The Web Authority

Okay not the far off future, but for this summer specifically. There are some new technologies that are emerging and I want to learn more, so here is my laundry list of things that I am actively and aggressively going after to learn, implement on my own website, and am testing to use for clients.

Rich Snippets

When Google speaks I listen. Recently it was announced that Google was embracing Rich Snippets. There is a special syntax to use that is XML based for creating your snippets and embedding them in your source code and I want to review, try them on my own website, and see how the search engines really use the information. Will it help in anyway with what is shown in the results, does it give a website a bump over the others? Whatever I find out, I’ll make sure to share with you here. Learn more about Rich Snippets at Search Engine Land.

Spry Features

I moved to Dreamweaver and am now introducing several new XML technologies into my own website. Right now I am working on creating and XML feed to show my online web design Portfolio. Dreamweaver makes it pretty easy to do this stuff, but the applications for other content and sites may be really cool, so I am chinking away at learning more about the use of accordion panels and data sets. I am already heavily using the Spry drop down and fly out menus. They are nice and very search engine friendly, but I would like to skin them better with background graphics for a more custom look. I’ll point to my projects when I am ready to show them off.

Web Slices

This is another brand new technology introduced with Internet Explorer 8.  Web slices are little snippets that you can change and people can subscribe to to review in their browser favorites bar without visiting your site. Could be a very cool way to show discounts, feature products, or snippets of content that change regularly. I think that this will have really cool application for websites and want to understand them more. Here is some information from CoDe magazine on how to build a web slice.  I’m not sure what search engines are doing with the information yet, but just like RSS feeds this could be a huge new technology that will bloom in the months to years to come.

You can visit our e-newsletter online here: http://www.mccordweb.com/e-newsletters/2009/july-09.html or you may want to consider subscribing to get our newsletter in your inbox.

Topics for this month are:

Graphic Electric Inc. Moves to the Web

Facebook Advertising Reviewed: Is It Worth the Money?

Microsoft Releases a New Search Engine Called Bing

As always you’ll get my candid comments and review as well as notes on special features or things to keep an eye on.

I had a client tell me the other day that I needed to create a web design and AdWords package all rolled into one on top of offering my Quick Launch website pricing with all custom design features for his needs.  Well, packaging sometimes can be good, but every business person should evaluate what packages make sense for their business first.

For us, we are niche suppliers. My firm specializes in organic placement and the creation of Web Authority websites. That means, great website design full of SEO built from the ground up and content rich. You will pay for this kind of website truthfully, but with nearly nine years of experience we know our stuff! Our typical client will spend about $4,000 to $5,500 for the initial website and then continue to add content and enhancements to it over time. At around the end of one year, we typically will have excellent organic placement on Google and a marketing machine built for the client that is propelling their business forward.

Many clients will tie the original design work in with our blogging services, article marketing, and Google AdWords services after the website is launched. However initially rarely do we sell all items as a package together. I really feel that I want to see what is needed after the site is launched before we recommend the next step.

I have long felt that the best approach for businesses is to allow them to “cherry pick” our service offering based on what their needs are and their budget is. I have rarely created big packages as I feel that each client is different and each persons need is different. We want to help the client make great decisions not based on a package we sell, but based on where they can get the most “bang for their buck”.

This is a question that I have been pondering. Does arrogance come with success? Possibly arrogance will lead to your downfall. My husband and I have a private joke… we call business arrogance the “Waldorf Mentality”.

We’ve lived in several different states over the years - Ohio, Florida, Texas, and now Maryland. When we moved to Maryland just outside the DC area we were amazed at how unfriendly the people in the area were in comparison to the other places that we have lived. We’ve lived here now over 10 years and our perception has not changed. In fact, as we have chatted with other transplants, we’ve found that they share our viewpoint.

I am not sure whether it is a “clannish” kind of Southern Maryland thing, where natives have never lived anywhere else and feel that the unfriendliness and outright rudeness sometimes is the norm, but it can be shocking to say the least. For the two of us, we call it the “Waldorf Mentality”. That means, “we are so busy and so000 very important that we do not have time for you or for your little need”. Man, I have to say for businesses who embrace this arrogance, this is a real growth crusher.

It is easy to slip into the “Waldorf Mentality” - hey I live here and I see that sometimes I even get that attitude too. When business is great and clients are really rolling in, you can forget your best business model which by the way my husband and I used to call the “Southern Suck Up”. (This one is the opposite extreme where the customer is always right and you do anything to keep a customer.)

Now, I strive to stay humble and focused on what the customer needs. I may not be the best match sometimes for a customer and am not afraid to say so, but when I am a match, I roll out the red carpet and work my best to be the best “partner” for success ever. So what mentality have you embraced? Is success and the arrogance that comes with it becoming your downfall?

There’s still time, but you should act quickly. You can get an easier URL to remember and share for your Facebook page. Facebook launched the vanity URLs several weeks ago, so many of the best and smallest names are already gone, but there is no time to waste.

Next time you log into your Facebook account you will probably see a list of URLs that Facebook suggests for you. You can even check some of your own selections. If you are like some of our clients, you clicked this closed and now that you want a vanity URL you cannot find where to get one in the Facebook control panel settings.

Here’s how to get your vanity URL:

1. Log into your Facebook account.

2. Enter this URL in your browser: http://www.facebook.com/username/ 

3. This will bring up the Vanity URL screen and allow you to select your vanity URL.

So what’s the big deal? Well my vanity URL is www.Facebook.com/nancy.mccord that is a whole lot easier to remember than what it was before with a huge string of numbers and characters.

For those of you who want to get going with Twitter but don’t know where to start or are too busy to tweet (write a Twitter post) we’ve created our Twitter Executive program. Now we know that this program is not for everyone, and that many of you can set up and do Twitter successfully all on your own, but this program is for the person who wants to outsource Twitter.

With our Twitter Executive program you will get:

• Twitter set up and account configuration
• Consultation with Nancy McCord to understand your business objectives
• Integration into your blog, website, and other social networking platforms
• Personal training on using TweetDeck
• Training on how to use Twitter effectively
• One business week of multiple posts per day on Twitter
• List of our resources to watch for great content to tweet about

If you really don’t want to do your own tweets after set up, for very select group of clients we will ghost Twitter. You can find out more about these two programs and our pricing by visiting our Twitter services page on our website.

Do you have multiple Twitter profiles like I do? Then HootSuite is just right for you. I have a Twitter account for my business under the name mccordweb and due to popularity and name recognition I now have a second Twitter profile - nancymccord. For me it is a problem to do tweets in two places - too time consuming.

With HootSuite, I can post to both Twitter accounts or just one account with one click. I can even schedule tweets to one or both whenever I want from one online control panel. In fact that is the beauty of HootSuite, it is an online application that really saves you time. You can have as many Twitter profiles set up as you desire. Then when you want to tweet, just click on the profile icon to assign where your tweet will be published. It’s easy!

HootSuite even allows you to review @ replies and direct messages for each profile on one very handy screen. For me, the power Twitter user, this is excellent news!

Now the reality of the situation is that HootSuite does not replace TweetDeck for me at this point, hopefully TweetDeck will add a multi-profile management option in the future, but for now does not. Typically during the day I will have TweetDeck open to monitor Twitter traffic and topics and also a browser screen open with HootSuite. This way I can rapidly tweet with one click yet monitor my groups and traffic.

HootSuite is not an application to replace TweetDeck, which is still hands down the best Twitter aggregator that I have tried, but it does make posting to multiple Twitter profiles easy which you simply cannot do with TweetDeck.

Just be careful if you have multiple Twitter accounts in posting the same content to all. Twitter can consider this spamming and will close your account so be judicious about when you tweet about the same topic on multiple Twitter accounts.

You can sign up for access to HootSuite for free and check it out for yourself.

Yes there is a situation where you can work to make your website so technology heavy that you get bogged down and lose the ability to be nimble or become prone to service outages or hostage to your programmer.

I have one large client whose site I occasionally webmaster who has had this happen to him. It crept up on him slowly, but now the tech bloat is really coming back to bite him. big time. The issue is that now his site is so dynamic in nature, pulls in fields from his database from many elements that  he is spending more time fixing things than he is spending growing his business. Right now his administrative control panel is down, broken when his developer added an interface to feed registrations to populate a store shopping cart. Then the developer broke the look and feel of the site when he set up a new password login. It is one problem after another.

Now if his database tied to his computer server in his business office has a hiccup, his website is impacted. It has become so sensitive and the problems now so fierce that he almost has had to set up a cot for his developer. All this for about 30 visitors a day to his website!

This is a situation where you don’t have to have everything fed into your website from a database. For a business this size they just don’t need this type of technological interface, in fact it is overkill.

At this point due to the nature of the problems, now the client is considering scrapping his entire site and all the technology that he has paid to be created and going back to a static site with an off-site place for certain transactions to keep the main site separate from the more dynamic problems. It is a shame that the client did not receive good guidance from the programmer to help scale his needs to his traffic and has ended up throwing money out the window. Technology is a good thing, but don’t let it drive your website before you really need it.