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No, not the soulless corporate ‘machine’ in Pink Floyd’s classic — I had just escaped from there, lol.

WARNING: Geek Post Ahead!

Welcome back to our 20th anniversary ‘look back’ at how it all began. Let’s talk 2004 tech! ‘The machine’ in question here being the BRAND NEW Dell Dimension 8400 tower that I bought as the first of the newly-launched Diamond Mind’s (tax deductible) start-up expenses. Pre-loaded with Windows XP, a powerful 3.0 GHz Intel Pentium processor, an incredible 150 gb of hard drive space, and a whopping 512 MB of memory. And all of this processing power attached to the Internet with — get this — a 56k modem!

Seriously, all overwrought superlatives aside, this new machine was quite an upgrade from my prior (and beloved) Gateway Select. Beloved because it was the first PC that I had personally owned — previously it was all laptop loans from work, and a word processor that I bought in the early 90s and carted around for YEARS but never did a damn thing on — but also beloved because it ran Windows 98, the best O/S ever. (And also also beloved because it was where I had spent countless hours playing Half-Life, Duke Nukem, Outlaws, etc. But that’s a post for another day!)

The old Gateway, while still rocking the same 56k modem, only housed an AMD Athlon 600 MHz processor, and that, along with the 20 gb hard drive and 128 mb of RAM, just couldn’t cut it in the high-speed world of web design, lol. Plus the tower was too big to fit under my new corner desk (the second major purchase, ha). So it had to go… to my in-laws, where it nobly provided many, many more years of quality service (read: Solitaire and Tetris).

Let’s see, what other awesome things were part of the new setup? A brand new wired keyboard and PS/2 mouse came with the Dell — no biggies there — and both old and new PCs had the (at the time, required) 3.5″ floppy disk drive (though the disks were no longer floppy, lol), and both had (for me, required) a CD-RW drive. I did upgrade the new Dell from a DVD drive to a DVD+RW, which was cool. But the best part — maybe even better than all the new processing speed and disk space — was replacing my old CRT-style, ginormous, desk-hogging monitor with my very first flat-panel! An LCD (from Circuit City, my local go-to at the time for tech) with a crazy big 17″ display (1280×1024 max resolution).

All the better to build those 860 or 1024 pixel-wide websites that were standard for the time, ha ha! But that also is a post for another day…

No, not Sgt. Pepper teaching the band to play. Something much less momentous, but certainly much more personal…

It WAS twenty years ago today that Diamond Mind Web Design, LLC officially opened our ‘doors’. What that meant in real world terms: I brought the DMWD website online, and wrote 9-1-2004 on all the forms as “first day of business”. 🙂

So, I thought I would celebrate making it through 20 years of web designing — 5 years longer as a solopreneur than my prior corporate life, you know, what I thought was my career — by reopening the long dormant Diamond Mind blog, lol.

Check back often this month, as I’ll be taking a look back at the exciting early days of running my own business! And yes, there might have been some slight sarcasm there. Truthfully, though, I’m grateful for all of it, even the not-so-easy times, but mostly for all those wonderful folks who have helped me along my way, from then to today.

Here’s to good web design never going out of style, and hoping our work will always raise a smile!

The What:

Website owners who use SSL certificates purchased from Symantec prior to June 1, 2016 will need to replace them soon, or site users will begin seeing the warning show below. This includes SSLs issued from companies owned by Symantec, including Thawte, Verisign, Equifax, GeoTrust, and RapidSSL.

The When:

The Chrome v66 browser, which arrives mid-April, and Firefox v60, coming in May, will both display the above warning. Other browsers will most likely follow shortly. In October 2018, new versions of Chrome and Firefox will completely remove support of any kind for affected certificates.

The Who:

The major players in this scenario are Google (makers of Chrome) and Mozilla (makers of Firefox) on the browser side, and Symantec and DigiCert on the SSL side. DigiCert has purchased Symantec’s certificate-issuance division and is currently working with Google and Mozilla to repair the situation.

The How:

If your website’s URL begins with https:// then you are using an SSL certificate. To check it’s validity, you may visit the link below. Enter only your domain name (the www.name.com part) to see if your current certificate will remain valid, or if it will need to be replaced: The link is:

https://www.websecurity.symantec.com/support/ssl-checker

The Why:

A series of poor decisions and misplaced trust in 3rd party outsourcing resulted in Symantec issuing thousands of faulty SSL certificates. More than once. This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment event, rather it is a joint decision made by the major browser manufacturers, put in place over time, in an effort to maintain consumer confidence in the SSL certificate system in general.

The ‘What The Heck Do I Do’:

If you have a valid SSL, then you should be good to go. It wouldn’t hurt to re-check closer to October, though, just to be on the safe side.  If you get the dreaded ‘you must replace’ message, you have a couple of options:

1. DigiCert is offering to replace all Symantec-issued certificates (including those issued by the subsidiaries listed above) for free. To claim your free replacement, visit this link (the sooner the better): https://www.digicert.com/replace-your-symantec-ssl-tls-certificates/
2. If you prefer, you may request that your website host replace the SSL certificate with one from another company. There’s no guarantee that this will be free, however. Discuss your options with your hosting provider.

If all of this is more than you want to deal with, contact Diamond Mind Web Design for help at (417) 496-9905.

The Other Stuff:

For more information regarding the contents of this post, please view the following articles:

• A list of Symantec’s SSL-related issues: https://wiki.mozilla.org/CA:Symantec_Issues
• Google’s plan/timeline and reasoning: https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-distrust-symantec.html
• DigiCert’s take on the situation: https://www.websecurity.symantec.com/en/us/digicert-and-symantec-faq

Perky voice on my phone today….

“Hi! This is Sarah, calling about your Google listing? I’m looking at my system here, and it still looks like your listing is incorrect. Correct listings mean you’re much more likely to be ranked above your competition. So if you’ll call me back at (1-800-number) and get me the correct information, we’ll get it all updated! ”

Translation: “Hi, I’m a scammer! I have no relationship at all with Google — you’ll notice I never said I actually worked there. I’m really trying to get your name, social, and any password info you’re dumb enough to give me! Have a nice day!”

I’ve heard from several of my clients about similar calls within the last few days, all with the same basic question: Is this legit or bogus? The answer — ding ding ding! — is BOGUS.  I tell them that Google is like the IRS — they will NEVER call you to ask for personal details about you or your business (unless you have specifically requested them to).

In fact, 95% of the contacts you may receive about business listings, either via phone or email (or even text) are scams of some sort or another. They may be straight up phishing scams like this one, or if coming from places like YP.com, scams of the “technically we’re telling you the truth, but leaving out some really, really important details” variety.  But that’s a post for another day…

Look, the fact is there are bad players in the web design industry. It’s true in any line of work, of course, but it’s a shame that in this business, one of the worst is also one with a large Internet presence and amount of pull. Without naming names, we’ll just say that this company used to put out a phone book, and it had pages of a lemon-colored hue… They only go by their initials on the Web, though, these days.

Simply put, they’re evil. As in e-EE-vill. Exactly why and how is a rant for another day, but it’s always a tremendous pleasure to get to pull another business out from under their Palpatine-like yoke. Dave’s Garage Doors is our latest ‘rescue client’. Dave’s is owned and operated by a wonderful couple who just want to run their business and serve others, not be held hostage by a gazillion-dollar corporation, yet that’s exactly what was happening. Unable to get that company to even make the most basic of changes to their site, and paying hundreds of dollars a month for non-existent SEO services, they were faced with the choice of either completely abandoning their current site and domain, or continuing to pay ridicuous fees.

It’s not as easy a choice as it may seem, but they were able to see the benefits of spending money on a fresh start, with plenty of growth potential, versus staying with the status quo that was getting them nowhere. Even with the usual small-business budget contraints, we were able to build them a fantastic little website by keeping the majority of content to a single page with parallax backgrounds and on-page links, adding a second page strictly for contact purposes. We’ll add a before/after work gallery as time and budget allow. Most importantly, our clients LOVE the new site, and the feeling of being independent once again. Check it out here: www.davesgaragedoorrepair.com

One of our long-term clients, Rod Triplett of Family 1st Pawn in Republic, is also the Vice President of the Missouri PawnBrokers Association. Rod had been trying to convince his fellow Association members for quite a while (years) to pony up and replace their old (and frankly embarrassing) website with something modern and new.

His wise counsel finally won the day, and of course he hired Diamond Mind to bring the goods! This is what we like to call an “iceberg site,” in that only a small portion of is public-facing; the majority of the site is behind a member login wall. On the back end, we have given them a (working) member account creation and payment system, a chat forum for fraud alerts, legislative discussions, items wanted and items for sale, and much more.

Check out the new site here, www.missouripawnbrokers.com, and if you frequent pawn shops, be sure to tell them to join the MPBA!

We see a lot of what we like to call “Bob’s yer uncle” websites — where the business owner “knows a guy” who does web design. Whether that guy is actually your uncle, or your kid who’s in college, a fellow from church, or whatever, the fact is they’re still amateurs that you’ve hired to put a face on your business. First impressions are the same on the Web as they are in person! You’re not going to hire an amateur to re-wire the electricity in your house, or fix your leaking roof, so why do it for something that’s just as important? It’s your livelihood!

This was just such a case. At first glance, the orginal Spot Plus website was OK (at best) — looked professional enough, wasn’t going to immediately scare anyone away. But on closer inspection, there were plenty of issues with the site (a list an entire page long, in fact) and what was there was in no way going to entice customers to use their services. In the entire time the original site was up, Spot Plus never got a single contact through their online form. True story.

Thankfully for his bottom line, the owner (Jerry Grant) hired Diamond Mind to put a NEW face on his business, both with an updated logo and an entirely revamped website. For inspiration, we used some sage advice from a Chuck Mefford marketing seminar that Jerry and I had attended together — figure out the “why” and start from there. So, instead of focusing the new site on carpet cleaning services, we built it around why we, as homeowners, need to hire carpet cleaning, carpet repair, and so on. We want to keep our children healthy! We love our pets but they tear up stuff! (Personal experience there.) Accidents happen!

This was a whopper of a site, and a fun challenge to get it to all come together. I’m proud to say that it’s the best work we’ve done (to date). We even got complimented on it by GoDaddy help line personnel! (May wonders never cease.) Check out the entire site here, www.spotpluscarpet.com, and if you want carpet that’s “white sock clean,” call Jerry!

Hot off the (virtual) presses!  Here’s a single page website we built for Southwest Dealer Services, designed to go along with a radio advertising campaign put together by our referral partner Scott Dickinson at Mid-West Family Broadcasting.  As with many (seemingly most) of the sites we build, we had very little to start the design with; in this case, just the slogan “Fall in love with your car again!” Everything else had to be created from scratch.

Southwest already had a website — one that gives the word ‘antiquated’ new meaning — but for various reasons, the existing site couldn’t be redesigned.  So, for Scott’s campaign, we registered a new domain — www.fallinlovewithyourcaragain.com, duh — and used it solely for the landing page, to give the radio ads a recognizable and easy-to-remember URL (Scott’s MO for all of his campaigns). As Eppy Epperman once said, “We think it’s pretty excellent!”

The Legacy of a System, or, The System of a Legacy (System)

Just wrapped up — a complete overhaul of the StrongPath Financial website for our long-time friends/clients Dean Arens and Rick Flores.  These fine fellows are financial planners, which means every single bit of marketing they do must be overseen and approved by “compliance”.  When it comes to websites, these restrictions even go so far as to determine what website providers they are allowed to use, and all available template options from these providers have plenty of restraining factors built in.

This redesign was necessary (and a long time coming) because the prior provider’s templates weren’t responsive or mobile-friendly in any way.  And I’m pretty sure the person who designed the content management system did so while listening to Tal Bachman’s “She’s So High”… the year it came out!  Suffice it to say, it was old. And clunky. And like working in a straitjacket.  And… you get the idea. At least the new provider’s system had a modern(ish) back-end, and some workable, and responsive, template options.

So, here is a “before & after” look at the StrongPath website’s home page.  We actually designed the “before” version of the site, as well, which was itself a redesign of an even older and more basic (e.g. ugly) site.  The first redesign, done back in 2011, was literally a case of “the best we can do with what we have to work with,” so please judge it based on that, ha.  The new site is not perfect (by our standards, at least) but it is MUCH better, and you can use it on your smartphone!  Which is nice.

Check out the full site at www.strongpathfinancial.com, and keep Dean and Rick in mind when you’re looking for help with your investments, 401(k), college funding plans, and retirement planning.

A good friend of ours, Preston Dial, has been a professional photographer for over 4 decades, but medical issues have severely limited his ability to use one hand, which has meant that he can no longer do most of what he did for a living. Photography is his passion, though, not just his livelihood, so he turned his attention, and his incredible talents, to real estate photography, where he can take as long as needed to set up a shot and not have to worry about the subject going off to do something else!

Few home sellers, or even real estate professionals, give much thought to how much of an impression the pictures of a home for sale make on a buyer, but in actuality, many times the prospective buyer makes a decision on which house to look at based on how it appears online, and may never even see it in person if it doesn’t look good enough! A home that’s up for sale may be a real beauty, but if “cell phone snaps” are all a buyer sees, that home may never draw the buyer to see it in person.

So, we built this WordPress site for Preston to use as a ‘display case’ for examples of his work. And amazing work it is, too. Check out the full site at: www.affordablerealestatephotography.com. And share Preston and his talent with anyone you know who wants to get the most value when selling a home!

Stills can’t capture the beautiful parallax effects of this website we built for Casey Cooper, a mortgage banker with USA Mortgage.  As with all of their lenders, Casey was given a free corporate website when hired — and as you can probably imagine, that cookie-cutter corporate template left MUCH to be desired. (It even uses Flash!) Some of the folks there have wised up and established their own web presence, and Casey asked us to do the same for him, even giving us some fellow co-workers’ sites to use as guideline examples.

Well, short story long, Casey was definitely not expecting the final result to be what it was!  We can safely say we blew his mind with the site we gave him. After all, mortgage loans aren’t exactly the stuff of which dreams (and dreamy websites) are made of.  Our thought process on this site, however, was to play up the “dream home” aspect of getting the right mortgage loan to buy that house you always wanted.  And, of course, the right mortgage loan can only be arranged by the right mortgage lender!  (P.S. That would be Casey.)

Check out the full site at: www.ccoop4mortgage.com. And if you know someone who needs a loan and would like to work with an experienced lender who gets the job done right, have them call Casey. He always has your best interest!

Steve Cox, owner of Dents Unlimted / Cox Collision / The Car Spa, recently refurbished an older building in downtown Springfield, turning it into a modern climate-controlled storage facility, and asked us to build a website for his newly christened Cox Climate Controlled Storage.  “Yay,” we said, “A storage center!”  (Read that as Wayne’s “Hi. We’re in Delaware.”)  “What do you have for us to work with on this project, Steve?” we said.  “Well, I have a logo,” said Steve.  And that was, in fact, it.  (Amazing how many sites we do that start in this exact same manner.)

So, the fertile (diamond) mind was put to work, and an entire site was developed from what was originally a black-and-white logo. (Kudos for the green coloring go to Cody Boggs of PostNet – thanks, man.)  The final result was pretty spectacular, we think, especially relative to your typical storage center website (including Steve’s competition).  Check out the full site at: www.cccstorage.net. And be sure to let your friends know that climate-controlled, ultra-secure storage is available in a convenient and central location!

Please accept my apologies for the email blast(s) that just went out to all of you.  I am working with a new theme as I update my website, and this theme apparently included some sample posts for reference.  Still not sure why they were published and emailed, but you can safely ignore/trash/delete all of them.

Thank you for your understanding!

Martin

Yesterday was International Data Privacy Day. Ironically, 1 in 10 people reading this post probably had their data stolen yesterday through a malicious Facebook app. Maybe this one, maybe not — depends on which source you believe — but data-stealing apps are out there and being used constantly by unaware, or unsavvy, FB users.

You should avoid those apps-of-the-month, but if abstinence from FB apps just isn’t something you can practice, here’s a good rule of thumb to identify the bad’uns: If you are ON Facebook, and click on an app or post that then asks you to log into Facebook before continuing, you can bet the mud farm that it’s about to record and misuse your login and personal info.

Depending on how enthusiastic you are in populating your Facebook profile with personal data about yourself, and/or how lax you are with passwords, that info can give the bad guys the ammunition they need to impersonate you on FB, steal your identity, even discover and access your financial accounts. Trust me, if they aim to misbehave, you would be very surprised at how easy it is to do so once you have clicked and given them permission.

At one time, Bowie was pretty much the biggest rock star on the planet, yet he never lost the ability to laugh at himself, and could still write and perform songs as personal as this. RIP, Mr. David Bowie — the coolest dude who ever was.

It’s always nice to wake up and find one of your clients featured in an article on the front page of the local newspaper. (In a non-criminal fashion, of course!) In this case, our latest client, Missouri Sun Solar, was one of the businesses spotlighted in an excellent article by Thomas Gounley of the News-Leader, titled “Why Solar Power Is Finally Having Its Moment In The Sun.”

We took on this project in collaboration with our friends at High Tide Communications. The project entailed turning an existing static website into a customer-manageable WordPress installation, while keeping the look of the site as close to the original as possible, as well as moving the whole thing to a new web host. We also needed to ensure the new site communicated captured leads to the client’s CRM.

Here’s a screenshot of part of the new homepage — improved from the original, in our opinion 🙂 — and the best part is that the client loved their new site so much, they immediately hired us to do a second, similar project! So thanks to Mar’Ellen and Melissa at High Tide, and Jason at Missouri Sun Solar — it was a great collaboration.  Or, as they say in Firefly, shiny!

Image courtesy of photostock at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Have you upgraded to Windows 10 yet?  By all accounts, it is leaps and bounds better than the universally-reviled Windows 8, and keeps alive Microsoft’s odd/even string of cursed/decent operating system releases.  The best part is that it is free (supposedly) to current Windows 7 and 8 users, though we have yet to test this out ourselves.

The less-than-wonderful part? Apparently the new OS is none too shy about spying on your activity — nothing new for Microsoft in terms of browser usage, but their data collection has now expanded to include the contents of messages and calendars, apps and networks, some purchases, what you upload to Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage, and use of the sparkly new Cortana search assistant.

Of course, you can opt out of all (?) of this stuff during installation, or afterwards if you’re the kind of person who never reads those Terms & Conditions screens (which means 99.5% of humanity). After all, Microsoft would never, ever want to know things about their customers without permission, right? As they have stated, “real transparency starts with straightforward terms and policies that people can clearly understand.”

Here’s the catch: that “transparency” comes in the form of 45 pages of service agreement documents. And you can believe those docs aren’t written in the King’s English, either, but rather in the kind of techno-legalese that pretty much guarantees you give up reading after three pages or so.  This comment from a terrific Rock Paper Shotgun article pretty much says it all:

There is no world in which 45 pages of policy documents and opt-out settings split across 13 different Settings screens and an external website constitutes “real transparency.”

Why all of this data collection? Two words: targeted ads.  No different than the practices of Facebook, Google, Twitter, or any other “free” online service whose end game is knowing as much as possible about you, and therefore about what you would like to buy. So, buyer-beware, and user-beware, when it comes to upgrading. Oh, and if you happen to currently use some other browser than Internet Explorer (and by all that’s holy, you should), be prepared to have that overridden by the upgrade, as well. But that’s an article for another day!

I hope you all got the opportunity to check out the excellent Google Doodles honoring Sally Ride yesterday, on what would have been her 64th birthday. Sally was the first female astronaut in the United States, riding the space shuttle Challenger into space in 1983 and again in 1984. In addition to her inspiring career with NASA, Sally started a company helping to educate and inspire young people, with an emphasis on girls, to pursue careers in science.

Below are the five Doodles covering aspects of Sally’s life and career, as well as a “behind the scenes” video by the artist/animator of the doodles, Olivia Huynh. You may have noticed that the Doodles loaded randomly each time the Google home screen was refreshed.  This random image rotation effect can be accomplished with a small bit of Javascript, and we currently make use of it on several websites. If this effect is something you are interested in placing on your site, give us a call at (417) 496-9905.

With the passing of troubled, yet undeniably genius John F. Nash, I felt like sharing this opening track to the movie ‘A Beautiful Mind’ by James Horner. Soundtracks are fast becoming a lost art, sadly, but inspiring works like this still pop up now and again to fire the imagination.

If you have not seen the movie, a Ron Howard rendering of Nash’s life as a Nobel Prize-winning mathmetician who struggled with schizophrenia for many years, I highly recommend it. In fact, you should watch it at least twice to really appreciate the nuances in the plot and the acting.

If you enjoyed this, seek out the rest of the soundtrack — you won’t be disappointed!

Anyone who knows me at all will have known that it wouldn’t be long before I posted something from the early ’80s! (Boy, that was a convoluted thought.) For those of you who weren’t around at that time, well, you missed out on something truly special, musically-speaking. The early ’80s was, and is, a treasure trove of so many wonderful songs and bands that it still pays dividends today, even thirty years later.

One of the bands I completely missed back in those days was Altered Images, led by the lovely waif from Scotland, Clare Grogan. Probably best known for “Happy Birthday” (included in one of the first scenes of Sixteen Candles), they weren’t around for too long, only putting out an EP and three albums, but during that time managed to run the gamut from punk beginnings to synth-and-bass New Wave. Here is a tune from their last album, sung “live” on Top Of The Pops, ca. 1983.

Yes, it is cliche to say that every song from the time had a saxophone break in it — though most did, ha! — but how many can you say had a trumpet solo? This next song did, and a heartbreakingly lovely one at that. Easily my favorite Altered Images tune, and a lovely but sad way for their career to end, as they broke up after this album (“Bite”) came out. Ach, but we miss ya, lassie!