Barefoot Solutions was brought on by the team at Headfirst to build a custom web application capable of managing every aspect of a high school baseball players life as they make their way through the often confusing recruiting process. Named the College Admissions Planner (CAP), this application integrates Headfirst’s extensive consulting experience into an automated system that interacts with each student to form a fully customized planner complete with reminders, insider tips, and even an application progress matrix to ensure that no detail of their athletics, academics, or applications is overlooked. From customized off-season fitness routines to parent email updates, CAP was designed to ease the minds of all those involved in a baseball athletes transition to college.

Students log directly into their profiles to create, edit, and review their customized planner.  When they first log in (and at other specific intervals) the CAP application asks students a set of questions and uses their answers to build a multilayered college admissions and recruiting plan. Another important tool within the CAP application is one of Barefoot Solutions previous projects with Headfirst, the HCAT locker.  The HCAT locker is an online searchable database with articles that Headfirst’s experienced team has compiled over the years to help students wade through the college admissions process.

CAP was developed using the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) and offers full integration with a payment gateway as well as content management tools to make for easy updates moving forward.  Both teams at Barefoot Solutions and Headfirst are extremely excited about the potential of this application, and look forward to seeing the impact it has on the lives of aspiring athletes.

If you’re someone like Ashton Kutcher, then you don’t have a problem getting a lot of followers on Twitter. If you’re someone like Ashton Kutcher, you can publicly challenge CNN to a Twitter popularity contest to see who would get 1 million followers first and then beat one of the largest broadcast news organizations in the world. For all the rest of us who aren’t someone like Ashton Kutcher, we would recommend the following to expand your company’s online marketing campaign into the 140-character realm of Twitter.

How to Twitter for your company:

1. Before writing your first Tweet, make sure your company’s user profile is completely filled out, especially the bio, website link, user profile picture, and background theme. These elements all lay the foundation for branding your company to fellow Tweeters.

2. Make your company a constant presence. If you’re serious about building a strong online marketing presence in Twitter, you need to consistently be available to post valuable information and respond to any questions. The concept behind Twitter is that Tweeters are constantly looking for new information and are looking to obtain it in the fastest way possible, and so to be effective on this site, you need to provide what your followers are asking for. One tweet may seem like a drop in a bucket, but hundreds and thousands of tweets will start to add up and help build your company’s online marketing campaign.

3. Search for followers. Twitter allows you to search for other Tweeters by their name or user id (if you already know them) or through keywords. Keywords in twitter are identified with the # sign, like #iranrevolution. Search for keywords or trending topics in your company’s field of products or services and select to follow other Tweeters who are interested in or involved in this field. Tweeters you click to follow also have the option of following you back. You can check to see if they do at friendorfollow.com and decide to stop following them if they don’t reciprocate. You should also include keywords in your own tweets to let other people more easily find you.

4. Be yourself. Don’t use Twitter as a soapbox to directly market your company’s products or services. Offer information to set yourself up as an expert in your company’s field or answer questions about your field to help build a potential client base.

5. These are always good reminders: use good text slang grammar and spelling. Make sure your Tweets are clear and focused. There’s poetry in writing a good 140-character Tweet. Always include shortened urls instead of the entire url for a hyperlink in a Tweet.

6. Retweet interesting information you come across, share your friend’s tweets with others, and always acknowledge your Twitter friends and new followers to build a stronger and more supportive base.

Bottom line, it takes a large investment of time and energy to learn how to twitter effectively to build a strong online marketing campaign for your company.

– Stephanie

We often hear this question from our clients as we’re building their website and guiding them through the web development process: “What should my company and domain name be?”  While there are no hard and fast rules, we always offer the following suggestions:

1. Search Engine Optimization will be an important method of building traffic for most, but not all, business models.  If SEO will be a traffic generating strategy, focusing your domain name on the services and/or products you provide will provide a keyword-rich jumping off point for getting high rankings with the search engines.

2. If you’re having a hard time finding those keywords for your products and/or services, choose some themes that relate to your business, like web development for Barefoot Solutions. Get creative and come up with a list of words that describe this theme.  Don’t forget to include plural and singular versions of the same word in this list.

3. Once you’ve generated a list of potential words for your company name and URL, edit the list down to a selection of 15-20 phrases.  Keep your client base in mind when selecting the finalists — what phrases would make it easiest for them to find your website?

4. Avoid phrases for your URL that would cause a repeat letter, like barefootssolutions.com. These represent some of the most common typos.

5. Don’t use hyphens, spaces, underscores, cute spellings, or any kind of strange punctuation marks that would make it difficult or confusing for a potential client to find your website, like www.dog.treatz.com.

6. Test the company name out in a few major languages to make sure that the potential names won’t offend someone in another language.

7. Once you’ve narrowed these results even more based on the criteria above, check the final company name and URL contenders for availability at register.com.

8. Most sites should try to obtain a .com address. Particularly if you are selling a product or a service, .com is the de facto standard. With that being said, new startups are meeting success with .net, .org, and .tv.

9. Avoid buying an existing domain. Unless it’s absolutely crucial to the business, it’s generally a waste of your company’s time and money.  You should be able to come up with some alternate options that will work just as well without the price tag.

– Stephanie