John McKown: President of Delaware.Net, Inc.
I just launched a new real estate portal on Delaware.com. The new real estate search engine for Delaware includes all homes in both Delaware area MLS databases. This allows us to offer a local real estate search that covers ALL of the available homes in Delaware. Each morning, we syndicate over 60,000 homes into our databases. With newer XML-based MLS data being integrated, we will expand this database even further.
2007 was a good year for Delaware.net. We grew 24% overall, and web design project revenue grew 90%. Our staff also grew, and we accomplished most of our goals, including launching new applications. Lots more is coming in 2008, and if you want to hear about some of our plans, click the link.
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Microsoft FrontPage is a web design program designed for beginners. In early 2006, Microsoft reported that they will not release any further versions of their web design tool. They decided to stop making the product for several reasons:
Cool! There is a quote from me on the Adobe.com Dreamweaver product home page.
Screenshot and link after the jump.
Adobe invited me to give and advanced web design presentation live online, and it happened today at noon EST. There were over 1200 attendees. The presentation will be available on-demand on the Adobe web site in about a week. I demonstrated how Delaware.Net is using the latest Adobe Dreamweaver and ColdFusion tools to build Web 2.0 web sites.
I am VERY pleased that we just won this project. The Delaware State News is one of the largest newspapers in the State of Delaware, and I have wanted to earn their business for years. When the Request for Proposal came across my desk, I knew we would be competing with other design firms to win the project, and that we would need to create an unbeatable proposal that demonstrated why we are the best choice for the project. Well, we just got the signed contract, and the job is a go. We can’t pat ourselves on the back too much for this one yet, because there is a lot of work that needs to be done in a short amount of time. I’ve always wanted to partner with the local papers to provide interactive services, but typically advertising agencies and print publications are threatened by interactive agencies such as us. This project should demonstrate to those agencies that we are the perfect company to partner with, because this is what we are best at, and we can add value to their projects.
Press release after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
2007 is our best year ever for R&D
In late 2006 and into 2007, I hired a bunch of new talent for Delaware.Net, and we also improved our internal web development process greatly. This was due to customer demand for more responsiveness from us, and I am happy to say that we achieved this goal. The new team and our business plan is literally transforming our company and taking us to a whole new level.
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.
Adobe invited me to give a 45 minute case study presentation regarding the Wesley College web site design project that we recently completed at Delaware.net.
Blogs. Certainly you have heard of a blog, but many people still don’t know what they are and why they are useful. In this article, I am going to explain what a blog is, why you need one, and how they can make you and your company a lot more money. Almost for free.
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