Instead of gifts from friends and family this year, I’m asking everyone to donate a dollar or two to bring fresh, clean water to a village that desperately needs it. We tend to take the abundance of clean water for granted, we fill wading pools for our dogs to play in on a hot summer day, but in many small towns around the world they don’t have clean safe water to drink or bathe in.

I’ve just posted this page where you can learn more about the cause and donate a small amount and make a huge difference in someone’s life. Just $20 can provide clean water for one person for an entire year.

Please take a look at the site and help me spread the word about this wonderful organization by sharing the link with your friends and family too. 100% of your donation will directly build freshwater wells and fund basic sanitation projects for people who would not otherwise have safe drinking water.

1.1 billion people on our planet lack access to safe, clean drinking water. That’s one in six of us. 80% of all disease on the planet is attributable to the lack of water and basic sanitation. I hope you can take a moment to help me spread the word and make a difference.
Happy holidays!

The Exploratorium is one of our favorite San Francisco museums and it was a pleasure helping them create a shiny new press site with a lot of social media features built in. The site is built entirely in WordPress so staff can add, edit and tag posts as they go up, and use the powerful content management and search attributes of WordPress.

We did a bit of custom code here and there as well to make it even easier for them to manage.

• We built a custom template for the site so it fits right in to the current Exploratorium website, maintaining the user experience.
• Custom post templates for the press releases allow the staff to easily create a release with video or images and include content directly from exhibits on-line or link to them for reference
• Custom press kit templates allow the staff to pull together a list of press releases, video and images on the fly and create a full press kit on any exhibit easily
• Featured releases get their own space and an image on the home page using custom fields
• The whole home page is widget based, so staff can edit content without having to get into the code
• A series of galleries were constructed to highlight selected images from the museum’s vast collection
• We did on and off site training for staff and supplied them with video tutorials for reference

Take a look at the new site and give us your feedback, we’d love to hear it!

We are excited to realase a new website for Barbara Means Fraser PHD., Ms Fraser is an accomplished playwright and an Associate Professor at Santa Clara University where she served as Chair of the Theatre and Dance Department from 2003-2006. Fraser’s philosophy is driven by her dedication to social justice. The plays she writes are impactful and range in topic from gay rights, breast cancer, race and societal issues to sexual harassment and abuse. Her direction repertoire includes: The Laramie Project, Twilight of the Golds, Parallel Lives: The Kathy and Mo Show, and Paul Robeson.

The goals of the site were simple: to make the body of work more accessible to the public and give her a place to send companies interested in producing her plays. We used HTML and AJAX for the main page elements and Flash for a gallery of playbills and a video player for some of her clips. As we dig more deeply into her archives and the repertoire grows the site will easily scale to allow for more work.

If you are interested in learning more about social media and how to make it work for your business, you should sign up for my up-coming Webinar: “Putting Social Media to Work for You” .
This is the first in a series of Webinars about social media and social media marketing.I’ll take user feedback to create the next in the series to make sure everybody gets what they are looking for out of these Webinars.

Length
This is a short session, just 30 minutes and no experience in social media is required. I’ll start with the basics and then quickly get to the good stuff.

What’s it all about?
I’ll cover the following topics:
What is Social Media?
How can it help my business?
Overview of social media tools.
Examples of social media use – the good, the bad, the unfortunate.
Where to find data on growth and social media usage.
Creating an effective social media strategy.
5 steps to get started.

Date: Sept 10, 2008
Time: 1 PM PST
Length: 30 Minutes
Cost: Free

Click here for more information.

Napa Valley real estate developer Barbara Bryson is documenting this vineyard estate as it is built with pictures and a “construction diary” detailing the special touches and the love that shows in every inch of this 7 Million dollar estate (which will be ready for sale in Fall 2008) right in the middle of Napa’s Oak Knoll appellation.

We created a website to showcase the project as it grows and designed it with the CMS capabilities of WordPress in mind so it can easily be updated and maintained as the final touches are put on, and the property goes up for sale. Visit the site for Terra Dolce Napa and let us know what you think.

We just launched a new website for San Jose Real Estate Agent CJ Brasiel. The property is in the Cambrian Estates neighborhood, and has a remarkable view of the mountains. If you’re in the market for an affordable 4 bed 2.5 bath home, check it out

Local Realtor CJ Brasiel. comes to us to create mini-sites for her real estate listings in San Jose. She just listed this lovely condo in Midtown PlazaCheck it out.

Russ Johnson has worked in the medical device field for over 25 years. Now that he’s formed his own company, Device Direction, he is helping companies working in the medical device industry promote their products. He does everything from helping them clearly define their marketing opportunities to product planning and implementation.

Since the company is new, Russ needed to build a website that will help him get the word out to medical device companies world wide, and present his services and experience in a website that gets to the point quickly. What’s the point?
If you are in the medical device field, and you need a marketing professional to help you launch a new product, or light a fire under an exisisting campaign, Russ Johnson is who you should be talking to.

We’ve been working on some custom WordPress templates lately, and several will be appearing for download here soon. Who knows, someday we may actually find time to update our own WordPress blog with some cool mods! In the meantime, here’s the newest WordPress template, called “Clean Machine”, as modified for Talk to CJ. You can also check out the custom templates we built for BigFix. Please let us know what you think and what you’d like to see. As we develop these templates it’s a great time to hear new ideas for WordPress designs!

If you’ve ever been to Sausalito you may have noticed that there really isn’t a place to go that gets you out over the water with a good view of the bay. A small grassroots organization has formed called the Sausalito Harbor Improvement Project (SHIP) that wants to put a public quay out from the shore so that locals and visitors can stroll out for a view or dock their small boats on a trip into town.

We’ve built them a website so they can better communicate their vision and get the discussion going locally. Take a look and if you’re interested in joining the cause or discussing options, come to one of several public meetings.
http://www.sausalitoharbor.org/