This weekend is the Space City Classic Gymnastic Invitational, held February 3rd-5th at the Legends Sports Complex in Spring. The Classic is hosted by Team Cypress of Cypress Academy of Gymnastics in Houston, TX and a portion of all of the proceeds from the event will go to The Greater Houston Gymnastics Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization. Schipul is proud to sponsor this great event!

The Space City Classic website is built with Tendenci Content Management System Community Edition. The site features include a large homepage rotator, News feed, Event Calendar, and Membership Login Area.

“The Greater Houston Gymnastics Foundation is extremely thankful for the support of Schipul and the Tendenci website platform in helping us revolutionize our presence on the web.  Not only does the quality of product improve the reputation of our meets and organization, but the simplicity and intuitive design constructs of Tendenci make web development, enhancement and daily use extremely attractive.  The fact that I didn’t have to train users on how to interface with our operations through the website says enough!”

- David Duren, The Space City Classic

TheSpaceCityClassic.com hosted on Tendenci. Learn more and sign up for a free trial at Tendenci.com

One of our servers is experiencing intermittent outages due to overload issues. This affects some of our WordPress & Drupal websites.

When attempting to access sites on this server, you may encounter “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” errors. For the most part, you will see no issues with the site – but we know that any down time can be frustrating. We apologize for the inconvenience to our clients and their site visitors.

This is one of our older servers; we are upgrading all of the affected sites to a newer server one at a time. We are starting this process immediately, but it may take up to two weeks to migrate every site.

Thank you for your patience, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact our Support Team at (281) 497-6567 ext 411 or support@schipul.com.

We will be following up with each affected client directly as well.

It’s the start of a brand new year, and that clean slate has likely got you thinking about goals and projects you want to tackle for your business. Maybe you’re wanting to take on a redesign of your website, or get started with social media to build online community. Maybe you’ve had all these online outposts for the past year but don’t feel you’re getting the most benefit from them. You’ve got questions but aren’t really sure where to go for the answers. Maybe you Googled something along those lines and ended up here.

Well, for those of you in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley, we’ve got a treat for you! Remember back in college when you were totally stumped on that assignment you were given and needed a little extra help? You’d head to the TA’s or professor’s office during office hours and get the individual attention you needed. It was great! Wouldn’t it be great if there were office hours for all your web marketing questions? Yea, we thought so too.

Schipul – The Web Marketing Company is pleased to kick off the New Year by featuring Office Hours for those in the Bay Area who may be looking for a little free web marketing advice. Our Silicon Valley office director, April Kyle, will be holding office hours every Wednesday this month – so sign up now! Topics can include anything you have questions about – non-profit management, association management, web design, event registration services, Drupal, WordPress – you name it. We want to be clear – this is 100% NOT a sales pitch. This is us at Schipul wanting to meet you, get to know you, and share with you the combined knowledge of 14 years of geeking out playing around on the web. We believe in knowledge sharing so much, it’s officially part of our culture.

There is so much awesomeness on the web these days – let’s chat about it! Sign up now and bring your burning web questions to us. We can’t wait to meet you!

Your Organization’s Online Brand relies on providing a positive, interactive experience for your customers on your website.  Your website needs to be timely, relevant, engaging and easy to find and navigate to meet the needs of your customers and members.  This year, make a resolution to give your website a little more love and your website and your customers will thank you.

Here are our top New Year’s Web Resolutions for you to create a great online customer experience and grow your brand in 2012.

1. Optimize for Mobile

Mobile search and web browsing is going to be critical to being found on the web.  It is estimated that nearly 36% of the U.S. now owns a mobile device and more than 80% of of small business owners are smartphone owners as well.

What this means to you is that there is a very good chance your site visitors are using a mobile device to search for and browse your website.  Pull out your smartphone or iPad and go to your website.  Spend some time trying to access different articles and content from your mobile and think about how this experience compares to the traditional experience from a typical desktop PC.  If you are frustrated from the experience – imagine how your site visitors feel.

Now, search Google using one of your keyword phrases from a mobile device and see where you rank.  Over the next few months, even high-ranking websites may see a rank decrease from mobile searches if they haven’t enabled user agent-detection for specific devices.  Google just introduced Googlebot-Mobile, a new search engine crawler that specifically looks for mobile type CSS that triggers a mobile stylesheet custom for individual users’ devices.  Someone browsing the web from their iPad is going to have a different experience than someone from their Android smartphone.  Google ranks mobile websites based on factors such as usability, speed, features, and overall performance.

Get started with this web-resolution and register and attend our Free 2012 Search Engine Marketing New Year’s Checklist webinar this Thursday to learn how to optimize your website for mobile search in the New Year.

2. Don’t Forget About the Technical Stuff

As the internet has become more widely adopted by the general public, websites have become easier to set-up and maintain with less technical know-how required.  There are some technical truths that still hold true and taking the time to understand these facts of the web this year will help you improve your customers’ online experience.

There’s no such thing as an “Out-of-the-Box” website.  All websites require customization like naming menu buttons, adding a logo and graphics, changing the color scheme to match your organization’s branding, and adding content that tells visitors who you are and what you do.  All of this takes time and is an ongoing process even after your website is launched live.  Your website will look very different day-to-day from the initial set-up to “Go-Live” day.

Where you host your website does matter.  Your website requires a host that stores your content, CMS software, and other data on enterprise-level computer hardware (servers and hard disk arrays) connected to the internet with high capacity bandwidth making your website accessible online to anyone who visits your website url.  Nowadays, this typically means a cloud environment like Amazon Web Services which offers security, expandable storage and bandwidth when your site experiences unexpected spikes in traffic, and a dedicated IT staff available 24/7 to maintain, update, and repair the infrastructure hosting your website.

Learn more about the Cloud in this great video from SchipulCon 2011 and learn more about website CMS platforms in our free upcoming webinar “How to Select the Best Website CMS for Your Organization’s Website.”

3. Improve What’s Inside Your Website – Content!

You have a beautifully designed website that takes visitors’ breath away when they stop by – but have you focused on developing and implementing a content strategy that communicates to your visitors who you are and what you do once their breath returns?

Great content is relevant to your visitors and is also what attracts search engine crawlers to boost your website’s search rankings.  Content isn’t limited to just text anymore either.  Add photos from recent events, upload digital training and product videos, and integrate your social media accounts with your website to give your website visitors a full view into your organization’s online brand.

January is the perfect time to go through your website and review existing articles, news releases, and other content and make sure your latest press releases isn’t from 1996.  Look at your website through the eyes of your visitors and think about what is not being communicated about your organization that should be and make a list of these items.  Tip: Create a weekly schedule to write new content on these topics in 2012 and you’ll see an increase in your site traffic as well as your search engine rankings.

Learn more great ways to improve your website’s 2012 Content Strategy on the SEM blog and register and attend our Free upcoming webinar “Writing for the Web” to improve your website’s content this year.

Tools for Successfully Keeping Your Web-Resolutions

Here are a few more tools and resources we’ve put together to help you succeed:

• Check Out our 2011 Pages, Videos, and Help Files You Used the Most.
• Find out what’s making waves in web marketing and technology each week in 2012.
• Learn great do-it-yourself web marketing tips.

Send us your questions and come hang out with us at our Houston Headquarters or Silicon Valley, California office!

Your 2011 Schipul Posts with the Most Love

At Schipul, we love to spend our time researching what’s new and innovative and the “next big thing” in web technology and online marketing.  We are super-pumped to uncover all the awesomely geeky web-tech coming in 2012 – and wanted to take a moment and reflect on what You thought was the best and most interesting news in web marketing in 2011 before we ring in the New Year – from our mobile phones, of course!

Our SEM team pulled up our analytics reports and took a look at what You were reading and sharing in 2011.  Here are the most popular blog posts visited on the Schipul blog and the most shared posts on Facebook in case you missed one.

Posts with the Most Reads on the Schipul Blog in 2011:

• Drupal and WordPress at SchipulCon – Drupal’s Founder, Dries Buytaert, joined the stage with WordPress’s Founder, Matt Mullenweg, for an awesomely open chat about Open Source, website CMS software, and how they got where they are today.  Read the blog post and then check out the video from SchipulCon 2011!
• 5 Ways to convince your Boss to Buy You an iPad2 – Want an iPad and want your company to pay for it?  Check out our 2011 blog post with tips to help you demonstrate the value of having an iPad2 for business use to your Boss, plus find links to great iPad business apps and accessories for your iPad.  Leave a comment and let us know if your Boss bought you an iPad2 after reading this article too!
• Monster Drupal Remix Featuring A.Hughes and D.Stagg – We love music and Drupal here at Schipul – so we thought it made perfect sense to combine those two passions and create the Monster Drupal Remix Video.  Watch it now and then come learn more about using the Drupal CMS software for your organization’s website.
• Nerd Alert: Get your CSS Menus in front of the New YouTube player – Come learn some advanced CSS tips for embedding the new YouTube and Vimeo iframe style players into your website pages.  Then come read how online video can generate new leads online and improve your website visitors’ experience on your site.
• google+ is here and why you should care – This blog post gives you the scoop on using Google+for your organization or personal account.  After you know how to better use your Google+ profile, come get the code to add a Google+ share button to your website on the SEM Blog.

Posts with the Most Shares on Facebook in 2011:

•  14 Years and a Big Year at That – Schipul – The Web Marketing Company turned 14 years old in September of 2011 and our CEO, Ed Schipul, shared some of our successes, lessons learned, and memories of the amazing people that have worked at our company in the past 14 years.  Now come check out AIGA Houston’s 2011 Brand Legend Roast which included a Roasting of our fearless CEO this year!
• Schipul Loves the Cali Sunshine Come Visit Our New Office – We were super excited when we announced the opening of our second branch location out in Silicon Valley and apparently – You were too!  Thanks for helping us announce our new offices and come read more about our California office website and web marketing services.
• Watch Our Video and Meet the Schipul New Guys - We love to make videos and show off our creative and geeky side and we’re glad You enjoyed meeting our newest Schipulites in this video post.  We invite you to come hang out with us in 2012 and meet us in person too!
• Five Companies to Watch from Launch Silicon Valley 2011 - Not only does our Silicon Valley office manager, April Kyle, get to enjoy beautiful California weather year round, she also gets to hear about the up and coming technology start-ups coming out of the California region before the rest of us at our Houston branch.  Read about these Five 2011 start-ups out of Silicon Valley and if you are in the area - come by our California office and say hi to April!
• google+ is here and why you should care- Google+ is 2011′s newest big thing for online social communications and so it’s no surprise it made both our top 5 2011 Posts with the Most lists.  Here are 3 more great guides to help you fully utilize all that Google+ has to offer in 2012:

1. Google+ Video Overview
2. Google+ versus Facebook for Video Calls
3. Google+ Business Pages Are Here

There’s Even More to Love Ahead in 2012!

Add Schipul to one of your Google+ Circles  to tell us what types of blog posts you’d +1 in 2012.

Follow Schipul – The Web Marketing Company on LinkedIn and see what we are up all year.

Find out Your Top 10 Favorite Pages on Our Website and Our Top 10 Favorites from 2011.

Keep current with the constantly changing web environment with our new, weekly feature page The Newest, Coolest, Next Big Thing on the Web where we’ll pick what we believe is going to be a Web Game Changer in 2012.

The countdown to Christmas has started and the Holiday shopping season is in high-gear! We’ve put together some handy tips to make sure that your e-commerce website is ready to handle the increased traffic and provide a great experience for your customers so they’ll keep buying in 2012.

Deck Your Website Walls with Holly

Share your holiday spirit with your customers by adding holiday graphics to your homepage and make it easy for shoppers to find holiday-specific information on your website. Add a Gift Guide with a link from your homepage, offer a special sale item each day, and provide a link with holiday shipping rates and delivery times to your website. Come see the holiday homepage we designed for the Children’s Museum of Houston.

Email Your Customers a Cup of Cheer

During the holiday season, people expect to receive more frequent email newsletters from their favorite stores. Design and send holiday-themed email newsletters at least weekly with your seasonal products and sales.  Find more great tips for your holiday email marketing in our DIY email marketing guide.

Remember Your Social Media Stocking Stuffers

Add a Santa hat to your organization’s Facebook and Twitter profile photos and share your holiday specials across your company’s social media channels. Promoting your products across LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Twitter and on your blog will attract new shoppers as well as share your seasonal goodies with your existing customers. Find even more great advice on your holiday social media marketing on our website.

Santa’s Got a Brand New iPhone

Today’s savvy shopper is on the go and that means there is a good chance they are visiting your website on a mobile smartphone or iPad. Make sure your website is optimized so customers can search and shop from a mobile device. A great mobile style sheet can drive traffic to your retail store as well and should include an address and telephone. Pull out your mobile phone and check out Schipul’s mobile style sheet.

Give the Gift of Security

Online shoppers want to know you won’t take their credit cards for a sleigh ride when they purchase online. Check to make sure your SSL certificate is installed correctly and up to date and protect your customers’ personal and financial data. We recommend heading over to GoDaddy’s FAQ for SSL certificate help: http://www.godaddy.com/ssl.

Keep Purchases from Getting Lost in a Snow Storm

You want to make sure the rush of shoppers to your website doesn’t take your site down. Now is the time to make sure your hosting environment can handle big increases in traffic. Schipul hosts our clients’ websites in a cloud-environment that expands and supports site usage spikes affordably. Give us a call if you are looking to update your website hosting environment and have questions.

Show Online Shoppers that Christmas Sweater is Haute

Enhance your customers online shopping experience with product videos and images and increase your holiday sales. You’ll want to make sure your website has the functionality to support digital media first, and then use professional equipment and lighting so your clients can “touch and feel” your products from your website.   For those new to using online video to sell products, check out the VideoCommerce.org’s Holiday Shopping Video Tips Article.

Start Planning for the New Year

Keep increasing your sales year round by reviewing and updating your search engine marketing strategy. Here is a great Holiday SEM slideshare by our very own Jonti Bolles and you can find a ton of free training and tools to boost your website ranking in search engines online at the Schipul SEM Blog.

We recommend updating your shopping cart to the latest version to ensure a smooth holiday shopping experience for both your customers and your staff. If you are looking to add a shopping cart to your website, check out these great shopping carts and then contact us to find out more about adding e-commerce to your website!

Drupal CMS – Ubercart
WordPress CMS – Shopp plugin
Tendenci CMS – Shopify

Organizations have long communicated through press releases to their public and the media.  Organize your official thoughts in a single document, snag a couple of relevant quotes for someone in leadership and go – it works.

But in the days of the Social Web, how relevant are one-sided blurbs of self-focused content?  That’s where we thinking tempering your official messaging with two-way, less formal communication (like great Facebook updates and blog posts) come in.

But the press release beat goes on…  here are a few resources and links to know and utilize when sending your organization’s news across the Interwebs:

Start at the very beginning, tweak those headlines!

Of course you can get super geeky on just headlines alone to help maximize your online press releases (like some of these tips from this great PR Newswire blog post):

• Length – Keep things short, sweet and Tweetable (stay under 90-120 characters)
• Keywords – Put your most important keyword at the beginning of the headline – within the first 65 characters.
• Informative – Readers like data, include numbers that are interesting and relevant (of course)
• Subheads – Share more detail (and keywords!) by using a subhead below the main title of your press release – or use it to break up a really long headline.

Use Social Media monitoring tools to help you gauge your impact

When sharing a press release online, know your network’s audience for greatest impact.  If you know that the majority of your likes, shares and comments happen in the morning – post then!  If your Twitter followers are more active on the weekends, share your content when they are awake and ready to chat.

Online monitoring tools like Sprout Social and Crowdbooster  actually look at your follower base on different networks and tell you the best time to post for optimal engagement.  And be sure you are actually engaging – not just throwing a press release in the room and not hanging around to answer questions or provide more info.  It goes back to that whole ‘relating to the public’ thing you signed up for as a PR rock star.

Another handy Social Media tool to use is a link shortner like bit.ly or tinyurl.com to more easily track links you include in your press release.  Change them up on different press release versions (ie: one you link to from Facebook versus Twitter) so you can more easily track what tools get you the most clicks.

Don’t forget to optimize, optimize, optimize!

Online optimization isn’t just for your website text.  Use your Search Engine Optimization basics and apply them to your online press release postings too, with special consideration for the power of internal links to your website and featured projects.  This press release optimization tips blog post has some good ideas to help you out too.

Need help creating an online press room or optimizing a press release for the Web?

Our Creative Services and Search Engine Marketing teams are pros at helping you get your messaging out to the masses in actionable and meaningful ways.  Contact us today and let us get started on broadcasting your awesomeness on the Internet!

Thanksgiving is best celebrated by pushing co-workers and family members down a steep garage incline, don’t you think?  Well, we do…

This year’s annual PlasmaCar Races were thrilling adventures in gravity-land, fully of (joyful) screaming, competitiveness and comrarderie – all on the backs of small children’s toy vehicles.  Take a peek at more PlasmaCar Racing photos on our Facebook fanpage here.

It’s a tradition best explained by being there, I suppose.  But this video might shed some light on our love of sharing a holiday with family and co-workers on the seat of a speeding scooter.  We hope your Thanksgiving was an exciting one, too!!

PlasmaCar Race Day from Schipul – The Web Marketing Co. on Vimeo.

When we were tapped to share some gadgets on our holiday wish list we naturally included some of the things that help us work hard and play hard! We shared a few of our favorite gadget gifts with the anchors at KHOU this morning:

Jura ENA 9 One-Touch Espresso Machine |$1,499 @ Sur La Table stores

Coffee. Heaven.  Even the most elitist coffee drinker will fall in love with the ENA. In one touch you can have whatever your caffeinated-powered heart desires. This machine makes lattes, cappucinos, espresso, or just a really great cup of joe with the help of a built-in milk frother/steamer. It even has a spout that’ll give you just hot water for your tea. It’s slim so it fits on the counter and doesn’t fill much space. And it takes instruction quite well: tell it how you like your coffee and it’ll remember it for you next time. Your coffee goes from bean to cup in less than 60 seconds (not 30 … my bad).

I don’t know how the rest of the office feels about getting one of these, but I’m all for it. The major selling point for me: we’ll never have to play “Guess How Fresh” when it comes to the mystery pots of coffee. (Dear Ed: we want one of these.)

Kindle Fire Tablet | $199 @ Amazon.com

Schipulites are big on reading. And we’re obviously big on technology. Those powers combined yield the Kindle Fire Tablet. It’s the only Kindle with a color screen, and it’s a touch screen at that. Right now if you buy the Kindle Fire Tablet, you’ll get one free month of Amazon Prime (not two…my bad again). This little gem is more than a device for reading books. It’s equipped with wireless access that let’s you surf the web, read and email documents, stream Netflix. Basically: AWESOME! Our operations manager Jonti lent us hers for the segment. She may have experienced withdrawals without it.

Go Pro Hero 2 | $299 @ Best Buy stores

For the life of me, my brain would not let me be great. I Rick Perry-ed the name of this camera and it’s a shame because it’s so cool. The Go Pro Hero HD 2 is small but it has a lot of spirit. Made for the adventure seeker in your life, this digital camera takes photos and records footage quite well. We’ve used this camera to capture our annual Plasma Car Races. We hop on child-size wiggle cars, bring our knees up to our ears, and push one another down the incline of our parking garage with the Go Pro strapped to the car or a helmet. Even if we eat it, the camera keeps rolling and our experience is preserved for the internet and posterity.

See? The tiny box protruding from the steering device? That's the Go Pro. Click the photo to see the footage.

Parrot AR Drone (Quadricopter) | $299 @ Brookstone

Ohhhhhhh Shinnnnnny. Let’s cut right to the chase: it’s a helicopter with four propellers (so it’s really a quadricopter — really), and you can fly it with any Apple device that lets you download the free app. It has a camera that streams live footage of your flight. It’s incredibly stable. And you can fly it indoors because it comes with a protective foam bumber-thingy that pretty much makes it crash-safe. We have one now. Come by and fly it!

We didn’t list these on the show, BUT they’re awesome and on our wish list as well:

iPhone Telephoto Lens | $35 @ photojojo.com

Also,  Photojojo needs your help! Please consider joining the Bone Marrow Donor Registry. Amit Gupta, founder of photojojo was recently diagnosed with acute Leukemia and is seeking a match for a marrow. Please consider becoming a donor and give the gift of life this holiday season.

Jambox Wireless Speaker and Bluetooth Speaker Phone | $199 @ Brookstone

What’s on your list…or what should we add to ours?