Fine Line is going to the Shorebirds game... and we want to give you a chance to join us free of charge!

The Fine Line staff is going out for a night to see the Delmarva Shorebirds host the Asheville Tourists on Friday, July 15, and we've got a pair of tickets to the Picnic Pavilion that are up for grabs! Win and you'll be treated to an all-you-can-eat buffet and a couple hours of good old fashioned baseball!

There are two ways to sign up:

• Go to our Facebook page and post "Take me to the Shorebirds game!" on the wall.
• Go to our Twitter account and Tweet #FineLineBaseball at us!

This Friday we'll compile a llist of all registered parties and randomly draw a name! The winner receives both tickets to do with as they please. Our only request is that if you win and can't use the tickets that you either return them to us or find someone that CAN go in your stead - we want to put these puppies to use!

Sign up today!

When: Friday, July 15
Time: 7:05 (buffet starts at 5:30)
Where: Arthur W. Purdue Stadium in Salisbury

Good luck!

Come to the Southern Delaware 'Tweet-Up' next Friday (April 8)!

Twitter followers should know that next Friday night is the Southern Delaware "Tweet Up" event at Bethany Blues in Lewes!

Join us and countless other Delaware "Tweeps" from 5-7 p.m. for some face to face communication. The first 30 guests are being treated to a drink on Fine Line, so be early! Click here for more information.

FL Slideshow Extension added to the Joomla! Extensions Directory!

Fine Line is happy to announce that our FL Slideshow Extension has been added to the Joomla! Extension Directory!

A free Joomla! based banner solution, FL Slideshow allows you to create fast-loading, rotating slideshows that are perfect for banner placement on any Joomla! 1.5 based site. Many of our active sites are utilizing it right now!

Join our friends at Azura Clothing to 'Get Down in Town' Friday night!

You can kick the spring shopping season off a little early tonight by joining Fine Line's friends at Azura Clothing for the "Get Down in Town" event in Rehoboth!

The event will run from 6-9 p.m. and includes businesses and restaurants throughout town! Over $2,000 in gift cards will be given away and more than 100 of your favorite locations are participating!

Even better, the event is kid friendly! Bring the whole gang out. Kids will receive free Grotto's Pizza on First Street and have the chance to participate in face painting, craft events and more. Be there!

Fine Line Tech Nights are back!

First, a huge thank you to everyone that attended our Tech Gadgets Tech Night this Thursday at the Lewes Library!

We've got two more planned already this spring, and have even more in the works for the summer months! We'll next appear at the library on April 21, and then again on May 12.

Our April 21 session will cover Basic Device Management - from the easiest way to wrangle your email box to tying your phone to your computer... anything you want to know, we'll cover.

Our May 12 appearance (Save a Tree) will cover the many programs and tools your computer provides that can help you go paperless!

Remember, Tech Nights begin promptly at 6 p.m. on the night that they're scheduled - don't be late!

Our March Site Launches:

• 228 Nick
• 360 Visions
• Affinity Realty
• EatDE
• Hook Productions
• Inspirit Studios
• Plein Air Brandywine Valley
• Stockley Materials

Happy New Year from Fine Line!

As we enter this New Year, the holiday season ends and life begins returning to normal. If you’re ready to jump start your 2011 with some work on your website, then make sure to contact us today. At Fine Line we’re always ready to help get your company off the ground!

Best wishes to you and yours this New Year! It's because of our friends and clients that we enjoyed 2010 - and we hope the feeling is mutual.

Fine Line's 2010 in Review!

Thanks to you guys - the best friends and clients a web development company could ask for - Fine Line had a banner year in 2010!

By our count, Fine Line launched a whopping 64 new projects over the course of the year (including our own new design this past Summer)!

There are way too many new launches to list here, but we've put a list up at the Fine Line blog - check out our complete 2010 lineup right here.

Check out our December website launches!

• Abbott's Grill
• Delmarva-NJ Ruritan District
• Holiday Inn Redesign Project

Fine Line has a new face!

Life at southern Delaware’s favorite website development company can be a busy one, especially when you’re dedicated to the top-of-the-line customer service that Fine Line likes to deliver – and that’s why Ashley Oakey was brought aboard as the company’s administrative assistant.

Alongside managing the phone lines and safeguarding the front desk, Ashley will soon be taking over client training procedures and assisting Frank with customer management.

Read Ashley's full bio at our "Meet the Team" page!

Happy Holidays from your favorite Delaware Website Developers!

Fine Line would like to wish all of our friends and clients peace, health and happiness this Holiday Season and throughout the New Year. Thank you for your business and friendship!

As an early notice: Fine Line will be out of the office on Friday, Dec. 24, Monday, Dec. 27, Thursday, Dec. 30 and Friday, Dec. 31 this holiday season. Our staff will still be available for emergencies (as we always are), but the Lewes office itself will be closed.

Hoping Santa brings you a custom website component this year? Fine Line can deliver the message

Fine Line has years of experience building custom web applications - and we're ready to help put together your next great idea today.

Our development team is prepared to help build you the Intranet/Extranet, Work Ticket System, Reservation System or Inventory Application you have in mind. Whatever you need, we can custom build to fit your business. For more information contact us today!

Check out our November website launches!

• Clendaniel's Plumbing & Heating
• Downes Insurance Associates
• Hotel Rehoboth
• Lingo/Tull Communities Pt. 2
• Slow Food Delmarva

Don't forget to stay in touch!

Fine Line’s always working, and we’re launching new projects each and every month. Be sure to keep an eye on FineLineWebsites.com for updates on what we’re doing, what we’re launching and what we can do to help you develop your web endeavors even further. We can help get any company off the ground. Be sure to check out Fine Line’s social media efforts too! Stay current by keeping track of our Twitter and Facebook accounts.

There’s no way to calculate how much (if any?) money Facebook helped make Fine Line this past week – but I can tell you that it certainly saved us at least $300 and a major headache. And all I did was ask a simple question.

Yep, everyone take a step back from your “Social Media Business Plan” and breathe a little bit. Sometimes, we’ve just got to remember what things like Facebook and Twitter were originally built for… simple social networking, not public relations plans or mock-advertising divisions. That stuff came later.

But I’m getting ahead of myself – let me explain. Two weeks ago one of Fine Line’s members (we won’t say who, because he’s kind of embarrassed) lost his iPhone. Lots of searching and a few dozen phone calls to AT&T later we confirmed what we’d figured from the start – we weren’t getting the original phone back. So, we had to start working on getting a replacement model (we didn’t have any iPhones laying around that we could tie the number to).

We checked with AT&T, who told us that a replacement iPhone would cost us more than $400 (plus activation fees) because we weren’t eligible for an update yet. Our sales rep put in a diligent effort and Tom scoured the Internet for solutions, but ultimate the story was the same. If we were going to replace the missing phone with a new iPhone, it’d cost over $400.

Not something we were looking forward to doing, to say the least. So, a day or two away from being forced to drop a bunch of money on a phone (and then wait a week+ to get it from the distributor, effectively handcuffing the phone-less member of the team) I decided it was Hail Mary time. I fired up my Facebook and threw up the plea “Does anyone have a spare iPhone they’d be willing to sell?”

The response nearly immediate and exactly what I was looking for. A friend of mine had an old iPhone with a damaged (but functioning) screen that she was willing to offer us at a much more affordable rate than $400.

We went over, checked it out, and left with a phone. AT&T was happy to change the SIM card and activate the phone less than an hour later, and our team member had a phone again. We replaced the touch screen earlier this week. Our phones are back at full strength, and we saved better than $300 and another week’s worth of frustration in doing so.

Who do we have to thank for it? Well, my friend, obviously. But also the simple benefits of Facebook and its ability to reach a mass audience quickly, easily and without cost. It would have taken me hours upon of calling around to find this phone (and that’s even assuming I thought to reach out to this person). Instead, all I had to do was throw up one post, go about my business and wait for someone to find me.

Score one for social networking.

Tumblr (and that’s not a typo, folks… there’s no “e”) didn’t invent blogging – it’s just making things easier.

Launched in 2007 and still working its way up the social media ladder, Tumblr is a useful little blogging platform that tries to bring social media and multimedia a bit closer together. So Social Multimedia? Or do you like Multi-Social Media better? However you want to phrase it, Tumblr offers a plethora of internal blogging tools that few, if any, other blogging sites can offer. And it’s free.

The company pitches its customizable options and relatively user-friendly build to potential bloggers. Users can completely rebuild their Tumblr interface as they see fit – custom layouts, dashboard structure… it’s all unique.

It’s after you get your layout figured out that the real fun kicks in. Whether your want to post a text blog, video blog, or audio blog (and you can even call a 1-800 number and record your audio blog on the fly and the site will post it for you), Tumblr gives you the ability to submit or publish it to and from a number of platforms.

You can publish posts from your computer, web-capable phone (or by using that handy 1-800 number…), AIM, Twitter, Facebook… everything. Nearly any social media tool you’re using can be linked to Tumbler via RSS (and they make it relatively simple, which is a plus). Got a Tweet? Go for it – and Tumblr will automatically grab it and post it.

Obviously, this works two ways – anything you send through your Tumblr account can be directly posted to any social media you’ve tied to Tumblr. Tumblr builds you an easy-to-use network of social media sites, and condenses the amount of posting you have to do by leaps and bounds.

But that’s not where it stops. Tumblr also shares some of the most popular features that sites like Twitter and Facebook have offered. Your friends can “follow” you on Tumblr, and your posts will show up on the Tumblr dashboard similar to a Tweet. They can also re-post (we’ll call it ReTumble) something you’ve said, or directly reply to it (all features that have become big on Twitter).

There’s also a “Like” button, allowing your friends to “Like” a post the same way they do a Facebook status, wall post, event, etc.

In the end, Tumblr’s a fantastic little companion to anyone who’s a regular social media participant. It can go a long way in streamlining the process – and makes things easier for the less-tech inclined that are just beginning to get their social media feet wet. It calls itself the easiest way to blog, and it’s right.

Sporting around a million users (and a flabbergasting 85% retention rate as opposed to Twitter’s 40%), Tumblr has the legs to survive the social media boom.

Given the time, I’d recommend looking into it.

“Hey, what are you up to,” is something that we commonly hear or say over the phone when answered. People are becoming more and more interested in what other people are doing. That one sentence has the potential for many great things.

Once replied to, you may find something out about that person that you may have never known. Relationships are created or strengthened in this scenario.

This is no different than the online social communities of Facebook or most especially Twitter, the fastest growing social community online.

For example, if a real estate agent was at a party or social gathering and overheard someone talking about purchasing a condo, would they not try to make the connection? Guess what? You can do the same thing with Twitter.

If you go to Twitter, you will see where CleoSunshine was obsessing about buying a Condo but doesn’t think that it is going to happen until 2011.

Just today, I searched for “Building a Joomla site” and found rufuscoolkitty on Twitter indicating that he is building an E-Commerce site with Joomla and wanted some advice. With experience in such things, I replied telling him that we have used Virtualmart.

We never know what might become of that reply. In my experience it has always benefited our business to be there to provide answers to the questions that people wanted to know more about.

In doing just this, we have built great relationships with all of our clients.

Hot on the heels of social media websites like Facebook and MySpace came Twitter – the new media sensation.

Originally launched in 2006 (though it didn’t become popular until 2008), Twitter’s a free social networking and micro-blogging service. It allows users to send and read message – thought 140 character limits are placed on messages in order to keep things short, sweet and manageable from mobile devices. Because these messages are so small, they’re called “Tweets” (also a nod to the website’s name, obviously).

Twitter’s “Tweets” are meant to be short bursts of information – many users simply post their current status, such as “At work,” “At home,” etc. Also common are quick thoughts, jokes or general musings. Part of what makes Twitter popular is the new generation’s connectivity – they want people to know what they’re doing and what they’re thinking, and also keep an eye on their friends and associates when possible.

Twitter, though, isn’t simply for the “Me” generation. Businesses and news sources have all jumped on board the Twitter bandwagon (follow FineLineWebDev to see ours), and aren’t getting off.

While some members of the Twitter community use the service for entirely casual purposes, most users have no problem following businesses that they may be interested in – and that makes Twitter an amazing source of completely free advertising if you play your cards right.
If you can cultivate a group of followers on Twitter, you can use it to send out sporadic messages regarding your business, your deals and more. Your “Tweets” can become direct messages to users nationwide (if that’s what you’re going for).

You can even use Twitter to build a good newsletter base. Sometimes people are reluctant to submit their e-mails to a website. If you get people to follow you on Twitter instead, you can send them updates whenever you like – and they never have to give YOU their e-mail, which creates a sense of security. They can leave you on Twitter whenever they like, making them more likely to follow you in the first place. People hate getting stuck on mailing lists that they can’t seem to get off of. Twitter eliminates that issue.

We’ll have much more on Twitter in the future – including stats that show how effective a good Twitter account can be. Today I just wanted to give you the basics. Twitter is here, and it’s what’s hot right now.

There are some trends that businesses have to ride, and this may be one of them for your company.