One of our clients is an assisted living facility here in Salt Lake City, Utah. Our primary contact, Virginia Echevarria, has written a book on caregiving called Caregivers and Would-Be Caregivers. You can download the book for free in PDF format or by a hard copy for $10.95 through her website. I’ve only read portions of it myself, but much of it appears to be a collection of stories about experiences various caregivers have had and some of the difficult choices they’ve had to make about caring for their loved ones. If you’re a caregiver yourself or likely to become one soon, or if you know someone in those circumstances, check out the book and pass it along. It’s pretty short, so there’s not a lot in the way of tough reading.

It’s not MLM and involves no selling, or very little, at least. My friend just earned his $1,000 this week, and here’s how it worked:

1. My friend works for a company. The management mentioned they needed a new website.

2. My friend told them they should hire MWI.

3. The company accepted a proposal from MWI for a $10,000 website.

4. My friend gets our standard 10% referral commission, or $1,000.

Maybe you don’t work for a company that needs a new website or SEO, but maybe you do. Maybe you know another company that does. Maybe they don’t need a $10K website, but maybe they need a $5K website and you’ll get $500. Maybe they need a $50K website and you’ll get $5K. Who knows? But maybe all it takes is asking the management at your company or some other company “Hey, have you guys thought about getting the website redesigned? You should talk to MWI.” And there you go, you’ve got a wad of money and it took you all of 20 seconds to earn it.

Since 1999 we’ve done a lot of web development and online marketing work for a lot of different clients, and we’ve become more experienced in certain industries than others, namely; self storage, venture capital, and law firms. While we can certainly design a great site or provide SEO for any type of company (although there are some types of companies we won’t do work for…), we have some special expertise when it comes to these three industries. We just launched a website for Price Self Storage in San Diego which is a good example. There’s not much we haven’t done for this company. We reworked their brand just slightly, designed a new website, built a content management system, integrated the site with Centershift’s self-storage management software, and we’re providing ongoing PPC management and SEO services. Oh, and we designed and built an awesome Flash piece that allows users to choose the right size storage unit.

When it comes to venture capital, we’ve worked with almost every venture capital firm in Utah, and some outside the state as well. Plus I’ve had plenty of dealings as an entrepreneur with VC firms and angel investors and when I was a college student at BYU I won the business plan competition there, so I know a bit about the industry.

In the legal industry we’ve worked with several law firms providing everything from website design to SEO to content management. We’ve created micro-sites to bring in leads for a specific class-action lawsuit, and we’ve done overall marketing for firms like Strong & Hanni and Siegfried & Jensen.

Due to our experience in these three areas, we’ve created three new pages on our site to promote our experience and show off our work in those industries.

• Self Storage
• Venture Capital
• Law Firms

Once again, this doesn’t mean we’re only focusing on these industries and don’t want clients from other industries, it just means we have something additional we can offer these niches beyond the normal and phenomenal services we provide everyone else.

Yeah, that’s right, we’re giving away five blog websites to five lucky people, for free. Yes, there are some conditions and catches, but if your situation is the right fit you can walk away with a nicely designed blog to promote yourself or your business and we won’t be charging you a dime. Get on over to My Free Website Design for the details.

We’re proud to announce the addition of the Utah assisted living facility Highland Cove to the roster of MWI’s SEO clients. We’re starting out providing search engine optimization services but will likely expand into providing search engine marketing as well, and perhaps we’ll be providing a new website design in a few months. To start out, we’re doing the standard SEO stuff, including an overhaul of the site to get it into standards-based XHTML/CSS, switch graphics out for text, and modify the directory structure.

About Highland Cove

Highland Cove, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, boasts 14 acres offering complete seclusion from the busy streets. The beautiful apartments look out on ponds, trees, shrubs, lawn and a putting green. South-facing apartments have a full view of the Wasatch Range and Oquirrh Mountains. Highland Cove offers a continuum of senior care, from completely independent living with housekeeping, meals, and activities, to assisted living with medication, bathing, dressing, grooming and incontinence assistance along with meal escorts. In 2008 they were awarded the 2008 Best of State Medal for independent senior living.

I’m not sure the last time I was so emotionally invested in the launch of a website, so I’m quite proud to unveil the new Price Self-Storage website. This site has got it all. A slight re-work of the brand, a new website design, Flash size chooser (check it out from the graphic link on the homepage, it’s pretty neat), content management system (still being finished up, actually), and integration with Centershift’s software for managing self-storage facilities. Price Self Storage has several locations in Southern California and one in the Bay Area, and now that the site’s launched we’ll be doing ongoing search engine optimization and marketing work to drive traffic and get as many customers signed up as possible.

Although we’re still ironing out a few kinks, it’s probably done enough that we can announce the launch of a new ecommerce site for one of our clients, TIW Jewelry, who is selling tungsten rings online under the simple brand “Tungsten”. We developed the branding elements, the website design, and coordinated the ecommerce integration for the website. The website, at TungstenRingsforMen.com, uses Magento for ecommerce.

I’m not 100% sold on Magento, but I have to admit I’m fairly impressed with it so far, especially since we’ve had some horrible experiences with other ecommerce platforms in the past. Magento was relatively inexpensive to implement, and is fairly simple to administer. It also includes a decent set of features to aid with SEO efforts, which is critical for this client.

We’ll also be doing ongoing SEO work for this client. Of course it doesn’t hurt to have a domain with some good keywords in it. We just barely started and their site is already #9 in Google for “tungsten rings for men”. Of course we really want to get the rankings for “tungsten rings” which they only rank at #85 for, but give it a month or two and we’ll see where things are at.

This is very likely the first, although not necessarily the last, time we’ll ever use the word “colon” on this site, so I feel we have to take advantage of it and go for the gusto. Dr. Christopher was an herbalist and invented all sorts of  capsules, powders, extracts, oils, ointments, and such. He’s since passed away, but his family still runs the business of distributing his products worldwide, and now MWI is helping them spread the word through a new SEO campaign. Like Marketstar who I mentioned yesterday, this isn’t the first time Dr. Christopher has been a client of ours. They were a client a few years ago when we worked on their Life Balm website, then they paused their campaign, and now they’re back with us as we optimize several of their sites.

Apparently this is the month for old clients to come back to MWI. Here’s to more of that.

Marketstar is back on board as an SEO client. Not that they really left, per se, they just paused things for a little while, which turned into a year, but now everything’s approved and they’re back with us for all 2009, and hopefully beyond that. If you happen to own a $100M computer hardware company and need help marketing your wares, check them out. If you’re smaller than that, I’m not sure if you fit their target market, but check them out anyway.

How’s that saying go about how the cobbler’s children have no shoes? And web design firms rarely have time to update their own website. A few months ago we updated some of the case studies (although we still sorely need to update more of them, especially the SEO/SEM case studies) and we put some goldfish on the homepage, but it was left feeling pretty stark and naked.

In this round of updates we trade gray for a rich blue and made the main marketing banner a solid color background rather than a white background so that the messaging pops a bit more and the site doesn’t feel so empty. We also added a new footer to every page which is where the blog updates are shown, as well as contact info, the copyright statement, and a small “about MWI” blurb so that no matter what page of the site people hit, they’ll know we’re an SEO and web design firm. You’d think that might be obvious, but with so many other companies out there named “MWI” we get all sorts of emails and phone calls. I just got one today from a lady wanting to order some hospital supplies. I have no idea what company she was trying to reach. Apparently she didn’t either, because when I asked her she sounded confused and said “I’m not sure…they just gave me this number.”

Let me know if you have any comments on the new site. We’re always open to constructive criticism, although getting around to doing anything about it is another thing.

Oh, and our XHTML/CSS code finally validates. Yee-ha.