Willigot T. Odhner may not be on the top of your Halloween Costume lists - he may not even be someone you have heard of before, but 121 years ago Willigot T. Odhner was granted a patent for a calculating machine that performed multiplications by a process of repeated addition.

This is just one of a year’s worth of historical tidbits that can be found on the Computer History Museum’s online calendar.

For copyright reasons I cannot display Willigot T. Odhner’s image here, but it does appear on his …

There’s a reason why old sayings become old sayings: Their pithy truth.

The cobbler’s children have no shoes because the cobbler is just so darned busy stitching up shoes—for everyone else.

I’ve been busy writing web copy—for everyone else. I enjoy the work: With each customer, I met a new and interesting person and learn about a new and fascinating business. The earning a living part is very nice, too.

But I want even more work, and I’ve decided that updating my web site will be the best next step toward expansion. Making that decision wasn’t hard. Making …

Excuse me.  I couldn’t help noticing that strange and interesting plant.

• Little Shop of Horrors

Unfortunately, we do not all work at Mushnik’s Skid Row Florists.

Putting a strange and interesting plant in your window (or on your website) will not drive web traffic all on its own.

If nobody passes your window, then no one can see what’s there, nor can they tell their friends and acquaintances.

What you need is an integrated strategy that both uses your website as an asset and uses your other assets to draw attention to your website.  Here are some things to consider before working on your strategy:

• Do …
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Yesterday President Obama announced that he intends to target a portion of the remaining TARP bailout funds to the needs of Small Businesses.

According to a summary of the president’s proposal posted on www.whitehouse.gov, this new plan would increase the funds available through Small Business Administration microloans from $35,000 per business to $50,000 to business and the funds available through 7(a) loans from $2 million per business to $5 million per business.

7(a) loans are typically used to purchase machinery, equipment, and real estate and can also be used to re-finance existing debts.  In contrast, micro-loans cannot be used to …

You’ve probably heard that earlier this month the Federal Trade Commission released new rules regarding blog disclosures.  What should you look for if you regularly write on blogs and forums and you want to make sure that you are in compliance?

First ask yourself the following two questions:

• Do you use your blog, forum, or other social media accounts to write reviews?
• Do you receive anything for the reviews you write (for example, special rebates, free samples, or cash payments)?

If you do not write reviews, or if you use your own money to acquire the products that you review without receiving any other …

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube… once only visited for personal use, these sites are now being used for business purposes. We all hear about them and see their icons everywhere. And, we feel out of touch or like we are dropping the ball if we don’t have profiles on all of them.

It is true that social media sites help business. But how? Most of the case studies we read about are about big business and their bigger than life social media campaigns. How can small business benefit?

The truth is—at least our opinion of it—that there are no step-by-step rules to follow …

Most small businesses know their business. They also excel at explaining how their business operates and probably have a supporting brochure that tells that story. This knowledge creates operational excellence. But, growth potential is found in identifying why customers buy, who is buying from the company, and how to connect with them; this is a reoccurring question for even the most passionate business owners. A marketing strategy is a foundation built on the answers to these questions, a strategy for success. Building a strategy can be simplified if it is broken into small components.

Moving past operational deliverables, a …

In all areas of design the trends of the past can inspire the variations of the future.  We all know this, and have invariably made studies of what’s come before in our own areas of interest.

However, without a large library and a lot of time, it can be difficult to consolidate the images of the past.  Thankfully, several online archives and indices may have already done the work for you:

For example, the Duke University Library maintains three digital collections of early Canadian and US print advertisements that collectively house more than 16,000 scanned images from the 1850’s to the 1950’s.  …

You choose. Which term annoys you the most:

• Ya know
• Whatever
• Anyway
• It is what it is
• At the end of the day

And we have a loser! In …

An important thing to remember when you go looking for your online market is that nobody can tell you more about your audence than your audience itself. With that in mind, here are five ways to …