Bala Krishnan, a young entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who writes about advertising and entertainment, approached us when he wanted to set up a blog as a personal branding tool and to help build an online presence for his new startup Adyana. Cody McKibben helped him customize his WordPress platform for his needs, incorporate a corporate logo and high-quality portraits into his site. Later, with help from freelancer Kim Pasma, we also helped Bala re-design when the company was ready for a more product-centric look.

Client: Bala Krishnan/Adyana

Location: Cupertino, CA

Site: blog.Adyana.com

Responsibilities:

» Project Management

» Incorporated Existing Corporate Logo & Branding

» Created Adjustable-Width Design with Hi-Resolution Photography

» Custom Navigation and Search Bar

» FeedBurner Integration/Email Subscription Form

» Custom XHTML & CSS Design

» Cross-Browser Support

Tom Alexander is the Chief Technology Officer of CLC Incorporated, a financial and legal firm, and President of CLC Technology in Granite Bay, CA. But he and his wife Sanjivini also maintain a personal blog where they share their Vedanta spiritual philosophy, recipes, photography, and thoughts on the news. When Tom wanted to move his site from a static design he had to maintain into an easy-to-use content management system (CMS), he came to us! Cody helped him port his design into standards-compliant table-less strict XHTML and utilize the WordPress engine to manage all of his articles and content.

Client: Tom Alexander

Location: Granite Bay, CA

Site: TomAlexander.com

Responsibilities:

» Design Converted from Tables into Strict Table-less XHTML/CSS

» Ported Design to WordPress (PHP)

» Fully W3C Standards-Compliant

» Implemented Dynamic Rollover Navigation

» Large Customizable Header Photographs for Each Unique Page

» Cross-Browser Support

In an interesting turn of events, the Securities and Exchange Commission may start allowing companies to fulfill their public disclosure requirements for financial announcements through their corporate blogs. From Brian Solis:

For several years, Sun CEO, Jonathan Schwartz has lobbied the SEC to allow disclosure of financial information through corporate blogs. In a landmark announcement, it seems that Mr. Schwartz may indeed get his wish, and with it, a historical decision that could break the age-old shackles that bound businesses to traditional media and distribution channels in order to satisfy full disclosure.

If you’re a corporate blogger, this may make your life easier. See the recent TechCrunch article SEC To Recognize Corporate Blogs as Public Disclosure. Can We Now Kill the Press Release?

Adam and Steve are two great sports enthusiasts up in Canada that have been writing the Highly Obsessed blog since 2005. Dubbed “The Snowboarding and Cycling Blog,” the site covers everything from ski resort news to snowboard and cycling equipment reviews to training and more. They draw a wide audience of active snowboarders and cyclists, so when they needed to spruce up their looks they came to us. Cody McKibben and graphic designer Nicole Hendrix helped give the site a much more colorful and active look by giving them a logo and designing custom graphics for each page of the site. We also helped the guys monetize their site a bit by incorporating tasteful Google Adsense ad units.

Client: Steve Barnes & Adam Eisner

Location: Toronto, Canada

Site: HighlyObsessed.com

Responsibilities:

» Project Management

» Photoshop Logo Design

» Supplied Stock Sports Photography

» Customized Header Images for Index, Single Pages & Archives

» Customized Category-Specific Images

» Custom XHTML & CSS Design

» Google Adsense Integration - Link Units & Ad Banners

» Cross-Browser Support

Friends have been asking lately what Twitter is. And I’ve been asked by several clients how to best use it and leverage it to improve their business networking.

Well, the exciting news is that there are a ton of businesses on there using it to improve the lines of communication with their customers, and there are many professionals building up a huge following and improving their credibility at the same time. Yesterday I published a detailed tutorial at our sister site about what Twitter is and some of the ways to best utilize the service for personal branding and to increase your leads. If you’re curious what this new social network is and how your business might benefit from you, I invite you to read Tweet and Grow Rich: A Beginner’s Guide Plus 5 Tips to Rock Your Business With Twitter at Thrilling Heroics!

I also highly recommend Brian Clark’s article Three Ways to Maximize Your Twitter Time for Networking, Marketing and Fun at the Copyblogger blog.

It appears that many WordPress-powered sites across the net are still running an older version of the software that has become vulnerable to security issues. I’ve personally seen this issue crop up when I’ve clicked through on the titles of a few RSS feeds that pointed to spam links, not the originating blog. If you’re not running the latest version of WordPress, take a look at your feeds to be sure your site isn’t compromised. Not only is this a bad thing for your users, but Technorati has stopped tracking many of these blogs, as will the search engines.

Technorati staffer Ian Kallen had this to say:

“This is a follow up on our post regarding a problem affecting thousands of WordPress blogs, Patch or Upgrade Your Wordpress Installation, Now. WordPress has since released version 2.5. However, we’ve noticed that a large number of blogs remain vulnerable to the security issue addressed by the 2.3.3 release.

Blogs that have been compromised by this security vulnerability are typified by having links to spam destinations inserted onto the blog page. These link insertions may be invisible to casual observations; the links are often obscured by style attributes that render them invisible. These links are still seen by crawlers such as Technorati’s, Google’s and Yahoo’s. You can find these links by viewing the source of the blog pages or, when using Firefox, looking under “Tools” -> “Page Info” -> “Links”. Blogs hosted on wordpress.com are not affected by this issue; only blogs hosted on their own installations of WordPress from wordpress.org require concern.

Because of this ongoing problem, we’re discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven’t been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) — this has been reported by many WordPress users.

If you have questions about installing WordPress or maintaining a WordPress installation, please refer to the WordPress Documentation or the WordPress Forums. If you feel that your blog is not vulnerable to this hack but your WordPress blog is not being updated, please contact Technorati support staff.”

Special Offer for Urgent Security Upgrades

The normal cost for a complete software update is $65, but for clients who are still running WordPress 2.3.2 or below ONLY, to help you get your blog secure again I’ll be offering a special discounted upgrade of your core files and plugins for just $35, but you must contact me before midnight PST Saturday, August 9.

[source: Vulnerable WordPress Blogs Not Being Indexed on Technorati Weblog]