I set up a Head Quarters for Dito, which I have embedded below.  I am not sold on this offering, but I am at least interested.  If you explore Dito HQ, you will notice the lava lamp on the table links to ditoweb.com…I likey lively for giving linky.

Check it out:

We are pleased to announce the launch of healthsolutionshelp.com which provides Virginia Health Insurance Quotes.

The site has been designed to be very easy to use and visitors should have no trouble finding the appropriate form to fill out to request a health insurance quote.  For now, the site owner is focusing on Virginia, DC, and Maryland residents, but it has the potential to go nationwide at some point.

We were proud to take part in the design of this website and we look forward to providing the internet marketing for this client in the months and years to come.

I need to get ditoweb.com v2.5 (currently 2.0) finished, which involves at least 8 additional pages, a new site architecture, and a complete rewrite of all the current pages.  It’s a lot to do on top of all the business that has been coming our way.

I also need to study up and take the Google AdWords Certified Professional test so that I may use that distinction on our website.  Our pay-per-click campaign management is a service that we do not currently feature on our site, and I know we could be capturing a lot more related business if I was properly advertising the service.  This is just one example, I have 7 more pages that will further help to convert more visitors.

We continue to explore and develop new services surrounding Google Apps. Most recently, we have been setting up Intranet Solutions using Google Apps and specifically Google Sites.  We have had only positive feedback surrounding this offering, and we are very excited about the future of this service involving Google Apps.

Dito continues to improve our visibility on the Internet and as a result we have been talking to a lot of small businesses in our area and across the country.  It has been exciting to see things progress to this point so far, and gives me great confidence in our SEO and Internet Marketing services to our current and future clients.

Lastly, a big thanks goes out to all of our existing clients who have been referring us business.

Google added a loading status bar when you log into your Gmail or Google Apps email. 

Today was a fun day.   Dito went to D.C. to visit the Google Apps Team, which was hosting an event to promote Google Apps.

Google went all out, turning a local web company’s office into a Google Playground for a day.  I did not take any pictures inside, but just visualize a Google office with bright colors all over and fun looking stuff to distract your eye. 

We wore name tags, and I heard the lady in front of me say she was from the Washington Post, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see an article in the paper and on their website tomorrow.  I really wanted to bump into her during my visit, it would have been great to get mentioned in that article, alas, it wasn’t my day for fame.

No, big deal.  After filling out our name tags we were directed to Jeremy who was a very friendly and helpful Googler and he answered all of our questions, with a smile.  

I told him I thought a Google Apps Task Manager would be a great addition to their current offering.  He responded that they had been getting a lot of feedback and that was what a lot of people were telling them.  We then discussed the current option of Remember the Milk and the Firefox addon that basically integrates your Google Apps Email and RTM seamlessly.  I think what I took away from the conversation is that both him and I think it would be really cool if Google launched their own variety of task manager within the Google Apps Suite. Take this with a grain of salt, but I think this app is coming soon.

I was stoked when Jeremy pulled up the Google Solutions Marketplace and suggested checking there for 3rd party solutions to some of the more specific technical problems we had been discussing.  My elation was directly related to the fact that Dito is listed in the Google Solutions Marketplace. 

We also discussed Google Accounts with Google Apps Email.  Right now, you need to sign up for a Google Account using your Google Apps Email and create a separate account for all the Google services outside of the Apps family.  This sucks and I got the feeling that Google realizes the problem and disconnect exists.  

Jeremy said they are working on ways to better integrate Google Apps Email with Google Accounts.  He said most people don’t even realize it is two separate accounts, which I am sure causes even more confusion on the matter (someone may think they lost their email or docs or calendar if they sign in on the wrong account in the wrong place, like I said, it is a little confusing).  Let’s hope we see more on this from Google in the near future.

When the conversation died down I immediatly asked for some Google Swag, and they offered up some “environmentally friendly grocery bags” and a variety of candy jars filled to the brim, for us to pillage at our will.  I normally don’t ask for swag, but hey, it was Google and I wanted something, even a crappy bag, with their name on it. 

It seemed to me that the Googlers had MacBook Pros and 30″ Apple displays.  I mention this because I am a Mac owner and I think now is the time of the Mac. 

There were quite a few people there when we came and went, leaving me to believe that this event was a success for Google in Washington, D.C.  

Thanks for having us Google, give us a call if we can help you in any way

Here are a couple more pictures from our day in the city:

I woke up this morning to a beta invite in my inbox for DropBox. There is no way the folks over at DropBox could have known it, but I actually had a specific need to transfer a significant amount of files between my PC and my MacBook Pro. I am leaving town tomorrow for a few days and this was high up on my ‘to do’ list for the day.

Needless to say I took this beta invite as a sign. (Chances are I signed up awhile back and just don’t remember.)

I got it up and running on my PC first since that is where the source files reside. As soon as I got that running and dropped my project files into my ‘DropBox’, it began to upload them to my account at www.getdropbox.com.

I didn’t even wait for it to finish, hell, it barely got started when I logged into my account on my MacBook and installed the software.

The MacBook started syncing right away, even while the PC was still uploading.

My MacBook prompted me to turn on the ‘Growl’ service and as a result I get friendly updates when DropBox has synced a file that has changed. The service is always running on both machines, which would normally be an issue for me, but so far it does not seem to use a great deal of system resources while it is idle.

The online interface is easy to use and allows you to Install the service on your machine, share your files with others, as well as the ability to upload directly within your browser. This allows you to upload a file from any machine, even if it isn’t one you have synced.

The ability to publish a public link to a file is a great feature as well if you want to share a file with more than one person…for most cases I will probably continue to email files instead of using this feature…that doesn’t mean I’m not stoked about it, just that I realistically will not take advantage of it in the near future.

For me, the beauty of this service is the multi-computer sync (especially between PC and Mac). I am increasingly making myself and my business more mobile and this service plays right into my strategy.

I think David over at the DropBox Forum said it best:

I’m sorry to have to say this, but considering Dropbox’s current feature set, I don’t think it can really be considered a real product until there’s a way to give it a hug. I mean… all this fancy stuff you’ve made so far is great ‘n all, but I feel this overwhelming urge to hug Dropbox for being so awesome.

Until you add some kind of feature to provide for this, I think you guys have really missed the mark.

I agree with his sentiments so far.

Has anyone else had a chance to use this service yet?

CushyCMS has a new take on content management systems: Allow web designers to make any portion of their page editable in a browser. I have just signed up for the closed beta (thanks TechCrunch), and I am building a simple test site as we speak, so I will have more to report later. Until then, here is a video showcasing this new and free service, which is slated to go live on the 15th of this month.

CushyCMS from Duncan Riley on Vimeo.