Setting Up a Website

About 1633 days ago Setting Up a Website

Do-it-Yourself Web Design for Small Business

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Sticker shock. That’s what Terry Sullivan got when he shopped around to have a website professionally designed for his new catering business. “I looked into it, and it was between $4,000 and $150,000… that’s pretty expensive,” says Sullivan, founder of Texas Prime Caterers near Dallas, Texas. “I had just started a business, and I didn’t want to spend that kind of money.” So Sullivan did it himself. After obtaining a domain name and a hosting agreement through 1&1 Internet, he started building. In about nine hours, he had a basic website without e-commerce capability. Not bad for a chef with no code-writing or graphic design background. To build his site, Sullivan used Wix, a publishing platform application that allows someone to design a website in Flash without knowing code and without using a template. Launched in 2006 as a free service, Wix now offers a $9.90/month premium service, too. Unlike the free version, the premium service offers hosting and does not carry Wix-generated advertising, explains Wix co-CEO Allon Bloch. D-I-Y Web design grows up Wix is one of the newer do-it-yourself Web design applications that are allowing small businesses and individuals to design or augment their own websites and social network pages cheaply and more creatively than ever before. Using Wix, users can drag and drop a wide range of content into their sites. Weebly, a rival app, uses a template and simple step-by-step instructions, as well as free domain hosting. Weebly also offers a free service, as well as a “pro account” for $3.99 a month with additional features.    Meanwhile, inexpensive domain-name and hosting services are plentiful in the marketplace, and many of them offer sitebuilding services. Likewise, many Web design firms offer cheaper do-it-yourself options. The result is a market that makes it easier than ever for smaller companies to do everything from find a domain name to power up their site faster and more cheaply than ever before. Wix’s Bloch notes that, between small businesses and personal users under 35, there is a growing market for technologies that let people design their own websites and personal pages. “Artists, designers, musicians, they are wanting to create their own sites,” he says. “And people under 35, their lives have been on the Internet. They want their social pages to reflect who they are.” Moreover, the technology allows people to easily update or change their sites without involving a designer, and yet another layer of expensive design, says Bloch. But attempting to design a site that is at once professional, informative, and easy to navigate is not without risks. Sullivan admits that one client pointed out a host of spelling and grammatical errors on his catering site. “It hasn’t hurt my business any,” he says. But for some businesses, it could. Sometimes it pays to hire a pro “You want your site to look professional, or you could lose business,” says Jim Dittman, co-owner of w3.com, a full-service sitebuilder site based in Birmingham, Ala. Errors in the pages, or advertising that diverts attention from your page, “isn’t considered very professional,” he warns. Moreover, adding features such as e-commerce or database functionality can get complicated if you don’t know the ropes, experts say. “If you’re putting in an e-commerce platform, you need to know, will it work? Will it integrate with your accounting software?” asks Susan Wade, spokeswoman for Network Solutions, a Herndon, Va.-based sitebuilder firm. Both Dittman and Wade note that professional Web design services don’t have to run in the thousands of dollars. A three- to four-page site, says Dittman, could run as little as $700. Wade advises that users try different options out first, and really think through what they want in their site before proceeding. “No matter what option you choose, you need to have a clear idea what you want your site to do for you so you can keep costs down,” she says. “Concept spread — that’s what will cost you.” SIDEBAR: D-I-Y Website Design Apps to Know Do-it-yourself website design apps becoming easier to use and more sophisticated than ever. Here are a few to keep an eye on: Wix: A Flash-based app that you don’t need to know Flash to use, Wix allows users to drag and drop content into their site freestyle, meaning that there’s no template in sight. Basic service is free, but users must first obtain a domain name and a hosting service, since all sites require a host. The free service features advertising. A premium service ($9.90/month) features no ads, and provides hosting. The company plans to offer domain-name search services soon. Weebly: Weebly’s simplicity allows users with almost no tech skills to form a website or personal page using a template. Moreover, says Weebly co-creator Dan Velti, it does not use Flash, thus making it easier for search engines attempting to index and rank the site. The app offers free domain hosting; its pro account at $3.99/month offers password protection, larger file size uploads, and an embedded audio player. Sprout: The Sprout app is not a sitebuilder. Instead, it allows users to trick out their existing website, blog, or page with rich media content (also known as a widget, mini-site, or mashup), such as a streaming video, real-time poll, or chat function with ease.

About 1724 days ago Setting Up a Website

Now Is the Time to Start an Internet Business

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A few years ago, Elissa Pignati was a brand-new mommy who wanted to preserve her baby’s handprints in a ceramic plaque. “I researched all the local crafters and only found one person who could do it, and she was a two-hour drive away.” Undeterred, Pignati called for an appointment, only to discover that the artist was on maternity leave herself, and wouldn’t be available for 10 weeks, by which time Pignati’s baby would no longer be a newborn. Realizing she’d just discovered an unfilled market need, Pignati and her friend Jennifer Carroll started By Baby, which takes little ones’ hand and foot impressions in a non-messy medium and turns them into ceramic keepsakes. They started the business by traveling around to new parent centers and events around the Bay Area, where they live. A few months ago, they launched their website, which has already matched their in-person sales. Soon, Pignati hopes, it will account for most of their revenues. “We really want this to be our primary source for orders,” she says. To many, 2008 seems like a dreadful time to start a new venture. The economy is tanking. High energy prices and a falling dollar have driven up the cost of just about everything, leaving customers with little disposable income. Getting credit is all but impossible. Better to hunker down, the logic goes, put off entrepreneurial plans, and wait for better times. You’ll be missing a great opportunity if you do. For many who’ve tried it, this turns out to be the perfect time to launch a new Internet-based business. Why? Consider the following: 1. Lower costs – Economic down times are neither better nor worse for starting a new business than boom times, according to Wil Schroter, a serial Web entrepreneur, and founder of Go BIG Network, an online community of startup companies. “The situation is just different,” he explains. “In boom times, capital is easier to get, but everything costs more. In the late 1990s, if you wanted to start an Internet business, you were probably raising $10 million. In 2002, you could start that same company for $200,000.” These days, with tools for building websites and low-cost hosting readily available, an Internet entrepreneur can get off the ground for as little as $1,000, he says. “You can acquire customers and have a storefront at a very cheap price. With a bricks and mortar company, you would need a lot more.” 2. Little or no inventory – Inventory is one thing you absolutely need with a storefront, but might not with an online business. Mike Faith, president and CEO of Headsets.com recently decided to start a second online business, MotionSeats, which sells special ergonomic office chairs designed to strengthen the back. Faith spent a lot of attention and money on getting a strong website design and crafting a near-irresistible free-trial guarantee but one thing he didn’t do is buy the chairs themselves upfront. “We put the website up, waited to see what sold, and bought the first few retail,” he says. “We lost a little on each chair, but it was a lot cheaper than buying five in each color and then seeing if they sold.” 3. Less competition — “In better economic times, you compete for everything,” Schroter says. “You compete for talent, for office space, for customers, and for attention from the media because there are so many cool startups to write about. When everyone’s running for cover, there’s much less competition.” “There are very few people willing to spend money on marketing,” Faith adds. “That makes it a great time to be starting a business.” 4. High gas prices — Paying more at the pump is bad for many American businesses, as well as Americans themselves. But it does mean that more people are staying home, putting off both shopping trips and vacations till prices come down. That’s good news for e-commerce, because many people are using their computers to go shopping instead. 5. More Web resources — The Go BIG network is just one of many, many resources now available to new entrepreneurs. “The beauty of the Web is that there are so many people around the world who can help you do what you need to,” Pignati says. Even better, the Web provides ready-made marketplaces, with customers primed to buy. “The biggest cost in any business is acquiring customers to sell to,” Schroter says. “The beauty of eBay and other such sites is they’ve done that heavy lifting for you.” They also give you a quick and easy way to test your product or concept, he notes. “If you can’t sell your product on eBay, with millions of customers already in the store, you probably won’t be able to sell it elsewhere.” Best of all, Schroter believes it can only get better from here. In the coming years, the Web will offer more resources, more places to connect with colleagues, and most important, more customers. “We always remind people that the Web is still in its infancy,” he says. “There are still whole generations of people who never or rarely use the Internet. We’re waiting for them to catch up.” Imagine the size of the online market when they do.

About 1786 days ago Setting Up a Website

How to Collect Money Online

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As buyers, we are all too familiar with those little shopping cart icons on our favorite shopping sites. But, not all shopping carts are the same. It may seem that way for the person making the purchase. For the company on the other end of the transaction, the story is much different. When a customer makes a credit card purchase in a bricks and mortar store, he or she swipes their card to initiate a secure electronic transaction. This is called a point of sale system. In the online world, a payment gateway is the equivalent of that. The solutions available to facilitate those transactions range from one-click simplicity to the Byzantine. It all depends less on the payment gateway itself and more on which gatekeeper (merchant account provider) is chosen. Types of merchant account providers “For any small business starting up, the easiest way to go is PayPal. They’ve been around a long time and most likely your customers already have a PayPal account, which is a huge advantage.” says Michael Miller, author of Choosing an Online Payment Service: Google Checkout vs. PayPal (Pearson Education, 2007). Turn key solutions like PayPal or Google Checkout may seem like the obvious choice for the new online seller. But there’s another alternative: dealing directly with a credit card processor. Most credit card processing companies typically offer bundled in services like back end integration with your website and the shopping cart navigation. However, the costs charged back to the merchant can vary wildly; sometimes cheaper than the turn key providers, sometimes much more. Brenda Mize, owner of Beacon’s Glow, an online collectibles store and her newer ecommerce venture, The Toy Bench, skipped right over turn key merchant account services like PayPal and Google Checkout and started out with a credit card processor. In the five years that she’s been in business, she’s never looked back. “We’ve never had one bad transaction. Our Web designer picked out the credit card processor, who waived all the up front fees. Customer service has been great. We’ve even been able to negotiate lower percentage rates. We never even considered PayPal. Their fees were astronomical when we started,” says Mize. Miller would consider Mize an exception to the rule who cautions smaller businesses, especially those just starting out, to avoid credit card processors. “It’s very complex. With a credit card processor, fees can vary. Make sure you shop around,” says Miller. Clearly opinions are divided when it comes to weighing all options. Here’s a look at some of the more popular solutions and the advantages and disadvantages therein. Turn key merchant account providers PayPal charges 2.9 percent of the sale price, plus 30 cents per transaction. It used to be much higher in their earlier days. PayPal has more than 60 million customers worldwide, operating in 190 countries. A major part of its customer base comes from its parent company, eBay. However, it’s not just the merchant account provider of choice for small businesses. Delta Airlines, CompUSA, and Overstock.com are just some of the large companies that use PayPal. “Five years ago, there was a stigma that PayPal didn’t look professional. Now it’s so popular, it’s ubiquitous,” says Miller. Advantages: PayPal can be as simple as embedding one click from your site to theirs to complete the sale. However, it’s scaleable too. Merchants can integrate the entire shopping cart process within their own site. It only takes about a week to set up an account and get it up and running. Disadvantages: Although distribution of funds back to the merchant is immediate, it is also manual. Meaning, it doesn’t happen until the merchant clears his account. PayPal then takes its cut and transfers the rest to the merchant. Miller cautions businesses to clear their accounts on a daily basis. “PayPal, especially, is very consumer friendly. So, if there’s a dispute, they tend to take the customer’s side. It doesn’t happen often, but PayPal has been known to freeze accounts until a dispute is resolved and that means everything in the account. You don’t want to risk money from other sales getting tied up in the event of a customer dispute,” warns Miller. Google Checkout charges 2 percent of the sale, plus 20 cents per transaction. It’s a much younger service than PayPal, less than two years old and only been operating abroad for about a year. Because it’s Google, one can expect its growth to make quick gains on Pay Pal’s market share. Advantages: “Google Checkout is pretty much the same system as PayPal,” says Miller. However, its percentages and fees are slightly lower. Additionally if a business is already using Google Adwords, those fees are reduced, if not waived altogether. “They’re clearly using Google Checkout to drive business to Adwords,” says Miller. Disadvantages:  Fewer people are using it than PayPal, so there’s the risk of more lost sales from first time buyers who don’t want to bother opening a new account. Though not measurable, there is also plenty of anecdotal information from former merchant account holders online complaining of technical glitches ranging from incomplete sales, funds collected by Google and then not distributed back to the merchant, poor communication notifying merchants of a sale, etc. Whether the complaints are valid or significant, perception is reality and a dicey reputation online is reason enough for merchants to think twice before they bite on that lower rate. Volusion is a much smaller (and newer) player in this market, with only 10,000 accounts to date. Percentage rates per transaction start at 2.17 percent of the sale   with no additional  transaction fees. This is a company to watch. Here’s why: Advantages:  It’s the only ecommerce solution that integrates with MySpace and Facebook, to date. Instead of that 20 to 30 cent transaction fee per sale, Volusion offers a flat monthly fee based on the number of products for sale on your site, ranging from $20 to $100 a month. Disadvantages: No one’s heard of it. That 2.17 percent taken out for the credit card companies is a teaser rate. No word on how high that rate can go. Credit card processors There are too many companies out there to mention. However merchants basically have two ways to go: dealing with the financial institutions itself or hiring a company to do it for them negotiating the best rates and using its own economy of scale to do so. “Your bank is probably the worst place to go. You will always get the worst rate there,” says Miller. Miller, whose wife works for a credit card processor (in the spirit of full disclosure), offers the following advantages and disadvantages to going this route: Advantages: There’s the potential of negotiating a lower rate, especially as the business grows selling in higher volume. Many sellers, like Mize, simply feel it looks more professional to have a customized cart than a PayPal or Google Checkout button on a site. “We also have a SSL certificate button on our site. I think it helps give our customers peace of mind,” says Mize. Disadvantages: Rates vary and can go up without warning, depending on the contract. There are often up front costs and monthly fees. No two merchant account providers are alike. Business owners really have to shop around for the best deal. “It’s very complex,” says Miller. One last piece of advice for online merchants shopping around for a credit card processor, some of the likely places to get the best deals include: trade organizations, co-ops, buying groups, even Costco or Sam’s Warehouse.

About 1786 days ago Setting Up a Website

Stop E-Mail Overload with Wikis, Blogs, and IM

E-mail is the central nervous system of most modern organizations, from startups to large corporations. Every communication, from the most important (planning for the big client meeting tomorrow) to the most trivial (fresh donuts in the kitchen) takes place through the corporate e-mail system. The results: e-mail overload and lowered productivity for the entire organization. Employees are tethered to their e-mail via BlackBerrys even over the weekend leading to communications burnout. The biggest single reason for this is the inherent nature of e-mail itself: it is a point-to-point communication medium. The sender has to decide both the content of the message as well as whom the recipients are. If the recipient list is too large, it contributes to e-mail overload. If it is too small, that could lead to communication gaps and “informational silos” in the organization, where one group in the company doesn’t really know what the other group is doing. Another problem is that each e-mail message is a single unit, making it hard to track conversations among multiple parties. Many e-mail readers thread conversations, but that is done at a syntactic rather than semantic level. Finally, putting everything in e-mail makes it difficult to build institutional memory. We hit the e-mail wall at my company Kosmix recently. When we were less than 30 people, managing by e-mail worked reasonably well. The team was small enough that everyone knew what everyone else was doing. Frequent hallway conversations reinforced relationships. However, once we crossed the 30-person mark, we noticed problems creeping in. We started hearing complaints of e-mail overload and too many meetings. And despite the e-mail overload and too many meetings, people still felt that there was a communication problem and a lack of visibility across teams and projects. We were straining the limits of e-mail as the sole communications mechanism. We knew something had to be done. But what? Sri Subramaniam, our head of engineering, proposed a bold restructuring of our internal communications. He led an effort that resulted in us relying less on e-mail and more on three key Web 2.0 technologies: wikis, blogs, and instant messaging (IM). Here’s how we use these technologies everyday in running our business. Blogs Each employee and each project has a dedicated blog. People can post as often as they wish to their personal or project blog, but they are required to post at least one weekly status update. All blogs are visible to everyone in the company. Anyone can subscribe to the feed for any particular team or individual blog. So for example, Josh in engineering can follow the blog of Mike in sales, if he’s curious what Mike is up to. This results in complete 360-degree visibility throughout the organization. People can also post comments on these blogs. Someone might post a problem they are facing, and others can post comments providing suggestions. This results in automatic grouping of conversations based on topics of interest. The biggest advantage of the blog approach is that it is a publish/subscribe mechanism. I don’t need to decide who to direct my communication to;  I just post on my blog. Anyone in the company who is interested in what I’m doing can subscribe to my blog to be notified of updates. And if someone just has a passing interest, they can always read my blog periodically without subscribing to it. This approach also breaks silos, for example, between engineering and marketing, or between marketing and sales. Sometimes the best product ideas come from sales people. And sometimes the best sales ideas come from engineers. No one is required to read any particular blog, with two exceptions: Managers are expected to read the status updates of their team members and post feedback. People working on a project are expected to read each other’s blogs. The blog approach has reduced e-mail overload at Kosmix and even reduced the number of time-consuming “status update” meetings.  Most important, the blog serves as an institutional memory — an electronic record of our business. Conversations do not get lost in the ether but are recorded and can be searched at any time in the future by new people on a project or new company employees. Wikis While blogs are great for status updates and discussions around ideas, they are not the best place to put items that serve as reference material: for example, documentation, specs, reports, and so on. The problem is that blogs are in reverse chronological order, and each blog can have just one author, preventing collaborative editing. For these situations, we use a wiki. The internal corporate wiki has sections corresponding to each project and each functional group in the company. Documentation, specs, and reports go into the wiki. The other critical section on the wiki is the “team” section. Every employee has a homepage on the wiki, with a recent photo, describing their responsibilities at work and interests outside of work. As the team grows, and you see a new face at the office, this is a quick way of finding out who that person is. Instant messaging As Kosmix has grown, we now have people working from more than one physical location. In addition, we promote a culture of people working from home whenever it is compatible with their job responsibilities. Thus, we need a substitute for the face-to-face hallway conversations that cannot happen because someone is working from home or from another location. E-mail is not the best option because it is asynchronous and thus loses the spontaneity of a hallway chat. IMing fills this need very well indeed. The entire Kosmix team is on IM. Each team member is required to set the “status” message on their IM client during normal sane working hours to indicate where they are working from. They can also post a “Do not disturb” message to indicate that they don’t welcome interruptions at the moment. IMing leads to quick resolution of many issues without spawning interminable e-mail threads. The effects of the communication restructuring have been immediate and very visible. They include a lot less e-mail and almost none on weekends; better communication among people; and 360 degree visibility for every member of the Kosmix team. After we instituted these changes, everyone on the team feels more productive, more knowledgeable about the company, has more spare time to spend on things outside of work. Online Resources We use twiki for our wiki and blog software at Kosmix. The wiki functionality in twiki is great, but it took a bit of customization work from our indefatigable Subramaniam to make it work well as a blogging platform too. We are planning to release Subramaniam’s twiki tweaks as open source in the next couple of months. Another great option for blogs is WordPress, which allows you to host blogs internal to your company. We went with twiki because of the integrated wiki/blogging solution. We have standardized on Yahoo! Instant Messenger for instant messaging. However, the other IM products such as MSN Instant Messenger and Google Talk have comparable functionality. I would suggest you pick the one most people in your company already use for personal communication. Anand Rajaraman is co-founder of Kosmix with consumer properties www.RightHealth.com, www.RightAutos.com and www.RightTrips.com.  He also sits on the board of several technology companies and is a consulting faculty member at the Computer Science Department of Stanford University. His latest thoughts and discussions can be found at http://anand.typepad.com/datawocky.

About 1816 days ago Setting Up a Website

Raising the Bar for Web Content

Back in the dinosaur days of the Web, it used to be that you could write an article, get a few of your friends to link to it, and voila — you could “own” a topic. You could become the authoritative source for that subject, at least for awhile. In reality, maybe it was neverthat simple.  But even so, back in the day when we had less content, it was a whole lot easier for your content to stand out on the Web. Somewhere along the line, things changed.  It crept up on us.  I’m not exactly sure when I noticed it — maybe a year ago, maybe longer? But now we seem to have a glut of content. And with that glut of content, it is becoming harder to new create content that attracts the links, get visitors, and gets in the search engine rankings using the same old approaches. Content has become easier to create Blogs, podcasts, photos, and online video are now within the grasp of millions.  It’s gotten a whole lot easier for individuals and small businesses to create content.  Michael Arrington of TechCrunch speaks about the explosion of content: “Back in 2000 it was fairly hard to do things like write a blog, publish photos (don’t even think about videos back then), or share bookmarks. Today, all that stuff is easy….” To top it off, media outlets increasingly put their material on the Web and make it available for free.  So you may not only be competing against other bloggers, but against newspapers, the Associated Press, cable TV networks, magazines, and other media. Add it all up and that’s a lot of content! As content becomes commoditized Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 also writes about the glut of content in The Declining Value of Redundant News Content on the Web.  He uses the example of Microsoft’s withdrawal of its bid to acquire Yahoo, noting that Google at one point was tracking over 2000 stories on the topic. He says it is a zero sum game for attention. There is finite demand for content on a particular topic.  For every time one version of content gets read, it means another version is not getting read. The end result, he contends, is that the more content there is, the less value that individual content has — it becomes commoditized. He is talking about news and media outlets. But you could say the same concept applies to a small business with a blog or podcast.  Just look around at some of the blog content you see.  For example, top 10 lists abound.  Do a search in Google for “top 10” and you get over 261 million results. There’s the top 10 spammers, the top 10 strategic technologies for 2008, the top 10 cyber security menaces…. Time magazine even put together a compilation of 50 of the top 10 lists. Just how many top 10 articles do we need?  Better question:  just how many top 10 articles will people read? Don’t get discouraged — get creative If you are a blogger or a small business owner trying to stand out on the Web inexpensively using original content, right about now you may be feeling discouraged.  Don’t be. My point is not to make you get all depressed and chuck it all.  Rather, I simply suggest you allocate a portion of your writing time to strategizing to create content that is original enough to stand out today.  Before you put pen to paper (er, fingers to keyboard), think about how to be original, so that you can meet the higher bar today.  The bar has gotten higher for quality Web content, but it’s not impossibly high.     As Rex Hammock writes, that there’s always demand for quality and originality:  “If you help me get to the information and insight I need to live a fuller life or conduct business in a more flexible and productive way, your blogging … does not burden me. Useless, redundant, meaningless, re-shuffled drivel is the burden. It can be delivered via print or on a weblog or a mobile device. Crap is a burden no matter what the medium used to deliver it.” These days you may have to give your blog posts a little more thought in order to be creative and come up with something new and different that stands out — and that is not “useless, redundant, meaningless, re-shuffled drivel” to use Rex’s words. How to stand out The way to stand out with your content today is to be original.  Be different. Easier said than done, right?  Not really. I offer three ways to do that: Focus on topic niches, rather than general topics.  Before you write that “top 10 list of marketing ideas” do a search in Google and see if there are already articles on that topic.  If so, consider how to make your article different. One good way is to go narrow and deep – because a lot of the broad and general topics have been done to death.  Narrow the topic.  Make it “top 10 marketing ideas for under $5” or “top 10 marketing ideas for home-based landscaping businesses.” Write about your own experiences.  The one thing that I guarantee has not been written about ad nauseum are YOUR experiences.  Instead of writing on broad topics, write from the perspective of what you have experienced, done, learned, etc.  Only you can write that.  Want an example?  Here is an article I wrote about a true story that happened to me — it got tons and tons of readers and links:  Hacked: It Could Never Happen to My Site (Famous Last Words). Add value to the news, don’t repeat it.  Even when writing about current news articles, add value to the basic story, don’t simply regurgitate it. Going back to Scott Karp and his article referenced above, he suggests three ways to add value to a news story, instead of just repeating it and adding to the noise: Link to the best coverage Publish source material Ask readers what they think

About 1816 days ago Setting Up a Website

Is Your Domain Name Killing Your Business?

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Putting up a website expands a small or local business’s market to the worldwide marketplace. Choosing the right domain name is crucial to helping potential customers find you — with shorter, simpler, intuitive descriptive names ending in dot-com considered better. However, most of the short domain names have been taken, says Douglas Shuman, senior vice president of customer marketing for Register.com, a domain name registration company. “All the four letter domains are taken. There are some five letter domains left, but they are not intuitive,” Shuman says. “You’ll probably have to settle for a long word or multiple words strung together.” Facing the dearth of short, simple name, some companies have gotten creative with names, to ill effect. When choosing a domain name, experts warn against common mistakes, and offer advice on selecting a catchy, easy to remember name. Here’s what not to do when naming names Common mistakes include creative spelling, using numbers, choosing unpronounceable or undecipherable names, spelling something embarrassing, or offensive by stringing words together. Creative spelling. The most common and damaging naming decision involve confusing spelling. Be creative, but not with spelling, says Alexandra Watkins, chief innovation officer of Eat My Words, a boutique naming firm in San Francisco. Make sure your domain is spelled the way it sounds. “If you have to spell it for customers, it’s a bad name,” Watkins says. Takkle (pronounced tackle) is a social networking site for high school sports. How many high school sports fans spell it the way it sounds and end of at Tackle.com, a site for fishing supplies? “They’re losing people and they’re annoying people,” Watkins says. If you have to spell the domain name to avoid confusion, it’s a bad name, Watkins says. Using “z” instead of “s,” for example, simply confuses customers. “You might think you’re picking a pithy way to spell a common word, but customers are not going to remember the spelling,” Watkins says. Unpronounceable or indecipherable names. Using “x” as a first letter is often a recipe for confusion. Take Xobni.com. It’s inbox spelled backwards, “but nobody would get that,” Watkins says. Xobni won Eat My Words’ “Headscratcher of the Year” award last year, voted as the name most confusing and annoying. Inadvertently spelling something unintentional. “You have to be careful when you put all the words together, that they don’t spell something naughty,” Watkins says. Double-check the way your name appears when multiple words are strung together. A company recently registered the name “World of Art” at Register.com, Shuman says. When spelled out for the Web or print, the site’s name takes on a scatological tone: worldofart.com. Other pointers, from Watkins: using an i or an e in front of a word makes your name look dated. Don’t make the mistake of choosing a domain just because the URL is available. Don’t use a number, as in 2guysfromitaly.com. Customers might wonder if two is a numeral, or if they should spell the word. Choosing the right name If your desired domain name already taken, get creative. If pandorasbox.com is taken, for example, try pandorasboxrocks.com. “I would say 90 percent of companies can use a modifier,” Watkins says. Here are some other tips to find the right domain name: Shop the secondary markets. “If you want a simple domain name, you have to go to a secondary market,” says Shuman. Don’t be discouraged; even if a name is not available, it may be for sale for a reasonable price, he says. Marriedbutlonely.com just sold for $8,000, but planourwedding.com changed hands for only $750. Buy all the extensions. Always go for the dot-com version first, and consider buying up .net, .org, and .biz extensions. Invest in a dot-ca if planning on doing business in Canada, or a dot-tv if the business is related to video, or dot-mobi if the business may expand into the cell phone market. Think about misspellings and buy those domains too. “Buy alternate spelling that redirect them to the main site,” Watkins says. Have fun. A domain name doesn’t have to be serious. It doesn’t even have to match your name, Watkins says. “If you have it printed on your business card, that’s fine,” she says. For example, a dance studio’s site could be learntosalsa.com. Get your name appraised. Check with the experts on how your name will be received. Some websites, such as Nameboy.com, offer a free appraisal, basing its outcome on the number of letters, number of words, use of hyphens (a detractor), or use of numbers.

About 1908 days ago Setting Up a Website

Drive Traffic to Your Business Blog

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It’s one thing to start a company blog. It’s something else entirely to get people to visit. Driving traffic to your small business’ corporate blog takes equal parts old-fashioned marketing and contemporary Web tools. It’s a mix of common sense practices like printing a blog’s URL on company business cards with search engine optimization and blog software plug-ins to come up with the right formula to motivate people to visit, according to corporate bloggers and blog marketing experts. Whatever methods you use, aim for quality, not quantity, says Tac Anderson, a Web 2.0 expert and blogger at the LaserJet business unit of HP in Boise, Idaho. Using lots of Web-based bells and whistles can dramatically increase traffic. But if people don’t make return visits, or all that traffic doesn’t lead to more customers, better bonds with suppliers or other measures of success, it doesn’t mean much. Old school marketing methods No matter what your company’s blog is about or who writes it, start with the basics to spread the word that it’s there: Include the blog’s name and URL on printed materials such business cards, letterhead and brochures. Include it in employees’ email signatures, and prominently display it on the company’s website, either on the front page or another suitable location. MobileDataforce, a 45-person Boise, Idaho, maker of software for mobile devices, has a link to a blog written by CEO Kevin Benedict on the front page of the company’s website. On a recent trip to Australia, Benedict was walking down the street in Sydney and someone called his name “because she’d read my blog and recognized my picture,” he says. Encourage whoever writes the blog to network offline to promote it. At HP, Anderson is frequently invited to speak about Web 2.0 and social media at technology conferences, and uses the occasions to talk to people about his blogs. “Even if they don’t meet you personally, if they just hear you speak, they feel a little more connected, and they’ll be more likely to become regular readers,” Anderson says. Network online. too. Become a frequent visitor of blogs that cover similar topics or industries. Leave comments on those blogs and e-mail the authors. Include those blogs in the list of blogs, or blogroll, on your own blog. MobileDataforce’s software is used on rugged hand-held PCs, so Benedict links his blog to blogs at distributors and manufacturers of that gear. “You get more eyes, and Google ranks you higher if you have connections with other popular sites,” he explains. Search engine optimization and other tools Professional blog marketers suggest using a different bag of tricks to drive traffic to the websites, including: Search engine optimization (SEO) — An entire industry has developed around the science of placing frequently searched words and phrases into the text of blog posts so they’ll appear high in search-engine rankings and get more traffic as a result. Search engine optimization specialists such as Gary Pool, proprietor of White Rose Productions in Portland, Ore., swears by SEO software such as: Niche Bot, a subscription-based software tool that bloggers use to search for commonly used words or phrases. SEO Book, a regularly updated e-book with a variety of SEO tools. Word Tracker, another SEO tool that offers a free trial version. Plugins — Pool prefers to create blogs in WordPress because of the bounty of available plug-in software including: Add Meta Tags, which automatically selects keywords in blog posts that will get picked up by search engines. Share This, software that adds a button to the bottom of every blog post making it easier to subscribe it to a viewer’s RSS news reader. XML Sitemaps, software that produces a sitemap of a blog that makes it easier for Google, Yahoo, and MSN to search a blog. Blog directories — Pool also suggests that companies submit their blogs to blog directories for specific states, industries, or professions. If you use SEO keywords to drive traffic, don’t dwell on the details to the extent that you forget the big picture. If your blog is so crowded with key words people can’t find what they are looking for, you’ve defeated the purpose of bringing them to the blog in the first place, Pool says. And don’t forget to have fun with it. “If it’s personal, people will keep coming back. It doesn’t have to be heavy handed,” he says. In the end, content is still king. Present interesting information visitors want to read, and you never know where it will lead. At MobileDataforce, Benedict had given up ever getting an order from a large New Zealand company that initially expressed interest then stopped returning emails and phone calls. But they didn’t stop reading his blog. After six months of silence they called. “Their employees read my blog every week and they were ready to buy,” Benedict says. The blog “is an ongoing communication with customers that we don’t even know we have.”

About 1999 days ago Setting Up a Website

Fight the Faux: Battling Cybersquatting

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It’s not only the McDonalds and Coca-Colas of the business world that have to fight to protect their Internet addresses from cyber criminals who will try to ride on a brand’s coattails and pick up business from unsuspecting, potential customers who type in the wrong URL. Back in 1994, one of the earliest so-called “cybersquatters” was a journalist, former Newsday writer Joshua Quittner, who successfully registered “mcdonalds.com” in the rules for registering brand names changed. Quittner ended up selling the brand to the fast food giant, and donated the money to charity. But other cybersquatters have looked to simply cash in. In the years since, however, small and mid-sized businesses have increasingly had to take legal action to protect their business domain names. Earlier this year, GoDaddy.com, a mid-sized Internet firm based in Conroe, Texas, won an arbitration proceeding from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and won the transfer of 10 different domain names — godaddyebay.com, godaddythis.com, and godaddythat.com among them – registered by Clark Signs, of Mableton, Ga., and Graham Clark of Del Mar, Calif. A bigger issue for small business The number of complaints about Internet domain names brought to WIPO, an international body based in Geneva that has become one of the leading dispute resolution centers for Internet names, has been steadily rising – from 1 case in 1999 to more than 1,900 this year so far. Among them are a growing number of small and mid-sized firms that realize someone else may be trying to siphon off their business by registering similar domains in the popular dot-com top-level domain. For business purposes, dot-com has become the gold standard for how to find a business online. “It’s probably more of an issue for small businesses,” says John Berryhill, a Media, Pa. attorney who does a brisk business in protecting domain names from cybersquatters for client. If you’re an Internet user and you can’t find Coca-Cola on the Internet, you know to go to a search engine and try some combination of the soft drink giant’s name. “But if you are a smaller, less well-known business and somebody has usurped your business name as a domain name,” Berryhill says. “You’re not even going to get a toehold on being found.” Large companies are primarily concerned with people chipping away at their good will by registering similar names or slight variations of spelling. But they’re not in any serious jeopardy of disappearing from the Internet, Berryhill says. For a smaller business, if some one else has got your domain name, then potential customers may not be able to find your outpost online. Fighting the cybersquatters Some cybersquatters — or their brethren, “brandjackers,” who register variations of famous brands – are simply looking to make money off of business they can pull away from more well-known firms or figure that the business ultimately may offer to pay them for the domain name. “From a financial perspective, it is to take money off of Web visitors who were really looking for the famous brand holder,” said Ari Master, COO of CitizenHawk, a company specifically focused on identifying and eliminating cybersquatters. “Cybersquatters register hundreds, if not thousands, of misspelled domains based on every well-known company’s trademarks,” said Master. “At this level, it is totally impractical and cost prohibitive to shut down these rogue sites through manual methodologies.” The deceptive websites are often used as landing pages for spam offers or in phishing attacks. These cybersquatting website may even try to take a consumer’s credit card information with the intention of stealing that person’s identity. Cybersquatting offenses were up 19 percent in the first three quarters of 2007 over the same period in the previous year. That’s according to the “BrandJacking Autumn 2007″ report released by MarkMonitor. Between the second and third quarters the rate increased by 10 percent alone, rising from 286,801 occurrences in Q1 to 342,512 at the end of Q3.  “Brand abusers take a shotgun approach — trying to get to as large an audience as possible,” said Andrew Horton, director of product management at MarkMonitor. He said very often the larger the brand, the larger the target. Howeve,r “for some industries a popular brand is not a function of company size.” Preventing domain confusion Any brand can fall prey to cybersquatting and other forms of brandjacking. It’s prudent to safeguard your brand in advance of such attacks. “The best defense is to put together a brand protection strategy for your company,” said Horton. “The first step is to prevent abuse from occurring by registering domains defensively. If you’re doing business overseas, make sure you register your most valuable domains and brands in the countries in which you are doing business. “You may want to register popular variants like ‘acmecustomerserivce.com’ or acmeproducts.com,” Horton advises. “Use your Web logs and Web analytics to help you identify the most popular terms that your customers are using online to find you and consider registering those terms to protect your traffic from brandjackers.” CitizenHawk’s Master suggests going so far as to think like cybersquatters. “I would highly recommend taking a proactive approach to protect against cybersquatters,” he said. “This includes purchasing the cloud of sites that surround the branded terms — the most likely misspellings — as well as derivations of the branded term — like ‘newbrandsucks.com.” The company has a tool on its website where domain and brand owners can see some of the top misspellings and alternate domains just to get things started. “While there will be no way to get all of them up-front, taking a strategic brand management approach from the beginning will stop a lot of future attacks,” says Master. Call for help in fighting brandjacking Google and other companies that operate sponsored links networks have rules against trademark abuse and can be helpful. While they can’t monitor the sponsored links bided on through their system, they will take down any that infringe on trademarks, once notified. The use of logos and other copyrighted materials is also a problem. Watermarking images, and having computer programs crawl the Web and detect such violations can go a long way toward protecting your brand. Another simple measure Horton recommends is to use notification services like Google Alerts to see how your name is being used. This is often referred to as a vanity search, and through most notification services it’s free, and effective. Plus sometimes you learn of the good ways people are talking about your brand.

About 1999 days ago Setting Up a Website

2008: What a Mashup!

This is the time of year when all sorts of predictions appear on old media, new media and not so new media alike: from what’s going to happen in the Presidential elections to what energy sources will replace oil and how much closer mankind will actually be to getting to Mars. Not to disappoint all my wonderful readers, here are the technologies that will be hot for small businesses in 2008. Writing about the future of technology is actually a cozy tradition for me, and this year it is my privilege to do it on IncTechnology.com. 1. Web 2.0 collaborative applications Small businesses need better, low cost and easy to manage tools to work collaborate within the company and to pool together resources across multiple businesses to better tackle large jobs. In 2008 you will see a proliferation of online tools that will make things a lot easier. Web 2.0 based applications are software tools accessible via any internet browser and are natively well suited for collaborations. A new crop of developers is taking full advantage of this capability to create great things, sometimes even offered for free! Office productivity suites that allow multiple users to work together, share information and collaborate in real time such as ThinkFree and Zoho. Project management tools such as Basecamp Messaging, communications and collaboration environments such as Zimbra and HyperOffice Don’t you think for a minute that the big guns like Microsoft and Yahoo, that have steeply increased their attention for the needs of small businesses in the past few year (see Yahoo! acquisition of Zimbra and Microsoft’s upcoming Office Live Workspaces) will just sit there and watch.  So expect a lot of competition for your attention and lots of low cost ways to leverage the web to collaborate. 2. Cached Web applications Ok, so what happens to all these wonderful Web tools if you cannot connect to the Web? Expect many of these applications to launch an offline “companion,” software that runs on your computer and replicates the online functionality. Wait a minute, what’s happening here? Software goes online and online applications go offline? Yes, that’s right. Traditional software is here to stay, but the new demands of the market are imposing more and more to make software available concurrently as a service and as a locally stored application, frequently with automatic synchronization of data files between the online and local storages. In a sense, Microsoft pioneered the concept at a Local Area Network and VPN levels with MS Small Business Server and Web Outlook . Now the concept is going mainstream and “on the Web cloud.” Expect tons of Web applications to come with offline companions or to work in “cached mode” without requiring Web connection; and expect more and more desktop software to become available as a complementary service, part of the software licensing fee. 3. Mashups Mashups are Web applications that derive data from different sources into one integrated tool. A popular example of a mashup, cited by Wikipedia, would be to combine the cartographic data from Google Maps with real-estate listing from Craigslist to get a new Web service that provides location information to those listings. Consumer mashups are becoming quickly popular, like iGoogle, mapmyrun.com or housingmaps.com. Expect the development of business applications that leverage this concept and bring you the best of all worlds. Currently the most common type of business mashup is the dashboard. There are tools like Serena that allow building mashup-based applications on the fly. Yahoo! has Pipes and Microsoft and Google are in beta testing with Popfly and Mashup Editor, respectively. Expect in 2008 many pre-developed mashup services bringing together your most commonly used business Web services. 4. 3g network connectivity Wireless operators are in full swing with the deployment of their 3G networks, offering data and voice connectivity almost anywhere at the sped of entry-level DSL. 3G data cards are almost free with contracts, all-you-can-use plans are as cheap as $30 per month and reliability has gone up to very acceptable levels. Watch for more and more laptops to come outfitted with wireless WAN cards. The technology is ready, the price point is affordable and the convenience is unparalleled for mobile workers. 5. Online data backup Internet connections are becoming faster everywhere and backup software is becoming smarter and cheaper. A new set of inexpensive online backup solutions that really work is emerging targeting small businesses. Some even have unlimited storage for a fixed fee. Online backup maybe a bit more cumbersome to setup and manage, but ensures a very high level of data protection. Check out some of these: Live.Skydrive.com, Xdrive, Carbonite, MediaMax, eVault, and Box.net. Surely one of them will meet your online backup needs. 6. Biometrically protected notebook computers Fingerprint readers and data encryption software will become very popular in 2008, as the technologies are mature and the costs have gone down. Look for tiny fingerprint readers on laptops and keyboards that unlock the computer instead of passwords. Also look for full hard disk encryption to become much more popular to safeguard the privacy of your data: Microsoft has made available BitLocker on Windows Vista Business and Premium versions. A good, easy to manage alternative is PGP. And what after that. Other technologies that in the next few years will land on the lap of American small business include: 4G mobile telephony Fully IP switched data/voice wireless networks that will deliver ultrafast connections to any mobile device. That is how small businesses will go online in a few years. Keep your eyes on Google. In-text advertising The new frontier of contextual advertising is in-text. Vibrant Media is the leader in the space, but look for more to start playing. RFID It is taking time for this new and initially costly technology to take foot, but the pressure of large supply chains, such as Wal-Mart Stores is forcing the adoption. Watch for RFID tags to appear on all sorts of retail goods. We’ll see at this time next year if I’m right! Andrea Peiro is a recognized authority, author, analyst and speaker on high-tech marketing and use of information technology in small and mid-sized businesses. He has been frequently interviewed and featured in such media outlets as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Inc. He can be reached at us.andreap@gmail.com..

About 2029 days ago Setting Up a Website

The Venerable Blog Gets a Facelift

Back in early 2004, after I’d been blogging a few months, someone pointed out that my free Blogger blog ranked higher in Google than my expensive business website.  That was an “a-ha” moment for me.  Right then and there I decided to start putting more time and attention on my blog than on my website.  Almost four years later, I’ve never regretted that move. And as it turns out, I’ve gotten more business from my blog than I ever did from my website.  Sure, I need the website for credibility.  But the blog is where the real action happens. The natural advantages of blogs Blogs are great for small businesses to develop and maintain an effective Web presence.  Just consider the advantages of blogs: The owner can update a blog easily and quickly, without requiring expensive technical help. Blogs are natural networking vehicles, offering social features (such as onsite commenting) that engage visitors. Blogs by their nature tend to be naturally search-engine friendly, so they help your business get found in the search engines. And best of all, blogs are inexpensive to set up and operate, with a typical blog ranging from free, to perhaps $5 to $30 a month. The limitations of blogs However, much as I love blogs and appreciate all these advantages, I have been frustrated by their limitations.  You see, most blogs are NOT set up to allow users to easily move around inside them or find information.  What tends to happen is that after a few weeks older blog articles that you’ve written get buried.  The way most blogs are set up, older articles may rarely if ever see the light of day again.  Sometimes those can be your best work — what a waste! Why does this happen?  Blogs usually have homepages with a long list of blog posts that you can quickly scan.  However, finding older posts beyond the 7 or 10 most recent ones can be challenging.  Navigation tends to be rudimentary or in some cases nonexistent.  Finding older articles on some blogs can require the blogging equivalent of reading a treasure map in a foreign language without your reading glasses.  You either have to click day-by-day on a silly little graphical calendar that was designed back in the days when blogs were merely online diaries.  Or you have to laboriously scroll through monthly archives or category archives.  Neither option is well-suited for a business searcher who wants to get to a specific topic quickly.   Some blogs offer search capabilities, and while this feature helps, it doesn’t prompt visitors to browse through your best blog posts or convey the depth and breadth of your work at a glance.  Enter new blog homepage designs To deal with these limitations, and increase page views and visit session length, some of the larger blogs run by professional bloggers or small businesses are leading the way with new blog homepage designs — with smaller publications starting to follow on their heels.  These new designs are set up to enable the bloggers/writers to showcase more of their best work right on the homepage.  GigaOm.net, ProBlogger.net, PaidContent.org, Huffingtonpost.com, CommuteByBike.com, Business-Opportunities.biz — these are just some of the blog-based sites that now have varied homepages containing more information than the standard blog homepage provides. Let’s look at some of the features these new blog homepage designs include: Partial posts.  Some of these publications no longer display full posts on the homepage.  Instead, they offer the headline and a short extract, requiring the reader to click through to read the entire article. Popular posts or featured posts.  Many homepages now have links to the site’s most popular posts, so that they can be highlighted and not buried, no matter how old they are.  Extended navigation.  Some blogs now feature extensive navigation.  In the old days your navigation consisted mainly of monthly or category archives.  Now you see navigation to site sections, and sometimes no links to monthly archives at all. It is not uncommon to see two or even three rows of horizontal navigation, or navigation that takes you to a section home page, where you drill down further from there. Links to related blog sites by the blog owner.  Some blogs now have branched out to additional sites by target niche.  They build in navigation links for the reader to access these sites.  Some even highlight recent posts or articles appearing on the other network sites, via headline links. Deep long footers, often in dark colors to capture attention.  The footers allow information to be pulled off the side columns of blogs and placed at the bottom of the page.  This is useful for information that you want on the homepage, but don’t want to take up important information above the fold. Video posts.  Some blogs are routinely doing video or including relevant videos aggregated from other sources.  Video on the page adds visual interest and provides interactivity.  Often video is more viral than text information. Job boards links.  Some blogs have become such popular hubs for their industries that they operate their own job posting boards.  You can find several of the latest job postings listed on the blogs. The list of homepage features can go on — the only limit is the human imagination. So consider some changes to your blog homepage design that highlight more of the hard work you and/or your staff have put into your business blog? Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.