I’m pleased to announce that the Manna website has been added to the ExpressionEngine Showcase.  Earlier this year I redesigned the site using a free template found on Free CSS Templates, and I think the result is a tight little site that serves the church well, allows anyone to contribute, and didn’t really take that much time to develop (fully redesigned over a weekend).

I do note I need to revise the project writeup and screenshots here in my portfolio....

Just a quick client sucess story to post today.  A little over a year ago Boyink Interactive launched a new ExpressionEngine site for The Villa Passalacqua, replacing a Flash-based site.  I just got an update from the owner of the Villa, and his traffic has increased from 35 average visitors per day to 700. 

For anyone considering implementing a site fully in Flash I’d just have to ask if it’s worth missing out on that much traffic.

How’s that for an attention-grabbing headline?  Mostly I just wanted to use the phrase namby-pamby to see what kind of search traffic it’ll bring…

Here’s what’s on my mind today - and this is inspired by this thread over at Godbit which is around the issue of, on a church site, having a member blogroll - a list of links to the blogs published by members of the church.  The main issue is around the content of those blogs and how they might or might not reflect well on the church, and what the church might do to mitigate any potential damage through the use of link agreements, positioning statements, review committees, moderators, having the blogroll be located seperately from the main site, etc.

It’s distressing to me, and I think the overall terrible state of church websites can be - partially at least - traced to some of these issues.

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Hello! We are here to give your website a marketing edge over your competition! Because people judge whether to remain on your website within the first 4 seconds, you must grab their attention quickly. There is no better way to do just that than with internet personalities called NetGreeters. Imagine a customer’s surprise when a talking person invites them to personally browse your site during those four crucial seconds.

See this “marketing edge” in action here, link provided by Jambor-ee..  I can imagine site visitors being surprised to get a talking head, alright—and then annoyed that there is seemingly no “close, go away or shut up” button, clicking on it in frustration takes you to the site of the company who produces the...thing...and the talking head covers up most of the links on the page which forces you to wait before proceeding.

This is nothing more than a Flash intro overlaid onto the home page with no “Skip Intro” button...and really - if all you have to say is “welcome and there’s alot of great information here”, then you’re simply wasting people’s time with something that could be done via a photo and and a paragraph of text.

Oh - and please...if you’re going to do audio on a website record it somewhere without all the distracting background noise....

This week the Boyink Headquarters have shifted 55 miles north here in Michigan where we’re staying at a lake-front cottage for a few days.  While the plan was to use the internet connection at the cottage to continue working, the whims of technology were not in our favor.  My laptop wouldn’t connect to the network, and the PC at the cottage has a habit of spontaneously rebooting.  This isn’t the first time the so-called “working vacation” approach has failed.  Thank goodness for the local coffee shops with free wireless connections.

At any rate, since I couldn’t work I decided to try fishing.  I have to tell you—I know very little about fishing.  All I’ve ever really done is the hook, bobber and worm approach and I’m happy to keep the experience on that simplistic level.  There were some poles at the cottage, one was setup with the necessary tackle so my son and I went and dug up some worms. We spent an hour or so out on the dock, and managed to find a small “hot-spot” where we got nibbles and caught a couple of small sunfish (sunfish being 50% of the species I can identify on sight).

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