Jeff and Scott met on September 22, 2008 to discuss the development of http://www.countrycomfortllc.com redesign in Denver, CO. Country Comfort is quickly becoming Denvers fastest growing Heating and air conditioning company. Country Comfort specializes in residential and commercial heating and air conditioning sales and repair. You can also visit Country Comfort on Tom Martino’s website, troubleshooter.com.

If you need heating or air services, contact Jeff Colburn at (303) 913-2986

Why Add a Video Spokesperon to Your Website?

Good lighting is essential for chromakey magic

Adding a video spokesperson to your website increases conversions, captivates the user, and sets you apart from your competion. In addition, using an Online Virtual Spokesperson on your website allows you to: welcome the visitor to your website, enhance your FAQ, increases traffic, drives a call to action on lead forms and phone calls, plus you can have us create landing pages and tutorials for your website. Customize your message any way you choose. Your creativity is the limit.

So what are you waiting for? Let USWebCentral.com breathe life into your website with an online spokesperson. Adding a virtual spokesmodel to your website will not only increase conversion rates but also add a human touch. Unlike most companies, we do not put our logo on your video and our prices are unbeatable!!! Click on the button below for Pricing, to View Live Examples and Check out our Our Actors Portfolio! We have several to choose from.

Thank you for stopping by!

USWebCentral.com inc.

Tutorial

Scott Carvin Does has done an extensive amount of chromakeying. As we’ve all noticed every time we attempt chromakey magic, Scott Carvin knows that lighting is the most important factor in determining whether your key will look wonderful or terrible. In his 20 years of trial-and-error, USWebCentral.com has discovered numerous techniques that can assure you of chromakey success. Here are two dozen of his tips for lighting your next chromakey project.

Place your subject at least 9 feet (3 meters) in front of your blue or green screen, 12 x 20 feet (4 or 5 meters) is better but needs a bigger key area.

Place your camera as far away as possible. This will result in a narrow lens angle. Advantages: green or blue screen is out of focus, irregularities will be less visible; a smaller portion of the green or blue screen is visible, which is far easier to light evenly; your foreground subject doesn’t cast shadows on your background.

Don’t use too much light. Light for a foreground f-stop of, let’s say, 2.8 (following the steps described below you will understand that in some cases, depending on your type of screen, a 2.8 f-stop might need the same amount of light necessary for f4-f5.6 on your background, because you have to overexpose). This will reduce the depth of field, which also helps to eliminate irregularities (of course it is best to avoid wrinkles or blots on your background, but if there are any, they will be more out of focus compared to f8 or f11, your set-up will also produce less heat when you use less powerful lights).
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
If you do blue screen, you might want to use an orange/yellow toned backlight. Not too colored, half CTO or Straw will do. This will reduce possible blue fringing in hair or clothes, because the color of this backlight is complementary to the blue. The result after you have keyed will look like a normal white backlight.

If you use green screen you can use a pale pink or magenta correction filter (1/4 or 1/2 minus green).

You can purchase these gels at professional light rental houses, where film and TV crews rent their lighting gear. Or maybe you know someone working in the film or TV industry whom you can ask to collect some used gels for you.

If you own an exposure meter, or if your camera has a zebra function, you can use this to tweak your green or bluescreen even further.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for setting up the ideal chromakey:

1- Set up a blue or green background of the type you are going to use in the shoot.

2- Light it evenly

3- Put your camera on manual iris

4- Place a white card directly on your background (you can also write the f-stop that you use on this card for reference). Make a series of recordings, about 10 sec each, at different f-stops, starting at the underexposed side. So f11, f8, f5.6, f4, f2.8, f2.

5- Capture the footage and put it in the timeline

6- Apply a color correction filter to the clip

7- In the effects palette click setup

8- Turn on the scopes and choose vectorscope and Y (luminance)

9- Locate that part of the clip where the white card just reaches 100% on the waveform monitor. It might be just below 100% at a certain f-stop and clipped to 100% in the next one. In that case it will be somewhere in between.

10- Note the f-stop indicated at this point in the timeline.

11- Now advance in your clip while looking at the vectorscope (waveform monitor is irrelevant at this point, because the white card gets clipped to 100%). You will see the blue or green vector moving towards the outer circle of the vectorscope until it reaches its maximum saturation. You can recognize that point because when you open the iris further the blue or green vector starts moving back towards the middle of the circle.

15a- Light your foreground for this f-stop (use the same white card in your foreground to check the level, you might want to have 100% white (= zebra pattern) at your highlights.

Take care not to adjust your foreground level with your iris. Only adjust the amount of light on your foreground by adding or removing lights, or closing your lights in or moving them further away.

Following these steps will give you very nice, clean keys.

Good luck.

USWebCentral.com inc.

When the Creole’s need to clean out the fridge, they throw everything that doesn’t have a home all together in a big pot. They call that Jambalaya. We call it Physical Properties. It should probably be called something like “Attributes”, but I’ve got better things to do than run through that ghetto. If you’re not a programmer, that’s what we call our VB repository because it’s full of projects.

Alright, moving on: the Physical Property module is one of those things that comes in handy so many times because it catches all the stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else. We can put properties on items, lots, formulas, formula lines, routings, routings attached to formulas, routings when they are attached to specific BOM’s, customer item codes, and on and on. This is because we built an engine that can be used against all of these things. Problem: that makes data a little bit less intuitive to get out because it is abstracted a level, so here is how this is done: EntityType and OwnerKey.

As you know in MAS, most everything has a Surrogate Key value. (For those of you who only know the database through crystal reports, I’m talking about those integers.) For example, the item table has ItemKey, and the customer table has CustKey etc. We call this key value the OwnerKey. But since we store all of our physical property values in the same table, we need to tell which type of data the record belongs to. For this we use EntityType. For a list of entity types, run a SELECT * FROM vo2Entity. For items, the EntityType is always 701 (Formulas are 10000, batches are 10006, etc). The OwnerKey is the ItemKey. Got it?

Now if you run a SELECT * FROM to2PhysPropValue, you will see EntityType, OwnerKey and the real data that you were looking for. But if you have 100 properties for a specific item, you will have 100 rows. Wouldn’t it be nice if the property values were laid out in columns instead of rows? I mean it would make reporting nice. You could just link on EntityType and OwnerKey and all of the properties would be columns that you just plop onto the report. We did that. It’s what you get when you make programmers implement software. So do this: After you create all of your physical properties, go to O2 Master Setup and push the button called “Generate Physical Property Views”. That creates a view vo2PhysProp_GEN, which does exactly what you want, all of the time**. The columns of the view are the individual property values. It makes a couple of other views even easier, like vo2ItemPhysProp_GEN and vo2FormulaPhysPropGen, by hard-coding a filter for EntityType.

By now you gen X’ers have exceeded your attention span, and have started drinking something with several orders of magnitude more caffeine than espresso, so I’ll wrap this up. But first my internal nerd wants to point out something cool that we call Physical Property Inheritance (Phys Prop Maint, 2nd tab at the bottom). What you can do here is set certain physical properties to inherit values from various sources. One of the popular ones is to set Lots to inherit certain physical property values from the Production Batch that produced those lots. Using inheritance, the production batch can get values from QC or calculated values from the ingredients, and pass them onto the lots that are produced from that batch. Then, from the Lot Physical Properties, you can print the C of A. The inheritance rules in O2 are enforced with real-time triggers, so when you change the parent, the children get updated. I’m done writing.

May you be blessed and increase.

Food and Beverage

Competition, highly variable material costs, regulatory requirements and quality management are key challenges to food and beverage industry profitability. To succeed, you must have a firm and immediate grasp of production and product margins, and make timely sales and operational decisions based upon accurate data. Real-time access to accurate, concise data with efficient work flows is a key component of managing these complex issues.

Security

To a food or beverage company, formulas are a proprietary, competitive edge and critical to quality and safety control. We give you the ability to specify formula visibility groups, formula change approvals, optional electronic signatures, and specific access rules.

Managing Profitability

Low margins and often highly fluctuating material costs make managing profitability a must for food and beverage manufacturers. Our real-time cost data helps you track material costs, labor, packaging and finished goods. We make costing visible throughout the entire formulation and production process.

Integrated Systems

Often in Food & Beverage:

Formulations are kept in Excel, Access or another third-party product then re-keyed into a production system. Changes often require data updates in several places.

• Quality Control keeps their own database of test profiles, results, hold status, lot information and more, meaning changes to the QC database do not affect inventory in the ERP, so adjustments must be made manually. This leads to errors and the possibility of using or shipping something not approved.
• Production reporting is not current enough to affect the present day’s production. With an active, integrated system, production could be notified immediately if yields/costs are outside of specifications.

Other issues addressed by Escape Velocity Systems:

• Instant lot traceability
• Quality Control and lot attribute analysis
• Formulation by percents and variable units of measure
• Customer service visibility into current production data
• Pricing flexibility: national accounts, contracts, promotions, customer/product price groups

Please contact John Stein at jstein@evs-sw.com for more information

I meet with Jesus again today!

Today USWebCentral and Concept Publishing annonced a new interactive web system for Concept Publishing.

Some companies do a very good job of using a Video Spokesperson on their website.  However, there are a lot of mistakes that are being made that can significantly hurt a websites appeal.

Why use a video spokesperson for your website?  Humans like other humans, and we want someone to give us advice and recommend things that will help us out.  It is always better to see and hear someone recommend something than it is just to read it.  So, make your website more effective by adding a video spokesperson who your visitors will listen to and follow. About every third advertisement you see uses a spokesperson to represent their product.  If it wasn’t a proven technique, ad agencies would have dropped it years ago.  People like looking at other people.

I’d like to help by sharing with you our “10 Tips to Adding a Video Spokesperson to your website”.  ?
 1.       General Script = Longer Life:  Make sure the message is general enough so it stays fresh.  Stay away from price points and dates as this will cause your message to go “stale” and force you to purchase more unnecessarily.

2.       Add a Call To Action: The goal of the script is to not only explain your business it’s also to add a call to action.  You want to engage the user to sign up or buy not just talk to them.   It is even possible to add a sign up form or contact us button.?

3.       Half Body: There are benefits to having your Virtual Spokesperson shot both half body and full body.  In the half body format, you will see much more of the actor’s facial features which leads to more sincerity.?

4.       Full Body:  Choosing a full body spokesperson will allow you to use the spokesperson to point at various page or sections of the website.  It will appear that a small person is on your page. ?

5.       Choosing an Actor:  Choose an actor or actress that fits your target market.  If your market is geared towards baby boomers it makes sense to have an online spokesperson that is of the same age range.

6.       Actor Quality: Make sure you see the actor you have seen in some other performances.  It’s imperative to choose an actor that is good quality and will represent your company with professionalism.  Don’t sacrifice on the quality of the actor.  ?

7.       Video Length: Keep it brief on the home page:  The key component to a video spokesperson is to explain a product or service, but also the goal is to direct traffic to specific sections or specials within the website.  Keep it brief on the home page under 45 seconds.  The user does not want to watch a 2 minute video on your business.  You are much better off with a quick video on home page then elaborating about a specific subject once the user gets to that specific page. ?

8.       User Experience:  You have the ability when adding a spokesperson to customize it where if the same user comes back to the same page within a 24 or 48 hour period of time, then that user would not get “force fed” the same video again.  The user would be given the option to play the video again if they chose to, but wouldn’t be forced to watch it again.   It is important to be courteous to your users and look at their experience when adding a video spokesperson

9.       Close Captioning- Adding close captioning is important.  The reality is that some users don’t have speakers or are deaf.  Therefore, taking into consideration their needs is imperative.?

10.   HD Quality- Make sure the videos that you use are always shot in HD.  We live in a world where we are judged by our appearance.  If you have videos on your website that do not represent your business in an ultra-professional manner it’s waste to even add a video.  Quality is key!?

www.USWebCentral.com

At the forefront of the SEO check and balance system is the leading search engine Google. They have pretty much set the standard for technology in search engine algorithms that can track the relevancy of a website to its content and SEO efforts. Their ranking system remains one of the most popular methods of determining a web site’s quality because of their diligent efforts of weeding out the bad apples that have little to offer a consumer other than skilled manipulation and the ability to ‘play the system’ to their advantage.

Of course taking advantage of the system makes perfect sense from a business standpoint but from the search engine outlook of wanting to provide the best quality sites on their results for the viewer it can become difficult to differentiate the site that is good quality wise from the site that is good because it has a very manipulative operator at the helm.

By hiring uswebcentral.com to create a blog for you, it can only take minutes for your blog entry to show up in google searches. What is more important is that your blog emulate your site so users can easily find your services. contact uswebcentral.com today for your free consultation at 720-296-8205 and ask for Scott Carvin.

eCommerce websites have their own unique character that is designed to lead the visitor to one simple task – make an online purchase. A web designer needs to consider a variety of online selling principles while designing an eCommerce website. In this article we will try to take a look at some of the major design aspects that you must have in an eCommerce website.

Many of you are probably already asking why eCommerce website design is different from any other website design. They all need to be attractive, well organized and use the right colors that fits the website spirit and so on. Your instincts are good. However a close look at some successful eCommerce websites will reveal the conceptual differences that are typical in a successful eCommerce website.

An eCommerce website needs to follow certain selling principles:

1. Give the user a pleasant experience during his online shopping.
2. Make certain you provide sufficient information on who owns the website and why they should be trusted.
3. The website must be easy to use. If it isn’t, the visitor will go to your competitor.

Those principles are not new. We all know those basics from our day to day experiences in the mall, shopping center and every other market place that is waiting for us to open up our wallets. The big challenge for a web designer is how to translate those conventional marketing techniques to the virtual world of the internet. I’m sure you’ve all noticed that in most supermarkets the bread stand is placed at the far end of the building, yet you can smell the fresh bread at the entrance (sometimes they even use a special air duct to carry the smells). That has been done deliberately. Marketers use our sense of smell to draw us through the store where we are exposed to all sorts of tempting goodies as we go to get our loaf of bread.

How do you draw an imaginarily path in a web page? A path designed to lead the visitor to do what you want him to do…make an online purchase. Unlike the supermarket our website has no smell. In a website the distance from one point to the other is pretty much the same, so the exit is always right there. In a website you can try to order the “shelf” in the way you think will best expose the visitor to many of your products, but there is always a chance that he will find a short cut to another page that can also be the way off your website.

As can be see, although putting your products on the web is much easier then renting space and opening a supermarket. However, selling your products on the web can be difficult.

A good eCommerce website design will lead the visitor to the right page in one click or two at the most. Sometime web designers will use techniques that would never be considered for non-eCommerce websites. Everyone has seen at least one sales letter website. On these web pages the only link is to the order form. Sales letters are not the most typical eCommerce website because they usually sell only one product. That allows the web designer the ability to exaggerate the one click principle and make it an advantage. All the facts about the product have been presented to the user is a smart way while every few lines he has the option to click on the order form. If he is not yet convinced he will have the option to continue to read more facts and testimonials about the products. Believe it or not, those sales letter websites are actually selling.

“What about online shops?” Online shops have to deal with more then one product. Of course, the greater number of products increases the complexity of the website. Sophisticated eCommerce websites use a variety of personalization technologies in an effort to determine the best selection of products to offer to the visitor. Personalization technologies are a major part of advanced eCommerce websites. However this topic is beyond the scope of this article. The cleverness of an eCommerce website’s personalization technology has a major influence on its design. The first to use such technology was Amazon.com  who decided to push their client’s books to a visitor based on that visitor’s past orders combined with the statistics they had collected on all visitors used to predict what someone looking at a specific book might also be interested in reading. Today the goal is to try to predict what to offer the user on his first visit as well.

An eCommerce web design is also about the layout. One important aspect is where the user’s eyes look first when accessing a web page. Lots of research has been done on this topic. Most research showed that the middle left side area will attract the most attention followed by the center of the page. By using these techniques web designers try to draw the “walking path” for the visitor’s eye, much like what was done at the supermarket. An experienced eCommerce web designer will know how to create designs to meets those demands.

If you are about to open an eCommerce website or you are already own one, make sure you understand the web design principles for online selling. Consider consulting with an experienced website designer preferably someone who has experience with eCommerce websites like uswebcentral.com. 

Good luck with your sales and feel free to contact us at 720-296-8205
artical by Warren Baker