There are still some finishing touches (you may notice a little Greek Text for a short time) but we felt that the project was far enough along to be able to make it public. We hope you like what you see and that you will look to Web-Sites-For-Less.com when you need website design, re-design or search engine optimization. We promise to work hard for you to help ensure your small business Internet marketing effort is a success!

Web-Sites-For-Less.com has developed a beautiful, easy to maintain plumbing website for American Plumbing Contractors, Inc. utilizing a state-of-the-art WordPress content management system.

As our premium Search Engine Optimization takes effect over the next few months we believe they will see a dramatic increase in the traffic to their new website — resulting in more plumbing clientele.

It was a pleasure working with the owners of American Plumbing Contractors. Please visit their site remember them for your future plumbing needs!

Wagner’s Bakery & Cafe and Bron’s Automotive are two long established and well respected small businesses in Olympia. At Web-Sites-For-Less.com we have been privileged to develop a brand new website for Wagner’s and a do WordPress re-design of the old Bron’s Automotive site.

The Wagner’s project was one that I completed personally. Owners Todd and Heidi Wagner have both been so much fun to work with and have become really good friends. I love it when I can find the time to just “hang out” at Wagner’s and enjoy a cup of Caffé D’arte and something sweet like a bearclaw or a lemon bar.

Bron Lindgren is the owner of Bron’s Automotive. His office manager, Tricia, looked me up at the Thurston County Chamber of Commerce Forum luncheon a few months ago concerning their website. Along with Clinton Brooks of Brain Bit Studios, Bron, Tricia and I all worked together to produced a wonderful new website for them, built on the WordPress platform. At Web-Sites-For-Less.com we absolutely love WordPress!

WordPress allows us to develop websites for our clients like Wagner’s and Bron’s that can be maintained by us, by them, or a combination of both through the content management system that is WordPress. And the ability for blogging is built right in!

The photos I’ve included were taken in Olympia while on assignment for these two clients. The first is from the Olympia Farmers Market where Wagner’s Bakery has their “Wagner’s Marketplace”. By the way, the Farmers Market opens again on April 7th — I can hardly wait!

The second photo was taken at the marina near the Budd Bay Cafe. Bron Lindgren is not only an amazing auto mechanic, but also a seasoned yachtsman who wanted photos from the marina to be featured on his home page slideshow. I’m working to get more. Click on each photo to see them at full size.

Please visit these two fine Olympia businesses and check out their new websites: www.wagnersbakerycafe.com and www.bronsautomotive.com.

Enjoy your week!

Since there was no other reason to drive in (to my office in Olympia) from Shelton, I decided to work from home the following day. This is normally a very efficient plan when I do not need to go in to to Olympia for a meeting or event.

Then I noticed, on the Chamber’s calendar, that this seminar was “sold out” with 15 people scheduled to attend the free event. Hmmmm… even though this Tammy Redmon probably didn’t know all that much, I thought, there were 15 potential clients I could meet if I went. And, Business After Hours was that night in Olympia as well. So, I changed my mind and went.

To make a long story short, Tammy is amazing! After her brilliant presentation I asked her if she could spare a minute or two to stop by my office. She did, and we were still talking nearly two hours later! On Friday of that week Tammy attended my very first One-on-One Website Analysis program and is now a new client of mine. More than that, Tammy is a wonderful new friend and an amazing resource!

The same thing happened with Kieran and Sherri Murry who teach the Facebook classes Extreme Networking 101 and Pages. These are two awesome people who have become good friends. I love it when I am able to attend the Kieranslist Coffee Club at the Forza in Lakewood on Monday mornings.

At Web-Sites-For-Less.com we are working very hard to get up to speed in social networking — especially Facebook. This is a fantastic tool to add to your overall Internet marketing program. Facebook recently made fairly major changes to the business Fan Pages side that allow us to do some really cool things.

We can now design narrow websites, even Flash websites, that can be “iFramed” in to the Facebook Fan pages. We call these Facebook Mini-Websites. They have their own navigation and can do almost anything that a full-blown website can do. For some businesses, this may be the only website they actually need!

Check it out at on our Facebook Fan page. If you are already a “Liker” of our page, you will need to click on the “Welcome” link in the left-hand navigation.

We hope you find this information helpful…

Have a Great Week!

• Accept that some days you’re the pigeon, and some days you’re the statue.
• Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.
• Always wear stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
• Drive carefully. It’s not only cars that can be “recalled” by their maker.
• If you can’t be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.
• If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
• It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to be kind to others.
• Never put both feet in your mouth at the same time, because then you won’t have a leg to stand on.
• Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance.
• When everything’s coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.
• Birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live.
• You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.
• Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.
• We could learn a lot from crayons…some are sharp, some are pretty, and some are dull. Some have weird names, and all are different colors, but they all have to live in the same box.
• A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

I hope you can put some of this to use in your life this week…

Cheers!

Some of them deserve honor, lots of honor, and others perhaps not so much. Like officers in the military, it’s not so much the person sometimes but rather the rank (or office) that you respect.

I had the honor and privilege to serve two president’s while I was a member of the While House Military Staff — Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Since I only served President Nixon for exactly 40 days, I will skip over him. Whew…that was easy!

Over the weekend I received a Facebook post from President Ford’s daughter, Susan, with information about an interview she was doing yesterday for C-Span with three other presidential offspring. I watched a recording of it last night and it brought back lots of memories and a few tears. It was called “Life in the Fishbowl”.

Much of the discussion that Susan and Lucy Johnson contributed involved the respect and deep friendships that nearly all senators and representatives had for each other when their fathers were president. Both Susan and Lucy lived in the White House as teenagers.

Lucy Johnson made mention of the “thinness” of the White House exterior walls and about how much sound would come through her north side bedroom from crowds of protesters on Pennsylvania Avenue. She said that on many nights she fell asleep listening to Vietnam war protesters screaming “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many boys did you kill today?”

In September of 1975, at the request of First Lady Betty Ford, I spent a month living in the White House Residence with the Ford family. The dog I trained for President Ford, a golden retriever named Liberty, had nine puppies on September 13th.

During that same month in 1975 two other significant events occurred, the results of which I was an eyewitness. On two consecutive trips to California, one on the 5th and another on the 21st, two women very nearly assassinated the President. I saw first hand how that affected his family and those of us who were close to them. It was not an easy time and the new puppies were very therapeutic up in the residence in the evenings.

My thoughts about President Ford are contained in an op-ed I wrote upon returning from the private memorial service held for him in Palm Desert, California in 2006. To say the least, he was an extraordinary man: http://www.dailyinterlake.com/opinion/article_151c5e22-64fb-58df-a376-db00511e6eb3.html.

While we may not care for the politics of the individual who holds the office during any given four years, we would do well to remember that he (or she) is the president of all the people. Perhaps we could all tone down the rhetoric a bit for the good of the country.

These photos are three of my favorites from my time at the White House. Click on each photo to enlarge them.

1. Yes, even presidents wore those ridiculous plaid pants in the seventies.

2. Me at the age of twenty-five in an Oval Office meeting with the President.

3. The President, Susan, Mrs. Ford and Liberty at Camp David. Notice that Mrs. Ford and Susan are in step and the President and his dog are also in step with each other. Am I a great dog trainer, or what?

Happy President’s Day!

A couple of weeks ago my brother and I met in the Salt Lake City airport to catch a “puddle-jumper” prop plane to Elko, Nevada. It was our “winter getaway”. Huh, you say? Elko, Nevada, you’re kidding!

It was a trip we had planned for nearly a year — we’d had our plane tickets and room reservations for over 6 months. Good thing or we would have been sleeping on park benches as there were no rooms left in the inns. Seriously!

So what brings so many people to Elko, Nevada in the dead of winter? The 27th Annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, that’s what. Hundreds and hundreds of the real thing (ranchers) and wannabes alike converge on this small mining town for a long weekend of music, storytelling, poetry reciting and amazing Basque food.

Listen to a sample by longtime cowboy poet Waddie Mitchell or some saloon piano music by Dave Bourne. Or, a very beautiful, powerful song called “A Long and Lonesome Ride to Dalhart” by Michael Martin Murphey.

On the noisy, vibrating flight over from Salt Lake City there was a lady from California who struck up a conversation with me from across the aisle. She said she learned about “The Gathering” after the second year and that this would be her 25th straight! It was my first.

I can tell you that I hope never miss another one. Unbelievable.

The photo seems fitting to the cowboy theme of this blog. It was taken after sunset in a high mountain meadow in southwest Montana. Summer rendezvous date back to the days of the mountain men, like Jim Bridger and John Colter (of the Lewis and Clark Expedition), when trappers, indians and other Westerners would meet the traders from back East in these mountain valleys all over the Rockies.

My late friend, Jim Stoltz, wrote and sang about it this way:
Old man Bridger’s got his tales to tell,
About the West and the golden days,
About the tribes and the trappers and the paths they made,
In the Rocky Mountain trade.
He’ll smile a lot about the clear Green River and the times in Jackson Hole,
He’ll tell you ’bout a pretty little Flathead lady that he loved so long ago…

The trick to taking photos like this one is the metering. Zoom in on the average part of the sky and meter the shot there. If you let the meter read the dark foreground the shot will be overexposed and turn out way too light, losing the silhouette effect.

Cheers!

“Never miss watching the rising of the sun and the setting of the same”

I’ve tried really hard to find the exact quote, but can’t. If anyone could help me…

I like Irish Folk music. A lot. One of my very favorite songs, Life of a Country Lad, has a chorus that goes like this:

I like to rise when the sun she rises,
Early in the morning;
And I like to hear them small birds singing,
Merrily upon the lay-land;
And hurrah for the life of the country lad,
Just a ramblin’ in the new-mown hay.

When I was a kid, Kodak would print instructions on all of their film boxes about how to take good pictures. Basically it came down to “shoot between the hours of 10 AM and 4 PM with the sun to your back”. That’s why most people are squinting in the pictures taken in the 50’s and 60’s, before in-camera meters became all the rage.

I probably like sayings and songs about sunrises and sunsets because I am an outdoor photographer. Without question many of the best photographs are taken during early morning and late evening light.

So here are a couple of late evening photographs I have taken — one from the California coast and one from a high mountain valley in Montana’s Spanish Peaks. In the next two weeks I will tell you the stories behind these two photos.

Enjoy!

In Big Sky I had the opportunity to burn through a lot of film (cameras used to use this stuff) both as the staff photographer for a local guest ranch and while teaching photography workshops in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.

My other great passion while in Big Sky was my involvement in Emergency Medical Services — I was the Medical Officer of the Big Sky Fire Department and the Search and Rescue Coordinator for the southwest portion of Gallatin County which included a portion of Yellowstone Park.

I have many fond memories and made several lasting and special friendships during my years in Big Sky. I recently re-connected with a great friend from those days, Jennifer Kelleher. Jennifer was co-owner and publisher of the Lone Peak Lookout, an award-winning local weekly newspaper. For several years I wrote a weekly article providing photo tips to their readers.

Jennifer contacted me, through Facebook, to see if I could look at a website of hers. Facebook is amazing — more on that in the coming weeks of this blog. If you are not using Facebook for you business, talk to us. Now.

Together Jennifer and I decided to develop a brand new website for the rental cabin she owns along the Yellowstone River near Gardiner, Montana. Jennifer’s new site is my first WordPress website. WordPress is widely known as a blogging platform but also is a great content management system, allowing the site owner the option of maintaining much of their own site.

The two images here are of the original site (still currently available) and and the new WordPress site which is still under construction at the present time. Click on the images to visit the websites. These links will only be available for a few days but will offer you a great comparison. This is what website re-design can do for you!

At Web-Sites-For-Less.com we are proud to have the opportunity to work with clients like Jennifer. We’d be happy to discuss new design, re-design, search engine optimization as well as blogging and custom Facebook Pages with any small business owner. Helping small business succeed on the Internet is what we are all about.