brianjkopp

Spread Firefox 3 on Download Day 2008 - Pledge Today

2008-05-30T22:21:00.006-05:00

Just signed up tonight to be apart of on new Guinness World Record Atempt all while Enjoying a Better Web. Firefox 3 is on it's way and the Mozilla Foundation is trying to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours.

Pledge today to make a run for the record and be apart of history while enjoying a better web:
http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

Google Analyics and Blogger

2008-05-13T19:57:00.003-05:00

Ok, so I made a dumb mistake the other day by not thinking first. I changed my theme of this site, and forgot to add my Google Analytics code to the new template, now a have a gapping whole in my reports, luckily I guess it was only for a week and I discovered and solved the problem.

Don't let this happen to you, make sure you include your tacking code on any new layouts.

Minnebar 2008 - Design Coding Panel Discussion

2008-05-13T18:10:00.002-05:00

The design coding panel discussion was once again, very interesting this year in that not much progress has been made in determining what the roles/responsibilities of "web designers" should be.

We got a chance to hear the several peoples backgrounds and their current working situation. In summary, they continue to vary from a graphic artist sitting next to a code monkey sitting next to a developer, to one person who doing the graphic design, html/css, clientside coding, and server side coding.

My colleagues and I continue to be amazed that we fall in the latter of the extremes and that those types of roles are significantly less common. Although it was clear that HR reps writing the job descriptions for "web designers" are looking (or least they think their looking) for someone who falls in the latter extreme as well. However, even though the job descriptions commonly ask for experience in all aspects of web design, it was agreed upon that a solid portfolio and basic understanding of web design concepts should be enough.

Similar to how print designers need to know about the printing process, paper, and printers; web designers need to know about usability, accessibility, semantic coding (separation of presentation, structure, content, and behavioral). In addition to those basic principles, a web designer may need to about both client and server side coding, information architecture, SEO, SEM, analytics and KPIs, email, and web infrastructure. whew...and don't forget we also have to ensure the design and coding work and look acceptable in multiple web browsers, cross platform, and if we're working with email, there are too many email client/browser/ESP/ISP combinations to list here.

So should I get a raise if I understand all of these things at a high level, I think so.

But the point is, how is a student going to a 2 or 4 year college suppose to get exposed to all of these concepts and getting a working knowledge deep enough to join the industry? The answer: self-taught. Every panel member (including myself and my co-workers) are all self-taught to some extent. So what should the college teach and what should the student learn on their own? That is the real question. A two year degree will allow the student to "get their hands wet" in many of these topics, but not to the extent required. While a 4 year will require a more well rounded education, many of the topics will not be taught.

I'd like you feedback on what you think should be the responsibilities of a web designer and what should the course work for a web designer include?

Minnebar 2008 a Success?

2008-05-10T19:17:00.002-05:00

As far as I'm concerned, yes, Minnebar 2008 was a success.

I considered Live blogging again this year, but decided I'd listen to the presentations and participate. Now I have an opportunity to think about the presentations before I give my take on the topics. Over the next few days I hope to hit each of the sessions I attended and recap the session along with my opinions on the topics.

I laid out the sessions I was stoked to attend last week. I attended about half the ones I wanted to. The ones I did decide to go to include:

Communication For Geeks: How to Influence Your Boss, Your Customers, And Your Team - Lead By: Brian 'Bex' Huff (Bezzotech)
Design Coding Panel Discussion - Lead By: Ben Edwards (Refactr), Norm Orstad (Slantwise), Mike Bollinger (Livefront), Margaret Andrews (Vita.mn), Darrell Austin (Darrel Austin Designs)
Enterprise Information Mashups: Web 2.0 + SOA +Data Visulization - Lead By: Jamshid A. Vayghan (blog, bio)
The spectrum of user experience design and testing: From Full Scale to Quick and Cheap - Lead By: Kevin Farner (Gomoll Research + Design)
Power WordPress plus MinneWordCamp Discussion - Lead By: Jamie Thingelstad (thingelstad.com - slashthing.com)

I had to leave before the final two sessions, family stuff.

So two final thoughts for this post:

Look for my take on these sessions in the coming days.
My good friend Ward Tongen is trying to coin the term "SearchBaiting". With that said, I'd love to see the people hosting the sessions I went to today at Minnibar 2008 listed above leave a comment, in the spirit of searchbaiting.

Working Definition of Searchbaiting: The act of leaving clues on the Web (searchbait) so that a targeted person will discover and act on the reference. One who searchbaits of course would be a searchbaiter.

MinneBar 2008

2008-05-01T20:59:00.003-05:00

So I'll be attending MinneBar 2008 at Coffman Union on Saturday, May 10, 2008.

I'm excited to go this year, I had to miss last year, but I was at the first MinneBar in 2006. Several of my co-workers are going this year as well which only makes the lunch hours that more exciting after the event.

The sessions I'm stoked to attend are:

Communication For Geeks: How to Influence Your Boss, Your Customers, And Your Team - Lead By: Brian 'Bex' Huff (Bezzotech)
Design Coding Panel Discussion - Lead By: Ben Edwards (Refactr), Norm Orstad (Slantwise), more TBD
Social Search in the Corporate Environment - Lead By: Rich Hoeg (Project Report from my Blog)
CSS frameworks when and why to use them - Lead By: Norm Orstad and ???(Slantwise Design)
Wordpress as a Content Management System - Lead By: Toby Cryns (The Mighty Mo! Design Co.)

So why these sessions?

Brian 'Bex" Huff just sounds cool. He's from Stellent, the CMS I'm know currently working in.

Ben Edwards is a great guy to listen to, I met and discussed Agile development with him back in 2006, I'm checking his session out cause I'm all about XHTML, CSS and all tasty morsels of chocolate.

Social Search sounds like a fun topic with Rich Hoeg, especially since I'll also be attending the MIMA session on Wednesday, May 14, 2008 which is focusing on

CSS Frameworks is a hot topic at work since we've since adopted Eric Meyer's Reset CSS framework (ok, maybe it's not a framework, but maybe it is, leave your comments on this below). So what are the pros and cons, hopefully Norm Orstad can fill us in.

Finally, Word Press as a CMS is a great topic especially since it's been used at the enterprise level, check out Ford's Global Auto Show Site, and because it's been making blogs suck less.

That's what I'm planning, along with posting here a lot more, we'll see ;)

Dude!?

2007-10-30T20:39:00.000-05:00

Since I took the day off to go to the MIMA summit, I've been paying for it ever since. I've been hit with a ton of work. Some interesting, and some not. Plus, I've been busy with some volunteering and extra curricular activities for work. Here's a short list if your interested:

Creating new email campaigns
Adding co-marketing events to online forms
Researching ESPs
Task force duties for documenting and correcting some integration issues
Member of a Mastermind Group
Launching a redesign for Multiple Connections of MN
Taking first place in the first annual Dresser Dash hosted by Thrivent Financial, benefiting Bridging Inc.

And just today, perhaps the biggest blow I could receive, I learned a fellow co-worker and dear friend would no longer be a member our tightly integrated team as the rest of the team will be leaving our Global Business Solutions home to support Corporate Communications.

I am extremely fortunate to have work with this individual. I have learned an amazing amount of information from them including programming skills, but also how to look at complex problems and break them down into manageable bits; allowing me to create simple, yet elegant solutions.

I wish him the best in his new adventures and hope he knows just how much he'll be missed and that we'll always do anything in our powers to help a brother in need.

With all that being said, I'm still hopeful that we can peruse our dreams of creating our own piece of software.

Most of all, I hope we'll continue to be friends and continue to share our stories about raising our boys and getting together with the families and even having a night out on the town once in a while.

I owe you one ohaiyoo1.

MIMA - Live Blogging: Wrap-up and Happy Hour

2007-10-03T17:11:00.000-05:00

Guess we're all done, see ya all at drinks.

MIMA - Live Blogging: Internet Marketing Toolbox - Moderator: Matt Wilson Panelists: Loren Gutt, Samantha Hensch, Jeff Nordeen, Ward Tongen

2007-10-03T16:00:00.000-05:00

Waiting for the final session of the day to start. I'm actually a seed for this demonstration. We'll be looking at Mindmeister where I'll be editing a mind map from my seat and Ward Tongen will be logged in showing how what I do instantly changes on his screen and the visual cues to see the changes.

Ok, so I almost got pulled into the presentation, I guess their computer wasn't working correctly and they almost need mine. Looks like they got things under control now, so I'm free to continue blogging.

So the presenter doesn't have Internet access, HA HA, I do!

Here we go, Happy hour is next. Open discussion of tools.

Sponsor's on stage from ePrize.

Loran's on now from ShopNBC based out of Egan, MN.

QuantCast.com - demographic data. Audience reports from thousands of websites. All you have to do is enter the web address and you get the data, along with simalar competing websites.
Compete.com - compiles similar data to quantcast with a more authoritative reporting. Measure data from campaigns.

Ward's on now from Medtronic based out of Fridley, MN.

Doesn't look like the Internet is working for the presenters, I've been volunteered to demo Mindmeister later in the presentation.

Eat the Dog Food. Ward's describing what that means. Not using client side software.
Back to Linkedin - how you can add your photo.
Del.icio.us - Mima 2007

Jeff's on stage from Ciceron.

Vikes vs. Pack reference and how the Vikes got beat up. GO PACKERS!!

Jeff wanted to discuss the same things as Loran, so he's talking about normal SEO stuff. Although memory presevation was a key word a company wanted to be number one for when they sold scrap booking materials.

Samantha's on stage from Fingernut - Email Tools

Surveymonkey or Zoomerang - Host survey's for you and allow you do download your data and use that for segmentation. Surveymonkey is $200 per year for unlimited everything!

Open Forum:

Lets hear about the tools from the audience.

WooFoo - another surveymonkey type survey tool, that allows you to download the code and host it anywhere you'd like. Embed the code anywhere.
Del.icio.us -
Techcrunch -
Ning - clone websites that are similar in functionality to myspace. Very cool!! Showed a demo of cobra.com - pgatourpartnerscobrs.ning.com.
Spyfu - Gives you all keywords competitors are buying. Showing negative keywords their buying.
MediaWiki -
TWiki -
SEODigger.com - reverse lookup for organic results.
Freshbooks.com - links into Basecamp for Project management, invoicing, and you can have your contractor clock in
livestats.com -
MailChimp -
SiteVista -
PewInternet.com
Browsershots.com

MIMA - Live Blogging: Advergaming: Architecting F-U-N Online - Bret Hummel

2007-10-03T15:17:00.000-05:00

So Bret's from Ham in the Fridge based in Minneapolis. I guess he wants to own his own sandwich shop someday.

They build online games for clients, including Comedy Central's Adult Swim.

Games should be fun and can be viral and sticky. Create products where the people while laugh and talk about you around the water cooler. You can't really evaluate fun until your 75% into the process.

Plan for flexibility and make adjustments on the fly.

I know our MiniMed division of Medtronic has some games that have been created for kids with diabetes. I haven't seen these, so I can't comment how how Fun they are.

Identify the dials, user controls (keyboard & mouse), point systems for leaderboards, things that assist the player, things that work against the player, game over.

Do you have 5 minutes to kill yourself? That would suck, don't think I'd want to play that game. Not too much of a laugh from the audience regarding that, but I thought it was really funny. 5 minutes to kill yourself.

Examples, showing a game from Cartoon Network.

One Squirrelly Squarial. One big gaming screen. Bret's son (Cole) is playing the game. Referring to the dials and both the things that are working for and against the player.

Demonstrating how when you change the controls the game changes.

MIMA - Live Blogging: Pimp My Reports - Bret Busse

2007-10-03T14:29:00.001-05:00

Back on-line at the first mini session.

Brett takes the stage, has difficulty with the mic...fixed now.

Loosing my battery, I'll have to finish this when I get juiced.

I got power, and in another session, I'll follow-up with this post tonight.

MIMA - Live Blogging: Unconventional Collaboration - Jason Fried

2007-10-03T13:17:00.000-05:00

Jason takes the stage.

Ideas about teams and collaboration based on experiences at 37signals.

Jason's identifying all of the ways people have criticized the ideas 37signals had about teams and collaboration.

Most of the topics are on par with Getting Real.

Red Flags - raised by people who work close to one another and occur more on large projects. These words make a project go bad, late, over budget. 4 letter words that can be red flags:

Need
Can't
Easy
Just
Only
Fast

Work is optional. Need kills the option of debate.

Team size should be small, 2 is good, if you need more then your doing to much. Keeping a team small means your doing the important things first. Works expands to fill the time available.

Collaboration is Communication - Keep your team apart. Jason's talking about bringing David to Chicago and how that was bad for production. Interruption is the enemy of production. Comparing R.E.M. sleep to production. When you in the Zone is R.E.M. work. Less interruption leads to more R.E.M work and more production.

Doing things in the work place like different hours, working from home, not talking after 1pm. Stay away from one another. Use passive collaboration to get things done vs active collaboration.

Get rid of the "Open" floor plan.

Meetings are toxic. Meetings are Costly. Number of people times time of meeting equal total loss of time for productivity. All meetings are optional. Meetings break-up the day and create small work times which can't be very productive. Not enough time to get into the Zone. Make your meeting attendees stand during the meeting, the get anxious and get done faster. Avoid meetings by making very smaller decisions. Judo. Progress helps moral. Small decisions are easier to fix than large decisions.

MIMA - Live Blogging: Lunch

2007-10-03T13:12:00.001-05:00

Yummy...and free prizes.

MIMA - Live Blogging: Evolving your SEO Efforts - Lance Loveday

2007-10-03T11:13:00.000-05:00

Our friend Kate from Team Vantage takes the stage, introduces Lance Loveday.

Lance has 7 month old twins. I have twins too, they'll be 2 at the end of this month.

Lance is very impressed with the event and jokes about his CA peeps saying have fun presenting to the two people in MN. He's from Closed Loop Marketing.

Lance has a new book coming out and jokes about the book finishing event his wife is holding.

Either get in front of more people or improve your effectiveness. Philosophy!

Comparing search engine results pages. Lance is impressed with Ask and claims they may be the leader in search result page design.

"All content should be created with findability in mind".

Getting listed in the organic search results makes up for 70% of web traffic and "is freakin' huge". If your not on the first page, 62% will miss your site.

SEO is Keyword Research, On-Site Optimization, and Off-Site Optimization (Link Popularity).

For web 2.0 - maximize online visibility of all content and integrate with social media, blogging, and conversational marketing.

One video per page, embed video in page, add content to page, maintain unique URL. YouTube is the model. Optimze metadata and embed keywords in in file name.

Some of these also go for images.

Blog SEO. Here's a topic I want to hear, duh!

Incorporate targeted keywords into Title and Meta Tags.
Make it easy for readers to subscribe to your feeds. Include the RSS feed buttons.
Claim your Blog in Technorati
Offer email-based subscriptions
Notify the blog search engines each time you post (Ping): http://pingomatic.com/

For individual blog posts:

Optimize the page title for the post, it doesn't have to page the post title
Use readable URLs
Use Tags and Categories
Check out Stephen Spencer

So in the time of this posting, I've claimed my blog on Technorati and sent a ping.

Lance is going over News Posts and Press Releases. And now onto RSS feeds. Add an image feed in your RSS so your logo shows up in the RSS reader, easy way to spread your brand. Only show 20 posts, use unique headlines, add your full post to the RSS, not just the summary so people don't have to cliock through to read the whole story, enable auto discovery, validate your feeds - http://feedvalidator.org.

Questions: Ward Tongen, from Medtronic - Looking for Cheap Medical Devices - How do you way SEO 1.0 to SEO 2.0 to get traffic and conversions?

Answer: 70% - 80% focus on the SEO 1.0 and build a good foundation for SEO 2.0 so when RSS really ramps up, your ready to go.

MIMA - Live Blogging: Email as a Digital Dialogue Vehicle - Jeanniey Mullen

2007-10-03T09:50:00.000-05:00

First break out session: Email, part of my job as an Interactive Marketer.

A few words from our sponsor EatonGolden.

Jeanniey takes the stage, founder of Email Experience Council.

Email - The Digital Dialogue Powerhouse.

Email role in 2.0 is to invite and engage people to take action. One element ties all 2.0 and 3.0 experiences to the user, their email. Email will be a digital repository, or profile which can be used for marketing.

Email is part our lives 50 million people have checked their email 5 times already today. 23 Trillion emails will be sent this year. Not including mobile messaging. Email is the backbone of online dialogue.

Showing video of Cube News from Youtube: Cube News 1: Email Call - Funny Stuff.
Showing BeRelevant! Blog. I already subscribe to this. Cool to see - originates from Belgium.
Next video is Bush "I don't email" from Youtube. Saying he doesn't use email because he would be accountable for what is said. Jeanniey says that's the old way of thinking that we should be engaging with our customers and use email to drive dialogue.

Next video is [One Bank] Bank of America - One (U2 Cover).

These all dealt with how people are using email, their sending links, videos, etc. to their friends, co-workers, and family, telling them "You've got to see this!"

For every $1 per email on your opt-in file, you'll get $4 back. Email as an integrated part of a campaign is far more successful then just sending an email newsletter. Opt-in email address spend an average of $100 more than non-opt-ins.

Email is a dialogue and can be really cool when integrated with other channels. It also allows you to start a new dialogue with other people (forward to a friend).

Inserting dynamic content and images in the email sent to them based on their search key words increases the emails effectiveness by 600%! That's a new idea I haven't heard about. Using their Key words to dynamically change the email content. I've only heard and seen the web site content to be changed.

Use your web analytics for email success rate in addition to using the email open, click through rates.

Email is being used as a dialogue for social networks, facebook, linkedin, etc.

80% of all Hotmail readers plan for the weekend Wednesday after 6pm, new topic begins Sat. after noon. Behavior Targeting. This type of data is available from the other big email houses.

Add view on a mobile device at the top of your email in addition to read this on the web. Track your mobile users.

Say goodbye to your design best practices for how your email looks inside the inbox.
Meet the IT guys outside and "duke" it out! - Add an opt-in option on EVERY web property.
Bribe your media planners/buyers to include an opt-in on all forms of media.
Get a stiff drink - erase your pre-disposition to email as a direct marketing or relationship driving vehicle.

The Break Up

Jeanniey Predicts by 2009, 60% of all email will not be read inside the inbox!

MIMA Name badge

2007-10-03T09:37:00.000-05:00

MIMA - Live Blogging: Opening Session - Lee Rainie

2007-10-03T08:32:00.000-05:00

Here I am at the MIMA summit. Took a while to get onto the network, but I'm finally on.

We've heard numbers about how big the organization is today, ~700 members, 660 attendees for today's MIMA summit.

Thanks to Target they've given away a classic iPod and Bose dock, DS Lite and a Sony Handy Cam.

Check out Ward Tongen's Moblog, I'm blogging this.

Lee Rainie is on stag now. Asked who's blogging this, and I said I am, blog.brianjkopp.com.

He's discussing another conference where they had an IRC chat on a large screen behind him. I guess someone there called him old. But another blogger said that's how you know he's important and you better pay attention.

Lee has several Hallmarks

72% of Americans use the Internet
93% of Teenage Americans use the Internet

Just under half of Americans have broadband data.

Cell phones and wireless numbers are just as important as broadband. 88% of college use cell phones while only 55% own laptops.

Number 4 deals with how ordinary citizens can become famous just using the Internet. 55% of Teenagers have a social networking account and claim their social network site is the Internet and only venture off their network if they need to email an "old" person.

He's telling a story about how a laptop thief got caught because on an integrated webcam captured images of the person and sent the photos to Flickr. The laptop owner setup their computer to capture an image every time it booted up and had those images sent to Flickr. The police caught the theif in a few days after his image was uploaded to Flickr.

Lots of statistics, not sure what the point is of telling us all these, yet. It's a young person's game. Taking questions now.

Lee's discussing the 10 user groups from their research. Mark Powell, Ward Tongen and myself are Omnivores. Only 8% population. I guess my iconic person is Al Gore. Not sure I agree with that. I would have said Jason Fried, especially since he's in attendance today.

Mark's wife and my wife are in the next group, Connectors, users of email and social networking.

The other groups are:

Lackluster Veterans
Productivity Enhancers
Mobile Centrics
Connected but Hassled
Inexperienced Experimenters - My Parents - Marge Simpson Googling Herself
Light but Satisfied
Indifferents
Off the Network

Visit their site: http://www.pewinternet.org/quiz/quiz.asp - to learn what type of information technology user you are.

Sort of dozed off near the end. The information was good at the end, but seemed to rushed, especially after hearing all of the data they've collected.

Seems to me we're suppose to use their data to alter your marketing messages. Thinking about Medtornic's patient population, according to their data, not many of our patients are going to be using the Internet and when they are, they'll only be using what their familiar with. Lee mentioned Googling their medical condition, but most older individuals won't believe what they read their after they have listened to their local newscast describing spam, scams, and spoofs.

MIMA 2007 - Lets Talk

2007-10-02T20:52:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow's a big day for the interactive marketers of the Twin Cities. It's MIMA's Annual Summit! MIMA is the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association. Last year's conference was very informative and fun at the same time. This ever however, their bringing in the big guns, Jason Fried and Lee Rainie!

This will have significant impact on my co-workers at Medtronic, especially Mark Powell, who idolizes only two people, Steve Jobs and Jason Fried. We've all read Jason's book, used several 37signals products personally, and we're currently looking at Basecamp for team use, to assign task, share notes, and track projects that come through our group. Personally, I'm also a big fan and used Basecamp, albeit the free version, for a couple of my self managed projects. I'm really hoping we decided to go with Bascamp, guess we'll wait and see.

I've been debating live blogging from the summit, I haven't heard of anybody looking to do that, so we'll see. I do plan on using Mindmeister to map my notes from the session, perhaps I'll share those here, just for the fun of it.

BTW, the summit's SOLD OUT.

Google Your Name - claimID

2007-10-01T11:15:00.000-05:00

So a co-worker of mine, Kristi Dugan from Dugan Creative recommended I add a claimId to my pages to validate the web pages I say are mine are actually mine. I've go ahead and done that. Pretty neat idea, you have to include a script to your web pages and then tell claimID to validate that code. Their servers go to the site you claim is yours and looks for the code, if it finds the code, then they record the site as being validated and that it actually belongs to you.

A nifty idea, but it has it downfalls. The code has to be in the HEAD of your document, doesn't work in the body. That means it doesn't play nice with my Google Page Creator web site, I don't have access to the HEAD of my HTML pages using that tool (yet...come on Google open the Head).

It also means you can't claim your LinkedIn Profile. Too bad.

I'd like to see this technology expanded and other tools allow for you to add these types of scripts to your profiles.

Google Page Creator - Site Wide Navigation

2007-09-21T19:21:00.000-05:00

So I found a work around so I didn't have to edit every page if I wanted to add a new navigation link or edit my existing navigation.

I decided to use a JavaScript file include like this using a script tag.

I then wrote some JavaScript to just do a document.write of my navigation menu.

Seems to work, but i question if using this type of document.write JavaScript for search engines. If I remember correctly, search engines bots don't have JavaScript enabled, so they won't spider my links.

Not sure what to do about that yet, I'll have to think some more and ask around about possible ways to handle this.

Google your name

2007-09-19T19:51:00.000-05:00

So all of my posts have been about using only Google products to create a website and blog. Everything from domain registration to hosting to design and production to tracking web traffic. In the future I'll continue to post about Google tools for your website and further investigate the possibilities.

I do have other things I'd like to post about, and the heading for this topic is one of them. Googling your name. I'm sure any one reading has tried it already, and if you haven't check it out. Just enter your name in Google and click search. Some of the results are just funny and sometimes you find a reference to yourself you never even knew about. And sometimes, your unlucky to have a common name and all that comes up is references to other people you'd rather not be involved with.

This potentially could cause some serious damage, especially if a new employer or client uses this technique to "check you out". I've heard several stories (perhaps urban legends) about individuals applying for a new job and getting denied a position due to some information and HR rep dug up on them on the web, either in general or on their myspace or facebook account.

It's been a while since I Googled my name and I thought I'd give a try a few weeks ago since we were in the process of hiring a new Sr. Manager for our group at work and because I was researching domain names for this site, plus considering applying for a new Sr. level position with our Corporate Communications team.

To my surprise, there were a TON of results for my name: Brian Kopp. (I'm sure I'll just get traffic from Google now since I added my name to this page) Why, well apparently I share my name with someone else named Brian Kopp who's really into World of Warcraft (WOW). I used to play Warcraft, but never touched WOW. Anyways, I guess he wrote some unofficially strategy guide and he's in a lawsuit, or was in a lawsuit (don't follow this much myself) against Blizzard Entertainment, the makers of WOW. Sounds like he's got a few people pissed off.

Next I decided to try and narrow my Googling by adding my middle initial since I was interested in having a domain that related to my name and I wanted to avoid just using Brian Kopp. My search for Brian J Kopp resulted to several pages on Google making reference to yet another person I'd rather not be involved with. The results were referring to a Dr. Brian J Kopp who has some, how can I say it, has interesting articles on the web regarding to homosexuality and abortion. Now, I haven't read these articles and I cannot comment on them in any way, but the point is, I'd rather not have these results be interpreted by some HR rep as results for me.

And before I get a bunch of comments telling me how to properly Google someone using a combination of location information or industry related information, I know that stuff already. Problem is, my future client or employer may not be that savvy and unaware of the issues just using someone's name in a search engine. Their the ones I'm concerned about.

So what am I suppose to do?

Change my name...not likely.
Buy Adwords for my name and compete...not likely.
Create a stronger online presence for my name...sure, but I'm up against some big communities.
Advertise my "User Name", you know, the name you always use for every account you've ever created online...sure, great idea, if I want my clients and employers to know how many thousands of posts I've created on different car forums.

Want to read more about the importance of Googling your own name check out this Wall Street Journal article.

Just so set a few things straight. I live in Minnesota and I'm a professional web designer who graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BS in Scientific and Technical Communications and works for Medtronic. I guess that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

So what am I suppose to do?

Google Page Creator

2007-09-17T20:30:00.000-05:00

Here's some of my thoughts and impressions regarding the Google Page Creator as a part of Google Apps.

It's annoying and time consuming to create a multi page design. Sure you can create a "template file" and duplicate that page to create all the rest of the pages, but anytime you want to change your navigation you must edit every page individually. I'm considering trying to use a server side include to see if that helps, that'll be in the coming days.

Second annoying thing, when you use the above description to create your site, the files are saved as home, home2, home3, etc. Not exactly what I'm looking for, and definitely not search engine optimized. So my site consists of home1 through home8 as the file names/urls.

Seems like it uses the site title as the page's title tag, which means your not able to maintain a site wide title. So in the upper-left corner of my site, I had to modify the site title to include the page title in order to save and link the pages correctly.

All in all, Google Page Creator was easy to use, but professional web people will realize the limitations quickly. As you can tell from my opening impressions, I'm already looking for ways to hack the pages to get a consistent navigation without having to edit every page. I'm also looking for a way to maintain a site title throughout and have readable context specific file/url names.

Google Analytics Working!

2007-09-15T21:38:00.000-05:00

Here's my latest update, Google analytics is now working on both my web pages and on this blog. I guess I did screw up when I tried to first setup the script code on the Google Page Creator web page.

So to wrap this up, I pasted the script code provided by Google Analytics into the footer section of the page created by Google Page Creator.

I did pose the question about about weather I should use one or two accounts to track data on my blog and web pages to Ward Tongen, my SEO SEM budy. Guess we'll wait and see if he makes another comment here and answers my question. Well Ward??

Load Time

2007-09-13T21:11:00.000-05:00

Not sure what the deal is, but it takes a long long time to load both my homepage and my blog page. My only guess is that Google is limiting the bandwidth, seems like really slow servers. Anybody else notice this either on my site or on your own. As I've described before, I'm hosting on Google servers with the domain registration going through enom, Google's default setup for the Google Apps standard edition.

Google Analytics with Google Page Creator and Blogger

2007-09-13T19:09:00.000-05:00

So I got my tagging on my blog in and I'm collecting data now. It's a different story for the home page which was created using Google Page Creator. According to the directions on the analytics page, you have to include the script code before the closing body tag. Since I haven't found a way to edit anything other than the HTML in the selected elements using Page Creator, I decided to include the script in the footer for the page. So far I haven't had any tracking data come in. The analytics page says the tracking code is installed and that it's just waiting for data. Problem is, I've visited the site from home and from work and no tracking. Think I might try to re-paste the code in the page again. And check some help files.

EDIT: When I went back into Page Creator to look at the script I pasted yesterday, I couldn't find it. I'm guessing I must not have saved or posted it. Anyways, I pasted in the code again in the footer, so hopefully, it works this time. Keep you posted.

Last update for today ...

2007-09-12T21:14:00.000-05:00

Ok I was browsing around the DNS provider (enom) again and this time I think I figured out how to add the URL forwarding for http://brianjkopp.com to go to http://www.brianjkopp.com. Add a URL redirect record under the Host Records section. It take up to 3 hours to take affect so I'll have to wait and see how it goes.

As for my other to do...add Google Analytics, I got my home page tagged and the blog sight tagged as well. This was very simple. I was debating using the same tracking code for both the website and the blog site. I decided to do two different tracking codes for now. Not sure if that's what I should do or not. Seems like for reporting I could then easily see my visitors for both sights. If I used one tracking code, then I'd have to create a filter if I only wanted to see one of the sites.

I think I'll ask my good buddy and co-worker Ward Tongen tomorrow during lunch, he's our SEO SEM specialist in our Medtronic eMarketing group.