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Terra Firma Landscape and Design servicing North Texas

Normally when I write a post on this blog I discuss my garden, the types of plants I grow, plant profiles and garden maintenance tips. Usually when I write I discuss topics as though I’m talking to fellow gardeners. However, I realize that not everyone who visits this site has already created a garden. Some of you might have just purchased a home, and or are beginning to think about landscaping your property.

I also realize that not everyone wants to get their hands dirty! Perhaps you’re interested in having a beautifully landscaped property that’s maintained regularly by a landscaping company?

Well, if you live in the North Texas area and you’re interested in having your property landscaped or maintained you might be interested in contacting Terra Firma Landscaping & Design for a free quote.

Terra Firma Landscaping and Design offers services such as maintenance, lawn renovation, landscaping and complete property or garden design. The company is run by three design experts who’ve come together to combine their 15 years of experience in lawn maintenance and landscaping design.

If you’re interested in having Terra Firma landscape your property you’ll be happy to know that they are interested in finding out what you want in a design, how you want it to function and what kinds of plants or colors interest you. They discuss all aspects of design with their clients prior to starting a project and if the client is interested they’ll maintain the garden, change flower colors with the four seasons and so on.

I found the website very easy to navigate. Whether you are just visiting to check out what services they offer, to get a free quote or to learn more about the company and the projects they’ve completed in the past most of the information is only a click away.

The site has plenty of photographs on each page to compliment the topic being discussed in each article. The photos are lovely and of good quality. The site has also been designed with what I find to be pleasant colors with a background of white in the content areas and a pleasing green for the sidebars and navigational menu.

The only real complaint I have about the site is that it’s too wide. My laptop has a widescreen and I find that the pages come up off center forcing me to scroll sideways to center the text of the article. This is probably because a background image is too large and while irritating I’m sure it can easily be fixed.

One of the site features that I liked best was the blog. I’ve already got a garden and it’s not likely that I’ll be contacting anyone in the near future about landscaping or design. However, I’m still interested in learning about what the latest gardening trends are, or how to resolve various gardening or plant related issues and that’s where the blog comes in handy.

On the blog you’ll find posts that appear to be questions that some of their clients might have asked such as Why does my Crape Myrtle look like it was set on fire?, and posts about the type of landscaping that’s done by builders, featured easy care low maintenance plants and so on.

I’m sure many of my readers could find a helpful post on the Terra Firma Landscaping and Design blog.

Overall I think that a home or business owner who is interested in having their property maintained or landscaped would find this website very helpful.

However, besides the site being too wide there are a couple of things that could be improved. There are client testimonials on the site and I’m certain that many of their lovely photographs are of projects they’ve completed, yet there isn’t a specific section that discusses past projects or shows before and after photographs. I’d love to see that on this site as there’s no better way to demonstrate your skills than by showing before and after pictures.

The only other area of the site that might be improved is the plant directory. You can reach it by clicking the Plant Directory link at the bottom right of each page.

There are two columns of plant names. Site visitors can hover over a plant name and a picture of the plant appears to the right. Below the plants photo is the name of the plant and what appears to be a link that says click here to learn more. However I haven’t found a link that’s clickable. Another problem is that when you hover over a plant name in the left most column you can’t move your mouse across the page to the right side where the photo of the plant is located because as you hover over any other plant name the photo changes. I think it would be better if the plant names in each of the columns were clickable and once clicked the photo of the plant would appear.

I’ve been viewing the site using my Firefox browser. I decided I’d better take a look at it with my Internet Explorer 7 just to see if the problems I’d pointed out on the site only affected one browser type, but I see them in IE as well.

Overall I think this website is appealing and contains enough information to interest potential clients and gardeners alike, however there are a few functional issues that need to be addressed to improve the visitors experience.

Take a look at Terra Firma Landscaping and Design if you’re in North Texas and are in need of landscaping, design or maintenance services.

Moving your blog to it’s own domain? Get a good web host

by Tricia

Many of the people visiting this site are not only gardeners and gardener wannabe’s, but also website owners. Some of you might blog on free platforms like bloggers, however eventually, many website owners move their sites to their own domains where they will be able to have more control over the look and function of their site.

Unfortunately, when you decide to take that big step and purchase a domain you also need to find a reputable web hosting company. If you don’t know someone with a lot of experience in such matters you might find it difficult to find the perfect web host and get started.

Luckily for any of you who might be thinking of starting a gardening blog or some other type of website, whether personal or commercial, Kaushal Sheth has taken the time to write an article listing what he feels is possibly the best web hosting company to put your trust in.

Now some of you might remember that I had major web hosting problems last year. Not only did I lose my host and had to scramble to get a new one, but it happened to me twice! This was because my sites were apparently using too much of the web hosting servers memory (CPU usage). Heavy plugins used on sites and other scripts can cause major problems with web hosts.

In his article, Kaushal discusses what he feels are his top three favorite web hosts. He explains why he moved his website to the first host on his list.

Of the three web hosting companies that he lists – Host Monster, Host Gator and Yahoo Host, I’ve only tried Host Gator. In fact they are my current web hosting company. I’ve been using them since July of 2007 and I haven’t had one single problem. Believe me that’s a huge relief after all the trouble I went through with two different hosts between February and early July last year!

If you’ve been looking for a good web host or know of another good one to add to his list why don’t you drop by and say hello to Kaushal and read his article? Oh and if you happen to be a blogger take a look at his theme and template sections. He’s got some great template listings.

Check in for Green Thumb Sunday!

by Tricia

Green Thumb Sunday participants:

I realize that now that it’s winter not everyone on the blogroll is participating each week. Whether that’s a lack of having some plant, garden or landscape photos stored up for winter GTS posts or due to not thinking about the garden as much during the cool months of winter, I don’t know, but it’s a fact that not everyone makes a GTS post each and every week.

To make it a little bit easier on those of you who’ve made a Green Thumb post and who want to visit others that have made a new post each week why don’t we work this a little bit like the Saturday Photo Hunt?

Here’s how it will work:

Each week I’ll make sure that my own Green Thumb Sunday post is up by midnight EST (Eastern Standard Time ( – 5 h GMT). Most of the time I’ll auto-publish my post just to make sure it goes up on time.
Once my post is up please feel free to leave a comment on my post stating that you’ve also made a Green Thumb Sunday post.
Please don’t just come by and say “mines up”. No one likes getting those kind of comments … not really, right?
If you want to visit others who have made a GTS post that week it will be very easy to see who’s made a post by visiting my GTS post. Just go through the list of those who’ve commented to visit their sites.

The blogroll will still exist and you can still go through the list of sites on the blogroll to see who’s made a post each week if you’d like. I’m only suggesting this to make it that much easier to see who’s participated each week.

Tag your posts!

If your blogging platform allows you to add tags to your post please do so.

Please tag your posts with Green Thumb Sunday and GTS. If you do this people will also be able to search for the term Green Thumb Sunday or GTS in Technorati to find new Green Thumb posts each week as well.

Suggestions:

If you tend to make more than one post on Sundays, perhaps you participate in other regular Sunday memes or have a regular feature post on Sundays, it would be nice if you would use the Green Thumb Sunday logo in your post or put GTS or Green Thumb Sunday in the title of your post so that it’s easy to find your GTS post.

I know that I’ve sometimes had trouble deciding just which post was the Green Thumb Sunday posts on some blogs that make multiple posts on Sundays! I’m sure you have too!

I have the blogroll set up so that those who have posted recently should rise to the top of the list. Of course this will only happen if your blogging platform automatically sends out a ping when there is a new post.

For example WordPress blogs are automatically set up to ping rpc.pingomatic.com/. You can add more ping sites to WordPress blogs by going to Options -> Writing – and then scrolling to the bottom of that page to where it says Update Services. You can then add more ping sites. I’ve added pings for:

Technorati – http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
Feedburner – http://ping.feedburner.com

*Remember to save your changes if you add more ping sites!

If your blog doesn’t automatically send out a ping to ping sites to let the world know your blog has a new post on it you can manually ping your site at a number of places. I sometimes manually ping my sites at Pingoat or Pingomatic. Hint – once you’ve pinged your site you can save your ping page to your bookmarks to make it that much easier to ping your site the next time without filling out all the feed info over and over again.

So what does everyone think? Are you willing to do a check in visit to my GTS post each week to let us all know you’ve got a new Green Thumb Sunday post up?

** Note – My Green Thumb Sunday post for the week is below this one. If you agree that we should do a weekly check in please leave a comment on my GTS post below to let all of this weeks participating members know that you’ve made a new post too.

Terra Firma Landscape and Design servicing North Texas

Moving your blog to it’s own domain? Get a good web host

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