In which the canny lads at Design Hammer give us Meetup members free web design advice AND free pizza.

Score!

A friend recommended Meetup to me a year ago but it wasn't until recently that I jumped in. I now go to a weekly Spanish conversation group, where we conduct show-and-tell, eat cookies, and cheer our amateur magician as he practices his patter en español.

I've also had my eyes opened, via meetup, to the wonderful world of "Search Engine Optimization," which is to say the sprinkling of magic herbs and the making of correct ritual incantations in order that ***GOOGLE*** may smile upon one's websites.

The economy being what it is, many brides are trading down yet again in the music department. Time was when having live music was de rigeur at a wedding. Then DJs started taking the work away from the bands and we musicians howled. Now, the brides and bridegrooms tote their iPods to the receptions and do away with actual humans altogether. Though I manage a bitter smile when the DJs howl, it's actually horrible for all of us.

Since the last time I'd paid any attention to my bands' websites, our Google standing had dropped down, down, down below a gaggle of mega-directory sites falsely promising "LOCAL MUSIC FOR CHAPEL HILL," for instance. They don't actually offer many local bands at all, rather, slick cover bands in Manhattan and Minnesota which will travel to Chapel Hill - for a large fee, of course...

I want to get more eyeballs on my sites and ears on my music - hence my new site, Wedding Music in North Carolina, and hence a visit tonight to the offices of local website mavens Design Hammer. Two nice young Design Hammer guys, very soft spoken, gave us pizza and proceeded to share 1-1/2 hours of their experience, just to be nice.

So I asked them as we left, "can I pay for the pizza?" and they said, "no indeed, just blog about us," and there you have it! Hurrah for generous young web designers, and kudos to Meetup for inventing itself.