Park Place Dealerships Launches Company Blog

Park Place Dealerships announced the launch of its automotive blog, referred to as "The Expert Blog" following the lead of the company tagline, “Experts in Excellence”.

The blog is designed to provide weekly tips, photos, videos and news/articles on Park Place luxury automotive brands, location news, new and used car sales and service research, as well as local community and event stories. Content will be developed from Park Place members who are truly experts in their respective positions within the dealership. The Expert Blog will provide a platform where members and clients can share and interact with the contributed content.

The blog design makes efficient use of advanced drop down navigation, and interactive and social media widgets designed and developed by a partnership between us, and Lee Chestnutt of Design Chemical. Developed on the popular WordPress blog platform - social media widgets will help make the content more interactive and shareable. We had a vision for a ultra-beautiful and highly-usable blog, and the dynamic WordPress mega menus conceptualized by us, and brought to fruition by Lee - are a huge part of what takes this blog 'over the top'. Thank you Lee!!

Over the last several months, Park Place has made a large effort in increasing exposure across social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Pinterest. The addition of the blog will make relevant and interesting company and brand news easily accessible to readers. This social media initiative is expected to continue as the company realizes the increasing need for social media interactions and exposure for clients and members. To view the Park Place “Expert Blog” please visit http://blog.parkplace.com.

Scrapbooking on Steroids

It's a bug blog to fall in love with...

Congratulations to my one of my classmates from *many* days gone by, and scrapbooking sensation - Stacey, for launching her brand new blog called, I’m In Love With A Bug.

What? A bug?

Stacey is in love with the Cricut line of electronic scrapbooking cutters (which she affectionately calls “bugs”) and is excited about sharing her creative experiences, inspiration and tips and tricks with the whole world.

These cutters are like scrapbooking on steroids as they allow you to get amazing creative results with the touch of a button. Stacey actually owns three different “bugs” or Cricut products. The original Cricut is a machine that cuts beautiful designs and alphabets for card making, home décor, scrapbooking, paper crafting, and more. Of course, she never leaves home without her Gypsy product which gives her the ability to design whenever and wherever she wants - at the dentist’s office, grocery store, or wherever she has a free minute and a free hand. And the third “bug” she can’t live without is the Cricut Cake which is specifically designed for decorating cakes, cupcakes, cookies, and confections in no time at all.

In order to marry the visual design of the blog with the verbiage of her topic, I used scrapbooking design elements in the background and recommended that she use video as well as words to educate whenever possible.

If you’re a scrapbooking junkie, be sure and visit I'm In Love With A Bug for a quick fix and put your scrapbooking on steroids.

LOVING Blogger Right Now

Ok, I just saw and used the BRAND NEW BLOG TEMPLATE DESIGNER - on Blogger.com - (where I proudly host my own blog) and while I'm a little worried that it is SO easy to design your own blog with these tools - (since I offer blog design as a service) I have to say - it's AWESOME.

You can easily select layout, theme, colors and your own elements such as font colors, background pattern or image - to make your blog stand out and be unique.

It appears - that now anyone can have a GREAT looking blog without any trouble at all - and just a few minutes of fiddling around back-end of Blogger. Could life be any better? Blogger is free - and now you can design it on your own in just a few minutes.

Seriously - With all the different layout, customization options - I can't see how any two blogs could be exactly alike using Blogger's new template design tool.

But certainly - (hopefully) people will still need help with custom graphics and special touches on their Blogger blogs.

If not - I can start selling more WordPress customizations.... :)

Happy Blogging!

Welcome to the internet... SPEXY LADY...

One of my clients, for whom I designed a blog - and who shall remain a complete mystery (because mysteries are really fun, and this person is...) - is a total SPEXY LADY.

A very saavy fashion editor and style guru, you are sure to find great info on her blog, info and news, great articles on style, fashion, parenting, relationships, nightlife and more - on her very cool blog: SpexyLady.

Welcome to the internet, SPEXY LADY! I for one am going to follow this blog!

Not New, But Very Much Needed - MySpace

Just stumbled upon a very good article and example of CSS to 'decrappify' MySpace web profiles. Great article, thought I'd mention it here - Mike Davidson's Blog.

I have to say, I tried this technique with a blog resdesign - here: Absolute Pitch Public Relations - and while it turned out fairly nice, I find that MySpace is crazy about cross browser compatibility, still. I had lots of problems getting my 'MySpace' project to look as nice as Mike Davidson did with his blog - but I finally realized that you can't allow HTML in the comments section, or the images and other doodads your 'friends' can put in your comments will throw your tables and design out of whack.

Took me a long time to figure this out, I'm a little embarrased... but lesson learned. So - for the most part, if you want a nice clean, contained look, you have to create new template with the default MySpace CSS, (as Mike provides in his blog at above referenced link) and then turn of the HTML Friend Comments. (or as far as I know.)

Still a learning process.....