I’ve never heard a perfect performance of the piece, however. That’s because the music itself is as perfect as I can imagine. We mere mortals can only approach what the composer ended up settling on, in his final revisions. When Gershwin first performed the piece with a jazz band, he actually improvised some parts. Since there was no recording of the performance, we’ll never know what that first attempt really sounded like.

The piece was first imagined on a train ride to New York. The rhythm of the train on the tracks inspired Gershwin, and he had most of the music in his head by the time he arrived. The absolutely original composition was for two pianos. He gave the music to an arranger, who scored it for a jazz band. Later arrangements included one for a symphony orchestra. The 1942 arrangement is the one most of us are familiar with.

Below are three versions I favor. The first is the Mantovani/Katchen version; the second, a loving arrangement for solo piano by a Russian (!); the third is the most popular version (featured in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan”). The first two videos come in two parts, the final one is a complete 16-plus minute recording. If you listen to all of them, perhaps you’ll see what I mean: none are perfect, but together, they are purely transcendent.

Naturally, a web design firm better make pretty websites! However, the key to a successful business website is how workable and usable the site is for customers, prospects and web-surfers. Along with a good user experience, the website client needs a responsive website creator and maintainer who understands business and marketing.

As media consultants, Vision Studios can create and deliver “brands, websites, mobile applications, and videos”. This means benefits for clients that go far beyond a cool Web page with spiffy graphics.

If you’re looking for a one-stop marketing resource, these guys can deliver. They also do print media, graphic & identity design, consulting and social media work. Oh, yes, they also offer SEO services, for those that hate doing it themselves.

When I asked him what his Mission Statement is, he replied, “Ours is simply, “Service is everything!”" Since I feel excellence belongs in every Mission Statement, he opined that he prefers to hear EXCELLENCE from his clients. Nice!

Those of you that know me know that I do not suffer fools gladly, nor brook any nonsense when it comes to Internet Marketing. Mike Vanderpool is no fool, nor does he indulge in nonsensical thinking.

When I prodded him about the appearance of his website (dark, with light type), he made a telling point: “consumer buys are heavily based on your appearance”. If you don’t look like you can do cool graphics and present a stunning appearance, you won’t get past the first five seconds a new prospect for your design services will invest in your Web page.

If you’re in the Northern Virginia area, check out this Harrisonburg-based Web Design firm: Vision Studios. Call 540-746-7009, and tell ‘em Vince Runza sent you!

P.S. I don’t make a dime off of referrals and wasn’t paid to write this, either.

Every holiday season, folks worry and fret over how to give something memorable without breaking the budget. You spend your hard-earned money on things for other people and hope that they’ll appreciate what you gave.

“Gifting” and “re-gifting” have become verbs in popular parlance. Personalized holiday gifts and favors are a great way to “gift” without the underlying worry that what you gave will be “re-gifted”.

In fact, something as simple, classic and timeless as an engraved pocket watch:

Engraved Silver Pocket Watch

can surprise and please a hard-to-buy-for man for under $25. With a little thought and a selection of reasonably priced gift items, you can turn holiday shopping into a fun, affordable and memorable experience.

CreateAFavor.com is just the place to start your search for the best holiday gifts and favors. With a broad selection of gifts and favors, you can create unique and memorable holiday items for those you want to please.

One great benefit to you is that personalization and engraving by CreateAFavor.com is done for free. Along with a broad array of themes and designs you can choose for free, custom logos and designs can be done for you with a modest setup fee.

As you continue to think about it, personalized favors for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years parties might be a great idea for you to offer your holiday guests. These affordable mementos can become the right touch for enhancing and reminding your guests how much you value them.

Take a moment now and go to http://createafavor.com/ or call 1-866-FAVORS2. Get started on your holiday planning with personalized and engraved gifts and favors from CreateAFavor.com.

If you’re having a CRM emergency, you may be kicking yourself for not having prepared for it before everything went South. According to Cedrick Holmes of F1 Solutions in Los Angeles, most folks don’t come to him until there is weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. He’d love to be able to provide managed IT services, CRM solutions, project management, custom reporting and custom programming in advance of his clients having urgent problems.

Unfortunately, too many business owners delay that decision. It’s something that they’ll do when they get around to it.

Emergency CRM Support Los Angeles

Fine. Here’s “A Round Tuit”. Print it out and stick it on your wall. You no longer have that as an excuse.

Seriously, the whole matter of getting yourself out of a bind is no joke. Chances are, if you found this blog post through a search engine, you’re in need of help. How urgently you need that help depends on how badly things have gone wrong.

If, however, you’re just researching CRM, managed services, IT support, project management, custom reporting and custom programming, you’re in luck! Take a look at F1 Solution in Los Angeles. Have a chat with Cedrick Holmes.

You’ll not only find an effective source for your needs. You’ll get the best possible solution in this area for what you want: managed services that help you increase your profit, no matter what the state of the economy is.

Discover how good it is to deal with your sales and customer service process in advance – before everything blows up in your face.

That research yielded several possibilities, but one stood out — Bracewell Web Works. That’s because Michelle Bracewell’s business did surprisingly well in being “findable” in the search engines. It’s no surprise to my Internet Marketing colleagues that “Web Developers” tend to be fixated on programming and layout, with SEO and backlinking an afterthought at best. This Web Diva knows her stuff and supplies good content on Web marketing for prospects to peruse.

My only quibble with her approach to Social Networking and Web 2.0 implementation is that it’s so two years ago. In the realm of SEM/SEO as a blood sport, being that far behind is deadly! If I or my colleagues were to depend primarily on MySpace and Facebook, with a nod to Squidoo lenses and blog comments, we’d be dead in the water.

Our competition would be putting out SlideShare.net presentations, YouTube videos, HubPages.com Hubs, WordPress blog posts with powerful keyword tags, Craigslist.org and Backpage.com classified ads and hefty, optimized Squidoo lenses. Then they’d get serious about getting backlinks from high Page Rank websites run by colleagues and Joint Venture partners.

Of course, for local search, that kind of massive overkill we Direct Response Internet Marketers use is only for the most competitive local niches. You know, like getting a WordPress blog post for Colorado Springs web design.

McFarlane Toys produces some of the most detailed, well sculpted action figures in the world. Naturally, such figures have a fanatical following among those who love to collect. Sports figures, in particular, are a big market, relatively speaking.

McFarlane Sports Picks

Ron Johnson is one of those fanatics. He has a website dedicated to collectors of “sports picks”. However, he doesn’t stop there. It’s possible for you to get a detailed, customized figure made from photographs you send — a service far beyond buying and selling collectible figurines!

If you’re into sports picks, you must check out Colorado Springs’ most avid collector online at http://www.figurefanatic.com/.

That’s because they have to be good! If you’re competing in an international marketplace for attention in the search engines, you learn very quickly what works or you fail. Failure leads to learning, which improves your results.

All it takes is one look at practically all local businesses: they’ve got NO Web presence worth talking about. That’s the point: if you’re not remarkable, nobody talks about you!

What that means online is that brick and mortar businesses that don’t show up in the search results of the major search engines are pretty much dead in the water. Taking a local business online properly is not rocket science, but it does require some basic knowledge of SEO, SEM and Internet Marketing. It means putting a Front Door on the business, so to speak.

Does your business have a Front Door in Google's search engine?

Local businesses profit from local search when they do it right. They make themselves found for the kinds of keywords that bring them the most revenue and the least amount of aggravation.

Internet Marketers who need help in actually promoting businesses and professionals as a service provider can have a hard time finding it. This is NOT like promoting an ebook, software or tech services online. It’s specialized knowledge.

You can find consultants who will help you do your SEO, backlinking and business planning for this type of market. Take me, for instance. I do that. Of course, I do it for a fee.

You can also get an info-product on the subject here: Front Door Pages Exposed!. Some of you are do-it-yourself types who just need some guidance. Others of you value your time and want someone to handle this stuff for a fee.

Here's Help! Front Door Pages 2.0 multimedia disc

Take your pick…

Front Door Pages Exposed

Promoting local businesses online with targeted local traffic is a rapidly growing phenomenon among Direct Response Internet Marketers. Local business promotion works wonders for brick-and-mortar businesses and professionals. The thing is, those local business owners and professionals just don’t know how that works, for the most part.

For those Internet Marketing professionals that want to refine and concentrate their efforts on promoting the most profitable local industries and niches, Front Door Pages Exposed reveals the secrets to doing just that!

While it’s nice to be able to build a website or put up a lead capture form for a client, wouldn’t it be better to deliver something even more valuable? Say, for example, Total Search Engine Domination for their business or professional practice?

By learning to identify, target, occupy and dominate the “rich niches” in the search engine results for your locale, you have the one thing practically all other “Web developers” and “SEO experts” cannot deliver: the top spots in Google for a business owner or professional (who has a robust ad budget) in advance!

This is way beyond doing a PPC (Pay Per Click) campaign for a local business, although that can be a good addition to this method. The fact is, “organic” search results get more clicks than AdWords advertising, when both references to the same business or professional are on the same page, in most cases.

If you’re a Direct Response Internet Marketing pro, go NOW to http://frontdoorpagesexposed.com/ and find out the best-kept secrets in getting the “big guns” in your area to pay you handsomely for promoting their businesses and professional practices!

Elkins West Virginia Best

Elkins, West Virginia, is not what you’d call cosmopolitan. It’s small-town America at its best. Naturally, the locals there think it is! In fact, with the launch of a new website, http://www.elkinsbest.com/, they have the chance to speak up and tell everyone just what is the best about Elkins.

This site will feature reviews by residents and visitors of just about any business or professional service in the area. It won’t be just for residents (or just for attracting tourists). This “Best Of” site will be an enhanced resource for everyone to benefit from and go to for honest, impartial information.

Sure, there will be featured advertisers and specific businesses and professionals will be promoted. That doesn’t mean that this will be just a “pitch fest” or one-sided view of what’s going on in Elkins! The site will be linked to www.elkinslive.com/, the area’s premier directory and local portal for all things Elkins.

More than just listings about local hotels and restaurants, elkinslive.com has loads of content and interactive features that keep bringing local residents back day after day. Local news, weather, sports, happenings and more attract nearly 2,000 viewers every week! That’s because this directory has a reach far beyond the little town of Elkins, pop. ca. 7,000.

The Best of Elkins will be the cream of the crop. This resource will also reach way beyond the local area, so that prospective visitors will have a way to preview what they may want in advance. Wouldn’t you like to know the best places to eat and stay in an area before you go? Well, that’s what this resource will offer to folks around the world!

Check out this newly launched home for The Best of Elkins. Then, “y’all come back now, hear?!”

That’s because the majority of people who are searching for this kind of professional practice tend to go to the biggest and closest location that might have the best and largest selection of what they want. From there, they may look for a branch office that’s closest to them. It’s a matter of perception and image.

It’s different if they’re looking for an emergency dentist or gynecologist. Then, they’ll look for the one that’s closest to home. That’s because the perception is that, for these services, there’s a level of proficiency that’s guaranteed by default.

Not so with lawyers, who practice a different kind of profession than medical arts. When you want to be represented in a lawsuit, you want the biggest, baddest shark on your side. There’s no guarantee that the closest lawyer will fit that description. So you go to the closest concentration of lawyers and search among them for the one that resonates with you.

No matter whether it’s an accident (at work, in the home, a defective product, on a holiday, in the workplace, etc.), an assault, medical or dental malpractice, industrial disease, or any other injury, the injured party wants justice. That justice is usually in the form of monetary compensation. In rare cases, the one who was injured simply wants to stop the party who caused the injury to be exposed and protect others from potential injury.

Given the litigious nature of our society (in the US, that is), most prospective clients want the biggest settlement or judgment they can get. That makes this kind of law practice very lucrative for the attorneys who choose to specialize in this “niche”. Yes, there are a few lawyers who do this kind of work in the interests of justice first, but they are few and far between.

In order for your legal practice to be perceived as worthy of consideration in this locale, you’d better have a presence in Scranton. Not unlike New York, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere in the region. Personal injury lawyers in Scranton and beyond can get an effective Web presence here: http://vincerunza.com/scranton/lawyers/personal-injury/