Tag! You're It! This week we're asking you to hand out the Friday Props either here in the comments on the blog or over on our Facebook page   Read More >>

Eggplant. Who doesn't love a little  Solanum melongena now and again? In this, our twelfth week of Friday Props, we're looking at eggplant. What a strange thing to be handing out props for, yes? Yes. But hold onto your hats because I promise you'll fully like what we have in store for you this week. Cooking up Color Love You might think we're going to look at recipes (and the thought did cross our minds), but instead we're handing out props to one of our favorite spots on the web to get inspiration for color schemes. Colour Lovers is a spot to create, share and use color schemes contributed by a community of users. The aubergine flower to the left was made with a color palette we liked named ... wait for it .... eggplant       Vermont Style Gardening We all know there are no better gardeners than those who manage to bring forth in our short growing season enough bounty to get a family through the winter. Well here's a garden in Rochester, Vermont where the bounty is so rich and the heart behind growing it so generous that we just had to hand out Props. (We don't actually know if there is any eggplant in [....] Read More >>

We are firm believers that every business ought to have a presence on the web - it's as basic as having a phone number. In fact, most people nowadays have their first contact with a business via the web - either on their laptop/desktop computers, tablets or smart phones. It behooves every small business owner to take seriously the need to be reachable, searchable and generally available online. But not all businesses need a full-blown website. In fact, there are many that can do just fine with a business card style website - one which shares the very basic information about a business that most people would be looking for anyway - telephone number, hours of operation, location, directions, links to any social media presence and perhaps the most recent news or specials, but not much more. We're happy to announce that we've used our Edgeworks CMS product to develop very reasonably priced Edgeworks CMS Biz Card websites for just these types of businesses. Our Edgeworks CMS Biz Card platform provides a simple, single page website with all the basic information for your small or micro-business. These sites are reasonably priced but offer features that are usually available only on much more expensive sites. Biz Card [....] Read More >>

For our eleventh installment of Friday Props I was going to start out with a tribute to space exploration and specifically to the Mars Curiosity rover en route and nearly arrived, but it got me thinking about the spirit of exploration in general. That then led me to thinking about the boundless potential of childhood and childhood dreams. So this week we are giving out Props for people and things in some way related to the wonder of childhood. Super Heroes The window washers at the London Children's Hospital dress in super hero costumes for the kids. This is just plain awesome. You can imagine how it might lift the spirits of some kids who could really use it. Major Props going out for these guys - a super hero thing to do. Moonrise Kingdom We won't be handing out Props too often for movies, but this movie is just too good to ignore. It's a sweet, silly, random story of childhood love and wanderings set in the fictional New England island of "New Penzance". The casting, the dialogue, the hillarity  ... it's all so much worth seeing. Props going out to Wes Anderson for his film. Watch the trailer below, check out the [....] Read More >>

We are quite pleased to introduce the Edgeworks CMS for Realtors. As we've mentioned before, we have developed a website building platform and Content Management System called the Edgeworks CMS which we use to build customized websites for businesses of all varieties. We take the basic CMS and then build on top of it in order to adapt the platform to each of our clients'  businesses. There are some types of businesses which have similar needs, however. We've identified a number of those business types and over the coming year we will be releasing versions of the CMS for those business types. The first business category we have targeted is real estate agents. The Edgeworks CMS for Realtors offers real estate brokers and agents a fully connected NNEREN MLS data-aware website. Our offering provides the following benefits: A completely custom front-end design Property detail pages that are well-organized and easy to read Simple to use CMS administrative interface Hands-on training covering how to use the CMS Ability to enhance your own properties with search-optimized pages for your properties Google maps of properties Similar Properties feature Property search feature with agent listings featured Mortgage calculator Hourly updates to MLS data Each and every implementation of the Realtor CMS will still have the individual attention and custom design [....] Read More >>

     As we’ve mentioned before in previous articles, links are a positive signal to search engines affirming the value and validity of your website.  By this logic, the more websites linking to you the better your page rank, right? Unfortunately, it isn’t quite that simple. In the early days of search engines, yes, it was that simple. Early search engines only assigned value based on quantity. They possessed no ability to ascertain quality or origin of external links. Webmasters constructed entire networks of interlinked pages designed to boost the ranking of specific websites and this still happens today! Their overall impact is, however, diminishing. This and other tactics intended to fool search engines and boost page rank are considers “black hat” strategies. After all, how does a web crawler definitively ascertain the value of the originating site? Only the people behind the search engines know. Suffice to say that as search engines and their crawlers evolve, so does their criteria for evaluating the origin of the website hosting your link. As you attempt to gain stature in the eyes of the search engines, be wary of engaging in the following practices; the short term gain isn’t worth the monetary loss and long-term [....] Read More >>

We're pleased to announce the release the re-designed Brooks Barron Real Estate website, the first Realtor to take advantage of our new Edgeworks CMS for Realtors. With the newly redesigned website,  Brooks Barron Real Estate now offers MLS listings data from the Northern New England Real Estate Network within the geographic area they cover. Whereas the previous website had the listing data for only their properties, the new site offers properties from other listing agents in the same geographic area. The detail view of a property has been given extensive and special care, making it quite possibly the best display of MLS data of any real estate website in Vermont. The new Brooks Barron website is simple to manage thanks to the Edgeworks CMS for Realtors backbone and we have plans for the platform that will continue to improve upon the experience for both website visitors and Brooks Barron. Congratulations to Susan and Brooks Barron on the leap forward! An example property detail page on the new Brooks Barron Real Estate website.   Read More >>

It's another Friday making it time for another round of Friday Props. I'm back in the drivers seat for this week so we'll be steering clear of the crazy things Phil presented the last couple weeks. Let's dig right in! Let it Rain! Musical Rain Gutters In the student district of Desden, Germany there is a building fitted with rain gutters that are so whimsical and creative as to deserve Props. The Kunsthofpassage Funnel Wall actually plays music when it rains. They are not only designed to look like instruments, they are instruments. How cool is that!?   Parallax to the Max There is a new trend in web design called parallax design. The idea is to provide the illusion of depth to a web page by taking advantage of the parallax effect. According to Wikipedia: Parallax is a displacement or difference in the apparent position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight, and is measured by the angle or semi-angle of inclination between those two lines.  The term is derived from the Greek ?????????? (parallaxis), meaning "alteration". Nearby objects have a larger parallax than more distant objects when observed from different positions, so parallax can be used to determine distances. We've been spending a fair amount of time recently [....] Read More >>

Design—it is all around us. Stop reading for just a moment and look around you—every man-made item in your field of vision was designed by someone. Permeating our lives, good design is often not noticed while bad design drives us to frustration; the cell phone that hangs up when held against your ear in a particular manner is more often noticed than the one that functions flawlessly and lets you go on with the task at hand without bringing attention to itself. Yet even without noticing it, all design influences you. Design impacts our daily lives. It can be found in a myriad of areas–from architecture to transportation to product design to graphic design (to name just a few). Sometimes design crosses into the realm of art and becomes something to look at and contemplate, to move people, to create controversy or to enrich lives. And while it is true that design shares a spark of creativity and innovation with art, most often design is much more specific—it is creativity deployed for a specific goal and that goal is usually one of solving a problem or communicating a message. Graphic design, in particular, conveys messages in our modern media-centric society. There is [....] Read More >>

Ed is still hunkered down behind the four computer screens in his office while I gaze longingly through the windows at the beautiful blue skies....FREE ME FROM MY CHAINS! Since all my work is done, I get the honor of giving you this week's edition of Friday Props, brought to you by the friendly interwebs, Where All Good Things Happen. For our first prop, I will add this disclaimer: I don't understand Spanish very well. OK, yeah, I used to work with a whole lot of guys from El Salvador, but most of our conversation revolved around food so my vocabulary is almost useless outside a grocery store or kitchen. Don't worry if you don't know Spanish. It won't take you too long to figure out how this invention works and how it will improve society:   Speaking of commercialization that helps improve the world, Rhett and Link have made an art of making low budget commercials for local businesses. This came out three years ago but its so campy, it makes me chuckle everytime I see it because it is so ridiculous. If every TV commercial was this interesting, I would watch TV for the commercials. What gets the Props here is not [....] Read More >>