My pure CSS Vertical Menu

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Maybe my pure CSS Vertical Menu is a little misleading, being that I took the majority of it from this site, but I did have to make a few tweaks to it to make it function the way I wanted to for the website I was building. It took quite a bit of digging to find the information to make it work, so I thought I'd share that with you to try and ease potential troubles you might be experiencing.

This is the menu I built for my mother-in-law's business Carol's Creature Care. Here is the link that will show you what the menu will look like standing alone, just the menu and a stock dreamweaver template.

Pure CSS Vertical Menu Finalized page.

Here is a link that shows the html portion of this and the CSS code.

Piece of cake, yes? Not for me it wasn't. As I said earlier, I built the CSS menu using the code at this website. Here is what that menu ends up looking like on a stock dreamweaver template.

Click here to see it.

The problem was when I tried to put this code into use on the website I was building, this is what ended up taking place. Click here to see.

As you can see, it turned out looking like garbage. The links that didn't have a sub menu showed as normal html links. They were underlined in my buttons, and they started off as blue when unclicked and then changed to purple once selected. They acted just like normal html links.

So how did I get it to go from looking like garbage here to looking like a normal vertical menu here?

The first thing I had to do was create a style rule to keep my links white before they were clicked on, and for them to continue to stay white after they were clicked on. I did this by adding in this code before my menu. Click here to see the html.

After doing that, my vertical menu now looked like this, click here to see.

As you can see, it didn't completely solve my problem. So I made the last change required, I altered the html in the actual link itself to remove the underline effect of a link and to keep the color status of the link white at all times. Click here to see the html code.

There you have it. A pure css vertical menu. I probably made that ten times harder than it needed to be, but it works all the same. If anyone has an easier way to do it, I'd love to hear it. Please leave me a comment.

I hope this was helpful.

A clean joke that is actually funny

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Now that is a rarity! A clean joke that actually makes you laugh. Very important to have one of these in your mental pocket that you can pull out when the time calls for it. And away we go...

A cop pulls a man over for speeding. He approaches the driver and says, "Alright pal, let me see your license." The driver responds, "I don't have a license."

"What?", the cop says, "Well then let me see your registration, grab it from your glove compartment."

The driver replies, "I don't have a registration either, and all that is in the glove compartment is a gun!"

"A gun!?", the cop asks. "Why do you have a gun in your glove compartment"?

The driver exclaims, "I needed the gun to steal this car from the woman who was driving it. I currently have her tied up in the trunk."

The police officer has heard enough. He quickly radios for backup, a short time later the Police Chief shows up at the scene.

The Chief carefully approaches the driver. He states firmly, "Let me see your license."

"Of course", the driver says. And with that he hands the Police Chief his driver's license.

Confused, the Police Chief tells the man, "Show me your registration".

The man pops open his glove compartment, and all that is in there is his registration. He gives it over to the Police Chief.

The Chief is now totally bewildered. He roughly tells the driver, "Pop your trunk, I want to take a look in there."

The man complies and the Police Chief lifts open the trunk of the car. Nothing in there except for a spare tire and a jack. The Chief shakes his head and marches back to the driver.

He says to him, "This police officer told me that you didn't have a license, no registration, there was a gun in the glove compartment, and you had a woman tied up in your trunk...what do you have to say about all of this?"

The driver replies sarcastically, "Yeah, and I bet he said I was speeding too."

Ta-Da! A clean joke that is actually funny. A rare find indeed.

Book review of The E-Myth Revisited

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While Rich Dad Poor Dad was more of a general "rah rah" get you into business mindset book, E-Myth is a focused nuts and bolts of running a business book.

The author, Michael E. Gerber, uses a relatable story of a small business owner experiencing trouble with her business. She could be anyone, it could be any business. This approach makes the book easy to read. It adds a human element that is often missing in a book in this category. Reading about dry business information makes my eyes hurt. However, I can read about people all day long.

The general message of the book shows the errors that entrepreneurs make when starting a new business. It then shows how you can go about avoiding common pitfalls, or if you're already in the quagmire, how to correct those mistakes.

Here is a starting fact from the book: 50% of all new small businesses fail in the first year. 80% fail in the first five years. And of those 20% that survive, 80% of them fail within ten years. Now guys I'll admit it, I'm a gambler. That being said, I'd never make a big bet laying those kind of odds. That's just bad money management. Yet here we are, trying to start a business and those are the odds we find ourselves butting up against.

Conversely, 75% of franchises opened succeed. How do you like that? A trend of epic failure, and a trend of 3 out of 4 making it. So as a non-franchised business, what are we to do? The E-Myth solution to this? Turn your business into a franchise.

To more correctly state it, treat your business like a franchise. Franchises have systems set in place that dictate how operations are handled. If you can build a system around your daily tasks, you can put into place a step-by-step guide to how you perform your business. Once it has been broken down as such, anyone with the proper training will be able to do it. You just built yourself out of your business. Enjoy being able to take a vacation while your business keeps generating you income.

There will be accountability. There will be defined jobs and roles. There will also be available the ability to stick people into those positions when your business begins to take off. E-Myth stresses the importance of visualizing the end game scenario of your business. That way when you do start to expand, good lord willing, you are ready for it. This is where an organizational chart will greatly come into play. I'll talk about that in a later post.

That's all the detail of the book that I can get into. I could keep going on and on, but I feel like it would not be fair to the author who put in all the hard work to spill all the wonderful information he collected in this book. There have been several books that I've read that have directly changed my life. The Great Divorce, How to Win Friends and Influence People, and If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him! are all books that come to mind. After I read them, I never quite looked at the world in the same way again. This is one of those books. It was eye opening. After reading this I started building systems for every day activities in my life. It really does make things easier, and an easier business makes for a happier me. That I am sure of.

If you would like to see the E-Myth website, go here. I have not browsed through it, but I'm sure it is full of much useful information. Good luck!

How google outsmarted me

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I wasn't as much outsmarted by Google as I was outsmarted by myself. I read quite a few guides for how to be highly ranked by Google and attempted to build the Carol's Creature Care site with that in mind. I made sure to name all of my pages after the business, insert the pet sitter/sitting words into as many spots as I could.

I submitted my site to Google, it was indexed within a few days, and...it doesn't turn up on searches. Say what?

It doesn't turn up on searches because I thought more about the business itself than what someone searching for the business would be looking for. The people looking for a pet sitter in Allen Park, Michigan, are going to Google search for "pet sitter allen park michigan". Guess how many mentions of the areas she serves are built into the website? One. One lousy mention.

It's never going to come up in a realistic search how it was constructed. I've attempted to compensate by adding the list of areas that Carol covers in some of the other webpages. At least that way there will be four or five mentions as opposed to just the one.

So what is the ever so obvious moral to the story? Build your website with the idea in mind that a person is going to be using specific words to search for what they want to find. And in the cases of the service industry, that is going to involve locations. Live and learn, when Google re-indexes the site I'll let you know if my tweaks had any effect.

Give Galarraga his perfect game

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I live half an hour west of Detroit. Last night Armando Galarraga pitched a perfect game...except he didn't. I was casually watching the game from the start. I was reading the 22 Immutable Laws of Branding and popping my head up to keep track of where things were. After the end of the 3rd inning it occured to me, I'm watching a perfect game!

I kept a much keener eye from there on, but I was still mainly reading my book and just keeping tabs. Perfect games never happen, not in Detroit. After the end of the 6th inning things got more serious. He had pitched two-thirds of a game of perfect baseball!

At this point I told my son Tony, who is ten, to stop doing his homework and come watch the game. I kept wanting to grab my phone and send out a dozen text messages to tell everyone to watch the game. But I know the rules of baseball, and the last thing I wanted to do was jinx them. I even kept reading my book, although I have no memory of anything in it from that point forward.

At the end of the 8th inning I was stunned, could it really happen? I tried over and over to explain to my son what was happening, the significance of it all. How it has only happened 20 times before. How it meant so much to me to be watching this game with him. He didn't get it. All he knew was that dad was excited. The 9th inning started and I was holding my breath. 3 outs. 3 outs to forever.

Bam, the 1st pitch of the inning was blasted towards right-center field. The center fielder had turned and was sprinting towards the wall. It was over. I've watched a lot of baseball, and that ball was a double. Every time. Except for that time. Austin Jackson had run it down and made a spectacular play. A play that saves history. A legendary play.

I was literally on the floor celebrating, writhing like a madman with glee. My son was hysterically laughing, I was making such a fool of myself. The moment was still alive. Next batter, out. One out away, 26 straight down. I clutched my book tightly, still paranoid of jinxing it.

Plunk! A little grounder towards first base. Oh no! But Cabrera was there, he had chased it down and it was now a race between the pitcher and the hitter to the base. A race to immortality. The throw was on target, it looked in time, SAFE!

What? Just like that it was all over. My heart had sunk. I immediately thought he must have bobbled the ball. He must have missed the bag. Then the replay, he had beaten the runner to the bag by almost half a step! In baseball terms it wasn't even close!

The Tigers manager Jim Leyland was out of the dugout to argue, the Tigers announcer with a voice filled with childlike shock murmured, "Why is he safe?".

My son echoed his comments, "What happened dad?" Why did he do that?". My moment had been taken from me. Stolen. There would be no perfect game memory. A memory celebrating with my son, sharing in a Michigan history that he would always remember.

Galarraga retired the next batter, the game was over. The Tigers players were all over the ump. By now he had realized what an awful mistake he had made. He robbed history. He had blown it.

I was livid, texting anyone I knew that cared about baseball. Telling them the tragedy. How can he make that call there? Even if it was close, how can you not give that to the pitcher? It was 3 to 0, it wasn't a one run game where that was going to make the difference. How can you make that call? How can you let an infield squeaker on the last out spoil a perfect game? Even if he hit the bag at the same time, how can you not call that out?

I was sick to my stomach. Instead of a jubilant moment with my son, I was once again giving him a speech about how sometimes life just wasn't fair. I'm tired of giving him that talk. I'm tired of facing it myself.

Today, the day after, the umpire has done all the right things. He has profusely apologized. You can see how badly he regrets his call. He was too caught up in the moment. I'm sure he was trying to protect the moment. Be sure the call was right, even if it meant ruining the perfection. But he too was overwhelmed, and his desire to protect it turned into a force that destroyed it. Anyone who has truly loved something has done the same thing. Sometimes you can care too much. Sometimes you wreck the thing you sought to protect.

Jim Joyce made a terrible call. If he had one wish right now I know what it would be. But that's not how it works, it's out of his hands just as it was taken out of Galarraga's hands. Done can't be undone.

Except by one man. Bud Selig can undo this. The commissioner of baseball, he can overturn the call and give Galarraga his perfect game. He cannot give me my moment of joy celebrating with my son in my living room, but he can give me the ability to tell my son that someone fixed what was broken. Maybe life is a littler fairer than we had thought.

After the horrendous call, Galarraga just smiled. He didn't say one cross word. Did not stomp and kick the ground, curse the gods, flip the bird to the Indian's bench. He was a class act. Calm and collected. He was a better person than I would have been, I can assure you of that. He showed the world what sportsmanship and general human kindness is all about. Two things sorely lacking on the planet today.

I've read that after the game the umpire personally apologized to Galarraga. Galarraga's response? Don't worry about it. We all make mistakes. None of us are perfect.

After all that had happened to him. After pitching the 21st perfect game in the 100 plus years of baseball history only to have it ripped away by what in my opinion is the worst call in sports history, that is what he had to say. No one is perfect.

Mr. Selig, who deserves a perfect game more than someone who can do that? So rarely in life can we truly right a wrong. Don't let this opportunity pass you by. This is your moment.

Finished my first website

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Carol's Creature Care

That's my mother-in-law's pet sitting business. When I began taking an interest in starting my own business I was very fortunate that my wife's mother has been running her own sole proprietorship LLC business for the past 14 years.

She's been a wealth of knowledge on the subject. She handles every aspect of her business. Customers, billing, employment, management, accounting, all of it. So when I run into questions regarding any of these things I have someone I can turn to who has real life experience on the subject. In my limited exposure to all of this, a mentor is a lifesaver.

To the site, isn't it pretty? I used Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 for the building. I was lucky to find a great video series that broke the website building process down into simple steps. You can find it here. The Web Learning Series

I was able to build alongside the video to construct what I consider to be a professional looking website. The author of the tutorials does an outstanding job linking one concept to the next where at the end you're looking at a well-designed site. I was surprised in that the hardest thing to complete was the content. Content is a bear.

As I'm sure you're painfully aware of at this point, I'm not the best writer. Thankfully I found the Lorem Ipsum generator to fill in the gaps in my content until later. Lorem ipsum is a gibberish that you can use to populate your website until you're ready to go back and put in the actual content. Gives you the appearance of paragraphs so that you can get your structure complete when you hit the dreaded case of writer's block. Which I tend to perpetually be afflicted with.

So check the site, tell me what you think. In my next couple blogs I'll give you some of the in's and out's of the building process. How I got my vertical navigation bar to work, why I now hate Internet Explorer (die), and how Google outsmarted me.

Happy Memorial Day everyone.

Is Bret Michaels the Antichrist?

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"And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast."
- Revelations 13:3

I wonder why he never takes his bandanna off?

Think about it.