Hi everyone! As some of you know already, Neighborhood Image is transitioning a bit. Last month Sean accepted the position of executive director with the local Boys & Girls Club (read about it here!), and therefore we’re not physically in the office so much as working on-the-go from laptops and cellphones.

This transition means we’ll be closing our physical office on Center St starting July 1st. We’ll have a PO Box for you to mail your payments to when invoices go out next month, but otherwise our phone number and the services we offer are staying exactly the same. It just didn’t make sense to pay rent on a space we were only using a handful of days each month.

As always, you’re welcome to email either of us whenever you have a question or need some help as it’s the fastest way to get in touch with us.

Looking for something fun to do Saturday night that supports a fantastic cause? Come hang out with Sean and I at the annual Boys & Girls Club dinner and auction! There’s food by Rob Stumpo (so you know it’s good), a cash bar that I’ll be helping run, and a TON of fantastic things up for both a silent and live auction. Including an advertising auction item that includes $400 worth of ads on MarionOnline.com that we’ve donated as well as advertising with other media outlets.

It’s a fun night out for a great cause! Tickets are $30 each or 2 for $50. For more information or to buy tickets, feel free to check out the B&GC website. Hope we see you there!

Holy moly, has it really been over a year and a half since we last posted? There’s some joke about the tax accountant being so busy with everyone else’s taxes that he doesn’t do his own, right? Because that’s exactly how we’ve been feeling lately! We love to advise and help our clients on their websites and social media, but then we run out of time to care for our own! That’s really something we need to work on remedying – there’s always room for improvement, after all.

So let’s see what we’ve been up to this last year or so… We’ve launched several new sites, including the Harding Home and the Marion County Council on Aging and several more. We have more websites in the works that I can’t show you just yet, but soon!

The biggest project we’ve worked on this year? In August Sean and I welcomed the newest little web designer in training, Declan! We slowed down our production a bit over the summer as my due date got closer, and these last 7 weeks we’ve both been on a bit of a maternity leave with Sean working from home in the mornings to help me out with the new little one. It’s been a huge adjustment, to say the least! We’ve already started him off with the United Way, taking him with us to their kick off at the library, and I can’t wait to take him with us to more community events and help raise him to be involved in his community. Gotta start them young!

I really, truly want to thank all of our clients for being so incredibly understanding about our bit of a break these last two months – I can’t begin to tell you how appreciated your patience is! Now that we’re in the swing of things and getting our routines down please expect work to pick up and us to get in touch with you soon if you’ve been temporarily wait-listed while we adjusted!

 

Every year around the holidays, you probably notice a big push on shopping local. While this is usually geared towards people shopping for gifts, keep in mind there are many ways to “shop local” throughout the year. For example, if you are going to shop local, shouldn’t you also host and advertise local?

There are a ton of studies out there showing the benefits to a community when residents spend their money close to home (see this story from Fast Company). Because of the gift buying around the holidays, this is always a great time to remind people that there are great stores offering the items they are looking for without having to drive to Columbus.

But how else can you shop local? Well let me give you a couple ideas using Neighborhood Image and Marion Online as two examples. Yes, this is a bit of shameless self promotion, but I promise to also give you some other shop local ideas.

Neighborhood Image is a locally owned and operated company. We pay local taxes, volunteer in the community, serve on non-profit boards, and give back to our area every day.

Neighborhood Image offers two main services – rock-solid website hosting and custom website design. Rather than pay a national company (like GoDaddy, Network Solutions, or Intuit), headquartered in some far off place, to host or design your website, why not choose an established company close to home? These national companies do not provide anything back to Marion and, in fact, they may be like Google who was recently accused of legally avoiding $2 billion in taxes.

Is Neighborhood Image as cheap as these national companies? Well, sometimes we are and sometimes we are not. But again, with us you receive the service of a local company while helping us support the local community. And do you really want to trust your organizations public image to the cheapest option? You can rest assured that we use the same systems as the big national brands in order to protect and maintain your website.

Marion Online (which is owned by Neighborhood Image) is no different. Rather than spend all of your advertising dollars with national companies, you can get great returns on your advertising and support Marion’s largest, locally owned, news service. You can be assured that you’re not only benefiting from our impactful, local advertising, but also that your money is being re-invested in your community.

Of course, there are many other ways to shop local throughout the year. You can use local attorneys, accountants, computer techs, tailors, and photographers just to mention a few. There are even local options for recording studios and video production.

If you’d like to learn more about hosting your website, or a new design, contact us by clicking here. For advertising on Marion Online, visit www.mariononline.com/contact and send us a message.

Some of our clients know our current office is pretty modest. And by modest I mean that we’re in the basement. In what feels like a cave. With no one but ourselves. And really, 4 days out of the week it’s just Sean… so yeah. Things can get pretty lonely!

But we’re happy to announce that soon we’ll be moving up – literally! An opportunity has come up for us to get out of this windowless cave we’ve called home and move to the 2nd floor. (cue the Jefferson’s theme song, because it’s what comes to mind when we think about moving up a few levels)

Our new digs are still under construction, but I snuck upstairs to take some pictures to share while things are in-between.  We’re really looking forward to being out of the basement. Because let’s face it: basements, no matter how nice, are just kind of creepy.

View of the front office into the back office

The back office, complete with our favorite thing: THE WINDOW!

Our soon-to-be new view of the Busby Park, which looks really sparse since it’s winter.

Thanks for taking a quick tour with me 🙂

On June 1st, 2010 Neighborhood Image launched a brand new and improved MarionOnline.com to its readers.  The new site is a huge step forward for us and brings a lot more features as well as more potential for future development. We’ve brought our readers a more user-friendly interface, making it easier and faster to access content, as well as cleaning out a lot of the clutter that made the site hard to navigate. For our advertisers we’ve added in not only larger banner ads, but also more advertising options, offering advertising opportunities for any budget!

While nothing is forever, we plan to do several things now and into the future, including:

• We won’t put ads in the text of stories. These are the words in a story that appear linked and when you mouse-over them, a pop-up appears.
• We will not compete with local businesses. If a local business advertises with us, then we will not show ads for competing online companies.
• As much as we can, we will not show ads that take over your screen with pop-up graphics. Sometimes this is beyond our control, but we will make every effort to keep this frustrating form of advertising off of Marion Online.
• Speaking of ads, we pledge to keep this an advertiser supported site. The main content of Marion Online, including news, sports, calendar, and obituaries will remain free for viewers. We also do not and will not charge for posting full-length obituaries.
• We promise responsiveness and openness. As best as we can, we promise to respond to questions about why we do and/or don’t do certain things. We hope this website reflects the best of what Marion has to offer. Your feedback will be used to guide our focus so that we provide you with the Marion Online that you want.

Sean and I would like to thank everyone for their support in the process of the changeover to the new format. We’re really happy with the final product, and we’ve had so many great responses about it from our readers as well!  I’m excited about the change, and I can’t wait to see where things go from here as we add new content and such to the site!

In honor of Earth Day, we’re bringing you a week of earth-friendly tips and information!

Everyone talks these days about being green – reducing your energy consumption, recycling, etc. But have you thought about what powers your website?   A website is there 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We shut our computers off at night but the Internet is still there! Shutting a server down every night just isn’t an option.

The company that maintains our server space has taken it upon themselves to do what they can to reduce the carbon footprint servers have. The average server has nearly the same climate impact as a 15MPG SUV! Multiply that by the thousands of servers in the world and that’s a lot! How do you counter that? Our server manager has purchased Renewable Energy Credits, equaling out to be about 130% of their electricity usage. So not only are they compensating for what they are using, but they’re giving back as well!

In honor of Earth Day, we’re bringing you a week of earth-friendly tips and information!

How can you practice “green” marketing? With a website! When you use the internet for your marketing you’re not using paper or ink for printed materials. And, best of all, information that is wrong, out of date, or you just want to change doesn’t have to be reprinted all over again with all the expenses involved with it – all it takes is a quick change to your website and it is done instantly!

In honor of Earth Day, we’re bringing you a week of earth-friendly tips and information!

Did you know that opting for an electronic invoice reduces paper usage for the invoice and envelope, as well as the emissions from mail trucks used in the process of having the invoice delivered to you in the mail! If you’d prefer not to receive a paper invoice or bill each month, we offer the option for an electronic invoice sent directly to your email!

To start receiving your monthly invoice through your email just send Sean an email, or give us a call at 740-751-6548 and let us know!