By Bryan Hoffman on December 29, 2009
R&D for small business
The term ‘R&D’ is usually heard in context of big industrial corporations and the pharmaceutical industry. It also brings to mind big budgets, big spending, big dollars, big big big. The most successful big companies in the world all have a Research and Development division who’s sole purpose is to push the limits and find new innovations and technologies. Governments give out grants for this kind of research because it’s well known that innovation drives a big portion of our economy. There’s no reason these same ideals can’t be similarly implemented on the small business scale.
Big Ideas
Let’s add another ‘big’ to that list in the context of small businesses: big ideas. Even though small business owners don’t have big budgets or a dedicated R&D division, carving out time to stay ahead of what is new and innovative in their industries is essential to staying viable and in the vanguard. Finding efficiencies; New ways to sell goods; Expanding into new markets – these are the ideas that expand businesses and drive local economies. Most business owners and entrepreneurs understand this, but knowing where to find the innovations isn’t always easy. Here’s a few things to take to ensure you’re not falling behind:
Continue reading “Small Business Research & Development”
Category: Business | Tags: ideas, research & development, small business
By Bryan Hoffman on December 20, 2009
Is there life after MobileMe?
About a month ago I received an email from Apple informing me that my MobileMe subscription was coming up for renewal. I’ve loved the services that MobileMe provides since signing up over a year ago, and had planned on keeping it going. But with the holidays coming up I decided to look into the possibility of dropping MobileMe while retaining the capabilities that it provides.
Turns out that it’s not only possible, but pretty darn easy to replicate most of the services MobileMe provides, for free. I’ll go through each service, in order of importance to me. Note: These steps were all taken with an iPhone and a mac, but similar options exist for PC/Other Phone users.
Continue reading “Dropping MobileMe”
Category: Communication | Tags: business tools, MobileMe, Software
By Bryan Hoffman on November 6, 2009
If you have a website, it’s virtually a given that you have a contact page with a form on it for collecting messages from your users. Pretty much everyone does. Which is why if you run a query for “forms” in the Wordpress plugin directory, you’ll be overwhelmed with hundreds of results. Some of the most notable come up on the first page, including WP Contact Form and Contact Form 7.
The latter has been my form plugin of choice, for its simplicity and flexibility. That is, until I heard about
Gravity Forms.
Continue reading “Gravity Forms vs Every Other Form Plugin”
Category: Wordpress | Tags: contact form 7, gravity forms, Wordpress
By Bryan Hoffman on September 24, 2009
Chax 3.0
Chax comes to Snow Leopard
A while back I came across Chax, a great little add on for iChat that, among other things, allowed me to consolidate my AIM and Google Talk accounts into a single contact window. It’s never made sense to have separate lists for each account, so this little gem made iChat more useable, and ultimately allowed me to stick with it rather than using an alternative application such as Adium (I prefer iChat over Adium for the screen sharing feature).
Continue reading “iChat: Multiple Accounts, One Contact List”
Category: Communication | Tags: Google Talk, iChat, Snow Leopard
By Bryan Hoffman on September 8, 2009
In the early days of Spigot Design, Flash based websites were all the rage. We’ve long since learned new tricks, and as a result have pretty much dropped Flash based work all together. Not a lot has been written on why we’ve given it up, so perhaps it’s time (although here’s an early tidbit from the Park Record).
Continue reading “Why we don’t do Flash”
Category: Business | Tags: flash, html, SEO
By Bryan Hoffman on August 26, 2009
Just a quick update on the Park City Chamber email list article from back in May.
Big, green and explicit
The plan was to take the 1200 or so contacts from the Chamber list and send one last unsolicited message requiring each recipient to explicitly subscribe if they wished to continue receiving the newsletter.
Continue reading “Chamber of Commerce Email List Update”
Category: Communication | Tags: email, newsletters
By Bryan Hoffman on August 25, 2009
As a professional web designer, it comes with the territory that one’s own site is rebuilt on a fairly routine basis. So lately I’ve been spending my nights and weekend work hours rebuilding spigotdesign.com. The focus this time was not the design, but rather the foundation on which it’s built.
Continue reading “Fresh Foundation for Spigot”
Category: Design | Tags: frameworks, hybrid, Wordpress
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Wordpress 2.8 Upgrade Error
By Bryan Hoffman on June 11, 2009
This morning I was pleased to find that a new version of Wordpress (2.8) was out and it was time to upgrade. One of the nice things about WP is the automatic upgrade option, which basically means you backup your site, click upgrade, and you’re done.
Well it didn’t go quite that smooth this time, and I received an error that WP couldn’t copy the wp-comments-post.php file. I could have just upgraded the old fashioned way, but decided to investigate further. Here’s what I did to fix it:
Continue reading “Wordpress 2.8 Upgrade Error”Category: Programming | Tags: upgrade, Wordpress, wp-comments-post.php | Leave a response