Confessions of Cork Fan

In Sacramento, California - close to UC Davis, a university nationally lauded for its commitment to environmental sustainability - we have a lot of customers committed to purchasing ‘green’ flooring. The products available to these customers are more varied and better constructed than at any time in our consumer history.

At simpleFLOORS, we make it difficult not to be green.

One sustainable choice that we’re questioned about a lot is our Enviro-Cork line. The appeal of cork is its calm, welcoming look and feel. Our choices are natural brown shades, reminiscent of driftwood, that coordinate well with both earth tones and brighter, cooler colors. Use it in rooms where you want a comfortable floor that will mature with your family.

In our Sacramento store, we’re all rabidly against carpet for both health and style reasons. We do have a lot of customers who have a hard time picturing any other type of floor in the bedrooms, mostly because it’s softer and warmer than hardwood. With that basis, I’d especially recommend considering cork floors for bedrooms. Cork is noticeably warmer and gentler on feet and joints than many floors, and also hypoallergenic, antifungal, antistatic, insect-resistant, mold-resistant, fire-resistant, and did I mention environmentally friendly? Because it’s a great insulator, cork flooring can even reduce heating costs in your home! Love it!

Keep in mind that cork choices with natural grains and tones are much better at hiding dust and any wear that does occur. Cork flooring is comparatively easy to repair. Any major damage can typically be filled with a natural-colored putty or just recovered with a polyurethane finish. It also can recover from impact; heavy furniture may leave a mark but once it’s moved, your floor will actually rebound to close to its original condition, typically within 24 hours. And it’s a click-together floor, similar to laminate, so installation is really as simple as possible.

One more thing I’d like to point out is the fact that the Library of Congress, the Mayo Clinic, and the New York City and Boston Public Libraries all have cork floors in busy, open-to-the-public areas, and have for years. Many Frank Lloyd Wright houses, including the iconic Fallingwater, employ cork flooring in a resolution to use sustainable materials evocative of nature. It’s a beautiful, renewable product that’s been time-tested in a variety of settings. Why not your house?

Blogging and Natural Search - flooring websites

Blogging and Natural Search
I feel blogs are interesting... a neat way to learn about what is important to specific companies, or groups of people that contribute to their particular blog.

That being said, I have been recently enlightened and dismayed by the current trend to post totally non-sensical and fake articles in company blogs purely to get better search optimization on search engines.

Although I agree that getting the most out of your company blog... education for your employees and potential customers should be priority, extra clicks should just be frosting on the cake- not the entree. Reading some of the fake articles out there by others in the flooring business makes me sad (and angry when the "advice" is clearly wrong and just worded for more clicks) as I think it is our job to inform potential customers through our company blogs, not just get some free advertising.

Ok, I am jumping off my soapbox now.

Information re: Natural or Organic Search - Wikipedia
The Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search engines combine advertising and search results on their search results pages. In each case, the adverts are designed to look like the search results, except for minor visual distinctions such as their background color and/or placement on the page. Further, the appearance of the adverts on all major search engines is so similar to the genuine search results that a large majority of search engine users cannot effectively distinguish between them.
Because so few ordinary users (38% according to Pew) realized that many of the highest placed 'results' on search engine results pages were actually adverts, it became important within the search engine optimization industry to distinguish between the two types of content. As the perspective among general users was that all the results were in fact 'results', the qualifier 'organic' was invented to distinguish the real search results from the adverts. Because the distinction is important (and the word 'organic' has many useful metaphorical uses) the term is now in widespread use within the search engine optimization and web marketing industry. It is, as of July 2009, now in common currency outside the specialist web marketing industry, being used frequently by Google (throughout the Google Analytics site for instance).
Google claims that their users click (organic) search results more often than adverts, which has led them to rebut the research cited above.
The same report (and others going back to 1997) by Pew shows that users avoid clicking 'results' that they know to be adverts.