Startup Nation recently ran an article on marketing your website. The five steps include:
In my humble opinion, marketing your website is probably even more important than a site’s design or functionality. What good is having a fancy website if no one visits?
On Work.Com, Richard Burckhardt writes about how to optimize images to maximize search engine placement. The article, Guide to SEO 101 - Image Optimization notes:
Google’s implementation of Universal Search has changed the whole search landscape and settled the often debated SEO issue of whether the use of ALT text and keywords in image file names have any effect on rankings. In two words - they do.
There are a bunch of other good tips, too.
Startup Nation recently published an article “Eight Steps to Win at Blogging.” I could find only seven steps, but they’re all very good:
- Choose a host. Bodnar says outside hosts like TypePad, WordPress and Blogger are easy and cheap, “but you’re limited to storage size and features.” You get what you pay for, he says, when it comes to adding audio, video, links and content other than text.
- Hire a dedicated blogger. “Find someone who’s interested in it and will oversee it,” Briguglio says.
- Collect links up the wazoo. Both inbound and outbound links are vital - collect some “link karma” by directing your traffic to relevant sites, and you’ll see it coming around in the form of inbound links to your blog. The more inbound links, the more traffic and visibility you get. Briguglio recently blogged about Hershey’s Kisses and linked to the Hershey site.
- Set up an RSS feed. Really Simple Syndication is a code-based system that allows Web users to “subscribe” to their favorite sites – including your blog – for up-to-the-minute action and updates. On that note…
- Update constantly. A blog’s success depends on the regularity of its posts. “We have so much information on our blog that we rank very high on search engines,” Bodnar says. Searches find frequently refreshed, keyword-rich sites first.
- Read other blogs and comment on the posts. Get involved in the blogsphere to learn what makes a good one. A great way to start: enter “entrepreneur” at Technorati, a search engine now tracking 56 million blogs. You’ll find more than 200,000 examples of how it’s been done.
- Collect images, links, statistics and other sources to include on your blog. Think of it as your personal online magazine and make it as visually appealing as possible. Spend some time at a heavily stocked magazine rack and mine it for what works – and what doesn’t.
I really like the idea of making your blog your own personal magazine. Put stuff in that you find interesting, and chances are that other will find it interesting, too.
I would add a few items of my own:
FreeforInvestors.com is the latest creation of the Web Publishing Group. It allows investors to get free information from Dow Jones, The Economist, and a wide variety of investment newsletter publishers.
In addition to serving investors, it also serves the marketer who runs the site. The website captures the contact information of those requesting information, and the marketer plans to use this information in marketing his own investment newsletter and associated products.
Do you have a similar application? Give us a call and we’ll get you set up!
Web Publishing Group and Mary Cronin Design have just completed a new, database-driven website for the West Washtenaw Business Association (WWBA). The WWBA brings together independent professionals and small business who are interested in improving economic, environmental, and security conditions within the community. The WWBA provides a forum for communication, group benefit participation, and social outreach.
The main design goal for the site is to promote member businesses. One of the ways the site does this is by hosting an online membership directory. Users can search the online directory by name or by category to find the products or services they need.
Another way that the website promotes its membership is by publishing news about member businesses. If, for example, a member business is having a sale, or is now offering a new product or service, or has purchased some new equipment that enhances their capability, they can submit this news via a form on the website, and it will appear in the website’s news section. Members will also be able to post help-wanted ads to the website.
To edit their directory information or submit news, members must log in to the website. Members in good standing were issued and sent login ids and passwords shortly after the site went live last week.
The new website also includes advertising opportunities for its members. Members can advertise on the home page or sponsor one of the directory categories. Advertisements on the home page appear at the bottom of the page, while category sponsorships will appear above the company listings.
The website will also help the WWBA administer its membership database. Included are screens accessible only to the database administrator that lets him or her easily add or delete members, assign passwords, and edit membership information.
Another feature that will help the WWBA be more efficient is a database function that will pull membership data directly from the online database. This will ensure that the printed annual directory has the most up-to-date information about member businesses.
The Inc. magazine website has two articles on choosing domain names:
They both offer similar advice, including:
Both are good pieces of advice.
Recently, I had to implement an events calendar on a website I was working on. My first idea was to find an open source package written in PHP. I did some Web searching and found the following:
After thinking about this a bit more, though, I opted for an online calendar. The two that I like best are:
Both of these calendars allow you to create a frame that you can insert into a Web page. I chose the SpongeCell calendar because it allows you to specify background and text colors. This capability makes it look like the calendar is actually part of my website website.
Another reason I went with this approach is that these calendars have more features than the PHP calendars. For example, they both will map a location.
These calendar services are really very good. Unless you need a very specialized calendar, there’s really no reason to build it yourself anymore.
I like to use contact forms on websites because I think forms encourage users to respond more often than a simple mailto: link. The problem with forms is that they’re abused by spambots. The form I have on w8pgw.org, for example, is spammed so often, I’d say that the ratio of spam to real messages is easily 100:1.
Fortunately, there are a couple of things you can do. One of them is to use Captcha. Basically what you do is to create a small image that contains a code consisting of letters and numbers that is human-readable, but not computer readable. The person using the form must enter that code properly for the form to be processed. There are many PHP Captcha implementations on the Net, so it’s relatively to set up and use.
One drawback is that it makes the form bigger. This could be a problem when you want to keep the form small.
One idea that was just floated on the Drupal support mailing list is to add a drop-down menu to a form and require the user to make a selection other than the default. The reasoning behind this is that the spambots aren’t smart enough–at least not yet–to actually make a selection.
I’ve just implemented this on w8pgw.org and am hoping that this works. It’s certainly simpler than adding a Captcha.
Is there nothing Google doesn’t do? Their latest is the Google Website Optimizer. Using this tool, you select sections of a Web page that you want to test and then develop options. For example, you might try three different headlines to see which one works best.
After you choose which section to test, you also choose a link that, when chosen, constitutes a success. For example, if you’re selling a product, you might select “add to shopping cart” link.
Then, you set up the page so that one of the three headlines is selected randomly. Google will keep track of how many times each headline is displayed and how many times a user adds a product to the shopping cart. So, after a time, you’ll know which headline works best.
Even if you’re not selling something, you can use this tool. Perhaps you’re trying to get people to sign an electronic petition, or you might be trying to get them to volunteer for your non-profit group. You can use this tool to help you tune your website to get the best response.
While PHP has enabled even the most novice programmer to build Web applications, the result is often poorly-coded websites that are a bear to maintain. I should know. I’ve worked on this kind of project myself.
The problem is that building a proper software infrastructure for each project is a time-consuming process, and the cost of doing this is prohibitive. Enter PHP frameworks. Frameworks aim to provide this infrastructure, allowing developers to focus on the application code and not the underlying code that makes it all work.
The way they do this is by using the MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture. Models are representations of your data structure, i.e. how your data is stored in the database. Views are template files that tell the framework how to display the data. Controllers are the code that retrieve and modify the data in your database and cause data to be displayed in a view.
There are many different PHP frameworks, but I’m only going to discuss two here:
Both say they support AJAX, another requirement for this project.
I’m a bit concerned about the learning curve associated with basing this project on an application framework, but if I can use this approach in the future, then I should be ahead of the game. We’ll see.
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