Faking Tilt-Shift Photography

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It works!

The other day, I got my first exposure (pun intended) to the world of tilt-shift photography. It was a link tweeted by one of my Twitter friends, @jebro, to a series of videos by Keith Loutit on Vimeo. These videos used time-lapse tilt-shift photography. The result were videos that looked as if they were created painstakingly with miniature models.

Take a minute right now and check out Keith’s video, “The North Wind Blew South.”

I’ve heard of time-lapse photography, of course. In fact, I used to play around with it using my Webcam software. You can see some examples here, here, and here.

But I’d never heard of tilt-shift photography. I did some research and found an excellent article on Wikipedia (of course) that included photos of camera equipment used to make the images. Per Wikipedia, the basic explanation is as follows:

Tilt-shift photography refers to the use of camera movements on small- and medium format cameras. In many cases, it refers to tilting the lens relative to the image plane and using a large aperture to achieve a very shallow depth of field.

The end result is that only a small portion of the image is in focus. This became popular in portrait photography. But it also has become popular as a technique to make fake miniatures — in other words, photos of full-size, real-life objects or people made to look as if they are miniature models. Wikipedia has a separate page about tilt-shift miniature faking that includes sample images.

You can also find plenty of sample images and videos on Smashing Magazine’s article, “50 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography.”

Photography is one of my hobbies and I was extremely interested in this technique. I think the photos look kind of silly and cool. But I wasn’t interested in buying special lenses just to give it a try. Fortunately, I didn’t have to. The Smashing Magazine article included a link to a tutorial on the Tilt-Shift Photography Web site titled “Tilt-Shift Photography Photoshop Tutorial.” It explains how you can use Photoshop to create a fake tilt-shift photograph.

I tried it today with a number of photos that happen to be with me on my laptop. The one shown below is my fifth try. It’s a photo of Juneau, AK (I think; forgive me if I got the wrong port city), taken from an upper deck on a cruise ship. In the original photo, the entire image is in focus; for this fake miniature, I focused on a boat and two buildings in the foreground. The color is saturated and the contrast is increased as recommended to give it that painted model feel. I think this photo is a pretty good example of the tilt-shift photography effect. What do you think?

Tilt-Shift Example

My first four tries simply didn’t look right. I think it was a combination of the image I chose and the lens blur mask I used. The photo here uses a radial gradient mask rather than the reflected gradient recommended by the tutorial. That makes it possible to pinpoint the in-focus area, which worked for this image. The example image in the tutorial had a horizontal strip of the photo in focus; that simply doesn’t work for all photos.

But I apparently did get the hang of it. Here’s my next try, with another Alaska port city:

Fake Tilt-Shift Example

San Francisco in MiniatureAnd here’s a shot from last January’s visit to San Francisco. That’s the dome of City Hall with Sutro Tower in the background. I took the photo from my hotel room at the Nikko. I think it comes across pretty well as a fake miniature.

And here’s a shot my husband Mike took on a helicopter trip up the Colorado River last year. It’s the Hoover Dam with the new bridge under construction:

Hover Dam Miniature

And one more…this is the power house downstream from Lake Chelan in Washington State. It’s another aerial photo — they certainly do make good subjects for this kind of exercise. The heavy equipment looks like Tonka trucks!

Lake Chelan Pumphouse Miniature

Anyway, now that I’ve tried this with a certain amount of success, I think I can get it out of my system. If anyone out there has experimented with this kind of photography — especially using a camera and lens rather than cheating with Photoshop — please use the Comments link or form for this post to link to examples of your work. And feel free to share any tips you might have for folks who are interested in giving this a try.

An Off-the-Grid Thanksgiving

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A pleasant challenge.

Yesterday, on Thanksgiving Day, Mike, Jack the Dog, Alex the Bird, and I took the truck up to our getaway place north of Williams, AZ. It’s an off-the-grid camping cabin on top of a mesa, 5 miles from pavement. If you’re not familiar with the term off-the-grid, it means that it’s not connected to any public utilities. We have solar panels with related equipment for electricity, a propane gas tank, and hauled water.

We left Wickenburg at about 9 AM for the 2-1/2 hour, 154-mile drive. We made one stop on our way out of town — to buy milk and an onion — another stop at the Chino Valley Safeway gas station (where we got a 70¢/gallon discount on diesel), and a final stop at the Jack in the Box restaurant in Williams.

More about Jack in the Box

I do need to digress a tiny bit here. This was the first time since my college days 20+ years ago that I’d been in a Jack in the Box. The last one I’d been in was in Hempstead, NY. I’d been standing at the counter, waiting to place my order, when someone robbed the place by reaching over the counter and grabbing money out of the cash register drawer when it opened. The robber fled quickly — the whole thing happened in about 5 seconds. I clearly remember the manager of the place vaulting over the counter with a sawed-off shotgun. When I say it was a rough neighborhood, I’m not kidding.

The robbery isn’t why I’ve avoided Jack in the Box restaurants all these years. Back in those days, the menu at those places seemed to center around tacos that weren’t very good. I’m not a big fast-food person — I haven’t had a McDonald’s hamburger in at least 10 years — so it wasn’t easy to avoid Jack in the Box. But yesterday surprised me. Mike and I both had hamburgers (since we planned to have turkey for dinner) and agreed that they were probably the best fast food burgers we’d ever had.

Muddy Roads…Again

Anyway, we ate the burgers on the road. There was snow on the ground — maybe about 3 inches of the stuff. It was wet and didn’t completely cover the ground. The clouds were low and thick and slow-moving. Every once in a while, we’d get a clear view of some upper level clouds or some blue sky. Everything was wet and clean looking. It was so un-Arizona. It was magnificent.

Howard Mesa RoadsWe made the turn off pavement and started the five mile trek up to our mesa-top retreat. We’d gotten about 2 miles in when the road’s surface started getting snotty. That’s really the only way to describe the reddish brown dust when it gets wet enough to make mud. Soon, it had coated the truck’s tires and we were starting to fishtail. Mike put the truck in 4WD. We continued up a gentle grade. The truck would not stay pointed in the right direction. This was not a good thing since (1) the road was only a tiny bit wider than a single lane and (2) there was a deep ditch on one side with water flowing in a shallower ditch on the other side. The photo here shows what it looked like the next day, after at least two other vehicles had passed through. By this time, the snot had solidified a bit and the road was passable again.

Back in May 2005, as I summarized in my blog post, “The Roads of Howard Mesa,” Mike’s truck had slid off the road into a deep ditch about 2-1/2 miles short of our place. The conditions had been similar. We’d been fortunate in that a neighbor had seen us go off the road and had “rescued” us with a Jeep. But it had cost $250 to get a tow truck over to pull the truck out. Neither of us wanted a replay on Thanksgiving Day. So when it seemed clear that we weren’t going to make it up the hill, we decided to back down, turn around, and try another route. We wound up sliding into the shallower of the two ditches. Mike put the truck in 4WD Low and powered us down. It was a tense 5 minutes or so, but then we were making a tricky 3-point turn in a bend in the road and going back the way we’d come.

There are 3 roads to access the lots at the top of the mesa. The access road for two of them was the snot-covered road we knew we couldn’t pass. The other road went up to the west side of the mesa. Our friends live up there year-round and the road up is kept in good condition. Between their lot and our side of the mesa is a 2-track “road” carved in by ranchers and hunters years ago. It’s not maintained at all and seldom used. In fact, I’d venture to guess that I use it more than anyone else, since it’s a “shortcut” to our friends’ place from ours. But the good thing about the road is that it’s relatively level and free of the snot-like mud on all the mesa’s other roads.

So we went that way. It was a 2-mile stretch of snow-covered ruts. Mike took it in 4WD at a pretty steady pace. We were both very glad to see the big metal water tank at the other end of the road. We got back onto the gravel surface and drove the final 3/4 mile without any problems.

“Off the Grid” Doesn’t Mean without Conveniences

At our camping shed were more challenges. We had to get the systems up and running. That meant turning on AC power (flicking a switch), turning on the gas (a lever), getting the gas refrigerator started (sometimes tricky), getting the hot water heater turned on (also tricky at times), and firing up the furnace. It’s this last thing that caused the most grief yesterday. As usual, a mouse had build a home in the furnace’s burner area and it had to be cleaned out before we started it up. Our miserable ShopVac stopped sucking, making Mike’s job more difficult. He worked on it most of the afternoon while I cooked dinner.

Cooking wasn’t tough at all. After all, we had an oven big enough for our 7-lb turkey breast (and nothing else), a 4-burner stove, and the decent quality cookware I’d had at home until we replaced it last year. There’s enough counter space, a cutting board, two good quality, sharp knives, and all the bowls and other cooking implements I needed. If you didn’t know we were off the grid, you’d never guess it. The only thing I didn’t use was our 600-watt microwave — and that was mostly because I didn’t want to waste what battery power we had left on what had become a nasty, rainy day.

I made an abbreviated version of a traditional Thanksgiving dinner: turkey breast, stuffing. gravy, and rice pilaf. Although I’d fully intended to make a fresh batch of mango chutney to go with it (instead of cranberries), I’d forgotten to bring along the mango. Going to the store definitely wasn’t an option. So I made the mango chutney recipe with apples. It didn’t come out bad at all. I was going to make some brussels sprouts, but after cooking for about 3 hours, I was too tired.

By 5:30 PM, Mike had the heat going. It wasn’t cold in the shed — the oven and stove had taken care of the chill — but it was nice to get the heat up to a more normal temperature, especially while we ate. We got Jack the Dog back in — he’d spent all afternoon trying in vain to catch one of the fat pack rats living under the shed — and wrapped his wet muddy body in a towel. Then we settled down for a good Thanksgiving dinner, complete with wine.

Reward After a Long Day

After dinner, we did the dishes and spent some time relaxing. I really love it up here — it seems that the troubles of everyday life just don’t exist. We played some “Chicken Foot” dominoes, then loaded a DVD — “Flawless” with Michael Caine and Demi Moor — in my laptop, turned out the lights, and watched the movie. Later, we climbed up into the sleeping loft, where it was nice and toasty — remember, heat rises — and went to bed.

I spent a lot of time looking out the window into the almost perfect blackness. A cloud had descended onto the mesa and there wasn’t anything to see. I’m pretty sure we were the only people around for miles. Some brief flashes of light in the clouds to the north indicated a thunderstorm over the Grand Canyon.

View with FogIn the morning, when it got light, we were in a fog bank. We could see the clouds move in, then clear. It was all quiet except the sound of coyotes off in the distance.

I took this photo, mostly to remember the fog — and the moment. It’s the view from the shed, looking northwest.

In Arizona, fog is a special treat to be savored. There’s no better place to savor it than at our getaway place in the middle of nowhere.

Captain Video Gets an Upgrade

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I’m going HD.

Captain Video is one of my “personal nicknames” — a name I apply to myself when I do something that’s silly or dumb or, in this case, an attempt to explore something new that’s currently beyond my skill set.

I’ve been interested in video for the past 10 or 15 years. I write for a living and I always thought it would be interesting to be involved with a video documentary project. Although one of my dreams has been to work on the research and composition of a documentary’s narrative, I really wanted to be part of the project throughout the video acquisition process, watching the cameramen and other professionals at work, seeing interviews conducted, listening to the director explain his goals for each shot.

I also toyed with the idea of doing my own video. We’ve owned various video cameras from the time the first shoulder mounted VHS machines hit the scenes. Cameras have been getting better, cheaper, and smaller. Over the past five or six years, I bought two different Canon video cameras. I used them a lot when I first bought them, then put them aside. Now their batteries never seem to be charged when I want to use them.

But earlier this year, I did make the big plunge into video production. I did it what I thought was the smart way: I hired a production team. Their job was to acquire the video that I could not shoot — mostly because I was flying a helicopter while the shots needed to be made. They would then take the video and put the best shots in the proper order using the proper transitions and adding the proper music and narration. The result: not one but three final broadcast-length/quality videos.

I won’t go into detail on how this is working out. It’s still to early in the process to say. In general, we have a lot of good footage — almost every bit of it in true high definition taken with professional video equipment. But there are gaps in the footage — scenes I need to tell my stories. And I simply can’t afford to get the video crew back up on location for a few days to get the shots I need.

HandyCam.jpgEnter the Sony HDR CX12 video camera. It’s small, lightweight, easy to operate, and shoots true high definition footage on Sony memory sticks. My production crew has one of these cameras and a lot of the footage shot with it was very usable. While not exactly cheap, it was affordable. I ordered it on Amazon.com yesterday, along with a spare battery and an 8 GB memory stick.

In December or January, Mike and I will head up to Page, AZ to pick up the video clips we need. We have some other business up there to attend to anyway, so we’ll be able to kill two birds with one stone. We’ll watch the weather and pick a weekend with calm winds and clear skies. We’ll fly the helicopter up with doors off on a Saturday, picking up needed clips along the way. Then we’ll do some late afternoon flying over the lake, spend the night in a motel, and follow it up with some early morning shots. Mike and I will take turns shooting, using the camera on the side of the aircraft with the best view of what we need to shoot. Then we’ll fly home, where I’ll put all the footage on a hard disk or series of DVDs and send them to my production crew for inclusion in the final videos.

At least that’s the plan.

Realize that I’m very worried that once this project is over, this camera will sit in a drawer with the others. The power will drain from its battery and I’ll be frustrated every time I take it out to use it. It’s going to take real effort on my part to keep using it. Probably a few small projects. None of those projects require HD, but it will be nice to save the footage in that format for future use.

I do need to mention here that I’ve been sitting on the fence about buying this camera since I first heard of it. My fears of not utilizing it and the price tag were the main things holding me back. But the need for HD video to complete my projects was a big motivator. It’s a lot cheaper to buy the camera and get the footage myself than to transport a video crew from San Diego to Page, AZ and back. To be honest, I’m also worried that they won’t get the footage I need on this second try, either. (You know what they say about wanting to get things done right.)

The thing that convinced me was the September 3, 2008 review on Amazon.com by Allen C. Huffman. It’s the first review that appears — probably because everyone who voted on it said it was helpful. He gave the camera 4 out of 5 stars and then provided some extremely helpful details and advice about using the camera with a Mac. He listed pros and cons about the camera, comparing it to another Sony model he owned and liked. This “real life” review by someone who is obviously not easily impressed helped convince me that this was the right camera for me.

Anyway, I’ve taken the plunge. Let’s see how much use I get out of this new piece of equipment.

Camping in a Hangar

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Not as bad as it seems.

As I type this, I’m sitting on a leather sofa in the second floor “pilot lounge” area of a friend’s hangar. The hangar is at a San Diego-area airport and the three large windows on this side of the room face out over one of the airport’s three runways. Outside it’s dark. From undefined glow of the lights across the runway that fade into the darkness, I can tell that it’s foggy. I can barely see the sweep of the white and green rotating beacon atop the control tower on the other side of the runway.

It’s 5 AM local time. I get up early no matter where I am.

If I look down out the closest window to the pavement outside the hangar, I can see my helicopter. I tied down the blades — needlessly, it appears; there doesn’t seem to be any wind here — and pushed it over to a level spot on the ramp area, clear of the taxiway. Seems weird to have it parked there, but it’s been there two nights now and no one has bugged me about it. After all, other folks park cars and other vehicles in the same place at the end of their hangars.

In looking at that fog, I’m sure I’ll be wiping the helicopter down with a towel later today. You get spoiled living in the desert.

You might wonder why I don’t put the helicopter in the hangar I’m camped out above. I could. But there’s already a Hughes 500c helicopter, a Diamondstar airplane, Jaguar sedan, and a GT40 sports car in there. There’s still a big empty space where the hangar’s third aircraft occupant usually parks his Twinstar and I probably could have fit in that space. But it didn’t seem worth the bother. A few days out on the sun won’t kill my helicopter. But with this salt-laden fog coming in, I’ll definitely be washing down the helicopter before I put it away at home later on today.

It’s wonderfully quiet here, with just some white noise — a distant hum that could be someone’s heat pump or even a generator. The heat inside the lounge, which just went on, is a lot noisier. The space I’m in takes up half the depth and the full width of the hangar below me. It’s completely enclosed and insulated, finished with nice plaster walls and carpeting. There are windows that open with screens on all four sides of the space; on one side, they open into the hangar’s main area.

There are three rooms up here, including a full bathroom, and one of the rooms has a little kitchen area, with certain conveniences conspicuously missing. There’s no stove or oven or dishwasher, but there’s a double sink and microwave and the small refrigerator has an ice maker in it. There isn’t much in the way of food in the cabinets other than coffee and the non-perishable condiments that go with it. But there’s a Starbucks off-airport, walking distance away, and I know the owner of this hangar frequently drives across the runway in his well-equiped golf cart to get his meals at the airport restaurant.

In all honestly, the second floor of this hangar is very museum-like. My friends collect Mexican, South American, and Native American art. Although their best and most valuable pieces are in their two other homes, there’s a lot of it here. There’s also a lot of weird items you’d expect to find in a museum: a copper diving mask, pull-down wall maps dating from the 1950s and 1960s, a fully restored glass-tanked fuel pump, an old Coke machine that takes dimes (with a small bowl of dimes on top and bottles of Corona beer inside), two free-standing and fully restored wood popcorn machines — the list goes on and on. Sometimes it’s neat just to look at these things. But when you pop a dime into the Coke machine and pull out a Corona, you remember that all of these things are still fully functional.

I’d take a picture and include it here, but I really think that would be a serious invasion of my friend’s privacy.

My friend is not here, although his helicopter is. He used to spend a lot of time here when the place was first built. He and his wife had lived in Wickenburg before then. His wife fell out of love with the town when the Good Old Boy bullshit that makes Wickenburg what it is started directly affecting her. From that point on, it was just weeks before she was desperate to get out of town and continue life elsewhere. She started spending more and more time in California with her daughter and less and less time at home with her husband. The hangar was a temporary solution, followed by an apartment on the coast and then a condo in Beverly Hills with a second apartment in Las Vegas. They spend most of their time in those places now, although my friend uses the hangar as a kind of getaway place when he has a few days off and wants to go flying. They still own their home in Wickenburg and have tried three Realtors in the past two years to sell it. But there isn’t much demand for a $1 million home in Wickenburg these days, even when it has a separate guest house, hangar and helipad, horse setup and plenty of acreage around it for privacy.

They want us to buy it, of course, but I’m not prepared to go into debt to buy a home and I’m certainly not going to sink myself any deeper into Wickenburg.

Mike and I have been camping out here in the hangar for a few days. Supposedly, it’s against federal regulations to live on the property of a Federally-funded airport — which is why this “pilot lounge” is missing a few necessities of life, like a bed. So we’re sleeping on an air mattress. We’re not living here, of course. Just sleeping over. We have business in the area during the say and just needed a cheap place to spend the night. My friend was kind enough to let us camp out here.

It’s a wonderful place to hang out. This airport, unlike a few I could name, has a lively population of tenants in the hangars. When I went out for coffee yesterday morning, I walked by a hangar where a man was busy preflighting a Cessna in preparation for an early morning flight. He greeted me as if he knew me and we shared pleasantries about the weather: “Great day to fly.” “Sure is.”

After lunch, we decided to drop by the hangar to put our leftovers in the fridge. We were very surprised to find our big hangar door wide open. Inside, tending to the Diamondstar, were three Brits. We introduced ourselves by name and were immediately offered coffee. It later came out that we were friends of the hangar’s owner. “Oh, well then you must come by at 5 for cocktails,” the woman said. “We have such fun.” When I mentioned I was in the area working on a video project, she hurriedly took me to meet a man named Steve who is also in film. He was stretched out on a leather sofa in his modest hangar, watching a game on a big television. The TV’s rabbit ears antenna was out of the pavement beside a gas BBQ grill. Inside the hangar was the neatest and cleanest Cessna 140 that I’d ever seen.

Later, when we returned — too late for cocktails, I’m sorry to say; I could have used one — we were treated to stories of other dinner parties in the hangar’s big lower area, with unknown pilots stopping by to join in the fun. There’s a real sense of community here. It’s more than just a place to store your aircraft. It’s a place to hang out and meet people with similar interests. It’s a place to watch the world — and the planes — go by.

It’s nearly 6 AM now and I can see a tiny bit of light in the sky. The fog is still thick on the runway; the rotating beacon is now invisible. If the tower controller have come on duty, there’s not much for them to do. It’s IFC — Instrument Meteorological Conditions — here and I’d be very, very surprised if we saw or heard a plane outside until the fog lifted. But I’ll get dressed and make a run for coffee. We have more work to do today. Then, at about noon, we’ll start the 2-1/2 hour flight back to Wickenburg.

I’m looking forward to camping out here again.

Seven Mistakes to Avoid When Using the Internet to Market Your Products

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Why is it that some companies just don’t get it?

Over the past week or so, I’ve been doing some research into coffee carts. You know what I mean — those movable carts you might see in office building lobbies or airports or malls that sell espresso and other hot and cold beverages. I’m working on a business proposition where I might just need one, so I’m been trying to see what my options are.

Trying is the correct word in the previous sentence. I’ve been trying hard to use the Internet — including Google, of course — to find businesses that manufacture or sell the kind of cart I want. What I’m finding, however, is that very few companies that make or sell this equipment have a clue about how they can use the Internet to make information about their products available to the world 24/7.

Why This Really Irks Me

Putting Your Small Business on the WebYou have to understand my frustration with this. After all, back in 2000, I wrote a slim book for Peachpit Press titled, Putting Your Small Business on the Web. I wrote it primarily to help small business owners understand how the Web could help them so they wouldn’t be victimized by unscrupulous Web developers. Back in those days, the Web was relatively new and people simply didn’t understand how to take advantage of it. My book explained what the Web could and couldn’t do for them and provided advice for making the most of what the Web offered.

Please understand that I’m not trying to sell anyone on this book. It’s old and terribly out of date. One of these days I’ll revise it and release it as a ebook or possibly a print on demand project. If you really want it, you can find used copies of it on Amazon.com. (That’s where I found this picture of the cover; I’d discarded my old scans of it.) My point is, I wrote a book about this eight years ago and I’m still finding people making the same mistakes I told them to avoid.

But They Just Don’t Get It

One of the things I advised was putting all of your product information on the Web. Photos, descriptions, dimensions, and yes, even pricing. This is the information people want when they’re shopping for solutions. Having complete information helps people decide whether to take the next step — which might include buying the product.

Yet in my search for coffee carts — and yes, I did use all kinds of appropriate search phrases in Google — I did not find many companies that provided the information I needed. Instead, the search results included companies that made one or more of the following mistakes.

  • They didn’t sell the product I was searching for. Yes, my search phrase was one of the phrases that appeared in the site’s meta tags or in page content, but that’s not what they sold. They sold vending carts that might or might not be used for coffee. Not what someone serious about building a coffee business wants. In this case, they’d used their meta tags to enhance search engine results in their favor, thus wasting the time of people who pulled up their pages. Just another example of SEO gone bad.
  • Blurry CartThey didn’t include images of their products. In this category, I’ll include companies that included blurry — yes blurry, as shown in this actual image from a site — images of their products and companies with a lot of broken image links. And how about a company with an embedded movie that simply wouldn’t play? I’d say 50% of the sites I brought up had insufficient illustrations of their products. Because I’m very interested in how my coffee business might look, these sites wasted my time.
  • They required you to fill out a form fully describing your business before they’d give you any information at all. WTF? Needless to say, I didn’t waste much time there because I certainly wasn’t going to provide that kind of information just to see what solutions they might have.
  • They provided vague information about some products but required you to contact them by e-mail or phone to learn more. So much for 24/7 information. I’m the kind of person who often does research at 5:00 AM on a Sunday morning. Will someone be answering the phone when I call? I don’t think so.
  • They listed so many products that it was hard to distinguish between them. One site, for example, offered eight different 7-foot coffee carts. I couldn’t tell the difference between them. There wasn’t enough information about any of them. And since the same company listed over 100 vending products, I started wondering whether they had any coffee expertise at all. Surely a coffee cart has different features than a hot dog cart.
  • They forced you to go to a different site — or multiple sites — to get complete information about a product. One site, for example, showed a blurry image of a coffee cart and listed specifications, then listed three individual Web sites where you could get pricing. Why three? Why go elsewhere at all? Of course, when you got to one of those sites, you’d have to search it for the product you were interested in. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have the time or patience to waste chasing information.
  • They have bad links on the site. For example, “Click here to get manufacturers specifications.” When you click “here,” it takes you to the home page of another site that lists hundreds of products — not the specifications you expected to find. Yes, it’s yet another way to waste my time.

I did find one company that had PDFs online that could be downloaded for specific products. The two-page PDFs had good photos and were relatively clear about the product’s specifications. They did not, however, include pricing. To get pricing, I had to e-mail the company. They responded quickly with yet another PDF. My question: Why wasn’t the pricing PDF also on the Web site?

Good Information Results in Sales

The result of all this is that after spending about two hours searching for a product that might meet my needs, I found only one company that makes a product I’d consider buying. I don’t know about those other companies — there wasn’t enough information on their sites to convince me that they knew the business and made a quality product I could rely on and afford. The company with the good information is the one I’m seriously considering doing business with.

What companies don’t understand is that their Web presence is almost like a storefront. If its shabbily maintained and doesn’t deliver the information people expect, that reflects on them. (I wrote about that in some length in the book, too.) By failing to make the most of their Web presence, they’re just adding more useless information to the Web — branded with their name.