FlagAndMap Weblog

Here’s a gem – Web CEO – outstanding SEO software that won’t cost a fortune. Indeed there’s even a free version that retains good functionality and has no expiration. They suggest that those who have benefited from the free version might like to help promote their software and as we liked it so much we decided to do just that.

We found Web CEO extremely useful and quite easy to use – there’s even a video tutorial, which might be a wise place to start. The SEO functionality of Web CEO is divided into four areas:

• Finding Your Niche (keywords and site optimization)
• Promoting Your Site (site submission, linking and ppc)
• Analyzing Your Site (rankings, link popularity and traffic reports)
• Maintaining Your Site (FTP uploader, site quality control and uptime monitoring)

We think you’ll agree that this is a comprehensive offering. Much of this is available in the free version but many people are also likely to find their pricing structure attractive. We encourage you to check it out via this link.

Follow our new twitter account for flagandmap latest news, product updates, current promotions and more.

Ring Binders are the latest addition to our product range. These come in three ring sizes, 1″, 1.5″ and 2″ and start at $18.95. They are of course perfect for organizing paper based products. Flagandmap customers will find them useful for travel scrapbooks, photo albums, school geography projects and similar creative ideas. The designs on our binders feature national maps composed of flag hearts and are, as ever, customizable so you could replace the front image with one of your own choosing – a favorite travel photo perhaps. Here are a few examples:

Two new designs of customizable mug have been added to our European collection. These are template products, which make it easy to substitute your own text for the placeholder text. Substitute the name of a person or organization plus a special message or anniversary details to create a personalized gift or commemorative item.

The first design features a flag-colored map on one side with your text on the other side while the second features a map of flag hearts on one side with your text on the other side.

We’re pleased to announce a cooperative marketing arrangement with, Flagnostic, a store that also sells products with designs based on world flags. Their t-shirts, mugs, hats, magnets, etc. feature gnarly national flag designs for every nation. We like their name and we like their designs. Here is their shop banner, which gives an idea of the kind of designs you might currently find there.

You can check them out at www.zazzle.com/flagnostic

Recently we created bumper stickers with flag and map designs for every European nation. Each carries the country name in english plus the text ‘adventure destination’. As ever, you have the option to replace that text with your own before you buy.

As an example here is the bumper sticker for Romania

If you go to our Search by Nation webpage you’ll notice that most of the links take you to our store at Zazzle where you can browse, customize and purchase products for the selected nation. However, you’ll also find that some of the links take you first to a FlagAndMap webpage dedicated to that nation. The page for Bulgaria is a good example. These pages comprise links to both products and information for the selected nation. Of course that includes links to our own products but there are also links to products from other designers with a connection to that nation. More than that though you’ll find links to general national information, relevant blogs by nationals or ex-pats, selected music from that nation, national publications and appropriate interest groups.

We hope you’ll find these pages useful and by all means contact us if you have observations regarding their content. Populating these pages is a time-consuming process so please be patient if we have not yet completed one for the nation of interest to you.

Want to keep track of what’s new at FlagAndMap? You’ve come to the right place! Stay informed about new products, current promotions and website enhancements. Be sure to use the ‘Latest News’ RSS feed for effortless monitoring of this information.

The ideas outlined in this post are prompted by commonly heard question these days: “How is your business weathering the current economic downturn?”. The first thing to state definitively is that FlagAndMap is not in danger of going out of business. FlagAndMap is still in an early development stage where growth is more important than profitability and modest long term investment ensures that the business does not encounter cash flow problems. For us the question is really about the impact of the current economic conditions on our rate of growth.

In fact, we have seen growth remain steady over the last six months, when correcting for year-end seasonal effects. Our stretch goal is for the number of customers and our revenue to grow by 50% year on year. In broad terms we are still achieving this despite the economic gloom.

In fact for an enterprise like ours it would probably be a mistake to use a recession as an excuse to relax growth goals. Companies in an early stage of growth are either riding the wave of an emerging market or, like us, trying to break into an established market by capturing market share. In the latter case unless the market has been catastrophically affected by the downturn (think car industry) the growth of a newer company based on market share capture should not be severely hampered. It may even be helped. Established players may be suffering – cutting costs to remain profitable, shedding resources due to overcapacity and struggling with cash flow issues. Newer ventures on the other hand may have none of these challenges – they are not currently expecting to be profitable, capacity has probably always lagged demand and long term investment for growth ensures that cash is on hand.

Of course FlagAndMap is a modest enterprise in comparison with some but the above considerations should be equally valid. We are therefore not intending to use the current recession as an excuse to relax our goals. Fortunately, so far this year we are not failing to achieve them and who knows, perhaps as the economy emerges from recession we may enjoy an unplanned boost.

Each visit to the blog over the last few months has reminded me that i wanted to find out how to make our welcome post ‘stick’ to the top of the page.  Poking around the WP admin screens didn’t unearth this functionality and time typically didn’t permit wrestling with their quirky online help search results.  I was reluctant to keep blogging until this had been figured out and so you’ll see there’s been a hiatus.  When i finally gave priority to figuring this out it turned out to be perfect timing.

My recent visit was greeted by a message urging me to upgrade to WP 2.7.1.  I ignored that and delved into the help topics with a search for articles on ‘sticky posts’.  Apparently there are plug-ins that provide this functionality (do i trust plug-ins?) but luckily one article concluded with the comment that this functionality is now native in version 2.7.1.  Aah! time to upgrade to 2.7.1.

It went smoothly!  It helps to have some idea how the blog is configured – there’s the basic software, which will get upgraded, there’s a customized theme, which would need to be preserved and hopefully would work with the new version, and there’s the database of posts etc., which would also need to be preserved.  Knowing this, the upgrade instructions were easy to follow – backup all this just in case; copy these folders; copy only selected contents of these other folders; etc.  Hey presto! it was done and after a little login hesitation we were up and running again.

The upgraded version is definitely better.  A clearer layout in the admin screens was the most obvious improvement – the previous layout had somehow seemed ‘sideways’ for want of a better description.  Of course i quickly looked to find the ‘sticky’ option and after a slightly protracted search found it as a check box under the ‘Visibility’ edit menu.

I was, however, stumped for a longer period by the disappearance of spaces that formerly existed between paragraphs in my posts.  The old posts looked the same as ever until you came to edit them, at which point all those spaces closed up.  This must be their most frequent of upgrade FAQs because the help button available while posting quickly mentions that their ‘wysiwyg’ editor eliminates all html code not compliant with XHTML 1.0, including <br /> tags between paragraphs.  It encourages you to go to your CSS style sheet to format the paragraphs in a more compliant way!  Great! digging back into all that custom coding done when setting up the blog.  It didn’t really take that long to track down what was needed (CSS is great), it was just an unwelcome chore necessary before i could proceed to blogging.

Anyway here we are running 2.7.1.  WordPress software really is neat software that continues to improve with each new version.