It looks like it may finally be happening, we are getting the paperwork today/tomorrow to move into our new office space. Ultimately we opted to stay in the same building and finish out our lease in larger space than we are currently in. This will buy us some time for our steady growth and allow us to make a better decision on the next location in 2008. I will post some pics when we are finally moved in.

Lauren and I went to the lake this past weekend and had a great time. We are on our way back and all we can talk about are the funny things that happened. Our lakehouse is close enough to easily travel to but far enough away that we can’t get internet. There are options that I could really push for to receive internet (satellite and dial-up are the only 2 available) if we wanted it that bad. We have actually enjoyed not being able to stay connected while we are there.

We stayed on the sandbar most of the day Sunday after wakeboarding in the morning and didn’t even realize that we had one of the biggest days we have ever had on You Design It. That was icing on the cake after a great weekend.

Be back on Monday with pics.

I subscribe to Business 2.0 magazine and I usually receive the magazine about a week later than it hits newsstands. Sometimes I just can’t wait and go to the website early to see what they’re all about that month. This was the case again this month as I ran into the cover story online about Kevin Ham.

Kevin has found a way to exploit newbie internet users by using their typos and domain guesses to make truckloads of money. The article talks about if this is ethical and how many enemies he has collected over the years. I think the guy has a great idea and deserves every penny he gets for the practice. There should be (and probably is) a whole market for monetizing early internet users and their navigational mistakes. Kevin makes his money from Google/Yahoo whenever a link is clicked on a landing page that someone accidentally lands on by directly typing in their search or domain name into the address bar. The ads on his landing pages are relevant to the domain name or typo and we have all probably landed on one of his (or someone like him) pages.

Once you land on page, you have an option to leave in many different ways:

• re-type the domain name in the address bar
• hit the back button
• go to a search engine

or actually click a link and follow the advertisement. Doesn’t sound evil to me. You still get a choice and you aren’t tricked into doing something you didn’t want to do in the first place. Two things stuck out as me as I read the article, unrelated to Kevin Ham, was how Microsoft’s newest browser version IE7 will correct typos or sometimes send you to their own landing page. This is kind of like Microsoft gaming its own ad platform. Again though, I have no problem with it because you never have to click a link you don’t want to. The other thing that struck me would be how Google should give this guy a medal because landing on those pages enough as a new user would make anyone learn how to use a search engine.

More power Kevin.

I try to buy 2-3 new albums off of iTunes each week. Some last long enough for me to learn a few songs and some get tossed after a few listens. For a few weeks now I have been listening to Timbaland religiously. Each cut on his album has a different sound and even changes genre at times. He is known for his beats and as a producer but he occasionally gets bored ebough to break us off with his own work.

I am trying not to wear it out so I am moving towards Linkin Park’s latest - Minutes to Midnight. Sounds good so far and will probably stay in rotation as Maroon 5 gets their shot tomorrow.

I just finished a 2 1/2 hour training call for Hot Banana as we are implementing our new content management system. So far my expectations have far been exceeded. Each place that I look for a hitch or a shortcoming I am pleasantly surprised with the flexibility and control that I find. Our new design has been cut up for CSS and added as templates for content. Right now we have reached a preliminary launch date of mid-June and that hinges on my adoption of the system and the creation of the content. I will spend the next week looking under the hood and seeing what areas are going to take a lot of practice.

I am adding some more analytics packages to the system that should bombard me with more user information. We are also increasing our paid search campaigns in an attempt to move past the majors and start diversifying our marketing efforts. It looks we are leaving the crawling stage into our first steps….

As promised I have posted some pics from Las Vegas last week. I went for a friend’s wedding and had a great time. We bachelor’ed it up Thursday with a table at Tao in the Venetian while the girl’s started with “Thunder from Down Under” and then headed to Tryst at Wynn. Tryst sounded cool but I don’t think I missed anything during the Thunder part of the night.

We stayed at THEhotel at Mandalay Bay and I really liked it. I have stayed at just about all the hotels on the strip and this one definitely ranks in my top 3. You can click here for the pics.