greg smart

I was recently asked to write a statement explaining our retainer agreements at Pleth, LLC. This is agreement is not designed for every customer, but is intended for our customer’s that require steady hourly work. We have found that there can be quite a bit of confusion as to the nature of these agreements. Perhaps this will help.

Our retainer agreements are intended to benefit the nature of our customer relationships and helps open the lines of communication with our priority customers. We have found that these agreements can smooth fluctuations in charges and often alleviates some of the hesitancy customers may feel when unsure about incurring hourly charges. A retainer will cover any content updates to the website as well as general consultations. This allows for updates to be posted in a more expeditious manner, can help maintain consistency of site design with content presentation, and ensures that the website will remain consistent with other marketing activities. It has been our experience that customers with this agreement tend to feel much more at ease in calling for overall site support, brainstorming sessions, and quality control issues.

This agreement does not include any site structure changes, graphic design changes, or increases in functionality. We will do our best to try to cover these unanticipated costs under this retainer agreement. Should a request be made that is deemed outside the scope of this agreement we will notify you and actively consult with you to explore your options. If necessary we will work to develop a quote at that time. This will occur prior to any additional site changes being made and any additional costs being incurred.

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I recently came across this jQuery Feed Menu link and thought it was worth sharing. As we completed the development last month on the University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville website we began to get all of the feeds and feed links in order. As I worked through this process I noticed that if you have more than two or three feeds to deal with that we didn’t have a good system for managing the feed links.

Although I haven’t tested this at all, everything appears to be in order and might offer a more elegant solution for managing multiple feeds links.

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Okay, I have to admit that I have been pretty resistant to exploring twitter. In that I tend to be a solitary creature I honestly do not understand why anyone cares what I am eating, drinking or thinking during the course of an average day.

Apart from myself, my partners have been fervently investigating twitter over the last few months and have finally gotten my attention as they have debated how practical applications of the “micro-blog” can be realized in a profitable manner.

RSS & News Delivery

Following a brainstorming session the other day I began thinking about how I could take a single site and apply Twitter in a truly effective way. Over the past few months we have been developing a web site for a local University and are beginnning to place the finishing touches on it. As I worked in MODX utilizing the Ditto snippet to create an RSS page for the news section I wondered if there was a method for feeding RSS into Twitter. Well, of cours there is: twitterfeed. All I had to do was sign up for a twitter account, sign up for a twitterfeed account, go through a short configuration page and my news posts were now being fed onto a new twitter page.

I think the most obvious advantage to handling news posts in this way is derived from the ability to push time sensitive data to a user through a mobile device, ultimately, from a CMS. Since this is a University site I felt this was a particularly practical example since management of campus security considerations has become a priority issue for schools.

My Partners

So, here it is: YOU WERE RIGHT.

I will probably never twitter my concerns for world peace or global warming, but I will admit that there are definite practical implications for a “micro-blogging” service like twitter.

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