websense

OK, so I gave in. We’ve been traditionally a PC shop for the last 10 years. However, over the last couple years, we’ve added a few team members that prefer Macs. And I have to admit, they’ve sold me on the usability and capabilities of Macs. To the degree that my wife and kids will hardly touch the PC at home. Needless to say, the huge beautiful monitor is a factor, but there is no doubt, the Mac makes photo and video editing much easier for a novice!

So, this afternoon we decided to pick up a couple of I Phones. Cool as heck. 3 or 4 of the guys at the office have ‘em and love ‘em. Of course, I love to spark debate because my Windows Mobile 6 device makes syncing with exchange extremely quick and easy. However the Moto Q has almost no “cool factor” when compared to an I phone. Lets be honest, a calculator with a color screen hardly looks good compared to a solid piece of brushed aluminum and glass that accesses the web, makes phone calls and takes pictures!

Now that I’ve sufficiently advertised the I phone; everyone knows Mac is known for ease of use right? Well, not if you’re a business. AT&T, the only provider through which you can legitimately get an i phone in the US, has zero accommodation for corporate accounts. So, we went to the AT&T Store, applied, got approved and received a confirmation code for our new accounts. Unlike a traditional wireless carrier, they don’t set them up at the store and hand you a working device. Rather, they hand you a couple really cool, but disconnected I phones with a “confirmation code”. Unfortunately, when you access their web activation site, via I Tunes, it has NO IDEA what to do with a “confirmation code”. Nor does anyone at AT&T, when you call them.

To try and shorten a long story, their web interface is useless for a Corporate Account. So are their sales support people available via phone calls. They told me I had to set it up personally, and they would convert it later! The person on the phone (after I had been transferred twice) actually told me we needed to “get around” the system to make this work. In other words, going into the store and setting it up before hand was a complete waste of time, which I know all small business owners love.

Now, because I wanted to keep the commitment I had made to a couple people regarding getting the I Phones, and the fact that i really enjoy cool new toys, I worked through this and got them working. But If Apple is smart, they will hopefully realize that not every business owner will be willing to spend 3 or 4 hours setting up something as simple as a new cell phone.

The syncing process for calenders etc. is awesome. If they could just carry the simple usability concept through their whole business!

I was just reading the Feb, 08 Kiplinger Letter and found some great insights in it. Even some good tips for online retailers that were pretty accurate in my opinion.

What I really found interesting is that much of the report discusses the weak economy, inflation in the near future, and the weakness of the dollar. It also discusses that almost as a result of this online retail will continue to rise. The Letter says that not only will the percentage on online shoppers increase significantly in 2008, but the amount that current online shoppers purchase online will rise.

So, while I hope no one would wish a bad economy on the US, it’s important for all businesses to find and capitalize on the areas of growth.

There are also some great insights regarding low conversion rates of e-commerce sites, and finding ways to convert abandoned carts. I know many business leaders read The Kiplinger Letter, so their advice should lend some great credibility to the Search Marketing and Web Analytics industries.

I recently had a very interesting discussion with Jeff Gauger, the Executive Editor of our local paper The Canton Repository. From what I gathered, he’s been in the print publishing industry for the bulk of his career and clearly still is. One thing that makes him different, at least in my opinion, is that he truly realizes the collision that is happening between the off line and online worlds. News is no longer limited to the paper, the TV, or the formalities the we’ve all grown to expect in those mediums.

I was surprised to hear these words come out of his mouth, I believe he said “web-first publishing” was a major initiative, which I of course agree with. However, I was somewhat shocked to hear that come out of the mouth of the Editor of an almost 200 year old newspaper! Kind of refreshing.

Jeff made some great observations in this article, regarding coverage of the Bobby Cutts trial and a great effort the Rep made to focus on the fast pace that web users expect the content to be delivered as well as the style and format they want it in. It sounds to me like they made some great strides and learned quite a lot from this process. A high profile, national story gave them the perfect venue to try some new things and they had the guts to take the risk and give it a shot.

Jeff wrote this article for the audience of other journalists, but web marketers and site owners could certainly learn a lot from his observations! Take some time and read the article. He talks about the variations in the content, style and of course speed. Web marketers have known for years that regurgitating print materials to the web isn’t going to do the trick. This reinforces that fact in a great way.

Kudos to Jeff and the Rep for taking the web seriously, and making a good effort to serve the demands of their market. The next year or two will be interesting to watch.

Some of the better questions and answers that came up:

Is there a an SEO advantage for either .NET or php?

Short answer is no. They are both perfectly fine languages and can generate search friendly dynamic content as long as some simple guidelines are followed.

Mod Re-write, or Isapi Rewrite to keep URLs clean, and of course avoid the common mistakes like session id’s multiple URLs for the same content etc.

There was some mild debate on the panel, as Sage mentioned that in his experience, it has been easier to get Mod Re-write accomplished, thus giving php an advantage for him. Because of our development backgrounds, Colton and I have both had relative ease with both .Net and php.

A good question from an attendee: “I have millions of pages and only a small percentage are indexed. Should I use sub domains”?

All panelists seemed to agree that sub domains are not likely to solve the problem. There is likely another core issue, such as session id’s, duplicate content, query strings, etc., to look into first.

It should come down to the user. If there is reason to break it out into many sites, for the users sake, then do so. However, if it makes more sense to have all of the content under one domain for the user, then leave it that way and diagnose the real reason the site isn’t being fully indexed.

A member from the audience did make the point that with a site that large, it may simply be a matter of disc space. He had observed in his own industry, that sites with millions of pages just don’t get fully indexed due to limited resources of the engines.

-by Collyn Floyd

Social media and I got off to a bad start. It started a few years ago when my college-age brother told me about MySpace and how I just had to be on there. After all, he already had like 110 friends. It’s not that I didn’t already spent a lot of time online, I just didn’t want to spend it picking out background wallpaper, theme songs, and whatnot (& the same could probably be for most of my friends). I saw the point, but MySpace wasn’t for me.

Then last year, there was the Digg phenomenon. I checked it out, but I like a friendlier online environment without all the incendiary comments. There was also Twitter – you know, so I can tell my friends, “I’m going to the bathroom right now”? Um, no thanks.

So, it came as a surprise when social media recently came to my rescue. I was stumped as to how to remove some decorative shutters from our home’s exterior. Google produced no help. I thought about driving up to Home Depot, but didn’t want to deal with the Saturday crowd, hunt for someone in an orange apron to help me, etc, etc. On a whim, I logged into Yahoo! Answers and asked my question, “How do I remove/uninstall exterior shutters?” Within several minutes, I had two answers. Within a couple of hours, I had several more.

These were good answers, mind you; a contractor responded, as did someone who had clearly gone through the process before. In total, I got eight responses. Even better, Y! Answers invited me to vote on the best response, and the answer with the most votes moved to the top of the page.

The size of the Y! Answers community is astounding. You can ask just about anything and get a response: Does butter spoil if left unrefrigerated? What should I do about the annoying guy at work? How often are there general elections in Britain? Of course, you could go to the USDA’s website to find out about butter or an online encyclopedia for British election info, but getting those experienced-it-myself, community-driven responses on Y! Answers makes for much more fun.

So I guess all is not lost for me with Social Media. It was just a matter of finding the right community.