What I have been warning customers about is that standard search engine optimization (SEO) as we all know it will start to go away in favor of real-time, updated content in your website that is constantly added on a regular basis. In other words, you won’t be able to add keywords to your website and wait to come up high anymore – it won’t work.   I ‘ve been preaching to customers and at networking events for some time that we are “leaving the information age, and that we are entering the participation age”.   This was the topic of my Ignite Sussex presentation a couple of months ago – that business owners need to consider who in their organization makes up the voice of the company’s heart and soul, and then pass them the microphone and let them talk to the world. Without telling your company’s story, you won’t have an easy time competing in today’s social-driven marketplace.

Even Google is feeling the social heat, where real-time news and information sources like Twitter, Facebook pages, and countless other online sources are competing to be the most timely source for certain information. So now, we have Caffeine.  Caffeine, is Google’s new secret sauce that helps them index a staggering amount of web pages simultaneously, so that they are updating Google search results with a much higher frequency.  This means that new content will enter Google faster, and older content will leave Googles top search results faster.

This is very good news for some, and very bad news for a lot of business owners.

Most business owners that I meet have a very hard time believing that there aren’t some secret magical tricks to coming up high in search engines.  They believe that if certain words are organized and linked just so in their site in just the right way, that they will dominate search results.   It is true that this is how it worked for many years, but with search results becoming more real-time, it will be impossible to constantly pay a search engine marketing company to tweak your site.  And lets be honest, “tweaking”your site will NEVER be as good as adding genuine, well-written content on a regular basis, that people will want to link to.

Truth is, SEO, and the search engine marketing companies that peddle their wares, have offered questionable value recently, because adding keywords to your website isn’t adding value.  It isn’t adding a soul to your site.  It isn’t making people come back to your site again and again.  SEO doesn’t make someone trust you, OR your website.  Also, if you get people to your site because of SEO alone, but the site isn’t designed well, doesn’t have decent content, is confusing to use, doesn’t look trustworthy, or has a multitude of other issues with it, NO ONE WILL BUY FROM IT!  But we see people time and time again that spend hundreds, thousands, and even tens of thousands of dollars per month (really) just to boost traffic to an under-performing website.  That is madness, stupidity, and a waste of money. Sites like this one that have a link at the bottom to every local city and town name are just trying to game the system to get traffic from Google.  Hopefully, we will see an end to this spammy strategy in the future.  To me, someone who knows what he is looking at, it makes your company look sleazy.  And I am not alone – as web users become more and more savvy, they can recognize a site loaded with keywords as a desperate attempt to gain traffic.

I say good riddance to SEO.   SEO is becoming automatic. This latest move by Google proves that this is where things are headed.  Want to know what to do to take advantage of this? Simple.  Hire better writers.   If you interview two prospective employees with equal credentials, hire the one who is a better writer. To me that applies to any position that involves use of a computer.  This is a REAL problem that honestly shocks me when I see it.  I’m talking about the number of people I meet that couldn’t write a simple business letter or article unless you held a gun to their head. Even then they probably couldn’t do it.   Those people…. the ones that can’t write and produce content…  Those are the people and the companies that should be scared about this new social marketing economy.  This economy, this public, and now search engines too, are demanding that you show your best stuff.  That you prove that you are an expert.  You can’t cheat with keywords and hope to milk the Google cow for money.

How big is this change with Google?  Its huge.  And its magnitude will sink in slowly as the rules for website “optimization” are again thrown out the window.  I think it is time that companies start to think about their own marketing voice optimization. This news about Google is GREAT NEWS for companies like mine.  Why? Because more people will soon realize that they need MULTIPLE PEOPLE in their companies working on their website content instead of just the IT guy or marketing person. THAT is how you will need to compete.  To have multiple people in your company editing your website content safely, you will need a solid Content Management System (CMS), like ours.

I remember how companies didn’t want to give their employees Internet access just 10 years ago.  “They will all surf the web all day!”  And that was a valid concern back then.  Today, we can’t imagine doing business without almost all employees having broadband.   We depend on the Internet.   And now, the Internet is demanding that you give something back to be noticed.  You can’t hide behind that old, tired brochure website.   You had better have good writers, AND good content, AND a Facebook page, AND a high-performance website, AND a blog, AND a twitter account, AND a good source of information to get noticed.  Or else you won’t get noticed anymore.

The Google Maps module is now live for all Delaware.Net CMS/Ecommerce customers as a free, automatic upgrade.    These automatic feature upgrades come about once per month (or more frequently), and this is one of the major benefits of using our CMS over other open-source solutions.    Free upgrades, free support, free training, and better integration.

Training videos for the new Google Maps builder are being uploaded today, so you will be able to see training videos directly in our on-demand help system.

These are not the reasons we want you to stop using Internet Explorer!

Last week, vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer Versions 6, 7 and 8 were exploited by the Chinese government in an attempt to hack into Google’s Servers. This is now very well documented all over the web. Last week, Google made headlines because they traced massive hacking attempts on their GMail mailboxes that originated in China. Google responded by threatening to block China entirely and shut down their operations in China. Why would China try to hack Google? Because certain human rights activists use GMail. The security holes that allowed these attacks are only part of the problems with IE.

The only reason that we don’t push the IE issue too much with customers, is because there are still archaic companies that are stuck in 1999 by forcing their employees or customers to use outdated technology that is just plain not safe. Probably the worst offender I have ever seen is TrendMLS.com, the company that currently has the contract for Delaware area real estate multi list services. This practice of standardizing on one browser needs to stop. Now.

Most people don’t realize that Microsoft creates their own standards for how they render web pages. This is changing slowly over time, and Microsoft has stated that their next generation browser (version 9), will pass most of the standards tests to render web pages properly. This literally can’t happen soon enough. The problem is that many, many, many people use old versions of Internet Explorer. IE6 is an incredible pain in the ass for web designers. As recently as 6 months ago, we had to spend days making a standards-based website work in IE6 with stupid coding tricks because a customer’s wife works for the State of Delaware and she states that the State of Delaware won’t let her upgrade her web browser. This is incredibly shortsighted and dangerous.

You have many options for a much faster, safer, and more fun web experience. What is the best web browser out there? That depends who you ask. Google Chrome is very fast, and Safari is very fast on the Mac. My main web browser is still Firefox. Firefox has regular updates, is very fast, and it has an amazing number of plugins that make it a joy to use.

Take a moment, and get a better browser now. Please?

Firefox: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html
Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/
Google Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome/

The new interface for the website was designed within the first week of the contract signing, and will begin moving online very soon.

Cities interested in upgrading their websites and gaining better management tools are encouraged to contact Delaware.Net at 888-432-7965, or you can inquire for a quote on our website at http://www.delaware.net/free-web-design-quote/.   Examples of our applications for municipalities can be found online at http://www.civic-logic.com.

Here are some of the differences between us and our competitors;

MUNICIPAL WEB DESIGN PRICING
Some municipal website design companies package websites into flat fees based on the number of citizens that live in the city/town in question.   This flat-rate pricing doesn’t work because smaller cities end up overpaying for their website, and larger cities end up paying more for add-on website modules to get a complete solution.    Delaware.Net’s fees for municipal websites is usually less than these other companies, and our proposals are more accurate because they are customized for each site.  Our one-time development fees for municipalities have ranged typically from $8000 for a smaller municipality up to $30,000 for a very large site (included dedicated servers, backups, GIS integration, and much more than the average website), with the average Delaware.Net project being closer to $10,000.   You could always spend much, much more, as evidenced by this quote given by CivicPlus.

3-YEAR TERM CONTRACTS?!?!
Other firms bundle design pricing with hosting over multi-year terms, selling the website services as a lease.  This can trap the municipality with a vendor over a long period of time, limiting their options.     A small city website project that we just won was quoted at $27,000 for a 3-year project from CivicPlus.   Our contract was under $9,000 for custom design and development, training, an Intranet, a request tracking system, email newsletter system, consulting, and more. We bill for our projects in three or four payments, so this is much more affordable.  We saved that small city over $14,000, and their site will also be completed much faster on our more powerful CMS.

CITY WEBSITE DESIGN
One of the challenges of building a custom website on a CMS is how to make the site not appear to look like a template.   If you look at the city website for the City of Cheyenne, Wyoming, you can see how a city website can look like a very plain, template-based website.  Should every page of your city website have a kid on a skateboard at the top of the site?   This is the difference between our company and others.   Our designs are custom, and we are not cranking out cookie-cutter designs.   Many times we hire local photographers at each city to get the best possible result.

CIVIC LOGIC CMS
Marketing speak aside, you have to really demo a Content Management System (CMS) before you buy it.  Your CMS is where you will be spending a lot of your time managing your website.    When you try these systems, ask yourself – “how easy will this system be for my employees to use?”.   If a system requires 6-12 clicks to accomplish editing a page, and our system takes 2-3 clicks, ours will save your employees a LOT of time over the other system.  All CMSs are not created equally.   We spent quite a bit of time looking at competing CMS solutions before we built ours, and it took us two years to get it just right.   Some systems, like CivicPlus, are simply a page management system for your website.  Others, like our CivicLogic system, are designed to be a true Intranet (secure staff website) for your staff, as well as being a CMS.    With a true Intranet website, you can securely add personnel documents, resources, file, pages, calendars, news, messaging, and much more for your staff.   Each department in your city can have their own private calendar and portal to share information.   This will save your municipality time and money, and get better adoption of the whole system from your staff.

MONTHLY CITY WEBSITE HOSTING FEES
Hosting from CivicPlus last year was generally $600 per month before they went to their bundled pricing.  That is a steep fee that still didn’t include all of their available modules. For example, you would have to spend another $100 per month AND a $1500 setup fee if you wanted their request tracking system.  A request tracking system is a VERY desirable system because it can be used to track complaints from citizens.  Our system includes a better request tracking system at no additional cost, a mass email newsletter system, and a real Intranet system for $150 per month.  That is a savings of $6600 per year!  For a better system!   It obviously isn’t all about price, so you should test both systems to see what is better for your city.

MOVING AWAY FROM CIVICPLUS
If you paid for a CivicPlus website, and you are tired of overpaying for your monthly fees, we can help.   Generally speaking, we can move a CivicPlus website to our CMS, Intranet, Newsletter, Request Tracking, and even our Project Management Module in a matter of two weeks.   The cost to move your site would be very low, and you would recoup that fee in a matter of a couple of months because our hosting fees are so much less than CivicPlus.  Your design files would also remain intact, so you wouldn’t have to pay for a new design.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Contact Me at 888-432-7965 x100 if you have any questions.   If you are looking to have a new website for your municipality, or if you are interested in moving away from an expensive CivicPlus solution, you can get a quote from us online using our free online quote form.

When I say that ecommerce is hard, I’m talking about running an honest to goodness custom ecommerce store that hopes to gross over $50,000 per month in sales using a custom-built website.   Stores that sell a couple of thousand dollars worth of goods per month are usually not profitable, but companies that are just now becoming serious about their ecommerce stores have to start somewhere.

How to tell if running an ecommerce website is simply not for you:

1. If you hope to drop-ship all of your products so that you can avoid dealing with shipping and packaging.
   If you have a full-time day job, and you hope to grow an ecommerce store on the side, prepare for your online store to be your second job.  You will need to dedicate several hours a day to your store.  Its also difficult for a business to just add commerce and walk away without a plan to manage and grow the online store.
2. You can’t designate a person at your company who can manage the store once it is built.
   Who will answer the emails that come in?  Who will answer questions from customers?  Who will handle returns.   Typically customers will try a small order with your store to evaluate your customer service before they spend a lot of money on your website.
3. You don’t typically check email more than once or twice a day, and/or you don’t have a smartphone.
   You have to be somewhat of a techie to be successful with an ecommerce site.  All successful ecommerce store owners that I have met have a smartphone with push email and internet access to monitor their store.   A cheap flip phone and no qwerty keyboard is a bad sign.
4. You don’t experience editing photos on your computer.
   Your product catalog must be full of great photos.   One photo per product is NOT enough anymore.  If your store has hundreds or thousands of products, you will be spending a lot of time resizing photos on your computer. If the cost and learning curve of a photo editing program is too much for you, then so is ecommerce.   You don’t need to be a photoshop expert, but it helpful to know how to resize, rotate, crop, and sharpen photos.
5. You can’t designate an area to take photos of your products.
   You will need to create a small photo booth to take product photos.   If you intend to steal product photos from other websites, then don’t build an ecommerce site.
6. You use personal email addresses (comcast, verizon) to run your business on.
   A legitimate ecommerce store should have email addresses at your domain name.    If you can’t use Outlook or some other program to check multiple email addresses, that is a bad sign.
7. You aren’t the type to do research online, to learn about the latest search engine optimization techniques.
   The best place to learn about ecommerce, search engine optimization, and more is the web.   If you have to call your web designer to learn about all of these things, that is a bad sign.   Certainly your provider can help you take things to the next level, but you need to be able to do some basic research on your own to save time and money.   There are a LOT of buzzword topics that you will need to learn about quickly to be successful with ecommerce; SEO, cart abandonment, visitor conversion, Landing Pages, Optimization, tagging, payment gateways, APIs, inbound linking, etc.
8. You think that keywords and meta tags are the secret to coming up high in Google.
   It is a myth that adding a few keywords to your site is all you need to do to get found in Google and other search engines.  What will you do to get quality website to link to you, for example?  You will need a plan for this, and that takes time and money too.  If you have a list of terms that you think your business should show in the top ten results under in Google, then you must work closely with your web design team from the beginning to make sure that your site is optimized for these terms.
9. You have never used ebay, or done online shopping on your own.
   Again, you have to be a savvy web user and shopper to know what makes a good shopping experience.
10. You can’t/won’t write descriptions of your products (all of your products).
    Quality original content is what can make your site stand apart from others.   Your store will need to convince shoppers to buy, so you will need well-written product descriptions.  If you don’t have time to write these, then ecommerce may not be for you.
11. The products that you are trying to sell are a commodity that can be found anywhere.
    The sites that make the most money that I have seen sell products that people seek out.   Usually these are very specific or hard to find items.   Parts websites aren’t very sexy, but they make a ton of money. You have to have a niche with your business so that people will seek you out.
12. You think that $100 a month to cover all of your store fees is too much money.
    Ecommerce is expensive.  Our ecommerce hosting framework starts at $50 per month for an ecommerce website.  Add onto that the cost of accepting credit cards, and the payment gateway ($10/mo), and the fees can add up.  This is without spending any money on adwords with Google.   Be realistic with your recurring fees, not just your store development fees.
13. You wish to emulate stores online that belong to multi-million dollar businesses, on a tiny budget.
    Look for stores online that more closely resemble what you are trying to create.   Do a lot of Google searches for related products to what you are selling.   See what the competition looks like.   While it might be tempting to want to emulate a multi-national corporation website, be realistic.
14. You don’t have a database of people to market to right away
    This is why brick and motar stores do so well online.  They can market to their existing customers.
15. Your project’s goals aren’t realistic.
    If you are trying to build an expansive website in a matter of weeks, it just wont happen unless you have an extremely small or template-based online store. If the store is very small, then your sales will be small, and you may not make enough to cover expenses.

If you have comment or questions about ecommerce success, please post a follow-up below.  I will answer your questions here.

Cities need to provide real-time bill payment options online

Municipal customers expect to find convenience features in their local municipal website. With the mass adoption of broadband, online banking, ecommerce, and web applications, it is no longer a novelty to add an online bill-pay system to a municipal website. Delaware.Net builds real-time online bill-paying services for small and large towns, as well as corporations and utility companies. When complete, city customers can look up their account online securely, and pay their outstanding balances using a credit card. We can integrate with any popular billing package that runs on an SQL database server, or that has an import/export API (Application Programming Interface). The API serves as a gateway that allows us to look up and insert successful payment information into a municipal billing system.

Who pays for credit card fees?

An important challenge we have seen in working with large municipalities and utility companies is determining who will pay the fees that merchant providers charge. To accept credit cards online, there will be typically two fees involved; the merchant account fee, which is a percentage of each transaction, and the payment gateway service (such as Authorize.net), which makes the transaction real-time in your website. If you simply tack-on these fees to the bill amounts that your customers are paying, then they will generally not use your online bill-pay system. Why? Because postage stamps are always going to cost less than the fees that you add to the transaction if they are percentage-based. Since your customers are able to gain convenience by using the website, and since your city employees won’t need to open paper envelopes and process checks (expensive in labor costs), the online fee amounts are generally a wash if the transaction amounts are under $500 on average. For this reason, you may want to limit the total amount that can be transacted through the website, to minimize fee exposure, or you can calculate your total cost of providing the online bill-pay service and incorporate it into your fee structures across the board.

How NOT to introduce online bill-pay to your customers

I witnessed one utility company that had a successful online bill-pay system, and then outsourced it all to a separate bill-pay company so that they would not have to worry about the fees any longer. The problem was, each bill had $20 tacked on as a service fee. It really looked and felt like a bait-and-switch to the utility company’s customers, because they would start to enter payment information and then get hit with the $20 transaction fee. As you can imagine, customers stopped using the service almost immediately.

How much are the credit card fees?

There are two primary fees involved in accepting credit cards online. The first is the payment gateway service, and the second is the merchant account fee.

The payment gateway service is straightforward and inexpensive. Typically they are $90 – $140 to setup, and then you have a $10 per month fee, and a 15 cent transaction fee. The payment gateway talks to the card issuing bank, the card companies (Visa, MC, Amex, Discover), and your merchant account. The payment gateway service is required for real-time transactions.

Merchant account fees are where things can get expensive. With fees generally between 1% and 3% of the total transaction amount, with the average being about 2.3%. In my opinion, a municipality should never pay more than 2% for merchant account fees. This is because merchant account providers use a risk assessment chart to calculate your fees. I have seen these charts, and you can find them if you do a web search. The lowest credit card fees are 1%, and this is typically the rate for a grocery store – they ALWAYS get the lowest rates. A typical mom-and-pop web business can get about 2.3%. As a municipality, your transactions are much more trustworthy than a typical online retailer. It is important to note that ALL MERCHANT ACCOUNT FEES ARE NEGOTIABLE so you MUST shop around.

Why you shouldn’t just sign-up for a merchant account from your bank:

A common mistake that I see is when an organization goes to their bank for a merchant account. This is because the vast majority of banks simply RESELL merchant accounts from one of the large merchant account providers. You should shop around and get a quote from several companies so that you can get the best rate. Even a fraction of a percent difference in cost can add up to big dollars in savings when you obtain a merchant account. I have dealt with MANY different merchant account providers over the years, and you need to be careful to make sure that they have experience with online transactions. Surprisingly – many do not. We have worked with PNC Bank corporate as a reseller of their merchant account, but we in the end, they too were simply reselling someone else. Today, we have a close relationship with a merchant provider that has superb rates, and they offer great customer service. I can’t post the name here, but contact me directly (888-432-7965 x100) and I can give you their name.

Integration with billing systems

While it may sound impressive to have a real-time synchronization between your billing system and your website, this is typically not how the two systems interact with each other. A batch import/export system that can be automated to run each day (or each hour) is much more reliable than a live data connection between both servers. This is the only way that we build our payment systems. The payment transaction is real-time, but the synchronization with your billing system is not.

Security and Data Storage

Unless requested by our customers, we do not store any credit card data or financial data that comes through the payment systems. We simply pass the transaction information to the payment gateways, and insert the “approved” or “declined” codes into the data tables that we synchronize with your billing system. All of our web accessible payment forms are secured with 128bit SSL security, which is the same as an online banking website.

If you have any additional questions about municipal online bill-pay systems, visit our website at www.delaware.net and shoot me an email.

This is why I am especially proud that we have been selected to build the new City of Rehoboth website. We were up against two other good firms for this project, and I am happy that we won. Our pitch for this project encompassed what we saw as the true needs for the city moving forward, including specialized hosting needs dynamic applications, and data security needs.

This is a special project for us, and it will use all of our latest web applications. The City of Rehoboth already uses our Team-Logic system for their Intranet, and the new website will allow us to integrate the two systems (website and Intranet) to provide a total end-to-end system for the city. One of the ideas that came out of our meetings with the city is very innovative, and we are underway now. Keep an eye out for this new site!

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.

Quality, Speed, and Cost – Choose Two!

If you go with a low-end CMS system, it might be fast to setup, and the price might be right, but your website will be a low-quality website. And if you factor in the time to customize it, that could then get expensive in a hurry.

Care should be taken to avoid a web design firm that charges a premium price for custom website development, then they turn around and install Drupal or some other low-end open system for their CMS solution. This is a way that a web desing firm can cut corners, and it is lying. We would never do this.

Another problem with the low-end open solutions is that they are higher profile targets for hackers. There are many examples of this that you can search for that show Drupal getting hacked, and other systems getting hacked. This is usually quite preventable if the systems are updated in a very regular manner, but the fact of the matter is that web desing companies that outsource their IT and hosting needs are much more likely to NOT update these systems. They build websites using these systems so that they can get them live quickly and turn a profit, but then the site (and the customer) gets neglected. This problem extends beyond CMS systems – it is also true of forum software and blog software.

Am I against open-source software? Heck no. We have our share of open-source software that we use at Delaware.Net, but there IS a trend away from it almost across the board, from operating systems to web development software, to application server software. Open source software is great if it is patched regularly, and if it meets a particular need. But sadly, most companies don’t do a very good job of updating.

Some folks assume that open-source software is somehow better because it is free and open, but this is just not true. To me, it is irresponsible for a web development firm to perpetuate that myth. Open source solutions shouldn’t be viewed as a software religion, they have to make business sense too. And when you actually track the time that it takes to make some open software work correctly, you find that it doesn’t always save you money in the long run. You also might be missing out on integration with your other business systems. Customers looking for a “quick and dirty” way to deploy and manage their websites might do OK with some of these solutions, but “quick and dirty” isn’t what our company is about.

So, you can go cheap with your CMS solution, or you can get one that is more custom to your needs, integrates with a nice custom design, and that doesn’t force you to log into three different interfaces to get your work done. And best of all your site will work better, and it will come up high in search engines.

Another advantage of our systems over other CMS systems is that ours is updated every month, with updates being seamless and free. Try geting your open-source system updated for free indefinitely by your hosting company (it doesn’t happen).

• FrontPage was a beginner tool, that professional web designers shunned.
• Adobe Dreamweaver is the defacto tool for professionals.
• Company Intranets became more critical to businesses, and yet most businesspeople are not web designers. So it made sense to make FrontPage into something even easier to use for web design newbies.
• Due to the last point, FrontPage because the built-in authoring tool for Microsoft Sharepoint (Microsoft’s limited Intranet product).
• Professional web site design requires tools that generate standards-based code, which FrontPage could not do.

Microsoft replaces FrontPage with “Expression Web”
For users that wish to build a web site, and who don’t need a basic corporate file-sharing Intranet like Sharepoint, Microsoft created a replacement tool for FrontPage called “Expression Web”. So far, it appears that this new program has been a colossal failure. Why do I say that? Because no one (and I do mean no one) asks for it. Back in the day, folks would go to Staples or their local office store and purchase FrontPage so that they could put up a web page quickly. Those days are gone. Those that need nothing more than an extremely basic web presence today can use online page-building tools to generate simple template-based web pages quickly.

More about template sites
Template sites built through a web interface have widened the divide between building a basic web presence, and building a professional web site. This divide means that it is both easier than ever to build a web site, and it is also harder than ever to build a web site. It all depends on what you call a “web site”. Domain registrars make a killing selling those template sites, and yet they really are hideous to look at. Superpages web sites that you can buy from the local phone book are also just as bad, and they fall into the template category. I stopped trying to talk first-time web site owners out of those template sites a long time ago, because if a quick and dirty web presence is all they feel that they need, then it will take a year or two of enduring zero business from the web before those web site owners smarten up and purchase professional web services from a firm like mine (Delaware.net). In a strange way, those template sites actually gain us customers because they serve to educate future customers of the value of a custom web site. Features like search engine optimization (making your site come up in Google) are sorely missing from template sites, and more web savvy customers realize very quickly that their template site is under-performing and is actually costing them money.

Web Video Overtakes Microsoft – Microsoft Responds
With the wild popularity of video on the web, thanks to sites like YouTube, Microsoft has been left behind in this important era of the web. Since Microsoft’s arch-enemy is Google, and Google bought YouTube, the situation has looked even worse for Microsoft. This is another reason why FrontPage went away. For example, you can’t even VIEW the web site for Expression Web without installing a “Microsoft Silverlight” plugin into your browser. What the hell is Silverlight? It is Microsoft’s attempt to complete with Adobe Flash – the web’s standard video player. Once Adobe got Flash to play video, it put another nail into Microsoft’s Media player (my least favorite video player). For Microsoft to get adoption of SilverLight, they have tied it very closely with ExpressionWeb.

If you still use FrontPage, its decision time
Since FrontPage is going away, you are going to need to get a new tool for building web sites. If a low-tech tool for a simple web site is what you want, then I would use Adobe Contribute, which is an easy to use tool for Creating simple web pages and Intranet content. Several licenses of Contribute can allow a small team to create a static Intranet that is a good start for having a basic Intranet. If you want to build web pages for a living, or if you are learning web design in college, then you need to start using Dreamweaver, Adobe design products (Photoshop, Illustrator), and Microsoft Visual Studio. Those are the tools that the pros use.

Lastly, there are other alternatives and hyrbids to all of these choices. It is now possible to have a web site designed fairly inexpensively, which can also have robust applications to help your business run. At Delaware.Net, we have many of these applications ready to install in your web site – like calendars, e-commerce, signup forms, file management, and more. If you have a site built in FrontPage, we can help you to come up with a newer, better way to manage and improve your web site.

Do I hate Microsoft?
No. We have a lot of Microsoft servers in our data center, and we are adding more every month. Most of the workstations in our office also run Windows, with the exception of some graphic design workstations that are Macs. But when it comes to the web, web authoring, or Microsoft’s attempt to compete with Flash, they don’t have a chance. Even their Internet Exploder (Explorer) browser is a CONSTANT headache for web designers because it is not standards-compliant. So how are we supposed to believe that MS will make their developer tools compliant, when their web browser isn’t? The answer is that they won’t. You can see the frustration of web developers over Internet Explorer in an article that Computer World just released, and if you read the second part of it you can see how much hassle IE causes developers. Every chance I get, I try to encourage customers to use Firefox instead of IE.

Here is the site: http://www.calfires.com

Note that it has a great Google map mashup, feeds, and more. This is a great way for municipalities to get information out using mapping.

I learned about the site from a government webmaster. There are some good ideas about sharing, syndication, and more with this simple web site.

In a nutshell, here is the problem:

Let’s say for the purpose of this example your domain name is “MyCompany.com“.
A potential customers hears about your company, and decides to check out your web site and learn more about your company.
So the customer goes to their web browser and types in “http://MyCompany.com”, and hits “GO” expecting to see your web site.

Then – Nothing. Your site doesn’t appear.

Realizing their mistake, more savvy web users realize that they forgot to put “www” before your domain name. So if entered correctly, the domain would look like this: http://www.MyCompany.com. But many, many, many people are too lazy to enter the entire domain name into their browser. You may assume that both domains are the same, but in actuality they are not. The “WWW” part of the domain name is called the hostname, or the subdomain. These are setup on the web server, and have to be entered by your hosting company when they setup your web hosting.

All about subdomains

It’s important to note that when you buy a domain name, your are buying the MyCompany.com portion, but you can put WHATEVER YOU WANT as a subdomain in front of the domain. At the very most basic domain name setup, you should have the WWW and empty hostnames setup so that they both reach your web site. But there are other subdomains that you should consider for your web site, as each subdomain can be used for a part of your web site, an application (like a blog), or for separate web sites entirely.

Sample subdomains

• WWW – again, every site has this to reach your home page. Sample: http://www.MyCompany.com
• MAIL or WEBMAIL – this is an easy way to create a link to your webmail program, or your email server. Sample: http://mail.MyCompany.com
• BLOG – obviously enough, you can use a subdomain to point to your blog. Sample: http://blog.MyCompany.com
• HELP – this is an easy way to give your customers a reference site for help in using your site or services. http://help.MyCompany.com
• CLIENTS, MY, or EXTRA – this is an easy way to make a client area where your clients can log into your web site. We use “extra”, which is short for “Extranet”
• INTRA, or STAFF – use these subdomains to create an Intranet site for your staff to access. Call Delaware.Net for information on how to create an Intranet.

Do lots of subdomains help with search engine ranking?

No. Neither does purchasing many domains. I’ve seen companies purchase domain names with the word “delaware” in them hoping this will help them with local search ranking, and it doesn’t. Domains help with memorizing how to get to your company’s web site, and that’s it. Its better to have one good domain name than to have many. I own “delaware.com”, and it is amazing how many people simply type it in to reach it. A big portal is a coming to that site soon.

So don’t forget…

Make sure all of your sites come up without the “WWW” in front of them. It can save a lot of missed web traffic! Good Luck.