Web Class Blog

We’ll be teaching another class this fall that qualifies for the Web Development Certification. This time it is a bit different than last fall - we are building the site in a simple content management system instead of in HTML. It speeds things up a bit, allows us more time to learn other skills which help make the site more effective.

This system is more suitable to small businesses who need to have an administrator to handle the site, but who want someone else to do the page updates, or for people who want to be able to make simple updates to their sites.

One advantage is that no software is needed other than image editing software to handle the images. You don’t have to keep buying updated versions of HTML software, because it is built into the system.

The software we install onto the web hosting account is free - so updates never cost you any more than the time to go get them. Nice little perk from choosing good Open Source software.

We’re kind of excited to be able to offer this option, which wouldn’t have been available even two years ago.

One of the major aspects of marketing that gets people down isn’t that it is difficult. In fact, most of it is pretty easy. But it is tedious because you have to do the same things over and over.

Even for us - marketing other people’s sites is tedious.  Of course, we can see the money more easily then, so it is easier than doing it for our own sites, where the money comes in much later. If it were more difficult, it would probably be more interesting.

But 90% of marketing consists of nothing more than doing what you know to do.

• Show up at the event.
• Submit another batch of links.
• Write an article and post it.
• Analyze your site traffic and conversion patterns.
• Re-optimize your website for search terms.
• Reply to one more question that you’ve replied to 100 times already.
• Hand out one more business card that you know someone will just lose or trash.
• Return one more phone call that probably won’t go anywhere.
• Make one more round of the social networking sites to drop comments.
• Post one more article to your blog…

It is all very boring after a while. So we get lazy, or we only do the ones we feel like doing - which is ok, as long as you do enough things, but which kills a business if you only do one thing and procrastinate the rest.

Once you have the text written and the logo designed and the literature created, it is just doing it. Over and over.

Our clients fall into two groups - those who do as we instruct (or who pay us to do it for them), and those who do not. We see them succeed or fail based on that effort. If they do it, they learn and succeed. If they do not, their business sits there without growth and without sales.

90% of life is showing up - and the same is true of marketing.

So what is an internet class anyway? Think you know? Think again!

An internet class may be any one of the following:

• A text course delivered via email.
• A text course delivered via website.
• A video or audio course delivered via email or website.
• A full modular class delivered through a system that also delivers quizzes and issues a grade and certificate of completion.
• A class delivered via chat, or video conferencing.
• A class hosted by an organization, broadcast through intranet to another location, utilizing specialized equipment.

And the options are growing daily!

The thing is though, that when you read that someone offers an “internet class” you’d better find out just what it is, because there are many definitions, and value is different from one to another.

I started selling off websites last year, because I had too many. No time to keep up with them all. Today, I have only 10 fewer domain names than I had a year ago, in spite of having sold over 20 websites. Something is wrong with this picture…

Yesterday, we finished the design for a new site - American Small Town (http://www.americansmalltown.com, of course). This one was built more as a promotional tool for our client sites. Our focus has changed some.

So now, we are finishing the last content details to have it go live. Which brings up the reason for the post:

• When do you decide that it is ready to promote?
• How do you begin to do that?

We begin promoting when we feel that there is enough there of value to be useful. With this one, we have the basic site pages in (all the legal stuff), and we have the basic directory structure done (categories for 50 states). We’ll have about 10 towns in by Monday, and that will be enough to show what the site is all about. We’ll keep adding towns after that.

We’ll start promoting by doing things like this - slipping in an announcement into our existing blogs and adding a link to our existing websites. Easy to do. We’ll also start submitting them to various directories and other websites.

The first effort in that begins with our own sites - we leverage our own sites and use our existing market influence first, then we expand to marketing beyond that.

This site is eligible for types of marketing that others are not - it is a directory. Which means it is eligible for submitting to directories of directories.

Each time a new site is launched, you use the tactics first that are easy, then do the harder stuff.

We’ll have another site to launch in a month or so, and when we do, we’ll go through the same process. Determine when it has genuine value and then plug it into our network first.

Our new networking site, Front Porch Folks, recently went to Public Beta status. So what does that mean?

It is really just a pretentious techie way of saying that a site is good enough to be publicized and tested by lots of people, but not yet ready to be taken seriously as a fully marketable business. Big sites do this to get people to the site before they’ve worked out all the bugs, and to put it through natural stress testing to find the rest of the bugs.

It works too - on both counts. If you have a fairly complex site that you know you need to have a lot of people visiting before anyone is going to take it seriously, a Public Beta phase can help to get it out there and noticed enough to be a contender. This is especially important for membership sites - you need members to get members, so you can offer free memberships during Public Beta, then charge when you go to full launch.

You can go to Public Beta as soon as you have enough of value to be worth something, but not quite full value. That value may be, in part, determined by traffic volume. Public Beta can last an indetermined amount of time. It gives you time to get the feel of things, and to see how the site performs under fairly natural settings.

Front Porch Folks is a Networking Community. It has some twists on the normal one though, so it catches people’s fancy even in its infancy. But we are still doing a Public Beta, until we get 500 members, because value depends partly on the number of members. Membership is free until then, later it will have a low yearly fee - because we want to keep it affordable for our target market.

Opening the doors to a Public Beta is a good option for a complex site, and provides a sometimes much needed transition between ready for something, and not quite ready for everything!

If you own a website, it pays to stay on top of the rules for online trade. The FTC website has a number of regulations that you are required to comply with.

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/ruleroad.shtm

Most of them are common sense, dealing with honest disclosure, which a business owner with high integrity will do anyway. There are a few that are specific to certain businesses though, that you might not think of.

Most of these regulations have been created to avoid misunderstanding in communication  - they require you to list things in ways that people cannot mistake for something more than what it is.

Once again, integrity is the greatest protection.

Shortcuts just don’t work in the web world. A blog created from automatically scraped material just doesn’t earn or grow. Sadly, that doesn’t stop people from doing them.

Worse, many of these people are selling the service of creating a blog for someone else, and just putting together a shoddy scraped blog. Search engines don’t like them, because they aren’t original. People don’t like them either.

Many site owners have no idea that blogging has to be done in a certain way in order to be profitable. When someone promises them a cheap and fast solution, they jump on it, because they think that blogging is easy. And it is, but getting traffic to a business from it ISN’T easy. It isn’t cheap if you pay someone else to do it either!

No blog owner of intelligence and morals is going to approve comments that have nothing but a quote of their own scraped content. Why should they? The backlink doesn’t help them one bit, since search engines will disregard it. The link to the other site from theirs though, is potentially harmful.

So now we have this network out there of scraped blogs - they exist solely for the purpose of automatically seeking out and reposting bits from legit blogs. Eventually, the only links they’ll have back are links from other scraped blogs. Everybody frantically auto-scraping and auto-posting and nobody listening.

Pretty much a waste of time… But then, shortcuts usually are.

Blogging for Business is not nearly as much fun as summer vacation. Our class this summer will be postponed until fall, due to inadequate enrollment.

Part of me feels discouraged, of course, but the other part of me sighs in relief that I, too, have more time to enjoy my summer! The garden begs attention, the kids want water fights and icecream,  and it is so much more beguiling than long hours installing and configuring WordPress!

Have a great summer… and join us in the fall when we bring it back.

I’ve been sickened by designers who have to use Flash for the whole site, or site owners who think they have to have it just because it is there. Using something because it is there is unprofessional, because it may actually impede the goals of the website. The function and purpose of the site comes first, over any desire to use a cool new toy.

I think with each new thing that people can do, they go through a phase of doing it just because they can, and everybody thinking it is neat that they can - look at the pre-WWII cartoons. Most aren’t even funny, they have these characters doing stuff on screen just because they can. They didn’t put much thought into how to really make it entertaining, they could make those characters move, and that was all they tried to do.

So now we have things like Flash, PDFs, Movies, Audio, etc. And all these people out there saying, “you just GOTTA do this!!!” without thinking about the purpose of the site, the target of the business, or the needs of the visitor.
After the shiny wears off, people will start thinking more logically about it - at least, the pros do.

No matter what the new toy, we always should consider whether it will add to the site and to the purpose and function.

There are very few sites that can benefit from Flash headers at this point. And even fewer that can benefit from any other Flash elements which are unfriendly to search engines and the disabled alike.

But there are tons of dynamic features which can benefit a site when they have a need to automate certain features, or break the hourly rate barrier, communicate more efficiently, etc. No feature is right for everybody, and each one has to be weighed carefully, the cost against the benefit. The major problem we see with many so called professionals is that they are recommending the features without mentioning the long term cost, so the site owner gets stung with a site that isn’t really what they needed.

Select carefully. Each choice has a long term impact.

We’ll be continuing to offer the Intermediate Images class this fall, but we’ll also be starting a new class on Starting an Online Business.

The Online Business course will be a short one, and will cover how to recognize a good business, some online business norms, and a personalized brainstorm and planning session to help get each student off on the right foot.

Our Web Development course this fall will not be the usual HTML class either. It will be a replacement for that, which will make creating a site faster and easier to maintain. We’ll be teaching people how to build a site in a simple CMS, and how to keep it going.  The advantage is that it does not require HTML editing software.

We’ll be starting summer classes next week, and are already looking forward to the fall lineup!