Joe D’Ambrose

In February of 2008, Normal Kings re-designed the website for the Vision Centers at Meijer.

The Vision Centers at Meijer provide discount prices for fashionable products as well as optometric services, including eye exams at all locations, which are conveniently located in the front section of the Meijer Store Locations. The Vision Centers are currently located in 16 locations in Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, which service 6 major markets across the midwest.

To visit the website, visit http://www.meijervision.com/.

We warmly welcome Patience Coleman and Miss Beth’s School of Dance to the Normal Kings website community. Normal Kings has recently launched http://www.missbeths.com/, a brand new website for a well known dance school that has been open for more than 20 years. This website gives Patience the ability to manage her news releases, photo gallery, and calendar, which will ensure that her website always stays up to date!

We are confident that this website will prove to be very useful for the students of Miss Beth’s and their parents.

Normal Kings is honored to welcome to Massachusetts YMCA Youth & Government to our website community. This website was rapidly developed over the past 3 weeks, and after its launch on Monday November 12th, has already received nearly 200 registrations from Youth and Government delegates. This will be a very useful new tool for their organization, and we hope to help other Youth & Government programs re-develop their websites in the future!

Check it out at this link.

Normal Kings is pleased to announce yet another addition to our website community. We welcome Green Mountain Lighting Designs of St. Albans, Vermont. Green Mountain Lighting Designs is the only lighting showroom in Vermont that offers the largest selection of lights for every room, on-site design consultations and blueprint reading, and so much more. To check them out, visit www.gmlightingdesigns.com!

It’s a long weekend for Columbus Day, and I’m in Baltimore with my parents, visiting my sister and her husband. In times of leisure, sometimes my brain starts ticking even more than when I’m overwhelmed with “stuff” to do at school. Senior year. Only a few months until graduation in May, and then many more rich business undertakings and whatnot as I move on through my 20’s.

Reading Fast Company as I try to get comfortable on this air mattress, I’m reading about Web 2.0 businesses, the advantages of good product design, and about media conferences taking place around the country. I found some good advice I want to jot down from an AT&T Small Business advertisement:

• Respect your customer’s time. When a customer can’t be helped immediately, tell them why and commit to a time to respond to their needs.
• Stand behind your product, even if it falls apart. Lifetime guarantees create lifelong customers who will return to your company and spread the good word to friends.
• Go the extra mile to give your clients the service they deserve. If you go out of your way to improve your clients’ experience, they’ll go out of their way to improve your sales.
• Remember the first rule of business. Don’t say “No” to your customer, instead work harder to provide the service your customers desire and chalk costs up to an investment in your company’s future.

Thanks for the advice, AT&T. I’m going to keep these tips in mind as I continue to service Normal Kings clients as well as Expedient Laundry customers.

Lastly, I wanted to comment on two great examples of entrepreneurship I witnessed today:

• Happy Feet: At a downtown festival, we passed by a bright orange booth with two friendly individuals inside. They were selling a delightfully simple product; therapeutic glycerin filled massaging insoles for your shoes. Supposedly these things increase circulation and massage your feet as you walk, helping sore knees, hips, etc. I cannot personally attest to the effectiveness of the product, but my mother is trying them out and seems to enjoy them so far. I was impressed with the simplicity of the product and the idea. You can learn more about the product as well as distribution opportunities at www.happyfeet.net.
• Robert McClintock: I was inspired by this entrepreneur/artist the first time I visited Baltimore, and once again was very impressed/inspired today as I walked through his gallery. Mr. McClintock takes photographs around various places in Baltimore (as well as Washington, D.C. and New York), and brings them into Photoshop to perform his signature smudging on the photos. They come out beautiful, and he prints them up on various platforms (card stock, pulled fabric, poster board). People are blown away by the beauty of this artwork and they can’t help but purchase their favorite scenes. Check out his artwork at http://www.robertmcclintock.com/.

I’m off to bed. More to come in a few days!

We welcome the Middletown, CT Transit District, more commonly known as the MAT (Middletown Area Transit), to the Normal Kings website community.

Thank you again to Mr. Thomas Cheeseman and Kathy Wallace for giving us the opportunity to work with you!

Visit their new website at http://www.middletownareatransit.org/.

Normal Kings, Inc. has had the privilege to work with Berlin, Connecticut based Refined Stone, a subsidiary of Tiles Unimited, LLC. For more than a decade Refined Stone has been fabricating and installing custom designed natural stone features for residential and commercial interior spaces across southern New England and south eastern New York.

Refined Stone first contacted us in late July, expressing the need for a new website to really showcase their portfolio items; a website that would be dynamic and frequently updated throughout the year. During a couple months of hard work, we built a custom website for them, with a dynamic portfolio, a product gallery, testimonials, and much more. Be sure to visit the newly launched RefinedStoneOnline.com. We look forward to helping them grow their business on the web!