For those of you unfamiliar with the Google Mini Appliance, the solution is a self-contained server that is powered by the exact same algorithm that powers Google.com. It can search and index up 50,000 documents of your choosing, be it standard HTML pages, or 219 other different file formats. From PDF’s to Word Docs, HTML to CSV files, this can search, rank, and display them all. The real killer application for this solution is that you can apply your own custom look and feel to the system, so it can blend in seamlessly with your current site. The reason this is so important is that sadly search is usually the red headed step child of features with most content management systems on the market today. When the developers are faced with the choice between implementing exciting new features like AJAX menu drop-downs in their product, or work on something boring like improving the search results engine, they invariably choose to work on the sexy new AJAX menu drop-down feature. But, as the old saw goes, every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case, the lining is a deep shade of Google Blue. Being able to customize the interface allows you to quickly integrate it into your existing site infrastructure without having to rebuild your site from the ground up to take advantage of it.

We’re right now configuring it before we cart it over to our data center, take a look at the pictures below:

Interested in what the Google Mini Search Appliance can do you for your site and/or company? Give us a ring at 912-228-3265 and we’d be happy to answer any and all questions for you!

We’re excited to develop this custom web site and E-Commerce application, it will be totally unlike anything else that’s on the market. We’re incredibly proud to be selected as an integral partner as Old Savannah Tours continues to expand its products and services.

The Google Mini Appliance is a combination of hardware (a server) and software (the google algorithm that makes their searches work) all packaged into a box that you can purchase and install. Its just like buying a Dell with Windows installed on it, only this is much more powerful and much more specialized.

There are a few different ways the Google Mini can be used. For example, say you own a large law firm with hundreds of thousands of documents that you and your employees reference and research on a daily basis. We can install, setup, and program the Google Mini Appliance to search all of those documents (it can search over 200 different file formats) with the same accuracy, speed, and relevance that Google uses for its online search.

This has the potential to save you a lot of wasted time and effort constantly looking for something and not finding it. This same scenario can apply to many industries, whether your searching construction documents, case files, insurance records, patient files, or articles on a website, the Google Mini Appliance can search it all and return accurate results.

When used on a large website the Google Mini offers the flexibility of full customization. We can install, program AND customize how it looks so it fits in seamlessly with your colors, logo, layout, and branding. This gives you the power of google search under your name and reputation.

Stay tuned for more details about how we can make this a reality for your business. More details will be posted on our “Services” page within the coming weeks.

So whether using it online searching your website or on your internal office network, the Google Mini Appliance can be a powerful tool that’ll help you to save some time and cash.

Joe Steffen Attorney

Challenges:

Joe was in need of a new site to advertise his legal skills online. His old site was dated and filled with information from past elections, so it was a real priority to add some relevant and recent content to the site to send out the accurate message.

Solutions:

We designed and developed a simple site which focuses on the legal services that Joe offers and puts a healthy emphasis on getting into contact with Joe. Since most legal problems can be complex and require personal attention, it was important to motivate people to call or email Joe personally.

Testimonial:

“Joe Steffen Testimonial Content…”
Joe Steffen

1) Mobile browsing is huge on the iPhone, 90% of all owners of the iPhone browse the web with it. Within 3 months of it’s introduction, it blew everything else out of the water in terms of market share. Now with the new version, it’s even faster with access to the 3G network. This is like surfing everywhere on WiFi which is going to make this an even more attractive platform for viewing content. Speed is king, and when you got that 1-2 minutes in the line in the grocery store waiting for the person with 60 items in the 10-item-or-less line, you want to have the speed to pull up something a) worth reading and b) quickly enough for it to be useful. Nothing sucks more than watching a progress bar crawl across a screen while web browsing. We all remember web surfing with a 28.8 Modem and nobody likes the equivalent of going back to it (Surfing over the slow, old cellular EDGE network)

2) Buying stuff through your phone. Steve has shoehorned another lovely way to separate you from your hard earned greenbacks, this time through the “App Store”. Now you’re able to buy games, applications, and more right from your phone. In that doctors waiting room for 30 minutes? Download a new game to keep yourself occupied, or download a new application to balance your checkbook while you wait. The developers who make these applications get 70% of the gross sale price, so it’s gonna be a cash cow for everyone, and a very easy way to empty your wallet. Why will it be so effective? Because every single iPhone user will have the ability to buy it, and it will be on standardized hardware so compatibility won’t be an issue, and payment is handled by Apple, they just drop the money into the developers bank account.

3) GPS in your phone. This is HUGE! Someone, somewhere, really really soon is going to build a great app that will allow you to see where you are down to 10 feet via GPS, and then display all the events that are happening around you, any merchants that have coupons/specials for what’s going on, and where your friends are. In terms of mobile advertising, this function alone is going to set off the equivalent of an atomic bomb in this fields revenue growth. The benefit for merchants and early adopters is that has very low barriers to entry for both price + ROI. The application that seems most promising right now is Loopt, a social-networking location-based system. Really cool, it will allow you to see and do pretty much everything you could ever want in terms of figuring out where your friends are. View the Keynote address and go in 27 Minutes and 30 seconds to see what it looks like and how it works. Welcome to the world of mobile advertising business owners, hop on board early and reap the benefits!

4) Its gotten cheaper. A LOT cheaper. As they say in the keynote, 56% of people wanted to buy the iPhone, but thought it was too expensive. Not anymore, the new price for the 3G iPhone is only $199. This will open up the phone to a huge number of people it wasn’t available to before, and even better, it’s now going to be available in 70 countries, so the global reach of this device is going to go up an order of magnitude, if not more. More people = more applications = more potential benefit for business owners looking to cater to that rapidly growing slice of the population.

5) Application development is easy. Companies that used to require employees to drag around enormous laptops for data entry, email, and CRM can now have a device that does all that and more in the palm of their hand. I know many hardened road warriors will be screaming at the top of their lungs to have these and drop those back breaking bricks called laptops. What’s really amazing is the trend in miniaturization recently. With a iPhone 3G and a Macbook Air, you can pretty much do anything you want to and still be carrying around less than 3.5 pounds (4.7 ounces for the iPhone, and 3.0 pounds for the Macbook Air)…viva la revolution!

All in all, an impressive day for Apple and the global community at large. Finally a device that will be equally empowering for phone owners as well as business owners, all in a hand held package that is so affordable that you can buy 3 of them with your snazzy $600 rebate. So get out there, help stimulate the economy, buy an iPhone 3G and help usher in the new era of mobile business and communications!

The answer to that is in this great article by the New York Times. It breaks down the Google AdWords system and how it works. For those of you unfamiliar with it, when you do any search on Google you get a series of boxes on the right hand side of the page that are paid for by advertisers. What many people don’t know is how it works. It’s all based on a highly advanced auction system. Search keywords prices are determined purely through whatever your competitors want to pay for it. Brilliant system, and oh Lord do Google finances show it, in Fiscal 2007 Google raked in $16.5 Billion in revenues, 99% of it from those little ads on its site + its network of other sites who use its search results.

Sure, the amount of money Google is generating is interesting considering how simple its system is. What’s more interesting is how they are tracking what makes a “Good Ad” and all the factors that determine how Google places your ad, it’s not just based on how much you’re willing to pay. Here’s the meat of the article:

Traffic was growing rapidly, as was the average price that advertisers were paying for clicks. But Mr. Fox and others realized that measuring the average cost-per-click was not good enough. Users might be clicking on more high-priced ads and fewer lower-priced ads. That would cause the average cost-per-click to rise, but it would say little about the health of the overall system.

So Mr. Varian and Diane Tang, principal engineer in the ads quality group, helped devise what they call a basket of keywords. Much like the consumer price index, a basket of goods and services that economists use to track inflation, the measure is made up of a broad sample of keywords and is weighted to make it statistically accurate. This internal benchmark helps Google get a clearer picture of its performance.

As measurements improved, Mr. Fox’s team unleashed a stream of experiments meant to optimize the ad system. They evaluated changes to things like the clickable area and background color of ads, and the criteria for placing ads above search results rather than beside them.

Over time, the company also looked beyond click-through rates to rank ads. Google now takes into account the “landing page” that the ad links to, and, for example, gives low grades to pages whose sole purpose is to show more ads. Soon, the loading speed of a landing page will also be considered, Mr. Fox said.

These factors contribute to an ad’s “quality score.” The higher that score, the less the advertiser has to bid to secure top billing. For example, an advertiser who offers to pay $1 per click to attract those searching for “vacation rentals in Colorado” may receive more prominent placement than another who bids $1.50 for the same query but has a lower quality score. An advertiser with a very low quality score may have to bid so much for placement as to make it uneconomical.

Quality scores work as an incentive to advertisers to improve their ads, which benefits users and, in turn, benefits Google, Mr. Fox said.

Most interesting things are the amount of ads on the landing page being taken into consideration, and of extreme interest to us (since we started in the web hosting business) is the speed you web site loads being taken into consideration. We have been screaming from the rooftops for years that the speed + reliability of your web hosting is mission-critical to your site ranking well and, we’re sorry kids, $5 a month web hosting is not gonna cut it. That is why we spend so much money on top of the line servers, keep the server load as low as possible. We never put more than 400 customers on one machine, the industry average is 5000-10,000. Sure, it costs a lot more to do it this way, but the end result is sites up 100% of the time and load as fast as possible.

In conclusion, it’s extremely interesting to see that Google is taking the results of even paid advertisers landing pages so seriously. What does this mean to you? If your web site is chocked with ads, loads slowly/irregularly and is offline from time to time due to poor choice of hosting platform then you’re not only going to be ranking poorly on Google’s paid results and unpaid results engines, but you’ll also be losing money from potential customers. Update your pages design/hosting platform before its to late!

Search Engines like Google and Yahoo are effectively blind. The only thing they can see is text like in this blog post. Now web technology has advanced to provide us a solution that has long been overdue. “Searchable” Flash Web Sites, powered by a full content management system like this blog. It’s called fCMS and really will open a new chapter in web site design. With the confluence of incredible animation and the ability to search everything in the site means that we’re going to see some pretty impressive sites in the coming years using tools such as these.

This is simply the beginning. The bright lads at Google have long known that while a lot of the information people are looking for online is text-heavy, the majority (in terms of file size) is in images, video, PDF’s, Flash, and downloadable files. Google and the other search engines are rapidly making progress in these areas. The one people are most familiar with is with PDF’s. If you do a search on Google for IRS Form 1099 the first result isn’t the proper IRS website, but the PDF form. As the years go on, we can expect more and more of the content that was previously available only by manually search on multiple sites. This will allow future websites to be increasingly content-rich and be rewarded appropriately with good rankings by Google.

The future is indeed bright for flashy, fun web sites.

music credit: “Movement in still life” by “BT”

A lot of people have been burned.

To quote a favorite movie “Every time you screw up, it makes us look like rockstars baby” (bad boys 2…hey I like it).

And its true…

Every bad site that gets produced makes our good sites look even better.

Some say that bad web companies hurt the industry, contributing to higher prices and lower standards. While that may be true, we look at it as job security. There are so many companies who have a website but the company, or the dude in his basement that built it for them didn’t put it together correctly at all and it isn’t making them any money.

Isn’t that what business is about? Well not entirely, but thats a good bit of it. We have expenses, you have expenses and we all need to pay them with a little leftover for some fun on the weekends. So its with regret and, paradoxically with joy, that I am writing this in the hopes that you are recovered enough from your full body web burn and are ready to fix your site.

I am here to tell you that it isn’t hard (its not easy but you get what I mean), we can most likely do it within your budget (yes you should have a budget for a website), and its not going to take 6 months. We try to have our sites done in 30 to 60 days depending on how long it takes to communicate back and forth.

So please, feel free to at least talk with us, let us know what you think! If you have been burned then tell us about it. Leave a comment below. Maybe we can help and maybe we can’t but its still worth a try. Who knows, maybe we’ll get some interesting stories out of this and we can all have a good laugh.

For now, we’ll just keep doing what we do and hopefully people will catch on to the fact that quality products are still offered in the industry of web design and development.

**web burn cream not available in stores**

Pro Location Sound

Challenges:

Our friend Whitney is a Professional Location Sound Recorder and Mixer who works freelance for feature films, reality television, live television, and other broadcast media.
Since he works freelance he needed a way to market himself and his rental gear packages. In building the site for Whitney we realized that there was no online resource that focused on location sound as a profession. We sought to make his website a place where people could get more information about Whitney’s services and his rental gear, but to also make it a viable resource for other people in the industry. The goal was to market Whitney as THE expert in the field.

Solutions:

We developed a simple word press page which promotes Whitney and his gear for jobs all over the world. The site has a simple, clean, easy to navigate interface and features a lot of rich content about his services and equipment, but also links to a lot of other resources all over the internet.
Whitney blogs weekly to attract a lot of traffic to his site, and he has been able to do very well, going from nothing to a highly trafficked website.

Testimonial:

“Gauge Interactive has helped us increase online visibility incredibly by building our new website and managing a highly-targeted SEO campaign, doing it all on time and on budget. With Dan and Mark’s assistance, my business has increased dramatically, making my website the best investment I have ever made for my business. Thanks guys!”
Whitney Ince - President of Pro Location Sound

If you’re like me (known to gravitate towards the x-box on weekends) then you remember when Super Mario 64 came out. If don’t remember, it was the first popular video game to use 3-D space. The Mario character could walk around and interact with the video game in full 3 dimensional space. Pretty cool. Well since then video games have made some pretty amazing strides, and so has the technology on the internet. As bandwidth increases and computers can handle larger file sizes and more media rich content, we are starting to see some pretty cool stuff happening on the frontier of the world wide web. One of those is 3D or 3 dimensional web space. Imagine looking at a website not like a piece of paper, but like you are looking into a room. Much like playing a video game, you can navigate through the site to pickup or interact with different things. Pretty cool.
For many of us, this is a really different and strange way to think about something we are so used to seeing in only one way, but humor me and lets do some brainstorming.

Imagine your website. Now imagine what it would be like to organize it much like you would an empty room. Imagine yourself as an interior designer placing items in 3 dimensional space. What does this do to the internet we are so used to? Maybe instead of a header we now have a desk. Instead of primary navigation, we now have an open space with different objects you can move to and interact with. Instead of links, we have doors or portals, “or something really cool that I don’t even know about” (old school). The possibilities are endless!!!

So chew on that this week as you go to that really crappy page that you need to see every day for work and you really hate. Sometime soon it might look like that favorite restaurant or park you visit on the weekends.

click here to read the article

Savannah Chatham Metropolitan Police

Challenges:

The SCPD were referred to us with the need to develop an impressive design to go on one of their promotional vehicles. They wanted to turn their 2007 Ford Explorer into something really cool that they could take to promotional events as well as training exercises throughout Georgia. The goal was to motivate people to talk to a recruiter about being part of the Savannah Chatham police force.

Solutions:

We created a design that uses great photogaphy, dynamic bright colors, dark deep rich colors to create a desire to want to be a part of what the SCPD is trying to do in Savannah and the surrounding areas. Ideas like honor, strength, discipline, professionalism, commitment, and service needed to be communicated by the design. The vehicle has been a huge hit so far and we are currently working on 2 more designs and can’t wait to see how they turn out as well. Thanks again to the SCPD for being so easy to work with, and to Image Is Everything for doing an awesome job of printing and applying the graphics to the vehicle.

Testimonial:

“The Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department contacted Gauge Interactive regarding our first vehicle WRAP for our Recruiting Unit. We wanted this “WRAP” completed before our annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Gauge Interactive did just that: They completed the design, which we were impressed with, and worked with the company that actually “wrapped” the vehicle. The Chief of Police liked the design so much, he drove the “wrapped” Recruiting vehicle in the Parade. During the St. Patrick’s weekend festivities, hundreds of people took pictures and made positive comments regarding the Design of the vehicle. We were very impressed with Gauge Interactive’s design, so we decided to “wrap” two more vehicles. Gauge Interactive did an outstanding job in working with us to make this project a success!”
- Captain Dean Fagerstrom, Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police Department

Premiere Coastal Insurance Group

Challenges:

Rob Kerdasha came to us and needed to update a very old site that wasn’t really working for him at all. He had some good information, but his old site wasn’t making him any money or really getting him any new contacts or business. It was more of an expense rather than an investment.

Solutions:

We really work hard to help people out of situations like this. A current, well designed, well maintained website can make a huge difference for your business. For Rob we really wanted to highlight his personal service and robust coverage. We wanted to show his success through the use of a lot of testimonials from current customers who use Rob for their insurance needs. We also wanted to make the site a source of information and help for his clients. Rob intends to use his blog to post interesting and helpful insurance tips and advice as a free service to his friends and customers. click here to visit the site

Testimonial:

“In looking for a new web design company, Gauge Interactive was super from the first meeting till completion. Both Dan & Mark were very attentive to detail, listened to what we wanted the site to be, and helpful in getting the information and format together. I am extremely satisfied with the professional manner in which they get the work done! Great going guys, I will highly recommend others to the guys at Gauge!”
-Rob Kerdasha - Principal - Premiere Coastal Insurance Group

“White space” is the space between broadcast channels on the television airwaves. The technology utilizes these super high speed television airwaves, now vacant due to increased broadband use, to broadcast online data like movies, music, web-pages etc. With this shift in technology, new devices will be produced which will be faster and easier to use than ever before, changing the way that we interact with the mobile internet.

Google is also working on open source mobile phone software pack which they are calling “Android”. It’s software which will allow anyone to create their own mobile phone applications, meaning you could theoretically program your phone however you want. Icons, fonts, text size, etc. are all customizable. Essentially it will make programming your phone as easy as making a web-page.

White space combined with Android will bring a big change to the landscape of the internet we now use on a daily basis. It will make it more customizable, more accessible, more powerful, and more portable.

With the internet being used more and more on a mobile level, its not unreasonable to expect people to be doing things that they do on their home computers now on their mobile devices in the future. Things like shopping, reading, listening to music, blogging, and watching online T.V. shows.

This shift in technology will bring more people to your website on a smaller screen. Imagine viewing your website on a 2-3 inch screen. What will that be like? Will people be able to buy your product, subscribe to your service, read your blog?

A lot of websites are now being optimized for use on the iPhone, but with these new developments, it is likely to become a requirement in order to stay competitive. Its important to stay up to date with new technology and emerging trends. Prepare yourself and your business by taking this into consideration for your future web needs.

New York Times: click here to read article
Washington Post: click here to read article