I took a few minutes and revamped the site. WordPress is so great like that, 1-2 hours and you have a brand new feel. I also tweaked the language on the homepage to be what I feel, much more reflective of the true reality of the current marketplace.
It reads raw, but think about it: As a business you specialize in your core business, not the web, that’s our business. Our business is to help your business do more on the web.
We truly want you to win. Lets talk.
Page.ly is a new product we are developing that allows for quick creation of WordPress based websites, complete with hosting, domain name registration and email service.
This is screen shot of the WordPress backend of a page.ly site. We created an API that allows the client to administer email services back on the server without having to login to a separate panel.
After Authenticating the user is able to create and modify aspects of email accounts such as adding mail alias, setting redirects, and changing mail account passwords.
We have been using the php framework codeigniter for sometime on many a project (bestpartyever, ultimatervrentals, page.ly) in conjunction with source control SVN.
Just a heads up to whomever else works like this.. Here are a few notes.
We do something similar like you will find in this article:
Moving the app folder out of the main CI install keeps things easy. Our file system looks like:
.htaccess
index.php
/app/
/public/
--/public/js
--/public/css
--/public/gfx
/CI/ SVN External: system http://dev.ellislab.com/svn/CodeIgniter/trunk/system/
This insures we always have the latest CI core running and keeps the .htaccess files tidy.
A decent auth lib we have used a lot is dx_auth It needs a few tweaks after install to work the way we want, but overall is reall nice.
We are happy to announce the pending launch of page.ly, a website builder we have created to provide a complete online website solution for small businesses. page.ly lets you create your own website with just a few clicks of a mouse. Every page.ly site is fully customizable with dozens of provided themes/templates and the ability for users to add their own. Powered by the wordpress, page.ly has many built in features that make keeping your website up to date a cinch. page.ly also provides users with their own domain name, and email service. A complete small business website builder.
Page.ly will launch mid-summer.
Our good friend Keith Robinson at Blue Flavor wrote a great piece for .net magazine this month on project management in the web space. Keith was kind enough to include a few comments from obuweb founder Joshua Strebel in the article.
Look for .net on news stands in a few weeks.
We are very proud and much relieved to have re-launched BestPartyEver.com. BPE is a website we own and operate an has often times been the forgotten child, but is now the center of our portfolio.
BestPartyEver.com is an online community that helps you plan that special event. Find thousands of free party ideas, recipes, special event vendors to hire, and party planning tips from industry professionals. A suite of party planning tools also makes it super easy to manage the details of your party with guestlists, online invites, budget calculators, event schedules, and to-do lists.
We are extremely excited to offer all this party goodness to the public. Please check it out, and enjoy.
We have been tinkering on some side projects and are happy to release:
pix.ly allows you to pull photos from yours are anyone else flickr account and rate them in a vs. style contest. Rate your flickr photos now.
Do you twitter? twit.pix.ly lets you rate your friends Avatars in a vs. style content. The ultimate twitter avatar battle is going on now.
Our new office address is:
325 E Elliot Rd, Suite 34 Chandler Az 85255
Our new Tele is: (602) 635-2455
Obuweb.com has moved to a new office space down in Gilbert, AZ.
We have taken residence at the “gangplank” which is a co-working environment for web/tech/awesome people in town.
Come find us at:
290 E. El Prado, Chandler, AZ 85225 (view map).
Look for the Liberty/Integrum building, and just head upstairs once you get there.
Please do not send any mail here. Our customers will receive our new billing address on their next invoice.
Better late then never, but 5 years late?
Social Media Will Change Your Business
Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they’re simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they’re going to shake up just about every business—including yours. It doesn’t matter whether you’re shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)
Wait for it…
A prediction: Mainstream media companies will master blogs as an advertising tool and take over vast commercial stretches of the blogosphere. Over the next five years, this could well divide winners and losers in media. And in the process, mainstream media will start to look more and more like—you guessed it—blogs. Clay Shirky, a Web expert at New York University, calls it “an absorption process where the thing doing the absorbing changes.”
If you have 15 minutes, read the full article. If you don’t, just understand this. Your successful online marketing = Social Media.
Update, this needs a graph to illustrate why this businessweek article is 5 years too late. We are now about dead middle of the red adoption curve.. relevancy is bottoming out soon as the medium is taken over by said corporate entities mentioned in businessweek article.
