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 – Rate your Flickr photos

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.

twit.pix.ly – The ultimate Twitter Avatar Battle

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.

We did a short post on tending your social garden over on our Arizona SEO blog. Worth a read.

While some may see time spent on social networks a waste, it really can be a productive endeavour. The name recognition, branding reinforcement, and personal connections you can make can prove valuable in tangible and intrinsic ways down the line. Tending your social garden in as important to business today as the trade show was 15 years ago.

A good friend of mine up in maple leaf country asked us to put together a sports blog for him.  This is the type of site where wordpress really shines.  A straight forward blog with multiple authors, basic navigation, and content sorted by team/author.

Be sure to follow sportstalkbuzz.com for all your sports blogging needs. Expect big things from this site very soon.