People we admire, people we work with, and books worth reading...

Absolute Website Design is owned and run by a guy in little Romeo, Michigan (in the far northeastern suburbs of Detroit) who happens to do great work. He does all of his Web designs from scratch (no pre-built templates), which means that all of his clients have sites that don't look like any others one may happen across on the Web. Larry can also host your site. E-mail inquiries to absolutewebsitedesign@sbcglobal.net.

Seth Godin is brilliant. Period.

Subscribe to his blog, read his books.

I first became aware of Godin when a colleague loaned me a copy of All Marketers Are Liars and Purple Cow.

Someone else I've been a fan of for a long time is Roy H. Williams, a.k.a., the Wizard of Ads. His first book was the best seller, The Wizard of Ads, which turned into a series of books, all of which I've read a number of times. Williams is the founder of the Wizard Academy, and offers a free subscription to his weekly e-newsletter, the Monday Morning Memo.

Williams was also mentor to Bryan and Jeff Eisenberg, who went on to start their own consultancy, called Future Now. They also wrote an excellent book on understanding one's customers, particularly defining "typical" customers in terms of the way they make decisions, then designing one's selling processes in terms of these "personas" through their Persuasion Architecture. It makes for fascinating reading.

Although it has a strong Web orientation, MarketingProfs.com is a great site to browse.  They offer a free newsletter, which contains a lot of insights into making marketing work better.  For a modest fee, you can get their premium subscription package which entitles you to "premium" articles in the newsletter, podcasts, and Webinars they would otherwise charge for.  Check it out here.

Michael Gerber is a fellow who wrote a book called The E-Myth (The E-Myth Revisited in its current incarnation). His organization, E-Myth Worldwide, is about helping small businesses become great (if still small-ish) businesses. Gerber's books have informed a fair amount of our own thinking since discovering him around 1999 or 2000.