I’m looking forward to the interviews, panels, and parties. If you’re at SxSW, find me on Twitter @beley and add me as a friend on Foursquare and Gowalla. I have very few scheduled appointments or panels, so if you want to grab coffee or a drink, just send me a message!

Next weekend I’ll be giving a presentation at IndieConf about effective networking for independent contractors and solopreneurs. Everyone says word of mouth is the best way to get new clients, but who can just sit around and wait for word of mouth to start bringing in the business?

I’m going to be talking about how to use effective networking strategies to land new clients and more work from current clients. I’ll be discussing several different strategies – both online and off.

Why should you listen to me about networking for independent contractors? After spending two years as head of web development and sales for a small company, I started my own (solo) consulting firm that I later sold to Kelsey Advertising & Design in 2006. I have owned or worked in small web consulting firms for the past ten years.

There’s still time to register for IndieConf. Register online and enter discount code “25off” for 25% off regular price. I hope I see you there!

UPDATE: Both presentations and slides are now embedded and linked below.

This was my first ever Barcamp, so I wasn’t too sure about what to expect. I was traveling to Atlanta on Friday with work, so I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to make it to Barcamp Birmingham because we were leaving for the beach on Sunday. My friend Chris talked me into going (and then bailed on me, no hard feelings tho!)

If you’re not familiar with Barcamps, they are a conference without a pre-arranged agenda. Everyone just shows up, some people propose a few topics they’d like to present on, and people decide which sessions they want to see.

I left from Atlanta Friday afternoon and headed straight to Birmingham; it’s about 2 1/2 hours from Atlanta. When I got to Birmingham, I checked into the DoubleTree hotel and got some dinner. I crashed pretty early; I had a really long day. I woke up early at 5 AM and was ready to get going, so I went ahead and showered, checked out of my room, and headed out to find some coffee and breakfast. After a while of searching, it seems there wasn’t much to choose from in the area of coffee shops downtown (none that were open at 6-7 AM anyway) so I ended up getting coffee at McDonald’s and heading on over to Innovation Depot, the host of Barcamp Birmingham ’09.

I helped load in some chairs and setup for registration, then started working on my proposed presentations. I proposed two sessions: “Selling Mobile”, about getting clients to say yes to mobile, and “Online Marketing Inside Out”, a discussion about online marketing, specifically social media and PR, with topics from my book.

I was missing a mini-displayport to VGA adapter, so I couldn’t connect my laptop to the projectors. I asked Jeremy Flint, one of the coordinators of Barcamp B’Ham, and tweeted to see if anyone had an adapter I could borrow. Unfortunately, I spent most of the morning trying to round up an adapter and didn’t adequately prepare for my talk, which ended up being scheduled for 9:45 AM. I managed to throw some slides together while sitting in the Podcasting session at 9AM, and borrowed a laptop for the presentation.

I personally think this was my worst presentation ever. I didn’t have time to rehearse or go over my notes, and I rushed through the presenation in about half the time. I missed a few key points and had to go back and try to explain them, making it a little awkward to follow. Still, I got really positive feedback from the people who attended, so I guess I didn’t bomb that badly. I guess you truly are your worst critic.

After presenting on Mobile, I went to an Introduction to Social Media panel. Not that I need an introduction to social media, but with only three concurrent tracks sometimes it was hard to pick a session to go to. I figured I may get some ideas for my own presentations by going to some similar presentations.

The last session I attended during the morning segment was Tammy Hart’s “Converting a Static Site into a WordPress Theme.” Tammy’s currently authoring a book on WordPress with Packt… she’s a WordPress ninja.

Lunch was catered in and was pretty good. I enjoyed just hanging out and talking to people. After lunch, the afternoon schedule was posted and my online marketing panel was scheduled for 2PM. I decided to run to the Apple Store and grab a video adapter for my presentation. I barely made it back. I think I walked in at about 2:01 PM and setup for my presentation in about 30 seconds.

Online Marketing – BarCampBirmingham3 from Jeremy Flint on Vimeo. My slides from the presentation are also online.

I think the Online Marketing session went extremely well, filled the time slot and covered a lot of material from the book. I was much more relaxed and felt it was generally a much better presentation… which is great considering that’s a variant of the presentation I’ll be giving several times throughout May and June.

After the Online Marketing session, I went to Mitch Canter’s session on integrating social media tools with WordPress. Mitch is a very engaging presenter. While I knew about half of the plugins and tools he mentioned in his presentation, I got far more from his presentation than most of the others, just in terms of mental notes and tips for my future presentations.

My last panel for the day was another talk about Twitter and social media by Wade Kwon. Wade is also an excellent presenter and really engages the audience, making it fun. Towards the end of his presentation we were told we had to cut it short and get out… the security was apparently only paid through 4PM, and we had to all exit the building. We quickly got together for a group photo (see top) and scattered.

Some of us went over to Shift Workplace for the after party (a little early, it was supposed to start at 6PM). They were nice enough to let us in a bit early, and we mingled there for a while. I was originally going to head out as soon as Barcamp was over, but ended up staying through the whole after party. I finally left Birmingham at around 9 PM to head back to LaGrange. I got home after 1 AM EST.

Overall, Barcamp Birmingham was awesome. I met a ton of great people and really enjoyed the sessions. I also really enjoyed presenting… it’s always good to get practice and with several speaking engagements coming up I needed it!

So far I haven’t attended many panels, but have met a lot of great people in the halls and at the parties at night (the real reason for coming). I’ll write a follow-up post reviewing the conference and all the people I’ve met, but just wanted to throw out what I was up to…

The new design features an Ajaxed dashboard that allows you to add modules you like and remove modules you might not need. You can moderate comments and create new posts directly from the dashboard, and you can see a list of recent drafts and click to edit them.

The menu system has also been revamped, and looks like it took some inspiration from the Tiger Admin for WordPress. They’ve moved the navigation to the left sidebar, and it will be collapsible to just icons, giving you more room for the dashboard.

Checkout the video and see what you think about WordPress 2.7:

There were some great presentations and keynotes, and the Expo had a lot of great companies represented. I have to say my favorite booth was the B5 booth with their poker game and giveaways. And what was up with the cement mixer??

My friends Patrick, Jeremy and Darren all spoke in panels at this year’s convention and all were great. I learned a lot about blogging and social networking and am excited about applying that information to both my websites and clients’ sites.

The parties rocked, but I think I missed the best party of all… I heard there was Backstreet Boys karaoke going on at the MGM! I’m sorry we missed it.

I also participated in the Digital Photography School Photowalk, and will be posting the photos to Flickr as soon as possible.

All in all, it was a great trip. I learned a lot and can’t wait to apply what I’ve learned. I’d also like to thank Rick Calvert and Blogworld – looking forward to next year!

Foul was created in 2004 and development on it has been pretty slow. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – it works and it works well. It’s a lightweight script that serves a very niche purpose.

That said, I was searching for some documentation on one of Foul’s features and came across a page titled “Foul 2.0 Documentation” that gave a 404 error. I was able to view a cached version of the page on Google. Foul 2.0 has never even been announced, much less released. The documentation was originally indexed by Google in July, 2008 so it’s fairly new. It must have been taken down shortly after due to being accidentally indexed.

The new version is integrated with Prototype, an extremely popular JavaScript framework. With many new tests and features, and Prototype integration, I’m looking forward to the release of Foul 2.0. We use Prototype on several websites, many that also need form validation, so it would be nice if they shared the prototype code and reduced the overall JS footprint.

See the screenshot to the right (click for a full-size image) or check out the link. I also archived a version of the page, for historical purposes. I’ve put a nofollow on the link so it won’t get counted as dupe content.

Today after running my regular monthly report I followed it up by actually searching a few of the terms on Google and Yahoo! to see who was above us (we have first page rankings for almost every major term we track).

When I searched for “large mens shoes” on Yahoo! the #1 result is a search page on Target.com. It’s a dynamic search results page, which I have no problem with. The problem is that the actual search results have anything BUT large shoes.

The results? 3 watches, a belt, 2 pair of insoles and ONE pair of shoes, which is not available in large sizes (it’s only available in two sizes – small and large).

How did Target get a #1 rank for this term? There is no content on the search results that would lead me to believe they got it from keywords on the page. I can’t imagine there are actually backlinks to their search results with the anchor text “large mens shoes.”

I completely understand when one of our competitors gets ahead of us in search ranking… at least the customer is finding what they are looking for. But when completely random results are shown above our site for no apparent reason, I have to wonder why.

In the trenches of everyday work, it’s understandable to make a mistake here and there, but if you’re paying for an ad, you should make it a habit to check the display of that ad before you submit it.

I’m also curious about why Google can’t figure out what the user meant, considering there is just an extra space in the formula. I would assume this is a fairly common mistake.

I’m back from Austin and while I definitely have enough catchup work to keep me busy, I thought I’d post a quick review since it was my first time at the conference.

First, I finally got to meet a lot of people in person that I’ve known for years… Patrick O’Keefe, Chrispian Burks, Jeremy Wright, Aaron Brazell, Stephan Segraves and more. It was great hanging out with you guys.

This was my first trip to Austin and my first SXSW conference. I had a great time, and wish I could have stayed for the whole week, but we stayed only for the Interactive portion. I learned one thing almost immediately — SXSW has two worlds — the panels and conference during the day and the parties and networking events at night. I’ll give a brief review of each.

The SXSW Conference and Expo

All of the panels and discussions were between 30 minutes and 1 hour long. It seemed like in many of the discussions we were really just getting started and it was over. In a way, this is good because it gets you thinking about a subject and asking yourself questions, and leaves you to finish on your own. Hopefully you go back with some unanswered questions and continue the discussion online and with colleagues back home.

The layout of the convention center made it difficult to get from one room to another. Several times we just could not physically make it to another panel in time because it required walking clear across the convention center (which was big).

The trade show itself was a bit smaller than I expected. Since it is an Interactive, Film and Music conference I expected to see a fairly large trade show, maybe divided into sections for each. The exhibitors had fairly small booths and were giving out schwag like t-shirts, pins, stickers, etc. I saw companies like O’Reilly, Opera, Mapquest, Google, and Yahoo. A few people I expected to see but didn’t: Mozilla/Firefox, Microsoft, Apple.

Overall it was very organized and the panels discussed interesting topics related to our industry. I learned a good bit and enjoyed bumping into interesting people on the show floor.

The Parties and Networking Events

I was fortunate to know a good number of people going to Austin for SXSW, many whom I have never met in person. Several of us got together Friday night to meet and have dinner, and had some discussions on industry topics and generally just hang out.

Every night after that it seems there was a party or networking event planned that seemed interesting. There were a few blog-specific events that I enjoyed in particular, including the Chitika/ProBlogger Beer Bus and the b5media Blog Network Camp. I learned a lot about blogging and met some great people.

I realized quickly that the sessions and panels are great but they just spark your creativity and get your wheels turning. It’s the Austin night life that really makes SXSW what it is. I had a great time at SXSW and can’t wait for next year.

Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards is a book about Patrick’s experience building and managing online forums.

If you run a community or are thinking of starting one, I’d suggest taking a look at Patrick’s book.

Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities

I’m a sucker for freebies.

Checkout the demo on their website, or download the beta.

It’s not production ready (so they say) but the demo is very impressive and I’m hard at work installing and configuring on my own server. I’ll have a full report soon!

Practical PHP Programming

It’s a great reference book on PHP, covers PHP5 and is formatted well. It’s supported by a few Google Ads.

This will finally force hosting companies into supporting PHP5. It only took 3 years and the upcoming release of PHP 6 to do it!

A few months ago, I came across a help-wanted ad on a competitor’s website. I have thoroughly enjoyed owning a small web development company, but it was time to move on to the next level. I really only saw two ways to do that. I could hire full-time employees and expand my company. We’d need a new location, marketing and a lot of business. Or, I could grow quickly by acquiring or being acquired.

I initiated a dialog with BKD, and with Brant Kelsey, the owner. From the start it was clear that we would make a good team and our companies had many complimenting strengths. Their focus and a great deal of their experience has been in branding, print design and traditional marketing. Our focus was web development, e-commerce and online marketing. Together we could offer a full-range of services to our clients.

After several successful meetings and negotiations, BKD acquired EleyTech in November of 2006. In addition to acquiring the business and clients, BKD hired me full-time.

As a full-service ad agency, design firm and web development company, we now have the capabilities in-house to tackle just about any project, large or small. We have a full-time staff of 6, which includes award-winning graphic designers, programmers, and a marketing and e-commerce
consultant.

I’m excited to be a part of such a talented and diverse team, and look forward to providing our clients with amazing service and proven results.

I plan on using my personal blog to write about my experiences at a growing advertising and design firm, about personal productivity, and about building businesses. I will share experiences from the field, and from my personal endeavors. I will continue to build my own websites, as I always have, and will continue to write. In fact, I hope that I will have more time to focus on my writing and personal ventures now that I do not have the responsibility of running a business atop developing successful websites for our clients.

So stay tuned… I’m embarking on a new and interesting journey. It has been a long time since I’ve been gainfully employed, and I’m looking forward to the potential for growth and positive change that this brings.

It has a lot of benefits, but the most beneficial thing will be separating my personal and business lives. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been on the phone with a client when my daughter would come running down the hall screaming at the top of her lungs “Da Da Da Da” (and she’s only been walking for a few months!) Other benefits include being across the street from my bank, two blocks away from downtown, and more.

Let me know what you think of the office building. I’ll post pictures after I’ve got everything moved in this weekend.

The reason? I’m making them more accessible, more usable and more standards-compliant. In doing this, I hope to increase search engine rankings and make the sites easier to update. I also want to try to make all the sites accessible to mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs.

Looking back at some older websites, I’m amazed at how much I have learned in such a short period of time. Web development is a fast-changing field, with new technologies and standards emerging constantly. And on top of that, many conventions and commonalities in web design today are against those web standards. Books still teach the “old” way almost exclusively.

Learning to create usable, accessible websites seperating content from layout is more important now than ever. I will probably be redesigning all my sites (and many client websites) to be standards-compliant in the coming months.

I had a meeting today with a company that has had a website for 6 years that has never generated any business for them. They just noticed that they are not listed in any search engines for popular keyword searches. Their website is pretty much flash and images, with poorly written code (no doctypes, alt tags, etc.) generated by whatever design program the firm used. The company that created their website is a very successful design firm that specializes in print design and show displays. The designers there have art degrees in graphic design and years of experience.

The problem is that these types of designers know absolutely nothing about how the Web works. They are very talented print designers and even make great looking websites. But that doesn’t really matter, unless you really just have money to blow… because these websites never get any visitors. They don’t get listed in search engines and aren’t accessible to those with disabilities or on alternate platforms or browsers.

I don’t know how we can solve this problem either – most colleges and universities are still teaching this type of web design in their art and graphics departments. It’s not neccessarily the designer or design firm’s fault for doing what they’ve been taught. But increasingly, companies are questioning why they aren’t getting results from their websites.

In comes self-taught designers like myself. I had formal training in graphic design, page layout, etc. but threw all my knowledge out the door when I started learning web design. I knew it was a completely different beast because I also have experience in software development. I treated web development more like software development (user interfaces, interaction, etc.) than a static format similar to print design.

I’m not neccessariliy complaining… it is actually getting me a lot of business I might not otherwise have had. I’ve had two new clients recently come to me after they noticed they weren’t getting the results they needed with their current website.

So if you’re looking for a web designer or web developer anytime soon, be sure to ask questions about usability, accessibility, search engines, etc. while you’re asking questions about design and portfolios. It’s just as, if not more than, important.

I don’t have time to post in my blog, much less design it. A blog is meant for reading anyway, right? So for right now this is it. Let me know what you think of this theme… I had picked about 8 favorites. I may end up switching out week by week since I like more than one.

We have the server back up and running but to be sure there are not any hardware problems that could have caused the issues (that could resurface again) we have a new server online that we are configuring and will be transferring everything over during the weekend. Yes, Christmas weekend. In one way it’s aweful that this had to happen so close to Christmas, but then there won’t be as many people online so it may be a blessing in disguise.

Our new server features an Intel Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz processor, 2 80 GB hard drives, 1 GB RAM and more data transfer and bandwidth that we could ever utilize at our current loads. It should be all we need for at least the next 18 months.

Hopefully, the transition will go smoothly. I have several technicians working today and will have one on call through the holidays. I will also be doing much of the configuration and setup myself, and transferring accounts over to the new server one at a time, testing each to ensure smooth transition.

I’ve tried blogging on and off for a few years now, and have been playing around with different software packages but have never really found anything easy enough.

I wanted to be able to blog quickly and get to the actual writing. I don’t want to have to have a huge learning curve with the software or have to enter a different markup for bold, italics and other basic text formatting. I also want to be able to customize the blog’s design and layout easily.

I am using WordPress for the last few days and it’s really easy to use. It even has a sidebar for Mozilla/Firefox (which is how I’m posting this message) so you don’t even have to go to your website and login, just click a link in your favorites.

If you’re thinking of starting a blog, I’d recommend looking at WordPress. It’s very easy to install and even easier to use.