We're happy to be adding features to this blog that will hopefully allow us to reach more people. One such feature we just recently added is AddThis. AddThis allows you, our loyal reader, to share our blog posts via e-mail, Twitter, facebook, and literally hundreds of other services. While this in itself isn't really blog worthy, the service we received from AddThis is.
We admit we're no experts when it comes to web development, blogging, CSS, etc. We do our best, but sometimes we just need a little extra help. Such was the case with AddThis. We were able to get the standard toolbar to work, but we really wanted the fancy pants version. Very simply, we contacted AddThis, and within a matter of minutes we had a response back from one of their tech guys, Rahf. We granted Rahf temporary access to the admin section of our blog, and a few email exchanges later, we had our fancy pants toolbar that you see now under each post. While it wasn't perfect at first (our blog sidebar mysteriously moved to the bottom of the page), Rahf worked hard to make sure it was just to our liking.
So thanks to Rahf and the entire AddThis team. Hopefully you'll use their product to share this post and many others to come. Give it a try!
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Testing Wordpress iPhone App
Just testing out the Wordpress iPhone app. When we head to Phoenix in November we want to be able to share our experiences at Green Build AZ from the road. Testing, testing, 1,2,3.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Partnering with The Hype Lab
Since starting bGreen, we've made no secret about our love/hate relationship with free/delayed payment labor. We've worked successfully with Stephen of Greenstein Consulting to develop our website and blog. We think he did a mighty fine job. We've been working with Brian Kramer, our PR guru, to try and get our name out there, and at the same time learn a bit about what makes the PR machine tick. We've been moderately successful working these connections through friends and family. Aside from a little bickering amongst friends and a few dinners on the company, the only other cost to this "free" labor has been time.
While discussing bGreen with another entrepreneur, he suggested we stop just thinking about how much actual money we've put into the company, and start thinking about how much time money we've put into the business. The reality is, our time is worth money, and we've certainly spent plenty of it trying to get the company off the ground. We've spent probably hundreds of hours working on bGreen, and our free labor has probably postponed our launch by a couple months. All that time spent equals money spent/lost/not earned.
We decided that to get bGreen to the next stage, we needed to take a serious look at how much more free labor we could handle. Our plan was once again to leverage the "free" labor and have a friend develop our web store. Fortunately for our friend, his real job has been keeping him quite busy. Unfortunately for us, this was going to delay our launch even further. The decision for us was an easy one.
Enter The Hype Lab. We met Paul from The Hype Lab a couple months ago at the Boston EcoTweetup. Paul has been in advertising, design, and web stuff for many years, and his company sounded right up our alley. They're into the eco-friendly stuff, their design skills are top notch, they're local, and Paul seemed like a good dude. We contacted Paul a couple weeks ago and pitched him our ideas of what we wanted in our store. Over drinks a couple days later, we hammered out even more details. Paul got back to us the next day with a price quote, and we were pleasantly surprised that it jived with what we had been thinking of spending. The rest is history.
Hopefully this is the start of a great partnership between bGreen and The Hype Lab. We're eagerly waiting to see what Paul and the rest of The Hype Lab team come up with for our design, and we've even more excited about sharing that with you. It won't be long now. Stay tuned.
While discussing bGreen with another entrepreneur, he suggested we stop just thinking about how much actual money we've put into the company, and start thinking about how much time money we've put into the business. The reality is, our time is worth money, and we've certainly spent plenty of it trying to get the company off the ground. We've spent probably hundreds of hours working on bGreen, and our free labor has probably postponed our launch by a couple months. All that time spent equals money spent/lost/not earned.
We decided that to get bGreen to the next stage, we needed to take a serious look at how much more free labor we could handle. Our plan was once again to leverage the "free" labor and have a friend develop our web store. Fortunately for our friend, his real job has been keeping him quite busy. Unfortunately for us, this was going to delay our launch even further. The decision for us was an easy one.
Enter The Hype Lab. We met Paul from The Hype Lab a couple months ago at the Boston EcoTweetup. Paul has been in advertising, design, and web stuff for many years, and his company sounded right up our alley. They're into the eco-friendly stuff, their design skills are top notch, they're local, and Paul seemed like a good dude. We contacted Paul a couple weeks ago and pitched him our ideas of what we wanted in our store. Over drinks a couple days later, we hammered out even more details. Paul got back to us the next day with a price quote, and we were pleasantly surprised that it jived with what we had been thinking of spending. The rest is history.
Hopefully this is the start of a great partnership between bGreen and The Hype Lab. We're eagerly waiting to see what Paul and the rest of The Hype Lab team come up with for our design, and we've even more excited about sharing that with you. It won't be long now. Stay tuned.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Blog Facelift
Today we are very pleased to reveal our new and improved blog. We thought it was terribly important to integrate our blog right in with our website. We're still rocking the Wordpress back-end, but Stephen, from Greenstein Consulting, has done a terrific job of taking our blog from an ugly little duckling to a beautiful swan (yes, I just walked by the Swan Boats in the Boston Public Garden on my way to get lunch, hence the corny reference). We're still going to be blogging away as usual as we build our bGreen empire from scratch. In the coming days and weeks, we'll be adding even more features to the site, including the Disqus comment system, which we really think is an awesome addition to any blog. So check back often. We hope you enjoy.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Hacked!
I woke up this morning to the following email:
No, of course I wasn't. Any good entrepreneur knows that you needs at least 9 hours of beauty sleep, so I most certainly was not interfering with that by tweeting at all hours of the night. However, I was curious as to what he was referring to, so I fired up the old iPhone, loaded up TwitterFon, and sure enough, there were a few tweets from @bgreenstore throughout the night. Hmmm, that's odd.
Yeah, so that's a bit strange. A couple of those tweets could be confused for ours, but quoting people? That's not really our thing. They funny thing is that one of those quotes got re-tweeted a couple times. Thanks, I guess?
So by my estimation, there are four possible scenarios that could have led to those tweets:
Wow, someone actually took the time to hack our account! How Cool! Yes, I know this should piss us off, but it really is pretty cool. I picture a dude in a
room with 20 computers, wires running everywhere, odd lighting, and fingers moving furiously over the keyboards. Maybe there's even an Angelia Jolie type character right over his shoulder. Something right out of the movie "Hackers." Sadly, this probably isn't the case, and it's probably some old gross dude living in his mom's basement with nothing better to do that try and hack a budding entrepreneur's twitter feed. Needless to say, we've changed our password, and made it ultra cryptic this time. Got to protect what's ours. Lesson learned.
From: Barry 7:37 AM
(no subject)
Were you up all night tweeting?
---
Sent from my iPhone
No, of course I wasn't. Any good entrepreneur knows that you needs at least 9 hours of beauty sleep, so I most certainly was not interfering with that by tweeting at all hours of the night. However, I was curious as to what he was referring to, so I fired up the old iPhone, loaded up TwitterFon, and sure enough, there were a few tweets from @bgreenstore throughout the night. Hmmm, that's odd.
- Green Building Products http://bte.tc/aWb #RTW about 1 hour ago from web
- Who the hell wants to hear actors talk -Harry Morris Warner #quote about 2 hours ago from web
- SmartyPig Decreases Interest Rate to 2.01% APY http://bte.tc/axk #RTW about 4 hours ago from web
- Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. -Natalie Goldberg #quoteabout 5 hours ago from web
- How To Become A Green Shopper http://bte.tc/dTw #RTW about 9 hours ago from web
- Is A Greener Product Green Enough? Our Greenwashing Series Wrap-Up http://bte.tc/agW #RTW about 9 hours ago from web
Yeah, so that's a bit strange. A couple of those tweets could be confused for ours, but quoting people? That's not really our thing. They funny thing is that one of those quotes got re-tweeted a couple times. Thanks, I guess?
So by my estimation, there are four possible scenarios that could have led to those tweets:
- Some people sleep walk, maybe one of us sleep tweets. Not likely.
- Maybe those crazy lawyers duped us, and we really have a third business partner that we didn't know about. And he/she decided now would be a good time to reveal him/herself. Possible, but not likely.
- The ghost of Po Po Potanipo suddenly took up tweeting instead of haunting camper's bunks. Maybe, but we're not sure he has thumbs.
- Someone hacked our account. Most likely scenario.
Wow, someone actually took the time to hack our account! How Cool! Yes, I know this should piss us off, but it really is pretty cool. I picture a dude in a
room with 20 computers, wires running everywhere, odd lighting, and fingers moving furiously over the keyboards. Maybe there's even an Angelia Jolie type character right over his shoulder. Something right out of the movie "Hackers." Sadly, this probably isn't the case, and it's probably some old gross dude living in his mom's basement with nothing better to do that try and hack a budding entrepreneur's twitter feed. Needless to say, we've changed our password, and made it ultra cryptic this time. Got to protect what's ours. Lesson learned.Thursday, September 3, 2009
The Late 90's Are Awesome
Last night the bGreen team got together to take the next step in our quest for world domination. We've decided to get involved with this new thing called "e-commerce." What's that you say? It's not 1997? Oh. Well, maybe e-commerce isn't a new concept, but it is new to us. This will be our first attempt at launching an online store, and we want to make sure we do it right. While we're not serial online shoppers, we do know what we like and what we don't. In our opinion, it's all about the user experience. Screw that up, and you're bound to lose customers and not make a sale. Provide a smooth, easy to use experience, and you're bound to keep people coming back. Seems simple enough. Unfortunately, finding the right software package isn't quite that simple.
Last evening we had the pleasure (or not) of playing around with two software packages. One from Network Solutions, called nsCommerceSpace, and the other from Shopify. Our first impression? We're screwed.
While we have some technical experience in our backgrounds, neither of us is really proficient in HTML, CSS, Java, Liquid, or any of the other 500 programming languages needed to truly make one of these two e-commerce packages a fully customized bGreen store. Designing websites for companies in the mid 90's doesn't equate to being able to customize a web store today. Sadly we weren't able to get the store to mimic our website design, so we were left to just putz around in the "dashboards" of each program, and try and learn as much as we could about each.
Each program has some shortcomings, and last night we simply put the two up against each other. The best analogy would be Shopify is a Mac, and NS is a PC.
There are two big categories for us: User Experience & Customization. From a user experience standpoint, Shopify wins. Their dashboard is clean, easy to follow, and very user friendly. We found the NS user experience to be a bit overwhelming.
Both claim that the shop design is completely customizable. Maybe that's the case, but we sure couldn't figure it out. The default templates that both offer really look like something from the mid 90's. We think they really need to update these. We got Shopify to look a bit more how we wanted, but neither was really very good. We'll chalk this up to OUR lack of programming skills, rather than a flaw with either solution, and call this point a draw.
A couple more notes from last night:
So after four hours of playing around, those are our first thoughts. Neither solution has won us over yet, and we'll be meeting again tonight, this time with our developers, to see if we can make a little more progress in making our web store a reailty. Stay tuned.
Last evening we had the pleasure (or not) of playing around with two software packages. One from Network Solutions, called nsCommerceSpace, and the other from Shopify. Our first impression? We're screwed.
While we have some technical experience in our backgrounds, neither of us is really proficient in HTML, CSS, Java, Liquid, or any of the other 500 programming languages needed to truly make one of these two e-commerce packages a fully customized bGreen store. Designing websites for companies in the mid 90's doesn't equate to being able to customize a web store today. Sadly we weren't able to get the store to mimic our website design, so we were left to just putz around in the "dashboards" of each program, and try and learn as much as we could about each.
Each program has some shortcomings, and last night we simply put the two up against each other. The best analogy would be Shopify is a Mac, and NS is a PC.
There are two big categories for us: User Experience & Customization. From a user experience standpoint, Shopify wins. Their dashboard is clean, easy to follow, and very user friendly. We found the NS user experience to be a bit overwhelming.
Both claim that the shop design is completely customizable. Maybe that's the case, but we sure couldn't figure it out. The default templates that both offer really look like something from the mid 90's. We think they really need to update these. We got Shopify to look a bit more how we wanted, but neither was really very good. We'll chalk this up to OUR lack of programming skills, rather than a flaw with either solution, and call this point a draw.
A couple more notes from last night:
- NS seems far more powerful/customizable than Shopify
- NS can handle gift certificates, Shopify can not - this seems crazy to us
- Cost is about the same, except Shopify charges a 1% transaction fee
- Shopify has a Wiki, which seems to be mainly a development resource
- The NS salesman got one of our last names wrong
- Both offer up a 30-day free trial for testing & development
- Both allow you to do batch uploads of product images and descriptions
- Both offer some sort of intergration with shipping & fullfillment
So after four hours of playing around, those are our first thoughts. Neither solution has won us over yet, and we'll be meeting again tonight, this time with our developers, to see if we can make a little more progress in making our web store a reailty. Stay tuned.
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