I’m not a huge fan of the orange/white/gray color scheme, and yet here we are. The MWI website has been updated and if you don’t like the colors then you can blame the goldfish and stock photographers. I wanted to create a new homepage marketing image that had something to do with the concept of being left behind, but when you do a search for images under the keywords “left behind” you get all sorts of stuff, none of which was suitable for our purposes.

I was thinking I’d like to have a photo of somebody who had been left by the side of the road with a suitcase while a car drives off, or something like that, but I could not find any such photo or anything remotely similar on any stock photography site. Which is surprising to me since I think the concept would be fairly useful to a lot of people out there. So goldfish were the best I could come up with.

Let me know what you think. But bear in mind we’ll probably be too busy with client work to do anything about it.

Some new web design case studies have been added to the site. Most of these have been done for some time, but it’s hard to get around to updating your own website, you know? We’ve added case studies for Unishippers, Poems Art, Price Self Storage, AEEC, and Artscape.

Price Self Storage is the most recent work and in fact the new site hasn’t launched yet, although the design phase is complete. We hope to launch the new site within a few days. If you think Artscape and Poems Art are curiously similar, there’s no mistake to that. We completed Poems Art and acquired Artscape as a client as a result of the Poems Art site.

We’ve had a blog dedicated to SEO up at TheOrganicSEO.com for some time, but we’ve let it languish this year. We’re interested in getting it back up and running and turning it into a valuable resource, and if you’re an SEO professional with a penchant for writing we’d like to invite you to become an author. Of course there’s no pay involved, but we don’t mind a little self-promotion here and there as long as you keep it under control and focus on writing interesting content first and self-promotion second, or third.

If you’re interested in writing for the blog, email me.

You know how you go into a restaurant and sometimes your receipt will say “Fill out our customer satisfaction survey and get $3.00 of your next purchase” or something like that? If you’ve ever gone through the process then you may have been using the services of one of our clients, Mindshare Technologies.

Mindshare helps companies in the automotive, retail, food and beverage, contact center, hotel and lodging, financial, home services, telecom, salon, healthcare, and sports and entertainment industries to measure customer loyalty, customer satisfaction, and employee satisfaction through their automated surveys and customer feedback tools. Check them out at mshare.net.

If you’re an SEO professional in the greater Boston area or are involved with search engine optimization, Internet marketing, search engine marketing, etc. and have ties to Boston then please feel free to join the Boston SEO group on Linkedin.

To join the Boston web designers group on Linkedin click here. The group is for anyone who provides web design services or who work for a web design firm in the greater Boston area, or anyone with ties to the Boston area who involved in web design. In other words, it’s pretty open.

We recently started a Utah web designers group on Linkedin.com. At the time of this post there are 41 members. If you are a web designer or someone interested in web design and you’ve got ties to Utah please feel free to join by clicking the link above. Once you sign up, it will send us a note letting us know that you’ve requested membership and then we’ll check out your profile and approve you. Linkedin also invites you to send a message but you don’t need to do that.

We recently started a Utah SEO Professionals group on Linkedin.com. At the time of this post there are 21 members. If you are an SEO consultant/professional with ties to Utah please feel free to join by clicking the link above. Once you sign up, it will send us a note letting us know that you’ve requested membership and then we’ll check out your profile and approve you. Linkedin also invites you to send a message but you don’t need to do that.

From time to time MWI is invited to bid on government contracts. We never respond to these requests for three reasons:

1. Bureaucracy. The bidding process with government is full of red tape and hoops to jump through. There are all sort of requirements that have to be verified. There is paperwork to fill out. It’s time consuming and a pain. By contrast, bidding on a job for a private company can be as simple as sending an email with some general pricing information.

2. Speed. The government is slow. Everything has to be approved and go through the proper channels. With private companies, we can go from responding to a request for proposal to having a signed contract and a check in our hand within 24 hours.

3. Multiple bids. The government is required to get at least three bids. Sometimes the decision makers have already decided who to use, but since they have to get three bids they call us up and ask us to submit a bid, knowing full well that we won’t get it, no matter what. Why would I want to spend my company’s time on something like that? Even if we have a fair shot at it, we know we’re competing against at least two other firms, and that whoever has the lowest price will probably win the work. We are never the lowest price and we don’t try to be the lowest price.

In fact, at MWI we don’t respond to bids from any company if they tell us we’re competing against someone else for the work. We have enough work where we are the sole company providing a bid that we don’t need the hassle of fighting for the work. We’ll let someone else focus on the competitive situation and we’ll spend our time with the clients who have already decided to use us before they even know what our bid will be.

So if you’re with the government and would like us to submit a bid for a project, we’re glad we’re on your radar, but not interested.

As a result of our partnership with Centershift we’ve begun providing SEO services focused on the self storage industry. Self storage companies have a specific need to focus on certain geographic areas which lends itself well to search engine optimization. The good news is that many self-storage companies haven’t jumped on the SEO bandwagon yet and are still using the phone book as their primary means of advertising. But phone books are on their way out and Google and other search engines are becoming the norm. The bad news is we can’t work with competitors of our existing clients, so contact us before we begin working with your competitor. We’re one of the few SEO firms with specialized experience in the self-storage industry, and we’re seeing a lot of demand.