BitBlog
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December 31, 2012
At BitSculptor we’re big fans of Lyoness. In fact, we were one of the first small businesses to join (with an 8% member benefit!) because we saw the massive potential for their innovative business model. Chances are if you’re reading this, you’ve seen that potential too.
Work Smarter
BitSculptor’s owner Eric Schlange built a website for his Lyoness team when he first started because he saw a need for a secure site where he could share resources with his growing team. This way instead of answering the same questions each time he signed up a member, he could answer them once and refer new members to those answers.
After testing, tweaking, and expanding the site for 8 months, Eric wants to share this resource with other Lyoness teams, because together we are strong. This is your opportunity to have a quality website just for your Lyoness team, at a fraction of the cost of similar websites.
What’s the Cost?
We wish we could give Lyoness teams these sites for free, but there’s too much labor involved (and too many Lyoness members!) to make that realistic. Therefore, we are offering these team sites at the lowest possible price point. The cost to set up your website for the month of January 2013 is $499. (And remember, Lyoness members receive an 8% member benefit when shopping with BitSculptor!)
What is Included?
You’ll receive a completely “turnkey” website which is populated with initial content and ready to rock from day one. Here are some details on the features of your team site:
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Domain and Hosting: Your own domain name (yourname.com) and one full year of website hosting
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Members-Only Security: You must create unique user accounts for each member who wants to access the site—there is no public information available, keeping you compliant with Lyoness GTC’s.
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Startup Blog: A blog with 15+ startup “reference articles” written by Eric Schlange including “How to Shop With Lyoness”, “How Do I Send Money to Lyoness?”, “The Income Potential of a Single Unit”, “The Value of a No” and separate, detailed articles with examples explaining each of the 10 benefits. You may add new blog entries as you wish.
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Automatic Merchant Feed: new merchants are added to your site’s list as Lyoness adds them to the Lyoness.net site!
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Event Calendar: powered by Google. Let your team know about upcoming Lyoness events!
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Customizable Team “To Do” List: give your team members a list of “to do’s” to get them started right, then track their progress. The site comes with a complete startup to do list which you can use out of the box or modify as desired.
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Audio Archive: post audio recordings of conference calls, etc which your team can listen to at their leisure.
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Email List: if you don’t have an email list solution in place we can set one up so you can easily email your team in a professional, trackable manner.
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Google Analytics: see how much traffic (visitors, page views, etc) your website is receiving.
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Basic Training: we will supply a “basic training” document showing how to easily modify and maintain your website’s content.
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Unlimited Expansion Capabilities: these sites are based on the hugely popular Wordpress platform. You can modify and expand your site’s content whenever you’d like.
Are There Any Ongoing Costs?
Your annual cost after the first year will be $100. This covers domain name renewal and website hosting.
Ready To Get Started?
Contact us at contact@bitsculptor.com and we’ll get your site going!
What is Lyoness?
Haven’t heard of Lyoness before? You will soon! Lyoness is a global loyalty rewards program dedicated to providing a rewarding and mutually beneficial relationship between their unparalleled community of international shoppers and merchants. Contact us for more information on the benefits available to consumers and merchants, or visit Lyoness.com for more information.
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Posted 12/31/2012 in Products/Services
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August 24, 2011
 Anyone who's tried to take a decent wine bottle photo will tell you it's not easy. The glass must show reflections to look right, but only particular reflections. On top of that, red, white, and blush wines each require very different studio setups to highlight their unique features.
BitSculptor is happy to announce our affordable wine bottle photography service to local wineries.
Costs are as follows:
- 1-2 bottles: $40/bottle
- 3-7 bottles: $30/bottle
- 8+ bottles: $25/bottle
 We can also do custom shots (such as group bottle shots) as needed.
Simply bring or ship your bottles to our office (open 8-5, M-F at 901 S. Main St. in Lakeport) and a few days later you'll have the images in your email box. We'll send you everything you need to use the images in any print and online media: high-resolution jpegs on a white background, as well as layered Photoshop PSD files with the background removed.
Note: for optimum photo quality please supply bottles with straight, undamaged labels and caps.
Lake County, California is full of vineyards and wineries producing top-quality grapes and wines. Many of these vineyards and wineries are BitSculptor customers, including Wildhurst, Steele Wines, Shannon Ridge, Rosa d'Oro, Bartolucci Vineyards, and St. Olof Vineyards. We've been shooting bottles for our website customers for several years, but are now making the service to all local wineries.
Look us up the next time you need bottles shot--you won't be disappointed!
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Posted 8/24/2011 in Products/Services
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August 2, 2011
The Internet continues to grow (with over 260 million websites as of August 2011) as having a website becomes the norm, even for small, local businesses. Additionally, more and more people are realizing the benefits of shopping locally (investment into your local community, reduced carbon footprint, etc). Search engines like Google realize this, and have invested millions in the past few years to provide higher-quality local search results for location-based searches like "restaurant in San Francisco" or "plumber in Reno, Nevada." If your business relies on local clientele, it is very important to claim and optimize your local business listing on the major search engines Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Chances are your listing already exists--you just need to claim it and improve it. Claiming your listing is fairly easily--optimizing it takes a bit more work. Do it yourself by finding your listing then clicking the link that says "Claim this Listing," "Edit Info," or something to that effect. Need an expert to claim and optimize your listing? Contact us today. We make it easy, we don't charge an arm and a leg, and the end result will be more customers walking through your front door.
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Posted 8/2/2011 in Products/Services
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January 3, 2011
 BitSculptor now offers management plans for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising accounts.
Many of our customers utilize PPC advertising to gain exposure when people search for particular keywords on search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. But keeping track of your spending can be an ongoing challenge. We regularly have customers asking us questions like: How much should I spend each month on PPC? Which keywords should I use? What should my top per-click price be for any particular keyword? Should I reword my ads to improve the click-thru rate? The truth is, answers to these questions are out there, if you know where to look and you spend the time to do so. Our new search engine marketing plans ensure that your account is being managed to bring you the most bang for the buck. You pay a simple flat fee each month (as low as $30 + 10% of your monthly budget) and BitSculptor does the legwork. We'll even send you a report each month so you know what we did, and what we're planning to do next. Interested in having us manage your PPC ads? Contact us today.
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Posted 1/3/2011 in Products/Services
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December 2, 2009
If you want to take your web presence seriously, having access to your website's traffic statistics is a necessity. These statistics give you insight into information like: - Number of site visitors
- Number of page views
- Search engine referals
- Typical "paths" visitors take through your site
- Errors visitors are encountering when browsing your site
and much more! SmarterStats is one of top-rated website statistics products on the market today, and BitSculptor has partnered with them to offer their full, enterprise-level package to our hosting customers for the low cost of $75/year. One of our customer's favorite SmarterStats features is the ability to automatically email you weekly or monthly traffic reports. Many of our customers use Google Analytics, which is a great product for the price (free) but it is a well-known fact that Google Analytics, as a third-party statistics service, isn't as accurate as a service hosted on your actual web server. In our research, we've found that Google Analytics typically misses 15-25% of your website's traffic. SmarterStats, on the other hand, doesn't miss a thing. Interested in using SmarterStats? Contact us today! View Smarterstats Intro Videos
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Posted 12/2/2009 in Products/Services
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July 16, 2009
Mechanics always drive old clunkers, and website developers always have outdated websites. Why? Because we're so busy working on everyone else's stuff! We just updated our website portfolio, adding a good number of new projects from the past couple years. We realized that the list of sites is getting rather long, so we also created a handy feature which lets visitors "filter" the list of sites by industry and/or feature, so you can view all real estate websites which include integrated mapping, for instance. Check it out! Visit the Website Portfolio >
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Posted 7/16/2009 in Products/Services
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July 1, 2008
 We are happy to announce our new Microsoft Exchange Hosting Service.
Microsoft Exchange has been used for years by many business customers who are looking for more functionality than standard "POP" mail provides (Microsoft Exchange allows your office to share your calendar and contacts list, among other things). Until now, many of our customers were forced to host an Exchange server in-house in order to have this functionality. This is a fairly expensive (and risky) proposition since you have to pay for IT staff, server hardware and software, and run the risk of server downtime and lost email. Our new Exchange Hosting Service is competitively-priced to reduce your overall Exchange Hosting costs, while improving reliability. Learn more about our Exchange Hosting Service >
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Posted 7/1/2008 in Products/Services
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September 24, 2007
BitSculptor is happy to announce that Postini, an enterprise-grade spam and virus filtering solution, is available on a per-mailbox basis to our hosting customers.
BitSculptor's president Eric Schlange had this to say about the new Postini option: "BitSculptor's hosting services use a variety of tools to stop spam and virus emails before they ever reach our customers, and while these tools filter out most of the spam, enough gets through that some of our customers have been asking us for a “beefier” spam filtering tool. I've personally tested Postini extensively on a variety of accounts, and am happy to say I'm sure our customers will be more than satisfied with the results they get with Postini."
We’ve been evaluating spam filtering solutions for our customers for the past several months, and have chosen Postini for these reasons:
- Postini stops virtually ALL spam and virus messages from ever reaching your inbox
- Postini lets all the good messages through (virtually no "false positives")
- Setup is quick and easy (no changes required on our customer's end)
- Postini priced very competitively (similar solutions often cost $50-$60/year/mailbox)
Pricing:
Cost for Postini is $25 per mailbox per year. No setup costs! We believe the benefits of Postini far outweight the cost, given how much time many of us spend wading through spam. If you could eliminate spam, would it be worth $2/month?
Money-Back Guarantee:
We're convinced that you'll be very happy with the results of using Postini, but if you aren't, we'll gladly refund your money as long as you cancel within the first 30 days of using it.
Ready To Get Started?
Send an email to support@bitsculptor.com or give us a call to get Postini set up on your account(s).
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Posted 9/24/2007 in Products/Services
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June 26, 2006
BitSculptor has completed the development of our powerful email marketing toolset. Built to run in an Windows server environment using a SQL Server or MS Access backend database, these tools provide the core functionality to easily build, maintain, and effectively utilize email marketing for small or large email lists.
Capabilities and Features: - Grow your email list by enabling subscriptions from multiple sources on your (or third-party) site(s).
- Maintain your list as needed by easily searching, removing, and adding list members. (Note: members can easily unsubscribe themselves if desired.)
- Track the effectiveness of your list messages by looking in detail at the number of times each link in your message is clicked
- Automatic archiving of messages and statistics allow you to view your email marketing history.
- Compose messages in a rich text editor which allows you to save message drafts, insert images, and format text precisely.
- Prevent being tagged as a spammer by implementing email "best practices" throughout the entire marketing process.
This tool has already been successfully implemented on sites with list sizes ranging from less than 500 to over 30,000. More implementations of the tool are scheduled in the coming months.
Interested in having this email marketing tool implemented into your web site? Contact us today!
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Live Statistics Screenshot
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Posted 6/26/2006 in Products/Services
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September 1, 2005
 BitSculptor recently implemented podcast creation tools for two of our church web site clients (Riverside Community Church and Bell Shoals Baptist Church).
What is a Podcast?
"Podcast" is just Apple's well-branded term for an audio broadcast using RSS (Really Simple Syndication), a common Internet technology which allows you to subscribe to content "feeds." This content is then downloaded to your computer or MP3 player automatically, allowing you to browse new information (or new audio) without making you go online to seek it out. Essentially, the beauty of podcasting and RSS is that the web comes to you.
Why Podcast?
Churches who regularly post message audio files on their site can increase their exposure and overall listening audience by podcasting their audio. Podcasts can be added to popular directories, giving churches exposure in otherwise untapped areas. Podcasting also helps ensure that your content (in this case, the message audio) reaches the listener's computer, instead of waiting for the listener to take the initiative and download the audio themselves.
How Do You Create a Podcast?
BitSculptor's new Podcast creation tools make podcasting a breeze. Coupled with other tools in our OAF toolset, creating a podcast is as simple as selecting an MP3 file from your computer and uploading it through our simple forms-based interface. The complex work of creating an XML file, saving the MP3, etc is done by our code in the background.
View Riverside Community Church's Podcast Page
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Posted 9/1/2005 in Products/Services
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March 8, 2004
We are excited to announce the availability of our custom site search tools to our web site development clients. These tools let your site's visitors search your site by keyword(s), effectively placing every page of your site at their fingertips. Our tools have been under development for over a year, and we honestly believe that they offer a solution that is second to none in price and performance compared to other search solutions available today.
You can test the search tools on several of our live sites, including:
Lake County Board of REALTORS®
Riverside Community Church
Enviro-Safe Refrigerants, Inc
Sitewide search tools are very helpful, especially on sites with a high number of pages. They offer an easy way for your visitors to find out if certain content is in fact on your site. Additionally, site search tools are useful to you, the site owner, because searches are logged, allowing you to find out what people are looking for!
Most site search solutions on the market today suffer from one of two issues. First, they may charge a monthly or yearly fee in order to keep your search indexes up to date. This cost can run into the hundreds of dollars per month, especially on sites with a high number of pages. The second problem that many site search tools have is that they do not index site content properly--they may not index content which is stored in the site's databases, or they may only search the content found in those databases (but not the rest of the site's content)!
Our search tool overcomes both of these obstacles. First, the only cost incurred is only a one-time setup fee of $150. Secondly, ALL of your site's content is indexed, including PDFs, Word documents, and more.
Contact us today to have us set up sitewide search tools on your web site.
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Posted 3/8/2004 in Products/Services
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February 1, 2004
We are proud to announce the addition of rich text editing to our already powerful OAF site content administration toolset. This gives our clients the ability to easily format the text placed on their sites by changing font face, size, color, etc in an interface very similar to MS Word and other industry-standard word processors.
Unlike many online rich text editors, ours is platform and browser independent, allowing both Mac and PC users, using Netscape and Internet Explorer, to maintain their site's content in a rich text enviroment.
Here is a screenshot of our tool in action:
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Posted 2/1/2004 in Products/Services
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