I usually don’t do these tagged post kind of things, but for my buddy Derek…what the hell. If you’d like to learn a little about Derek, check out his five things meme post.

5 Things I Was Doing 10 Years Ago

• Being a junior in high school
• Starting my first company (SystemLogic)
• Going to Florida twice a year to visit my dad
• Spending a month in Chile
• Studying for SAT’s

5 Things on My To-Do List Today

• Head over to Target to pick up a measuring tape, some stuff for the bbq grill, and stop off to eat some pho
• Unpack from the week in Las Vegas while attending SEMA
• Measure out and design the garage in photoshop for the new garage flooring I bought while at SEMA
• Write about 7 posts for both this site and Carbon Fiber Gear
• Setup a hub so I can get my home VOIP to start working again

5 Snacks I Like

• Cereal
• Baked Lays potato chips
• Doritos
• Twix
• Skor/Daim/Heathbar

5 Things I Would Do If I Was A Millionaire

• Pay off my mortgage
• Buy some cars
• Pimp out the house even more
• Buy a lot of stocks right now
• Save the rest

5 Places I Have Lived (for various lengths of time)

• Princeton, NJ (growing up)
• Baltimore, MD (college)
• Fairfax, VA (3 years)
• Owings Mills, MD (2 years)
• Rockford, IL (1 year)

5 Jobs I Have Had

• Owned a few companies
• Data analyst at SAIC
• Car audio installer at Circuit City
• Retails clothes sales at Van Heusen
• Computer repair/sales at some mom/pop shop

Your Turn

The first 5 people to do the same meme on their blog and link it to mine will be added to this post.

As you may know, I’ve been pretty busy on a few new designs (This blog, Carbon Fiber Gear, and dpitMedia). All of these designs were custom created from the ground up by yours truly. Many many hours of work is spent on these designs, so it’s always nice to get any sort of recognition for the work. All three sites were just featured on a couple of design showcases:

We Love WP

We Love WP is a showcase site that features the best Wordpress powered sites on the net. They recently featured both this blog and Carbon Fiber Gear!

One Page Love

One Page Love is another showcase site, but specifically features sites that are only one page. dpitMedia was a perfect site to fit that need.

A buddy of mine owns FullSingle, which is the same idea other than the fact that they only feature one site at a time (although you can see the archive of sites)…except he hasn’t added yet

In the background I’ve been working on a new brand of company to work as a sort of umbrella company for my endeavors. The name of this company is dPit Media. To start things off, I’m trying to come up with a few logo concepts, and it’s always good to take a look at what’s out there for a source of inspiration.

I went out there and found as many companies as I could find with the word “media” in their name. Out of the hundreds that I looked at, I picked out the best 69 logos. I think that having the name “media” in a company brand is fairly common, so I think this will be a great resource for others.

Stay tuned to the blog (or feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed) for updates regarding my own logo for dPitMedia.

24/7 Real Media

1105 Media

Adconion Media Group

Ariamedia

Ashweb Media

b5 Media

Backbeat Media

Blaze New Media

Blueprint Media

Bootcamp Media

Breeze Media

Casale Media

Church Media

Churchplant Media

Congruent Media

Digicog Media

Dunamis Media

E8 Media

Ecstatic Media

Edvens Media

Evolving Media

Federated Media

Fling Media

Glacier Media

Glam Media

Go Media

Greentech Media

Gunpowder Media

Hyperx Media

Idearc Media

Imagex Media

Immersive Media

Jello Media

Logicbomb Media

LS Media

Manticore Media

Maxgen Media

Media72

Media Crumb

Media Inspiration

Medianomaly

Media Temple

Medicon Media

Millennial Media

Mindset Media

New Brand Media

Premiere Media

Primal Media - Concept for PrimalMedia.com

Redux Media

Resolution Media

Respiro Media

Resurgent Media

Right Media

Sabotage Media

Shock Media

Simplify Media

Sling Media

Split Media

Spring Media

Third Screen Media

Trademark Media

CMP - United Business Media

ValueClick Media

Vibrant Media

Virgin Media

Visicom Media

Volo Media

Yojo Media

Yul Media

If your “media” company wasn’t in here, but you think it should have made the list, feel free to comment below with a link and I’ll check it out. If I find enough more, maybe I’ll do a part two. Also, between the time of writing this and when it actually went live, I’ve come up with my logo for dpitMedia. I’m going for a retro sort of theme, so let me know what you think:

For a long, long, long, long time I’ve been talking about doing a new custom design for this blog. It was one of my 2008 goals to finish and launch this design, and I’m happy to say that it’s finally here!? If you’re reading this from the RSS feed, come on by and check it out.

This new design was built entirely from the ground up, so there was no modifying a theme, and there is nothing else like it out there. I’m still using Wordpress as the software that runs everything in the background. I was the one that designed the site, and had a developer code up the site and integrate it into Wordpress (Thanks Mubs!). Let me give you a complete walkthrough:

Featured And Standard Blog Mode

You’ll see on the homepage that there are two blogging modes, featured and standard. By default you come to the site seeing featured blog mode. This is simply the headline for the post, and a quick little intro paragraph about it. At the top of the page the most recent post is featured.

If you go to standard blog mode, you’ll see that it’s just like a regular blog, and shows the full versions of the last 10 posts.

I think the featured mode is more unique and looks cleaner, but I know that some people will still prefer your standard blog, which is why I decided to offer both.

Single Post Page

I spent a lot of time making a regular post page look good and work effectively. At the top of each post page you’ll find the “featured” box which just shows you the headline, a big featured image related to the post, a quick intro, the author, how many comments, what categories it falls in, and the ability to promote the post through a variety of social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

At the bottom of each post is where I really spent most of my time. The first box you’ll find under a post is the “Save/Promote This Post” box. This is simply a box with some social media buttons, as well as a Digg button on the right which shows how many Diggs the post has.

Below that box you’ll find the “Related Posts/Subscribe” box. This is a clean format which provides up to 5 related posts to the one you’re reading, as well as a few links to subscribe to the sites RSS feed. I hope this helps out with increasing the number of RSS subscribers. If you haven’t already subscribed to my feed, make sure to do so.

Below that box you’ll find the comments section. I really cleaned this up a lot. FIrst of all, comments and trackbacks are now separated (you’ll find trackbacks at the bottom of the page). Each comment is now in a separate alternating color comment box to make things much more readable. Each post also cleanly shows the name of the commenter (linked to their website), the date, and their avatar. The avatar information is being pulled in from Gravatar, which is a site that allows you to create an account and show your avatar at many sites, linked by your e-mail address. Wordpress 2.5+ has Gravatar functionality built into it, and I think we’ll see more and more sites supporting it, as well as more and more commenters using it. If you haven’t added your Gravatar yet, head over there and open a free account.

Another cool thing I can do is utilize a “promote” feature. If I’m writing a post in Wordpress, I can add a custom field called promote, which will automatically add some code next to the headline of a post. Right now it will make a StumbleUpon badge appear, but that can be changed to whatever I want. This will hopefully increase social media submissions on posts that are really worth it.

Sidebar

On the sidebar I’ve cleanly made sections to show the categories of the site, a few my recent posts, as well as 5 of my most recent Twitter updates. I’m hoping the usage of the Twitter updates will increase my followers. Feel free to follow me on Twitter if you aren’t doing so already.

Advertising

This is something that will most likely be tweaked over time, but I’ve built in advertising in a pretty effective way. First off I want to note that all my ad serving is being done by Google Ad Manager. Ad Manager is a pretty powerful FREE ad server, it’s still in beta, so you’ll need an invite to use it. I come from a background using Doubleclick as an ad server, as well as having used OpenAds, so it may be a little complex to use for some at first, but I felt right at home.

So my concept in advertising right now is when I’m ready to sell an exclusive “package deal” to an advertiser
. What I mean by that is basically a site takeover, one advertiser would get all of the ad spots on the site for a premium price for a set amount of time. This will allow an advertiser to get very effective advertising. There are three set spots for an advertisement on a page right now.

There is a top small banner in the red bar, a 250×250 in the top of the sidebar, and a long thin banner either after the third post on the homepage, or between the save/promote box and related posts box on a single post page. An advertiser would be able to get all three spots, as well as a link in the RSS feed at a flat monthly rate. The spot would be exclusive to that advertiser and no other ads will be run.

I will likely be slightly changing around the sizes and/or positioning of the ads for something for effective (or to meet IAB guidelines). When the blog is generating more traffic, I would change the format to include more ads, and not provide exclusive deals. If you’re interested in doing an exclusive takeover for a month, contact me.

Bugs

There are a few bugs here and there (Mostly IE6 stuff) that I already know about, and will work on fixing over the next couple weeks. If you happen to find something, please make sure and let me know.

Suggestions/Feedback

I really hope you guys like the new design. I put a lot of time and work into launching this, and I hope it will be better overall for the growth of this blog. If you have any suggestions or feedback, I’m all ears. You can either contact me directly or post a comment below.

I’ve recently been spending a lot of time working on the new design for this blog (Which I hope to launch as soon as next week!). One of the parts I was working on was a “promote” feature, where I could choose to put some sort of social media promotional button on the top headline of a post in order to better promote people “voting” for a post. I was planning on using your standard Digg badge that we’ve seen everywhere, but then I really thought about something that bothered me about Digg.

I’ve had posts that generate a good amount of Digg’s, but they happen over time. Digg works more like a popular “news” site in the fact that content has to be Dugg enough times within usually 24 hours or less to make it on the front page. That why I really like StumbleUpon.

It can literally take just one stumble to get content to generate some good traffic. Then say two months later, somebody else randomly stumbles your post…traffic can generate again. It’s not always just a one-time surge, it usually lasts a few days, and then can continue to bring traffic over time. For this reason, I decided to give it a shot and promote StumbleUpon over Digg for this section (for now). I wanted to use an SU badge, but there wasn’t really anything out there…so I made one:

It follows the same design as the Digg badge so that people recognize it and are more willing to click it. Feel free to use this on your site if you’d like. I will probably do a couple of sizing variations, while I’ll update on this post in the future.

If you have seen or made a StumbleUpon badge, feel free to let me know so I can link to it from here.

Also, feel free to add me as a friend on StumbleUpon, you can find my profile here. I sometimes forget to stumble things, but I generally try to if I really like something I see on the net.

Oh, and make sure to Stumble this post

I’ve talked about doing a new design here, here, and here in the past. One of my goals for this year is to actually go through and launch it! I’m currently working with a developer now to get this done…the actual design aspect is 95% complete. The design (just the homepage) has been HTMLized and integrated into Wordpress.

Now we’re working on doing some of the custom stuff that I need done. Once that’s complete we’ll work on getting the actual sub pages (like a post page) HTMLized and integrated into Wordpress. After this is done, we’ll be going through other pages to make sure all looks good (ex: category pages, archives, etc), importing all the old data into it, doing a bunch of testing…as well as updating (this will make more sense when it’s launched), and then hopefully launching it.

I’m really hoping to have the new site launched this month as it is the one year anniversary of my blog…and what a great way to celebrate that! I think you guys will really like the new look and feel! For now a teaser will have to do:

We (Tri Megatech) recently finished a website for a client that I figured I would feature on here. The client is throwing a Hispanic fair at the DC Armory in Washington DC called La Feria De La Familia. The client is an affiliate of Telemundo, a Spanish channel I’m sure many of you have heard of before. Take a look at the website that we did for them:

Feel free to take a look at the live version at LaFeriaDeLaFamilia.com. What do you guys think? It’s one of my personal favorites that I’ve done so far.

Out of curiosity, are you guys interested in seeing more of the type of work that I do for my businesses?

For anybody out there interested in having us do a web design for you (or your business), feel free to get in touch with us through Tri Megatech.

When we started Tri Megatech, we were counting on the Yellow Book to generate a lot of our initial business. We dumped over $2,000 into it for the year, hoping to see a large ROI. While we definitely made our money back on our investment, it wasn’t nearly as much business as we had hoped for. I originally made the ad for the book, and here’s what it looked like:

The time has come now when we had to renew our contract to advertise, so I began doing some research on how we can improve our results…we needed to generate more phone calls. I found a few important key factors that can hopefully dramatically improve an ads effectiveness:

• The size of the ad is not everything
• Color is normally a good way to make you pay more, but doesn’t necessarily make your ad more effective
• A good headline is important to catch a readers attention
• Good graphics that are compelling are important to catch a readers attention
• Differentiate from your competitors

There is a ton of other things that can make a good ad, but just looking at these key things we can already see some major mistakes that we initially made in our first run. Our logo is huge. Who cares? It’s not even compelling. Nobody cares what the name of your company is, people are looking for somebody that can provide a service for them. There is no headline for anybody to read, or anything like graphics to compel them in. By now they’ve already called another competitor.

With my newfound knowledge, I decided to redesign our ads. We decided to do two, one targeting home users, and another targeting networking aka businesses. Here’s what I did for home users:

In this new ad we see some drastic differences from our previous copy. For one, look at the difference in the logo size. It’s much tinier, and hidden in the corner. We have a compelling headline and graphic to catch a readers attention and get them looking at the list of services we provide. Hopefully one matches their needs, and they give us a call. I added credit card logos, as people love to charge things. It also better legitimizes our company.

For our ad that targets businesses we were given an opportunity for one color. We wanted to use this to our benefit in order to help us stand out as much as possible. We just need to lure the reader in, and get them to call. Getting them to call us is 90% of the battle of generating new business:

We obviously used red as our one color, and we used it to emphasize two key elements of the ad; the headline and what we’re giving away for FREE. People love free. Readers are already looking in the “Computer-Networking” category, we want to make sure we targeted that reader. While we do a lot more than networking, we knew that’s more than likely what a potential client was looking for, and what we could use to lure them in. We also made sure the first three services we list have to do with networking. Hopefully we get a client for networking, but end up doing a lot more business with them over time. Business clients is really where its at. They spend more money, and they are more concerned about getting things done then every penny that’s being spent.

Do you guys think that these ads are more effective? It will be some time before they go out to print, but I will definitely report back and let you all know whether or not we’re getting more calls. Constructive feedback is also always welcome.

One of my new favorite sites is PSDTuts.com, a great place for Photoshop tutorials. I used their latest “Making A Photoshop Shield” tutorial to make a David Pitlyuk badge featuring my new mark that you’ll be seeing in my upcoming design:

Pretty nifty looking, eh?? If you know many of the Photoshop basics, PSDTuts is a great place to utilize those skills. It’s owned and run by one of the guys that run a bunch of great sites like FreelanceSwitch and FlashDen.

Back in May I made the decision to undergo a custom design for this blog. I even went about pretty much doing the entire design and getting it to a coder. I had some communication issues with the company/person I had hired to do the coding and Wordpress integration, but I sure am glad that nothing came out of that. While I liked the design I had done, I have been working on a couple new websites for Tri Megatech clients (more on that in upcoming posts as those come along), and have been more inspired to do something even better. My inspirations come mainly from some magazines and other prominent blogs out there, and I can’t wait to show you guys what I have in mind….I think it’s going to look amazing.

At this point I have two main concerns:

1) It’s not going to be your standard blog layout, but I still want everything integrated through Wordpress. What I have in mind is probably pretty easy to do, but not something that I want to do

2) My other concern is who I will get to help me do the coding and Wordpress integration. While I’m sure I can do it on my own, I don’t like to. It takes me much too long, and I hate dealing with all of the inter-browser compatibility issues. I also want to ensure that everything is coded with the best SEO standards in place. I’d still love to work with the original guys I was working with (you know who you are, contact me and let me know what’s up!!), but if that cannot happen, I need to look at other alternatives. If you know of anybody that may be capable of this, let me know…Keep in mind, all of the design is being done by me.

Stay tuned, I’ll be providing sneak peaks as I continue to find some time to design in-between all the other stuff going on!? In the meantime, check out the new redesign at ProBlogger, and John Chow will be launching his new design tomorrow or tonight (at the time of writing this).