Shawn Franklin

I’ve completed an instructor-led course on the introductory topics in C#. The application of choice was, of course, Visual Studio 2005.

This fits nicely with my SQL Server 2005 course and adds ASP.NET programming to my skill set.

I’ve completed an instructor-led class on MS SQL Server 2005.

So far this class has turned out to be quite timely. We are discussing a web application that shows power consumption data stored, of course, in a SQL database. We have only discussed this app being available on our company intranet. But I expect that it will public as the app expands in scope. At that time, I’ll be sure to post an example.

Things I have learned so far:

Owning a Business

Do you remember when you were in grade school english class and the teacher made you start every class with writing a journal entry based on a prompt? There is one entry in particular that I found when going through one of my old journals where I detail a business plan for sports memorabilia (e.g. baseball cards, autographed helmets, authentic jerseys, etc.). To own and operate my own business has been a part of me for a very long time. I like business, but am limited by my own intelligence and I constantly get frustrated by my own ambition and desires. e.g. my ambition far exceeds my intelligence.

I can not count the number of MS Project plans I have created. Some seem to go on for hundreds and hundreds of tasks and some seem to get the job done in less than 50.

I’ve realized, though, that many times people just want the comfort of knowing that a file exists. Furthermore, the people that want that comfort are inevitably the people that end up deviating from the plan or making changes.

As of this post, which will be updated often, I have only officially been webmaster of one corporate website – http://www.digitalrealtytrust.com.

digitalrealtytrust.com is a small site in number of static pages. Windows server – SQL database – ASP – CSS – XML – JavaScript

The “property database” – link – is probably the most complex part. Its the database driven part of the site, but has a limit of 70 possible pages.

I have worked with several marketing automation vendors: Eloqua, My Emma, Vtrenz, Constant Contact, Email Brain, etc.

They all seem to have similar designs / features. Some get more “advanced” – and price themselves appropriately so – by adding more features that they feel marketers demand. My take is that most of these applications suffer from the fact that their end user never wants any application they manage to be more complicated than MS Power Point, but, in order to differentiate, the marketing automation vendors add features that they feel they can charge more for. This would be blatantly clear if you were experienced with a robust application like Eloqua and compare it an app like Constant Contact.

I have implemented Google Analytics on a couple of sites.

True to what they do, Google it seems will always add to this application. This is my recommendation on Google Analytics:

Make sure that your marketer and webmaster are on the same page when it comes to adding the tracking script. In other words, because the tracking script is something that you must ADD TO EVERY PAGE on your site manually, your marketer must ensure that the creative agency is adding your organizations tracking script OR when the creative agency turns over the pages to your webmaster to add to your marketing directories that the webmaster has it as part of the go-live process to add the script.

How much money has Google made from AdWords? wow!

I think it is a great application and appropriate for marketing departments that have larger than usual marketing budgets.

My recommendation is this: get a full-time employee to manage your AdWords account effectively and give that marketer a $5000 / per month budget. Instruct that person to constantly tell your webmaster or SEO agency what keywords are working. (Then instruct your webmaster or SEO agency to optimize your site accordingly).

A constant back-and-forth should be established between your guy managing your AdWords account and the person responsible for your site.