It started with sheep...

I've been reminiscing a lot lately. I guess it is because I'm entering my 11th year of online community and that really blows my mind. So I think back a lot to where I was in 1995, the things that I saw and what impacted me most. Which made me think of the sheep. I recalled there was one single web page which completely did me in - it snagged me forevermore on the World Wide Web.

To my utter astonishment, it is still here.

And it still makes my mind tingle to read that.

Read it and tell me what you think.

News & Views

What's happening around here?

I just finished setting up Century21Omaha.com with some editable pages through Edit.com. Easy as pie and the guys downstate were super helpful.

Started working on a project for a new client Christine Buyce at In the Door Consulting. I network with Christine at a bi-weekly meeting and let me tell you - this woman knows how to open doors! I've never known anyone who is as comfortable as she is with cold calling and wriggling her way into a prospects midst. And she's writing a book about it - which is why she's hired me. We just set up her mailing list with EmailBrain.com - I think I still prefer Constant Contact's interface but the pricing was better.

The new web site for Rosanne Raneri, the phenomenal singer songwriter I had the pleasure of singing with in high school choir is SO very close to launch. I can't wait to show you ... just as soon as I can pull Rosanne off the summer gig schedule and get those finishing touches on it.

I'm patiently waiting for the start of a very exciting and very large new project - as soon as an official contract is in my paws, I'll be announcing it here.

I survived one week without a laptop - probably the nicest week we've had in Albany this year. I didn't like it one bit and have never felt quite so trapped and stuck in my home office. I've already figured out what I will buy (I was up at Circuit City petting it just this week) to replace the dead one and have thought through some creative financing to make it mine. I just need a few more pieces to fall into place !

Happy weekend everyone

Get your products into Froogle

Do you have an online store with your own products? Are you providing a feed to Froogle? If not - you really need to read this!

I do a ton of online shopping - but more often, I do what I guess would be called "monitor shopping" (like window shopping) :) I browse, read reviews, collect information on what I want to buy some day. And, much of my research is centered around Froogle.com - a sort of mega marketplace for researching products and prices. So, as I was off studying the costs of laptops, I thought I'd tell you how you can get YOUR products into Froogle so they can be found.

For those of you who haven't used it yet, Froogle.com is a product based search engine powered by Google, that lets you search by brands and keywords and then sort the results by price and so on. It's particularly useful if you know the model you want of something - it'll find it and tell you which online shops sell it and for how much.

Froogle gets its data from independently submitted feeds, and from it's own web scouring activity. The more accurate data is that which is submitted by a store - and so your goal as shop owner would be to get your feed picked up by Froogle. Best of all, getting listed is FREE (as of today).

Free to anyone? Not exactly - there are requirements. Your site must be in English, in the US, have fixed prices, be your own products (not an affiliate shop) and the site must be "crawlable" (meaning, a spider can hop from link to link to link within your site).

To get started, go to the Froogle Merchant page and sign up. They will send you information, including a universal data structure they need your product data provided in (Excel spreadsheet or a comma separated text file) and instructions - all pretty standard formatting you can export your products to.

The instructions will say how to FTP (upload) your product data - which you need to do monthly or else it will be dropped from the database. But they encourage shop owners to do this more often than monthly, to ensure highly accurate info in the search results.

That's it in a nutshell. Whether you do this yourself or need a web programmer depends on 1) your own prowess and 2) the existing system your store is utilizing. To be efficient, I'd suggest automating the process so you can do it frequently - depending on the number of products. The important thing is that, if you do have an online store with your own products, that you get some of the traffic and hang your shingle in the global marketplace!


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Eileen Parzek is a graphic designer and writer providing graphic and web design services. Always found at the intersection of information, creativity and technology, her business, SOHO It Goes! (www.sohoitgoes.com) helps small businesses make a big impression.