Peter Grandstaff

Web Marketing for Your Small Business

Community Website Launch: TriangleDogForum.com

For the past year or so I have been working on a side project, a local community site for dog lovers.  Triangle Dog Forum is the result, and it’s now open to the public.

Triangle Dog Forum

There’s a ton of functionality here.  There are Lost Pet Alerts, discussion forums, free classified ads, and a directory of local dog and pet business and resources from dog trainers and vets to shelters and rescues.  The entire site is 100% free.  I do have a few ads running, but I don’t really expect to make any money.  I just wanted to create a useful resource for local dog lovers.

Do you love dogs and live in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina?  If so, check out Triangle Dog Forum.

Google Wave Coverage – May 2009 eNewsletter

May sure has flown by.  I hope your month has been profitable.  Have you gotten Google Analytics set up on your site yet?  If you need some help, hit that reply button and let me know!  One of my clients is so excited by his Analytics data that he checks it first thing every morning.  It’s always a pleasure to see someone take the ball and run with it.  This month…

Newsletter Contents

  • And now for something completely different…

Google I/O 2009 Keynote

This month I resolved to exclude Google from the newsletter.  I was going to talk about customer retention strategies.  It’s all the rage these days, what with the economy and all.

Then I watched a video on YouTube. This video blew my mind. It was the first announcement of a new Google product that will change the world, and how we communicate. So, I’ve decided to depart from my usual format and tell you about what I saw.
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Election Result Website Screenshot Showcase

Well, now that the dust has cleared from the monumental election here in the United States I’ve decided to share some souvenirs.  I wasn’t able to get a newspaper on November 5. I’m sure there are a lot of other folks out there in the same boat.  Lets move on into the digital age and save websites instead!  I took care of the screen captures, you can download them here! [Read more…]

Obama is President Elect Website Roundup

Well, moments after I posted my last entry everybody declared Obama the winner.  Looks like I need some more practice with the whole live blogging thing, but tonight was a fun start.

I took screenshots of many many major news websites’ front pages, interesting to see that the NY Times changed their headline after about five minutes.  That’s one of the great things about publishing on the internet.  You can make a change instantly.

North Carolina still can’t be called, but Obama leads by a fraction of a percent.  Indiana is the other really close one.  Figures, the Grandstaff side of my family lives in Indiana, and my folks and I live in North Carolina.

It is always exciting to see Democracy in action, and the world wide web has brought us a lot of amazing technologies to watch it all unfold.  Stay tuned and I’ll post some screen shots with web design critiques in the next few days.

Now it’s time for me to watch an episode of something funny over on Hulu.com and retire for the night.

Latest Election Website News

I neglected to mention last time that guardian.co.uk formats their summary graphs in a very attractive way.  All the US websites seem to be a horizontal bar with the win point of 270 electoral votes marked at center.  The Guardian is using circular, or arcing bar graphs for electoral votes and popular vote.

a good example of displaying data on a website

a good example of displaying data on a website

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Some Website Diamonds in the Rough – Election Update

Google is doing a nice job.  A clean clear interface with graphs and tallies in the right sidebar and breaking news stories in the center of the page.  Google seems a little less conservative with their projections than others, I’ll stick with the New York Times for numbers I can trust.

Over in the UK The Guardian has something I haven’t seen elsewhere.  There is a tab on their map that lets you see a map where each state is drawn such that its area is proportionate to the number of electoral votes it represents, very cool.  Additionally they offer three shades of coloring on the map to indicate varying degrees of leads in addition to wins.  Very nice web design and programming!

Current NY Times count, Obama: 159 electoral votes and McCain 49.  Google and The Guardian agree on 202 for Obama and 80 for McCain.  Blue is up 3 seats in both the house and senate.

Congrats to Fox News, their online map now shows color on states, but just one shade.   Strange thing is that they are showing zero electoral votes for either candidate.  Looks like they should put some more money and talent into their web development team.

Election Update & Website Roundup

Since my last post, Obama has climbed to 118 electoral votes while McCain is only up to 17.  Obama took New York and Maine while McCain picked up Alabama.  I’m using the New York Times website for my numbers here.  Google is saying Obama: 195, McCain 70.

I’ve got to start off by giving kudos to Fox News for having the most useless election coverage I’ve found so far.  As is customary they give a US map, but where you expect to see color coding based on current reporting there is but one color to the whole nation.  You have to move your mouse over a state to see the results.

So far I think I’m most impressed with the NY Times site, you get great color coding of states and counties with light coloring indicating a lead and dark coloring indicating a “victory.”  Of course, these are victories being called by the news media based on the polling results as they trickle in.  The NY Times site also gives you all the local info you could want by letting you zoom in to state level.  This is a great example of a quality web application.