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]

Update: The guys just sent out a message that the program has been filled to capacity a day and a half early! So disregard this post. If you’re interested in this awesome training course, you’ll have to wait until early 2009 when they open their doors to new members again, with more, updated content. I’ll keep you updated.

Brian Clark, the successful writer behind Copyblogger (with over 40K subscribers!), along with Tony Clark of Success From the Nest, have been running a fantastic training program for online marketers and content producers for the last several months. Many of the world’s top bloggers, from Australian Problogger Darren Rowse to Maki of DoshDosh have been raving about the Teaching Sells program ever since it started up in October 2007, calling it the best program for kick-starting your online content marketing and creating awesome paid-content membership sites.

Teaching Sells is a multiple-course educational program that encourages internet entrepreneurs like you and me to “Teach and Grow Rich.” Brian and Tony will walk you through all the specific strategies that online marketing gurus are using right now to make a fortune from setting up members-only multimedia learning environments online and sharing their expertise with others. If you’re a coach or consultant, this program is the perfect fit—and if you’re a blogger or online publisher, these guys will show you how to leverage the authority and exposure you’ve built with your online presence and funnel it into paid-content and create additional revenue streams for your online business.

Click here to learn more about and enroll in the Teaching Sells program.

Teaching Sells has nearly 1000 Charter members already and they will be closing their doors to new members Thursday night, July 31, so I finally bit the bullet and joined the program. I’ve worked through the first course and the program looks really well put together—the subscription cost is just $97/month, but it certainly looks well worth it. Access to the members’ area includes tons of great articles in easily-digestible chunks, audio and video files, interactive assignments, helpful user discussion boards, and even a library of valuable private label rights content that you can republish and repurpose to fit your needs.

The program currently includes over ten detailed courses (and more to come!):

1. How to Create Content That Sells
2. How to Effectively Market Membership Sites
3. How to Create Killer Multimedia Content with Quick and Easy Tools
4. Seven Profitable Business Models for Interactive Content Developers
5. Your Blueprint for Building Membership Sites with Open Source and Low-Cost Software
6. “Under the Radar” Marketing: Persuasive Educational Content That Sparks the Buying Process
7. Quick, Easy, and Inexpensive Niche-Focused Membership Sites
8. Explosive Content: Delivering Your Message Payload with Multimedia Storytelling
9. The Winning Difference: Advanced Positioning and Creative Adaptation Strategies
10. Launch Strategies for Membership Sites and Training Programs
11. The “Entreproducer” Model for Online Business Success
12. Under the Radar Affiliate Marketing
13. Quick and Easy Content Strategies
14. How to Explode Profits with Seminars and Workshops

Teaching Sells even has a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re not totally impressed with the material, and you can opt to discontinue your membership anytime you choose.

At the time of printing, there are currently 36 seats left, and when Teaching Sells re-opens its doors to new members several months down the line, the subscription cost will increase at least threefold as they continue to roll out new material. Just like I did though, you can still get in before they close on Thursday, and take advantage of all the new features and benefits they have planned at a much lower price. To learn more about the program and the curriculum, check out their free report first.