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.
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.
Here we go again, another election year…
Election years can be dangerous times for business owners that have strong political views and little self-control. Especially for those who force those views down the throats of their customers, employees, and peers. While I feel that it’s commendable for anyone to be passionate about their convictions and views (I know I am), there is a proper time and place to voice those views. Email makes it painfully easy for anyone to instantly forward a political view, comment, article, video link, etc. in the blink of an eye, automatically alienating at least HALF of the people that they are sent to. Recently, a local business owner did just that when they sent me a politically-charged email.
More after the jump.
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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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.
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.
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.
I participate on an email mailing list where other Internet company owners discuss local and national marketing strategies. Sometimes there are great ideas, sometimes not so much. Recently there was a post from someone in the industry about how a good local marketing strategy should contain marketing to not-for-profits and other good-natured word of mouth efforts locally that can help your reputation.
I used to believe that, but what I found is that they really don’t work all that well.
Our new creative team celebrated the completion of the MonsterRacing.com web site by taking a ride in Monster’s NASCAR racing cars. Monster was very pleased with their new web site so they invited our team out for a day to experience what their program is all about. Jason Cockerham, Creative Developer at Delaware.Net said “1 word…. AWESOME. Better than any roller coaster that I have ridden“. Shannon Sierra, Graphic Designer at Delaware.Net said; “The staff at Monster Racing was great and very attentive. They take special care in making sure that everyone understood that, as thrilling as the ride would be, that it was also safe, so everyone was relaxed and comfortable with the experience.”
I’m really proud of the new Wesley College web site, which was just re-designed by Delaware.Net and which will launch this Thursday (March 22, 2007) on the College’s “Founder’s Day”. We’ve also designed a new HTML Flash mass email that will go out to the College’s mailing list. Wesley College is a local university whose web site really needed some help. It consisted of thousands of static web pages that were designed in Microsoft FrontPage. That’s right - FrontPage.
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