I decided to take a moment to showcase our new design work. i am going to list all of our new jobs and give each of them a little description. We are working on some cool stuff! We have so many things going on that I could'nt even fit them all in our showcase graphic! Here is our new client list!

• First Light Tackle
• Color Blind Media
• Dialmychurch.com
• Total Golf Cart
• Chapman and Plymale
• Quicky Sites
• Bulldog Batteries
• Intuitive Design Group

First Light Tackle
We are in the final design stages on this one. We are installing and reskinning OS Commerce for Client Tom Lewis in Fort Pierce, Florida. Tom ties hand made jigs that Snook and Cobia can't resist. This new site will feature a three step easy purchasing process and is sure to increase sales for Tom! Look for it's launch in under 30 days.

Color Blind Media
If you don't know Cavin Brothers, you should. He is a very talented video production dude that operates under Color Blind Media in Jupiter, Florida. Cavin and I are working on the new Florida Sportsman T.V. show that is airing the last week in December. Cavin needed graphics support for this project and I jumped on this one. It is looking tight and can't wait to bust out the popcorn for what is sure to be a cool show! Visit Color Blind Media to see Cavin's work.

Dialmychurch.com
This web site is a spinoff of dialmycalls.com. President Dave Batchelor of West Palm Beach, Florida asked me to come up with a new design that targets a new audience for his great service. When complete churches will be able to contact their congregation via text and voice services for updates on Bible studies, small groups, prayer chains, and more. The best part is churches can try it out for free. WARNING: Once you try it you will want to beef up your service and get on a monthly plan. This service is priced right and makes communication a breeze! For now visit dialmycalls.com for more info!

Total Golf Cart
This web site is going to be rad! I am going to get to edit high resolution images of tricked out golf carts with monster wheels, lift kits, and custom graphics. Fred and Doug James are the owners and have a showroom in Vero Beach, Florida. this site is going to feature clean graphics that highlight the parts, service, and sales department. Going to be pretty awesome!

Chapman and Plymale
We are ready to finish this one up in the next couple of weeks, Chapman and Plymale is a law firm in Stuart, Florida that specializes in Bankruptcy, Personal injury, Civil litigation, Foreclosure Defense, DUI's, Intellectual Property and more!

Chapman and Plymale were signed up with a hosting plan that was very expensive and needed more control over their web site. We were able to reduce their hosting costs significantly while proving them with better graphics, and a blogging system that will drive more traffic and increase their monthly visits! We will announce this web launch as soon as we get her done! For now visit www.treasurecoastlegal.com

Quicky Sites
This is a project that is going to be awesome! We get asked to design web sites every week by client's that had smaller budgets. We hate turning away work so we are in the process of designing and developing this new web site that offers template based packages for haor salons, lawn maintenance companaies, landscape contractors, and non profits. as of now our web package is $950.00 and includes one year of free hosting. These packages are not custom and are for business that only need minimal data on their website. All these sites will feature WordPress and are fully upgradable at a discounted price! We have a lot of work to do but are excited about the future of this new sister business! The site is not up yet, but will be soon. Make sure to check out Quicky Sites soon!

Bulldog Batteries
I just lined up this design this week and concepts are due next week. This company manufactures high endurance batteries in Indiana. Based on their logo, it should be a sweet looking web site. As I learn more about the message and graphics, I will make an update in our web design blog.

Intuitive Design Group
Working for family! That is right. My father asked me to redesign his Landscape Architectural web site. Micheal Sapusek of Stuart, Florida is a landscape architect that specializes in high end residential and commercial landscape architecture. From hard scape to soft scape he is consistently tricking out big time outdoor spaces. This project should be fun and I am happy to be able to help out my the man that taught me to design. I got started working for my Michael in 2001 after my 4 years in the United States Marine Corps. He taught me color, typography, and perspective techniques that I use each and every day. Thanks dad and you are forever the man!

If you didn't know about last year's Salty Fly Tournament, apparently you missed out. If you don't know who Sam Root is, then you are still missing out.

Sam is a professional photographer and ally of Magnetic Media Works. Known for his excellent fishing and wedding photography, Sam has made a little name for himself in Florida for his ability to put on a killer saltwater fly fishing tournament.

Sponsored by Hell's Bay Boatworks the Salty Fly will be held on February 25th, 2012. If you love to fly fish, drink beer, and chat with like minded nut jobs, this is the tournament for you.

We are pleased to announce that Magnetic Media Works is a sponsor and is designing the 2012 salty Shores web site as well some other marketing materials.

We will announce when the web site goes live and post a link!

Check out Sam Root's world of fishing and photography insanity.

http://www.saltyshores.com/

http://samrootphotos.com/home/

We are in the process of going through concept files with our latest client Gel Tech Solutions. Based in Jupiter, Florida Gel Tech Solutions offers several different products for a variety of businesses. We are working to design print collateral for their latest product called Soil2O.

This product helps retain soil moisture and naturally releases water as the plants and sod are in need of it. They also use their product in the American West where nasty dust storms occur during the summer months. Soil2O helps keep the dust down in heavy traffic areas where these dust storms can completely destroy visibility.

DID YOU KNOW?
They call these crazy dust storms "Haboobs".

A haboob (Arabic:"هَبوب", "strong wind") is a type of intense duststorm carried on an atmospheric gravity current.

Here is a sneak peak at some of the graphics. There is a lot of work to do, but it is coming along nicely.

First Light tackle makes all sorts of fishing jigs, but are known for making hand tied flare jigs that Snook anglers can’t live without. Last year we redesigned all of First Light Tackles logos and hang tags, now we get to implement our work into the web site design. First Light Tackle is located in Fort Pierce, Florida and we look forward to launching their new web site and new design shortly! Stay tuned.

Should be looking pleasant here real soon!

Can anyone confirm if this is an Impala, Cape Bushbuck, or what?

Thanks in advance!

White’s Tackle is just about the coolest tackle shop around, or at least I think so. As a native Floridian I have traveled most of the state in search of both fish and game. This journey (30+ years) has placed me in random tackle shops all over this peninsular state we call home.

I have spent countless hours in these shops shooting the sh%% with boat captains, store owners, reel boys, and people that love this state and it’s fishery.  When I moved to Fort Pierce in 2006 I eventually made my way into a small tackle shop with the greatest history ever.

Established in 1925,  White’s tackle opened it’s doors on 2nd street  in downtown Fort Pierce.  It was founded by Buck White while the the Raffensberger family owned and operated the business until it’s 2007 sale to local businessman Scott Crippen. Scott grew up in Fort Pierce and even worked in the store as a kid.  Scott eventually built the current store that can be visited at 1106 S. US 1 Fort Pierce, Florida. WARNING: This must see tackle shop that  has caused several local divorces after unnamed men spent way too much money on really cool fishing and archery hunting gear.

When Scott Crippen bought the store he asked me to design and develop something the store never had before. A web site. It was my 3rd paid job ever and I was just starting my business. Whitestackle.com went live and my phone almost immediately started ringing. Scott and his crew really pushed my name and before long I was cranking out designs for numerous fishing related businesses. I quickly found myself in the middle of a major outdoor network and was able meet all kinds of people and work on all kinds of awesome marine projects.

The above photo shows the interior of White’s Tackle.
It features 4000 square feet of fishing and archery gear.

The Lost Arrow Ranch

As I grew busier, I maintained my relationship with Scott Crippen and White’s tackle. Scott even had me design his fishing guide service web site entitled www.fortpierceflatsfishing.com.  This entire site was designed with sketches at a 500 acre ranch in Fort Drum while drinking Modelos and eating fajitas.

Here’s a tip: The best business trips involve hunting, beer, fajitas, and sketches. Yes in that order

I remember one trip to the ranch when Scott looked at me and said “We are going to be building skiffs”. I listened as Scott told me about his old school buddy Chris Ivey and this amazing skiff that he built at his house and wet tested in his pool.  At that moment I think I laughed, but wanted to hear more.  That night Scott gave me all the dirty details and before I knew it, the skiff was brought to Fort Pierce in absolute crap weather conditions. Scott and Chris ran this skiff across a white capped Indian River lagoon, when they got to the other side, Scott and Chris both looked at each other while realizing either of them had any salt water on their sun glass lenses. At that moment Scott said to Chris Ivey ” We are going to start building these skiffs. No matter what.”

Within weeks Scott Crippen and Chris Ivey sat down with Paul Ellig of Treasure Coast Boatworks and discussed the skiff. After going over all the details, Skull Island added Paul to the team.

Paul is a truly talented boat builder and agreed to retool the original skiff to correct some minor details. Paul worked for Maverick boat company for 11 years and was intimately involved in the design, testing, and tooling of the infamous Marverick HPX. Paul’s involvement in the Skull Island Skiff project has been instrumental in the development of this awesome little boat and he continues to work closely with Scott and Chris as they are about to amp up the production level.

The above photos were all taken in 2009.
These photos represent the early stages of design and construction of Skull Island Skiff Works hull number one.

The Skull Island Skiff

If you are still reading this blog post then you will start to realize that on that nasty day in the Indian River Lagoon Scott and Chris formed a partnership. Skull Island Skiffworks was born. Well, not actually. A boat company was formed. We began working on company names almost immediately and I found myself texting back and forth with Scott and crew. Hundreds of texts later, Skull Island Skiffworks came up after talking about a fishing spot in Vero Beach that Scott and Chris frequented together as kids. We all liked it and it was in keeping with that edgy hard core angler driven small skiff market. After all, we are all part of it, and love it!

Before long, the logo designer was hired. I was ecstatic to hear that Brian Sylvester (another hard corps angler residing in Costa Rica) was to be working on the brand. Brian is not only an amazing illustrator and artist, he is a good friend.  I met Brian through my best friend Josh Smith and his wife Jenna. Jenna and Brian are brother and sister and are truly great people and friends. If you wanna see how rad Brian’s work is, visit bsylvesterart.com.

As Brian was sketching logo mach ups  in Costa Rica. I was capturing screen shots of his work and coming up with web concepts . Fast forward two years from when Chris began building this little skiff in his backyard and we are about to launch this new site in the next thirty days. Concepts have been approved while final sketches, content, and photo shoots are being finalized.

Hull number one has left the mold and hull number two and three are getting ready to “pop” and it appears three or four more may need to be built almost immediately. I am delighted to have been apart of all of these projects and am truly excited about this skiff and what it has to offer. I can’t give away too much now, but this skiff’s marketing points are based on supreme fit and finish with a price point that gets a lot more anglers out on the water. It is a technical poling skiff that doesn’t require a second mortgage.  It is 16’ x 50”, super light, super quiet and polls like a dream. This boat is awesome, and on my 2012 list of things to acquire!

Before I “fire up” Photoshop again, I wanted to leave you with this video from Skull Island Skiff works. It features Captain Christian Yergens (shallow water expeditions)  and Captain Scott Crippen  tearing up the Snook  in Fort Pierce on the front side of the mullet run.  Enjoy!!!

Keep checking back soon for more updates on this and other Magnetic Media projects. Thanks for reading!

As graphic designers we are often asked to design these street signs for local small businesses, and there is a proven number of success stories behind each one of the small campaigns. Local businesses use the small discreet signs for many different reasons. Here are just a few:

-Advertising Current Deals or Sales
-Grand Openings
-Event Announcement
-Change in Locations
-General Branding
-and much more!

Every one of the above listed reasons for placing street signage in Indian River County do two things. They increase the tax revenue the county sees, and increase the amount of revenue these small businesses generate for themselves, employees, and sub contractors. It seems pretty simple to us. Let your small businesses market themselves and create more income for everyone. We pay your salary, and we would rather stop paying labor to remove signs that create what everyone needs right now. MONEY.

If you feel the same way as we do about this topic, we ask that you take a minute or two to sign the petition we created. We have embedded the petition just below this text and will be forwarding this to Indian Rover County Code Enforcement in hopes that they are willing to begin talking about revising their current ordinances regarding this topic.

SIGN THE PETITION!

If you are a Magnetic Media Works client that uses WordPress as your content management system(cms), you need to read this. We have noticed that some of our clients are not been moderating their comments and are missing out on business opportunities as well as creating a bunch of maintenance work for themselves. Please take some time out of your busy schedule to read this to understand wordpress and it’s commenting system.

In this article I will cover the following topics:

What are comments?

Comments are pretty much what they sound like. When a person reads a blog post or page on your website, They have the ability to post a comment that pertains to the topic or content of that page. Pretty neat right? Well, it is almost perfect, but there is some SPAM included in the neatness. “Back linking” and “ping back” consultants have found ways to exploit the WordPress system and they relentlessly post comments that are are irrelevant to your content and ultimate business goals. Deleting these SPAM posts can be a “pain in the blog”  but a weekly cleanup usually keeps the task manageable.

Why comments are extremely important!

First, Let’s define a good comment. A good comment is a comment that pertains to the post or page.  A person may ask you a specific question about a specific product or service, or they may want to thank you publicly for creating a great product. Either way, you can reply to these people as the admin and create more than just a static page. When comments begin to fire back and forth you begin to create a social environment that lets potential customers begin to feel even better about what you have to offer. On one hand, these comments back and forth show an active business to customer relationship and that is pretty hard to beat. On the other hand, unanswered comments can produce the opposite effect.

Now, let’s discuss the spammers and why they insist on creating annoying comment moderation.

The spammers are in place doing what they do best. They are constantly dropping links to sites other than and not relative to yours. Why are they doing this? Well, in theory the more “backlinks” to their listed page the more valuable it becomes and it begins to show up for better search engine placement.

I said “in theory” a moment ago.

I said this because backlinks are a strong and powerful method for achieving better search engine results, but Google does place value on the the links that are generated. If you own a landscape company and you have a ton of backlinks from insurance and cosmetic related webs sites,  google may just throw the “SPAMMY” flag and you could lose traction in the search engine results very quickly. Let’s not forget how much of a pain they are! It takes time reading through and determining whether or not the comment is from a relevant business or person. If you have problems with extreme amounts of SPAMMY comments, send us an email and we can install some software that cleans that up!

Where the commenting system is. (See visual steps at the end of this article)

Your commenting system in located in the control panel of your web site. First log in using your username and password that we provided you. Next, you will want to look on the left hand side of the dashboard and you will see the left hand navigation panel. Look down for the comments tab and click it! You will now be looking at all of your comments. The latest “unapproved” comments are near the top!

How to approve, delete, or mark a comment as Spam.

All you have to do is roll your mouse over each comment. As you do the comment you are hovering over will turn yellow. You will also notice some additional text appears under the comment itself. You will see options to approve, delete, or mark as spam. Click the option you desire and move onto the next one! It is pretty easy!

We hope this article was easy to read and understand. If you are having trouble with any of this, please send us an email, and will will make arrangements to contact you and fix your issues. As always, thanks for being a Magnetic Media Works client and we look forward to continuing to serve you and you business!

How to manage comments in three steps:

Step1

Step2

Step3

What is that one thing?

CONTENT!

You may or may not have heard the phrase “Content is King”. This term has been thrown around ever since Google showed up and knocked us off our feet as the best search engine to date. What is content? Well, content is any page on your web site it is that is index able by search engines. In an effort to explain the difference between a web site that has normal content versus a web site that has great content, Let’s use our imagination real quick.

A business owner named Allen has a pest control business in Port Saint Lucie. He has a web site that consists of five typical pages. His pages are typical for a small business web site and look something like this.

• Homepage
• About Page
• Services Page
• Contact Page
• Pricing Page

The above page list or site map is very typical of a normal small business web site and in a lot of cases it may be just enough to get Allen to show up in the top results when someone searches for “Port Saint Lucie Pest Control”. That is the idea right?

Now let’s say Allen has a competitor in Port Saint Lucie and his name is Bubba. Bubba’s business name is Bubba’s Bug Control.  Let’s just say that Bubba has no idea about the web but knows he wants to show up above Allen each and every time someone is searching for Pest Control Services in Port Saint Lucie.

Is it achievable for Bubba to beat Allen “at the top”  if Allen is already number one? YES!

The key is having Bubba use content management system(s) to populate his web site with more pages and more information that Allen. In fact, Bubba’s web site will more than likely have the same main pages as Allen.  The difference between the two web sites is Bubba is going to take our word for it and begin to add articles or blog posts. What in the world is Bubba going to blog about?

WHAT IS A CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM?

Well, we aren’t  pest control specialists, we are web designers, but we have some ideas. Let’s make up some possible articles titles that Bubba can write about.

EXAMPLE ARTICLE LIST:

1. How to hire the right Pest Control company.
2. The difference between a cockroach and a palmetto bug?
3. The right way to treat for Termites.
4. Pesticides that are dangerous around kids.
5. Safe Pesticide application.
6. New Pesticide on the Market.
7. Knowing if you have a bug problem.
8. Florida Pest Identification.

These were made up in two minutes, but could go on forever!

Now that you can see how easy it is to generate a list of possible articles, let’s talk about how exactly all of this content gets indexed and ultimately makes Bubba’s phone ring with new business.

Once Bubba begins to blog, his website will begin to get crawled by Google and in turn, Google will begin to store his page(s) and display them  in search results when someone is searching specific things like “Pesticides that are dangerous around Kids” The more content he has with keywords that pertain to his business and his geographic location the more traffic he will get. More traffic can and will lead to more business.

LET’S TALK GEOGRAPHY:
When Bubba has finally added all of this content to his web site, he now has something special about to happen. Potential customers in his area will continue their daily searches and when they do, it is highly likely that they are going to be looking at exactly what Bubba wants them looking at. HIS WEB SITE and more importantly his PHONE NUMBER.

This is because the master minds at Google know where you are searching from. Even if you search a generic topic they are always going to show you local results first.

These local searches can fall into two categories.

A. Someone searching for a specific service
B. Someone searching for a generic topic not interested in services at that time.

Of course Bubba wants to target group A, but group B is not bad either. You are marketing to someone that will eventually need a pest control service, so why not wow them with your web content so it becomes a resource for them. Chances are they will remember you name and service for future use.

TURNING YOU WEB SITE INTO A RESOURCE:

This is the final point we would like to make. Building a simple web site is great and everyone business should have one. The key though is to turn your web site into a resource with all kinds of information for those seeking information about what you do for a living. The more valuable content you have the more likely you are to have people reading your content. When Google sees how much great relevant content you are producing, they will reward you with placement for terms that you have targeted. This is where and when a web site becomes a true business tool.

IN CLOSING:

If you stayed with me throughout this article, I hope you learned a little bit more about how content plays a role in your search engine optimization. Please understand that there is a lot more search engine tools and techniques. We just wanted to touch on the most crucial issue involved. If you are interested in learning what Magnetic Media Works can do for you, we encourage you to give us a call. Typically we can ask a handful of questions and have some solutions figured out quickly. We aren’t afraid to talk to people and look forward to hearing from new clients each and every day. I hope you enjoyed this article and hope you continue to visit our blog! Feel free to share this article with your friends, family, and coworkers!

Keep Rolling!

DOUG SAPUSEK
Magnetic Media Works
owner/designer
(C) 772801.1796
(E) magnetic.doug@gmail.com