New Web Site and Blog

As you can see,  I had the site converted to a format that is much easier to modify, post and add as many image galleries as I want.  It’s based on WordPress and I am extremely pleased with the usability of this format.  Why I didn’t move to this format earlier, I don’t know, but I’m glad I did and I won’t be moving back to a standard HTML site any time soon.

Look for more frequent updates to the blog and the site itself.

Great Development Team

I want to put in a good word about the development team that put this together.  I met Joel Quinn of Quinn Companies a few months ago when he came in for an executive portrait and convinced me to go with his team of companies to create this new site.  He has roughly ten different companies under his direction, all of which work in some area of the web, IT resource management, backup services, data warehousing, SEO optimization and even cell phone and printer repair.

Joel Quinn

Joel introduced me to Derek Dirks of SEO Blink.  Derek, is doing my SEO optimization and was my point of contact between the developers and this WordPress rookie.  He is very knowledgeable, easy to work with and, at times, had the patience of Job with some of the questions I was throwing his way.  For me, he directed a team of people to not only answer all of my questions, but they were able to handle a very difficult conversion issue along the way.

We ran in to an issue converting the original blog to a compatible format.  The original blog was built on a propietary system and even though I was able to supply the team a database of my blog entries, it wasn’t an easy task to perform the conversion because it was a custom database.  I’m not sure of the database programmers name, but he did a fantastic job of converting it so that I wouldn’t have to do it the hard way…copy from the old, and paste to the new.  Essentially manually recreating 3 years worth of blog posts or losing them.  This saved me about 8 hours of work.  Many cudo’s to the team on that one!

I’m happy to say that without Derek and the rest of the team, this site would not be up and running in it’s current form and I’d still be flopping around like a fish out of water trying to do the conversion.  Derek, thanks for all you did during this process.

And thanks to everyone who was invovled with converting this site and educating me in how to keep it updated.  I look forward to a long relationship with this group of people!  Joel, you were right, your people can do just about anything!