Man what a brand!

The folks over a Q-Based Healthcare have busted out their new All Stop brand. The brand is topped by their new logo (caduceus / Asclepius staff and forward leaning fonts). The colors are strong and keep the medical theme moving forward. I imagine it took a few heated marketing meetings to approve the bold red & green color scheme, but I have to admit it works! The new look speaks to power, knowledge, and vitality.

The new All Stop brand name is technically a rebranding of their flagship DermaTechRx product line. They do have a statement about this on their site at http://www.allstop.com/faq/brand_notice.html

So why All Stop?

Folks who remember the DermaTechRx product line know they worked great on various skin ailments. Q-Based has been selling relief for arthritis pain, scabies, lice, eczema, bed bugs, poison ivy and ringworm for years. The bulk of their business is done online and they claim nearly 200,000 satisfied customers. I have used their products and always been satisfied.

All Stop has become their new brand to signify the power of the products to STOP ALL the ailments they are designed to treat. They certainly can stop lice and bed bugs, and ringworm (oh my), but more than that; these solutions help thousands of people help themselves with affordable home treatment solutions.

Not everyone can afford to go to a doctor for non life-threatening problems. Smart shoppers have learned to leverage Q-Based ‘heathcare advisors’ (read customer service reps) to get helpful tips on saving money and using products wisely. Issues never more important than now; with a ragged economy and rapidly increasing food and fuel costs.

Smart Shoppers… Smart Marketers.

So the brand works well to express the product. All Stop products work for many common ailments and parasites. Need to treat bed bugs? They have that. Raging Jock itch? You’re covered. (With my sympathies).

Along with the rebrand, their website has also undergone some effective retooling work. Now their sites are SEO compliant. The structure follow logical tree flow and their URLs are really search engine friendly. In the last week they look to be adding some link building features. With the new design they could easily move into the social networking traffic cloud.

Check out a corporate page at www.allstop.com or a sample affliction landing page at: http://www.allstop.com/lice/head-lice-treatment Pay close attention to the new packaging. More facelift work here. I suspect these folks are going retail shelf any day now. I’ll post updates as they grow. It is very interesting to watch a young growth company like this in its early stages.

One of the most common tasks clients ask me for help with is how to paste Youtube or Google video into their Microsoft FrontPage website. It’s really a snap to embed videos but there are a couple of foundation principles you must know to do it.

You’ll need to know how to use your clipboard to select, copy, and paste. You will need to be able to look at, copy, and insert (paste) html code into your page HTML. Now don’t get nervous…HTML is just some formatting that makes the page appear in your visitors browser. Normally FrontPage isolates you from working in HTML. But this is going to be easy, so follow along. Let’s get started!

The best way is to start a new page for this to practice on so you don’t mess up a working page while practicing. So open up FrontPage and make a new page in your site.

Notice in FrontPage at the bottom of the page editing window there are tabs for Normal, HTML, and Preview. If you click the HTML tab it will show you the HTML code of the current file. So if you started a video.htm page for example you can look at the code of that page. Now go back to normal view and put some text on the page. Just write a couple sentences, then go back to HTML view and see the changes. Now minimize FrontPage and go to your Web Browser.

Now go to YouTube or Google Video and locate the first video you want to embed. Both sites have embed code they create for you on the video page. Find the video you want to embed. Locate the the embed code on the video page and select and copy it to your clipboard. Then go to FrontPage and look at the html code of your page again. This is where you’re going to ‘paste’ this embed code. (Please note that some publishers block embedding so if you can’t find the embed code try a different video.)

Switch to normal view and locate the spot where you want the video to appear. Put your cursor there. You may need to hit a carriage return to put the cursor where you want it below the text. Once the cursor is there, hit the SPACE bar a couple time to make a couple blank spaces on the page. Then select these blank space with your mouse, or you can hold your SHIFT key down and hit your left arrow key to select the blank space. Either way, all you need to do is highlight the space. (This is basically creating a bookmark in the page you can see in the code.)

Now switch to HTML view and you’ll see the highlighted section that corresponds with the selection you just made in normal mode. Now if you followed the steps so far you should still have the video embed code in your clipboard so you can ‘Paste” the code into the html area where the highlighted spaces are. (A quick shortcut is just to hit CTRL+V on your keyboard to paste the contents of the clipboard. This should insert the code into the page for you.

Now go back to normal to keep working or save the page and use Preview to see how it looks with the video. Once you do this a few times, you’ll be a pro at it so have fun and start embedding video!

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Well the talks are off for now.

Tempers flared, ties loosened and negotiations abandoned…at least for the weekend.

Let’s call the whole thing off shall we?

The proposed Microsoft purchase of Yahoo! may make for good theater, but it’s more disaster film and corporate drama. When two 800 lbs gorillas try to dance, someones banana always gets stepped on. The latest snag Friday was an insurmountable + $4 share demand that Yahoo! won’t budge from and Micro$oft wont meet. So get ready for banana splits all around this week.

This is one time I say, ‘Can’t we all just NOT get along?’

Microsoft buying Yahoo! will be just another super merger that makes the web smaller. The bigger these monsters get, the more narrow the public data pool becomes.

No, I’m not wringing the anti-corporate crying towel here folks. I’m Mr. Marketing remember? Hey let’s all get so rich we can buy Bill Gates breakfast, or better yet buy Bill Gates! However, my short hairs get stiff when the mega-powers start bowling for eyeballs at this level.

The only thing worse than Microsoft is Yahoo! — powered by Microsoft.

Get your spoons ready…

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