Building Better Web Sites

John McKown: President of Delaware.Net, Inc.

Archive for November, 2006

How wide is your web site? How wide should it be?

November 30th, 2006

This question comes up time to time from customers, and it also comes up in our office when we are training a new developer or when we are beginning a new web site. Years ago, it would have been downright irresponsible to build a web site larger than 800 pixels wide, because there were users with 13″ and 15″ monitors (yes, I have been around that long). Today, a web user could have a 24″ monitor or larger, and when you view a web site that is narrow, it seems like an awful waste of space to see the background image or colors taking up so much useful real estate. Since the height of a web page can be larger than the window due to scrolling, the WIDTH is really the important thing web developers have to consider.

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Posted in Articles, Internet Marketing, Web Development

Holiday ECards in Flash

November 29th, 2006

We recently completed a holiday ECard for Wesley College, and this went out to their faculty, students, and families of students. These can be built in a very short time, and are inexpensive to produce. It sure beats paying the postman to send out all of those greeting cards each year. Let me know what you think.

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Posted in Delaware.Net, Inc., Internet Marketing

Our New Application Developers Rock!

November 26th, 2006

I am soooo happy right now with our new application development team. It took a lot of work to get through the summer and staff it up, but we are so much better than we were just a year ago. It is like night and day, and it feels great because we are finally getting our new applications where they need to be quickly.

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Posted in ColdFusion, Delaware.Net, Inc., Web Development

SEO Tip – Using Error Pages and the Robots.txt file

November 17th, 2006

A customer called me today and asked this question: “why is my error page in my web site my consistently #1 ranked page in my web site?”. This is a great question. Before I answer it, I should point out some important facts about this customer’s web site.

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Posted in Articles, ECommerce, Internet Marketing, Search Engines and SEO

It’s finally time – I’m now selling Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services

November 16th, 2006

Traditional SEO work involves tweaking a web site’s code so that Google ranks the site higher in the free organic ranking area of search results.

So far I have not been impressed with the companies that do this work full-time in our area. They all seem to be focused on getting rich via maintenance fees than actually innovating and providing real results for our customers. Since we built our store engine and it has some SEO already in it, we are really the best choice for ecommerce seo for our customers. For this reason, we are going to start to formally offer SEO services at Delaware.net. For our ecommerce customers, this is a no-brainer service.
» Read more: It’s finally time – I’m now selling Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services

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Posted in Delaware.Net, Inc., ECommerce, Internet Marketing, Site News

Back from ISPCon Fall – Just got caught up

November 16th, 2006

ISPCon was great last week in Santa Clara, and it was nice to see some familiar faces like Peter from Rad-Info, Jack Brandt from Register.com, Jon Price, and many others in the CEO session. I also made some new friends. There were some new faces in CEO, and I came away (as always) with new ideas and new perspectives on our industry. » Read more: Back from ISPCon Fall – Just got caught up

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Posted in Internet Industry

One of the best CSS sites out there

November 3rd, 2006

Any decent web designer knows what CSS is. But most have a hard time really adopting it. I think this is due to a few reasons.

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Posted in Articles, ECommerce, Web Development

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