The Holiday Bridal Show has returned. For those of you who remember the previous site I designed for them, this is taking it to an all new level. Sporting a new design and a sprinkling of AJAX throughout, the new HBS site has a more integrated feel. While the site is only available as a “first preview” beta to previous participants, I’ve included a small screenshot of the new design below.

I joked with my wife while designing this one that I had to get ‘in the mood’. So for days at a time, I could be found listening to Nat King Cole and Amy Grant Christmas Classics. Oh, what I do to create the perfect site!

Hamner Ridge is one of our newest designs. Created to be simple, it showcases information for a new luxury development in the Shelbyvile area. Featuring a clean-cut design, the site’s main goal is to generate web leads for the projects developers.

Check it out!

We’ve been busy lately putting the finishing touches on a website for a truly unique realtor. ScottTheRealtor.com is a great design and useful for finding homes for sale in central Indiana as well as a resource for those looking to move into the area. Scott Diehl (the Realtor) wanted his site to reflect his laid back, yet professional attitude toward selling real estate. We did that by embedding a flash based media player, pleasing colors and graphics.

As I said, we’re still putting the finishing touches on this one, but when you get a chance, check it out and let me know what you think.

Lately, I have been very busy with some big projects and in the next couple of days, I’ll begin to give you a sneak peek at some of these projects and new websites that we’ve finished.

So be patient.. and come back soon.

My wife sent an email out about her new blog that I designed and here's a few responses that she received.

Your blog is amazing. Kudos to your John. He is very talented. The colors just pop.

I love your blog!

By the way, if you are in need of a redesign of your blog, shoot me an email at johnpwooton@gmail.com or click the contact link below my blog header.

Okay, so I am designing a blog for my wife and ran across this awesome plugin for Wordpress that allows you to publish posts as WYSIWYG instead of the usual text based method. This is a big time saver for all you bloggers out there that use Wordpress. Kudos to Mudbomb

A big announcement from Microsoft yesterday that the newest SQL Server (2008) is now available as a Community Technology Preview. Most notable in the release is the new Language Integrated Query (LINQ) and incredible Entity Framework which allows data to be organized in a conceptual model rather than in logical tables.

Imagine this… it’s 12 noon. You are just a month away from a major product launch. All estimates say that your product, out of the hundreds of similar products, will already garner more than 1% of the market the day it launches. Everything, in your mind, is great.

Suddenly, an editor from a popular blog that garners a major readership receives a bogus email from a supposed “trustworthy” source at your company, that the product you will launch in a month will not be released for another 5-6 months. Not missing a beat, they post the information to their blog and within moments it spreads like wildfire across the net. It spreads so fast that within less time than it takes you to brush your teeth, your company’s stock has lost $4 billion in market cap.

Think this is just a story? You’re wrong! Just last week the editors at Engadget received this same email talking about Apple’s iPhone, saying that it wouldn’t be released to the public until the Fall when the company is scheduled to release it next month. What happened? In 6 minutes the company lost $4 billion in market cap! Can you imagine?

The power of the online publicist is powerful. An angry blogger can tear a company down in a matter of minutes as we’ve seen and the readership can lead all the way from Wall Street to your front door. So with all this in mind, how do you combat this and stay ontop of your reputation with bloggers, the media, and your customers.

It’s simple… Online Reputation Monitoring.

We now offer a service to help you know when good, bad or indifferent news, opinions, and information is available online. With the success of blogs and RSS, it’s possible to be able to know within moments of new items concerning you or your company are made available. With Online Reputation Monitoring, you can be alerted instantly and more importantly react quicker to information that affects your business.

Like in the instance of Apple. Within 6 minutes the damage was done, but because of good contacts in the industry and quick reaction, their stock rebounded in the same amount of time.

If you’d like to know more or get started with Online Reputation Monitoring, click here to contact us today

This might be a simple solution, but when I was first starting Sql Server development, it was a difficult problem to fix. User instances are new to Sql Server 2005 and the easiest definition is that user instances allow those who are not administrators to attach a Sql Server database to an application. This is necessary if you are attaching a database using Visual Studio rather than the Sql Server Management Studio. It’s only enabled in the express edition, so if you’ve spent money on the full version of Sql Server, don’t worry.

I first noticed this when I tried to attach a new Sql Server database to an app I was working with a while back. Here’s how you fix it:

The easiest way to solve this problem is to se the Sql Server Management Studio.

1. Log in to Management Studio (Regular or the Express version, it doesn’t matter). Connect to the database engine for your local machine. Generally you can use the Windows authentication, although if you are managing the server remote, you’ll have to use the Sql Server Authentication.

2. Click the button to create a new query.

3. In the query box, type the following:

sp_configure  ‘user instances enabled’, 1; RECONFIGURE

4. Right mouse click and select the option to run the query.

5. It should come back successful

The only other way to change this is through sp_configure. You can click here for more information.

I found my favorite new tool. Since I have limited time, I can’t spend all the time to learn different programming languages. Because I learned .net using vb, I find it very frustrating when I can’t always manually convert c# to use in my apps. So, I just found this and it will significantly reduce the time I spend on my apps Plus, you can convert back to c# from vb if you so choose. Check it out and let me know your thoughts.