We’ve just finished up the bulk of the new site for Kristie Blankenhorn, a Realtor with the F.C. Tucker Company here in Indianapolis. Kristie came to us wanting to something unique that would showcase the wide variety of homes she sells as well as the diverse array of areas she can serve. For Kristie, we created a unique design that focused on the Carmel Arts and Design District, but showcased community information for the entire surrounding areas, including Carmel, Westfield, Zionsville, Fishers and Indianapolis. In additon to an embedded IDX property search, custom featured property section and testimonials rotator on the home page, we also did some custom development work including a custom mortgage calculator.

You can view her new website at http://www.kristieblankenhorn.com.

Google Ad Planner was designed as a free media planning tool as it relates to advertising. Large corporations and advertising agencies use media planning tools with detailed and sophisticated data to formulate plans for their clients. This new tool from Google ties in data from their search results, anonymous Google Analytics data and anonymous opt-in data from third party resources to give the same tools to small and medium businesses.

The first thing you’ll notice when you log into the Ad Planner is that you have two options. You cna either start researching or you can create a media plan. Since we’ll cover the researching phase as part of creating a media plan, I went ahead and started to put together a plan for a fictitious company, Good Guy Realtors. 

So the first step in the process is to name your media plan:

Click on ‘Create Media Plan’ and give it whatever name you’d like and click ‘Save’.

This will bring you back to the main screen. Next, you’ll perform some research, so go ahead and click on ‘Begin Research’.

You’ll be brought to a screen that several search options for you to choose from. In the sidebar of the page, you have filtering options including the ability to filter down to gender, age, education, household income and keywords. For instance, for Good Guy Realtors, I wanted to filter down to websites that had some element of real estate on it since I don’t want to waste my advertising dollars on anything outside of real estate.

Once I have the filters focused on the demographics that I want, I can then use the main pane of the screen to choose the websites that I want to focus on. In this section you’ll notice the following columns:

• Site name: This is usually the url of the website 
• Category: This is a generalization of the overall category of the website. Note: At first glance you might think that this has to relate to your desired criteria. This isn’t always the case. For example, Yahoo has a category of ‘Web Portals’ but they also focus on real estate, jobs, personals, music, shopping and more. 
• Comp Index (or composition index): This is the concentration of the audience relative to the entire country. Because you are filtering down by country (US by default). For example, say that you are looking for men ages 18-24. If you returned a comp index of 200, it would mean that you are twice as likely to find men between the ages of 18-24 on that site than you are elsewhere on the internet in that specific company.
• Reach: This is a number calculated by Ad Planner that tells you the estimated total percentage of internet users you can reach on this site that match your demographic.
• Unique Visitors: This number reflects the total number of visitors within your demographic on that website. This number changes with the changes in the demographic.
• Unique Visitors (Country): This reflects the estimated visitors within that desired country for the website.
• Pageviews: Total number of pageviews for that website within the last 30 days.
• Formats: If a website offers advertising through Google Adwords, then this column would show the types of ads that the website could display. Note: A website doesn’t have to participate in Adwords for you to get the benefit. For instance, many websites use a third party ad network or require you to contact them for ad rates. Hovering over an icon in this column will display a list of ad sizes available for that ad format.
• Imp/Day - This number reflects the total number of ad impressions per day on the participating website (if they display ads through Google Adwords)

Muddie Puttie is a revolutionary product that helps floral and plant designers and train enthusiasts create reslistic landscapes and potted plants using a formula based product that dries to a hard crust. We created a design for Muddie Puttie based off of the design they had previously for their promotional peices. We programmed the site with a gallery of images provided by Erin Hession and a basic shopping cart powered by Paypal. You can view their new website at http://www.muddieputtie.com

I have the best wife in the world! Happy Birthday Erin. You mean the world to me and to so many!

I love you, baby!

Since this is a new update, if anyone notices any issues, feel free to contact me at johnpwooton@gmail.com and let me know.

Today also proved to be frustrating for many as two big problems plagued Apple. The first of which was the activation problems with the iPhones trying to update to the new 3G activators. The last step in the process was for the phones to connect to the iTunes App Store which was overloaded and couldn’t handle the traffic. The result was a bunch of bricked iPhones that couldn’t be used until the Apple network traffic died down.

The second was the upgrade issue with the iPod Touches (which I have). Apple made links available for iPod Touch users to upgrade to the 2.0 firmware (which enables the iPod Touch users the ability to add apps from the App Store), but it turned out to be dead, leading to a page that didn’t exist in the iTunes Store. Reports then came in that the link was made available, but when I tested out the update, nothing really happened. I spoke to an Apple rep who mentioned that the update was being taken offline and would be restored shortly. Hopefully I’ll have some good news to report on it shortly.

Nothing yet is known on how the content in flash websites will compete with other websites in the search results, but this is the first step.

Read the full story here.