Posts Tagged ‘positive’

eHarbor names final MVPs of 2009

Friday, December 4th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

We’ve had quite a few MVPs in 2009. MVPs are eHarbor, Inc. employees who go above and beyond their normal job requirements to accomplish something extraordinary. This month, eHarbor’s leaders selected winners for both November and December in preparation for the big announcement on December 10.

On December 10, at the Hawaiian Christmas Party in the Provo City Library, we’ll find out who is the MVP for the whole year. They’ll select someone from all of the MVPs who’ve been named in 2009. But that’s the topic of a whole other blog entry. For now, I’ll talk about November’s and December’s MVPs.

We had one winner for November and two for December. Designer James Gentry is the November MVP, and Developer Matt Walker and Customer-Support Representative David Smith are the December MVPs.

I can’t take credit for writing all of these MVP descriptions. I wrote the one on David while my coworkers Alyssa Udall and Britnee Nguyen wrote the spotlights on Matt and James, respectively. Britnee was actually last month’s MVP. You can read about her in my blog entry, “eHarbor MVP creates 6-month PR plan.”

On with the MVPs!

James Gentry
eHarbor, Inc. MVP James GentryWith hard work and dedication, James has really made an impression on his coworkers and earned the November MVP! Recent changes to the Design team opened up a position for a design manager, which James was unanimously appointed to.

Coworkers say that James “stepped in greatly” with his new promotion and continues to “go above and beyond and is always available to help and give his advice.” This new position enables him to “make sure customers are happy and that our Design team stays happy with their work,” his team leader said.

He loves recording and mixing music, eating peanut butter M&Ms, tacos, watching the shows 30 Rock and Community, and his favorite color is #669900… green.

Matt Walker
eHarbor, Inc. MVP Matt WalkerMatt’s Web-development skills have been valuable to eHarbor for the last three years he’s worked here. Matt’s the recipient, along with David, of the December MVP award for his combination of working hard behind the scenes and being a nice guy.

With the other developers, he’s been keeping things running smoothly throughout the company. He’s also a friendly guy who assists new coworkers around the office. “Matt always does such great work and is always so nice and pleasant to work with!” said one of his nominations.

Matt enjoys programming, which is a good thing since it’s his job, but he also likes to read, write and play video games. His favorite movie is Dead Poets Society and his favorite dessert is chocolate velvet. You can catch him watching Mythbusters and Doctor Who on TV or eating sushi at Sakura.

David Smith
eHarbor, Inc. MVP David SmithDavid works hard to give top-quality customer service to everyone who calls in. He goes the extra mile in helping customers by answering people’s questions thoughtfully and following up to make sure they are satisfied with their custom Internet-marketing solutions. Well done, Dave!

His favorite candy is Reese’s Pieces and his favorite food is gum. Interesting. Like James, his favorite color is green… forest green. For fun, he enjoys working on cars and playing sports, as well as listening to bands like Weezer, Pearl Jam and Saves the Day. His favorite movies are V for Vendetta and Gladiator, and his favorite TV show is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

eHarbor gives back with Food Drive

Monday, November 30th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Starting on November 2, eHarbor, Inc. has been hosting a Food Drive to help the needy in our local Utah County area. Christmas is always such a great time for charity and a spirit of service. Winter isn’t my favorite season of the year, but December might just be my favorite month because of all the awesomeness it contains.

eHarbor, Inc. logoWe have enjoyed an incredibly successful year in 2009, and so of course we want to give back to our community. It’s amazing how fast the time has gone. Can it really be almost 2010? Incredible.

The eHarbor Food Drive will end on December 10. To make it more interesting, we’ve divided the company into two teams: the Turkeys and Cranberries. We’ve all been donating canned items, toiletries, cereals, macaroni and cheese and other nonperishable products to see who can do more good. We’ll see who the winner will be.

Competition is a great thing, isn’t it?

Keep coming back to the eHarbor Blog for fun company updates like this. Check out the Submit Solution Internet marketing blogs for the latest on Web design, social media and PPC solutions.

eHarbor MVP creates 6-month PR plan

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Content writer Britnee Nguyen (pronounced “when”) was selected as the MVP at eHarbor, Inc. at the Halloween party we hosted on October 30. You can read more about that party in my blog entry, “The most colorful pie chart you’ve ever seen.”

eHarbor MVP Britnee Nguyen

Britnee is extraordinary, even for an MVP. Take a look at her accomplishments. Within 90 days of joining eHarbor, Britnee has:

- Helped organize the Submit Solution website launch party.

- Obtained cool Submit Solution “S” stickers for employees to stick around the office.

- Gotten eHarbor CEO and founder Oliver Bigler into the Utah Valley BusinessQ as one of the 10 coolest entrepreneurs in Utah Valley. That will appear in an upcoming issue. I’ll hopefully keep you posted on when it comes out.

- Designed a six-month public-relations plan for Magellan Commerce.

And those are just her four most visible accomplishments. Yeah, amazing. When she’s not performing superhuman feats around the office, she likes to sit outside on a warm day with a Dan Brown book. You can find her enjoying enchiladas or an ice cream cone at the Chunga’s restaurant in Provo.

She also enjoys reading, writing (Does anyone ever like doing one but not the other?), bike riding and playing sports like volleyball. Her favorite color is pink and her favorite TV show is Scrubs. Her favorite movies include The Guardian, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Pride and Prejudice (2005).

You can read many of Britnee’s superb blog entries on the Submit Solution Internet marketing blogs. Keep coming back to the eHarbor Blog for updates on our company, and check out Submit Solution’s four blogs for the latest information on free search engine submissions and other topics, like Web design and social media.

The most colorful pie chart you’ve ever seen

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Do you want to see a pie chart that is full of colors. I mean Full. Of. Colors. You might have seen some colorful pie charts and graphs before, but I’m positive you haven’t seen one this colorful. I’ll show it to you at the end of this blog entry, but first I want to wish you a happy Halloween in two days!

eHarbor Inc. will have its annual Halloween party tomorrow at noon. I wrote about it in a blog entry, “eHarbor Halloween party to showcase culinary talents,” a few weeks ago. This will be a fun event. We’ll have a chili cook-off (hence the title of my previous blog entry) with several eHarbor employees vying for the title of best chili. Yum yum.

I think I’m most looking forward to the creative costumes people will wear. We’re having a competition for who wears the most creative costumes.

This is where the colorful pie chart comes in.

Each month, I send out a poll to my fellow eHarbarians to ask them about different topics. I then include the results in pie-chart form in the next issue of the eHarbor ePort, our monthly newsletter. We have another issue coming out at the Halloween party, so I’m excited about that. Anyway, for the October issue, we asked people what was the best Halloween costume they ever wore or saw someone else wearing.

And these are the responses we got.

There were so many different ones that I considered not putting them in a pie chart at all. But it looked so nice I just had to do it. Usually, there’s a clear winner followed by a few other responses. In this one, almost every answer only got one vote, offering a variety of results. Feast your eyes on the creative minds of eHarbor’s employees.

Keep coming back to the eHarbor Blog for company updates, and go to the Submit Solution Internet marketing blogs for the latest insights into free search engine submissions and other SEO and PPC topics.

October eHarbor, Inc. pie chart on Halloween costumes

Bing and Google launch social-media solutions

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

Google could soon change the rules of keyword Internet marketing with the debut Have you heard? Google and Bing are adding new social-media search capabilities to their search engines in an attempt to keep up with these innovative websites. Bing already has a beta version of its new search engine designed specifically for Twitter results while Google is holding back at the moment.

Chess match in color and black and white

Google and Microsoft are caught in an escalating fight over who will dominate the search-engine market for social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook. I read about this in the PC World article, “Real-Time Search: Google and Bing Rivalry Intensifies on Facebook and Twitter.” This article refers to the Google-Bing rivalry as a chess match. Quite an apt metaphor, in my opinion, because I love all of the strategy that goes into a seemingly simple chess game.

Social media has been a thorn in the side of major search engines for a few years now. Facebook and Twitter are simply updated too often and too fast for search engines to keep up with them. It looks like that might be changing, though.

You can find the rest of this blog entry on the Submit Solution SEO Blog on Monday, November 2, 2009. The photo of the chess match is from Flickr, and it is the copyright of marcusrg.

eHarbor Halloween party to showcase culinary talents

Friday, October 9th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

On Friday, October 30, 2009, eHarbor, Inc. will host its annual Halloween party. I can’t imagine it being anything but a lot of fun. We’ll have people dressing up in Halloween costumes, decorating the office with plenty of orange and black decorations and, best of all, competing in a Chili Cook-off.

That’s right, we’re going to enjoy some hot chili just in time for the frosty weather that’s bearing down on Utah and probably other parts of the country. Several people have signed up so far for the competition and each of them will bring their chili concoction in on October 30 to serve it at the party. I’m not sure how the dishes will be judged, but the winner will be rewarded for their efforts.

I’m looking forward to the food and the costumes. I’ve never been too interested in dressing up, but I hear some eHarbor employees are quite creative. Last year, one employee dressed up as Severus Snape from the Harry Potter books, and another dressed up as the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, who famously walked through New York City in the film “Ghostbusters.” It will be fun to see what they come up with this year.

This talk of Halloween costumes reminds me of something I would like to share with you.

Each month in our company newsletter, which we call the eHarbor ePort, I write a comic and someone else illustrates it. In the October 2009 issue, I did one on the upcoming Halloween party. You can find it below. We’ve been doing these comics since February of this year, so maybe I’ll post some of them on the eHarbor Blog for all the world to see. Some of them are pretty funny, if I do say so myself, but others are inside jokes.

If you haven’t seen “The Karate Kid” recently, I highly recommend you check it out. That’s one of my personal favorite movies.

This blog entry has been all over the place. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading a little bit of my stream of consciousness. Be sure to keep coming back for company updates, and go to the Submit Solution Internet marketing blogs for the latest insights on Web design, SEO, PPC and social media.

October 2009 eHarbor comic

Merchant-service expert wins eHarbor MVP

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

By Robert Lockard

It’s time to spotlight this month’s eHarbor, Inc. MVP. This month it is Jeni Lavea, an eHarbor employee who took on an amazing amount of work with our Merchant Services unit. Remember my blog entry on the new Magellan Commerce merchant services? It’s a lot like that.

eHarbor MVP Jeni Lavea

Most of the content in this blog entry was actually written by Alyssa Udall, who writes lots of great blog entries on the Submit Solution Internet marketing blogs. We included most of this in our monthly company newsletter, which we distribute to our employees at the start of the month. I’m sure she won’t mind me sharing it here, though.

When we asked people around the office, “If you had to describe Jeni in one sentence, what would you say?” we received one response that stood out from the rest: “Jeni is the girl who loves you on your worst day; she works hard and is determined to do everything the best she can!”

Anyone can see that Jeni is very friendly toward everyone and is always cheerful. She always works hard and she never complains.

Originally from Temecula, Calif., Jeni now lives in Provo, Utah. She loves spending time with friends and family. Jeni enjoys Tim Burton movies, Mexican food, Disneyland and reading books like Pride and Prejudice and the Twilight series.

Plus, her favorite holiday is Halloween. I’ll talk more about our exciting Halloween Party in my next blog entry on Friday. Be sure to stay tuned!

This is the fourth time I’ve spotlighted an MVP in the eHarbor Blog. You can read about last month’s winner, Jeff Ashby, in my blog entry, “ThemeFury.com creator named eHarbor MVP.” I’ll keep showing off our MVPs accomplishments in future blog entries.

Submit Solution receives tasty website launch party

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

By Robert Lockard

The new Submit Solution website is quite amazing, isn’t it? If you haven’t checked it out, be sure to visit www.submitsolution.com right now to see all the great Web design, SEO and other services we provide there.

In fact, Submit Solution’s new website is so cool that we actually held a launch party in its honor on Monday, September 21, 2009. Alyssa Udall and Britnee Nguyen, the other two writers on the four ecommerce blogs on Submit Solution, and I planned a company-wide get-together in which we enjoyed refreshments and gave out prizes. The refreshments were made up of drinks, as well as orange and white donuts, which were shaped like the new Submit Solution logo. See for yourself.

Submit Solution logo made of donuts

Submit Solution logo

That S-shaped group of donuts was one of my favorite parts of the celebration. After that, we held a fun scavenger hunt. Employees had to search the Submit Solution website for clues to lead them to prizes cleverly hidden throughout our eHarbor, Inc. office. We hid clues on Submitsolution.com in the site’s blog tags, image titles and in the text of Web pages.

The prizes people could win by finding and unscrambling the clues included toys, candy bars, eHarbor mugs and Bigler Bucks, which we affectionately named for Oliver Bigler, the CEO and cofounder of eHarbor, Inc. We use Bigler Bucks to buy company products, like pens, mugs and shirts. Our employees enjoyed this friendly competition. Most of them are used to playing foosball, so this scavenger hunt was quite tame in comparison.

You can read more about this website’s great features in my blog entry, “Submit Solution launches updated website with new design features.”

eHarbor softball wins dramatic doubleheader

Monday, September 21st, 2009

By Robert Lockard

The eHarbarians’ softball season ended on an incredible high note on Wednesday, September 16, 2009. The eHarbor, Inc. softball team had to play a doubleheader that day, one game after the other, and they came through both times to grab a double victory.

eHarbor softball player batting

Coming off a stellar victory in the first game, our team kept up with the other team in the second game. It was close. We were trailing by one point near the end of the game.

During one play under those dangerous circumstances, one of our runners was declared “Out,” even though the second baseman totally bumbled the ball and didn’t have it in his mitt when the runner slid in under him. Our coach, eHarbor President John Russell, pointed out that serious flaw in the umpire’s call, and he was promptly thrown out of the game. It was quite a sight to see.

After that, things got even more exciting. With little time left, our batters were looking to smash a game-winning hit, but, ironically, all they had to do was stand next to the plate to win. The pitcher must have been really tired or had some crazy strategy because he just kept walking our batters until we scored two runs and won the game. That was awesome!

We ended this season with a record of 3-4. Our post-season begins on Wednesday, September 23 at 6 p.m. Whether we win or lose that game, we’ll play another one that same evening. I’ll let you know how we do. Go eHarbor!

Magellan Commerce the 1st to offer ecommerce and merchant services

Monday, August 31st, 2009

By Robert Lockard

With the release of its Magellan Merchant service today, Magellan Commerce has become the first one-stop shop for businesses looking for website, branding and online payment solutions. No company has ever offered both an integrated ecommerce platform and merchant services until now.

There is a huge demand among online businesses for a simple, low-cost merchant service. That’s why Magellan Commerce combined its expertise at Web design with this new merchant service. Now businesses won’t have to work with several different companies to build their website and then allow customers to pay with credit cards online. It can all be handled by Magellan Commerce for a low price.

Here are some of Magellan Merchant’s great features:

Magellan Commerce logo- No setup fees

- Low transaction rates

- Low, 5-cent monthly fee

- No contracts

- No minimum monthly transactions

- PCI-compliant security protocols to protect against identity theft

Magellan Merchant services are only available to Magellan Commerce customers. Magellan Commerce is an innovative ecommerce platform that specializes in designing websites and logos for small businesses. eHarbor, Inc. is the parent company of Magellan Commerce.

To find out more about Magellan Commerce and Magellan Merchant, go to www.magellancommerce.com or call 1-800-925-1647.