Welcome - Purpose

Hello and thanks for visiting my blog!

Why am I blogging?
I own Technigrafa - a print design, web design and web hosting company in Raleigh, NC and I decided it might benefit our clients to have a blog where I can post general tips on websites, business promotion, or just cool stuff that I have run into.

Who am I?
Well, as described above I keep very busy with my business, but here's some other information that may help you understand who I am. I am a Christian and attend Colonial Baptist Church in Cary, NC. I play the drums (and sometimes bass) for church and also for a blues band in Raleigh. I taught middle school at Centennial Campus Middle School for five years before going full time with Technigrafa - which is probably a big reason I stress spending personal time teaching our clients so much :-) I love riding my 1980 Kawasaki 440 LTD motorcycle when the weather is nice. I am a HUGE Pittsburgh Steelers fan - even back in the 80's and 90's when they stunk :-) I am a member of the Raleigh Chamber of Commerce and the Capital City Club for help in establishing business contacts, so I have a business card holder full of contacts that I can offer clients as they need them.

Who is Technigrafa?
Since this blog is geared primarily towards my business, I should explain a little bit about what we do. We are a print design, web design and web hosting company in Raleigh, NC. Let me tell you a little more about each aspect of what we do:

Print Design - We put the polish on your business. We work with a lot of new businesses who need a brand new corporate identity, IE logo, branding, business cards, letterhead, brochures, post cards, promotional items like shirts, pens, etc. We also work with more established companies who want to rebrand themselves in order to make them stand out from competitors or reinvent the company's image.

Web Design - Web design makes up a majority of what we do. From simple informational websites, to database-driven portal or content management systems (CMS), to ecommerce sites. I am a firm believer of using cascading style sheets (CSS) for laying out sites, rather than using tables, which was a common practice years ago before CSS and some designers still rely on them today. Why is that a big deal? Tables were designed to hold tabular data. Say you want a chart that shows your products and how much they cost. Well, designers didn't like the fact that HTML didn't really give you a way to format a page the way they were used to in print design. So, being the creative, ingenuitive types that web designers are, they figured out quick that tables are a good way to put stuff where you want it. So they ran with it - and I am guilty of this as well. Several years ago a technology called CSS came out and as browsers started to support it, it became an alternative way to layout a page - and in a much smart way. CSS works like this: All your page formatting (colors, location, sizes) are stored in a separate file from your site's content. That does a couple huge things. One, your site's HTML code is MUCH cleaner, which makes it easier for search engines to index your site. Second, pages designed with CSS load faster because the browser doesn't have to render hundreds of tables, which is messy. Third, CSS designs are more compatible with web-enabled devices like PDAs, phones, etc. with a small screen because these devices can ignore the CSS and just get the content they need quickly and without the fancy formatting. So am I a CSS nut? Yes, I suppose I am. Is CSS perfect? Goodness no! The biggest problem with CSS is every web browser renders CSS a little differently, so getting a page to behave nice in each browser is a huge, time consuming pain. Often you have to trick certain browsers to behave the way you want them too. Also, many browsers don't support CSS completely the way the standards say they should. Microsoft Internet Explorer is notorious for not supporting CSS the way it's supposed to. Now, I hear that IE 7 will fix a lot of that. But what happens when a site is designed to hack around IE's flaws and people begin to use IE 7 and it no longer has those flaws? Good question. I can't wait to see how that will affect things.

Okay, that was a horrible rabbit-trail tangent. Sorry about that! :-)

Web Hosting - We have our own server and it is hosted at the class A Peak 10 data center in Research Triangle Park. Peak 10 is arguably the most reliable data center in the area. That's why we chose them. Our server is backed up daily and backed up off-site on a weekly basis. Our plans include many of the features that other hosting companies charge extra for, like spam blocking and antivirus support for your email.

A big difference in hosting with us is since our server is here local and not in California or Canada, as many of the other "really cheap" hosts are so you will notice our sites load a lot faster. The data has less distance to travel. Also, since we are not a huge web hosting conglomerate, you get more personal service. When you call Technigrafa, you'll most likely get me and if there's a problem, I'll fix it right then or get our tech people to work on it ASAP if it's beyond my abilities. With the big "cheap" web hosting companies which will remain nameless, if you have a problem, you have to wait forever on the phone to talk to someone, who will put your problem in a queue which may not get even get looked at for days. It might be worth it to lack in customer service for the inexpensive prices they can offer - it takes all kinds. So the bottom line - our hosting might cost a little bit more, but you will get more personal service.

Anyway, if you've made it reading this far, I am impressed! I think I'm going to start off by posting some tips that we've sent out in our newsletter. I hope it helps someone out there!