmonkey — the daily Monkey Bites blog, the reference library and the bulk of the tutorials — and given them a new home. When you browse the new website, you’ll notice that the vast majority of the content is now hosted on a wiki.

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