It's been a busy start to the summer for Saelstrom Marketing, and we're not complaining. Last Wednesday (June 16th) was the first 2nd Thursday educational event - Search Engine Marketing in 2010. This event was targeted at a general business audience, and covered a broad overview of 8 core elements of internet marketing in 2010. To avoid a boardoom feel, this educational event was held at the private backroom at Moxies Grill with dinner/networking following the presentation.

The event consisted of 3 main speakers - Chris Onyett from Saelstrom Marketing, Andrew Spoeth formerly from Enquiro Search Solutions, and Muriel Archibald from Search Academy West. Chris spoke on the topics of conversion optimization, usability, and cost-per-click (CPC).

SEO has been a buzz word for a long time now. In fact, these days you’ll be hard pressed to find a web design company that does not advertise “internet marketing” as a provided service. Unfortunately, only a fraction of these companies have genuine knowledge and experience delivering quality results in this area.

At Saelstrom Marketing we have a proven track record increasing quality traffic and website conversions for our clients, and most importantly we have a process. I'm very happy to release our first internet marketing case study. This case study is based on an internet marketing campaign we performed for a local client, The Okanagan Skin Care Centre.

Challenge

The Crockett Book Company, an independently owned trail bookstore, asked Saelstrom Marketing to build them a website that would appeal to their audience and offer simple usability. The challenge was to create a site that would educate the viewers on both the history and the services provided by The Crockett Book Co. while simultaneously directing them towards The Crockett Book Co. Online Store. By creating a website with a fully integrated Content Management System(CMS) and customizable ‘online coupons’, The Crockett Book Co. would easily be able to keep their visitors up to date.

Today Google released the "Google Font Directory" and the "Google Font API". Google has created the Google Font Directory to help address the common need for high quality fonts for use on the web.

Over the last year or two Mozilla Firefox has started to forget its roots, those being speed and performance. Of course we can't lay all of the blame on Mozilla as most of this has happened thanks to Firefox's massive library of third party add-ons. I'll admit I'm a add-on fan(11 plugins installed!), but it's at the point where I myself am considering switching to Google Chrome for its pure speed.

We’ve been discussing this for awhile now, and have finally decided to pull the trigger on dropping support for internet explorer 6 (IE6). IE6 is a nine year old browser that can make web development a real pain.

It’s important to us that every website we create looks as good as possible on every platform that a website visitor may potentially view it on. However, we are drawing the line on this decade old browser and here are some reasons why:

In our beautiful city of Kelowna rests many innovative companies that understand the importance of having an online presence. There are a lot of different ways to get traffic to your website;  Ads, Search Optimization,  Pay-per-click, Inbound Links, local listings, directories etc. etc. etc.  We talk about it a lot! Everyone does!

But what about keeping people interested, engaged and captivated? There seems to be a lot more road signs then interesting destinations - and keeping people on your site can be a challenge.

Unless you spark an interest, 53% of your audience will be gone in under 30 mississippis!

Today is an amazing day. Adobe Systems has officially launched the brand new Creative Suite 5(CS5). As a graphic designer and web developer a brand new Adobe Creative Suite means a whole new set of tools to make life easier and offer more possibilities. For those of you who don't know Adobe CS5 is a collection of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications created by Adobe Systems. Each collection in the Creative Suite consists of Adobe's ever popular applications, including Photoshop CS5, InDesign CS5, Illustrator CS5, Acrobat, Flash CS5 and more. Without these applications technologies like PDF, PostScript and Flash wouldn't be as readily available as they are today.

Yesterday was the first “2nd Thursday” event held in Kelowna at The Rotten Grape. 2nd Thursday(@2ndthursday) is a brand new organization that hopes to bring together all of the talent within Kelowna and the Okanagan Valley’s Marketing, Creative and Media sectors. I’m extremely excited for 2nd Thursday and the opportunities it will provide for the tech community throughout the valley.

Yes, we came up with the ingenious idea to 'Rickroll' all of the visitors who come to our brand new website on April 1st. If you're not sure what Rickrolling is you can read all about it here on wikipedia. The following is a snippet from the wikipedia page:

Rickrolling is an Internet meme typically involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up". The meme is a bait and switch: a person provides a web link that they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true destination of the link without clicking. When a person clicks on the link and is led to the web page, he or she is said to have been "Rickrolled".

It's here! Our brand new website has finally been launched. Saelstrom Marketing is proud to present to you the new site we've been piecing together over the last month. I still don't know how we managed to get it all done, but here it is in all it's glory!

Keep in mind we will still be updating the site with some additions that we weren't able to incorporate for the launch. Check back next week for even more surprises! We'll keep you up to date and let you know what's going on through the blog, twitter, and facebook.

Campaign monitor noticed a design we did for our Saelstrom Marketing internal newsletter, and has showcased it in their email design gallery.