So Google just came out and said that they are more actively punishing websites that copy website content from other websites: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/algorithm-change-launched/

I’ve long advised my clients against copying content from other websites. This practice, known as “blanding”, makes your website content appear as content that Google has already seen before. A best practice has been to always write your own website content. But people are either too lazy, or too busy, to set aside time to write new website content. We’ve known that this blanded content could hurt your website’s search engine performance for some time. Now it is going to hurt it even more, and this is probably a good thing overall for website owners and those who write their own content. It will also be very bad for those who cheat and copy articles and other content for use on their website. Syndicated sites are now going to be more vulnerable as well.

More after the jump.

At Delaware.Net, my website development firm, We have been able to directly measure the effects in recent years of how websites that are updated regularly – namely blogs, act like traffic magnets for Google. Unfortunately, this has made blogging programs such as WordPress gain quite a bit of fame for the very modest features that they possess. True content management systems are still a much better solution for managing websites. We’ve also seen WordPress become a HUGE hacking target, and I will cover that in an upcoming post.

If frequent content updates to websites with unique well-written content make them come up higher in Google, then it makes sense to assume that websites that aren’t updated should drop in the Google search engine result pages (SERPs). When we let our websites go without content updates, and also our blogs, we see a direct drop in traffiic. Likewise, when we add new content to our sites (we have 8 websites), the inbound traffic from search engines jumps dramatically. We have passed this information on to customers, who understand that they need to keep their sites updated.

This news from Google is quite interesting, because they are admitting that is possible for websites that that copy website content to somehow come up higher than the original author’s website. Scary stuff. I am glad they are closing whatever loophole has been exploited. As companies look to outside firms to help them with social media, blogs, copy writing, and content management, the lesson here is to make sure that those outside firms aren’t re-posting content across multiple websites. If you hire employees in-house to help with marketing, it is becoming increasingly important to hire the candidates that have superior writing skills, all other factors being equal. And make sure that they aren’t stealing content.

I know a CPA firm locally that signed up for article content for their email newsletter. They didn’t have time to write their own tax tips, so they subscribed to a service that created a newsletter that they could put their name on. They used that same content as news articles on their website. With this new change to Google’s algorithm, that content will actually harm their website, because the content will be on MANY websites.

When I talk about syndicated websites, and how they are at risk, here is what I mean. Imagine you are an auto dealership owner, or a real estate broker. Those industries have hundreds of turn-key website solutions that are marketed to them daily. It is possible for them to turn-key a website, and have the template-based design company give them content. These websites that are using content across multiple websites are “syndicated”. A car dealership that came to us for help recently had a syndicated website that never got significant traffic from Google. By giving them a custom design, helping them write their own unique articles, content, and tips, they saw a huge spike in traffic from Google. But alas, it is hard for many companies to keep that going. That is why they need a relationship with a professional website design firm that will meet with them regularly to test their website’s performance. That is what I do for a living.

Lessons from this article:

• Always write your own content for your website.
• Never steal articles or content from other websites.
• If you wish to share content that you find online, link to the original article and write your content to go along with it.
• When hiring employees, start to judge how well the employee can write business articles and content. Just as doctors need to have articles published in medical journals to gain respect, the same is true of other professions posting articles online. Any company could take better advantage of their expertise by publishing articles online.
• Create a schedule to keep your content fresh and current.
• Meet with your design firm for a performance checkup every three months.
• Never settle for a syndicated template website with syndicated content, because it won’t perform well on Google.
• Get a quote from Delaware.net to make your website high performance.

A lot of business owners tend to get the wrong idea about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and how it can help their websites. Years ago, when every web page in your site was built by hand, your web developer had a dramatic impact on the search engine performance of your website. But today, the complete opposite is generally true – Content Management Systems (CMS) tend to have fantastic optimization for search engines BUILT-IN. This puts more of the burdon and responsibility of search engine performance on the website owner/author, and less on people actually coding up your website.

More details after the jump

Can more be done beyond writing good content to help your site’s traffic? Aren’t there little secret tweaks that can be done to your site’s code to make it come up higher in Google and other search engines? Well, sure. But it doesn’t work like it did in the past.  Years ago, you could focus on a dozen or so key strategies to optimize a website for search engines. But those key elements (i.e. page titles, heading tags, link titling, sitemaps, etc) are now just considered best practices, and are generally built-into the CMS that your site runs on. So it then becomes a garbage-in = garbage-out type of thing in regards to your content’s quality, uniqueness, and frequency of updates. Choosing the right mix of keywords, using analytics, and managing content in a more proactive way are crucial to your website’s performance, yet most companies are too lazy to do this work.

There ARE other things that can be done to help SEO, but they are tedious, take a lot of work, and may still not make your website come up higher. Why? Because instead of a dozen main things that Google and other engines look at, they are now looking at HUNDREDS of aspects of your pages, including traffic, age, inbound links, page speed, and off-page SEO factors that a small business owner can’t easily change. What is the easiest way to hit all of those attributes at once? Write good content. There is a lot more to it, but it isn’t just keywords any more. We tell our customers all of the secrets to help with this.

But business owners don’t want to hear that there isn’t some magical SEO trick. In their mind, there MUST be a magic silver bullet that will make their website come up high in Google results. All they need to do is find the right developer to make that happen. This myth is the reason why there are countless search engine optimization, search engine marketing, campaign management, and other firms out there that will take your money, promise the world, and they won’t back their services up with guarantees of any kind. It is simple supply and demand. And from time to time, these firms call us to work on their client’s websites, and in 5 minutes we can tell that they don’t know much at all about SEO. They are simply selling hype. And people are buying it, so they churn through their dissatisfied customers with no end in sight.

Mark my words, as we move from the Information Age (relying on geeks) to the Participation Age (creating your own voice online with content), search engines will continue to show “live” results for websites that have a pulse. So your website beterr be “alive”. Also, just because you might get some traffic with a higher search engine result, that doesn’t MAKE PEOPLE BUY. You still need a well-designed website that has the necessary design features and applications that help people to use your website. It takes time, management of the site, analytics, and a strategy.

We are great at SEO. It is built into all of our applications. But instead of looking for a keyword strategy that might get you a few more hits, we would rather help you to design an online marketing plant that will get you more SALES. Sales beats HITS any day of the week.

I recently got this email from a mortgage broker salesperson that wants to build a website to generate mortgage leads:

“I want to design my own web site so I can be on the major search engines and have the ability to have realtors put their listings on my site. I hope to generate leads on a consistant basis. I am working on a limited budget to get started. I have some quotes from national web designers but would like to deal with a local Delaware company.”

My response is after the jump

Mortgage brokers and Realtors have to be very careful in how they interact. If they are not careful, they could be breaking federal rules that protect the public in how Realtors are compensated by mortgage brokers. I will break down this inquiry so that it might help other mortgage brokers that wish to use the web to generate leads.

“I want to design my own web site so I can be on the major search engines”

Do you want to design it yourself? Or do you want a design firm to design it for you? I am sure he means that he needs someone to design it for him. The next part of the sentence highlights the major problem with how the public perceives how search engines work. They assume that the web designer is the sole person responsible for making the website come up high in search engines. This was once true, but now it is only 50% (or less) true. The building of the website and entering content from the get-go can be done using understood Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques, but all websites require ongoing content updates to be successful in organic search engine results. The problem is, most website owners won’t add content to their websites after they are built, so they will drop like a rock in Google after they are launched. “Being Found” on search engines isn’t the same thing as ranking high, and ranking high takes time and commitment from the website owner after the site launches. The good news is that our CMS is fantastic at SEO. So if you have a decent amount of content to get started, your site should get found and perform well.

“and have the ability to have realtors put their listings on my site.”

It is easy to use our Content Management System to add real estate listings to a website. In fact, we have a pretty neat module in our CMS that we call the “Listing App” that can be used for rentals, commercial, farms and land, residential, and apartment listings. It works great. But again, there are problems with the goal stated above. Realtors WON’T spend the time to place listings onto a new website that has zero traffic. Especially one that doesn’t rank in Google anywhere. And one that doesn’t already have a bunch of homes in it. Expecting Realtors to log into a ghost town website and spend time logging in, uploading photos, etc. is just not going to happen. Part of the reason is because in most real estate offices, there is an office manager or full-time employee that puts all of their listings into the local MLS system. Try asking that employee to go to a NEW website and add listings a third or fourth time on top of what they are already doing – good luck with that. Perhaps the easiest way to accomplish this goal would be to go to public MLS sites (there are many) and find the URLs to the homes that you want to market. You could have the Realtors send you the MLS number of the home in question, and you could do the rest. But do you have that kind of time?

“I hope to generate leads on a consistant basis.”

Good goal. Leads will come when the website has traffic. Traffic doesn’t come by adding keywords to a shell of a website. The website will need significant content. Content that is unique. Content that is updated regularly. The site will need inbound links from other websites. Google tracks how websites link to each other, and without any inbound links, your site won’t appear popular or important to Google. Saying that you want to generate leads is the same thing as an overwheight person saying “I want to lose weight”. It is a good goal. A good web designer would be like a personal trainer in that regard. If you show up and do the work with us, you will get the leads. But if you just buy a gym membership, or in this case a basic small website, and you don’t put in the work, you won’t get the results you seek.

“I am working on a limited budget to get started.”

Surprise, surprise.  These are words that no web design firm wants to hear. However, with recent advances in CMS technology, it is possible to get a website online in several days, while still having the same advanced CMS that we use to build massive websites for large organizations. So you are in luck here. But you will still need to spend some time learning to manage your site, no matter what solution you choose.

“I have some quotes from national web designers but would like to deal with a local Delaware company.”

This is very nice to see. We have a lot of local customers, and we like to do business locally when we can as well. We also have customers from across the country, but it all adds up. I would guess that based on your inquiry, most of your quotes will come from companies using templates on top of free CMS software. You will get a template site that won’t scale like our solution will. I’d be happy to help you succeed online, but keep in mind that mortgage brokers are not allowed to compensate Realtors for leads, as this is a federal law.  As a licensed Delaware Realtor, that is something that I know a little bit about. I doubt that you will find another web design company owner locally that also has a real estate license.

My goal is to win new business, but also educate potential customers so that they understand the risks and demands that are required to be successful online.

Questions or comments about this post? Please sign up and comment below.

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.

You can lookup the registration on almost any domain name by using a “whois” search. A generic one can be found here: http://www.internic.net/whois.html. The whois search result will tell you when your domain name will expire. What most people don’t realize, is that domain names can be registered up to TEN YEARS into the future. If you are confident that you will be using your domain name well into the future, then you should register it for at least three years right away. The reason is because spammers and sploggers (people who generate splogs) only register their domain names for short periods of time, while legitimate businesses tend to register their domain names for more than one year. Search engines now look at this data to determine the trustworthiness of your website. In the case of Google, this data is used (in addition to other data), to give your site a trustworthiness ranking (The Google Page Rank).

What most people don’t realize, is that domain

names can be registered up to TEN YEARS into the future.

Back in the old days, all you had to do was to focus on creating Meta Tags and Page Titles for your website to come up high in search engines. Today, search engines are WAY WAY more sophisticated than that. Even things like your domain name registration can affect your online success. Adding a couple of years to your domain name won’t make you number one in Google search results, but it is one of many things that Google looks at.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Folks are now waking up to the power of blogs, and how they can help their company’s image, their search engine optimization (SEO), and how to better communicate with customers. Unfortunately, most people setting up blogs are too lazy to realize their true benefits. And guess what else? Mediocre web design shops profit from this laziness.

People always want a quick fix – like taking a diet pill instead of eating right and actually doing the exercise they need. Hey, that sounds like me! So… when most folks realize the power of blogs, they say “I need a blog”, and there are many hosting companies that are more than happy to set one up for them, just like me (I sell blogs like this one for $50 per year, which includes a domain name). But here is the bad news. A good, useful blog isn’t just software. A good, useful blog is one that has information in it that clients actually seek out because it is useful to them.

Web 2.0 web technology, such as blogs, is changing the way information is being distributed around the net, as search engines now process this content differently than regular web sites. In fact, entirely new search engines are emerging that threaten Google and Yahoo because they work differently, put the collaborative search power into the hands of the people, and they are VERY effective. While I can tell you all about these engines and how they work in another blog post, this whole new genre of search and marketing power is called social networking and social bookmarking.

Do hosting companies and little one-man web shops take advantage of all of these features for their clients? Of course not. They just say – “we can give you a blog, it will help your SEO”, and most people unfortunately take the bait and set it up without any additional help or consulting. What happens next is an inevitable one-way ticket to an empty blog web site. Gartner recently did a study where they announced that 200 million blogs are abandoned, and while the number sounds high to me, I can easily see why so many blogs are abandonded.
Some examples of how NOT to deploy your blog

This week, I checked out the web site of a company located near me, whose name I prefer not to mention. Their web site was recently redesigned by a graphic designer that doesn’t really understand SEO, social bookmarking, or Web2.0 programming. How do I know this? Easy – from my years of taking drab web sites and making them work better. What this company’s new web site became, unfortunately, is nothing but an online print brochure, with some free blog software and photographs thrown into it. They probably think it is great. But 4-5 years from now, if they are lucky, they will realize that they missed an opportunity to have a site that could have added a lot more value to their company.

This company’s web site has a blog in it that says it is a knowledge base for answering customer questions. But it is empty! All this does, is send web site visitors to a dead-end, and it shows the world that this company is not really serious about their web site. Lesson: An empty blog or forum is worse than no blog or forum at all.

The Realtor Blog

Then there is a Realtor that has a “blog” in his/her web site. This Realtor has an under-performing web site, complete with an annoying Flash intro movie. If you really want to self-destruct your web site, put a flash into in front of it. The Flash intro fad disappeared (thank goodness) almost as soon as it started, waaay back in 1999. After you suffer through the flash intro, you are greeted with a very basic web site that has a “blog” in it. It can barely be considered a real blog, because it doesn’t take advantage of any of the latest Web2.0 features that blogs need to work well, like tagging.
Why is this blog useless?

• It has only three posts in it.
• Someone along the way told this Realtor that a blog is a diary (that is how blogs originated), so he/she uses it as a personal political soapbox. It is OK to have some of this kind of content in your blog, but it shouldn’t be the only content in the blog.
• Instead of educating folks about real estate, the area, schools, financing, or home improvement, the blog has three negative posts that complain about how the media affects the real estate market.
• All three posts say “I am selling more homes now than ever, even though the media says things are so bad”. That may be true, but it smacks of desperation.
• As I mentioned above, it doesn’t have social bookmarking or social networking technologies in it. This means that no one will find the site from alternative search engines.
• There is no SEO technology in the blog, so traditional search engines such as Google won’t index it well.
• No customer-focused content

Everyone has heard of the old famous saying in real estate – “The three things that matter most in real estate are; LOCATION, LOCATION, and LOCATION”. Well, in the world of blogs and Web2.0, the saying goes like something like this: “The three things that matter most with blogs are; CONTENT, CONTENT, and CONTENT”.

Before you start writing content like crazy for your blog, remember – it takes the right combination of design, technologies, content, time, and persistence to get the most out of your blog. Don’t just blog because you feel that it is something you HAVE to do to market yourself online. That isn’t true. If you write your blog content with customers in mind, they will repay you with their business. If you would like for me to help you with your web site, give me a call.

The written content that is necessary to build the web site can come from a lot of areas, including brochures, interviews, videos, history, testimonials, product information, and more. When none of this information is available for the web site, then it might be time to employ a copy writer that can help you to write this content. Typically a professional copy writer will charge about $1,500 or more to help write the copy for a small web site. We know of several copy writers that we can contact if a client wants to go in that direction, but most of the time we end up helping the client to organize this content in one respect or another.

When planning your new web site, you should begin to gather and organize all of this content for your web developer, and it should all be provided in digital format (such as Microsoft Word).