Our first few years were spent doing freelance CAD design and drafting projects for various companies in the Colorado area. After our first 2 years, we’ve added website design, online marketing, and 3D Visualization to expand our service offerings. Our client list has grown steadily, which now includes clients from all over the United States. We try to work with local businesses in Colorado, but if you are out-of-state don’t let that stop you from filling out a free quote request! Being local allows us to offer the best level of customer service, but with today’s technology it’s easy for us to keep communication fast and open with companies anywhere in the United States.

As businesses like yours spend more resources and time online to find companies to work with, it can be hard to find a trustworthy company for your design needs. Where are they located? Why can’t I find contact information on their site? How long have they been in business? These are all standard questions you may ask yourself when looking for companies to work with.

For instance, there have been many online marketing companies that have sprouted up with the recent popularity of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). But how do you know which to choose? There is no industry qualification to be an SEO company, so all you really need to do is call yourself one. But would you trust your website in the hands of a company that has only been around for a few months? Or how do you know that company will not use “shady” techniques to bring “instant” traffic at the same time harming the long-term success of your website?

We know how hard it is to find great companies to work with. That’s why we are promoting our experience and talent as a design company that has been in business for 6 years. It may not seem like a long time, but in a digital age it’s an eternity!

So take a moment to fill out our easy quote request to see if we can help you with your design needs today!

We’ve recently launched a new website for Diamondback Data, an online data backup software provider. Whether you’re a home user or small business user, anyone and everyone can benefit from the time and money saved by using Diamondback Data. Diamondback Data offers an off-site and secure solution to backing up your digital life. Start the program, select your files, and let it run! It’s as simple as that. Future backups of your files happen automatically. See more on how it works.

Home Users can benefit by backing up their tax forms, important documents, purchased MP3’s and everything else that matters to them. How much money have you spent on MP3’s from itunes? How much money would you lose if you were a home-based accountant or graphic designer that loses all of your clients’ files?

Business Users can backup all of the important files that keep their business running. It can take days and weeks, along with a lot of money, to recover from data loss. Whether that data loss is from hard drive failure, fire, flood, theft, or whatever, it can all have a devastating effect on your business. An estimated 25% of businesses will not recover from a disaster.

For as little as $8 a month, you can have peace of mind knowing that your most important files are safe and sound, ready to be recovered instantly when data loss strikes. The benefits to keeping a primary, or even secondary backup of your important files with Diamondback Data are many. Data loss tends to happen when you least expect it, so don’t risk losing everything precious and backup today!

View Mark’s Demo Reel to see his work. Big name clients include The Discovery Channel, National Geographic, The History Channel, and the Weather Channel. In addition, Weiler Productions has corporate clients that range from Coors to Qwest, and has done many Music Events.

If you are looking for office cleaning in Denver, Colorado or the surrounding cities, do not hesitate to get in touch with Complete Commercial Services. Visit their website to get the full scoop on their unique cleaning services.

While Shycon Design won’t have a booth, we will be attending and volunteering at the festival. You will likely catch us working in the Beer Tent on Sunday Night, and the rest of the time hanging out in the VIP tent.

How many times have you been ripped off as a landlord or property owner by a bad or difficult renter? Were you burned by late or no payments, or was your property left in horrible condition? The Renter Hall of Shame is the place to go for new tenant background screenings. This network of landlords and property owners is growing by the day, so submit your bad renter experiences today!

Wouldn’t you be great if you knew that the person you are about to rent or lease to was known for bad checks, property damage, or a large array of other violations? Background and credit history checks only go so far. You need a past-performance database that tells you everything you need to know about the person you are about to rent to! With this website, you’ll be able to stop landlord tenant issues before they even happen because you’ll know if a person is worth renting to in the first place.

Centennial Bank completes merger into Guaranty Bank and Trust - All 15 branches of the former Centennial Bank of the West are now operating under the Guaranty Bank and Trust Co. name, parent company Centennial Bank Holdings Inc. said Monday.

UPS targets Colorado, seven other states for faster shipping - United Parcel Service Inc. is aiming to deliver quicker ground shipments in eight states, including Colorado.

Tuesday, 2/19/2008

Denver residents more pessimistic about money - A sense of pessimism pervades the feelings of Denver residents surveyed about their financial security.

Website created for rental housing during DNC - A new website has launched to offer a conduit between people with homes to lease and people attending the Democratic National Convention who need a place to stay.

Adam Aircraft files for Chapter 7 - After failing to secure additional funding to stay in business, Adam Aircraft filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Colorado on Feb. 15, according to court documents.

Committee moves to eliminate Colorado tax for many businesses - A proposal to effectively eliminate the business personal property tax for more than 30,000 Colorado businesses was unanimously approved by the House Finance Committee on Tuesday.

Founder of Denver Bears, Broncos dies - Bob Howsam, who co-founded the Denver Broncos, died Tuesday in Arizona. He was 89.

Wednesday, 2/20/2008

Colorado foreclosures up 40 percent in 2007 - Colorado foreclosure filings jumped 40 percent in 2007 compared with 2006, according to a report released Wednesday by the Colorado Division of Housing.

Denver CPI shows year-over-year increase - The Consumer Price Index for the Denver area rose 1.9 percent during the past year, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics said Wednesday.

Ballot initiative would hold execs accountable - A state board gave preliminary approval Wednesday to a proposed November ballot initiative that would hold top executives accountable for corporate fraud.

Coors, Wal-Mart winners in Xcel energy contest - Xcel Energy Inc. on Wednesday announced that 10 local companies won its Colorado Energy Efficiency awards and collectively saved more than 28 million kilowatt hours of electricity in the last year.

Thursday, 2/21/2008

Abengoa Solar plans world’s largest solar power plant - Abengoa Solar will build what it calls the largest solar power plant in the world, the company reported Thursday.

Xcel Energy wants wind farms - Xcel Energy Inc. on Thursday issued a request for proposals for companies to build wind farms capable of generating up to 150 megawatts of power.

Friday, 2/22/2008

Sunday liquor sales bill advances in Colorado Senate - Coloradans are another step closer to making beer, wine and whiskey runs on Sundays now that the state Senate approved a bill that removes a “blue law” that prohibits liquor sales on Sunday.

Payday lending bill gets preliminary OK in Colorado House - A bill that targets the payday lending industry got preliminary approval from the Colorado House of Representatives on Friday after an intense, mostly party-line debate.

Have you ever visited a link from a website and ended up at an error page that let’s you know you’ve just wasted a few seconds of your life you’ll never get back? Whether it’s a 404 Error page or Missing Document page, a missing page is the black hole of the internet.

We’ve been updating many client websites and have come across missing pages a lot lately. By providing links to other web pages, your website can provide additional information for the visitor at the external resource. If these pages have moved or have been renamed, then they are worthless to the visitor if they haven’t been redirected to their new pages.

As an example, the IRS has a business section that was linked to from one of the websites we work on. If you try going to the linked page for small business information , then you’ll see that the requested page does not exist. You’d think with all that money, the IRS would be able to provide some proper redirection! The new page is here by the way: Small Business One-Stop Resource

Why you need to redirect your web pages

As a designer or webmaster, it’s your responsibility to redirect your old web pages to their appropriate new ones. Whether you have changed the file names to something more SEO friendly (See Poor Domain and File Naming), or have changed the extension from .html, .php or something else, you need to redirect all of your old pages to the new ones for the good of the web!

While not annoying the people that link to you is one reason to redirect, redirecting serves another important purpose. Search engine friendliness! Search engines “crawl” the web by going from link to link. If you are redesigning your website where all of your filenames change, then any and all “linkjuice” to your pages will be lost if not redirected properly. You’ll basically be starting from ground zero. Redirecting preserves the “stamp of approval” that your former web pages received. Not redirecting will have search engine spiders confused and will penalize your website for it through lost rankings.

How to do 301 Webpage redirects

Warning: Techy Mumbo Jumbo ahead

There are a number of ways to redirect your old web pages to new ones. More importantly the type of redirect you want to do is a 301 redirect, which tells search engines that the webpage has moved permanently. There are other types of redirects available for temporary purposes, but the ones discussed below are for permanent changes. All of these redirects depend on what is powering your website: Windows, Linux, and so on.

Redirecting through the .htaccess file

The most common redirect is through the .htaccess file on the root of your server. The .htaccess file is a directory level configuration file for Apache Servers. The example line of code below:

• redirect means it’s a redirect.
• 301 means it’s permanent
• /old/page.htm is the file name you are redirecting
• http://www.shycon.com/my-new-page.php is the location of the new page.
• You must use the same naming convention for these redirects to work! Your old file will not have you domain name attached to it, while your new file will!
• Add additional lines for each and every page you want to redirect.

PHP redirect

PHP redirects are added to the actual file you want to redirect, not a central file. Adding this code to the old page will redirect it to the new one when a visitor goes to it.

• Change the URL in the Location line to the correct page

Getting more complex…

The above examples are great for redirecting new sites with a manageable amount of pages. It’s a one-by-one approach. But what if you wanted to redirect thousands of pages? It really depends on your situation, but it should be manageable most of the time. It just takes more work than simple PHP and .htaccess redirects.

Further reading:

• How to Set-up a 301 Redirect
• The Rundown on 301 and 302 Redirects
• Many Redirection Examples

The Small Business Directory is a human-edited directory focusing on resources that can help aid in the success of small businesses.

This is not your everyday catch-all directory full of spammy sites. We monitor this one to ensure that it remains a helpful resource to find information and help related to a wide variety of business topics.

The Small Business Directory is currently divided into 44 categories, but this number will likely grow in the future as the directory itself grows, lending itself to even more niche categories.

Categories range from Brick and Mortar and Signage to eCommerce and Search Engine Marketing.

We are always open to submissions from those who offer a site that can be useful to someone starting and/or operating a business. This is not a place to submit any site you may have. Spammers need not apply.

So if you run “Alfie’s Donut Shop”, this is not the place to submit your site. You may, however find the directory useful for finding information and advice to help you run your donut shop more successfully.