New Testimonial

We received this testimonial from Joe Venuto:

Mobile Consulting, Inc. and MIGEW.com

“Mobile Consulting needed to reinvent our website and Michigan’s Global Entrepreneurship Week needed to develop one. Merlee and Chris of MutinyWare exceeded my expectations with their work on MobileConsultingInc.com and MIGEW.com. Both sites secured everything we were looking for. Working with their team was a pleasure. They are professional, knowledgeable, efficient, informative, creative, and completed the projects ahead of schedule. I look forward to developing my professional portfolios with MutinyWare. Thanks Merlee and Chris!”

Joseph Venuto
Mobile Consulting Inc.
Michigan Global Entrepreneurship Week

 

Tags: design, development, Mutiny Designs, testimonials, website

New Mutiny Designs Launch – MIGEW.com

We just completed the site design and development for the Michigan Global Entrepreneurship Week initiative.

We met Joe, the owner and founder, at an Ann Arbor Spark meeting.  We had worked on his company website for Mobile Consulting, Inc, and he asked us to setup a site for MIGEW as well.

Joe had already had a design layout for migew.com, and we discussed how best to set up a website on short notice.  After some consideration and discussion, we recommended that the site for migew.com be a WordPress blog.  This would enable the site to be setup quickly, would allow for quick and easy updates, and also automatically incorporate a content management system.  By customizing a WordPress template to match the originally desired design, we got the look that Joe was hoping for.  Also, by utilizing some WordPress plugins, we were able to gain the functionality that he was looking for as well.

Please feel free to check out MIGEW.com and see how you can participate!  Also take a peek at our design services and portfolio at Mutiny Designs.

Tags: design, development, Mutiny Designs, website, wordpress

New Mutiny Designs Launch – MobileConsultingInc.com

We just completed the site design and development for Mobile Consulting Inc. Mobile Consulting is a company that provides a service to help you lower your cell phone costs. By negotiating ethically with your current carrier, Mobile Consulting can lower your monthly cell phone bill, as well as save you money on device and plan upgrades. Mobile Consulting offers a 100% money back guarantee with their services

We met Joe, the owner and founder, at an Ann Arbor Spark meeting.  We got to talking, and matched up our needs, resulting in MutinyWare being selected to complete the design and development of the website.

When coming up with the design for mobileconsultinginc.com, we wanted the site to be bright, bold, friendly and welcoming. By utilizing fresh, bold colors and graphics, we have achieved this goal. We also customized their blog to match the site, and reworked their logo slightly to co-ordinate as well.

Please feel free to check out Mobile Consulting and their services. You can save money on your cell phone bill as well! Also, don’t forget to visit Mutiny Designs to see some of our work, and what we could possibly do to boost your online presence.

Tags: design, development, launch, Mutiny Designs, website, wordpress

A Fairy Tale

Tags: CrowsNest, development, Products, story

Domain Decisions

Decisions, decisions. Trying to manage and formulate the best strategy for domains, names, sites and so forth for multiple products can be a challenging one.

We have decided to use sub-domains of the mutinyware.com primary domain to setup our products’ website and application on. After some debate and research, we came to this conclusion for a couple of reasons. One is integration. We plan on having all of our apps be capable of complete integration with the others, and can easily foresee a future where clients may be subscribing to more than one app. Having all of these under a single domain makes this a little less painful. The second consideration was branding and SEO. By keeping all of our products under the MutinyWare umbrella, we are better able to consolidate branding efforts, as well as SEO.

Previously, we had setup individual product domains, such as mw-crowsnest.com and mw-quartermaster.com. We have now transitioned these to crowsnest.mutinyware.com and quartermaster.mutinyware.com. Hopefully this will make things easier both for us in administration and branding, and also for our customers. This should make our SEO efforts and rankings more relevant to all, instead of to a single product.

If anyone has any feedback on this conclusion, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

PS – what do the feet have to do with this post? Nothing really, I just like the feeling and the photo

Tags: domains, sites

Google Apps Standard Edition

I went to Google Apps today to set up an account for one of our products.  To my surprise, the free version of Google Apps no longer seemed to exist.  We have been using Google Apps to host our domain email for years.  Now, when you visit Google Apps you only have the option to sign up for their Premier service, at $50 per user per year.  There was no mention made at all for the standard edition option that we are currently using.

After doing a specific search for “google apps standard edition”, I did find the following page where you can still sign up for the free “Standard” version of Google Apps.  http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html

I am a bit concerned however, about this change.  How will Google go forward in the future in regards to existing free users?  Will there come a point where they will simply force users to upgrade to the paid “Premier” version?  Unfortunately, many of us have become extremely dependent upon using Google services in many areas of our business.  Google did put out a blog post in January regarding the limitations now imposed on the Standard version: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/01/serving-businesses-better-with-google.html

Now, obviously I don’t have a problem with paying for certain web services.  We charge for our products after all.  The issue I have here, is that they are misleading people into believing that no free version exists.  On the main Google Apps sign up page, there is no option for the Standard version, and nowhere do they say there is a version for acounts with <50 users.  This is deceptive, and incredibly unfair.  Better that they just came out and honestly say that they no longer want to provide a free service.

Tags: gmail, google, google apps

Standford Study: Glowing Rectangles

This is a brilliant article that is sure to give you a giggle if not an outright chuckle.

Report: 90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles

PALO ALTO, CA—A new report published this week by researchers at Stanford University suggests that Americans spend the vast majority of each day staring at, interacting with, and deriving satisfaction from glowing rectangles.  Read full article here.

Lessons Learned

We all talk about lessons learned, and mean to keep track of these things, but the unfortunate thing is, we rarely do. I know for myself, I always think….”Oh, I will definitely remember this!”. Then, a couple years go by and we hit up against the same issue, and the familiarity is there, but the solution is long gone. So we end up searching our files for the exact place where we encountered and solved the issue in the past, and going online to find the solution….again.

In programming, this can be a disastrous waste of time and energy. Hours upon hours can be spent trying to fix the smallest of problems. And yet, we still fall prey to this problem.

So, in order to attempt to keep up with these things, we have created a sub forum on the MutinyWare forums to log this type of information. Not only will it help us to keep these issues and solutions in a place where they can easily be found, but hopefully, they may help others who encounter the same problem.

You can view the Lessons Learned forum here.

An economic article worth reading

Due to a Twitter post from Chris Brogan, I read an article called “Why the Present Depression Will Be Deeper than the Great Crash of 1929“.  While I am certainly not an economist, there are a great many points made in this article that make sense, and should be considered by individuals and business owners going forward.

Many of the problems indicated in the article are reasons why MutinyWare was started and how we are commited to doing things differently.  Working off our own steam, empowerment, honesty and responsibility are keys to our philosophy of doing business.

Tags: business, economy

Some details about Software-as-a-Service

I was forwarded an excellent article from a Twitter friend the other day, called The Next Wave of SaaS.  The article does a great job of explaining how SaaS functions, its benefits and why it is becoming so important to business large and small.

Excerpt:

By Jim Frome – CIO.com

Mon, May 25, 2009 — Network World — Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has gone from a curiosity to the mainstream in just a few years as businesses turn to the technology to take advantage of the inherent economies of scale. Yet that’s only the beginning.

Tags: article, saas, software