Station Four Blog

Life, Love, & Client Relationships

info.nospam@nospam.stationfour.com (Chris Lahey) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:55:00 -0400

Client Relationships

Every time that you win a bid with a client, you are not just getting money from them. You are creating a relationship that is not unlike a relationship that you would develop with a friend or a loved one. There are unspoken and spoken rules of conduct and there are also obligations that must be met in order for the relationship, and ultimately the project to be a success.

Starting Off On The Right Foot

I've been in the web design and development business for almost 10 years, long enough to see many of these such relationships come and go. Some are one time things, and some are lasting partnerships. With all of the different types of projects and relationships, there is one thing that remains the same. And that is the position with which you start the relationship. In order for any project to be a success, the relationship has to be initiated from a position of strength. And more importantly, it must be beneficial for both parties. The money might only flow one way, but there is an equal and opposite energetic response to that check.

I've seen companies in the past that would do anything for a check. They would lie, mislead, and sell you up the river and back again. I've also seen companies underbid the first project and then attempt to get the money back in future projects. There is no room for prospecting in client-based work. I've seen companies set up with an amazingly large gulf in between the sales and development departments. Sales always over promises which in turns causes the development team to under deliver. This cycle always exists to the detriment of the project and the client relationship.

Know Yourself

Bidding is never fun. You do your best to come up with the most appropriate solution for the client and hope that you hit the mark; one that is going to achieve their goals and will also be beneficial for you as a design/development company. Every now and then, a project comes across your desk that appears to be the makings of a great relationship. However, there are a few things that you must be cautious of that can sour an otherwise great relationship.

In order to function with clients you need to have a solid understanding of who you are and who you are not. This applies to you as an individual and also to you as a company. In the courting phase, pre contract signing, you need to be able to put your best face forward. And you'll also need to stand your ground when you're boundaries are pushed. If you don't have a solid understanding of yourself, your business, and your product the client will pick up on this and the relationship may never have the chance to come to fruition.

Cheap, Fast, & Good - Juggling Expectations

Every relationship starts off with predefined expectations. Managing them is paramount to navigating a successful project. Does the client have unrealistic expectations? Are they asking for too much work for the budget? Do they have extremely tight deadlines? The old saying applies now just as it did then: "There are three things a project can be: cheap, fast, and good. But you can only have two."

You can have it cheap and fast, but it won't be good. And you can have it fast and good, but it sure isn't going to be cheap.

These Boots Were Made For Walkin'

If a client is demanding that they get all three. Walk away. No project or relationship that is founded on those expectations is worth it and it will never result in a quality product. Furthermore, you will be setting a precedent that will never be able to be broken with that particular client. And when the next project for that client comes along, you will be stuck in the same unprofitable mode that you were in with the first project. Knowing when to let a project pass you by can is a tough lesson to learn. However, it will define you as an individual and it will define you as a competent and ethical business.

To sum it all up, working with clients is like dating. Be open, be honest, and be true to yourself. It could lead to something amazing.

The Station Four Redesign - A Programmer's Perspective

info.nospam@nospam.stationfour.com (Chris Lahey) — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:51:00 -0400

We just launched our new website yesterday evening. Launching is always a frantic event. No matter how much you pre-plan, it always seems to be a frenzy of last minute To-Do's that make a launch an especially stressful event. It took us about 6 months from the moment we decided to do a redesign to get it launched. Take into consideration that we were doing client work concurrently. The standard "cobbler's family with no shoes" syndrome.

what we changed

There are many changes that we made on the new S4 site and I'll address the programming aspects of the new site that are unique and interesting.

Static Content Filtering

Most web browsers only allow 4 concurrent connections per domain. So, for the domain: stationfour.com, when the browser is downloading the HTML from the server, all of the CSS files, images, and Javascript, and all of the content get downloaded using those 4 connections for that domain. Now, suppose right before the server sends the HTML to your browser, we replace all of the domains for the images, CSS, and Javascript to an alternate domain? Then we'll be able to have 8 concurrent connections. Those 8 connections are making our website load faster.

Web Services

Our old website did not have the Blog posts integrated into the homepage, or any other section of the website for that matter. We've added a few Web Services that allow us to communicate with our blog engine which is running under a different application. Now you'll notice that we have our current Blog posts on the home page as well as our individual "about us" pages.

Twitter Integration

I'm sure you all know what Twitter is by now. If not, a simple Google search will answer all of your questions. We've integrated our own personal Twitter feeds into our website. Twitter offers some "off the shelf" Javascript to accomplish this but this did not fit our needs. We only wanted to display Tweets that we have specially tagged with the tag #s4. So, I've created a method that pulls only our Tweets that match the given criteria.

The S4 Feed

We've added to the homepage a column that holds the S4 Feed. This is a combination of our Posts, Tweets, and News Items. It's a work in progress but it serves as a "what's new" section for our homepage. Guaranteed to keep it lively and never stale.

Advice to a Web Design Student

info.nospam@nospam.stationfour.com (Chris Olberding) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 21:20:00 -0400

Recently I was asked by a university student studying web design if they could interview me as part of a class project. I agreed, however I was too busy for a phone interview so I ended up responding in length to a set of questions in writing. I believe a much of what I wrote would be applicable to all design students interested in web design so I'm posting my interview here.

1. What is Your Job Title

We tend to avoid job titles but I could use either ‘Owner’ or ‘Art Director’. My titles at the last two agencies I was at were ‘Senior Web Developer’ and ‘Design and Marketing Analyst'.

2. What is Your Education/Training

Fairly unorthodox. I began working in photoshop and designing webpages when I was about 14 (around 1994) in addition to playing around with programming languages like C and, later, Java.

As an undergraduate at the University of Florida I had a number of art shows showcasing my photography and digital art. I also designed a few sites here and there for myself and friends and had a number of small online ventures that derived ad revenue. I got a BA in Political Science and spent about three years pursuing a doctorate degree in Comparative Politics.

While in graduate school I worked for the Center of European Studies, updating and maintaining their PHP/MySQL site and worked with the political science department on a complete redesign (which is still up but a little worse for wear: http://web.polisci.ufl.edu/).

However, I learned most about web design, marketing, and web development after I got a job at a small web company in Jacksonville. I was hired to replace the manager there and there wasn’t really anyone on staff that knew a whole lot more than me. So starting out I would buy tons of books and magazine on various related subject and taught myself.

3. Do You Have a Specialization

My own specialization is design and marketing. The other owner at Station Four handles application development and programming, however I am the resident HTML/CSS ninja.

4. What Drew Your Interest to the Field?

I’ve always been a bit of a computer nerd, keeping up with the latest trends online. At the same time I’ve always been creative and worked across a number of mediums. When I first started in the field I didn’t know much about how marketing and business strategy tied into the discipline of web design. As my experience working directly with clients increased something sort of ‘clicked’; I realized that web design should be a rational, goal‐driven process that results in a creative and successful design, which sort of jived with who I am.

5. How Your Get Your Start in the Industry?

Luck. As I described above, my resume starting out wasn’t real impressive. I interview well and was hired as a ‘Senior Web Developer’ at a small and poorly managed company. However, because it was poorly managed I learned as much with that company that I have anywhere since and because it was small I had the opportunity to institute policies and processes and quickly see the affect they had on client satisfaction and the company’s bottom line.

6. Describe Your Typical Workday.

As a business owner there is really no ‘typical workday’. In a given day I’ll do some, if not all of the following: take sales calls, go on sales meetings, write proposals, meet or talk with clients about their project, respond to a million emails, work on site architecture deliverables such as sitemaps and page description diagraphs, work on layouts (wireframing), work on client design work (logos, websites, flash, print materials), produce marketing analyses, manage online ad campaigns, play Mario Kart on the Wii, manage workers and freelancers, and do some bookkeeping.

6. Positives and Negatives.

One thing that is both is that everything changes very quickly. There are always new technologies and techniques that are exciting and cool but require you to constantly keep up. The type of work I do now is significantly different than it was a year ago. Because everything changes so quickly people working as in‐house web designers, focusing on a single site that employs a given set of technologies, can find that their skill set is out of date if they ever want to move to an agency.

Also the pace of change hinders mid‐sized companies that try to employ a traditional management structure as they find their process and employee’s skill sets become outdated fairly quickly. On the plus side, smaller more agile agencies can do very well and are typically more fun to work at anyway.

As with any design work, being forced to be constantly creative can be draining. I find that I go through all sorts of stages of frustration and self‐ doubt in the early stages of a design only to eventually have a ‘lightbulb’ go off. Completing a design you’re proud of is a great feeling but I find the process so draining that it’s difficult for me to just start a new project right away. However I’ve always had the experience where I am responsible for a variety of tasks and in most cases can take step away from design work for a few hours or a day between projects.

7. Advice to someone interested in Web Design.

Unless you’re very interested in either Flash or web development (database programming etc) then keep your skill set general. In the case that you are very interested in Flash or web development then focus on those skills exclusively as there are good jobs out there for people that are great at either that don’t require you to know anything else. Knowing about search engine optimization is great but the number of jobs out there for low‐level relatively unknown SEO specialists will be small. Someone who can design and code (html/css) will be able to find a job at more places than someone who can only do one.

Learn about usability and what makes interaction design different than other types of design.

Use web standards and xhtml/css. Tables should only be used for displaying tabular data.

Think about the web design process, with client work you just don’t start up photoshop and start designing. Learn about the tools and documents people have developed to streamline the process.

Follow trends in web design but don’t always follow them. Super web 2.0‐ ish sites with reflections everywhere sites will look dated in a year but similar techniques can be employed to good effect. This tends to be the case with most fads and trends.

Keep up to date with blogs on web design and comment on them. Know something about marketing and the actual business value of a good design. Clients don’t want a ‘cool’ site, they want more business. Find your community. There are a lot of print designers, web designers, and programmers about, find them. Go to AIGA events and just meet other professionals and students in the field.

Always be open to new things. Do something using a different technology or platform just to figure out how to use it.

301 Redirects on non ASP.NET pages with Mosso

info.nospam@nospam.stationfour.com (Chris Lahey) — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:01:00 -0400

Over the past few days I've been going back and forth with the support team at Mosso. They are great by the way. However, we couldn't seem to find a solution for the problem that I was having. I needed to return 301 redirects for .html pages and have them redirect to their proper .aspx pages in a newly redesigned website.

Traditionally, I would have just added a ISAPI filter within IIS to map all .html files to be parsed by the isapi.dll engine. This would force ASP.NET to attempt to parse the page. At that point, I would have included a bit of code at the top of the .html page to return the 301 redirect. Unfortunately, I could not get access to IIS b/c Mosso is a shared hosting environment and modifying server settings was not an option.

I then attempted to add some handlers to my web.config file like this:

This would have told ASP.NET to run anything with the .html extension thru the default handler for .aspx pages. So, I tested it locally using Cassini (the internal web server for Visual Studio). Well, that caused my application to not compile. ASP.NET didn't know how to go about building the html pages since I was not passing thru ASP.NET. Quick fix:

I added a bit to the <configuration> tab in the web config to let ASP.NET know I want to use the default page builder to attempt to build the .html pages. Now my application compiled just fine. I went about my task of putting code chunks on every one of the old pages and uploaded them to the Mosso servers to test. And....nothing... All of my code just came thru as plain text is the .html files. Bummer! I had searched until the end of the internet and hadn't found much. The support guys were very helpful but still, nothing was working.

So, I took a wild guess. I crossed my fingers and hoped I could force the .html pages thru the isapi.dll and removed the <httpHandlers> config in my web.config and added the following:

<system.webServer>
    <handlers>
      <add name="Wildcard" path="*.html" verb="*" modules="IsapiModule" resourceType="Unspecified" scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll" />
    </handlers>
</system.webServer>

Now it works! So, if you have any problems with Mosso or any other shared hosting account, you can do your 301 Redirects referencing the isapi.dll in your web.config. Then just add chunks of code at the top of each .html page to specify the redirect like this:

<%@ Page Language="C#" %>
<%

Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
Response.AddHeader("Location","http://www.websitename.com/default.aspx");

%>

Good luck!

Artworlds & Definitions: An Awakening

info.nospam@nospam.stationfour.com (Admin) — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 07:52:00 -0400

Regarding the compilation of notions of a one Terry Barrett on Artworlds and Definitions:

I think writing of a personal experience, and of the opinion that I am loosely grasping as of this moment, when it comes to the definition of art, would perhaps be more interesting for you. That is, rather than simply regurgitating what this one, I’m sure very competent and credible art critic, Mr. Barrett, has to say on the subject.

For years I would have to admit that I had a very closed mind about what should be considered art. That is to be expected. I was young and dumb at the time. (Read more about the opening and closing of the mind in my last blog ART RUN). Now old and slightly less dumb I feel I could write about this intelligently enough for all the world to read.

Oh god is that the dumb speaking again or am I truly wiser with my age? Perhaps just more ornery and less self-conscious. Hence the whole blogging thing.

Anyway. I will narrow this down to one specific experience, out of the seemingly thousands, so as to save time. And blog space. My experience with Andy Warhol:

I didn’t understand the appeal. I just didn’t get it. How could something so easily produced, and mass-produced at that, be considered a masterpiece? Indeed, it is just a hairline away from even being considered art.

And yet it was.

It is.

They are.

All of them.

All of his work.

He could have spat on a piece of paper, called it art, and sold it to the highest and most desperate of a sea of bidders. And what’s more, Warhol’s theory on what is considered art was absolutely appalling.

What is art?

Why, everything!

Anything!

That crumpled soda can lying on the ground.

This loose thread on my collar.

Hey check out that dog relieving itself on my latest painting. Why, that’s art too. And isn’t it beautiful!

How insulting to all hardworking artist and aspiring artist alike, dedicated to the very blood, the sweat, and yes the tears, the emotions that are shackled to this craft like the formidable and yet so awe-inspiring boulder that it is. How dare he, this strange little man, make light of such a thing, to depreciate the incalculable value of our beloved Art. For many years, this tormented me, this infamous theory of a respected and celebrated man. Till one day…

I was sitting in art history class and the professor exclaimed that we were to be watching a documentary video on Andy Warhol. My initial reaction was a very cliché rolling of the eyes and exasperated breath of ‘ugh’. And to my amazement, I was not alone. Most of the rest of the class reacted in much the same way. I thought for sure that my peers had been brainwashed, just like the rest of the world. But, indeed, they too had not yet been “enlightened” the way I was, very unbeknownst to me, about to be.

The video of course had the usual expected filler – Photo’s, film clips of Warhol, interviews with some of his more eccentric followers, and of course, a famous actor narrating the entire spiel. They got around to the latter years, his time spent mainly on film. That was my turning point. His incredible short films.

Imagine…

A close up shot of a man, sitting on a sidewalk.

He sits.

He sits.

His hand moves a bit.

He looks in another direction and then directs his attention back to what he was originally looking at.

He sits.

He sits.

I sit.

My jaw drops open. My eyes - the very eyes that were once aching with indescribable pain after having to be laid upon all that Campbells Soup garbage, and drag queen-esque Marilyn Monroe, and do I have to mention the portrait series on buttholes? (No, like literally. Buttholes. Really.) – are now open like they’ve never been before. I see now, at this moment what Warhol was trying to do, trying to say. And from that point on, I became… dare I say… a fan.

Anything can be art, eh? Why, yes I suppose it could.

And being that I’m an artist, this willful acceptance of such a theory will haunt me till my last breath. Will surely be the death of me. Oh Andy, how I loathe thee for loving thee so fervently.

So shamefully.

You too can partake in just such an experience. Watch a Warhol short film. It may very well change your life.

Dun dun duuuuuuuun!!!

As for you, Terry Barrett, I applaud your efforts.

I’ll just go ahead and add you to my mile long list of authors, artists, aspiring artists, instructors, family members, friends, fellow classmates, colleagues of sorts, acquaintances, as well as all those complete ignoramuses whom have attempted to define the indefinable.

network dissolutions

info.nospam@nospam.stationfour.com (Chris Lahey) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 12:35:00 -0400

I had a rather frustrating experience today that was worth mentioning.

At Station Four, we deal with a number of website hosting companies. Some are better than others, but for the most part, they are all the same. I'll take a moment here and describe a scenario that, in all my years or development, has happend more times than I can remember. Seeing as how we do almost all of our work from scratch, we often have a database driven application that we have running on our servers during development. When it comes time to launch, depending on the client's preferences, we begin to push the code and the database to the preferred production servers.

Today, we began to launch a website for one of our clients. I logged in to their Network Solutions control panel and began mucking around. Got an FTP account set up, created a MS SQL database and all was cruisin' along. That is, until I tried to restore the data in the freshly created database on the production server with a backup copy of the existing database on our development server. There was no way to perform this action. I Googled til the end of the earth, searched the FAQ's, and finally broke down and called the help center.

Long story short, after 45 minutes, talking to 4 different people, getting disconnected, waiting on hold, and generally getting pissed off, I was finally able to get them to understand what I wanted to accomplish. I had to FTP a backup file of my database to the web server (mind you the database server is on a completely different machine). The support person then downloaded my database file from the website directory and forwarded a help ticket to engineering to have them put the file in the proper location so that I can actually perfrom the database restoration using Enterprise Manager.

It blew my mind that there was no way to push my schema and data to the production database server. And to top it all off, the outstanding lack of knowledge of the support staff was so extensive that I began to think that I was mildly retarded.

So, here I am at 8pm, still no word from Network Solutions as to the results of this escapade and I have a website that needs to be up and running for a big marketing push by Monday. Needless to say, we will be moving 5 websites from Network Solutions to our own hosting account here shortly.

Official Business Listings: Slimy SEO Sales Tactics

info.nospam@nospam.stationfour.com (Chris Olberding) — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:18:00 -0400

On Wednesday I receive a call in the office from someone telling me that they are with Google and needed to confirm my address on my local business listing. The caller had a thick accent and their phone connection kept dropping. After confirming my address it seems that the caller wants to call back later in the week. Through the garbled connection he asks if Friday at 2pm would be okay. I say sure.

On Thursday I ignore a call from an 800-number, the speaker leaves a message trying to confirm something for Friday at 2pm without mentioning her company or a callback number. I shrug it off.

On Friday I’m out of the office around 2pm getting a haircut (which looks great btw). When I get back in we have a missed call from someone named Harold Kopec, who is apparently was at my location. Confused since I didn’t know I had inadvertently scheduled a meeting with who I assumed was a Google rep and also because I couldn’t imagine what someone from Google would want to meet with Station Four for, I called him back.

Harold is trying to sell me a spot on Google’s local listings (the top ones next to the map). Thinking that this guy is still some way associated with Google I ask if they are moving those to paid listings, since they are free now. He says they are. After a while of listening to a bunch of sales BS, guarantees, and factually incorrect statements I finally stop him and ask him to clarify how this meeting was booked and who was it who called me Wednesday. As it turns out Harold is a sales rep for an outfit called BizPros, which is part of Official Business Listings (http://www.toblonline.com/), no affiliation with Google at all. He tries to apologize saying that they can’t control everything their outsourced telemarketers say.

He keeps going, telling me that I will lose my spot if I don’t hire them and that he’s already signed up some of my competitors (which he lists by name). As it is I have a professional relationship with the owner of one of the companies and will recommend to her that she cut ties with this slimy outfit.

Here’s the deal, they’re trying to sell a service that doesn’t exist. It didn’t sound like they did much SEO, just local business listings. Local business listings are free and easy for anyone to setup. In many cases Google prefers companies that have explicitly setup their listing to those that it just grabs itself. Many companies however have not setup a listing so by simply doing that most companies will actually rank decent in the local listings simply by setting up their account, which can take 10 minutes.

This company has a significant sales apparatus just to sell a made up service. Much like a few web design companies I know that have ‘franchises’ consisting just of a couple sales reps who know nothing about how to manage projects or clients and send everything to a central production center. All this just makes it that much harder for legit and professional marketing and design to properly manage and educate clients.

The company seems to be located in Tampa, below are the listed officers of the company:

DUNKO, CARLTON D, Pres
PUREBER, FRANK M III, CEO

8412 SABAL INDUSTRIAL BLVD
TAMPA FL 33619

ART RUN: Critical Thinking About Amateur Art

info.nospam@nospam.stationfour.com (Admin) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:56:00 -0400

“About four or five years ago something came over me and I just had to paint all the time.”

As tempting as it may be to interject with a quick and spirited “that’s what she said”, followed by an I-just-can’t-help-myself, shit-eating grin, I’ll restrain myself.

Reluctantly.

I am quoting one of the artists who managed to finagle his artwork into the St. Augustine First Friday Art Walk. Though, finagle is probably not the right word for it. Apparently it’s really not all that difficult to get your work displayed. As I see it, all you need is some paint, a basic understanding of the color wheel, and an ego the size of a Don Johnson’s growing gut. Presumably most of the artists I’ve seen on these walks must possess such sizable egos for how could they otherwise manage to dig up all that shockingly foolish audacity.

Ok I exaggerated. You actually don’t need to have a basic sense of the color wheel. Indeed no sense at all.

So, my dear wannabe artist, Mom knows what’s best for you and was always your biggest fan when it comes to your art, but lest we forget, Mom also has selective blindness when it comes to her spawn. For instance, wasn’t she the one trying to convince everyone how adorable you were as an infant when indeed your looks had, at best, a resemblance suspiciously like that of a hairless troll?

PHASES OF THE OPEN MIND

Through decades of observation and direct participation my mind has reached phase IV of the letting in and pushing out of all things art related. If you are an aspiring artist between the ages of 25ish to 35ish you should be right there with me. This phase allows for a certain amount of justified subjective criticism towards the works of all those self-proclaimed artists out there so as to better able our impressionable minds to reject all that unfiltered nonsense.

PHASE I: Doo Doo Run Run Run, Doo Doo Run Run

Infant To Juvenile

Don’t you wish we could all go back to the days when we thought everything to be so wondrous and beautiful that even the very caca doodoo in our pants brought a sparkle to our infantile eye?

Well I don’t.

Though in many ways it’d be nice to see all things in a new light with the eyes of an infant, there are certain things that should never be received with such open arms – like certain works of art that in many ways could use the same descriptive words as those you would use to describe caca doodoo

When you’re that young, the limitations of personal bias is usually not an issue, however the limitations of your naivety certainly far out way subjectivity.

PHASE II: Know Jack, Know Crap. No Jack, No Crap.

Adolescence

“Mommy, that Jackson Pollock painting is so stupid! I could do way better.”

Ah kids. Ya gotta love em. They always know how to keep it real. And let’s face it Jack, the little brat’s got a point. It is at this age that we are becoming more selective about personal taste and conscientious of art and the making of it. Our minds begin to close off quite a bit.

Don’t panic. A closing up of the mind after several years of being open wider than Ben Affleck’s schedule is a good thing. We can finally begin to defend ourselves from all that shallow, kitsch, artsy fartsy crap. This phase prepares us for a careful and thoroughly discerning re-opening of the mind.

Which brings us to..

PHASE III: Dude, Where’s My Opinion?

College Kid

You don’t need a college degree in art and design to understand art, buuuuut it helps get you out of phase II and through phase III a hell of a lot faster. All those class critiques, cramming for exams, writing of papers, you eat drink and crap art every single day for roughly four years. You are again as wide open as Amy Winehouse’s track marks, but, like Amy’s nasty little habit, only on and off.

But mostly on.

Your once closed mind is now scolded and shunned, dare you speak even one disparaging word against any artist, great or not, let alone against good ol’ Jackson.

And don’t get me started on Andy.

PHASE IV: Andy You’re a Star…In Some People’s Eyes

Out in the Real World

I hate to say this but this isn’t by any means the final phase. Nowhere near, really. In fact, phase IV is going to be significantly different for everyone. We are now discovering the critical balance of the letting in and pushing out. To know when to open up to something smart and to know when to shield the shit.

It’s a good feeling to be in phase IV. Despite how pompous it may sound to someone still in phase III, I love that I can look at a wannabe work of art and say out loud, free of guilt and the repression that is the popular kid vote, that it sucks. That it’s an already been done and shouldn’t have been done in the first place, please get a job as an accountant as there is where your talent is more likely to reside, god-awful piece of crap.

And oh, hey Andy, listen, your work sucks and all but you’ll be happy to know that I’ve at least come to acknowledge the sheer brilliance of the message behind it and the vital impression you’ve left upon me as well as upon this world.

Where I’m at in phase IV - contemplating the theory that anything could be art.

Confused?

Yeah, so am I.

CONCLUSION: Run, Don’t Walk

Wannabe artists can best be described as a bunch of rampant monkeys flinging their feces at any and every innocent and unsuspecting passerby.

Don’t let this happen to you.

Good luck to you, dear reader, on your journey through your own city’s Art Walk. If it’s anything like St. Augustine… God help you.

Sojourn in Surlyville

info.nospam@nospam.stationfour.com (Admin) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:03:00 -0400

I feel I should make a kind of introduction of sorts before moving forward with such an outward display of my own personal reflections relevant to the team at Station Four.

Time and again, with weary consideration, I mull and brood over this thing called Art. And a broody brood I am at that. This whole love/hate relationship I’ve developed over the years spent surrounded, touched, and ultimately wounded by my beloved Art, with prospects now of permanent scarring, has left me with quite a stranglehold on this one single quote…

“Why do I always get so surly when I talk about this industry?”

These being the words of a fellow artist friend of mine, a comic book illustrator who happens to be one of the few people I know more impassioned by the subject of art than myself.

You see, my humility barely enables me to consider myself an aspiring artist let alone an actual, no kidding, artist. I am but a mere infant in comparison to the legitimate artists and masters of the art field. So please take whatever I say with a grain of salt, as one should with any opinion of art and design, annnnd perhaps the occasional opposition on highly overrated contemporary pop movies (ehem… Superbad). Sometimes something really can be summed up simply by the very words of its title. Then again, my company’s name is called Bad Art Graphics. Oh Irony, how relentless your pursuit to make me out to be a complete ass.

I digress. Sure, so my surliness is bound to rear it’s head on this blog space from time to time, but an ugly head, I assure you, it is not. Luckily for you, my written word tends to carry much more diplomacy than my spoken, thanks to the magic of editing and more so out of dutiful respect to the very fine readers of this blog space.

Thank you for your time and enjoy…

Hiding and Pushing Down Search Results Part One: Personal Reputation Management

info.nospam@nospam.stationfour.com (Chris Olberding) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:46:00 -0400

What do you do when search results for your name or company prominently returns results that contain negative or otherwise undesireable infomation? Can you remove these from the search index or otherwise prevent interested parties in uncovering the information contain therein?

I've had to deal with such situations a handful of times and, as is anything, it highly depends on the situation. I remember years ago searching for my name would return links to a Japanese art contest that I somehow placed in when I was a teenager. As I became older and embarassed of the quality of these works I set about having the relavent pages removed. This was in the late 90s and I didn't know much about how search engines indexed and ranked websites so I took the only course of action that seemed available to me, I wrote whatever email address I could find associated with the contest and requested they remove the relavent pages. I don't know if it was due to the language barrier or if the site itself was even maintained any longer but this strategy didn't work. Over time the pages ended up pushed so far down that I'm not even sure I could find them anymore.

Managing Personal Reputation (i.e. what comes up when you search for yourself)

Yesterday I had a woman contact us inquiring whether we could remove or hide a handful of pages that contained damaging infomation about her father. It seems that many years before he was involved in some dispute or litagation that was a matter of public record and a government site had made certain documents about this situation available online and these documents were prominately featured when someone searched for her father's name in Google.

While I told her that in all liklihood our rates would be too high for it to make sense to hire us, I did spend maybe 15-minutes telling her what she could do herself to push these results down.

Given that it was public record, contacting the site and requesting that they remove the offending material would probably not be successful. Additionally the man's name was uncommon, which decreased the liklihood of pre-existing 'noise', such as references to other people with the same name.

Managing this would likely be a simple, if time consuming, matter: muddy the waters. Use the name in question to respond to blog posts, on forum posts, to create a personal website using the name as the domain. While posting to many blogs these days has little value in generating incoming links to your own website due to 'nofollow', the pages are still indexed and will show up in search results. In this particular cases all the offending pages used the middle name of the father, making them more suceptible to being pushed down for the vast majority of searches, which would likily only use his first and last name.

This should be enough for cases like this or the one I faced that I described above because the damange was inadvertant, noone was intentially attempting to get the offending material to come up for that particular query. This is often the case for personal reputation management and is the primary characteristic separating it from managing a business' online reputation.

Check back soon for part two, which will dicuss the trickier topic of corporate reputation management.