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Thursday, February 1, 2001 |
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News Feeds
We now have the capability to add news feeds to a Rev9 web site.
Do you see the New York Times Tech News box at the right? That is an example of a news feed that gets updated on the dynamic version of this site every day. To see the dynamic version of this site and the latest news, click here.
If you would like to add dynamic news feeds to your web site, give us a call. We're here to help.
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Thursday, January 18, 2001 |
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Free Upgrade!
We have just increased the Data Transfer limits for all of our hosting plans.
Here are the details:
Personal Plan: was 2 GB per month, now: 3 GB per month
Professional Plan: was 4 GB per month, now 5 GB per month
Corporate Plan: was 5 GB per month, now 7.5 GB per month
Commercial Plan: was 7 GB per month, now 10 GB per month
Enterprise Plan: was 8 GB per month, now 15 GB per month
High Volume Plan: 20 GB per month, now 35 GB per month
How much extra is this gonna cost you?
NOTHING!
This is a free upgrade for all of our hosting customers. Enjoy your new bandwith. Use it. We'll buy more.
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Wednesday, January 10, 2001 |
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Search Engine Submission Tips
You have probably seen the ad on TV: 3 or 4 men and women sitting around a computer monitor, watching the results of their online store on opening day. At first, the orders trickle in. The participants look nervous. Then the orders come faster. And faster. Elation turns to glee. Then the floodgates open and the orders rush in. Glee turns to dispair as the group begins to ponder how they will support and fullfill that many orders. (Of course, the ad is for a shipping company who wants to help the fledgling company deliver the shipments to its waiting customers.)
For the past 3 or 4 years, the hype has been that anyone with a website and a good search engine listing will become an instant Internet success. A lot of my customers ask me, "How can I get my site listed in the top 10 search engines? And by the way, I don't just mean listed anywhere, I want to be listed in the top 20 for my keywords".
I usually answer their question with "Well, thats not as easy as you might think.". I always expect my customer to say something like "if you can't get me listed in the top 20, I will find someone who can." and hang up on me at this point. Strangely enough, no one has said that to me or hung up on me... yet. I think most people realize the enormity of what they are asking. At this point, the number of websites on the internet runs in the millions. Each of those websites would like to be listed in the top 20 listings of the top 10 search engines. Do the math: 200 postions (20 x 10) all being pursued by millions of website operators. As you can imagine, it takes a pretty good effort and a lot of luck to get listed in the top 20 of any one of the major search engines.
So how can you increase your odds of being ranked in the top 20 or of even being listed at all? Start by taking the time to make your site ready. Most search engines index websites using software programs called 'spiders' that are always crawling the Internet following hyperlinks and indexing the content they find. Since these spiders are computer programs, they are best at indexing text content. So make sure you put content on your site that the search engines can index. Articles and stories with lots of useful text is a good idea. So is using META tags that describe your site and its contents and image references that include descriptive 'alt' tags. If you are not sure what those things are, consult with your web developer or a good web development book.
People have tried a lot of tricks - like repeating several words over and over on a page that is the same color as the text - but the search engines have gotten a lot smarter over the years and those tricks don't work as well as they used to. But if you think about it, those tricks don't serve you or your customer very well. You may get listed, but if a customer visits your site after finding you in a search engine only to see nothing there that they can use, they will leave in a nanosecond. They probably won't even wait around to see your page completely load.
Do yourself and your visitors a favor. Build your site with good useful content, keep it updated on a regular basis, and pay attention to the details. After you have added value, submit your site to the search engines. Give them some meat to chew on. You might be surprised by the results. And if you need to deliver products to all of your new customers, there will be a shipping company ready to serve you waiting in the wings.
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Thursday, January 4, 2001 |
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Atomz Search
We just added a new search engine called "Atomz.search" to the BIGSEA website. You may be asking yourself: "What is Atomz.search?".
Atomz.search is a sophisticated search engine that indexes the content on your web site so that users can find what they are looking for more easily. Atomz.search indexes the content just like the major search engines: it uses a "spider" to "crawl" the links in your site and index the text content that it finds.
A few days ago, we added Excite! search cababilities to the BIGSEA website. The two search engines, while they both provide search functionality to your site, are very different in implementation.
Excite! search is a cgi script that resides on your web hosting server. Because it is local to the server, it can see all of the files on your server whether they have a link to them or not. What this means is that if you don't limit the files that the Excite! search engine can index, it will index much more than you want it to. The first time we generated an index using the Excite! engine, it indexed all of the text files on our server in addition to the public html pages. When we did some test searches, we were surprised to see that the Excite! engine had indexed many files that we did not want the public to see. This is not to say that the Excite! search engine is inherently bad; it is actually quite useful and fairly easy to configure. To try the Excite search engine, click here.
Atomz.search is a free (for sites that are 500 pages or less) service provided by Atomz.com. To try a sample search using the Atomz.search engine, enter a keyword in the box in the left margin of this page and click the "Search" button. Atomz.search has some great features:
- The "search" and "results" pages are (almost) completely customizable.
- Atomz.search can be scheduled to re-index your site on a regular basis.
- Atomz.search tracks the keywords your visitors used to search your site and can create summary reports of the searches to help you understand what your customers are looking for.
- Atomz.search "crawls" your site just like the major search engines, so the only pages it can index are pages that have links pointing to them.
- During the indexing process, the Atomz.search engine finds broken links and reports them to you so that they can be corrected.
- Atomz.search offers advanced search functionality to help your visitors better define their search queries. To see an example of the advanced search, click here.
Which engine would we recommend? They are both good search engines and they each have unique features. If you want to implement a search engine for your web site and aren't sure which engine is better for you, give us a call. We're here to help.
First Steps for Editing Your Rev9 Site
If you are editing your Rev9 site for the first time, it may be a little confusing at first. Don't worry; with a little practice you will be on your way to becomming a professional web site editor.
Here are a few suggestions if you are a first-timer:
- Before you can edit your site, you must login. Click the login link on your page, and fill-in the username (your email address) and password. After you are logged in, you will see a new "Editors Only" menu on your page.
- You will also see some new buttons on your home page. They are "Flip Home Page", "Edit This Page", and (if we have set up a web hosting account for you)a "Render This Page" button. The "Flip Home Page" button does just what it sounds like. If you imagine your home page being a page in your calendar or a journal, then to turn the page, you click the "Flip Home Page" button. After you flip the home page, you will need to click the "Edit This Page" button to add text to your new page.
- To modify the content on a new or existing page (sometimes refered to as a story), click the "Edit This Page" button, make your changes in the form that appears and submit your changes. Tip: You can include html in the form if you want to add special formatting to your page.
- If you are a web hosting customer, you will also have a button called "Render This Page". When you get your page looking the way you want it and you are ready to make your changes public, click the "Render This Page" button. Be patient, this part can take a few minutes. When your page is rendered to the public webserver, you will be transported to the public version of the page (notice that the url for the page you were editing has changed, and the "Editors Only menu is now gone.). To make more changes, just click the "Back" button on your browser to return to the page you were editing in the Rev9 site.
These are just a few pointers to help you get started. As you use the system, you will probably become more interested in learning about the other options in your "Editors Only" menu. Feel free to take a look at the various options available to you. You will see that the Rev9 sytem is very customizable. As always, if you have any questions, give us a call or send an email. We're here to help.
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