Yellowseed Web Design Services

Inspired by the famous quote from Gandhi about being the change you want to see in the world, we've launched the BeChange Package. This is a bundle of services designed for individuals and small businesses creating positive change. Our current focus is to support coaches and teachers in the health and wellness industry but we'll soon be expanding it to include other social entrepreneurs. The BeChange services include managed marketing and logistics backed by an integrated website and CRM system.

Administration

Business Management

Yellowseed uses a business management system called SugarCRM. Designed to manage your contacts, registrations, courses, and documents, Sugar can also organize and track every phone call, support issue, and task. Since SugarCRM is web-based, your data is stored on a central secure server and can be accessed by assigned users, at the same time, from any location in the world. This means you will always have instant access to the latest course registrations, payments, contact details, phone calls and more.

Website Management

Yellowseed manages your website using a content management system (CMS) called ExpressionEngine. This CMS integrates with SugarCRM to display all your courses and workshops to website visitors while providing a seamless method for online registration and payment. ExpressionEngine also allows you to easily add or update any content on your website and comes with a blog, photo gallery, discussion forum, shopping cart and more.

Reception

Yellowseed uses Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) technology to make or take calls on your behalf. When you need us to answer your phone, simply forward your incoming line to our VOIP number. If you want to make the process even more seamless, we can set up the VOIP number as your primary contact number to be shared between you and our admin staff. The phone number can be forwarded to us at any time, wherever you are in the world.

Payment Processing

Based on 4 years of experience in this sector, Yellowseed recommends PayPal for payment processing. PayPal is a secure, affordable and widely embraced method for online payments. Yellowseed can integrate PayPal into your website payment process for fast and easy payments.

Logistics - Event Management

Dedicated Staff

Yellowseed provides dedicated logistics staff to organize and manage your workshops, courses, or retreats. Trained at one of Canada’s largest and most successful yoga teacher training organization, our staff know how to organize and market courses so that they run effectively and smoothly.

Marketing

Event Marketing

Yellowseed offers comprehensive marketing services for promoting your retreats, courses and workshops. Marketing may include postering, newspaper advertising, online advertising, PR, word-of-mouth and referral campaigns.

Brand and Website Marketing

Yellowseed offers extensive brand and web marketing services. We offer search-engine optimization, Newsletter management, podcasting, blogging, newsletters and Web PR services.

How we’re different:

There are a number of reasons why we can offer such an affordable service:

1. We use web-based open-source technology, like SugarCRM, ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter, PHP and MySQL.
2. We use VOIP technology (Internet telephony) which allows us to make and receive calls at a low cost from any location in the world. This helps us reduce the overhead of central offices and expensive communications infrastructure.
3. We share development costs and management staff between many clients and we maximize the cost/benefit ratio by working with clients in a similar field. This allows us to deliver a highly personalized service at a low cost.
4. We have 4 years of experience working with one of Canada’s largest and most successful yoga teacher training organizations.

Nelson radio station CJLY, 93.5FM in Nelson BC launched a new website today. The new site a sweeping upgrade for the station with sections for each show, a member forum, downloaded files, news, comments and more. In addition to creating the site, Yellowseed created a podcasting system for the station that currently delivers weekly shows through iTunes to the world.

We're pleased to introduce Yellowseed's lead programmer (and newest staff member) Balakrishnan Somasundaram.

Bala is an experienced web developer with extensive programming skills. He is passionate about creating elegant and useful web 2.0 sites that unite and engage humans in their digital experience. Bala studied engineering and received his B.Tech from Madras University in Chennai.

Bala’s objectives (as written on his resume) are: to obtain a challenging career in web 2.0; become associated with a progressive organization with committed & dedicated people - which will help me to explore myself fully; willing to work as a key player in a challenging & creative environment.

Looks like we both scored. Welcome aboard Bala - it’s shaping up to be an adventurous ride!

Stay tuned as we will be traveling to India in June to meet Bala and set-up our development office.

Simple question: if you had 2-hours a day to devote to no-cost, off-blog (even off-line) marketing for your blog, what would you do� The author posed this question to a collection of some of the world�s top bloggers and social network marketers�and here�s what they revealed. Click here for the article.

Centennial Canoe Outfitters Inc. take viewers on a scenic ride down the wild rivers of Colorado in a new video released today on You Tube.

Marty Generaux and Julia Gumper, owners, shot the video over a whole summer and sent it to Yellowseed for compilation and upload.  The canoeing video will also be displayed at http://www.centennialcanoe.com.

Proposed model for the future of e-commerce exploits a novel peer-to-peer video sharing application

Computer scientists are using a novel peer-to-peer video sharing application to explore a next-generation model for safe and legal electronic commerce that uses Internet bandwidth as a global currency. The application (available for free download) is an enhanced version of a program called Tribler. Click here to read more...

We launched NCES.ca today, a website for a local non-profit group (NCES = Nelson Citizen Empowerment Society).

It’s cool to be able to offer functional donations to groups such as NCES. We wove community building features into the NCES site including: mailing list sign-up, events calendar; issues bulletin and a blog. Communication is the heart of groups such as this, and so we included the ability to post content and add comments directly to the website.

Building an interactive website is but one ingredient in a social networking recipe. The true flavour comes from the voices of its members. The saying “if you build it, they will come” does not hold true for the Internet. A vibrant, active site requires the regular human touch - the dialogue between members.

We wish NCES all the best - and hope that this site opens the doors for deeper discussion.

Facebook has just released an API that gives company the ability to develop software (called "Widgets") that can be used within Facebook - think of Facebook like an operating system, say Windows, and widgets like software that runs on the OS, say Adobe Photoshop.

Facebook’s timing is perfect. They just released an API that gives third party developers deep access to Facebook functionality and it’s 20 million users. Not only can these third party startups get a widget placed on people’s Facebook profiles, but they can also get viral distribution through users’ news feeds and access core Facebook features. Using the tools that Facebook made available, developers could build new versions of some of Facebook’s own applications, like Facebook Photos. Users can then remove those default applications and add the new ones. Like Microsoft with Windows, Facebook is now competing with application developers on its own platform.

What makes this interesting is that not only is Facebook insanely popular and growing by 100,000 users a day, it provides an almost complete platform for relating to other people. Imagine, for example, a future where you can not only check out what music your friends are listening to, but you can instantly purchase the song from iTunes and give your friend a commission for the recommendation. 

DoubleClick, an online advertising company founded in 1996, provides display ads on Web sites like MySpace, The Wall Street Journal and America Online as well as software to help those sites maximize ad revenue. The company also helps ad buyers — advertisers and ad agencies — manage and measure the effectiveness of their rich media, search and other online ads.

Google reached an agreement today to acquire DoubleClick, from two private equity firms for $3.1 billion in cash, the companies announced, an amount that was almost double the $1.65 billion in stock that Google paid for YouTube late last year. Click here for the full story.

Here's a good glossary of SEO terms used by search engine marketing professionals.

Social Media Optimization (SMO), a new term recently coined by Rohit Bhargava, has since been taking on life of its own. In his introduction to SMO, Rohit draws similar comparisons to SEO...

… SMO tactics can drive huge amounts of people to a website and can also determine whether a startup, website or idea will make it or not. It involves driving traffic to a website through new channels because search engines aren’t the only sites that drive big traffic anymore. While it’s not taking over SEO yet, it has the potential to someday soon.

Click here for the full article

The choice quotes:

Google controls more network fiber than any other organization. This is not to say that Google OWNS all that fiber, just that they control it through agreements with network operators.

Why? One thought is that it kept down the price since people didn’t really know it was Google snatching up this stuff (they’ve done it under a number of different corporate names). But if price was the issue, then why hasn’t Google just bought the companies that own the fiber? It made no sense until I scratched my head and thought a bit further, at which point it became obvious that Google wants to—in its own way—control the Internet. In fact, they probably control it already and we just haven’t noticed.

Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television.

The Internet as we know it is a shell game, with ISPs building their profits primarily on how many users they can have practically share the same Internet connection. Based on the idea that most users aren’t on the net at the same time and even when they are online they are mainly between keystrokes and doing little or nothing when viewed on a per-millisecond basis, ISPs typically leverage the Internet bandwidth they have purchased by a factor of at least 20X and sometimes as much as 100X, which means that DSL line or cable modem that you think is delivering multi-megabits per second is really only guaranteeing you as much bandwidth as you could get with most dial-up accounts.

It is becoming very obvious what will happen over the next two to three years. More and more of us will be downloading movies and television shows over the net and with that our usage patterns will change. Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we’ll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY—a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs. Those ISPs will be faced with the option of increasing their backbone connections by 30X, which would kill all profits, OR they could accept a peering arrangement with the local Google data center.

Seeing Google as their only alternative to bankruptcy, the ISPs will all sign on, and in doing so will transfer most of their subscriber value to Google, which will act as a huge proxy server for the Internet. We won’t know if we’re accessing the Internet or Google and for all practical purposes it won’t matter. Google will become our phone company, our cable company, our stereo system and our digital video recorder. Soon we won’t be able to live without Google, which will have marginalized the ISPs and assumed most of the market capitalization of all the service providers it has undermined—about $1 trillion in all—which places today’s $500 Google share price about eight times too low.

Here’s the full story

RSS is a funny old thing - once it takes hold in a person's daily routine it becomes as essential as checking ones email or reading the morning newspaper - but as far as mainstream usage goes, it's a long way from attaining widespread approval.

The technology behind RSS is not the issue - it’s just the underlying transport, like the ink and paper of traditional media. If RSS is to break into the mainstream, it’s the means of delivery that will make it or break it. Here’s the rest of the article on RSS feed readers.

There won't be much mistletoing or hearts a-glowing among e-commerce sites if they aren't ready for what's supposed to be their most wonderful time of the year.

Most retailers generate 20-40 percent of their annual eCommerce revenues and profits during the holiday season, according to Web research firm CoreMetrics. And contrary to popular belief, the Monday after Thanksgiving isn’t the biggest holiday sales day of the year.

Sure, that Monday, often dubbed ”Cyber Monday,” will see the highest traffic this season. But CoreMetrics predicts that sales on the following Monday, December 4th, will be 19 percent higher than “Cyber Monday.”

So you weren't born on MySpace and you didn't cut your teeth chatting on MSN Messenger. So what do you do when some kid throws an STFU or ROTFL at you? A good place to start is with a translation from the Acronym Finder, a searchable database of tens of thousands of acronyms - an essential tool for translating chat into english.

"Splash pages are the pages that the user sees before they actually get to a website; typically, they're flash and offer some kind of introductory animation. The user clicks "Skip Intro" or "Enter Site" and from there is taken to the site." Here is a good article on why splash pages can be a bad thing.

Over the last 10 years, thousands of companies have spent hundreds - of - thousands of hours experimenting with search engine optimization. Thankfully, the results and opinions have been openly shared among Internet marketers and has formed into something close to knowledge. Of course, every time Google or Yahoo changes their code that determines their page-ranks, some of that knowledge becomes obsolete. The core principles, thankfully, do not change...

1. Content should be relevant and informative with clear use of important key words in titles headings and body content.
2. Pages should be easily found, read and understood by search engine spiders so that they can be properly placed in the search engine’s index.
3. The website should be registered with as many directories as possible.
4. Finally, and most importantly, the content should be well regarded by other experts in the field (or industry) and linked to by as many legitimate websites as possible.

These core principles will never change, but there’s still a lot of discussion over how best to implement them for your website. One way to look at the problem is to ask how much time should I spend registering my site with web directories versus how much time I should spend reaching out to bloggers and forum posters. Here’s a great article that breaks down relative time distribution for effective online marketing.

"If visitors to your Web site become annoyed, it is very easy for them to broadcast their irritation: They are already online!

“This is one of the obvious but frequently ignored findings revealed in a recent study of how companies treat their online customers. A study conducted by the Customer Respect Group asked customers about issues of site usability, communication and trust, as delivered online. Outstanding site usability, including access for disabled users, put Intel at the top of the list.”

Read the rest of this article about communication in customer relations from eMarketer.com.

Here's a brief look at some problems with the new Internet Explorer Browers (IE7), spotlighting some areas and features that may pose problems to developers, as well as tools available to help with application development. This is a pretty technical article but it might help you understand some of the problems that your web site might be forced to deal with.

Wikipedia has a great article on customer relationship management (CRM), which is gaining a lot more attention these days. Wireless is everywhere, so why can't we use the Internet to store our company contacts, manage our group scheduling, and handle our customer support? Well, there's no good reason why not, and hundreds of reasons why it makes sense to think about this for your business. This article will get you started on understanding the basics.