Jay Selthofner, attending a Free Fishing Weekend event in Green Lake, Wisconsin, which he organized. Photo provided by the DNR.

In the interest of full disclosure, I would like to state up front that I am the volunteer webmaster for Friends of Jay Selthofner and I am in the process of creating a website for him. However, no one asked me to write this, I am not being compensated for it in any way, and it is solely my personal opinion as a citizen who is concerned about the state of the economy, our environment, and the many other urgent issues facing us today.  (I didn’t start a company called “Green Web Design” for no reason! I have spent a lot of time learning about what Jay thinks on the issues that are most important to me in the past few weeks, and I really believe that his plans and ideas will work.  He’s a really nice guy who cares about his community. Vote for Jay Selthofner for Wisconsin State Assembly in November!

Original Wisconsin Marihuana Tax Stamp from Markesan, Wisconsin offers a glimpse of our state's history, and possible future! Jay's campaign slogan is "Let's Get Growing".

Jay’s proposal to legalize Industrial hemp in Wisconsin once again would not only create many different types of jobs and generate revenue for our state, it would also help the environment in the process at no additional cost, making things cleaner and safer for ourselves and for future generations.

Industrial Hemp Farmer and John Deere Tractor

• Industrial Hemp can yield 3-8 dry tons of fiber per acre. This is four times what an average forest can yield.
• Industrial Hemp can displace cotton –  50% of all the world’s pesticides are sprayed on cotton.
• Industrial Hemp can displace wood fiber and save forests for watershed, wildlife habitat, recreation and oxygen production, carbon sequestration (reduces global warming), and other values.

bird covered in oil

With the BP oil spill and other environmental disasters that are going on all over the world at the moment, now more than ever I hope that people will realize we can’t go on using endless natural resources and wantonly polluting forever as though there are no consequences.  We are killing ourselves, and our world economy is in shambles. How much do you think  this oil spill going to cost us to clean up when it’s all said and done? At what cost to the environment? How many lives changed by health problems as a result of the cleanup efforts and how much of the fishing industry harmed?  If you’re not alarmed, you’re not paying attention. Want to know what you can do to help in Wisconsin?  For starters, vote for Jay Selthofner for Wisconsin State Assembly in District 41, and vote for Industrial Hemp in Wisconsin. We can  create biofuel from Industrial Hemp, as well as many diverse and beneficial products including textiles, medicines, and foods.

oil spill cleanup

No amount of money can buy clean water, air, and soil if there is none left anywhere in the world.  It’s only going to cost us more in the long run if we destroy the scarce natural resources contained in this tiny planet that we all must live on, while foolishly refusing to use cleaner, better resources whenever they are available to us.  We must develop cheaper, safer technologies for the future. Industrial Hemp can be a valuable asset, as it was for over 12,000 years around the world. Hemp can actually clean up toxins from the ground. This process is called phytoremediation. A good example of this is when hemp was used to help clean up the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site to remove radioactive elements from the ground. Why couldn’t we use it to try and help clean up the oil spill? If we have to wait months for a fix that works anyways, why not get growing now so we have one more option to help clean up this disaster!

What will we do when every last inch of the land, air, and sea has been polluted?

The bottom line is that we need to work towards boosting the economy and trying to save our global water supply from massive scale pollution. We also need to spend our tax dollars to fight violent drug cartels and other ACTUAL criminals, rather than farmers, cancer and other types of sick or dying patients, as well as decent, taxpaying citizens who aren’t hurting anyone, even themselves.

Putting patients and other responsible, law-abiding taxpayers in prison is not the answer. Our current laws are cruel and unusual.

Rather than bailing out the mega corporations that cumulatively contributed towards the whole sorry mess to begin with, we need to bail out our farmers, as well as patients and citizens who need jobs. We need to introduce and vote on compassionate laws which heal our economy and our environment while respecting human rights. The penalties for breaking a law should never be more harmful than the crime. Especially when it’s an unjust law to begin with. Refusing to hear any of the facts before rushing in with guns blazing is NOT acceptable anymore. We need effect an actual change, one which benefits us all.  We need jobs, we need for our economy to recover, and we need to start working towards a cleaner, safer environment for all. Visit Jay’s website: www.JaySelthofner.com You can also follow him on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/JaySelthofnerForWIStateAssembly *If you click “like” on facebook, you can keep up with his campaign between now and November!

Wisconsin State Assembly District 41

Please come to the polls and vote for Jay if you live in the following areas: Wisconsin District 41 covers parts of Waushara County, Green Lake County, Marquette County, and Fond du Lac County. Cities in District 41 include: Springwater, Saxeville, Bloomfield, Wild Rose, Wautoma, Mount Morris, Leon, Poysippi, Coloma, Richford, Dakota, Marion, Redgranite, Warren, Aurora, Newton, Crystal Lake, Neshkoro, Seneca, St. Marie, Berlin, Mecan, Princeton, Brooklyn, Green Lake, Ripon, Metomen, Alto, Marquette, Kingston, Manchestor, Mackford, Markesan, Fairwater, Brandon, Omro, Fremont, and more!

50StatesClassifieds.com

This post is regarding our free classifieds website, 50 States Classifieds.  We thought it was worth cross-posting, since so many Green Web Design blog readers also use the site.

Some users may not be aware that there is an easier way to reach their ads.  This is just a quick note to let you know about some of the other ways you can find us.

We use these different website addresses when advertising, so that shoppers can easily find local ads in their state without remembering a  long, complicated URL.

For example: Telling people to go to AdvertiseWisconsin.com is so much easier than telling them to go to “http://www.50statesclassifieds.com/category.php?cid=87”   and expecting them to remember it!

50 States Free Classifieds

Use this easy reference list to find our free classifieds site quickly and easily according to which state you’re in:

As those who know AJ are no doubt aware, these past several years have also been rough in other ways. In addition to losing Molly Mae, he has lost several human loved ones, had multiple knee surgeries due to injuries he originally sustained fighting for our country, and has suffered other numerous setbacks that, in my opinion, hardly seem very fair, considering how much of his life he has devoted to volunteering in his community and helping others. Because he is humble and does not like to draw attention to himself, he has largely suffered in silence, not asking for help. Well, as his friend, I’m not too proud to ask for help. Please help me find him a new animal companion to train as his next K9 partner. The lucky dog who goes to live with AJ will be incredibly loved, and will receive extensive training in Search and Rescue, Forensics, and more.

Here is what we need from you, the reader:

A Rough Coat Collie (basically, a lassie dog), pick of the litter, approximately 6mos – 1 year old – the dog must be FREE, as AJ cannot afford to buy a dog at the moment. However, the dog will receive excellent veterinary care, as we do have a veterinarian who generously volunteers their services to AJ / 911BC. AJ has 35 years of experience in SAR – All you will have to do is give AJ 15 minutes with the dog, in person, and he will be able to tell whether it is a suitable candidate for Forensics work. The dog must be healthy, well socialized, and not too afraid of new things, also must not be afraid of climbing, and other awkward activities.

Not only would you be doing a good deed, you would be bringing joy to a man who has selflessly volunteered for his community for decades, asking for nothing in return for his hard work. He does not accept payment for his volunteer work, and has found many missing persons both alive and dead, bringing their families help and closure that they otherwise might not have had, or may have had to wait a long time for otherwise. Please help him now.

Even though he is too shy and proud to ask for help, he does need your help, and yes, I am talking to you, specifically.

Please contact AJ@911bc.org or Jessica@greenwebdesign.com if you have a rough coat collie that you would be willing to give AJ, or if you know someone who has such a dog, and may be willing to help.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Jessica

Go to http://www.google.com/webmasters and sign up for an account.

You will see the Home page.  Scroll down and click the “Add a site” button, and add your website address.  Then, under “sites” click on the domain you just created.

You will now see the dashboard.  It is an overview of several tools:  Top search queries, Crawl errors, links to your site, keywords, sitemaps – you can click “More” under any section to see more information.

When you are done exploring the dashboard, look to the left.  There are 4 main navigation sections: Site Configuration, Your site on the Web, Diagnostics, and Labs.

First, click the + sign next to Site Configuration and go to  Settings.  You can see the current crawl settings and change them here.

Now, click the + sign next to Diagnostics.  Here, you will find HTML Suggestions.  Here, you can get a good look at how many pages that are indexed have duplicate meta descriptions, duplicate title tags, etc. It’s a good idea to look at this section often and see what can be fixed when you notice new items have appeared.

Last, click the + sign next to Labs.  When you use the “Fetch as Googlebot” tool, and enter any page from your site, Googlebot will show you exactly how it sees that page.  Click on the word “Success” next to any fetched page to see the results.

Under Site Performance, you will see a performance overview of your site.  It takes several days for this page to update after it takes a reading, you may have to give it a week in between updates.  Scroll down and you will see it offers page speed suggestions for improving your website load time.

If you have any questions about the other sections in Google Webmasters that I did not discuss, submit them here!

==

Jessica Franke is the owner of Green Web Design, a full service Website Design, Web Hosting, Domain Registrar, and Online Marketing firm.  She is also the owner of 50 States Classifieds, and has been providing Free Classifieds online since 2002.  For more articles written by Jessica Franke, visit her blog.

The best place to start?

I recommend starting your people search by signing in at Facebook.com, Myspace.com, classmates.com, and other popular social networking websites.  Do a search for your relatives, and see if you can find them easily.  If so, offer up a thanks to the Internet and get back in touch.

Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy.

If you find several different pages of results for the name, and one or more doesn’t have a picture, here’s the general idea:

scroll through all of the results and see if the people with pictures are the person you’re seeking.

If not, take a second look at the list, this time looking more closely at those with no pictures, to see if you recognize them in the details – a mutual friend on their friends list, or perhaps you’ll find that they’ve become a fan or friend of the restaurant you used to meet at every tuesday afternoon at 1pm.

If you can’t find this type of helpful information in any of the profiles, and there are only a couple of results that you’re unsure of, it doesn’t hurt to send a quick message to a few of them.

Remember to state any other names (maiden name, married name, siblings, etc) that they might have known you by;  State any other names you knew them by;  thank them for their time, and wait for a reply.

Don’t be offended if you don’t hear back right away – many people only signed up because someone talked them into it initially, and they may not have been back to their profile in ages.

Next, go to Google. com type in their name and see what you come up with.  In most cases, you’ll get gazillions of results, none of them what you wanted.  You just need to know how to ask!

If you go to Google.com and search for john doe, you’ll get way too many results to find the one you’re looking for, in most cases.  Instead, search for “john doe” with quotation marks around it, or or john+doe+chicago with plus signs instead of spaces.  Keep it simple – by using the quotations, you’re telling google to look for that exact phrase, letter for letter, no ifs, ands or buts.  if your search criteria is too strict, and you add quotation marks around it,  you likely won’t get any results at all.  On the other hand, when using + signs, you’re searching for john AND doe in one page, but even if nothing matches exactly, you’ll still see some results.

Remember, even if you can’t find them the first time, that doesn’t mean they’re not out there, or that they won’t be some time in the future.  If you try again every 3-6 weeks, eventually, you may just find them!

If you don’t, why not give Family Heritage Consulting a try?  Ron Kolb is a professional Genealogy Researcher, whose skills can be just as valuable for finding the living!

Above all, Good Luck with your search!

==

Jessica Franke is the owner of Green Web Design, a full service Website Design, Web Hosting, Domain Registrar, and Online Marketing firm.  She is also the owner of 50 States Classifieds, and has been providing Free Classifieds online since 2002.  For more articles written by Jessica Franke, visit her blog.

Happy Christmas

Christmas 1985 - The day Jess Became a Computer Geek

How would you like to start your own business selling domain names, web hosting, SSL certificates, and more to small business owners and others in need of domain name related services? GreenWebDesign.biz offers a very flexible reseller program for webmasters and others who want to offer domain name registration and web hosting with a very minimal startup cost. Set your own prices for domain names, web hosting, SSL certificates, Fax through Email, Website Tonight, Domain Transfers, Domain Backordering, and more!

This is the first installment in a series of entries that I will be writing about the various tools that are used in professional Website Design.

First and foremost on the list of important things:  Website Editing Software! I started out coding mostly by hand in notepad, and alternated between that and Netscape Composer.  But when you get to the point where you are managing 60 websites and you don’t want to edit each and every page by hand anymore to say, update 1 link on the footer of a page, then you need to think about professional grade editing software!

When I designed my first website in 1995, there weren’t many tools available. I took a class where one of my assignments was to download a copy of Netscape Composer (which was one of first free “WYSIWYG” editors available for free on the web.) WYSIWYG stands for “What You See Is What You Get”. In other words, you could point and click and it would create very basic HTML code for you so that you could format your text size, color, or font; insert a picture; make a link; center something; etc. But if you wanted to do anything more complex, you would need to read an HTML book and use trial and error until you got it to work. This software was actually pretty advanced for a time when the Internet was new and most browsers were text based.  Until I took that class, I had been running Lynx on a DOS based PC.  I finally decided to upgrade to Windows 95 and Netscape Navigator after using them in class.

Our class only spent a week on web design, but I was hooked. I started a free geocities page, something with a silly name like geocities.com/enchantedforest/neighborhood15/something/something – and went to work on a personal website. I asked the teacher some questions – how can I do this, how can I do that? – and he didn’t know. He said that half of what I wanted to do was simply impossible. And the rest, he had seen but didn’t know how to do. So, I picked up a copy of the gigantic HTML Bible, which I still have sitting on my shelf to this day, despite the fact that Google and the Open Source community and their websites have rendered it pretty much obsolete.  Sometimes there’s still great satisfaction in picking up a book and looking it up.  Especially when you have an Internet outage and can’t read a tutorial website.

Over time I developed what was, at the time, a fairly complex website design for a beginner. (Later I moved it to its’ own domain name, and it is still intact and looks the way that I designed it all those years ago on a free geocities server).

The next year, I bought my first version of dreamweaver – a student version of – at the college bookstore.  For my professional websites, I still use Dreamweaver today.  (The version I use is by Macromedia, but Adobe has bought them out since then).  You can read about and purchase Dreamweaver here.

There are many, many, many other tools out there.  However, I can’t recommend any of them.  Years ago, I took a computer class where students received a discount on Front Page (made by Microsoft) and was dismayed to find that it broke my javascript codes (which had taken me many painstaking hours to get working in the first place), it inserted proprietary code that often messed up my clean, crisp, HTML code, and in general, annoyed me at every turn.  I have also tried a few others, like Xara WebStyle, CofeeCup, and several online WYSIWYG editors, but never got the functionality that  I needed out of them.  Several of my customers used to use such programs, but later hired me after they either got confused and gave up, or realized that what they envisioned for their website was not possible to create with the tools they were using.  Many had the desire to learn proper web design, but not the time.  Which is where buying the proper software and making enough time to learn it, or knowing when to hire someone who has already made those investments, comes in.

If you are only maintaining 1 website for your business and don’t want to rely on a web designer, then some of the above tools *might* work for you, if you don’t want your website to be overly complicated.  They can certainly build an adequate website with a few pages describing your products or services, store hours, contact information, etc.  But you will never make a really great shopping cart website to showcase your hundreds of products with these types of software, so you really need to sit down and figure out what your plan is before you invest in editing software.  What are you trying to achieve?  Will the software that you are considering do what you need it to do?

The other problem I have with most simple editors is aesthetics.  Many times, WYSIWYG editors come with pre-created website templates for users who  want to get started right away.  They are great and very useful when used as a learning tool.  But sadly, they usually look like a 3 year old drew them with a crayon.  Or at best, like a 12 year old made them with a WYSIWYG editor. Yet many business owners use these templates almost “as is”, simply adding text and a few pictures.

I will be the first to admit that aesthetics have nothing to do with usefulness.  When marketing your website, an ugly website can be just as successful as a pretty website if it is programmed correctly.  Often, all the stuff that goes into making a website pretty, makes it more difficult for search engines to crawl through.  There are things to be said in favor of ugly websites.  And yet, no one wants to be the business with the ugly website.  Which is why these beginner and DIY tools are fantastic for learning the basics, but should never be relied upon by anyone who is serious about becoming a professional Website Designer, nor should they be used by any business who wants to impress potential customers who find their website.

If you are just starting out and can’t afford to jump in and buy professional software yet, don’t despair.  There are many website editing programs out there that will allow you to try them without an expensive commitment.  That way, if you decide that web design just isn’t for you, and you would prefer to hire a professional to assist you with your website, you won’t be out a huge amount of money.

You can really do a good deed by helping other small business. Many of these businesses are woman owned, and most are in third world countries.  Support the entrepreneurial spirit and lend money to a business through Kiva today!

Visit the Green Web Design lender profile on Kiva:

http://www.kiva.org/lender/greenwebdesign

Join the “Friends of Green Web Design” Kiva Team and help us help others!

http://www.kiva.org/team/friends_of_green_web_design

As usual, I got an invoice from Liberty Names of America, Inc. asking me to renew my domain name.  Why is this dishonest, you might ask?  Because I *own* a domain name registration company of my own, and have *never* done business with Liberty Names of America, Inc.  Not once, ever.  And yet several times a year, they send me an official looking invoice asking me to renew one or more of my domains with them.

I am not alone.  Millions of people get these deceptive letters, from the company above, as well as several others.  They do what is known as a “whois” on a domain name, get the contact information of the owner, and then send out an invoice, hoping to trick you into switching registrars.  My mom’s boss always gets these, and I would have to explain to him that no, I didn’t sell the company to them or anything else – and that he should just throw it away.

The invoice they sent me states:

Dear Green Web Design,

As a courtesy we would like to remind you that it is time to renew your odmain name which is expiring soon.   Failure to renew your domain name will result in losing exclusive rights to it on the web and losing access to your online presence.  By moving your domain name to Liberty Names of America you can take advantage of the savings we have to offer.  Your renewal will start from the day your domain name expires, even though you are signing up months earlier.

They then offer me a 1 year renewal for $29.99, or a 2 year renewal for $49, or a 5 year renewal for $94.

These prices are rediculous – at TheyreAllTaken.com, which is *my* domain name registration company, I pay the same price I charge my customers -  1 year for $7.99, 2 years for $15.95, 5 years for $39.95, or 10 years for $79.90.  What a huge difference in pricing!

So, if you get a letter from Liberty Names of America, Inc, don’t be fooled.  They are not your domain name company.  They are just trying to get you to switch to them.  You are likely paying less at your existing registrar.  And if you’re not, take a look at my website and consider switching. 

We are currently in the process of copying our blog entries from several different websites over to this new blog.  We are doing this in no particular date order. We hope to be finished within the next 2 weeks or so, time permitting.

Please let us know how we can improve our blog!

Thanks for reading 

The Design Interviews website belongs to Arther Browning, “the Template Dude”, who publishes interesting and informative website designer interviews on his website.

Come check out the updated website today to take advantage of the great new features we’ve added!

We are also currently offering a Banner Advertising special:  Purchase any banner advertising package, and we will DOUBLE your impressions, FREE of charge!

Come visit our Online Newspaper Classifieds today!

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Free Link Exchange for our Clients

Ripon Wisconsin Website Design
www.RiponWebDesign.com

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www.FondDuLacwebdesign.com