When it comes to running a successful business, of course it is important to have good products, good customer service, and a good business plan. However, it is also very important to have the right infrastructure and to have your basic operational needs addressed. Printing plays a vital role.

Serving customers in the Guelph, K/W, Cambridge and Brantford areas is Ribbon Encore, the company that serves as the Bluefur Customer of the week. Ribbon Encore focuses on selling high quality cartridges for your office printers, photocopiers, and other related devices. They also help customers when it comes to basic repair and preventative maintenance for your printers.

More so than ever, customers want to support companies who look beyond the bottom line for the greater good. That’s why it’s good to see that Ribbon Encore is dedicated to environmental concerns. They offer a free cartridge recycling program; some of those cartridges can be remanufactured and reused by various charitable and non-profit organizations. Ribbon Encore currently supports Michael House, a local crisis pregnancy home.

Do you use BlueFur to host your websites? Let us know and we can feature you in a future blog post. Send an email message to blogfeature@bluefur.com with your name, website URL, and a brief description of what you’d like to see highlighted.

WordPress may be most commonly used as the platform for a conventional blog, but it can also be utilized for a range of different kinds of websites too. If you are a graphic designer, photographer, or otherwise engaged in the creative arts, then the Portfolio Press theme for WordPress sounds like it is up your alley.

Rather than having a post thumbnail image followed by a snippet of text for each post, you get a grid-based pattern of squares, each with a unique image. This theme is a great way of showcasing your design and creative work, as it gives visitors to your side an “at a glance” look at some of your most recent work.

Using the options panel, you can further customize the look and feel of theme by updating the logos and changing the layout. A video screencast for setting up Portfolio Press can be found on WP Theming, which is also the site of the theme’s developer. It is also on that page that you’ll find a fairly extensive FAQ, in case you have any questions about how the theme works.

After that, you can head over to the Free Themes Directory on WordPress.org to view a live demo of Portfolio Press, as well as access the free download link for the WordPress theme.

There is always something new to read on the web, so we’ve sifted through to find some great posts to add to your list for the weekend.

Robert Park takes us on a journey through the past, describing the startups he didn’t deliver. All too often, we hear about the success stories of new companies; now, let’s take a look at the flip side and see why these startups failed to launch (and what Robert learned along the way).

Thursday Bram has a post on MoneyNing that’s just in time for all those summer barbecues you plan on hosting. Check out her tips on how to save money on parties without resorting the usual potluck scenario. What about an event without food?

Enkay Blog continues on the food theme with his take on the Epic Meal Time YouTube series. What happens when a guy that’s a little too enthusiastic about adding more bacon, more bacon, and more bacon documents his gastronomic endeavors for all to see? Epicness, that’s what.

Jan Ozer is a guest expert on Reel SEO and he offers the perfect segway from the Epic Meal Time post: the most important aspect to video quality online is your bits per pixel value. It’s not necessarily about resolution or framerate, per se, but rather a combination of the two along with the amount of data dedicated to each second of video.

Last and certainly not least we have Melody Fury celebrating a special BC delicacy around this time of year. She lets us know about the joys of sucking on the heads of spot prawns and freezing the bodies. Not too many people are interested in the heads, but are they missing out?

When many companies consider their social media efforts, they oftentimes think about the company’s own Twitter and Facebook accounts. They think about the kind of messaging they want to use, the kinds of links they want to share, and how they want to broadcast these messages to the Internet at large. These are all valid concerns, but there’s another part of it that they’re missing: the community.

One Twitter account is just that: one Twitter account. The key is trying to leverage the community to work as your own ambassadors. Even if your end goal isn’t to go viral, per se, you can still get other Twitter and Facebook users to help advertise and promote on your behalf. Some great examples of this include Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook Places.

When someone “checks in” via Foursquare or Facebook Places, they are letting all of their friends and followers about your business, even if they are doing so briefly. Some people might ask where this place is, what it sells, and why they may be interested. This represents a great opportunity for brick and mortar businesses to get that word of mouth started.

How can you encourage this kind of activity? Contests, giveaways, and incentives can certainly go a long way. In the case of Foursquare, you can say that whoever is the “mayor” of your location each month will receive some kind of free bonus. How have you used these kinds of social media platforms to promote your business?

As you may have noticed, Google recently rolled out a new product called Google +1 (or Google Plus One, if you prefer). In essence, it works the same way as a Facebook like button on a website or even like a “tweet” button. When you click on the +1, that webpage gets a bump in search rankings as viewed by your friends.

In some ways, this sounds like Google Buzz too, though Buzz hasn’t exactly had the kind of impact that Google was trying to get. Even so, Google +1 could prove to be a useful tool for all the webmasters and bloggers in the audience. Whatever way you can get more traffic and get higher in search rankings, the better.

You could simply install the code that is provided to you by Google, but an easier way to integrate Google +1 on your site is to use the google Plus One Button WordPress plugin. It gives you many options for sizes and styles, as well as where to put the button on your pages and posts.

As with most other plugins, this one can also be found in the official WordPress Plugin Directory. Some useful information about Google+1 itself (and a screenshot of this plugin) can be found at DragonBlogger.com, though he has no direct association with either the new Google product or the new plugin.

When you own a very small business, you might say that you are a solopreneur. You take on every role in the company. If you are a growing company, you might find yourself hiring more people to take on more roles. At the same time, you might be seeing how you can combine some of these roles so that you can be the most cost-effective.

One example of this is sales and marketing. While there are absolutely differences between these two departments, as the people who have these kinds of jobs will certainly attest, there are also many opportunities for synergy between them.

What does the marketing department do? It takes care of all the advertising and all the other promotional dealings for the company. Why? The ultimate end goal is to increase sales. what does the sales department do? It sells the product. And how can it do better? Some great marketing and promotion can’t hurt, right?

Marketing to your potential customers has an integral sales component. If you’re looking to expand and hire more employees, combining sales and marketing into a single department might be a possibility to consider.