My goals for this site this year:
Who needs ‘em?
I do remember one year that I sat down and thought through some goals I had for my life. At New Years, I sat down and wrote them out and formalized them. There were only 3 or 4 and they were very specific and attainable.
During that year, I actually remembered those goals and started to make decisions based on them. Should I do this or that? This lines up with the goal and that would be a lot of fun, but doesn’t line up with the goal.
I kept track and measured myself during the year. Nothing hard core, but I was aware of exactly where I was on the quest.
What do you want to achieve?
I create even more goals for the next year. I had charts and graphs for the entire upcoming year. I had a manila folder. I was set. This new year was going to be great.
About 3 months into the second year, I realized that I had no idea what those detailed goals really were for each step along the way. I couldn’t remember the details. At 6 months, I had given up on all of them. Quit. Done.
At the end of the year, I hadn’t accomplished anything. I was still were I started and completely distracted by other things.
What do you want to achieve? Pick a couple goals. Make them simple. Make them measurable. Then go accomplish them.
What are your goals for the upcoming year? Leave a comment.
Douglas at Hostgator actually looks for people talking about his company. This is the kind of proactive research that you should be doing for your company. You need to search Google and Technorati to see what people are saying about you on a regular basis.
Look at his response. Leads with a compliment, addresses the concern, and follows with a positive statement. Also notice that he gets a link to his site in the comment he left (good for SEO). If it was just comments spam, I wouldn’t have approved it. Since it was a meaningful comment, it’s approved and he got the link.
I wish I could comment as well as Douglas! The dude is a professional. I’m happy to give him the extra links.
I’ve been promoting PowWeb, since they are who I’m happy with, but perhaps it’s time to stroll on down to Hostgator and check them out.
Quoting from How To Use The “Suckage Ratio” | Web Design and Developement for Small Business
I wish I could comment as well as Douglas!
By Douglas – HostGator.com on Dec 29, 2008 | Reply | EditI’m glad to see that you utilize a ratio (most posts like these just use the flat out number of results), but am disappointed to see that HostGator had the highest “suckage ratio.”
With that in mind, though, our customer service is still amongst the best in the industry and is continually improving. We also invest a lot of time and resources into reaching out to customers that have any trouble (we have an extremely strong presence on the Twitter and regularly reach out to bloggers). And the CEO of the company is also personally available to customers who ask (this is not a gimmick and actually does happen).
Hopefully our reaching out will help demonstrate our commitment to customer service excellence. If you have any questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to send me an email.
Read the entire article at:
Web addresses on business cards just work. Every church needs a web site. Every one.
Quoting from Church Marketing Rocks « Billy Chia
When I reached into my wallet to pull out my debit card to pay, I pulled out a churchinabrewery.com card as well. I laid it down and said,
Web addresses on business cards just work.
“I worshiped with these guys on Christmas Eve.”
She said she’d never heard of Church in a Brewery but that she really enjoyed the Christmas Eve service at Grace UMC. She asked to keep the card. (My vibe was that Grace is the right place for her – but I’m suspecting she might have a friend to pass the card along to who would find a great home at Sojourn.)
Business Cards with a web addresses just work. In a situation where it’d be awkward to try to start up a conversation about going to church while there are 300 other people waiting for driver’s liscneses it’s simple and gets you to the point quick.
Read the entire article at:
http://billychia.com/2008/12/29/church-marketing-rocks/
It looks like there will be some valuable articles on WordPress SEO over at Remarkablogger. Since I’m such an advocate of WordPress and SEO, I’ll be interested to see what he has to say. He usually have some good information that I can learn from.
Quoting from About WordPress SEO
Why WordPress SEO is Separate from Blog SEO or “Regular” SEO
WordPress SEO needs to be its own thing because of all the unique factors a blogger needs to understand when applying basic SEO principles to a WordPress blog. For example, many of the common points of standard SEO advice have to be translated into how to specifically do them for WordPress SEO. Things like:
Title tags
File names
Headings
Redirects
Meta tags
Robots exclusion
This Ain’t the Old Days AnymoreBack in the day, web pages were edited by hand, and you had to know HTML, and, for some of this stuff, a little scripting. How is today’s blogger going to accomplish the above without any editing of HTML or scripting?
WordPress. With WordPress, about the most technical thing you need to know is how to install a theme or a plugin (and with the advent of WordPress 2.7, even plugins have become super-easy). There are plugins for WordPress SEO. Problem is, that’s not quite enough. You have to know what to do with them in order to really improve your search rankings. And in order to do that, you have to know SEO.
Read the entire article at http://michaelmartine.com/2008/12/28/wordpress-seo/
I really appreciate comments. I really do. I love the interaction with people who use this site. Most of all, I love being right and crushing the opposition.
Network Solutions is waiting for you to search for an available domain name using their site.
With that as background, I got a comment or two from Jack Carlson, who, again, I really appreciate for commenting. He defended NetSol and I had to question if I was right about their practices or not. I know what happened to me and a client of mine. Maybe they saw the error of their ways and changed their practices. I needed to reevaluate.
I checked Wikipedia (and since it’s on the Internet, it must be right of course,) and they also had references that all seem to check out. I think this section below is probably true. It matches my experiences and my client’s. Please click through and read the whole thing.
What do you think? Have you ever had a good or a bad experience with NetSol? Please leave a comment and we’ll all battle it out in the never ending search for the truth.
Network Solutions – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Controversy over domain name front running
Network Solutions Inc offer a search engine which permits users to find out if a domain name is available for purchase.[18] Unregistered domain names entered into this search engine are then speculatively reserved by Network Solutions. [18] It should be noted this “reservation” can be removed by anyone immediately by contacting Network Solutions customer service hotline, or it will automatically unreserve within 4 days, allowing the domain to be freely registered anywhere. Also, visitors searching for domain names on their website allow the reservation when they click “OK” on the Reservation Confirmation dialog box. Clicking cancel will prevent the domain name from being reserved.There is evidence that there are parties subscribing to this information which are buying some of these domains within milliseconds of them being de-registered.
On January 8, 2008 Domain Name Wire published a story alleging that Network Solutions practices domain name front running.[18] “If you try to register a domain at Network Solutions, but decide not to register it, you won’t be able to register it anywhere else,” the article says.[18] “Network Solutions registers the domain in its company name with the words ‘This Domain is available at NetworkSolutions.com’.”[18] Circle ID reported on January 8, 2008 that Jonathon Nevett, Vice President of Policy at Network Solutions and one of the seven members of the ICANN community who was consulted by the ICANN committee looking at domain tasting abuse,[19] had offered a response to the news story stating Network Solution’s policy.[20] The policy was “a security measure to protect our customers,” said Nevett.[20] “When a customer searches for an available domain name at our website, but decides not to purchase the name immediately after conducting the search,” Nevett added, “after the search ends, we will put the domain name on reserve.”[20] Nevett said that if the domain was “not purchased within 4 days, it will be released back to the registry and will be generally available for registration.”[18]
WOW! THIS is what using the Internet is about. Here is an organization that advocates spending less money on Christmas and giving more. This is what Christmas is all about.
This is what Christmas is all about.
This organization has a free web site that looks great, works great, and has great results.
Yes, they did lobby displays and other, more traditional marketing efforts also, but the free web site was part of it.
Merry Christmas. Spend time, not money.
news: Back to the basics at Christmas
How did the movement generate such a massive response?
Church leadership sowed the seeds several months earlier. Beginning in October, the congregation, including children, repeatedly heard the Advent Conspiracy’s call to “spend less, give more, worship fully and love all.” Officials added a blog to the church Web site (adventconspiracy.wordpress.com) and created a lobby storyboard where churchgoers could share ideas on how to give creative gifts of time and relationship.
Read the entire article at news: Back to the basics at Christmas
This is quite an indictment against the church’s use to technology, or the lack there of. This is how the secular world views the church, as “a primitive, backwards relic from a superstitious, theocratic Dark Age”. While this article is specifically about the Catholic church, the view applies to most all Christian churches.
I think that phrase could also be used for any business that doesn’t have a web page. In 2008, there is not reason that any business doesn’t have a web site, none at all.
It’s not that hard folks. It’s really not. I sell a book, Web Site Starter Kit, that will tell you how to get a web site for free, (yes, free!) and it won’t suck, I promise. You need to drag your small business or church out of the Dark Ages and into the 21st century. All the kids are doing it these days.
The Teapot Atheist: Isn’t that cute! The Church figured out the intertubes!
Secular people practically own the internet. It’s old news. We’ve been bloggging, podcasting, all of it, ever since the internet was invented. And now the Vatican has just figured out what this crazy “iTunes” thing is that all the kids are using. The Pope made headlines in 2005 because he figured out how to use a five year-old piece of technology known as a “text message” with the help of only a $90 million Peter’s Pence Vatican budget.Church is a primitive, backwards relic from a superstitious, theocratic Dark Age.
The whole story is quite a commentary on what people really think about the Church. Why would it be news for them to use the internet if it didn’t defy our understanding of the fact that the Church is a primitive, backwards relic from a superstitious, theocratic Dark Age?
Read the entire article at The Teapot Atheist: Isn’t that cute! The Church figured out the intertubes!
This is the correct use of a church web site! When things change, it’s much easier to check the computer in the den to see if the church service is still on or not than to drive down there in the snow to find locked doors.
My dad lives in Portland. He said it’s been snowing, melting, freezing, and snowing more. It’s really slippery. This is why I live near Los Angeles, a half mile from the beach. It will never snow at my house. Never.
Church web sites should contain current information about everything that is happening at the church. Special events information is at the very core of why you want a church web site. What time was that meeting again?
The Portland First Church of the Nazarene and the Portland Christian Center canceled their Christmas Eve candlelight services because of the weather. So did the Portland Foursquare Church , Hinson Baptist Church, and New Song Community Church.Please use care and discretion in problematic travel conditions. God wants you healthy and happy and so do we.
Portland’s First United Methodist Church scaled back to a single service at 7 p.m. with carols, a children’s story and informal communion in the chapel. The church’s Web site expressed what many in the religious community are thinking: “Please use care and discretion in problematic travel conditions. God wants you healthy and happy and so do we.”
Read the entire article at Many Portland churches cancel Christmas Eve services – Breaking News From Oregon & Portland – OregonLive.com
I have some experience with building and maintaining web sites for churches. Most of my professional life has been building them for large corporations, which is cool. It paid the bills. My heart is for church web sites though.
It just hurts to see what some of them look like out there. I am going to change the direction and focus of this site a little bit to point it more towards churches. Most of the advice and knowledge about small business web sites will apply to churches as well.
I’ll write a new version of the Web Site Starter Kit, this one will be for churches. You’ll learn how to build a site for FREE! Yes, this means that there will be no excuse at all, for not having a web site.
I am going to change the direction and focus more on churches.
I told the worship leader about it and he was excited. He “got it” back then.
I had a meeting to tell the church business manager about it. He told me to take it down immediately. The Internet was for child porn and software pirates, not churches. He was angry that I had even registered the domain name. Wooah… Dude. Slow down.
I left the meeting disheartened. Of course, being the obedient, submissive soul that I am, I left the site up and did what I knew was the best thing for the church anyway. Idiot.
There were more meetings and the business manager backed down. He began to see the benefit of the site. People were actually excited about it and word got back to him that it was “a good thing”.
The next step, after the “fear and loathing” step, was obviously the “control” step. They wanted to dictate to me exactly what should be on the site. They wanted everything approved before it went on the site. Again, I submitted by doing the best thing for the church. He never went to the site, so he never knew any better.
We finally got some people in the main office trained to keep it updated. It began to really become a useful tool in the life of the church. They started to look for a higher end publishing platform and spend money on it. About this time, there was another political shift in the church, unrelated to the web site, and my lovely wife and I chose to leave and help start a new church.
The original site fell into the hands of the, well, we’ll call them ill-equipped to design and maintain a web site. They didn’t spend any money after all and the site follows all of the “10 Common Mistakes for Church Web Sites”. It’s horrible, last time I looked.
Based on that wonderful experience, and the others that followed, I’ll be giving my advice on how to create and maintain a web site for a church. I’ll try to not go on religious rants, whether they involve Calvinism or Microsoft.
Here’s some clarity to what is happening. If you are going to offend someone, you should be clear and precise about what you are saying.
Saddleback Church Site Not Taking Down Gay Condemnations After All / Queerty
We received a nice email from Kristin Cole, the press rep for the Sadleback Church letting us know that they are keeping their anti-gay rhetoric on the church website after all.
Cole writes us:
“I wanted to make sure you were aware that the Q & A addressing homosexuality on the Saddleback Church Web site has not been permanently removed, but rather repurposed for clarity. I know your readers have noticed the change.
Read the entire article at Saddleback Church Site Not Taking Down Gay Condemnations After All / Queerty
Just a reminder that what you put on your site will be forever available. Hardware wears out, but data is forever. Apparently Rick Warren’s church changed their web site in the midst of criticism, but Google remembers the old version in its’ cache.
So Rick Warren pulled the anti-gay language from his church Web site. The site used to explicitly ban gays from membership in the church. — Now the offending language is gone, but you can still find the anti-gay language via Google’s cache.
Read the entire article at Rick Warren pulls anti-gay language from his Web site (John Aravosis/AMERICAblog News) – Examiner.com
Apparently Rick Warren's church changed their web site in the midst of criticism, but Google remembers the old version in its' cache.
We don’t know if this was a staff person acting on their own to polish the web site or if it was a directive from Rick himself. That question points out that the owner or head of an organization should be aware of what goes on the web site.
Mistakes happen. Change occur. A leader can’t always be aware of what is going on in the organization. When something like this happens, you better come out and explain it right away. The truth will always come out (except about the Kennedy assassination…)
People will always forgive if you tell them the truth. They will never forgive a cover up. Compare Nixon with Clinton.
I worked with a designer once who was playing around and used monkey heads instead of human heads on some presentation comps that were to be presented to a client. It was a joke and he would change them before the presentation. You know what happened.
A developer was coding a site once and had some external links on it. He didn’t know exactly what the correct URL was, so, as a place marker, he added the tag as <a href=”xxx”>. When the client reviewed the site, they clicked on one of those links.
What does your browser do when you don’t complete a URL? It adds a “www.” to the beginning and a “.com” to the end and tries to go there. What do you suppose the client saw on the site at “www.xxx.com”?
The “suckage ratio” can tell you which company or product to use, including web hosts.
You can do Google searches on exact phrases by putting quotes around the words. If you want to know what people are saying about a specific company or product or web host, do a search for these phrases: “product” and “product sucks”
When you compare the suckage ratio of one product to another, you'll get an idea of what the general population thinks of the products.
Divide the number of “product sucks” search results by the number of “product” results. That is your “suckage ratio”. The idea is to compare the number of times the product is talked about with the number of times that it is talked about negatively.
The number itself doesn’t tell you anything important, but when you compare the suckage ratio of one product to another, or of one company with another, you’ll get an idea of what the general population thinks of the products or companies. I wouldn’t this as the only point to base a decision on, but it’s a good piece of information to have when making choices.
As you can see from the chart below, Powweb, the web host that I recommend, I use and I am very happy with, is very close to the best. I don’t have any experience with BlueHost, but maybe I will have to check into them.
| Web Host | Total | Sucks | Suckage Ratio |
| Hostgator | 2,980,000 | 1,900 | 6.38% |
| HostMonster | 2,060,000 | 926 | 4.50% |
| iPower | 1,470,000 | 1,650 | 1.12% |
| Pow Web | 779,000 | 815 | 1.05% |
| BlueHost | 2,120,000 | 2,180 | 1.03% |
One way to rate companies is to search for their name and the word “sucks” to see how many pages contain that term. Put quotes around the two words for the best results, e.g., “Network Solutions Sucks”.
Search for just the name and compare those results to the “sucks” results. Divide one by the other the get a ratio, then compare that ratio to other companies’ ratios to see what people think about them.
Try to use the company with the lowest “sucks” ratio. In effort to support that rating, here is my rant about how Network Solutions Sucks.
Network Solutions Sucks!
I once had a client who used Network Solutions to look up a domain name to see if it was available or if it was registered already. It was available, so they asked me to register it for them. Of course, I suggested Godaddy.com and tried to register it, but it was on administrative hold at Network Solutions.
They had done us a favor by putting a hold on it because they knew we were interested in it. They didn’t want anyone else to get it before we did. That was nice of them. Oh, and they’d take the hold off and give it to us for $60 unless we wanted to register with them.
They will also grab your name if you register it with them and let it go at the end of the registration. You will have to pay them a bunch of money to get it back from them if you change your mind. Enom.com has been rumored to do similar things with domain names, so steer clear of them.
The reason that Network Solutions is so evil is that they make you actually call them and listen to a sales pitch before they will release your domain name for transfer.
I hate Network Solutions. Network Solutions Sucks.
I ran into a situation where I had some old hard coded pages that I needed to drop into a WordPress site. The pages can coexist with Worpress just fine, but getting them to interact was a little harder.
I added the bit of code that would then display the menu.
The next step was to get those 20 hard coded pages to use the same menu that I was using in the WordPress theme. I needed to change the content of that included file.
Here’s how I did it:
I took the index.php file that WordPress uses to do all of it’s magic. I copied that file over to the location of my existing menu.php file, replacing it. My new menu.php file now has the same content as the WordPress index.php file.
<?php
define(‘WP_USE_THEMES’, false);
/** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
require(‘./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php’);
?>
<!–start meu–>
<tr>
<td colspan=”6″ align=”left” valign=”middle”>
<div id=”navmenu”>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_pages(‘title_li=&depth=1′); ?>
</ul>
</div>
</td>
</tr>
<!–end menu–>
Where it says to “define(‘WP-USE-THEMES’, true);, changed it to say false. This is where is can get all of the information, the variables, the values that WordPress has to offer, without all of the themes and HTML stuff along with it.
I added the bit of code that would then display the menu. That is between the comments. It adds a <tr>, because this is going into old school table designed pages. This table row will have a div whose ID is “navmenu”.
The actual WordPress tag for the menu will not have a title and it will only display the top level of pages; depth=1. Here’s the WordPress menu tag that I used on the whole site:
When this whole file is included in the static, existing, hard coded PHP file, it will display the existing menu for the whole site. I can add a page or change the name of a page and it will be reflected on these static, hardcoded, pages that are not part of the Worpress theme world.
Pretty cool, huh? Saved me a bucket of work trying to convert all these existing pages into WordPress with a new template for each page.
Here’s the method in work. Look at the “Portfolio” pages on this site:
http://www.flowerart.biz/
I also wanted the highlight to happen on that parent menu item. I couldn’t get the “child_of” to work, since these are not actually pages in WordPress, so I had to look at the “page-item-14″ since that parent page will always have that class. I added this line to my style sheet: .page-item-14 { background-color: #DBE1BB; } It’s not the cleanest way to do it, but it works and I don’t know any other way around it without putting each of those pages into WordPress.
Back in the dark ages, the days before WordPress, I created a site for a friend using the latest and greatest methods of the day, tables. I happened to be great at laying out and implementing tables for designing web pages. I even taught a class in how to do it for the large aerospace company I worked for back then. This was back when we were still afraid of the Millennium Bug.
I happened to be great at laying out and implementing tables for designing web pages.
Fast forward to a couple weeks ago. He wants to add some videos and a video page. I have just written a book on how WordPress is so wonderful for everything, so I figure I really need to convert his old school web site into WordPress.
WordPress is great with CSS and I’m a huge believer in CSS myself, so it was particularly difficult to read this old code that I wrote years ago, using tables. One of the cool design features of his site is that every page is a bit different in layout. There are random images strewn about the place. I used multiple templates and passed variables to change the images.
To convert the old site to WordPress, without having to recreate the whole thing, meant that I needed to create new template pages for each section, using the existing tables, then assign the templates to the pages.
I threw in a div in the middle for the content on most. The front page is totally custom, so I actually have the template as the entire HTML page, with no content displayed at all. It’s just an HTML page.
The tricky part was the menus. I learned how to do child menus for the Venues pages, so that each venue gets its’ own page with a submenu of all other venue pages, because they are children of the Venue page which lists them all. I’ll do another post on menus to explain that better.
It took a lot of tweaks, but I finally got it to work. The decisions had to be made on which data would be hard coded and what would be “content”. He’s got to have the freedom to make changes to a lot of it, but I didn’t want him to be able to make changes to other parts.
I think it turned out OK. Please don’t view the source on it, unless you want to see some ugly code. Ack. It all works though. It’s possible to convert an existing site into WordPress.
Years ago, I set my browser’s default background color to gray, the shade of gray that the original Mosaic used. Since then, I’ve been shocked at how many sites don’t specify a background color.
Write this down. Specify a background color for your site.
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Is your (website’s) underwear showing?
It’s astounding how many web designers forget to specify a background color on their site. They’ll spend months iterating wireframes and design comps; write CSS hacks for browsers predating this century; test their work on everything from Blackberries to old Macs running System 7; and of course they’ll validate their markup and style sheets. But after all that, they’ll forget to apply a background color to their site, and they won’t think to check for it.It's astounding how many web designers forget to specify a background color on their site.
Read the entire article at Jeffrey Zeldman Presents : Is your (website’s) underwear showing?
Dwight D. Eisenhower: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
This seems to sum up the essence of web project management. There are always plans and as long as you understand the plans, then you can change them when you need to, and you will need to.
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
But…
As Pee Wee Herman said, there’s always a big but.
You need to know all of that stuff so that you can change it when you need to. Things will be different than you assume they will be. Something will come up. Something will break. Something will work better than expected.
Usually, when a client sees their site for the first time, even after they planned it and agreed to it in detail, they want changes. It happens every time. I have NEVER built a site to plan and had the client approve it without changes. Doesn’t happen. It won’t happen to you either.
Just be ready for it when it comes, because it’s coming.
Dwight D. Eisenhower:
“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
She doesn’t mention the idea of using search terms, your keywords in your URL. That’s the best way to get found for those search terms.
Choose the Best Name for Your Business Web Site | The Small Business Blog
Some business owners get caught in the trap of thinking their business name and their domain name have to match. They don’t. Schultz advises you think of your potential URL as more than just a name, but as a descriptive call to action as well. And, he adds, think locally. For example, a plumber might choose as his or her URL “BestPlumberOnWestside.com.”
Think of your potential URL as more than just a name, but as a descriptive call to action as well.
Once you buy your domain, your job isn’t over. Remember that your URL is your Internet identity. Use it as your e-mail address. Schultz advises that your domain name appear on your business cards, in your e-mail signature, and on all your marketing materials and other business collateral. And spread the word. Get registered on all the search directories, social networking sites, and rating sites like Yelp or Angie’s List. Ask your customers to go to the various rating sites and rate their experiences with your business.
Domain names are cheap enough that you can buy one whenever you get a good idea, years before you actually start the business. I own around two dozen URLs. Some may never see the light of day, but I have high hopes for a few of them.
No more excuses. Coming up with a domain name is fun, easy, and inexpensive. How many business activities can you say that about?
Read the entire article at Choose the Best Name for Your Business Web Site | The Small Business Blog
Find out how my site beat Wikipedia in Google. Even if you don't know anything about any of this web stuff, you can learn how to improve the ranking of your web site in the search engines.
