The Marketing Technology Blog

Paul D’Andrea and I met when I worked at ExactTarget. As with many gifted developers, Paul has a creative, artistic side as well. His passion is photography. One of Paul’s photos of a Coyote in a local cemetery is in this month’s Indianapolis Monthly Magazine.

Last Christmas, my son and I purchased a Nikon D40 SLR digital camera for my daughter, Katie. Katie has been taking an interest in photography and we wanted to kick it off right. With my son, Bill, into music and music production, Katie’s never really been the one to get the big ticket items. So Bill and I made it a Katie Christmas and set her up with the works - backpack, camera, a couple lenses, tripod… you name it!

This afternoon was part of Katie’s 14th birthday present - her first photography lesson with Paul. He’s a great teacher - very patient and exceptionally thorough. A 14-year old young lady may not be the best pupil, but Paul really opened up her understanding of the camera and its capabilities.

After the sitting lesson, Paul and Katie walked around Monument Circle here in Indianapolis. It was a beautiful day. The photos that Katie took with Paul’s guidance were breathtaking. Here are my favorites from today. If you’d like, check out the full set on Flickr.

Paul said that this was his favorite of Katie’s. She framed the monument within some tree branches that had lights on them:

I’m no photographer, but when I pick up the Nikon and take shots none of them look as beautiful as these! Katie is going to take some more photos over the next few weeks and then go to another lesson with Paul to review them and learn a little more.

If you live around Indianapolis and want to get the most out of your Digital SLR Camera, be sure to give Paul a call for some lessons!

When I was first hired at Patronpath, I was horrified (yes, that’s accurate) at the website that was up. It was pure flash, no pages, no back-end optimization (although SWFObject was loaded), no means of updating the content… and most of all, no traffic.

It was a site that cost plenty, with no return on investment. When I approached the agency who developed the site, there were no apologies. In fact, when I complained about the SEO, they offered another pricey contract to optimize the site. That was the final straw! No agency with any conscience would build a site that no one can find.

Enough of a rant! Mark Gallo and I worked with our Branding and Marketing partners at Kristian Andersen and had them design a site for us, which is implemented with Imavex’s content management system. Kristian has some incredible talent in his organization.

We went through a few iterations of the site before settling on this layout. I believe it speaks to the professionalism of our company as well as the strength that our brand is beginning to gain momentum with!

The site is now live, and it’s absolutely beautiful and very simple to navigate. (In case you’re wondering - yes, blogging will be a feature in the future). Here’s a screenshot:

I’m glad this was one aspect we were able to deliver on before hiring our new Director of Marketing, Marty Bird! I would have hated to have handed off the old site.

Maybe it was the quad-shot non-fat mocha? The hot lights? The megascreen? The ‘reverse’ auditorium’? Maybe all of the above - but I was nervous when I quickly spread through my presentation today at BlogIN. In fact, my heart was pounding pretty good before I got up to speak. That’s unusual for me. As soon as I started sweating from the lights, though, I noticed my voice shaking. Ugh.

Weird - because it was a comparably small audience with many folks that have previously seen me speak. I definitely felt a great connection to the audience, but was still nervous. Perhaps I’ve had a such a great string of events that it was time that I got stirred up a little.

Correction to my presentation - I said 160 characters for micro-blogging, it’s 140. Doh! 160 is SMS.

Public speaking isn’t always easy but I really appreciate any opportunity to speak. Perhaps the key issue on this one was the venue. I don’t think I’ve actually done a presentation with such a huge screen and the audience ABOVE me rather than below. I’ve read a lot that a practice walk-through at your venue is always a good method of easing your nerves. I think that may have helped a lot today.

After we cut from the Auditorium and moved to the sessions in IUPUI’s classrooms (that were INCREDIBLY equipped!), all was good. I can’t explain what a feeling it is to see someone’s confused face and eventually turn that into a ‘Oh!’ and see the lights turn on. That’s what I LOVE about doing these events. This technology is NOT easy for most people - and I really appreciate every chance I get to help someone through it!

Redirect Advice for WordPress, converting to Permalinks

I may have given one piece of bum advice to Lorraine Ball. Ken Zweigal (who is a master with SEO) gave me an odd look and may have identified my mistake. Thankfully for me, he didn’t rip me.

Lorraine was converting her blog from normal querystring links to permalinks (where you see actual keywords and phrases in the URL for each post rather than a ?p=1234). Permalinks with Post Slugs can make quite a difference in the Search Engine ranking of your content.

I said that Lorraine HAD to put some redirects for each of her posts in her .htaccess file. It’s actually not a requirement to do that - Wordpress will still find and display the appropriate article. However, it is good to still use the redirect to notify the Search Engine that the link to the article is now the new permalink.

Maybe next time I’ll cut the caffeine before the event and get used to the heat of the lights.

I’m sitting here at IUPUI’s School of Informatics (a beautiful building) and awaiting the start of BlogIN. You can still make it if you want to drop by! Here’s our list of attendees that have registered:

• Adam Small
• Rupa Chatterji
• Laura Arnold
• Juan Carlos Carrasquel
• Chris Baggott
• Michelle Hartz
• Randy Mershon
• Douglas Karr
• Bruce LaDuke
• Kevin Makice
• Rick Wilkerson
• Bruce Allen
• Woody Collins
• Toni Deckers
• Stephen James
• Barbara Jones
• Anita Sloat
• Steve Hall
• Joyce Boadt
• Jason Bean
• Roland Cole
• Amy Hensley
• Pam Weaver
• Faith Wesstrom
• Paula Henry
• Scott Abel
• Deb New
• Lois Wyant
• Joseph Kerschbaum
• Erik Deckers
• Amber Benedict
• Bree Dunscombe
• Linda S Fitzgerald
• Chi Sherman
• Joseph Dager
• Ken Zweigel
• Lorraine Ball
• John Uhri
• Noah Coffey
• Aaron Renn

It’s a beautiful day! I took this picture as I walked in: