Atlanta, Ga (PRWEB) December 08, 2011 — http://wphostingreviews.com announced that HostGator won Best Host of the Year for 2011. This award was earned based on editor and customer reviews, tech support quality, hosting plan choices and pricing. HostGator proved to be the best in all categories.

WordPress Hosting Reviews follows each of the top hosting companies and measures their quality against a set of criteria reviewed by the editors and customers. To read what they have to say about HostGator read their HostGator Review page.

Steven Johnson, one of the senior editors at WordPress Hosting Reviews went into more detail about HostGator, “Hostgator has been my primary choice for several years now. They have very competitive pricing and provide excellent quality services. I host several sites with them and enjoy all the features that come with cPanel, stability of their servers, compatibility with WordPress, and outstanding tech support.”

HostGator was awarded for high quality services which include stable and secure servers. Their hosting environment works great with WordPress. There are no issues getting WordPress up and running.

Additionally, HostGator was picked because of their great technical support. Their wait times are minuscule and the support staff is available twenty-four seven. Many have complemented HostGator because of their quick response tech support team. Also, they are known for resolving issues using social networks like Twitter for example.

HostGator have shared hosting plans while allowing anyone the opportunity to scale up their service should the need arise. HostGator’s starter plans (known as ‘Hatchling Plan’, ‘Baby Plan’, and ‘Business Plan’) as well as VPS and dedicated server plans. The features that come with each are plentiful says site editor, Steven Johnson, “They come with a wide variety of applications, tools, and features which are helpful to making a website successful.”

Some of the features provided by Hostgator include: unlimited disk space, transfer, ftp accounts, and MySQL databases. All of the servers run the latest versions of php, MySQL, Ruby On Rails, SSH, Perl, Chilisoft ASP, Python, and more.

WordPress Hosting Reviews pays for all hosting to maintain to help avoid any conflict of interest.

About WordPress Hosting Reviews
WordPress Hosting Reviews, established in 2008, is owned and managed by Intown Web Design of Atlanta, GA. The site was created as a place for WordPress users to post reviews and learn about the best WordPress hosting companies. It is a website that helps to the WordPress Hosting community. For more information: http://twitter.com/wphostingreview

Williamstown, MA (PRWEB) November 19, 2011 – - Vegan authority Nava Atlas’ website, www.VegKitchen.com, surpassed 100,000 visitors this month for the first time in its 15 year history. The site – designed, built, and hosted by local firm Berkshire Direct – has doubled in traffic over the past year.

“Making the move to the WordPress platform has been huge for me,” said Ms. Atlas from her home in New Paltz, NY. “It allows me to add/edit content on the site myself, without having to pay a developer to do the work. And, the folks at Berkshire Direct have just been amazing to work with. They help with site improvements and email marketing.”

Allen Jezouit, owner of Berkshire Direct, said, “Nava has consistently invested the time required to create fresh new content for the site each day. When you feed a WordPress site with plenty of top quality content, your readers AND the search engines fall in love with you. Her ‘Recipe of the Week’ e-newsletters to her large and growing email subscriber base are a huge reason for the site’s traffic growth, too.”

About Nava Atlas and VegKitchen.com
Nava Atlas is the author and illustrator of many books on vegetarian cooking, most recently Vegan Express, Vegan Soups and Hearty Stews for All Seasons, The Vegetarian Family Cookbook, and The Vegetarian 5-Ingredient Gourmet. The Vegan Holiday Kitchen will be published in the fall of 2011, and a book on leafy greens, Wild About Greens, will be on the shelves in the spring of 2012. Visit www.VegKitchen.com for more information.

About Berkshire Direct
At Berkshire Direct our goal is simple – we help businesses grow through marketing by delivering effective solutions that gets results. Our services include print, direct mail, fulfillment, tv/radio/print ads, web design & development, email / social media marketing, and more. We worry about executing on the details and the “tech stuff” so our customers don’t have to. For more information, please visit www.berkshiredirect.com.

MEDIA CONTACT
Allen Jezouit
Owner
Berkshire Direct
173 Water Street, Suite 7
Williamstown, MA 01267
413.458.1721
allen@berkshiredirect.com

Google +1 Button on More Homepages than Tweet Button – Search …

A study from BrightEdge examining the prevalence of social plugins on the home pages of major sites shows that Facebook is still the most dominant social…

Publish Date: 07/11/2011 9:00

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2092682/Google-1-Button-on-More-Homepages-than-Tweet-Button

Study Shows Google +1 Adoption Spreading Rapidly | Search Engine …

As a prelude to its social network, Google released a social sharing button known as Google +1. Available to webmasters as a widget or to searchers on.

Publish Date: 07/09/2011 17:16

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/study-shows-google-1-adoption-spreading-rapidly/31066/

Bill Colvin
Consultant
Office: 413-458-1721
bill.colvin@berkshiredirect.com

Bill Colvin joins Berkshire Direct with over 20 years of executive-level experience across a variety of industries. Bill has worked and consulted in both the public and private sectors, working with private companies, public companies, not-for-profits and municipalities. At Berkshire Direct, Bill will act in project management roles, as well as in marketing and management consulting capacities. One of his primary activities will be working with the partners to continue to expand the business services offerings available to Berkshire Direct clients.

Bill has working experience in a number of industry sectors including real estate, finance, training, security, publishing, licensing, manufacturing, government and not-for-profit. In working with entities such as Mace Security International, Mosler Safe Company, Natural Elegance, Vermont Marble Company, Applejack Art Partners, McGaw Graphics, Sotheby’s International Realty and a number of municipalities and non-profits, Bill has assisted in the creation and implementation of programs designed to manage finances, sales, marketing , production and human resources. In addition, he has worked with municipalities and non-profits to create robust economic and community development programs and has authored, supported, and managed over $10,000,000 in grant-funded projects.

Bill’s experience across sectors in companies and institutions large and small uniquely positions him to assist Berkshire Direct’s clients in identifying and implementing programs to drive results tailored to meet a wide array of challenges and to capitalize upon unique business opportunities. Bill graduated from Middlebury College and earned his MBA through the Alabama University system. In his free time Bill enjoys traveling and active outdoor pursuits such as running, hiking, snowshoeing and skiing with his partner, Jessica, a professor at Williams College.

• searching for words you are not sure how to spell – voice search makes this painless, quick and easy
• have a really long search query – with voice search all you have to do is talk
• every want to search for something while you had your hands full? – with voice search it is now possible

Let us know – how useful is voice search in your day to day actions on the internet?

Watch the Voice Search for Google Video

Published: June 23, 2011

WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission is preparing to issue subpoenas to Google as part of a wide-ranging civil antitrust investigation into practices in Google’s search engine business, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

For several months, lawyers at the commission have gathered information about Google’s search and advertising business and whether the way it orders search results and related advertising constitutes illegal anticompetitive behavior.

This month, commissioners privately debated whether to authorize its Bureau of Competition to issue subpoenas to Google and are close to moving forward. As of Thursday afternoon, commission formalities remained before the investigation is officially started, but two people with knowledge of the matter said a final decision to issue the subpoenas was imminent in a matter of days. They agreed to speak only on the condition of anonymity because the action was not yet final and because it could be postponed if the commission required additional information.

Read the entire story here …

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., June 23, 2011) – Every production of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire is haunted by the ghost of Elia Kazan’s film version starring Marlon Brando, Vivien Leigh, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden. Wise are those actors and directors who pretend it doesn’t exist, which seems to be the case in the fascinating version playing now at Williamstown Theatre Festival’s Nikos Stage – and aptly so, given the legendary Nikos Psacharapoulos’s penchant for producing Williams at Williamstown.

Read more …

by Stephen Leon on June 23, 2011

When Berkshire Co-op Market opened at its current location in Great Barrington in 2002, the store sold about $100,000 in locally grown and made products in its first year. “And we thought that was the bomb,” says general manager Art Ames, expressing his happiness at that time with the low-six-figure sales.

Little did he know the extent to which the demand for locally produced food was about to explode: In the current fiscal year, Ames says, the market will sell about $1.8 million in local products.

Running the Berkshire Co-op Market has put Ames squarely in the midst—in more ways than one—of a significant cultural shift in how many Americans think about the food they eat. For one thing, he is very aware of significant changes happening in his own industry: “In the early ’80s,” he says, “the fastest growing department in grocery stores, bar none, was frozen foods.” Today, he says, among food co-ops nationwide, frozen foods is the one department that is actually shrinking.

All across the country, phrases like “locally grown,” “farm-to-table” and “100-mile diet” have been turning up with more and more frequency as restaurants increasingly feature locally sourced ingredients, and buy-local advocates and consumers alike extol the virtues of farmers markets, food co-ops and CSAs. But if this movement seems widespread now, it came early to Berkshire County—and seems more embedded in the culture there than in many other regions of the country.

Agriculture has deep roots in Berkshire County, but in the postwar era, any idea of a sustainable food culture took a backseat to a new model of food production that stressed processing, packaging and mass production of heavily marketed brands. Even as the county began to develop a reputation for excellent restaurants—spurred in large part by the weekend and summer visitors who flocked there to relax amid the natural beauty and experience world-class arts—the best chefs weren’t necessarily shopping locally. In the late’60s, says Ames, when gas was cheap and we were starting to see peaches in supermarkets year-round, chefs “were interested in getting the best stuff, but they’d shop far and wide for it.”

But new ideas about the relationship of consumers and food were beginning to take hold in the ’80s, and Berkshire County was on the leading edge of what would become a widespread movement. In 1985, Robyn Van En, Jan Vandertuin and a coalition of local citizens (including Susan Witt, who has long been a local advocate for land trusts and human-scale economies, and developed a microcredit program that was a precursor to the county’s local-only currency, BerkShares), founded one of the nation’s first two community-supported-agriculture programs at Indian Line Farm in South Egremont. (The other, in New Hampshire, appeared at roughly the same time; today there are more than 12,000 CSA farms in the United States.)

Read more …

By Matt Wilson | Posted: June 22, 2011

It’s hard to imagine someone getting all worked up about mayonnaise.

Kraft Foods’ Miracle Whip isn’t quite mayonnaise, though, and it engenders some strong feelings, says Sara Braun, marketing director for the brand. “It is a polarizing product,” she says. “Rather than deny this truth, it’s something that we needed to embrace.”

Early this year, Miracle Whip launched its “Love Us” and “Hate Us” counter on its YouTube page. The message on the page asks people to say whether they love or hate the brand, and to leave a comment saying why. “If it’s unfettered hatred, that’s cool,” the message on the page reads. “We know we’re not for everyone. We just ask you let it out on the right. And if you love us? Well, we love you too. Confess it on the left.”

So far, the counter has drawn a total of nearly 55,000 “loves” and more than 3,300 “hates.”

“We’re used to hearing the negative things that people say about the taste of Miracle Whip, and we want to present the honest opinion that exists out there,” says Braun. “Our hope is that the love comments will really overshadow the hate comments.”

It’s a risky move to ask people to express hate for the brand, she admits, but so far, the payoff’s been worth it.

Read more …