Notebook

Congratulations to our in house Creative Director and Canadian Artist, Mandy Budan. She is an inspiration and a mentor to other Graphic Artists and we are proud to have her leading our creative team.

This is a superb accomplishment in the area of abstract acrylic art. Her work will be displayed at the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, who include The Group of Seven and other prominent Canadian artists in their permanent collection.

You can view more of her work on her paintings website or blog.

A while back I wrote a section on the status of META tags and I was not surprised to learn the greedy history behind it’s use and how today it is out of the picture when it comes to rankings.

What was more infuriating was the vast number of websites still claiming that the key to rankings is the keyword META tag. Just below these statements there are usually a few ads conveniently placed to promote their so called  “SEO Services”, which remain hidden partly because they don’t know what is going on themselves.  A month of research on SEO for the sake of learning what others are saying or doing about it, enlightened me to the sad reality that most of these services are quick profit making schemes that care nothing for long-term success of their clients.

So here is a video from Google themselves explaining quite shortly the use of keywords. Let’s just hope the showcases of lectures and information coming from Google is true.

Alaia is pleased to announce the availability of another business partner site - tykethreads.com.

For high quality, cool outfits for little boys from birth to preschool, TykeThreads features great brands like Coccoli (for organic infant clothes made in Canada), House of Mongrel (organic and low-environmental-footprint made in the USA sweats, hoodies and T’s), RileyRoos infant shoes (my son’s daycare loves them) and funky brands like Appaman, Ben Sherman (yup, they do little boy’s clothes) and Knuckleheads.

We did the site design, store workflow and we host and maintain that sweet store.

Enjoy!

Alaia has just brought to life the iToys2Buy classified network. Owned by our partner Boost Recreation, Toys2buy is a network of powersports classified sites (sleds2buy.com, iboats2buy.com, myrv2buy.com, motorcycle2buy.com and quad2buy.com as of this launch date) each of which provides a sharply focused marketplace for powersports vehicles. Personal and Dealer accounts are available, so hit sleds2buy.com and buy that snowmobile you’ve always wanted. If you’re selling a boat, bike, atv, rv, sled or trailer, it makes sense to sell them on sport-specific sites.  Part of all listing proceeds in the iToys2Buy network are channeled back into the national and/or provincial associations to support the sports you love.

Alaia provides all development and hosting for the iToys2buy network as well as the Boost Recreation Dealer Inventory tools.

At the end of July, Alaia launched revamped web sites for our new business partner, Boost Recreation. Boost Recreation provides recreational product dealers with web-based tools to manage their used inventory of snowmobiles, motorcycles, ATV’s and watercraft. They can then “get their inventory online” to attract consumers. Boost also offers templated dealer web sites and has been contracted by Yamaha and Suzuki to make their new model catalogs availalbe to their respective dealer networks.

Alaia is excited by the opportunity to partner with Boost Recreation and provide them with industry-leading technical solutions that offer a unique value proposition to recreational product dealers and consumers.

For more information about Boost Recreation, please see www.boostrecreation.com

For information about the Boost Suzuki Dealers website program, check out www.boostsuzuki.com.

Stay tuned - later this summer Boost and Alaia will be launching the toys2buy online recreational classified network.