Our Client Name Top 200 In North America

Our client, Misbehaven Spa & Salon, was recently named in the top 200 salons for salon growth and best practices.  This honor was presented in the January 2010 edition of the Salon Today magazine.  It is a huge honor for them to be among the 200 other businesses awarded out of 25,000 top-producing salons and spas in the country!

Search Engine Optimization Telemarketers

Lately, we have been getting phone calls from search engine optimization (SEO) companies on a daily basis.  Is it something in the air?  Of course we are also getting the typical emails on the SEO subject as well, but that's halfway expected.
After talking for 45 minutes on the phone to one such unnamed company, I suspect one of two things are happening:

1. Poor economy is causing the public to spend less in the SEO field.  This is causing SEO companies to work harder for business and resorting to telemarketing.
2. Economic hardship for the average business owner turns their mind to marketing.  This allows SEO companies to get a much high success rate in telemarketing and they are riding the wave.

Thankfully, our web design company has not slowed down with the economy.  In fact, we are more busy than we have ever been.  Since SEO-centric companies are closely correlated to our business, I suspect that they are also experiencing a drive from the public to market better.

TYPO3 5.0 - A Complete CMS Interface Makeover... Seriously!

To stay ahead of the curve in the web design and development business requires constant attention to the competitive software entering the market.  A robust content management system (CMS) is key to our success not to mention our client satisfaction, website maintainability and flexibility.

TYPO3 has already established itself as an enterprise-level CMS, but many people have hesitated to begin using it.  Why?  Well, the barrier to entry usually involves many months of learning to understand the full scope of the software... until now.  The new proposed interface for TYPO3 v5.0 is in my opinion revolutionary!  I feel confident that TYPO3 will see a dramatic spike in users and we will see other CMS's begin copying some of the ideas used by it.

Rather than ramble on about details, I recommend those who are interested to view the video, The radically new interface - TYPO 5.0.  From a web development standpoint, this video contains some truly revolutionary usability ideas.  These will soon empower us to more quickly and efficiently manage your website and give you the power to edit in a much more intuitive interface.

HOW TO: Boost Your Search Engine Ranking (Part 1)

"How can I boost my search engine ranking?"  This question in one that our web-based company is asked on a very regular basis.  Well, as we have said before, there IS a science to improving your web stats.  However, it also takes time and experience to really hit a jackpot with your site.  Here are some tips to get you started:

1. Good Web Statistics Software - What use is it to continue working in the dark? If you don't have a metric that you can measure your success by, there is not way to celebrate once you reach your goals or achieve a new record.  You need software that will give you detailed analytics on who your visitors are, where they are coming from and what is most important to them.  This software will also let you know where you are failing.  Are people just looking at your front page and moving on, or are they really becoming involved and paging through your site?
   
2. What Makes Your Website Relevant/Interesting - This may be different than what you think.  Let's say you have a small mechanic shop and want to increase your traffic.  You live, eat and breath the miracle cures for the countless ailing vehicles who hobble into your shop on their last hypothetical leg.  Instead of starting a blog centered around all your latest equipment in the shop, step back and think about your audience.  Why not put your over-qualified auto mechanic receptionist to work writing blogs on common vehicle issues and their solutions.  Most everyone is looking for a quick answer to know if they should worry about that knocking sound coming from the engine.  When they stumble into your blog, you have just what they are looking for and if you get luck people will even start linking to your useful blog post.  Some of the visitors to your site will be locals and will see that the solution to their problem requires an invasive car surgery they are not interested in doing... ca-ching... you just got yourself a sale from someone just because they know that you understand their problem and you have the answer.  This philosophy can be extended to countless applications.
3. Who Is Your Audience - You probably already know who the vast majority of your audience is.  Are they old, young, tech savvy, bread winners or stay-at-homers?  Theme your website to look, act and read well to your target audience.  If your target audience is interested in your website, it will naturally engage them.  A happy audience is sometimes a repeat audience and will visit your website on a regular or semi-regular basis.

Now that you know the first first three steps to boosting your search engine ranking, stay tuned for part 2.  Learn what kind of traffic to target and the insights to what will get you where you want to go fastest.

Online Musical Instrument Retailer

123acoustic is an online musical instrument retailer, currently specializing in stringed acoustic instruments.  They required a large number of features in their online store that we had to fulfill.  Here is an abbreviated list of the shopping cart features now being utilized:

1.  Marketing tools to help handle cross-sells, up-sells and related products
2.  Full analytics reporting on each product and site page
3.  Web Services API to integrate with third party applications
4.  Tiered pricing for different customer groups
5.  Digital downloadable products
6.  Multiple payment methods; credit card, check/money order, Google Checkout
7.  Automatic Google sitemap generation for search engine optimization purposes
8.  Integration with real-time shipping rates from UPS, FedEx, USPS and DHL
9.  Product comparison
10.  Order tracking from customer accounts
11.  Google base integration
12.  Multiple RSS feeds from product stock levels to price point notification for potential customers
13.  Inventory management
14.  Customer shipping to multiple addresses
15.  Product reviews

If you are interested in need of an enterprise-level ecommerce shopping cart of your own, we provide fully customized web stores tailored to meet the specific needs of your store.  We would love to hear from you.

2009 Highest Grossing Year to Date

We give God the honors for our financial milestone this year.

Many business consultants say it is possible to succeed just from the power of positive thinking sheer business saavy.  Yes, being business smart and good at what you do are key ingredients to being successful.  However, we would like to attribute our success to something greater than ourselves.  That something is God.

With this milestone behind us now, we look forward to 2010 and pray for God's blessing as we serve our clients and community in website development and design.  We have appreciate all the referrals and positive feedback and are excited about the prospects of helping you to reach your goals as well!

If you would like to partner with us, we'd love to hear from you!

Rapidfyre's Social Media

Since there are many ways to communicate, we use multiple channels to reach our clients and community. We publish our valuable info and services to the community in an easily accessible way and to as many people as possible. To do this, we cross-post in social media streams at times to ensure each audience gets important information. This blog serves as an independent source of information to see what's going on at Rapidfyre Inc.

Please feel free to visit our website and call/email us with any questions or comments on these blogs or potential work we could do for you in the web design and development world.

http://www.rapidfyre.net