About Our Web Site
A potential client once said to me: "I don't get it: what is your site all about?". Good question. At first glance, our site may not make much sense to a new visitor. We have articles about web development and hosting, links to tech support and services, dynamic news feeds from national publications like the New York Times, a calendar, and a search box, among other things.
I'll agree that we've broken just about every marketing rule in the book. But that's the point. This site is part marketing, part customer service, part technical support, and mostly a showcase of interesting technologies that we can implement for our customers on their web sites.
Take the calendar, for instance. To a casual visitor, it just looks like a normal calendar with the current day highlighted. But it is really a daily index to all of the articles that we have archived on our site.
And the search engine? How many times have you visited a site looking for a specific piece of information only to be frustrated because they didn't offer a way to search their content? An integrated search engine is another example of the kind of functionality that we can offer our clients for their own websites.
You will also see references to Rev9 throughout our site. What is Rev9, you ask? Rev9 is a tool that our customers can use to keep their sites up-to-date, every day. Although the casual visitor may not realize it, this site is driven by Rev9. If it were not for Rev9, keeping a site like this up-to-date would be a major pain. If you don't believe me, try it the old fashioned way, then give us a call. We can convert your existing site to a Rev9 site. We'll teach you how to use your web browser to edit your site (that's right, I said "web browser"). And then you will understand the beauty of Rev9. Remember, give us a call. We're here to help.
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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.
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