lolatech.net

Windward Farm Garden Retreat

lolatech — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 19:02:16 +0000

I just recently finished a project with the amazing Dorothy Ernst, who created Windward Farm Garden Retreat. Not only was she just AMAZING to work with, her retreat is fantastic!
Here is a link to her new site: www.windwardfarmgardenretreat.com

This is by far one of my favorite sites that I have built. The photography is gorgeous, and I think the site is a great reflection of the feeling you get when you are on her property.

Some of the reasons why I love this site:
1. every page has a different header, giving each page a different feel.
2. because Dorothy had a preexisting blog, we made it so that each time she creates a new post, it is automatically updated to both her new and existing blog site
3. integration of newsletter sign up
4. interactive calendar of events
5. … and my favorite – the SHOPPING CART! This site has a nice shopping cart, which dynamically updates the sidebar when you have placed items in your shopping cart. FYI – you can buy beautiful handmade greeting cards here. As pretty as the pictures are, they don’t even do the greeting cards justice!

Thank you again to Dorothy for allowing me the opportunity to work with her. It was true pleasure!

Loving Webinars…

lolatech — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:35:46 +0000

Recently, I have signed up for all sorts of webinars. ( Webinar is short for a Web-based seminar, a presentation, lecture, workshop or seminar that is transmitted over the web. - http://www.webopedia.com) If there is a free webinar out there on anything related to social media and website development, count me in! This week alone, I listened to a webinar on how a one person company can and should utilize Twitter, I have one on Thursday on creating custom Facebook fan pages, and a 3 part series on intermediate/expert WordPress development! I was nervous being a 'solopreneur' that my ideas would be limited due to lack of stimulation from co-workers and new environments - but boy was I wrong! Going down this new avenue of learning and sharing has truly opened so many new doors and is helping me grow and develop my business in ways I never thought possible.

More than woman who lunch…

lolatech — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 18:15:05 +0000

I recently joined a networking organization called PWBN - Professional Women's Business Network. Best investment I have made in LOLA so far! This is a fantastic organization of women who meet once a month, break bread, and discuss their businesses. The nice part is, the women in this group are not necessarily trying to sell to each other, but rather, help each other grow their companies through connections and referrals. Generally, the meetings are based around open discussion and sharing - however, this week a local chapter was having a speaker present on social media. Nicole Newman, president and CEO of Newman Network (http://newman-network.com) was an amazing presenter! She was dynamic, energetic and completely knowledgeable on social media and email marketing campaigns. I was shocked, that after learning about LOLA tech, I was invited to participate and help answer questions the other women had on how to better utilize social media. What a great motivator! And the cherry on top? I went to listen to this amazing business woman speak, and ended up with 2 potential new clients! Thank you again to all the women of PWBN!!

Where Does The Time Go?

lolatech — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 19:56:34 +0000

Geeze! I have been slacking on my blogging duties! A lot has happened since my last entry. First, its a brand new year! I have high hopes for 2012, both personally and professionally.

I have been a busy bee working on some new and exciting projects. Notably, I have just signed up to create a new website for the North Penn High School baseball team! Not only am I excited to be able to contribute to one of the largest and most influential school districts in the state of Pennsylvania, but also to be able to showcase my work to my local community.

Also – I am currently working on top secret project – literally, top secret! I am collaborating on a project for an investigations and corporate solutions company. I am so excited to be part of this exciting and emerging new venture. As soon as I can share more details, I most definitely will!

Lastly, I am working on creating a new logo for a local photographer, in exchange for her helping me with some professional head shots. As I am expanding more into social media, I would like for people to associate my image with LOLA tech to help strength my brand and hopefully add a bit of personality!

Stay Tuned!

What a year…

lolatech — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:09:45 +0000

I just renewed my domain and hosting for LOLAtech.com – and it hit me that it has been a full year that LOLA came into fruition. (Technically, not a year in business, but a good year+ since I thought to myself “Yes, I am crazy enough to attempt to start by own co.”)

If you flip through the images above, you can see the transformation of the LOLA tech logo, which is pretty great summation of how the company has really developed over the past year. I can officially say that the current logo and site are here to stay. It took a little bit to really figure out my niche and style, but now that I am here, I couldn’t be happier.

Some good quotes that help remind me of why the concept of LOLA tech didn’t stay stagnant:

The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. – Peter F. Drucker

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. – Charles Darwin

and my personal favorite…

If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude – Maya Angelou

What a perfect quote to sum up both business and life, right?

Virginia Tech and the Power of Social Media

lolatech — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 16:57:39 +0000

I was a senior at Virginia Tech in 2007 – which we all know was when the shootings occurred. I have a first hand account on how VT was able to communicate with their students – at the time. Fast forward 4 1/2 years to today and another tragedy has unfolded on my beloved Virginia Tech campus. This blog post is not going to focus on these horrific incidents, but rather, look at these events from my view and the utilization of social media.

I am currently over 500 miles away from VT, but with the use of social media – I was aware of all the details of the shooting on December 8th, almost instantaneously. Within minutes, my facebook feed was flooded with notes of sympathy and recollection of my peers with whom I graduated with in 2007. As soon as I read the first message I went to the school’s website which had posted details. However, within a few minutes the site had gone down due to the tremendous volume of people trying to stay informed. My next course of action was to head to twitter – which acted as my direct life line to VT for the next 5 hours or so. I have to commemorate the school’s newspaper, the Collegiate Times (@CollegiateTimes), for their in depth and accurate account of the day. I went to their twitter page around 1:00 pm and noticed they had about 12,000 followers – a couple of hours later they had 14,000 followers – and by the end of the day had over 16,000 followers. (As I am typing this blog post, they have 19,968 followers). That statistic alone speaks volumes. I was glued to CNN all day and found that I often was able to find information quicker by focusing on a few reliable social media sources. Don’t get me wrong, I am not taking away from the validity of television news, as I know they need to check and re-check their facts before they share.

In 2007 I was in Blacksburg and felt as informed as I could have been, given the situation. In 2011 I truly felt informed and part of a larger community that was grieving and wanted to show their support for Virginia Tech. I saw a great quote that said “From the outside looking in, you can never understand it. From the inside looking out, you can never explain it. ” I whole heartily believe this, but I think social media was able to open the doors a little to let other people into our amazing community.

My tremendous gratitude goes to Officer Deriek W. Crouse for his ultimate sacrifice in protecting Virginia Tech and my love, thoughts and prayers to his beloved family. Officer Deriek W. Crouse will forever be remebered as a hero.

Happy Thanksgiving!

lolatech — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:05:02 +0000

Happy thanksgiving from me and mine to you and yours! I am thankful for so many things – most importantly my family, both the family that was given to me and the ones I chose. Right up there on my list of gratitude (as cheesey as this may sound) is everyone that is reading this post. It means the world to me that people are taking time out of their hectic schedule to take a minute to read what I am writing and even know what LOLA tech is. I am thankful that I was able to pursue this crazy dream of starting my own business, and even more grateful that other people see potential in me are hiring me to create their websites and run their social media campaigns.

Lastly, I am thankful for all the food I am going to devourer today - I mean literally unhinge my jaw and inhale! There is no more perfect day than the one where your only responsibilities are to cook, eat and be gracious. Perfection.

Lucky Number 4!

lolatech — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:51:55 +0000

For the past couple of weeks I have been a busy bee! I was really fortunate to get 4 clients in 4 different states – Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland and California. Does that officially make me a national company? (just kidding…)

Pennsylvania
I am just about done with this one! I created a website for a general contractor with some pretty cool image effects. For starters, the menu bar slides like the bubble on a level! ( I was pretty happy about that). Also, I put up a before and after image of a house addition. When you first see the picture, you actually see 50% of the before and 50% of the after, and you can slide a bar in the middle left and right to see the full before/after effect.

Virgina
This site was a joy to work on! Not only is it an interesting project – an author writing about the war of 1812 – I was able to collaborate with a good friend of mine. While Ashley of “Socially Savvy Ashley”, worked on the social media aspect of this project, I built the website. Due to the nature of the site, it will constantly be updated – but feel free to check it out – www.careycroberts.com

Maryland
I have been hired to rebuild the website for the residents of a townhouse development, – as well as run their social media campaign, making sure all of their residents are up to date of the goings on in the neighborhood.

California
What a fun and challenging project!! I built an entire e-commerce store for a shepherdess out in California. Some trivia casino online about me – i LOVE to knit! This was a dream job for me. We are not quite ready to start promoting the site – but trust me, this yarn is GORGEOUS!! Such a dream to go through these pictures of amazing yarn.The best part though was gaining all the knowledge and competencies of building an e-commerce store. Add that to my bag of tricks!

Not to play favorites, but I am really proud of the e-commerce site. I was able to stretch my skills and did several things with this project that I can cross off my professional bucket list. I worked with a client on the other side of the country, built an entire e-commerce store and built a site that accepts credit card payment – oh my!

Once all the sites are up and ready to go, I will share the rest of the links. I just feel so fortunate that LOLA tech is getting out there and making a name for itself. Hopefully the good mojo keeps coming!

Stay tuned!

A Whole New Side Of LOLA

lolatech — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 19:59:37 +0000

As you can image, I am ecstatic about the new website (re)launch – but even more exciting is a whole new service that LOLA tech now offers. I”m busting into the social media game!
As some of you know, the brain child for LOLA was to offer computer coaching services, which turned into into small business website development and now I am adding social media consultant to my resume. People always say “do what you love” and I can”t think of anything (work related) that I love more than social media. My interest goes beyond sitting on facebook and twitter for recreational enjoyment (although that plays a part in it too) to a bigger desire to utilize these tools to spread a brand and give a personal voice to a company. Talk about working in a field where one person can really make a difference! If you use the outlets effectively, your voice, opinion and brand can all be amplified. We all know what a powerful medium social media is, but here is my food for thought… the public now looks negatively on a business that does not utilize social media – a technology that didn”t even exist a few short years ago. (Be honest… you judge if you can”t find the company you are looking for online, or on facebook or twitter, right?)

Take a look at the STUNNING statistics (from www.jeffbullas.com)

20 Social Media Statistics

One in every nine people on Earth is on Facebook ( This casino spiele online number is calculated by dividing the planets 6.94 billion people by Facebook’s 750 million users)
People spend 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook
Each Facebook user spends on average 15 hours and 33 minutes a month on the site
More than 250 million people access Facebook through their mobile devices
More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook
30 billion pieces of content is shared on Facebook each month
300,000 users helped translate Facebook into 70 languages
People on Facebook install 20 million “Apps” every day
YouTube has 490 million unique users who visit every month (as of February 2011)
YouTube generates 92 billion page views per month (These YouTube stats don’t include videos viewed on phones and embedded in websites)
Users on YouTube spend a total of 2.9 billion hours per month (326,294 years)
Wikipedia hosts 17 million articles
Wikipedia authors total over 91,000 contributors
People upload 3,000 images to Flickr (the photo sharing social media site) every minute
Flickr hosts over 5 billion images
190 million average Tweets per day occur on Twitter (May 2011)
Twitter is handling 1.6 billion queries per day
Twitter is adding nearly 500,000 users a day
Google has more than 25 million users
Google was the fastest social network to reach 10 million users at 16 days (Twitter took 780 days and Facebook 852 days)

Stay Tuned!

-LO

The New Blog!

lolatech — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:11:07 +0000

Welcome to the new LOLA tech blog!.. along with the fancy new website.
For all of you who are new to this party, this blog is where I share, well, basically everything, about starting and growing my small business LOLA tech. I don"t believe in sharing just the good stuff -because that would be boring (and inaccurate). I talk about the good, the bad and the TRUTH. Starting a small business is just as hard (if not harder) as everyone says it is - but definitely worth it.

Just a little recap about me... I pokies play online studied business at Virgina Tech, and after several years in the "real world" I discovered I was a square peg trying to fit in a round whole. I enjoyed working for my employers, but never felt that often alluded feeling of accomplishment. I discovered that if I wanted to feel real joy and pride in what I was doing, I needed to put it all on the line and start from the ground up.
I have a passion for technology, and more importantly - utilizing it effectively. Building websites and being a social media consultant just felt like a perfect fit. The first time someone asked me what I did for a living, and I was able to say "I own a company building websites and working with social media" - POOF! that long awaited feeling of accomplishment.

So that"s my story, and I"m sticking to it.
As I chronicle my journey, I hope you read and enjoy!

Stay Tuned!

-LO