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Corporate Holiday Gifts have been a long time standard among the corporate world. Never underestimate the value of this tradition. For years, companies have branded their logos and advertised themselves with gifts to leave an impression on the receiving end. These gifts let people and their employees know how much they and their brand cares. This is an important element in the human resources and advertising world. Showing gratitude to the people that support you and work for you is invaluable. People who feel appreciated are way more likely to work hard and buy from you in the future. Creating a team like atmosphere is important for any successful business. Corporate holiday gifts help show that every team member is valued and every customer is appreciated.

Well we all know everyone loves to get a gift, how about a gift that lasts even longer…

Here are 5 Top Corporate Gift Ideas:

1. Popcorn and candy tins are great! The treats they offer are enjoyed for weeks, and after that, there is a reusable tin to use for so many things. They can hold mementos, or coupons, or even a coin collection. Best of all, your companies brand will be there. 

2. For the more established company, there are eye catching, decadent gourmet towers. These towers will be sure to woo your employees or customers.  They are offered with an assortment of the most wonderful, mouth pleasuring delights you can imagine. Also an imprinted ribbon is sure to get your brand noticed.
   

3. Executive Gifts are wonderful for those customers and employees with a distinguished taste. There are so many to choose from. These are gifts that will be used year after year and exude class! Choose from leather coasters to elegant desk accessories. And of course your brand will be forever on these items.  A sure to please gift at that!
   

4. For a simple and elegant thank you, gourmet chocolate truffles in a beautiful gold or silver box are sure to be well received. A timeless classic, these little drops of heaven are sure to be appreciated. Your logo can be imprinted on the ribbon and with every bite, they will think of your brand.
   

5. Wine gifts have been a favorite year after year. Who doesn’t love to receive a bottle of wine or a beautiful wine gift set for the holidays! For years, Corporate companies have given bottles of wine wrapped in beautiful holiday wine gift bags. Why not kick it up a notch and give a beautiful Rosewood wine gift set with a brass imprinted plate. Of course your company logo will be forever branded in brass!
   

These are just a few ideas from our company to yours! Enjoy your Holidays! May your business prosper and grow!

Web Design Tools are always handy to a web designer and coder, with tons of features, and fantastic user interface, these tools will make a web designer's life much easier.

1. Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

2. ColorZilla

With ColorZilla you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. You can Zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes. DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily.

3. Typetester

Typetester is an online application for comparison of the fonts for the screen. Its primary role is to make web designer’s life easier. Typetester is a great way to test and compare fonts for brands, keywords, signs, ads, etc. Instant access website without any registration.

4. IconFinder

IconFinder provides high quality icons for web designers and developers in an easy and efficient way. Search through 158,184 icons or browse 822 icon sets.

5. COLOURlovers

If you are looking for backgrounds or patterns to use on your website or Twitter page, Colour Lovers has a ton of ways to create patterns or your own palettes for background images. The site is made up of a community where people from all over the world share patterns or palettes on the website. The site allows developers to browse, create, and search themes, patterns, palettes, or colors. There are also design tools like ColorSchemer or Themeleon to help design page backgrounds.

6. FireFTP

FireFTP gives you the power of a top-notch FTP client from within your Firefox browser. It can handle multiple accounts and remember different logins, passwords, and connection settings for each. The plug-in works across platforms, lets users import and export account settings, and supports directory comparisons and synchronization, time-stamp syncing, file hashes, and auto-reconnect.

7. Browsershots

You can view screenshots of your website as it displays in different browsers, with a great degree of customization. Browser shots lets you choose your screen size, color depth, JavaScript and Flash settings. This website features the kitchen sink of browser lists, including a few you may never have heard of before.

8. CSS Tab Designer

CSS Tab Designer is a unique and easy to use software to help you design CSS-based lists and tabs visually and without any programming knowledge required. With CSS Tab Designer, you can: Quickly design your list visually; Choose from a variety of styles/colors (currently 45 different designs/colors supported); Generate strict XHTML compliant code (only available for Windows).

He has inspired us all. He will never be forgotten.

(Desktop Background)

Steve Jobs quotes on life.

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“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

_____

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

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“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

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“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

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“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.” [Wired, February 1996]

_____

“I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals. As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.” [Wired, February 1996]

_____

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.” [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

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“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.” [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]

Hiya!

I have some exciting news. We are taking our social networks (Read: Facebook and Twitter) off autopilot. It's time to start providing you with some sweet content you can use to run your business better.

Our mission is to help your business run the best it can. So, going forward you will find many new and helpful posts on Facebook, Twitter, and The Mines Press Blog. The crew is working on some great design guides, marketing and productivity tips and a bunch more cool ideas.

But we need your help.

To make sure we are providing you with exactly what you need we want to know exactly what you want to hear about. So go to our Facebook page and post a comment with something you'd like to see more of from us.

Oh yeah, I said there would be free stuff too. Anyone who comments with an idea on our Facebook page will get a free gift from us. So get to it!

You're a small business. Maybe you're an independent insurance agent or a lawyer or an accountant. You know a website is an important part of your small business, but you're not really sure why or how it integrates with your marketing. You just know that in 2011, not having a website that represents your services well is probably a bad message to send clients and prospects. What to do?

The first thing you need to do is recognize the benefits that an appropriate website can have for your business and set your online goals accordingly. For example, if you're in the business of selling personal insurance, does it make sense for a small independent agency to try and compete with the online giants like Progressive and Geico? Of course not. That would be an unrealistic expectation.

So what should the goals of small and medium sized professional businesses be for their online presence? If you ask me, the best outcome of any prospect visiting your website would be that prospect calling you on the phone. That's right. No online communications, no forms to fill out, no online quoting. You need your phone to ring. That's how small and medium sized professional businesses have dealt with new business opportunities for generations and it's still the best way to close a sale or gain a new client. I'm not suggesting you shouldn't have some of the online bells and whistles on your website. Some of them are quite simple and inexpensive to implement, but your best shot at closing a sale is still your own personal charm, knowledge, experience and ability to be flexible in a conversation with a prospect. Computers don't have any of those skills.

Let's return to our personal insurance example for just a moment. The giants in the industry are spending a fortune getting prospects to go through their online quoting systems. I just finished quoting my personal insurance with two of them to see how well the process works. While the sales process was impressive, and the websites fairly easy to navigate, I still didn't know the answers to several of the questions they asked during the process, so I guessed. I also couldn't be sure they knew everything they needed to know about me to quote the appropriate amount of coverage. Wouldn't the fact that I own a business be an important detail concerning how much coverage I need? They never asked.

In short, I would have been much happier talking to a real person and preferably someone local (and in fact, I do). I don't know how many people get halfway through those online quote systems and then pick up the phone out of frustration, but I'm betting it's a large percentage. The question is, when someone in your area finally picks up the phone, are they calling you? or a competitor?

Now you can start to understand where and when your online presence matters. It matters when a prospect or even an existing client Googles your product or service. Your challenge is to make sure your small business is presented as one of the options offered when Google returns its search results. Meeting that challenge begins with understanding the online search process and then taking the necessary steps to optimize your online presence with the major search engines.

So let's see how the online search process works. Often, people begin the online search process by Googling a product or service and get inappropriate results because the term they searched on was too general. Then they refine their search, often by adding the name of the town they're searching in. An example would be someone searching for a contractor to build a new backyard fence. They may begin the process by searching on the word "fencing." That would bring up results that might be inappropriate for two reasons. They might get some fencing contractors, but they may be of the national variety. Home Depot perhaps. That search might also yield results having to do with the sport of "fencing."  Wikipedia will probably show up, as would numerous news articles about the national fencing team.

At this point, the person performing the search would refine the search term by adding the name of their town. They might also modify the search by adding additional descriptive terms like "backyard" or "chain link." The new search would look something like this:  chain link fence contractor Yorktown NY. Now Google has much more quality information to work with. Right off the bat, Google knows this is a local search. This person lives in Yorktown and has no desire to see listings from anywhere but the area surrounding Yorktown. This person has also removed the confusion surrounding "fencing" the noun, and "fencing" the verb. The new list of results presented by Google is exactly what the searcher was hoping for. The group of businesses shown in this second screen shot is a perfect example of Google Local.

You can see that there is one paid advertisement at the top of the screen (often there are two or three), followed by the local listings. Sometimes, Google will "blend" the local listings in with the organic listings which in this case followed all the local. The determining factor for blending the local and organic listings seems to depend on how large the city or town is that you use to modify the search. Smaller towns almost always result in a group of local listings at the top of the search results. Larger towns or cities tend to result in blended listings. In either case, the presence of local is the only way a small business can get visibility in Google.

Most often, when a prospect clicks on your local listing the end result is a phone call.  What this means in layman's terms, is that Google's local listings have effectively replaced the printed Yellow Pages.  In the old days, you bought a display ad in the local Yellow Pages and felt confident local prospects would find you.  In the new paradigm, you have to make sure you show up in Google's local listings.  That process, local search engine optimization, is half art and half science and the rules are constantly changing as Google tries to stay one step ahead of those trying to "game" the system.  If you're not someone who pays constant attention to what Google does, then your search engine optimization, whether it be the local variety or traditional SEO (they are very different) is better left to the experts.

Are you working on improving and maintaining your local search rankings with Google?  Have you registered those business pages properly.  Done your keyword research?  Explored which citations are the right ones for you and registered them?  Have you set up your review sites optimally?  Do you check your search metrics monthly to see what search terms are leading customers to your door?

If all of this sounds like Greek to you, fear not.  The Mines Press has a dedicated staff just waiting to serve you so you can spend your time working on your business and we can spend our time doing local optimization for you.

Go to http://boostyoursearch.com/

October is Breast Cancer Awareness month.  It is the month when people become more educated about the signs of breast cancer, its symptoms, and how to help prevent it.

Since 1985, the recognizable symbol of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, pink ribbons, are displayed on TV, poster and magazine advertisements as well as proudly adorned on women’s lapels.  Pink has been the primary color used to support this cause. Susan G. Komen Foundation, is asking people to wear pink as a sign of support for breast cancer awareness. By wearing pink you will help create awareness.

By creating awareness we can greatly reduce the risks of developing breast cancer. Remember, “Early detection is the best prevention”!

Quick facts:

• Breast cancer is the most common in American women and the second leading cause of women's cancer deaths.
• The five year survival rate of breast cancer is over 90% when detected early.
• In 1940, the lifetime risk of a woman developing breast cancer was one in twenty.
• In 2005, the American Cancer Society estimates that risk to be one in eight.
• 70% of all women with breast cancer have no known risk factors.

The Mines Press has an array of breast cancer awareness products to support this cause. 5% of proceeds will be donated to help find a cure for breast cancer.

Wear a pink ribbon to show your support!

Health Tip: Coffee addiction may not be the detriment to health many people think it is, according to a new study published in the journal Breast Cancer Research. Postmenopausal women over 50 who drink five or more cups of coffee every day may be as much as 57 percent less likely to develop estrogen-receptor (ER) negative tumors, say researchers from the Karolinska Institute (KI) in Sweden.

Learn more:

http://www.naturalnews.com/breast_cancer.html

Donate now:

http://www.nationalbreastcancer.org/

Question:  What do Dex Media, R.H. Donnelley, Idearc Media and Ambassador Media Group all have in common?  Answer:  They are all involved in the publishing of Yellow Pages directories and all of them have filed for bankruptcy!

Is this a curious coincidence, or is there a larger pattern to be seen here?  Think back to the last time you needed to find a local product or service.  Did you reach for the Yellow Pages directory in your kitchen drawer? or did you reach for Google, Bing or Yahoo?  If you’re like 70% of consumers, according to recent surveys, you got your information from the web and not from a printed Yellow Pages directory.  When you consider the facts, that statistic makes sense and is probably only limited to 70% because not all consumers have access to computers and smart phones with search engines.

First, there’s the convenience factor.  Many people are either sitting in front of a computer for a good portion of their day, or carrying a smart phone in their pocket.  When the time comes to search for a product or service, are you going to go find the tattered Yellow Pages directory stashed in the kitchen drawer or near the receptionist’s desk at the office, or are you going to Google it on the computer sitting in front of you or reach into your pocket and pull out your phone?  After all, you’re going to dial the number anyway.  You’ll be reaching for the phone even if you do use the printed directory!

Second, you get higher quality information from a Web search than you do from a printed directory.  A printed directory is essentially a book of advertisements.  A search using Google, Bing or Yahoo on the other hand, returns the basic directory information but also includes ratings, reviews, and other editorial that might help sway your opinion on who to give your business to.

If that last sentence didn’t stop you in your tracks then you’d better go back and read it again.  I said a Google, Bing or Yahoo search returns the basic directory information but also includes ratings, reviews, and other editorial that might help sway a prospect’s opinion on who to call.

Long pause . . . . . . are you doing anything to control the message Google, Bing and Yahoo are sending to your prospects and customers about your business?  For that matter, are you doing anything to make sure you show up at all when a prospect searches for your services?  

If you’re not familiar with the “local” versions of Google, Bing and Yahoo, now is the time to get acquainted because big changes are afoot for local search and you don’t want to have to play catchup with your competitors.  All three search engines are smart enough to detect when someone is searching for a local product or service and when they do, the results are dominated by a local map and a list of businesses that fall somewhere on that map.  If you’re a small local business, the trick is to make sure you appear on that map.  That’s a more complicated process than you may think.  

At this point in the conversation, most people say “Oh . . . I show up on the map” and then they type the name of their company into Google and smile when they come up.  The problem with this, is that is not how your prospects are going to find you.  They don’t know who you are and won’t type your name into Google.  Instead, they search for a product or a service, and they don’t always know exactly what to call that product or service.  For example:  say you have a new home-owner looking for an electrician to install landscape lighting.  What might that person type into Google to find the right contractor?  Electrician? Lighting installer?  Landscape lighting installer?  Any and all of these terms are possibilities.  If you’re a local electrician, will your website come up for any of those search terms?  What if you don’t have a website, does that mean there’s no chance online prospects will find you?  

The answer to both of those questions depends on how you’re handling your online presence.  There are a host of things you can do to improve your chances of showing up when prospects are searching for your services.  For example, there are literally thousands of online directories.  You’re probably already in many of them because they “scrape” your data from each other, but is your listing complete, accurate and identical throughout all these directory sites?  There are also free business pages on Google, Bing and Yahoo.  Have you found yours and optimized them?  Optimizing them doesn’t mean just filling them in with data.  You have to think about what people are searching for and adjust what information you put on these sites to match the search terms you’re hoping to rank well for.  If landscape lighting is something you want to rank for, but there’s no mention of it anywhere on your website or business pages the chances of you ranking for it are slim to none.  

While we’re on the subject of search terms, do you know which search terms are better ones to optimize for?  For example, which is a better term to optimize for if you sell auto insurance . . . . . “auto insurance” or “car insurance?”  The answer is it depends on which part of the country you live in.  In some areas, more people search for the term “car insurance.”  In other parts of the country, “auto insurance” is the better search term.  Knowing the answer to that question can make a big difference in how much traffic you can attract to your listing.

Last and probably most important, did you know that customers can review your business?  It used to be that reviews were only for restaurants, but websites such as Yelp, Google, and many others have given people an easy way to rate and review almost any product or service they use.  It’s a fairly new trend and it’s really just starting to gain traction for general businesses, but there are two important things to consider when thinking about ratings and reviews.  First, the people most likely to review a product or service are the people who are extremely dissatisfied.  Satisfied customers don’t think to reach out to the world and tell everyone about their experience buying insurance or having some lighting installed.  On the other hand, get someone angry and they’ll gladly carve an hour out of their busy schedule to go online and write about you.

The other very important thing to know about reviews is that Google, Bing and Yahoo factor them in when deciding which businesses to show in their local listings.  That means all things being equal between businesses competing for an online listing, if one has reviews and the others don’t, the business with reviews is more likely to get listed.   That means you need to be asking your satisfied customers to go online and review you.

In conclusion, if you’re spending hundreds or even more on a local Yellow Pages listing, it’s high time to consider whether or not that investment is still worthwhile.  More important, it’s time to take stock of your online presence.  Make sure Google, Bing and Yahoo are showing your listing when potential customers search for your services and even more important, make sure your reviews reflect the true nature of your business and not just the ravings of one unhappy customer.

Key Elements of Logo Design

1. Line - When you draw a line you activate space and/or create a mood. Diagonal, curvy lines are energetic and suggest motion. Horizontal lines evoke rest or stability. Lines can swell or shrink to create a sense of space or be used to express direction. A line can be continual, a series of points or an implied connection.

2. Shape is a flat, enclosed area created by a line, color, texture or the boundaries of other shapes. Geometric shapes represent order and precision. Organix shapes reflect the natural world. The simpler the shape, the clearer your communication will be.

3. Texture - The repetition and variation of lines, dots and shapes create texture (surface quality), adding visual interest to design and providing a sense of density.

4. Value is the relative lightness or darkness of the logo. The greater the difference in value, the higher the contrast achieved. Darker values are often associated with drama; lighter values are perceived as airy or restful.

5. Color adds an expressive element to design, each hue having symbolic relevance to cultural influences. Colors can be warm or cool, aggressive or calm. In combination, they recede and advance.

What makes a good logo?
"A good logo is distinctive, appropriate, practical, graphic, simple in form and conveys an intended message"
- the Logosauce Blog, www.logosauce.com
 

Working for a company that provides promotional pens, I tend to take ballpoint pens for granted.  It wasn't until the other day when I came across a fountain pen that my Mother had used to write letters to my Father during World War II, that I became curious about how the ballpoint pen came into being.

In 1888, an American leather tanner named John Loud patented a rollerball pen for marking leather hides.  The ink was the problem - it was either too thin and it leaked or it was too thick and it clogged.

In 1935, two Hungarian brothers, Laszlo and George Biro, invented an improved version of the ballpoint pen.  Lazlo, an editor at a small newspaper, was frustrated by the amount of time that he wasted refilling his fountain pens and by the fact that the pens frequently scratched or tore the newsprint paper.  George was a chemist, and together, they created new pen designs and inks to be used with them.

While vacationing at the seashore,  the brothers met Augustine Justo, the President of Argentina, who urged them to open a factory there.  When World War II erupted in Europe shortly thereafter, Laszlo and George fled to Argentina, but first stopped in Paris where they obtained a patent for their pen.

By 1943, the Biros had patented their pen and set up a manufacturing plant, but the Biro Pen was a failure.  The ink flow relied on gravity to feed the rollerball and the ink flow was unreliable.  They came up with a new design that used capillary action to deliver the ink to a textured rollerball. The redesigned pen went on the market a year later, and although the new design solved the problems, the pen was not a big commercial success and the Biros ran out of money.

It was, however, very popular with American and British fighter pilots who liked the pens because they would write a high altitudes and did not need refilling like fountain pens.  The British government licensed the pen for the RAF and the U.S. Department of State sent samples of the pen to a number of American pen manufacturers so they could develop a similar pen.  The Eberhard Faber Company paid the Biro brothers $500,000 for the U.S. rights to manufacture their pen and later resold the patent rights to the Eversharp Company, which began an extensive campaign to introduce the pen to America.

In a surprising end-run, a salesman from Chicago, Milton Reynolds, became the first American manufacturer to successfully market the ballpoint pen.  Reynolds had seen the Biro Pen in stores in Argentina and thought that it would sell well in America.  He ignored the Biro's patents, many of which had expired or had been improperly filed in the U.S. and set up a factory.  In a bold marketing move, he made a deal with Gimbels to be the first store to sell the pen.  On the first day that the pen went on sale, 5,000 customers showed up at Gimbels and purchased the entire 10,000 pens that the store had in stock for over $10.00 per pen!

Sadly, ballpoint pens fell out of favor with the public as they discovered that many of the problems with the pens still existed.  Somebody needed to invent a pen that was smooth writing with ink that dried quickly, didn't skip or fade and, most importantly, didn't leak.

Patrick J. Frawley and Fran Seech solved the problem.  Seech was an unemployed chemist who lost his job when the pen company that he worked for went out of business.  Working in his own home laboratory, he finally developed the successful ballpoint pen ink.  Frawley was so impressed by Seech's ink that he purchased the formula and started the Frawley Pen Company in 1949.  Frawley's pen not only had smear-proof ink, it also had a retractable point.  An imaginative marketing campaign ensued and soon Frawley's pen, which he named Paper-Mate, took off.

The other person who helped revive the ballpoint pen was a French maker of penholders and cases, Marcel Bich.  Not only was he appalled by the poor quality, but also by the high cost.  He did, however, recognize that the ballpoint pen was a true innovation and resolved to create a low-priced, top-quality pen.  Bich struck a deal with the Biro brothers to pay them a royalty on their patent and then spent two years studying every detail of every ballpoint on the market.

Finally, in 1952, Bich unveiled his new pen.  It was an inexpensive clear-barreled, smooth writing, non-leaking plastic pen called the Ballpoint Bic.  The public accepted it with open arms.  By the late 1950's, Bic had captured 70% of the European market.

Today, Bic dominates the world market.  The modern version of Laszlo and George Biro's pen - the Bic Crystal - sells more than 14,000,000 pieces daily.  And "Biro" is still the generic name of the ballpoint pen in most of the world.

So the next time someone gives you an imprinted promotional pen, or you buy a pen at the store, remember the amazing story of the Biro brothers and their gift to the world - the ballpoint pen.