Here are some news posts about the hacks:
http://blog.sucuri.net/2010/05/second-round-of-godaddy-sites-hacked.html

Note all the GoDaddy WordPress hack news here:
http://www.wpsecuritylock.com/

SlashDot
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/04/26/1527215/Massive-Number-of-GoDaddy-WordPress-Blogs-Hacked?art_pos=1

My thoughts after the jump.

My Thoughts:

Companies like GoDaddy that charge $5 a month per customer for a blog can’t possibly fix this issue, and GoDaddy has been tight-lipped about this problem.  I spoke with someone who was hacked today, and he is an IT pro from PA that I have been friends with for years.  He says that his site has ridiculously long passwords, and they were hacked already, which makes him think that the server that he is on has been rooted (hacked at the root of the server).

We like WordPress, this blog is running on WordPress (for now), but we will be leaving WP as we add more blogging features to our CMS-Logic system.   My friend is telling me that he spent all weekend fixing sites that have been hacked on GoDaddy.  Yes, you can use open-source software and build a great website, and yes, you can host that website for $5 a month.   But your site won’t evolve, and you will be a target.  This is one of the reasons we invested in building our own CMS instead of building websites on free blog software.  

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.

Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0. What does it all mean?

Web 1.0 was the “information age”. In regards to the web it was from 1995-2001. Building your website, getting a domain name, and having a presence with email were about all a Realtor could do with Web 1.0. Adding meta tags to your website and some other formatting is what web designers did to get you found on search engines. There were a LOT of search engines back then. Today there are just a few. The old meta tag days are gone forever. It will never again be that easy to spoof search engines and become #1 on Google with a meta tag or even a blog post.

Web 2.0 is about shared content, online applications, and syndicating content. It was also about mashups and the new nature of syndicating, cataloging, and making data discoverable by using tagging to create a more democratic search. Mainly, it was about applications and new ways of posting and sharing data. For Realtors it was the MLS systems, blogs, photo sharing sites, and other websites that are now indispensable tools for Realtors.

Web 3.0 (to me) is about relationships. It is the “participation age”. It is about much more than building applications that automate marketing (Web 2.0). It is about knowledge currency. Trust. Honesty. Transparency. Reputation. Networking. But you can’t have any of that if you don’t understand the unwritten rules of being a good net citizen, known as Netiquette.

Yeah, us geeks are full of ourselves, and we talk too much.

Well, hey… there is a lot to know with all this stuff. So in this article, I will answer the fundamental questions that I am getting from Realtors as to how to best use these new methods of networking to grow their real estate sales. How to come up high in Google. How to really use a Blog. And why how you use Facebook matters to your reputation.

Rule #1. There is no simple path to coming up number one in Google.

It can be a little draining explaining to folks how to come up high in Google because most people don’t want to hear the truth. Everyone wants to believe that there is a quick fix or trick to coming up high in Google, but there isn’t.
Some Truths:

• You need a site that has a lots of content.
• You need a site that has an old domain. The older the domain the better.
• You need a site that has well-formatted content.
• You have to have ORIGINAL content. Lots of it.
• You have to have a high Google PageRank, which can take quite a while to develop, and Google doesn’t update it often.
• There ARE formatting things that you can do to your website, like text linking, deep linking, adding a Google Sitemap, better page titling, and MUCH more.
• To get your Pagerank higher, you have to GENERATE A LOT OF INBOUND LINKS to your websites.
• You have to have time to wait – it sometimes takes a generous amount of time, especially to develop your site’s PageRank.
• There is more.

Stop thinking of Google as “something to be done” or handled, and think of it as a report card of your online work. ALL of your online work.

There are no free lunches with Google, no quick and easy tricks. But there ARE tricks and techniques. Most small web development shops don’t know all them. The more experienced web developers that understand how Google works charge a fee to work on your website.

Your blog can help you with Google. Your Facebook page can help you with Google. Simply adding tags to your blog posts WON’T MAKE YOU NUMBER ONE ON GOOGLE! But if you do them right, then they can help. I really want all of my clients’ websites to come up #1 in Google. But only 1% of my clients are willing to do the work it takes and wait for it to happen. This creates a natural conflict for us, especially because it is complicated to make happen. This is why there is a strong cottage industry of thieves that will take your money to “get you ranked in the top 10″. I have looked at many of them, and 99% of them are thieves.

I will focus on additional things that you can do to come up higher in Google outside of Blogs and Facebook in a future article.

Rule #2 Your website solution company should be your SEO consultant too, not just your web designer

It is up to YOU to contact your web design company, perhaps every 4-6 months, to give your site a checkup. Going to Google and typing in some words to see your ranking is NOT how you should be testing your site. Did you know that when you are logged into Google they change your search results based on what they know about you? It is true. So typing words into Google is not the way to test your site. There are many tools for testing your site outside of Google.

Rule #3 If you use a template company for your website, your Google Pagerank WILL suffer.

There are a LOT of companies out there offering turn-key Realtor websites with MLS listings in them. For the non-technical Realtor on a budget, these sites are an easy way to get a site live with listings. A Realtor was in my office the other day, and we pulled her site up to look at it. She is a friend, so I wasn’t charging her. I was just taking a look at what she has. Her site is build by a company that does Realtor template sites. So I check her Google PageRank, and her ranking is ZERO out of 10. That’s right – zero. So no matter what this company can offer her, the site won’t come up high in Google. I pointed this out to her, and she quickly back-peddled saying “most of my sales aren’t from my website anyways”. But it is pretty obvious that this is a copout, because why have the site if it isn’t going to generate leads?

So you might be wondering, why do template sites get penalized form Google? Duplicate content. Google is now smart enough to notice when a bunch of websites all look the same, and it hurts your score when your content isn’t unique.

Rule #4. Blogs are great for SEO, but are you using your blog correctly? Probably not.

I recently had a Realtor asking me for tips to make their website come up higher in Google. It happens all the time. Looking at their site, I saw a lot of things right away that could be done to make them come up higher in Google. It would take me….. 5 hours to explain all of it to them. It would take…. 20+ hours of work to implement it all. At $110 per hour, that gets expensive. Would they pay for that? Probably not. But some of my clients do. So, an easy to fill, glaring gap in their online marketing efforts that I saw was to add a blog link to their website. Why a blog? Because a blog makes it easier for the Realtor to add UNIQUE, ORIGINAL CONTENT to their website. Rich, juicy content that Google will respect when it reads it. Is that all there is to do? Fire up a WordPress blog, enter some articles, and sit back and wait for the Google gold rush? Hell Friggin No. There is still lots to be done.

Your blog needs articles that people actually give a shit about. Articles like this one! A rule in the new web world is that you have to stop holding onto your “secrets”. If you are an expert, you have to prove it with valuable information and less hype. The realtors that blog about Obama’s stimulus bill and who post their opinions about politics or their political affiliations on Facebook and their blogs are COMPLETELY MISSING THE POINT OF HOW THEY CAN HELP MAKE NEW RELATIONSHIPS. Why would you alienate 1/2 of all of your prospective customers by being political? Leave your ego and your confrontational political opinions at the door in this new web world. If I am a potential home buyer that wants a Realtor that can be trusted (and some can’t be), then SHOW ME that you are an expert and that you can be trusted. TELL ME WHAT I SHOULD KNOW about what it is like to live in this area. Posting a list of links to area parks and restaurants is a cop out.

OK, so how to choose content for your blogs…. Ask yourself “If I was a home buyer, will this content help me?”. If the answer is “no”, then don’t post it. Also remember that blogs are chronological. They are for telling the story of the moment. The top ten tips of the moment. The top recent problems that you are solving for customers. The top resources for customers, etc. etc. It is OK if these get old over time, because if you are a TRUE PROFESSIONAL, then you will constantly have new subject matter that is unique, easy for you to write, and relevant for your customers. THAT is what blog content should be. Content like link pages, information on neighborhoods, taxes, employers, zoning, entertainment, restaurants, mortgage lenders, all that content that isn’t time sensitive – that content should be on static pages in your website. That content is not time-sensitive. It isn’t storytelling. It is resource stuff, not blog content. Don’t repost listings into your blog – it looks desperate. It looks even more desperate on Facebook.

Rule #5. Blog Content Needs to Be Described AND LINKED to Be Found

So you wrote a great post to help potential home buyers. Terrific! Then you go to Google and you don’t see it. Not even a month later. Something must be wrong, you say! My web designer led me astray with all of this blogging malarky! Those bastard web designers. Well, before you blame the web designer, you have to ask yourself these questions:

1. did I add tags to my blog posts?
2. do I even know what the hell the tags are, how they work, and what they do?
3. does my blog have a decent number of posts in it?
4. am I linking my blog to other blogs?
5. are my tags formatted as complete keyword phrases?
6. am I linking to my blog from lots of other websites?
7. am I emulating this blog content and posting strategy to match the leaders of my industry?
8. have I created adequate categories in my blog so that I get the quality text links in the blog?
9. is my blog IN my company website, or is it linked from my company website? (hint: link it).
10. am I using the right blog software? is it the latest version?
11. am I using link directory websites like Digg.com, delicious.com, Technorati.com, and the other MANY sites?
12. am I tagging and linking words WITHIN my blog posts to other websites? hrm?
13. am I getting press coverage to get inbound traffic and links to this valuable blog content?
14. am I tweaking the permalinks in my blog posts to create adequate search engine safe URLs?
15. am I using Wikipedia to lookup all this crap that John McKown is telling me?
16. if I don’t want to learn all the blog crap, can I honestly blame my web designer for not doing it for me for free?

Digg.com and Delicious.com are nice, solid ways to get your blog content indexed by Google. It isn’t foolproof, and no SEO tip is. They are all part of what is required today.

Rule #6. Facebook is a powerful networking tool. But no one wants to be friends with a jerk Realtor.

Am I bashing Realtors? No. I am not bashing Realtors. There are a lot of great Realtors out there, some are my close friends. Some, unfortunately, are jerks. There are also jerk web designers and definitely jerk mortgage brokers. Hang with me here…. I think it is great that Realtors are using Facebook. I have a Delaware real estate license and I pay the National Association of Realtors and KCAR dues. So I AM a Realtor, at least technically. So are you a “Jerk Realtor” you ask? Well, that depends totally on your behavior. If you joined Facebook because some guy in a marketing seminar told you to add everyone in your address book to your Facebook account to make money, then yeah, you might be one. My point is, I will help you. I don’t care if you are a Realtor or not. I help people because, quite frankly, when I do so it ends up helping my business and it makes me feel good to share what I know. My ego likes me being considered an expert. I’d be a jerk web designer if I used my knowledge to exploit people like I see happening EVERY DAY from other companies in my industry. If you are HONESTLY interested in me, my experience, what I have to say, how I can help you, then great. Add me as a Facebook friend and I will accept you. Again, I really don’t care if you are a Realtor or not. If I help you and gain your trust by doing so, then you should return the favor and recommend me as an expert too. But….. if you sponge me for information and then blame me because you didn’t do ALL of the things that Google and Facebook and your website require for online success, then you are a Jerk Realtor. If you use your Facebook account to post all your listings, then you don’t look professional. Why do I want to see all of your listings in my Facebook account? I don’t. And you will be removed from my friends list in a hurry. I bet other people feel the exact same way. Relationships are built on trust, sharing, and listening. Not by adding a hyperlink to someone. Use Facebook, but don’t be a ….. you know.

You are on Facebook. Is your company?

You can create a FREE business page for your real estate company. I added one for Delaware.Net, check it out and become a fan real quick: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Dover-DE/DelawareNet-Inc/41553338643?ref=s . This a great way to get traffic, and to mass email your friends list with news from your organization. But BE CAREFUL. Don’t overdo it. Add content that matters, and don’t do it too frequently. Get all your business friends to add themselves to your new business page. There is a link at the bottom of the page when you look at my business page. That is how you can add your business site to Facebook.

Are you syndicating your OWN content?

If you are posting a good article to your blog, you should also use that article for an email newsletter. You don’t have an email newsletter? You should. The content that you mass email people is almost as sensitive as what you blog and post into Facebook. One thing that email newsletters are better at, is letting the visitor choose what content they want to get from you. For example, they could chose to get emails about new properties. So it is totally acceptable to email them property information. It is much different to dump your listings into your Facebook account.

Build a link share network – it is important

Earlier in this article I mentioned getting inbound links to your website to build your Google Pagerank. Google Pagerank can be thought of as a multiplier. Meaning, if your site has lots of jucy articles and keywords, but your Google Pagerank is a 1 (out of 10), then you are going to get beat in the search results every time. So your Google ranking can be thought of as this formula: Google PageRank * Relvance of Content = Ranking. One of the things Google looks at to determine how “important” your site is, is by measuring the number of websites that are linking to yours. It also takes into account RECIPROCAL LINKS. This is critical. So you should link to other large websites that have a good pagerank, and most importantly you should try to get them to link back to you. Start to look for sites that have a high pagerank, and then try to get a reciprocal link between their site and yours. Now repeat this dozens or hundreds of times, and you will start to see your Google Pagerank climb.

I wrote this in one sitting while watching TV. Ask me questions about any of this and I will do my best to answer you and explain further. Use the form below this story to post your questions. Thanks for reading, and I hope it helped.

Cuil uses the same preview graphic of the web sites in it’s index, like Ask.com does. So this part of it really isn’t new. What seems to be different about it, is its size – Cuil states that they contain over 121,617,892,992 web pages – much larger than Google’s number of indexed pages. I look at a lot of news sites each day and evening, and I sometimes look at Google news (news.google.com). The problem with Google news is that they basically pull in news headlines from around the world, and they massage the data a bit. After the announcement of Cuil on CNN and other news sites Monday, Google news had articles on it about how lame Cuil is. I really don’t trust Google that much anymore, so I decided to try out Cuil so that I could compare it against Google and Yahoo.

The first thing that you notice about Cuil is that their site is black, and there isn’t anything on it but a search box. The founders of the site are being tight-lipped about how it works, but just as we have reverse-endineered how google ranks sites, I am sure that over time we will be able to pull out some useful techniques to help sites come up high in Cuil (if it gets any traction).

The second thing that I noticed about the results I was seeing in Cuil is that when you add a local state name or place name to your search, there really isn’t a fair set of results that come up. When I added state names and area names to searches, what Cuil returned were mainly very cheezy directory sites. This is bad, and it could be easy for spammers to trick Cuil in this way by creating bogus directory sites. Some of these sites were obviously stuffed with keywords. For example, one search that I entered came back with many different results for the same web site, and that web site had made a page for every state name. Google would have been better at filtering that out, and that spam filtering is necessary to have a good search engine. So to sum this up, it looks like for right now, it will be incredibly easy to spam Cuil with some doorway pages, and old-school black hat SEO. But why would you want to do that, and get kicked out of Google? Cuil will need to work hard at getting lame directory sites out of its index. Who cares how many pages are in it if they are all lame?

Cuil – not ready for prime time
I really wanted to see more from Cuil, but I am not giving up hope for it yet. I want them to succeed because I want to see a viable alternative to Google. Something new that won’t be “evil” for a while. Cuil isn’t ready yet because there is no way to add a website to their engine. Also, as I said earlier, it appears that it would be incredibly easy to spoof Cuil and get sites to come up high, as I kept getting results that had blatant black-hat spamming techniques right in the body text of the websites coming up at the top of Cuil searches. Even a non-technical person could scan the results that Cuil spits out, and tell that the websites listed in the results were not trustworthy. It has that spammy aftertaste to the whole site when you look at the results.

Why Google has Become Evil
In my opinion, Google is about to start a long, painful decline. Some have said that this has already begun. Google’s stock price had a high of $714 per share in December 2007, and today their stock price is down to $483.11. That is an enormous drop. I think it still has a long way to go down. Why am I hating on Google? Because they are modifyng search results for each person that logs into Google, and that is bad news for your web site, for the web design industry, and for piracy. Here is how we discoverd it… A while ago, we started to notice that our search results in Google were changing if we were logged into Google, and if we weren’t logged into Google. We would have two computers in our office that were getting different search results for the EXACT SAME SEARCH in Google. If you use GMail, or Google Analytics, or any other “free” Google service, and you don’t log out of their site(s), then your next Google searches are tracked and altered to match your physical location and preferences. They are tracking who you are, what you search, and your results (and advertising) are then modifed to match your profile. I don’t like that at all.

Modified Google Search is bad for Ecommerce
It MIGHT sound like a good idea, but imagine trying to sell products to people around the country with an ecommerce site. Instead of showing sites that rank the best, Google might show the LOCAL sites that rank the best, when what you really wanted was a nationwide search for results. Once we realized this was happening, and we were able to duplicate it over and over again, I was convinced that the beloved Google is now in fact as evil as any other corporate behemoth that puts provits above customers.

Yahoo is now better than Google? Huh?
After seeing the privacy issues that Google is now presenting us, it caused us to go back and look more at Yahoo, and other search engines so that we could compare raw search performance and accuracy. The result was surprising – Yahoo had much better and more accurate results for just about every search we did. And believe me, I am no Yahoo fan. I haven’t used their site in a loooong time. Pretty much since Firefox put a Google search box in the upper right hand corner. So I decided to make Yahoo my default search in Firefox for a couple of weeks, and see if it works better for me. I’ll let you know how that goes.

So try out Cuil.com, do some searches, and let me know what you think!

“we are able to stop over 98% of spam before it gets to our customer’s mailboxes “

Why email forwarding is bad
Unfortunately, customers are sometimes blissfully unaware of how they hurt their own email service. Here is how it happens… A new customer calls. Let’s call him “Jim”. Jim purchase a new domain name for his business. Let’s call the domain name “somecompany.com”. Easy enough. Jim can now have an email address that looks like “Jimbo@somecompany.com”. So after we register the domain name for Jim, we also setup a hosting account for Jim’s web site and any email accounts that he wants.

A sample scenario
Jim then asks us “is it possible to have all email that comes into jimbo@somecompany.com to forward to my home email account?”. In the past we would say “sure”, but not any longer. Let’s say that Jim’s home email address is jimbo@comcast.net, or jimbo@verizon.net, or jimbo@att.net, or whatever. After Jim gets his web site live, and his new email address is published online, it will at some point get picked up by a spambot, which puts his email address into a spam directory. Or, an even worse scenario, is if Jim asks “can you have ANY email sent to somecompany.com, and have it forwarded to my home account?”. The second scenario is called a “catch-all”, and is a much worsescenario than simply forwarding a single email address. If a spammer were to use a baby book of names to guess a bunch of addresses, like bob@somecompany.com, carol@somecompany.com, and so on, they could easily send hundreds or thousands of emails to Jim’s new domain name.

Then… other providers block the customer’s server
Let’s assume that Jim uses Comcast for his personal email service. I am not picking on Comcast, this example is true of any large email provider. Comcast wants to block any spam that Jim gets, just like how Delaware.Net wants to fight spam. Since Comcast has a LOT of spam to fight, they have spam-blocking servers that are smart enough to be alerted to large volumes of email that look like spam come from one source. That one source my be your catch-all domain, or that source of spam might be the server that is fowarding your email (and your spam) to your Comcast account. Comcast, Verizon, Yahoo, ATT, AOL, and most large personal email providers have systems like these.

“It’s important to note that ALL hosting companies get their email servers blocked
by other hosting companies from time to time. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens to all of them.”

When these systems see this spam coming in, they try to block it. What do you think they block? They block the IP address of the server that the spam came from – automatically. That means that ALL EMAIL SENT FROM THAT HOSTING SERVER IS NOW BLOCKED BY COMCAST. Including email from other customers on the same server. Not good. Jim’s seemingly simple request to have all of his email forwarded into one account just caused a very serious problem for anyone else that has email accounts on the same server as Jim. Basically, those other customers can’t email anyone that has a Comcast email address. If Comcast blocks an email server, then NO ONE else on that server can send email to Comcast. It’s important to note that ALL hosting companies get their email servers blocked by other hosting companies from time to time. It doesn’t happen often, but it happens to all of them.

Getting blocked for forwarding email is a huge headache for email hosting companies, because they have to (in this example) call Comcast, and ask to be unblocked. This takes time, energy, and money to make happen. It can take 5 minutes, or it could take 2 days. It depends on the systems that the blocking company has in place. Some systems are automated, and some are not.

So what is the answer to this problem? It’s amazingly simple. First, email hosting companies shouldn’t be auto-forwarding at all, since their customers can use one of the many popular email clients (like Outlook), that can check multiple email accounts at once. Outlook can also auto-filter the email to separate folders, giving Jim the separation he needs between his work email and he personal email.

We have finally removed all forwards and catch-alls from all of our email servers, and if someone ever asks to have their email automatically forwarded again, we will just point them to this article.

]]> http://www.johnmckown.com/hosting-companies-must-stop-forwarding-email-or-else/feed/ 0 http://www.johnmckown.com/delaware-expo-trade-show-a-huge-success/ http://www.johnmckown.com/delaware-expo-trade-show-a-huge-success/#comments Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:03:59 +0000 john http://www.johnmckown.com/delaware-expo-trade-show-a-huge-success/

Three years ago, I came up with an idea to get a little more local exposure for us, and to also help out area chambers of commerce. The idea was to have a business-to-business (B2B) trade show, where businesses that sell to other businesses could mix and market. On March 5th, we held our third one. It went great!
Thanks to all of our customers, friends, and partners that attended the Third Annual Delaware Expo Trade Show. The weather was perfect yesterday and we had over 1,000 attendees at the show. The exact number was close to 1,200. Our show is now the largest business-to-business networking event in the state of Delaware, with over 120 exhibitors. We got a lot of positive feedback on the show, and some ideas that we will use to make the 2009 show even better.

I was interviewed by WHYY television from Wilmington, and there were also several newspapers that were present that did stories on the show. We landed a spot on the front page of today’s edition of the Delaware State News. We are waiting for the pictures to come back from the photographer, and once those are available we will put them on the web site.

This show was planned and executed entirely by the Delaware.Net staff. We also sold all of the booths using our new Store-Logic Ecommerce engine.

We gave some presentations on search engine optimization, blogging, and more. Here is a picture of me giving my presentation:

Here is Greg, our SEO guru giving his presentation:

One of the coolest surprises for us came when Monster Racing brought their new NASCAR race car to the show, complete with a Delaware.Net logo on the side of it. They will leave our logo on the car for the rest of this season, so in a way we have our own race car.

We used a new thermal name badge printer this year from Zebra, and it really helped us get the name badges printed faster. We didn’t anticipate the number of walk-ins that we had, so for 2009 we will get a second Zebra printer so we can print them even faster. Those printers are like $600, but they really made registration faster. Special thanks to the Central Delaware Chamber of Commerce for bringing additional badge holders when we ran low.

As usual, the staff at the Dover Downs Hotel and Casino did a superb job. We also used a new pipe and drape company called Diamond State Party Rentals. They did a great job as well.
Our team did a fantastic job pulling the show together.

The examples in my presentation included AJAX, ColdFusion 8 tags, Spry widgets, and more. I demonstrated how we are using these technologies in current web projects, and I also spent some time explaining how we win projects, how we manage them, and how we bill for them. Typically this is an area most web development shops don’t like to talk about, but we don’t have any secrets in this regard.

I demonstrated a couple of Delaware.Net’s latest on-demand applications, including our AJAX-powered email newsletter management program called Mail-Logic. During my first web design presentation with Adobe, there were a ton of Q&A questions about our web-based project management system that we use to help us manage our projects. With this presentation, I got into a little more depth on how we use this tool to manage over 100 projects successfully. That system is called Team-Logic, and yes, we do sell it.

A lot of folks sent me emails after this last presentation asking me about the CSS design resource links that I mentioned in the presentation. If you would like a copy of those, shoot me an email and I will send them to you. Sign up for this blog and I will send an alert when the on-demand version of the presentation is also available.

One last thing – the Adobe Acrobat Connect product that Adobe let me use for the webinar is straightup AWESOME. I highly recommend this product for giving webinars.

Recently, I bumped into a local business web site that is the only web site for the business. It is run on WordPress (the same software running this web site). Blog hosting fees and and the cost to launch a blog using pre-built designs is so low, that it is basically free. We charge $50 per year for a blog, and yes, I consider that to be almost free for a business.
So what is so bad about using a blog for your entire web site? Lots of things.

Reasons for NOT using a blog as your company web site:

1. Blogs contain posts in chronological order
   This makes it hard for you to stick product pages and informational pages into your site to promote your products.
2. Dated sections drop in search engine performance over time
   It is indisputable that blogs help you company show up higher in search engines. But not without quality content that is DATE SPECIFIC. Over time, the older posts in the blog lose some of their search engine power, and they become harder to find in the blog. Will the older pages show up in search engines? Sure. I have seen blog posts from as far back as 2001 in Google results, but you don’t want your products and services hidden from view.
3. Think of a blog as a STREAM of data coming from you
   Blogs are great for sharing things as they happen, and for sharing professional opinions and advice regarding timely issues. This is why a blog is a good supplement to a more standardized company web site.
4. Most blog owners don’t modify their blog code
   Out of the box, blog software is great for posting articles, and getting content online quickly. But to make the blog into a company web site means that you will have to install a lot of third-party plug-ins, and you would still need to get under the hood and get your hands dirty with the code to make your site world-class.
5. There are better solutions for posting certain types of content
   One misuse of blog software that I have seen is using them as an image gallery or portfolio. While this is POSSIBLE, it can be done using much better tools that look 100 times better. For instance, my company has a plug-in for web site that allows the site owner to create a handsome Flash image gallery and project portfolio. And it isn’t limited by the date-sensitive nature of blog posts.

It may sound like I am downplaying blogs and their importance – I am not. Blogs are critical to marketing. But like every good technology and tool, people sometimes overuse them and misuse them. Blogs should be ONE tool in your tool belt, not the ONLY tool that you use.
There are some exceptions. Here are some situations where a blog works great as a primary web site.

1. Professionals working for large companies that already have a web site
2. Freelance reporters and authors
3. For a sharing tips (like this site)
4. A content-specific news web site
5. Political web sites
6. Any site that relies on date-specific content

Why people make this mistake and settle on a blog for their business web site

1. Money - I have a saying that I like to use when presented by strange actions by other businesses: “If the behavior of a professional or business doesn’t make sense, look to the money first”. The majority of times this tends to hold true. Really thrifty companies that don’t want to spend money on their web site might opt for a blog to get started. While this might get them online quickly, they will outgrow the blog quickly if they are the least bit successful.
2. Domain Name Confusion – Amazingly, the choice and use of a domain name is STILL a confusing thing for many new businesses. I bump into folks all the time that don’t realize that they can have a business web site at www.theirbusiness.com, and then a blog at blog.theirbusiness.com. Not sure why they don’t get that, but that is an opportunity for me to help them out.
3. Laziness – Some folks simply don’t have the time or energy to do an all-out web site for their business, or they are satisfied with a simple web brochure. The problem with blogs is that they aren’t even a quality web brochure.

If your business is profitable to begin with, then the money your bad web site DOESN’T make will always much more money than the cost of building a great web site. Bad web sites cost companies a fortune. New business is lost. Brand identity and image are tarnished.

Initial impressions are important. I had a customer last year that only spent serious money on their web site after a potential client called them and said “I am interested in doing business with your company, but your web site is so unprofessional, I am not sure that you are legitimate“. We didn’t build that ugly site, but we hosted it. And I had tried to convince that company to let us upgrade their site for months. Only when they plainly saw that their ugly site was COSTING THEM SALES did they get very serious about their re-design. The new site cost them under $10K, and they landed six-figure projects through the new web site. Now their business is booming, and the web site as part of a new advertising campaign is partially responsible for that.

So treat your web site seriously. Yes you should have a blog. If you are professional working for a large firm, a blog web site is a great way to share your expertise. But if you are a small business that needs a professional presence to show off your products and services, you will need more than a blog.

There were over 1,000 attendees watching the presentation who had lots of questions about the project. I demonstrated how we build the new web site and how we managed the project from beginning to end, from prototyping the design, through using our Team-Logic CRM system for managing the project, to integrating AJAX and building mass-eMail eCards using Flash.

The presentation was delivered over the web using Acrobat Connect Pro (formerly Breeze), and I really liked the interface and the performance of it. There were about 5 Adobe employees who helped me with giving the presentation, and we did a trial run of the presentation last week. I couldn’t have done the presentation with out their help (Thanks Adobe!) This was my first time using Adobe Connect for a webinar, and I must say that I am very impressed with it as a webinar tool. The VOIP quality and desktop-sharing worked without a hitch. I am running dual 23″ monitors on Vista, and it still ran great with no issues.

I answered close to 30 questions from attendees, and I still did not get to answer every question that was asked. There were a lot of questions about our Team-Logic project management system, and other questions about what CMS systems we recommend for small web sites. If you attended the seminar and you still have a question about it, feel free to post a reply to this thread and I will answer it.. All comments on this blog are moderated, so I will have to answer your question before you can see it posted here on my blog.

Once again, I would like to thank Adobe for the opportunity to share how we build web sites and how we use Adobe tools for our work. I hope to do more presentations for Adobe in the future for some of their other products that we use, including ColdFusion, Illustrator, Photoshop, and more.
The presentation should be available next week to watch after they have edited it and uploaded it. I also posted a PDF of the presentation here with this post. The link at the top of the article should forward you to a copy of the webinar once they post it.

This new release of ColdFusion server will bring many new features and improved performance to our applications, such as our Team-Logic CRM application and our Store-Logic eCommerce application. Team-Logic is now being moved to these new servers, which use a fiber channel connection to a large storage array network (SAN) for storage. These hardware upgrades, combined with a new security framework, will make Team-Logic faster and more robust with features, such as integration with mobile devices and Microsoft Exchange.

.Net Integration
ColdFusion 8 server also has native support for .Net objects, so we will be able to use .Net with our applications as well.

PDF support is improved
This is great news for us because we are dynamically generating PDFs in several of our applications now. We are winning a lot of government and municipal projects now, and we are seeing more PDF workflows in those environments, so this will help take our municipal web application further.
AJAX
We are upgrading all of our applications with AJAX, and they all have AJAX technology in them now in one fashion or another. With server-based AJAX integration, this will simplify how we use the AJAX libraries in our ColdFusion applications.
Improved Uptime
There are additional features to the new server platform’s administration and debugging that will give us more information on any problems that may arise in hosted applications, making them easier to debug. This will help with response times.

I’ll give a full report plus some sample uses of the new features in ColdFusion 8 as we launch them.

Delaware.Net uses/offers Postini services as a reseller, and the price is right – $1 per user. Postini catches almost all spam and viruses before they reach your inbox. This saves hosting companies time and money and allows users to gain access to the control panel that is doing the filtering, so that you can see the spam that is sitting in the quarantine on Postini’s servers.

It will be interesting to see if privacy advocates get up in arms about this or not. Postini routes the email of 5,000,000 users.

Press release sent to me from Postini:

Google has announced their plans to acquire Postini.

This is great news for Postini customers. Postini has always had aggressive plans for the future. We have excellent solutions and a loyal and strong customer and partner base, thanks to you. The opportunity to become part of Google will allow us to accelerate our growth and leverage the scale and resources of this great company.

What does this mean to you? It will be business as usual at Postini. We will continue developing new solutions in compliance and enhancing our core communications security services. We will continue to support you and honor all contracts. You will receive the same quality, value, and service from Postini that you have come to expect.

Postini and Google are an excellent match. Google is interested in Postini as part of their strategy to deliver compelling hosted applications to business of all sizes. As you know we already have a partnership in this area. The Postini product line for secure messaging infrastructure and providing compliance solutions are very complementary to Google Apps including Gmail, Calendar, Talk, Docs & Spreadsheets. Google already has 100,000 customers for these services today. Together Postini and Google will become the next-generation Software as a Service (SaaS) company.

Please visit the Postini Community Forum, and stay tuned for more updates through our website, email, and other vehicles.

The acquisition is expected to close by the end of third quarter 2007. Until then, we will continue to operate as an independent company and it is “business as usual”. Please watch your email for an invitation to a special webinar for customers and partners.

Click here for additional information.

Regards,

Quentin Gallivan
President and Chief Executive Officer
Postini, Inc.