Car shopping!

When I’m not busy designing websites or picking up dinosaur turd piles from Helmet, I am online shopping. I love doing preliminary comparison shopping when I’m buying high-dollar stuff. Lately I’ve been browsing around the auto market to see if the economy is bringing out any smokin deals.

My friend just bought a brand new Jeep Liberty and she’s been super happy with it. All I’ve ever owned are Chrysler vehicles so I’m no stranger to the brand I think the Liberty’s look so sleep but the Car Connection only gave them a 6.8 rating.. boo. But they didn’t even give the Mercedes SI-Class that good of a rating, only a 7.7? Lame! I could always go the Chester the Molester route and get a Chevrolet Express LOL. I didn’t even know they still made vans that creepy looking.

Grants for your Small Business

In this economy, keeping a job could be a constant worry for you and your family. Wouldn’t it be nice to rely on YOURSELF and not the well-being of the company you work for? Now is the time to start considering starting up your own small business. Even if you have trouble getting a loan, don’t forget about all of the small business grants that are still available and waiting to be claimed.

BusinessGrants.org is the your finest resource for everything you need to know about receiving small business grants. They have a regularly updated blog so you can stay informed about what companies are giving grants, as well as their own youtube channel with dozens of informative videos. If you’re on the search for information about small business grants, this is the place I recommend bookmarking.

It’s a texting era.

Did you know that the average American sends and receives 523 text messages per month?

To some people, texting may seem like a step back in technology. But statistics continue to show that you simply cannot beat the  “right to the point”  convenience of a text message. So it’s only natural to try and capitalize on this information if you’re a savvy business owner.

What better way to stay in contact with your clients than via text message? Nobody opens business newsletter emails anymore, they go right to the trash. But when someone receives a text message, they will ALWAYS view it. Mobile marketing is this generation’s alternative to TV commercials, radio ads and billboard signs. The pricing of this service is even a fraction of what it would cost for any of those other old-fashioned advertising alternatives.

It’s simple: As technology grows, so will your business.  This blog post demonstrates how Smartphones are dominating the 18-34 year old market. If we weren’t consistantly using their cell phones to stay in contact, we wouldn’t be spending the money on Smart Phone technology. Marketing your business right to the communication gateway of your customers is not only smart, it’s necessary.

Are you credit worthy?

This year I made the largest purchase of my life to date.  A home. My first home! Looking back five years ago, I would have never imagined I’d be in the position to buy a home. My credit score was atrocious, I had bill collectors blowing up my phone and I was living paycheck to paycheck.

As each year went by, things looked better and better financially. I started selling my web design services along with getting consistant pay increases at my entry level office job. Everytime I would go online and lookup my free credit score, the number would be higher and higher.

My boyfriend and I stayed in a little 2 bedroom apartment in the ghetto of Tucson for years while we saved enough for a house. But eventually, moving day came. And it couldn’t have come fast enough. Living in a seedy area of town was definitely affordable, but it can diminish your quality of life.

Now looking forward five years, I am wondering how the real estate market will be. Better? Worse? Can it get worse?

Business Web Hosting

I know I’ve blogged about web hosting before, but now I’m going to switch gears to business needs versus personal needs. When you’re starting up a business website, you need reliability first and foremost. What good will an awesome SEO optimization and design do if you only have constant downtime?

If you have the know-how, you can always go the route of setting up your own web servers. But you’ll soon likely realize how much maintenance is involved there. Consider purchasing a managed hosting plan. You will be able to use your own servers, but the hosting company will remotely be responsible for the upkeep. No more worrying about backups, updating infrastructure and patches and monitoring your servers.

The third option is colocation. If you already own your own servers but don’t want to deal with storing and running them, just ship your servers to your hosting company and they will be responsible for running and managing them in a temperature-controlled, secure location.

Whatever option you choose, make sure you do your homework about the company and it’s reliability.

Home Life

So I haven’t posted a personal entry in a long time. It’s weird you get carried away with life and get too busy… to blog about your life. Anyhoo.

I became a homeowner in March! I was able to tax advantage of the $8,000 tax credit and get into a gorgeous brand-new-never-lived-in house on a beautiful side of town. I’ve never felt so lucky, honestly.

I had been living in a fourplex for the past 4 years, which I used to really like. It was a nice apartment but in a horrible area. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a shooting that happened in front of my doorstep. I was outside with my dog and noticed a car full of people at the end of our driveway… and they were just staring at me. I had become so cold to all the suspicious activity from living in the neighborhood for so long that I didn’t really thing twice about it. I take my dog inside and 5 minutes later, gunshots. Someone from the car had broken into the apartment directly facing mine, literally a few feet away, and they exchanged gunfire. Both the intruder and my neighbor both shot each other. My neighbor was taking a shower with his gun when the guy broke in (to collect a drug debt), so obviously he knew it was coming. One of them crawled out of the apartment on his elbows and laid in the driveway, pooling blood, while the other laid shot in the shower. It was a crazy thing to see. And knowing that I was outside just seconds before it happened was enough for me to give my 30 days notice to my landlord the next morning.

So the move was the most major thing that’s happened this year. In June I got “promoted” at work, so I’ve been adjusting to my new position. I’m now responsible for the bookkeeping and accounting, which was a completely new thing for me. Math has never been my forte, so it’s been a learning experience for sure. I like it though. I was ready for the challenge. 

Other then that I’ve just been working on getting moved in. Yeah, I technically moved in 5 months ago, but I’m still not unpacked! Shopping for house stuff is so fun too. Now I walk through Home Depot with a purpose LOL. We just finished landscaping the backyard. My boyfriend owns a landscaping company so that was convenient They installed irrigation and hauled 22 tons of decorative rock! We went and picked out an apple tree, two pomegranate trees and a tangelo tree to plant. The tangelo tree is so special to me because my grandparents had tangelo trees too. One of my favorite memories as a child is picking tangelos with my grandma. Everytime I look at my own tangelo tree I think of them. It’s my way of always keeping them close to my heart and that is really a priceless gift for me.

I’m still doing web design, and more importantly, still loving it! I’m a busy girl but I wouln’t want it any other way. Man, I miss blogging here