Intellectual Property on the Web: Free for All, or Free for None?
As many of you may have noticed, my blog contains reposts of articles I find during my day on the web from select sites I frequent. My goal is to share the same content I read with those who share common interests. Every post that I make that does comes from a third party always begins with a link back to the source. I don't in any way try to take credit for someone else's work. However, it has been brought to my attention that some may see this as an issue. Here are some of the complaints I have seen (not on my blog personally, just in general):
Hofmann U.S.A. Web Site Redevelopment
The home page of Hofmann U.S.A.'s web site. Hofmann specializes in Automotive Wheel Service Equipment and is a brand that is sold by Snap-on Equipment. The site they had up before this one was in poor condition, poorly coded and did not provide the functionality Snap-on Equipment wanted from their sites. Content was very outdated, and the poor coding made it hard to maintain.
I created this web site to help Hofmann share news with their customers and employees, and bring their product offerings to the World Wide Web. All pages are W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant. There is a basic search engine, interactive navigation and a "Find a U.S. Sales Rep" page. Brochures can be downloaded from the web site on the product page, and customers can also find accessories and part numbers for their equipment. There is a Documentation page for locating brochures and operators manuals, and a Contact Us form that validates to make sure all required fields have been entered so that customers can get assistance quickly. The form also has several security measures in place to prevent someone from hacking it. Any page that has a brochure on it also has a "Get Adobe Reader" button on it to help those who do not have it. Future plans are to add movies showcasing Hofmann's products.
New Look For My Blog
Yesterday I spent a great deal of my day (1:00 - 11:00 to be exact) redesigning my professional blog. Right now, you are looking at the result! I am pretty impressed with it. I like the look, plus I love the liquid layout. If you're a designer, you know how much of a pain it is to get a liquid layout to work. I was so tempted to use table's when constructing the template, but I eventually found a great site that helped me with getting the divs the same height. Here is the link.
I first constructed the template in photoshop (as man of us designers do). I created all the graphic used and then sliced out the necessary elements. Afterwords, it was pretty simple for me to create the template files for it. My blog is powered by WordPress, which is a great blogging CMS.
I still have some ways to go, but I figured I would just fix things as they come up. For right now, I am happy with it. I will focus more on it this weekend. More posts coming very soon!
My First RSS Feed!
Shortly after I came aboard at Snap-on Equipment, I along with the assistance of my team put together our first company newsletter (you can see it here). It was great, because a newsletter is a great way to reach out to customers and let them know about new products, how your product can help their business, and what new and exciting things are going on in your company's world. Anyways, when we first started, we printed and mailed all of our newsletters. The newsletters looked great, and a lot of people liked them. However, it was hard to maintain the list of people who wanted to receive them, and tedious to remove those who didn't. Most of all, it was very expensive.
Naturally, I also placed our newsletter on our web site. The first alternative to printed newsletters I thought of was to try to start up a e-mail subscription. However, the other reason I thought this was a bad idea is that with all the spam people get, people will probably not want to sign up for an e-mail newsletter either. Also, it would be time consuming and tedious to maintain the database of registered recipients, and a pain to have to remove people. So I came up with what I consider the best solution: RSS 2.0.

























