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Marketer. Designer. Entrepreneur.
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Building My Dream

August 20th, 2008

I have lots of ideas about where I want to end up in 10-15 years with my career.  Yesterday, a family friend told us about his new jobs making eye-glasses for kids as part of a non-profit organization that leverages big name sponsors and an intellegent board to bring sight to underprivileged children.  Talk about shady characters; how do those people sleep at night?

But the more I think about it, that is the direction I want to head.  I would love to combine my love of sports with my love of marketing and my love of philanthropy to market charitable sporting events.   In fact, as this summer began, I told myself that if I couldn’t find a worthwhile internship I would split my summer time between starting a new business and organizing a charity road race in Logan.  I found an internship, but the desire to do something like that remains.

So the dream as it stands right now is to keep working my tail off to improve my skills and gain experience, all the while remembering where I want to be and make sure my choices in experience and work are taking me closer to that goal.


An Indecent Proposal of Value

August 13th, 2008

I am tired of websites that shout at me and I am tired of hype.  I am tired of headlines full of words like: instant, secret, laser, exposed, killer, and explosive. I miss simplicity.  I miss clarity and honesty.  I miss being able to trust a website. Stop shouting…talk to me.


Salt Lake Property Management Site Design

August 10th, 2008

I recently finished up a design project for Bristlecone Realty, a salt lake property management company I found through a friend.  It was a fun project, a clean, simple design with some embedded PHP and HTML elements that they could use with a WYSIWYG editor to make changes on the site they update frequently.

They also wanted some SEO work done and so I have also been tackling that this summer with the most mixed, unusual results I have ever had with SEO.   I am optimizing for the keyword string “salt lake property management” and right now they are sitting at #1 for MSN, #32 for Yahoo, and nowhere on Google.  Yup, one day we were steadily climbing around #45-50 and the next day it was delisted…why?  I have no idea.  I submitted a reconsideration form and am waiting on that.

A weird thing to happen when there appears to be nothing black hat at all about the site.  I scoured over every inch of the HTML and found only a period that was “hidden” to hold space in an area that was showing up differently in FF and IE.  I removed that and am now just waiting for Google to give the page back its proper place.

Meanwhile, you can check out the page at http://www.brgsaltlake.com


Sometimes Dumb, Illogical Things Work

August 9th, 2008

I went to a concern a few nights ago…Nada Surf was the main band.  The opener, Tim Fite was a dude in blue, cut-off overall singing some of the weirdest stuff I’d ever heard.  It was a cross between Salad Fingers and Weird Al.  Crazy at is sounds, I liked it…really.  The dude was so crazy eccentric that it was fun, I have no idea why.

So, sometimes I create a website or product or whatever that is logically perfect and smart…and it turns out average.  Sometimes I see a product or website that makes me scratch my head and wonder why moron spent 10 minutes on this one…and then notice that is in the top 20,000 in Alexa’s rankings and kicks the trash out of all my sites.

So why do they work?  I dunno…I honestly don’t.


NY Times, Eat Your Heart Out!

August 4th, 2008

Checking the stats for my site today I noticed a few visitors coming from a new URL…this one actually http://www.hardnewscafe.usu.edu/ archive/april2008/ 041708_snow.html which turned out to be an article about yours truly.  A friend of mine had written an aritcle last semester for a project and I assumed it never got published…yet lo and behold, here it is!

Just to fill y’alls in, the Hard News Cafe is a worldwide source for the latest and greatest in news.   Hundreds of people each year pour over the stories…never to read it again.  Well, this found of knowledge is now complete after being graced by my name earlier this year.

Althought a few of the facts are a little bit off, its still fun to see my name up in lights…no matter how small.


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