Whisper Rock Estates is one of Scottsdale’s most alluring communities, nestled around the base of Lone Mountain and the adjacent Whisper Rock Golf Club. With 86 custom homes and villas already built, and 125 custom homesites available, the real estate opportunities for those seeking a strong sense of community, value-enhancing architectural detail and sun-splashed days and cool evenings make for exceptional buying opportunities.
 
The Whisper Rock Real Estate team of Tom Locati and Will Foote wanted a website that would reflect the qualities, attention to detail and warm colors that every prospective client would find compelling. In addition, they wanted to create a Feature section they could use to place specific custom homes and custom homesites on the main landing page for easy viewing.
 
Our digital team created a customized framework that included a non-Flash rotating image gallery in the website’s header section. These images can be easily replaced with updated seasonal images or used by the sales team to show some of the communities unique amenities in a very special way.
 
The landing page also provides for a 2×2 Featured Homes section to stand out from other key listing sections of the website. These Feature content blocks include usage of iconic devices, a gallery of beautifully photographed images of the homes and homesites, plus each Feature allows the listing agent to craft short descriptions of the property.
 
You can visit the new website at WhisperRockEstates.com.

Communication Links was recently called upon by the fine folks at Lamkin Grips to assist with the production of several short videos introducing their new line of Performance Plus 3Gen Wedge Grips.
 
You’ll see that Scottsdale’s very own Gary McCord is the pitch man. Tune in. These grips just might be for you.
 
 

As if choosing which spectacular course to play wasn’t challenging enough, Grayhawk has added more delicious ways to indulge before, during or after a round! Be sure to try these new dining options:

Mojo Morning Joint

Morning tee times just got a bit more enjoyable(for your taste buds anyway). The fresh morning joint starts pouring and dishing at 6:30 am and keeps it rolling until 3 pm. They’ve got jo, Frappuccino, cappuccino, burrito, mojo and a lot of stuff that doesn’t end in “o.”

Takin it to the Streets

Grayhawk has joined the growing army of food trucks! Yep. Meet Chuck. If you see him on the street, stop by for some great food and drinks and maybe even a reason to play more golf. Follow Chuck on Twitter @GHchuck and he’ll let you know where he is going to be each day.

Isabellas Kitchen

Beginning in the fall of 2012, Grayhawk will be opening its newest dining venture- Italian style! From the tasty treats to the astounding atmosphere, there is surely a lot to look forward to!

Here is what’s in store for Isabellas:
• Comfy Italian fare – you know, pizza, meatballs, spaghetti, all your favorites
• Comfy furniture – indoor, outdoor, by the fireplace, by the bar wherever you want to sit and stay awhile
• Comfy clothes – we’re going to be comfortable while we serve you, you should be too. Wear whatever you like.
• City lights – we couldn’t work “comfy” into the description, but the views will be spectacular


For menus, contact info, and descriptions visit grayhawkgolf.com/dining

The Schaffer’s Mill Community was recently featured on NBC 4 Bay Area’s Great Getaways television show. Host Dave Mulligan showed off the beautiful community, the awesome Club yacht, the award-winning golf course and much more. If you missed the show, never been to Schaffer’s Mill, or want to relive a past visit, here’s a great opportunity to see the community and amenities in beautiful HD!

http://www.nbcbayarea.com/brchannel/Great-Getaways-Schaffers-Mill-Lake-Tahoe-146025995.html

The CL Digital team is very busy these days. Between launching several new sites, maintaining those already built and managing the projects growing in the pipeline, the only chance they get to see a golf course is through resizing images they load onto these websites. But, our clients are far more important than our golf handicaps!

While the tee times have been replaced by deadlines, we are surely proud of how these websites turned out! Check these out, let us know what you think and stay tuned for those coming soon…


Artigue Agency
The Artigue Agency is a full-service marketing firm that serves selected industries with research, planning and strategic communications programming. The agency is headed by CL’s neighbor, long-time marketing and public relations executive, Ray Artigue. (How could we turn down this project?! After all, they know where to find us!)
artigueagency.com


Grayhawk Golf
Since opening in 1995, Grayhawk Golf Club has become one of Arizona’s most celebrated daily-fee golf clubs, mostly because of it’s two exceptional 18-hole golf courses – Talon and Raptor. Sure the golf is spectacular, but Grayhawk offers much more than just golf. With several dining options, enjoyable amenities and exciting events you might not ever want to leave after your round! The fun atmosphere is reflected in the website design. Just check it out… you’ll see what we mean.
grayhawkgolf.com

Grayhawk Real Estate
Grayhawk Scottsdale is a master-planned community consisting of more than 4,000 residential homes along the nationally acclaimed Grayhawk Golf Club. The neighborhoods feature a distinctive landscape, access to exceptional dining, shops, schools, parks and trails, as well as an architectural palette that complements the dramatic natural beauty of the surrounding Sonoran Desert. Visit the website to find your perfect home and learn more about this unique community.
grayhawkre.com


Sun Devil Club
The Sun Devil Club is a community-owned organization focused on the funding and support of Sun Devil Athletics. It was designed to be inclusive, sustainable, fun and governed by the community. After all, the most successful University athletic programs have a strong, committed community behind them. The newly enhanced website offers valuable information, ways to get involved and member benefits. Also watch the “Every Member Counts” tracker increase as new supporters join!
sundevilclub.com


Tales from the Tour
On Monday, January 30, 2012, almost 1,500 people gathered in the Bird’s Nest at The Waste Management Phoenix Open to hear some funny and inspirational stories from Mark Wilson, Aaron Baddeley, Webb Simpson, and Ben Crane. All of the guys were interviewed by Brandel Chamblee and gave us great insight into their personalities, their secrets to overcoming adversity and their reliance on faith- they just might be better people than golfers! Visit the website to see each pro’s interview, personal bio and career highlights.
talesfromthetour.org

A D.I.Y. SOLUTION TO THE ARCHAIC OLD-BOYS NETWORK

I watched exactly 32 minutes of The Master’s this past week. For the record…I hate The Masters. Not the tournament itself. The actual golf is its only saving grace.

What I abhor is the genuflecting of the national media who dutifully grovel at the soft-spike saddle shoes of the Augusta National membership. They’re like wannabe fraternity pledges, scared to death they’ll never be invited back to the party if they dare call fans anything but “patrons” or the rough something besides “the first cut.” Don’t believe me…ask Gary McCord.

And, as pathetic as I find all this…what really gets my gag reflex going is the overwrought deference and hushed tones of Jim Nance and Mike Tirico. Guys…seriously…grow a pair.

Defenders will say all this over-the-top pretentiousness, with accompanying bowing and scraping by the media, just hearkens back to a bye-gone era when golf was a more genteel game. Well, I say let bye-gones be bye-gones. Besides weren’t those “good ol’ days” the same ones when people thought black-faced lawn jockeys were cool? Never mind…I’ll ask Tom Hanks.


Which brings me to my point (Finally!). This year, even more so than in the past few, the light of scrutiny was cast upon the Augusta National Golf Club and its lack of women members. The hubbub was over the fact that Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, one of only three Masters’ sponsors, is female and would never be considered for membership in the Augusta National Golf Club. Heck, even President Obama chimed in on the matter. (Bet George Zimmerman was glad the Prez found something else to comment on for a while.)


All of these do-good crusaders clamoring for Augusta National to change its evil ways are at best misguided and at worst they’re playing straight into the wrinkly old hands of the Augusta National membership. These guys eat this kinda stuff up. They’re in the business of shutting people out and thumbing their noses at the “little people” of the world. It gets their rocks off faster than a stock split.


For the life of me, I can’t imagine why Ms Rometty would want to join…if indeed she does. I don’t believe it is about golf. I don’t believe it is about “networking.” (She’s the CEO of freaking IBM after all. I think she’s got the networking angle covered.) Rather, I think this entire argument is simply about sticking it to the a-holes at Augusta National, and bringing them to heel. And, as much as I viscerally would like to go along with this argument, I just can’t. Truth is…they have the right to be A-holes. It’s a private club. They bought and paid for that right.


If the goal is to simply shove it up the…uh…noses of Billy and the boys, you need a different tactic. What you need to do is stop playing their stupid game. Simple as that.


It’s not like Ms Rometty is June Cleaver, cleaning house while the boys go play golf. She’s obviously got some wherewithal. And, there’s more where she came from. In fact 12 of the Fortune 500 companies are run by women. Approximately 40 percent of all MBA’s last year were earned by women. And, nearly 1 in 10 of all adult women in the U.S. is an entrepreneur. What I’m saying is…fight fire with fire.


At any given time, there are upwards of 200 golf courses for sale in the US. Ms Rometty and crew should go buy one of those. Decree it an all-female membership. Get a solid cadre of up-and-coming (or already arrived) female executives, professionals and business owners. And, shut the boys out. I guarantee the media would love it. This new club would get all the fawning praise it could handle, and the members wouldn’t have to wear those ugly green jackets or eat stupid cheese sandwiches.


Best of all, perhaps we could stop worrying over the unfairness of Augusta National and turn our collective attentions to something that really matters. Like the upcoming NFL draft.

Anyone who has been on Facebook for longer than a year probably feels a sense of frustration when your comfortable Facebook business page is changed for seemingly no reason. Worse, it sometimes changes at random times of the year with no prior warning. This has happened time and again over the last couple of years as the Facebook business platform (called Facebook Pages) has evolved its look-and-feel, and has altered how you can control some portions of your Page…but, not all.
 
In fact, there is always a reason for the change. These evolutions are couched in user friendly dimensions (“We’re from Facebook and we’re here to help you!”). But, let’s face it, these changes would NOT be done if Facebook itself didn’t benefit in a very big way (namely…advertising dollars).
 
To be fair, all user platforms do change over time. The more a company like Facebook learns from user experience feedback, as new technology is integrated into the software and as economic pressure is applied to increase revenue, changes will be made. Facebook used to be a 300 pound chimp; today, it has become an 800-pound gorilla, dueling constantly with the other giants (Google now the biggest gorilla in the jungle) for CPM and PPC-based advertising dollars.


How Does This Affect You?
 
On March 30, 2012, all Facebook Pages will convert to a radically new look intended to make Facebook pages feel a bit more like a website landing page. Unfortunately, businesses have not been able to vote on this change, or delay its execution. Facebook is pretty hardcore about making the transition, and will change your site over to the new Timeline framework with our without your permission. However, Facebook will enable you to launch your new Timeline design sooner than March 30 if you are ready to go.
 
The best thing you can do is to accept the inevitable (presuming you see the value in being on Facebook longer-term), and get your team involved in the process of adapting your site to the change with new posts and new engagement strategies. If you are currently using a default “welcome” tab or promotional tab as a landing page, these will go away on March 30. They will be pushed back into the tab box menu position on the landing page.
 
What’s new and really cool is that you can embed a large “header” image that spans the width of your available space. Facebook calls these “Covers.” At 850×315 pixels, this is a rather large space, which golf courses, real estate communities or other businesses can certainly use to display a positive brand or company image.
 
However, these cannot be “call to action” promotional banners, they cannot include a text URL within the graphic and they cannot be overtly “commercial” in nature. For all practical purpose, Facebook will ensure you don’t make your “Cover” an over-sized advertisement. Why? Because it would compete with Facebook’s desire to sell advertising on the right rail of your Facebook page. Facebook’s crawlers will look for violations and will likely remove your Cover without your permission if it violates the terms of service.
 
But, you can create a Cover with a dramatic panoramic image of one of your featured holes, or club house or an overhead shot of your residential community. Anything that helps show off WHO and WHAT you are will work. Think big and think outside the box. It can help create a lasting impression on those who visit your Facebook Page.
 
You will also be able to display an inset logo box that must be a minimum of 180 pixels square. This will overlap your cover image using an off-set position in the lower left side of your cover image. A colorful, bold image that can work within a square shape will work. Your creative designers will need to work a little overtime if your logo is a wide, rectangular size.


No More Landing Page Tabs
 
Previous versions of Facebook allowed the business to pre-set the default “landing page” for your Facebook page. If you had a special promotion, a contest, a “welcome video” from your general manager or a tee time booking page as your default page for all new visitors, that option will no longer be available to you. Facebook will now require its new Timeline page to be the only possible landing page which site visitors will see. You can build and host promotional tabs and other functional pages on your Facebook page, but these cannot be the landing page defaults.


Pinning a Post
 
One nifty new feature, one that I believe is a bone thrown back to us as page builders, is something called “Pinning.” In the web world, these are called “sticky posts.” The emerging success of a new pinboard-based social media platform called Pinterest has no doubt been instrumental in Facebook’s new pinning feature. Under Facebook’s new guidelines, you’ll be able to create a post that sticks to the top of your timeline post section. The pinned item could announce a new special promotional opportunity (with link), or contest, or direct a visitor to an inner landing page on your website where you are hosting or featuring something new and exciting. Facebook will allow you to pin that post to the top for 7 days. After 7 days, that post will revert to its position along the date timeline on the main Facebook page. You can create new pinned items as each one expires, but you cannot extend the pinning period for any one post.


New Box Tabs
 
Immediately under the Cover image, you’ll see a number of boxes into which you can place images or banners of one kind or another. You can re-order these with the exception of the first position box…that will be controlled by Facebook. You’ll be able to edit these by hovering your cursor over the tab box, select edit for each box and then move them to a new position in the tab section.


More Visible “About” Tab
 
The About tab box was pretty much invisible on previous versions of Facebook pages. As a result, your value statement, business philosophy or company tagline wasn’t seen by anyone unless they really worked hard to find it. The Facebook change to the Timeline design will elevate the About box so that it is very visible…just under the cover/logo image header section of the Facebook page. While you won’t be able to write your company’s entire history here, you will be able to create a very strong statement about your company, whether it’s “Where Customers Come First” or “Arizona’s #1 Rated Golf Course.” Take some time to think about what you want to say here, because it will be front and center for every Facebook Page visitor.


Embedding Video
 
Images and Video are engaging, eye-appealing ways to attract site visitors to your Facebook Page and hold them there. It will now be very easy to place video on the Timeline so that it can be readily seen and played back from the Timeline landing page. This could be a welcome video you “pin” to the top post position for 7 days, or a guided tour of a new spec home in your residential community.


What About Advertising?
 
There are two things to think about as it relates to advertising on your Facebook Page.

1. The right rail of your Facebook Page is totally controlled by Facebook. This is where you’ll see small ads appearing on your site. These are sold by Facebook based on PPC bid pricing, demographic, geographic, topic-related and/or psychographic selection criteria that PPC advertisers will select when placing ads with Facebook. This real estate is not yours to sell. In the past, Facebook would place between 3-5 small ads positioned vertically in the right-side panel of your page. Facebook is experimenting with 7-9 ad spots in the right sidebar position, so you’ll likely see these numbers go up and down as they continue looking at click-rates and other value metrics to choose the right number of ads to appear on each Facebook Page.
2. If you are an Advertiser that wishes to use Facebook for PPC or CPM campaigns, then you may be familiar with how you select your ad criteria. The amount of your budget, the click value, the frequency of your buys, and the perceived strength of your keywords (measured by click-through rates) will help determine whether your ad is at the top of the vertical stack, or at the bottom. The ad rotation sequencing is one of those dark mysteries controlled by Facebook. But, keep in mind that instead of the previous limited number of ad spots on the right rail, this number will effectively double in size creating the potential for more advertising clutter and lower CTRs for those further down the vertical ad stack.

Seeing is Believing
 
Several large companies, including a few in the golf industry, have already made the transition to Facebook’s new Timeline page design. You should log into your Facebook account and you can get the full effect at a few of these sites:
 
Titleist www.facebook.com/titleist

Starbuck’s Coffee www.facebook.com/Starbucks

Ford Motors www.facebook.com/ford

PING Golf www.facebook.com/PINGGolfFans

Electronic Arts (EA) www.facebook.com/EA


Can We Help?
 
Communication Links has helped build, launch and manage many Facebook pages for our clients. And, with full-time graphic/web designers on our staff, and a dedicated social media specialist, we have the in-house team to help you make the transition quickly and easily. This may be especially important in developing your cover and logo image header spot at the very top of the new Timeline page. Or, in helping you with your overall Facebook strategy.

Give any of us a call or drop us an email. We’ll be delighted to help you in any way we can.

When we build websites for our clients, one of the challenges with which we have to deal is cross-browser compatibility. As much as we wish it wasn’t true, the fact of the matter is that Internet Explorer (Microsoft), Chrome (Google), Firefox (Mozilla), Safari (Apple) and Opera all have varying degrees of support for “industry standards.” HTML, XHTML, CSS and other alphabet soup technical acronyms are all supposed to work within the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guiding principles, ensuring a good user experience regardless of website visited or browser of choice. Alas, not true (yet).
 
However, the problem is exacerbated by the wide range of browser versions being used. And, of all the browser development companies, Microsoft has been the most egregious violator of web standards among its earlier versions. That’s basically because Microsoft didn’t care much about supporting web standards created by global technical consortiums…it wanted to create its own. That didn’t go down well within the development and standards communities, and Microsoft abandoned that effort and slowly began getting into alignment with the rest of the industry. Unfortunately, that’s only AFTER millions of copies of IE 6 and IE 7 were distributed and used…and, which are STILL being used by millions of users to this day.
 
Microsoft’s key distribution method for any browser version is pretty simple…if you build notebook or desktop PCs (such as Dell or HP) and include some version of Windows, you also have to load the latest version of Internet Explorer. As Microsoft built succeeding versions of Internet Explorer, they began the process of making older versions incompatible with newer versions of the Windows operating system. And, while it is hard to believe there are still Windows ME and Windows XP users still out there over 10 years after those operating systems were introduced, Microsoft has made it impossible for those users to upgrade browsers to IE 8 or IE 9. The upshot is there are still millions of users around the world accessing the Internet with Internet Explorer 6 and 7.
 
As a result, every website we build for our clients requires some special tweaking or “patches” to the code to ensure compatibility with legacy versions of Internet Explorer. We have a test bed of computers in-house with older versions of the browsers so that as we build a new website, we can check how a page of text and images render across the major browsers and browser versions. Firefox, Chrome and Safari are very standards-compliant and generally pose few web development challenges. IE 6 and IE 7 add development time to our website builds since we have to run daily Quality Assurance tests on every page of a website build to ensure that it renders correctly.
 
We recently came across an interesting graphic representing the 2011 month-to-month marketshare decline of older versions of Internet Explorer and the surge of newer versions that are finally getting traction (through the purchase of a new computer or through Microsoft’s free browser upgrade program). With the advent of Internet Explorer 10 in 2012, Microsoft is preparing to more aggressively send IE 6 and IE 7 to the trash bin by forcing users to transition away from its older browsers. There will be hiccups along the way because PC users upgrade their operating systems even less frequently than they upgrade their browsers. But, Microsoft has finally realized that the adoption of next-generation Web 2.0+ development tools, the need for more standards compliance for a seamless user experience and the expected shift to IPv6 Internet Protocol addressing (see Is the Internet as We Know It Over? from my post of February 19, 2011) all will require an end-of-life strategy for its oldest browsers.
 
If you have any interest in how Microsoft’s strategy will play out over the next year or so, please check out this article from one of my favorite technical news sites CNET.
 
In building websites, we’ll continue to have some new technical issues we’ll need to confront such as iPad compatibility, HTML 5 vs. Adobe Flash adoption and others. But, eliminating IE 6 soon, and IE 7 later, will be beneficial for users, for our clients and for us as digital developers. A parting question for you: if you use Internet Explorer as your main web browser, which version are YOU using? If you can, upgrade to the latest version of IE that your PC operating system will allow. If you are on a Macintosh, then you are not only lucky, but you’ll also have nothing to worry about!
 
If you have questions or would like to discuss further, please contact me at jmartin@commlinks.com.

Hayman Woods is an investor in a wide variety of real estate-related communities. They also own EscondidoTexas, the golf & lake community outside Austin, Texas. Communication Links manages public relations and many marketing functions for EscondidoTexas, and we also built their website here.

One of the principals at Hayman Woods asked us to build a low-density “corporate” web site for their investment company…and, to keep it very simple. This site went “live” LAST NIGHT, so we’re still tweaking some post-launch issues. You’ll see some new web build innovations such as vertical boxes and button short codes. You can find this new website at http://haymanwoods.com.

Want to get the lowdown on what makes Scottsdale the world’s finest golf destination? Check out the Golf Road Warriors golfroadwarriors.com.

The GRW crew is comprised of four nationally acclaimed golf writers: Jeff Wallach, Tom Beddell, Terry Moore and Peter Kessler (okay…so actually one is a broadcaster). They came to Scottsdale to take a whirlwind tour of the best we have to offer.

It was a rough schedule they had. Accommodations at Four Seasons, The Boulders and The Fairmont Scottsdale Princess. Golf at Troon North, The Boulders, McDowell Mountain Golf Club, TPC Scottsdale, Grayhawk and WeKoPa. Mix in some yoga, off-road driving, bull-riding and sharing a couple local craft brews with Robbie Knievel (heir to the greatest motorcycle stuntman of all time and no slouch when it comes to jumping things, himself)…and you’ve got a pretty fun trip by anyone’s standards!