John McKown: President of Delaware.Net, Inc.
In a startling news release on CNET News, it was just reported that Network Solutions and Monster Commerce, who host about 10,000 ecommerce stores, had their credit card data stolen from almost 5,000 ecommerce websites. This is obviously a nightmare for their customers, and the cardholders that have shopped on Monster Commerce stores. We can help them!
Here is one of the plays that comes right out of my Search Engine Optimization (SEO) playbook. This tip should make you more money with your website, but it also unfortunately takes more work for you to implement. This technique is one of the tips that high performance website owners use to dominate Google.
We are in the Web 3.0 world now. Realtors are just starting to get it, but most of them don’t get it. Not all of it. Not yet.
It took a while, but Realtors are finally coming around to Web 2.0, Web 3.0, social networking, whatever you want to call it. It is becoming clear to Realtors (finally) that building a website and waiting around for Google to find it simply doesn’t work. This is a good thing! It means that they are waking up to the reality that we are LEAVING THE INFORMATION AGE and that we are ENTERING THE PARTICIPATION AGE. While this is a positive step, and Realtors are using more of these social solutions online, many see them just as a tool for profit instead of a tool for SHARING THEIR KNOWLEDGE and building credibility.
Delaware.Net has built many websites for municipalities, and one of the major reasons why we are chosen for projects is our integration of the public website with complaint systems, content management systems, mass emailing systems, intranets, project management and – online bill-pay systems (or OBPP). A solid municipal website design effort requires all of these components to be successful, and an online bill-payment is one of the most important features that municipalities need. In this article, I will provide an overview of what is involved in building one of these systems, so that your city/town can plan how to integrate a bill-pay system. Read the rest of this entry »
There are many Content Management Systems (CMS) software packages on the market if you want to manage your own website content. Some are very inexpensive or free, and other enterprise CMS suites can cost over $100K. Delaware.Net offers our own system, called Team-Logic. It is neither costly nor free, and it is incredibly powerful but still easy to use. Prices start at $50 per month for the whole system.
There ARE cheaper open source solutions out there, and on the low end you have systems like Drupal, PHPNuke, PostNuke, .netNuke, Joomla, and others. These can be made to work if you have the time and patience, but for the most part they are solutions for non-profits and companies that don’t want to spend a lot on their website design work. I would never recommend them for a growing business that really cares about their website. Especially if they don’t have an in-house IT team. These low-end systems are well suited for a website where it is OK to use design templates for someone that wants to get up and running quickly. But there WILL be problems when using these systems, and like everything else – there is a trade-off.
Companies that offer email hosting service have seen quite a few changes over the years. Compared to years ago, spam is obviously more of a problem for everyone that uses email. To combat spam, we have employed special technologies on our network, and we have also used on-demand filtering services to pre-filter spam email before it comes into our network. Clients LOVE this service, because we are able to stop over 98% of spam before it gets to our customer’s mailboxes. While filtering spam has been has made email much more enjoyable, there are still other threats that can affect email delivery and spam. The biggest problems are mail-forwarding and catch-alls. In this post, I will explain what these are, and why they are so bad for email hosting providers. These two types of email accounts used to be OK to provide, but we have had to completely eliminate email forwarding over the last year. In speaking with other email hosting companies, I have discovered they have all had to make the same change, or are planning to. Find out why after the jump.
“we are able to stop over 98% of spam before it gets to our customer’s mailboxes “
OK, this is a very basic, but powerful tip that will improve your web site’s performance. It is a problem that I see over and over and over again with web sites that prevents your customers from using your web site. It’s a problem that I have seen on very prominent web sites, and also very basic web sites. It is a very easy problem to fix, and yet many people don’t know that they have this issue.
Blogs are continuing to explode in popularity. In a recent post, I explained why you need a blog, and how to set one up. If you aren’t familiar with blog software and what it is for, then you should read that post first. I also explained some of the pitfalls and potential misuses of your blog in another post. With this article, I want to give a bigger picture for folks that need a web site quickly, and who are considering blog software to run their ENTIRE web site. There ARE cases where blog software can work as the main web site for a business under rare circumstances, and I will go over this as well.
I market socially in local networking groups, national trade shows, local trade shows, and here on my blog. To do that much marketing, I have to expose some of my techniques and secrets behind online marketing and what works. That being said, it takes a LOT more than a couple of tricks to be successful with your online marketing. A good example is blogging.
One of the biggest (if not THE biggest) challenges in building a new web site for a client, is getting quality written content for the web site that is provided by the client. Jason Cockerham, a web developer at Delaware.Net, just wrote a good post about this in the Delaware.Net blog.
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