Erich Stauffer

Tag: Erich Stauffer

  • It Was a Hot Day

    It Was a Hot Day by Erich Stauffer, 6-28-1997

    He escapes through the front door and begins to run.

    The man inside would realize he was gone and start after him in his vehicle if he chose. The who escaped started running through the woods instead of on the road. A vehicle was coming from the other direction to pick him up – he had to avoid being re-captured, yet catch a ride with a vehicle traveling down the road not knowing where he is. “Only a few hundred more yards to a payphone,” [he thought].

    He gets out his phone card and the number. Dial. Get behind the phone. Punch in the code. Get behind the phone. Type the phone number. Get behind the phone. What does the man’s engine sound like? Here comes a car!

    “Cellular customer unavailable.”

    He keeps walking. He walks past the church. Could it be open? He might miss his ride. He kept walking. Visual contact!

    “Get in the car!”. [He gets in the car.]

    “Turn around and get outta here.” He’s sweating. It was a hot day.

  • New Logo Defines What is a Water Shawl

    You may or may not have noticed that we updated our logo recently. This is partly because Erich Stauffer has never had a logo other than his name, which was done with both Telablue and Watershawl. But the primary reason for changing the logo was in order to define, “What is a water shawl?”

    I often get asked, “What is a water shawl?” It could mean ‘a water-filled shawl you wear around your head’ or it might not mean anything at all. It actually started as an Internet ‘handle’ or username for Erich Stauffer that he named after his stay at “Waters Hall” at Kentucky Christian University. But people never really seemed to like that truth of that answer so we set out to create a new story for the name and this is what we discovered. It also means a type of Pashmina shawl.

    The water shawl that surrounds us all

    If you define a water shawl as a ‘water-filled shawl that you wear around your head’ then some poetic license could be taken to both move that “shawl” inside our body and outside of our earth. There are actually two water ‘shawls’ that surround each and every one of us. There is the fluid that surrounds our brains that protects us from shogs and there is the water that surrounds the earth that provides us with rain (why do they hate you?).

    How the logo portrays a water shawl

    The blue ring symbolizes the water surrounding the inside of the circle where your mind might see a head, face, or the earth. The bottom section is cut to represent the slope of a persons shoulders and sometimes looks like a a person smiling, which we liked. We like to think of our clients being inside that circle and being happy with us.

    Some design trouble we ran into and how we overcame it

    I liked that I was able to keep the colors consistent with the web site theme, but I ran into trouble with the choice of color for the bottom part of the ring. It was originally white, but when placed on a white background, it didn’t have the effect I wanted. I experimented with adding an outline, but settled on changing the bottom color to gray when on a light background and back to white when on a dark background. We think this works well, but I look forward to your feedback.

  • Indianapolis WordPress Development

    Erich Stauffer is a WordPress implementation shop serving the greater Indianapolis area. We specialize in developing web sites for WordPress using professional web design techniques. WordPress is an open source, fully supported content management system (CMS) that was originally developed for blogs, but can be used for almost anything. We chose WordPress because it allows our clients to manage their own content if they so choose, not to mention all the built-in functionality like search and RSS.

    Another one of WordPress’ greatest features is the ability to add software called plug-ins that add functionality for SEO, web forms, or social media, just to name a few examples. And for those who stay up at night worrying, WordPress has backup tools and we at Erich Stauffer use international web port monitoring to make sure your web site is up at all times.

  • Mixer Sales Hits Page One of Google

    Mixer Sales asked Erich Stauffer to help them get better search engine rankings for their primary keywords, best mixers and mixer sales – and now Mixer Sales is ranking on the first page of Google for ‘mixer sales’!

    While Mixer Sales ranks #6 for the keyword ‘mixer sales’,  they currently don’t rank in the top 100 for ‘best mixers’, which means we still have some work to do, but we believe in celebrating the small victories.   We also helped them setup what we call a ‘sticky page’ which is a page that stays on top of WordPress blog post listings. This is named after ‘sticky posts’, but uses a page instead of a post to prevent double posts on the front page. Going forward we’re going to recommend on product marketing sites like this a “start with sticky” policy because it provides a kind of launching pad for all of the other posts, which can sometimes get lost. Users can still find posts using categories or tags, but for the most important posts, they should be linked to from the sticky page and possibly even through the top navigation bar.  Most of the time we will start off with allowing WordPress to automatically display pages, but as the site ages and becomes more concrete, we’ll go back and manually manipulate the page navigation to add posts and other keywords for SEO reasons.

    Overall we see good things for Mixer Sales and wish them well in their endeavor to help people find the best deals on kitchen stand mixers, which have become more and more popular over the last several years.

  • Erich Stauffer Web Services

    Telablue has merged with Erich Stauffer, Inc., an Indianapolis Technology Consulting company and will continue to provide web design, development, and hosting services in addition to SEO. Erich Stauffer also offers search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and online advertising. We also do computer services like network management and mobile phone support. Browse all of these services at our services page or contact us for more information by calling 317-572-7521 where we will be happy to discuss these changes with you.

  • SEO Terms – By the way, what does SEO stand for?

    When I first got into web design, I didn’t even know what SEO was, let alone stood for. If you’ve stumbled upon this article you might already know that it stands for search engine optimization. This refers to the process of improving search engine results, which leads to our next SEO term, SERPs. SERP refers to search engine results page(s). The number your site is on that SERP is your PR or page rank. When the term is smashed together with no space it is a Google registered trademark. You might also see the term PR5 or PR4. Search engines give greater credibility to sites with links from PR1-PR5 websites. PR, as noted before stands for page rank and the number indicates the rank on that page (1-10). A PR1 website is the number one website for a given search term, for example.

    If you choose to get help on your Internet marketing, how do you decide which SEO firm to go with? Erich Stauffer, an Indianapolis SEO firm writes that, “web design built around search engine optimization,” is something to look for in a SEO firm. SEO is more than just in-bound links. The website has to have good content and a good structure. Are you using H1 tags on every page? Strong tags instead of bold? Are you adequately using your description and keyword meta tags? Are you using tables or DIV tags to organize your information? Can your web page be viewed on a mobile device? Have you submitted your website to ODP? If you do nothing else, please do this last step as the ODP, the Open Directory Project, is the most important step in your SEO or Internet marketing campaign.