This week Global Wire Books released its latest e-book in the Short Guide series. In the year since I launched our web shop Global Wire Design, we learned a lot about our customers who are mainly small business owners and their needs. After a while we noticed they were asking the same questions. So earlier this year we decided to create a Short Guide that answers the most common questions and issues small business owners should be aware of when considering a website design.
Short Guide to Business Websites is a quick, informative checklist for small business owners looking to create a new website or redesign their current one. Over 50 percent of all businesses don’t have a website. Many of them cite the high cost to create one and not having the time to maintain one as obstacles. Many businesses that do have websites have a hard time figuring out how customers can have the best user experience.
This Short Guide provides a concise list of tips and issues business owners need to consider before embarking on a website design, whether the website is built in-house or a professional web designer is hired.
The tips from this Short Guide come from best practices and case studies developed by Global Wire Design.
Short Guide to Business Websites Price: US$13.99 Buy it here!
This summer I am teaching classes in web design, programming and entrepreneurship to a group of teenagers as part of a STEM empowerment program. Last Thursday in my weekly class I showed them the videos below, which showcases examples of how technology is all about your creativity.
The saying goes what is old is new again, and that is certainly the case with Tufts University computer engineer Chris Gregg, who decided he wanted to transform his vintage 1960s Smith Corona electric typewriter into a printer that could be controlled by his computer.
The Smithsonian Museum created a 3D printed portrait of President Obama a few months ago. It is the first bust of a head of state created using 3D rendering. Pretty cool stuff!
Last week’s post on testing out our Americanism made me really think about this country’s “collective history.” And when I say collective history, I mean all aspects of American history, even the untold aspects.
So it would make sense to turn to one of the purveyors of alternative storytelling, The Concise Untold History of the United States by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick. This is the companion book to Stone’s documentary of the same name written for general readers.
(Disclamer: This book was sent to me for free by a publicist a few months ago for me to review.)
America is a great country, but it is also flawed.
Both the book and documentary challenge the idea of American Exceptionalism. While he says that America is a great country, Stone wonders if it has “drifted away from its democratic values.”
Are Americans freedom hypocrites? Do as I say, not as I do? Untold History tries to answer these questions by looking at American history through the lens of all the presidents from the last century and how their foreign policy decisions were mostly driven by greed, bigotry and a false sense of security. From William McKinley’s disastrous Philippine-American War to President Obama’s drone program and NSA wiretapping, Stone makes the case that the American government has a sinister foreign policy agenda to dominate the world no matter the cost.
Each chapter examines successive administrations and comes to the same conclusion: start an unnecessary conflict overseas, occupy countries or install CIA-friendly heads of state under a guise of protecting American interests. Before World War II the guise was to build an American Empire; during the Cold War it was communism; and after 9/11 it was democracy. What would have happened if the United States didn’t get involved in the affairs of Iran, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, El Salvador, Grenada, Haiti, Panama and the Democratic Republic of Congo?
Stone writes about the little-known progressive heroes who have been left out of history books because of their outspokenness, like Henry Wallace, FDR’s liberal reformist vice president who was forced out of his position by the more conservative members in his party. He is best known for his 1942 speech “The Price of the Free World,” where he called for a more democratic post-war world where colonialism ended, world peace was supported and workers had a right to unionize. In another speech he said the United States can not “fight to crush Nazi brutality and condone race riots” in Detroit.
As a side note, I was reading this book the day the State Department released it annual human rights report a couple of weeks ago. While the report chastises other countries for their human rights abuses, there is no mention of the growing number of unarmed black males being shot down in American streets.
This same report criticized and then retracted its claim that the Jamaican government was monitoring private phone calls and online communications.
From the US Embassy in Kingston: “When there are inaccuracies, the Department of State documents these errors online and issues corrections to ensure the integrity of the reports.”
But doesn’t the US government monitoring data from its own citizens?
Back to Henry Wallace, the old guard of the Democratic party were not thrilled with his controversial positions, and made some backroom deals to nominate Harry Truman for vice president during the 1944 Democratic convention.
Stone contends that if Wallace was nominated and eventually became president upon FDR’s death 82 days later, Wallace probably wouldn’t have dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, ultimately killing thousands instantly and permanently injuring countless others.
Untold History also speculates how history would have been different if other life altering events didn’t happen. During his presidency, JFK actually wanted to end the conflict in Vietnam. If he wasn’t assassinated, would he have ended the conflict sooner? Would the United States have invaded and occupied Iraq in 2003 if George W. Bush hadn’t stolen the election wasn’t elected president?
I read this book in four days. It was well researched and I learned a lot about stuff I never learned in school. Regardless of your opinion of Stone and his leftist perspective, Untold History makes you really think twice about this country’s past, present and hopefully a different future.
“Have we been right to police the globe?” Stone writes. “Have we been a force for good, for understanding, for peace? We must look at the mirror.”
Around this time of the year, Americans think about their collective histories and what makes this country great. The United States truly is a great country with opportunities not found in many other countries. My family moved to the United States in the 1970s to take advantage of the opportunities and freedoms for a better life.
I am very grateful to be an American myself. I had the opportunity to grow up in a nice home, get a decent education, have a career as a journalist and start a business. There are not many places in the world where someone like me could do the things that I do.
Sometimes we Americans take for granted these freedoms and opportunities. I have a great deal of friends from around the world who want to come to this country to live, and they spend months training themselves for the naturalization test. As a US citizen born on American soil, I never had to take this test. This past weekend I was talking to my friend Rita from Eritrea about her upcoming test. She came here as a political refugee five years ago with her husband and 4 children.
“You Americans have it so easy,” she said. “I had to study for this test for three months. You just have to be born here and you automatically get citizenship.”
So I took the official 25-question self test online and another test from the Atlantic just for fun, and I did pretty good.
Actually, I am in the minority. According to a study, only one in three native-born Americans would fail the civics portion of the naturalization test, compared to 97.5 percent of immigrants that pass the test. If the pass rate was 7 out of ten, about half the native-born population would fail.
This week Global Wire Books released its latest e-book in the Short Guide series. In the year since I launched our web shop Global Wire Design, we learned a lot about our customers who are mainly small business owners and their needs. After a while we noticed they were asking the same questions. So earlier this year we decided to create a Short Guide that answers the most common questions and issues small business owners should be aware of when considering a website design.
