I decided to stop punishing the easy logo design clients, and start rewarding them instead by charging hourly creative charges. My creative charge is $70/hour because being creative is as tough as being technical (this is the same rate for my technical skills clients). This charge is at an hour minimum, charged in 15 minute increments, rounded up. So an easy logo can cost $70, a tough case can go for several hundred dollars, and you get to choose how long you want to nitpick over details (and it’s your logo — you SHOULD nitpick over the details!!!). Designing business cards, flyers, post cards, etc. goes under this category.

So what about people who need something easier, less creative?

While it can be time consuming, some clients just need artwork cleanup rather than creatives. If you never received a clean copy of your logo design suitable for imprinted products, or scaling up, Eclectic Tech is charging less for artwork cleanup charges. In-trade (printers, promotional product consultants, screen printers, designers, etc.) the charge is $50/hour. For one-time-only clients, i.e. direct-to-consumer, I’m charging $60/hour. So please come to me if you need your logo or artwork cleaned up for a project. Most artwork doesn’t take more than hour to clean up. Half-hour minimum, charged in 15 minute increments rounded up.

If you give me anything from a vague idealistic concept of what you’re looking for through a rough sketch (back of a cocktail napkin or computer mock-up rough) of what you’re looking for, it’s a logo design charge. If you have finished artwork that just isn’t up to snuff for the project at-hand, needs a text change, a color change, etc. then it’s a “light design” charge and goes under artwork cleanup. If you already have a business card, and you want the exact same design with a change in a phone number or color, the charge is an artwork cleanup charge.

Prices may change in the future after this blog entry. Please check my website for current charges.

My first client for artwork-cleanup is Prisms Promotions — I’ve done almost a dozen cleanup projects for them, and I’ve decided to advertise the service. See my portfolio page or testimonial page for more information on who is using this service.

When searching for a service online, I don’t care if you’re looking for website hosting, website design, logo design, custom graphics, or an alarm company (the only item in this list that I’m not providing), you probably want — or need — to know where the person is.

So how do you figure it out?

I wanted to use a specific set of examples in this post. Top-of-the-search engine results with fantastic prices, and absolutely no phone number or address to be seen on their website. Sites that ended up being in other countries. Websites with blatant grammatical errors that obviously still rake in enough cash to get to the top of Google search results on pay-per-click hot topics that are highly competitive.

But they asked me nicely to remove their website address and information from my blog. So I’m removing it. Not exactly sure what offended them about the post, as they were only a live example and it was true that they were in a foreign country, but I’ll remove it to keep the peace.

Some cliches exist for a reason. “You get what you pay for” is one of them. In a vast sea of choices and no education, people choose the products by lowest price. There’s either too much information, or not enough, to educate the consumer into making informed choices.

There are real dangers in sending your money to a foreign corporation. They can be of the most stellar reputation, 100% honest, hard-working people, but you are still never afforded the same protections and conveniences you have working with someone in the same town or at least the same state. It is much less convenient to do business out-of-state, or out-of-the-country. If it’s out-of-state you have the additional complications of figuring out which state/jurisdiction to interpret your contract in, and where you have to travel to in order to arbitrate disputes. In foreign matters, unless you have the type of money it takes to go to International court, you don’t have legal protections no matter what the contract says.

If you are going to a local company, you can check their mailing address, their reputation, get a real referral from someone you know to someone you know you can trust. You can track their professional affiliations, check the Better Business Bureau to see if there are complaints against them. And more.

So how do you figure out who people really are? There is a database that stores their legal domain registration information. There is real consideration to abolishing this information on the web, but in the meantime the more of us who are using it for legitimate reasons (to check on the idenitity of a service before purchase) the better. This database is accessible at http://www.whois.net/

If you enter theirdomainname.com into Whois you can see their registration record. Enter “theirdomainname” in the field for looking up domain registration data. Make sure the right suffix is selected (”.com”) and click GO!

Not all domains show legal registration information online. The domain owner can hide that information by paying their domain registrar a few extra bucks to make even that anonymous…. Then you need to get into some website gymnastics to figure out who these people are, and I am not sure it’s worthwhile. If they’re hiding, maybe they have something to hide. More often, though, people are banking on ignorance. This blog post is to help some people wake up and smell the scandal. The flip side of this idea: If you run a legitimate business, you should not be anonymous on the web, and prospective clients shouldn’t need to resort to the “whois database” method above, just to figure out where you’re located. I get a few junk mails and a junk fax or 3 for having my information up — the worst is the domain-registration related spam, but that’s a hazard of doing legit business on the web.

I suggest you look at people’s Contact Us page and check that their information matches their WhoIs registration — check their professional affiliations and their memberships in local chambers of commerce. Ask if there have been any complaints against them.

If you’re in the local region, you could ask for a face-to-face with the person you’re doing business with. The only way to see eye-to-eye on any project is to actually be able to look someone in the face.

Moral: You pay for what you get.

Good luck!

It involves several 1.5 & 2 inch 3-ring binders, and Avery (or similar) business card sheets — these sheets hold 10-up — putting cards back-to-back to display on 2 sides makes it 20 cards per page… There also are tabbed business card sheets so you can use some of the sheets as dividers. I also get 100% post-consumer recycled college-ruled 3-ring binder paper, which I keep in clipboards on my desk, normal section dividers, and a set of A-Z section dividers I had laying around for years.

Here’s how I set them up:

One binder (about 1.5 inch right now) is the “Business Cards” binder and that has a section for the Orange County Chamber, Sullivan County Chamber, Orange Networking Alliance, each BNI chapter I visited, Toastmasters, etc. When I meet someone at an event by a specific group, their card goes into that group’s section. Later, when I’m trying to connect people together, all I have to do is remember which group I met someone at to find their card. Within sections, I’m not terribly picky about the order I put them in: most of those groups don’t have enough people/cards in them to get too anal about how to organize the section.

I keep a 2″ binder for warm/hot prospects, a 2″ ring binder for current clients, and a 1.5″ binder for clients “in support.”

Prospect book: I set up the book with a few business card sheets, a plain piece of filler paper for an index, then the A-Z dividers. When a prospect calls, I grab a clipboard and start taking notes on the filler paper (or on 1-sided scrap, more on that later). Then it’s time to file their information. If I have their business card, I slip it into the business card sheet in the front of the book. I write their name & business name, perhaps how they were referred to me, on the index in pencil, underline the letter in their name or business name that I’m filing them under, and file them in the binder in that section. Now when I need to touch base with that prospect, I can easily take the binder off the shelf, start dialing or emailing them just from their card, then turn to the divider section and have my hand-written notes at my fingertips.

If that person becomes a client, their information gets moved to my client book, and their name gets erased from the index in the prospect book. Their business card goes in the front of the client book, and I now use a complete divider section for the client. I still use an index in pencil for the front of the book, but these sections are numbered. I file notes on phone calls, timesheets, contracts, and other documentation in their section. Once the client’s job is finished, they migrate to the In Support book.

All the books are labeled and sit in the hutch of my desk.

This works best for people who aren’t trying to cold-call every business they’ve ever contacted — and people who can remember where they met someone but not their name or business name, although some electronic systems allow you to track when and where you met someone. However, if you are going to cold-call everyone, I’d recommend adding small post-its to your collection. Why add people to an electronic database if they’re not interested, and probably will never be interested, in your product? Keep a notepad nearby, a small post-it pad, make the initial call off the business card, and if they’re not interested now, put the post-it on the card with the date you called and that they weren’t interested. … or a date they said to call back. You might only manage 10 business cards per sheet, but you could take some notes on paper, fold them up and stick them behind the card in question. Now you can try them again later, but don’t have to spend much time on someone who is not making you money.

Another person I know writes the event & date on the cards when she brings them home. She’s going to start using my binder system, rather than have the cards in piles, but I like the idea of putting a date on them. I’m not going to, but I like it

Even if I had a business card scanner, I would want to hold on to the business cards themselves. I find they give me important clues to who the person is — the style of card often helps me remember who the person behind the card was. If I only had the information, I might not remember the person. Also it’s easier to pass along a business card if you have it than if you scanned it. I have been known to bring the whole business card binder with me to speed networking events.

Now, there are some cards you should not have in this system. These are your preferred vendors, other members of your own referral group, cards from terrific places to bring a client for lunch or dinner, and the people you feel most comfortable referring to others. If you’re in a larger organization you might include your colleagues in this category. For these types of cards, I have a small portable business card book, because I’m most likely to need these cards on-hand at any event. I can leave the big binder at the office and bring along my smaller binder.

When buying your supplies, shop local! Please find the nearest mom & pop stationery store and open a business account with them. I use Charles B. Merrill Office Products in Newburgh, NY — they deliver the next day.

Another thing I do is keep a stack of half-used paper, usually Chamber flyers that were printed only on one side, folded in half. These make great notepaper that I grab when I get a phone call and start taking notes on. Until I know someone is going into a binder, why use the virgin paper? They still fit in the book with 2 holes from a 3-hole-punch. It’s a great way to re-use before recycling. With a stick of re-stickable glue, I can quickly make any note into a post-it.

Phew. Good luck!!

I’d like to make a multi-faceted argument, so I may explain an awe of the relationship between the planet we live on and our people, our companion animals, our vegetation, and our creations. I can look at it from theology, from philosophy, and from a pseudo-scientific standpoint.

Someone said that mankind owes its entire existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains. I don’t know how many people really think about that statement. I want you to really think about that statement. We owe our existence, our persistence, and every one of our inventions to a layer of fertile soil and the fact that it rains water and not ammonia. Look at what other planets have for ice, and feel lucky.

On theology and as an Interfaith minister, I want to make a statement about humanity’s neglect of our relationship with the Earth: We wave a book — either a most holy book or the greatest work of fiction ever — that we will gladly interpret as granting the God-given right to abuse the planet and its creatures, as if that’s a good excuse for our neglect. I suggest that everyone reread that section. We were not appointed by any God to be the despoilers and abusers of the earth, but the caretakers, the tenders, the shepherds. Not to be above, but to be in love with every critter, and take loving care thereof (because one of the most inoffensive statements I’ve ever heard in trying to define “god” is that “god is love”). Those of us who don’t have those books usually have a similar idea of our relationship with the earth and its creations. It’s amazing how many religions incorporate not only gratitude to their powers-that-be, but to the earth and its children. And some go so far as to attribute spirit to all things, whether or not they are created by mankind. Above all, through the ages we have noticed and respected the fickle relationship between ourselves and our environment.

Oil, and thus gasoline and propane, plastics, and petroleum jelly, are taken from the veins of the earth like blood from a donor. We who would consider it unjustifiable to strap another human into a chair and bleed them day in and day out for years upon years without consent are doing this to our Earth. Our planet. By our, I mean every insect, every human, every fax machine, every toaster, every car, every tree.

The cluelessness astounds me. The neglect frightens me.

Somewhere in this terrifying rollercoaster of how we treat our planet, I wish someone had the ability to push the red button that makes the ride stop. But we don’t. As individuals, we can’t push that red button. But we can refuse to take that ride.

It’s not enough to watch the rollercoaster of destruction. We have to run around the amusement park planting trees, picking up litter, playing less games, winning less “prizes” that we can’t take into the afterlife anyway.

There is only one thing that will make a difference beyond this lifetime — relationships. Whether you believe in absolute blackness after the flesh dies, whether you believe in Heaven, or reincarnation — the lives you touch will live beyond your time, just as those who are gone have touched your life. And relationships can be relatively carbon neutral. If we spend our time building dreams for the bigger prize of love — and here we are back at god again — we can consume less, plant more, and maybe other people will decide it’s more fun doing what we do than to embark on that terrifying ride that ruins our planet.

Everything has a spirit, because everything, and I mean everything we surround ourself with, is a part of us. We breathe the same air. We eat the same carbon. My molecules are yours. My energy is yours. My spirit is yours. WE are Mother Earth. Every lightbulb. Every stone. Every living, inanimate, and dead being on the planet. We are Mother Earth. Why are we killing ourselves?

Orange & Sullivan (NY) Chamber of Commerce members, and members of Business Exchange Network get a base 5% discount on Eclectic Tech’s easy-to-edit websites.

Child care professionals (including teachers, schools, and child care centers), holistic businesses & practitioners, organic businesses, and registered educational non-profits get a base 10% discount on Eclectic Tech’s easy-to-edit websites.

I’m extending a discount of 5% for any contract which is paid in full at contract signing. This discount is in addition to the discounts mentioned above. So for a chamber member to enjoy a 10% discount now requires payment in full up-front.

The discounts will no longer extend to other services or my hourly rates.

I’ve watched some very large contracts come through where chamber members would be getting a discount that is more than enough to pay for me to renew my chamber membership next year. I can’t sustain that level of discounting on my services, especially any services that are laborious and may not be furthering my overall goals in my business.

I’m sorry for any inconvenience. I will honor any proposals that have not expired, but the new policies will take place in any future or re-assessed contracts.

I do my best to make sure I don’t bleed my clients for every cent they have. Came up with a great way to picture it — sudden inspiration in a restaurant in Warwick: “Free your website from the Bastille! Liberate your website from your oppressors!” all in a French-ish accent I like to flatter myself is pretty good. It was a hit. I love making people laugh.

Well, I have yet to find a French person who is offended. I don’t like doing the same schtick twice, but this is certainly my most popular self-aggrandizement. So it stuck — now I run around saying “Liberate your website!” a Whooooooole lot. Usually with the French accent. Because people actively request it. Once I did it in a fake Transylvanian accent “Is your vebmaster sucking you dry??” Did any Transylvanians come out of the woodwork to take offense? There was a room full of about 60 or 70 local business people — no one said anything, a few people laughed, most people smiled.

So, my client Paul Ellis created this Faaaaaabulous commercial for me, inspired by my own inspirations. He has 4 actors do this commercial — 3 “Mexican revolutionaries” and a damsel in distress. Same basic schtick: freedom from your oppressive webmasters. It’s on the radio. It’s on my website. I love the commercial. It’s a work of art. It’s a whole minute-thirty long, you can’t BUY an ad slot like that on the air!

After all my other “revolutionary” spontaneous ads, someone’s taking offense at the commercial. Maybe more than one someone. Because maybe, just maybe, it’s racially biased.

I don’t know who you are, but there’s no racial slurs in the commercial — there’s no vandals or “bad guys” in any of the voices and the webmaster’s race or lifemate are not mentioned. The damsel cries “Help, Help” and the revolutionaries come to tell her about Eclectic Tech and how Eclectic Tech can free her from oppression. I’m not Mexican, so maybe I have no right to portray Mexicans in my advertising any more than I had a right to portray a French revolutionary, or a Transylvanian vampiress. But I grew up the daughter of an Argentinean immigrant. I’m Hispanic. My children are 1/2 Puerto Rican, and all Hispanic. When he described the commercial to me, and I read the script, I thought it was cool. When I heard it I thought it was brilliant.

All of this was probably not an issue until it came time for Paul Ellis to run for Chester Town Supervisor. After all, someone has to find some dirt to fling and get offended — and men aren’t marching after him with torches and pitchforks for the character named “Harry Paratestis” so I guess the next obvious target is my commercial. Gotta get dirt on this man who works himself to the bone, collaborating with everyone on every project, trying to make people laugh, no matter what their color, gender, or who they sleep with. So this man makes me an inspired, funny, and talented commercial, intended for play during a radio COMEDY, and somewhere in the middle of the high sidekick and the dead guy with the dirty name, people can’t seem to locate their sense of humor anymore. It’s with the missing sock, people!

No wonder commercials have to resort to CGI-animated bullfrogs and geckos. People have missed the point, but I’ll let you in on it: The joke is NOT about the revolutionaries. The accents are trite clues that there’s a bigger joke going on. The REAL joke is about web-masters who take advantage of their clients, creating websites no one can touch but them. These people charge either monthly fees or per-change charges for people to keep their websites up to date. And so far, even THEY aren’t taking offense!! No matter what color they are, where their ancestors are from, what language they speak, who they sleep with, or what gender they are, the webmasters have not risen to defend themselves. I believe they have every right to their residual income, and I believe their clients have every right to get fed up with it and choose a different alternative, which I will happily offer them. And I’ll use every historical reference to revolutions and oppression I want — as long as it makes someone giggle — to drive that point home. Robin Hood? Sure! Boston Tea Party? You betcha!! Moses & the Pharaoh? Now you’re talking! “Let my website go!”

I don’t get people. But here’s one Hispanic woman who is saying WTF about this attitude. Do you want to talk about crimes against humanity: Paul Ellis made me laugh! Now there’s a crime — I might live a little longer because I laughed and released some endorphins. If you don’t find it funny, why are you listening? At least I got a good hearty laugh out of the thought of anyone being offended!

In June I tightened ship on my own website. I’ve implemented some new security on the blog software, notably reCAPTCHA, a captcha project by Carnegie Mellon University. Captchas use images containing distorted text that you have to re-type into a form field. The reCAPTCHA project uses portions of scanned/OCR’d books that failed to be recognized easily by computers to test users. Once the text is verified to be read by a human, it helps add books to electronic libraries. So using this method not only foils spammers, but helps with online literature projects.

I’m also working on editing down my website. I am guilty of using my ability to create web pages so easily as an opportunity to be too wordy. Some websites don’t have enough information, and you leave disappointed that you couldn’t find what you needed to know. Others are too wordy: “Welcome to (this website). We’re so glad you came… have a seat. Would you like some tea while you’re waiting for real content? The bathroom is down the hall.” I’m guilty as charged, in a court of my own self-examination.

I altered the navigation on the site, so it should hopefully make more sense to someone at least passingly familiar with websites. I started out with really obscure labels for the links, now I’m back down to the basics. Practice what I preach: I’m always telling my clients what should be on their homepage, how their navigation should be labeled. I have finally followed my own advice.

As a new service, I’m helping clients with their website “talk” — a website needs to be the executive summary of a longer proposition. The longer proposition can be there, behind the scenes, and you can bring on the content in layers that are carefully crafted to build detail into the subject. However, people don’t need to be hit over the head with a heavy sales pitch, proposal, or autobiography from the get-go.

Tightening up the wording, reducing babble, using bullet lists for main points, taking advantage of proper linking, and proper keyword integration.

People don’t have time to sit through a long reading: they came with something in mind, even if it was just to learn more about you, and then they’re going to go on to the next thing in their life. I’m working on other ways to increase website traffic to my client’s site other than the stinking, lying, cheating ways that some search engine optimization businesses have taken up. It’s a definite art, and it’s easier to do on content that you didn’t write yourself, so for me it’s slow going between projects, and for clients, hopefully it won’t be as slow and inconsistent.

Some of my new philosophies about optimization of websites were covered in my second workshop at the QED Business Edge conference yesterday: “Who’s your website for?” It went over well. More about it later.

Because I’m expanding my business into content development and website planning, I’m starting to subcontract some design work out so I can make room for adding new services to my business. To see what this looks like, see the Rhthym and Rhyme Childcare and Simply FlawlessFaces websites.

My next several weeks are going to be hectic. Post-mortem of yesterday’s conference, all the business meetings normally held 3rd week of the month, all the meetings and business I put off so I could handle last-minute tasks and stress before the conference…and getting my kids back from Mother before packing them off to school again.

And I’ve said this before, but there’s always time for you. I love helping people out.

Today I sent someone to ICANN to see if they could recover their domain name — why would I take someone’s money to scramble to replace their website at a new domain name when they might recover that name legitimately?

I have a few appointments to help my client Linda Borghi of Abundant Life Farm to network in the region and gain clientele. I’m training two clients. The normal networking events like the Orange Networking Alliance. And I’m trying to remember where I left off when I put my business on pause for a moment.

The conference, on the other hand, went well. I’m so glad I didn’t have to handle every detail. I thought, the night before the conference, “Oh, no, I need evaluation forms for my workshops!” and had to give that up — no time. When I was there the next day, there were evaluation forms. I have to thank Susan (QED, LLC website coming in the future…) for handling details without needing me [I have a serious “If you want something done right…” complex!]. And Joe, her husband — I would think we either took turns keeping Susan sane or took turns doing things that needed to “just be done”. I like that synergy. People with focus getting things done. I could go quietly insane for a week and no one noticed Linda Borghi unknowingly helped keep me sane. It was better to focus on someone else’s needs than the billion things I should have been doing, but would only have stressed about and never accomplished anyway. I had honest moments of peace in the tsunami of anxiety.

I apologize if I missed a phone call, missed returning a call, missed a hint that someone wanted me to do something, or somehow made a commitment that I didn’t keep. What a month! I could list the accomplishments, such as the 92-page Business Edge website, but then you’d think I was bragging.

And I thank all the people who helped out at the conference. Thank you!!! I had a WONDERFUL time and didn’t have to run around taking care of “stuff” all day. Joe & Susan & Frank Lowell and I think the other woman was Andrea at the registration desk….you made my day terrific by taking care of all the minutia.

I’m exhausted. More about saving the planet when I’ve got a moment. Take care of the Earth!!

He’s started a new company named Light Iris, with a focus of marketing to new mothers.

He had a notion one day that he should get a better perspective on being a new mother, and has been wearing a 35-pound pregnancy suit on his off-hours. Not to parade around town, but to get an idea of what it’s like to have all that extra weight on.

He’s doing this experiential experiment for a month. You can read about it at http://blog.lightiris.com/