With this particular site, we just did a little tweaking and freshened it up a bit.  The restaurant is really starting to use social media tools to encourage new visitors and reward their loyal patrons, so we felt that we should make a few changes.  If you’re in the area, go see them and tell them I sent you.  While you’re there, check in on FourSquare for specials and more!

The first thing I thought to write about this site was how much fun it was to do, but I realized that I say that about all of them.  The fact is, I love my job.  I love to provide great looking, functional, useful sites for everyone from small businesses, to artists, writers and musicians.  Scott and Michelle are a husband and wife duo that perform in the Central Florida area.  Their music is beautiful and it’s been a pleasure to get to know them.

For this site, I wanted to provide a place where their fans could go to find out where they were playing as well as a place for booking agents and venues to find them.  We incorporated lots of widgets and plug ins for tour dates, music downloads, CD sales and promotion while maintaining a stylish, clean look and lots of beautiful photographs. The current background was made from a photograph of the pattern on Michelle’s drum.

The short answer?  Why not? These little black and white graphics have been popping up everywhere and more and more people seem to be interested, so if you’ve got something interesting to embed in one, I say go ahead.

But what are they?
QR stands for “Quick Response” and they are a black and white, two dimensional graphic that you scan with your smart phone that has all kinds of information embedded in it.  It could be a coupon, contact information, a URL, a location using Google Maps (very cool!) or any other data.

How do I scan them?
First you’ll need a reader app. I use QR Reader for iPhone.  There’s a free version, but if you hate the ads, you can upgrade to no ads, for 99 cents.
Visit the app store for your particular smart phone and search for QR Reader and choose whichever one appeals to you.  Once you have your app installed, simply open it when you find a code you’d like to scan, place it over the image and your camera will automatically scan from within the app.  If you’d like to try it now, here’s a QR Code that I generated.  It’s my contact information that will go directly into your phone book and a memo that tells you about a secret code for a major discount on my services.

Do I need one?
Again, why not?  There very easy, free to do and they might come in handy.  My favorite place so far to create them is Delivr – again… Free, easy and I like that they have the contact information option. You just fill out the information, click “generate” and you’ve got the code to embed into any page.

One Last Thing
Make sure you’ve got interesting data to embed.  Whether it’s a coupon code, or promotional text, or whatever, make sure that your data is interesting, otherwise people are just going to get mad that you wasted their time.

Lots of camera phones are also able to read these. Here’s a comprehensive list and instructions for lots of phones.

Need more help with this?  Want to track it? Then, please consider contacting me for a quote.  I’d love to work with you!

From the website:

Marion County Citizen’s Coalition, Inc. was formed by local property owners and neighbors during controversy created over a proposed distribution center in our area.  Whether you opposed or supported this center, one issue became clear – CHANGE!  Our urban service boundaries and our comprehensive plan can be changed annually, our zoning more often.  We as property owners do have control over change.

For this site we needed to create the information pages, social networking profiles and access county information for meetings, voting, and anything else that the citizens of Marion County, FL need to keep up with the zoning, planning and preservation of the rural areas of Marion County.

The citizens of Marion County, Florida are very involved in keeping the farmland, the farmers and the farms, in tact and providing the community with the information they need to know about getting our food from local, organic, sustainable means.  This cause is also very important to me, so I was thrilled to be a part of it. We created the website as well as Facebook presence to keep citizens informed and invited to any and all of the farm fresh events during the course of the year.  A calendar, mailing list, downloadable .pdf files and newsletter are all critical parts of the package.

It’s so easy to install free, gorgeous themes in WordPress – Here’s a tutorial to get you started. Hope it helps!