Your Home page is the most important page of your Web site, and not just because it’s by far the most visited. It’s where first impressions are formed (the oft-quoted “where am I and what can I do here?“). It must highlight your business goals, address customer needs, be interesting, have SEO content, and...
Free Web Site Advice
Renewing Domain Names
Last night after hours I get a message from a client: “Hey, my domain name is expiring tomorrow. Can you take care of that for me? Thanks.” Umm, thanks indeed. Thanks for missing the half-dozen or so messages that you’ve already received in the past month telling you that your domain is expiring soon....
Creating a New Web Site While You Already Have One
Creating your first Web site is easy — get the hosting, create the site, test it… and when you’re ready, start promoting the site. (Hah! Easy…) But once you have a Web site, how do you create a new one? People are (hopefully) visiting your current site — browsing pages, clicking on services, sending...
It's My Birthday! (Now buy some stuff)
Today’s my birthday. Yippee! Here’s the reason for the disclosure: in an increasingly social online world, business can no longer afford to be faceless. Facebook and Twitter facilitate connections between people that are often unexpectedly personal and intimate. For example, I’ve learned from Facebook of the death of an acquaintance’s mother; of the birth...
Protecting Digital Content
You’ve paid big bucks for your site — original artwork, professional photos, carefully written content. How do you keep someone else from stealing it? You don’t. If someone wants to grab your Web site content, images or HTML, they can find a way. Best you can hope for is to let them know that...
Reverse Image Search
Recently, I had success looking up an image using TinEye, a reverse image search engine. A client sent me an image asking about using it on their Web site. This is always a concern for me, since most better photos and images are under copyright, and I try to be careful. But with a...
The Lights Are (Still) On, But…
One thing I always advise my clients is: if you’re going to put anything on a Web site, keep it up to date. Solid advice, and often overlooked. A few years ago, I was doing background research for a client that had me reviewing Voss Water’s Web site. At the time, their News section...
Your Life, Online (and some extra stuff on the side)
You have to have been living under a rock to not realize that more and more of our life and work is happening online — online bill paying and banking, online socializing and networking, online radio and TV, online applications like Google docs. All within a Web browser, I can edit videos — my...
Wolfram Alpha, Bing and Deep Research Tools Made Easy
Search is back in the news again. Long dominated by Google (and for now, still dominated by Google), some new tools are emerging. Microsoft is throwing a lot of ad dollars into Bing, which to me is Google with random header photos. Yawn. Meanwhile, Wolfram Alpha is fascinating, even to a mathematics noob like...
Monitoring Your Web Site
A few weeks ago, a client Web site disappeared. It happens: in the past, other clients have occasionally lost their sites, for reasons ranging from hosting hard disk failures to various human errors. (In this client’s case, they hadn’t renewed the domain name, so the site was still there, but the URL pointing to...