0
was successfully added to your cart.

All Posts By

Mark Woodruff

Feb 06
2

Need a great chat tool for your website?

By | great tools, plugin review, recommendations, technology | No Comments

Chat tool review

Great chat toolIf you are looking for a great chat tool to help users on your website have quick and easy access to a sales or support person, we really like the Live Chat Inc tool. With the Team version, their mid-priced option that costs $33 per month, you can have up to six agents using the dashboard and available to help users. The tool is surprisingly easy to set up and launch in the WordPress environment. It took us less than 30 minutes to sign up, embed the code and even configure the tool so the colors and content reflect the respective brand of the website.

See the client dashboard below and you’ll see how the agent interacts with a user. The agent even can see the location of the user based on IP address. Lots of customization options are available. We found this tool because it’s the tool of choice for WP Engine, the managed WordPress hosting company in Austin, another company of which we are big fans.

Great chat tool, and not too pricey

More good news: You can do a free trial with no strings attached and no credit card. Full disclosure … this link will get you the 30-day free trial and it’s our affiliate link, but we wouldn’t recommend it if we didn’t love this. We promise.

Live Chat chat page

Nov 04
3

New design for Crossroads website now live

By | great design, logo design, website design | No Comments
Crossroads at Panadero Ranch

Crossroads at Panadero Ranch logo

Crossroads website features the beauty of Central Texas

Woody Creative designed the logo and the website for Crossroads at Panadero Ranch, a wonderful non-profit that shares the great outdoors and the word of God with deserving young boys. The Crossroads Ministry experience includes a weekend on Panadero Ranch, where the boys join peers and adult mentors for a weekend of camping, hunting and time for discussion and reflection around the campfire. Most of the boys have never experienced hunting and many have never been camping.

Crossroads at Panadero Ranch

Oct 04
1

Some new logos

By | great design, logo design | No Comments

We’ve been creating a lot of logos lately. A couple are below. You can see a whole bunch of logos on the Logo Design page.

 

Sep 22
3

Our client Genesys Spine named to Inc 5000 list

By | technology | No Comments

Genesys Spine named one of America’s Fastest-Growing Companies

Revenue growth rate of 334%

Congratulations to our client, medical tools and instruments company Genesys Spine, based in Austin, Texas, for being named to the Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies. Their three-year revenue growth rate of a whopping 334 percent put them at No. 1,296 out of 5,000 on the 33rd-annual list. Not too shabby. See the article in the Austin Business Journal.

TiLock-2-Extended-Tower-750

Genesys Spine makes cool stuff, like this.

Sep 11
1

Yoast SEO ebook is pretty darn good

By | search engine optimization, Wordpress, Yoast | No Comments

Check out the Yoast SEO ebook for some good, basic WordPress optimization tips

About a week ago, Yoast released it’s long-awaited “Yoast SEO ebook,” and we have to say, it’s pretty good stuff. The ebook offers optimization tips exclusively for WordPress, and it seems to target the Intermediate WordPress user, but certainly isn’t too advanced for the Beginner. The PDF is 152 tip-packed pages and also is available in other editions, such as for Kindle and ePub. It’s easy to read, it’s colorful, and they even have taken the time to give it some nice infographics and design elements.

Who is Yoast?

Yoast is the maker of what is arguably the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress, called the WordPress SEO plugin. Yoast also has other plugins for video, Woocommerce, Google Analytics, etc. Yoast is a small team of developers and SEO experts who focus on nothing but WordPress.

What’s in the ebook?

Sections of the ebook are … well, why don’t we just list them for you:

  • SEO
  • Navigation
  • Sales
  • Analytics
  • Conversion Research
  • Social Media
  • Speed

We were particularly interested in the section on Speed, as we’ve had a couple of issues with some WordPress sites that didn’t want to load quickly, and as expected, we got some good tips that we were able to put to good use immediately.

Get the ebook

The Yoast SEO ebook costs $19. Full disclosure: For every sale, we get absolutely nothing. We just think that this is a great resource and want to share the love. This particular post, in fact, was optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin.

Sep 04
1

Cheap photo service with great quality

By | great design, great tools, other, recommendations, Wordpress | No Comments

A cheap photo service we think you will love

Our clients often ask us, “Can you recommend a cheap photo service?” The answer is yes. But while a cheap photo service doesn’t always translate to “great quality,” this one is an exception. It’s called Dollar Photo Club, and the photos really do cost, you guessed it, $1.

Just one caveat

You will pay an up-front “membership fee” of $99, but that fee instantly gives you an account stocked with 99 credits, so you essentially are buying 99 one-dollar photos. We’re not here to sell you a bunch of crummy third-party marketing services, but when we come across a marketing resource that really is a rare and excellent value, we have to share it. Full disclosure is that, yes, we’re signed up (proudly) as an affiliate for these guys.

Photos and vector art that are top-notch

We think the quality of the photos and vector illustrations is as good as many of the other services that often charge hundreds of dollars per image. So if you want a cheap photo service or cheap vector art that is still pretty darn nice, check out Dollar Photo Club and we think you’ll be thrilled.

 

 

Jun 06
1

New technologies make my kids yawn

By | BMC Software, technology | No Comments

How do you measure and reminisce about tech advancements in your lifetime?electric-football

Whereas the slightest advancement in technology once caused our respective heads to spin, we now casually shrug off that which would have been considered jaw-dropping to previous generations. Why? It’s because my sons, and every new generation to follow, are victims of the advanced technology curve that has occurred in their lifetime. It’s too difficult to impress them with new technology because they are technologically spoiled.

Read the rest of my guest blog about how we measure and remember advancements in technology in our lifetime, on the BMC Software Communities blog.

Apr 29
1

Cool postcard design for Cecropia Solutions

By | great design, print design | No Comments
Cecropia Solutions postcard

Cecropia Solutions postcard

White water ahead

Our awesome, award-winning technology client, Cecropia Solutions, the builders of the Map My Fitness suite of mobile apps (with 23 million freakin’ users), asked us to create a cool postcard design to show how neat-o they are when they are visiting and recruiting and presenting at nearby universities. So we made this little baby. Kind of makes us want to go find some white water.

Looking for a cool postcard design? Call us.

Apr 25
1

Great video on a budget

By | great tools, social media, video, YouTube | No Comments

Yes, you CAN get great video on a budget

Nikon D5200 and the Rode VideoMic Pro

We do love the “TV-like quality” of video we get from our Nikon D5200, and the amazing audio from our Rode VideoMic Pro. Here’s a short clip reel that shows off the quality that you can get from this package. Yes, you can make great video on a budget. Rumor has it that several episodes of TV shows have been filmed using this series of DSLR cameras, just to demonstrate that the camera is capable of producing high-quality video visuals.

And, be sure to check out this great video on how to make great video on a budget. Highly recommend it.