Pandora is a great way to discover new music, and today we stumbled upon a song that is sweet, simple and a bit haunting in a good way. The band is ‘The Civil Wars’ and the song is ‘Dance Me To The End of Love’, a song originally by Leonard Cohen.
‘The Civil Wars’ is a band made up of just two people, Joy Williams and John Paul White. She’s originally from California, and he is from Alabama. They play without a backup band… no drums… no bass… just the two of them singing to an acoustic guitar. There’s something raw about that. Something real. It’s intimate and close. We like that.
I have a thing for acoustically based music. I used to play guitar… used to. Now the only plucking my fingers do are on the computer keyboard. But, I am eyeing that Martin guitar at Bounty Music Store! These guys are an inspiration and well worth a listen.
Link building for better SEO (search engine optimization) and rankings – we all know having incoming links help your website rank higher in search engines; however, don’t get all crazy and use tactics to build up that number of links in unnatural ways. Relax… breath… and gather up incoming links from more natural means.
If you haven’t been penalized by Google already when they came out with Penguin last Spring, take note and be sure to clear away any questionable links you may have already gathered. Be sure to gather up incoming links… the good old organic way, by providing content that people will naturally want to share.
Be wary of people offering you 10,000 links for $1… don’t list your site in directories with tons of other completely unrelated links… or by clicking away on bookmarking sites like a fiend… clean it up… and be organic in your efforts. Google will reward you kindly.
We just launched a new website for Kihei Rent A Car. They had an old dinosaur website created eons ago, that needed to be brought up to date with the latest look and the latest coding under the hood.
Kihei Rent A Car came to us looking for a clean, yet inviting site that was user-friendly for the older clients that may come to the site wanting to book a rental car on Maui. We chose to use a larger font and create large buttons for the folks that may not be too accustomed to the world of the web. We also did a couple photo shoots with Kihei Rent A Car to get photos of all the rental cars, trucks, vans and jeeps that they offer.
They also wanted a reservation page where people could book a rental vehicle online, AND also a separate quoting mechanism for each of the different car pages so that people could see the actual pricing dependent on how many days, type of vehicle, etc. The challenging part was factoring in the Summer and Winter Rates with their Weekly and Monthly rates.
We created a blog for them and a video tutorial so that they could learn how to go about posting their own articles on the blog. They will be writing about company news, such as drag racing at the strip, employee highlights, and rental car special discounts, etc. They realize how important it is to have a blog so that they can add fresh content to the site and get those brownie points with Google for higher rankings.
Here’s a great song that is especially perfect for Valentine’s Day, “Oh, Heavenly Day” by singer/songwriter and musician Patti Griffin – who says this song is the very first love song she ever wrote…. dedicated to her dog. She must’ve really loved that dog, because this song is really beautiful.
Patty Griffin is an American Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter and musician born in 1964. She’s known for her raw songwriting style that centers around the folk music genre.
In 2007, Americana Music Association granted Griffin the “Artist of the Year” award and her album, Children Running Through, won for “Best Album”.
In 2011, Griffin’s album entitled Downtown Church won the Grammy Award for Best Traditional Gospel Album.
According to Robert Plant’s official website, the two award winning musicians recently wed. But, let me tell you, it’s not really true… at least not yet! Plant and Griffin have been dating for over a year, spending half of their time together in Austin, Texas.
Robert Plant (of Led Zeppelin… our fave!) and Patti Griffin are planning a Band of Joy album set to come out this year, 2013. It’s been said that is will be “far, far out with psychedelic pedal steel and all sorts of stuff.” They are also part of a “spacey, trippy” group called the Sensational Shape Shifters, who have been performing since last summer. Keep your eyes peeled for them.
Recently, we completed phase one of a web design project for Hawaii solar company, Haleakala Solar. They came to us looking for a fresh new look for their old out-dated website. The design was generic and the back-end coding – which no one ever gets to see except for the search engines – was in pretty bad shape. We took their old website, kept some of the text and photos and then revamped the entire web design from the ground up to reflect a more modern and sophisticated branding.
Haleakala Solar has been in business for over 35 years, getting its start here on Maui. They’ve installed over 10,000 solar systems all over the state of Hawaii.
We had the chance to meet a good number of the employees through the photography and photo-shoots we did for them. What we found striking about the employees is their enthusiasm for what they do, and a sense of pride to be a part of the Haleakala Solar team. It’s no wonder since Haleakala Solar is considered to be one of the best solar companies in Hawaii, and one of the few remaining from the early days when solar energy was first getting its start. Always on the cutting edge, and always striving to be the best… this is the feel we needed to capture in the design of the layout.
Our goal was for the design of the new website to reflect the solar energy company, but without using the usual colors of orange or yellow to represent the sun. Thinking out of the box with the colors and layout, the new website is fresh and easy on the eyes, and easy to navigate through – while also being full of information presented in a way that is not cluttered, but appealing to look at.
