Looking back at 2007

After a relatively flat 2006, we approached 2007 with a refined game plan. Specifically, to get the best talent I could find for our four teams; creative, programming, sales, and engineering. Mission accomplished. We now have 15 professionals, all working to bring the latest web technology to our clients. We are also looking for more employees to join our technical on-site team.
Some of the smaller office upgrades for 2007 include painting our office, getting all new computers for our staff, upgrading most of our software, and getting large dual flat screen monitors for everyone. We upgraded our office kitchen with new appliances and food choices. In the data center, we purchased a bunch of new HP and Dell servers, Cisco switches, and additional storage devices and drives.

Looking ahead to 2008

For 2008, we have some exciting new services and technology for our customers. Some of it I can talk about here in my blog, and some of our plans are proprietary and I can’t give too much information (yet). Here are some of the highlights…

1. New corporate web site for Delaware.Net, Inc.
   We’ve built so many web sites, that unfortunately we have had very little time to keep our own web site up to date. Now that we have a larger staff, that is all about to change. The conceptual designs for our new site is already complete, so you will see the new site in early 2008. We’re using this opportunity in redesigning our site to show our commitment to web standards, our newest applications, and more (the secret sauce).
2. New micro sites for our applications
   In addition to our new company web site, we are also working on new, smaller versions of our site for our applications. These sites will launch after our main site, and will contain more resources for our clients.
3. Team-Logic 2.0 AJAX Beta
   We completed our new AJAX-powered Intranet system in the fall of 2007, and it’s fast becoming our new web application hosting platform. When compared to commercial Intranet and ecommerce systems from other providers, there simply is no comparison because we offer more features, a better application, and for less money. We are undergoing live data testing in-house, and also with select customers now. This is going very well. In early 2008 we will add more functionality to this system and officially launch it with it’s own new microsite.
4. NEW – Mail-Logic Newsletter Server
   Starting at just $12 per month, our new newsletter server sets the standard for sending value and performance when you need to send out email newsletters to your customers, and your staff. Unlimited groups and mailings, automated bounce processing, web site signup, and HTML generation makes sending newsletters easier than ever.
5. NEW – Updated Real Estate Applications
   After leaving our real estate applications alone for years, they are undergoing a complete transformation. It is no longer good enough to simply have IDX listing feeds in a real estate site and call it a day. Our new real estate suite combines rentals, MLS feeds, lead tracking, content management, and local portal advertising. The new applications will launch in February, in time for the spring real estate season. Existing Delaware.Net clients will get special upgrade packages.
6. NEW – Updated Vehicle Dealership Application
   We’ve been rebuilding our dealership applications to use our latest CRM, email marketing, and content management applications. These will also feed used vehicle inventories to Delaware.com.
7. New Delaware.com Marketing
   Can’t talk a whole lot about this yet, but suffice it to say that we are building a local portal that will compete with other popular area web portals. We won’t be satisfied unless we create the best marketing portal for local area businesses.
8. Lots More
   More detail on our latest applications will be released soon.
9. Dream Home
   On a personal level, My wife and I have begun building our dream home, which will be complete in 2008. It is an exciting time for us as we pick out all of the options for our new home. We have already purchased a one-acre lot in the most prestigious neighborhood in Kent County, and our architectural plans are complete as well.

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.

Delaware.Net, Inc.
Dover, Delaware
September 24, 2007
For Immediate Release

Delaware.Net, Inc. was just awarded the contract to redesign the Delaware State News’ web site. This is a large project, which encompasses restructuring the web site, applying a new graphic design, introducing web standards, improving site search engine optimization (SEO), and more.

Delaware.Net competed against one other firm in Delaware, and several firms from outside of the the state to win this project. John McKown, President of Delaware.Net, Inc. said: “We are very pleased to win this project. We approached this project from the outset with the attitude that The Delaware State News is an organization that we would love to partner with. As one of the area’s largest newspapers, this is a great opportunity for us to show what our capabilities are, and hopefully continue to work with the newspaper on other interactive projects in the future as well.”

To win the project, Delaware.Net created several design prototypes to demonstrate the design strategies that would be used to build and and maintain the new web site.Because this project has a tight deadline associated with it, development is already underway. The new site will be ready in October.

For more information on this project, please call John McKown at 888-432-7965 x100.

Our new slogan for the company is “World-Class Web Works”, and this has several meanings for us. It defines our goal – to build and host “world-class” solutions for our customers, and to give them the best support around. It also defines our advantage – the fact that our world-class solutions make customer’s web sites work better for them. Even though we are miles ahead of local competitors, we are committed to constantly improving our services across the board. To that end, I am happy to share with you some of the milestones we have reached already in 2007, as well as a sneak peek at our TENTH anniversary announcements that are coming in October.
Our New Hosting Framework – Team-Logic 2.0
We’ve built a Software As A Service (SAAS) web application suite that allows us to launch and manage ALL of our web applications more quickly. We call this new system Team-Logic 2.0. We’ve looked at “foundation Intranets” and hosting panels offered by other web design and hosting companies, and I have to say that our new framework blows away what these other firms can offer.

Our new Team-Logic system combines roughly 30 of our hosted applications into ONE new interface. By creating a new security system for all of our applications, customers can now log into ONE interface to control their web site, handle their marketing needs, and track sales.

This is a MAJOR deal because we can build dynamic web sites faster than other companies, and these applications are easier to manage and improve. Turn-key applications running on Team-Logic 2.0 include; custom web sites, blogs, content management applications, eCommerce storefronts, real estate MLS systems, Intranets, mailing lists, and much, much more. We completed this new framework back in July, and deployment of the system is underway now for some large clients. The new system works for all clients large and small, and it offers a significant performance boost over previous versions of our applications when they were separate. We’ve also invested in new hardware for this system, which will run much faster than the virtual servers that other companies use. As you can imagine, it has taken over a year of planning to build this new framework, and now that it is complete we will be able to offer an incredible amount of value for web site hosting customers that they will not be able to find anywhere else.

New Email Marketing Newsletter Server – Mail-Logic
Our newest on-demand application is called Mail-Logic. Mail-Logic is a complete re-build of our email newsletter application, and it is now complete and undergoing testing for a large client. Mail-Logic makes it possible to send out your newsletters, special flyers, and more to a very large audience easily. Mail-Logic will be sold as an on-demand product that can be used within minutes for any client that we host. Existing Delaware.Net newsletter clients will get a free upgrade to Mail-Logic. The feature list for Mail-Logic is very long, and there will be a new web site for it soon. We have designed Mail-Logic to compete with Constant Contact and other email marketing vendors. Mail-Logic can be used as a standalone solution, or it can be used within ANY existing web site. Pricing will be very competitive with national solutions. Mail-Logic is built as a module that runs on our Team-Logic framework, which means that it takes only minutes to deploy the newsletter server for new clients.

New eCommerce Engine – Store-Logic 2.0
Our Store-Logic engine is undergoing a complete upgrade. The store administrator will work as a module under our new Team-Logic 2.0 framework, allowing us to deploy eCommerce store with new features quickly. Store customers will enjoy new data migration features, as well as enhanced UPS shipping, AJAX, XML, and other features. The new eCommerce administrator is much faster than before, and busy stores will be able to manage their stores more easily due to the AJAX technology. Since our CRM, eCommerce, and Mail-Logic programs all run under the same framework, we can custom-tailor an eCommerce solution that includes email marketing and sales tools for any size company.

More!
There is much more coming that we will release information on soon.

Christine Fairbanks, Delaware.Net’s new Creative Director, said; “Working with Kenny and Sonny from Monster Racing was a great pleasure. They offered the opportunity to see what they do and it was one of the greatest experiences I have ever known. I have a new found respect for the industry and the drivers. Kenny and Sonny are awesome hosts who are very knowledgeable about the sport and I have learned so much from them. I can’t thank them enough and look forward to working with them in the future.“.

Up Next – We have a killer retreat planned for June to Philadelphia to celebrate the completion of the Wesley College web site, and our upcoming feature on Adobe’s web site!

If you are an Internet professional that lives in Delaware, then this is what it is like to work for the area’s best web development and web application company. If you would like to join our growing team, visit our site and apply for a position today!

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.

We have ALWAYS done SEO work for our customers, we just never advertised it. Now that Google’s AdWords bidding engine is in wide use by customers, we are seeing a greater demand from customers to get help in managing their Google and Yahoo accounts as well as improve their site’s SEO and analytics work. For these reasons, we are going to offer ALL of these services in packages for our customers, effective immediately.

I am amazed at the number of companies that offer SEO and campaign management, that really are not qualified to offer the service. Even if they understand many of the tricks and theory, they either can’t handle the work, or they are implementing techniques that are horribly out of date. If you speak with an SEO company that thinks meta tags and a bunch of landing pages are still important – run for the hills. I just spoke to a fledgling SEO company last week that didn’t know how to FTP to a web server – sad. We can make a site come up higher in search engines whether we built it or not.

In the past, my mantra on this subject was that we did not want to offer the service because we could not guarantee results for customers. What I mean is, no one can REALLY guarantee that you will come up #1 in Google except for Google themselves. What is different now, however, is that the tools and the search engines themselves have advanced to the point where is now possible for us to greatly improve a customer’s ranking in Google and other engines. Almost to the point where it can be guaranteed. The demand from web site owners to come up high in google is an amazing thing to witness. I have customers that spend $100 per month to host their large e-store, but they spend $10,000 with Google PER MONTH (seriously). We can help these customers save a lot of that money, and also get them more sales from search engines.

A couple of weeks ago, I took a look at a large ecommerce site that we recently completed, only to find that the customer had stuffed the homepage of their site with keywords. The site looked terrible. And honestly, the way that they stuffed the keywords into the site was not going to have a significant impact on their Google rankings. I convinced the customer to stop by our office so that I could give them some tips on how to properly format their site to come up higher in Google. That meeting lasted just over an hour. After explaining the theory of what needed to be done, the client asked us to do all of the work for him. In about a week, we had gone through his LARGE web site and we made many changes to his site to make it more Google friendly. I am happy to report that he went from #5 to #1 in the rankings. He paid us for that work, and now we are doing the work on his other sites. His company is pretty sophisticated, and they are managing their own Google AdWords accounts.

There are a LOT of small businesses that don’t have the time to manage a Google account, much less go through the nitty gritty of SEO in their web site. For these clients, we can now manage all of these services automatically.

On the subject of SEO, in January 2007, we will launch the next generation of our commerce engine (currently called Store-Logic). This new version will have MOST OF OUR SEO METHODS BUILT-INTO THE SYSTEM. This means, that by simply USING our ecommerce engine, your site should come up high in Google. It will also automatically generate Google Sitemaps, Google Conversion tools, Google Analytics, SES URLs, and much more. The new engine has a new name, and it will be called “Commerce Engine”. The domain will be www.ce.net. There is a feature coming to this engine that is so amazing, I can’t put it in the blog. Watch our site for the press release, and when you see the press release you will be shocked. That is all I can say about it right now.