Valitics. Web Strategies, Net Results

Apple's (over)hyped ebook-reading, video-gaming, mail-sending, photo-displaying, video-playing wunderkind iPad device has the ability to change the way we interact with the web, in a few ways. 

Yesterday I talked to a dental professional who spent a great deal of time and money investing in a talking avatar and videos of their office. He told me that the salesman did a great job selling him on how cool everything was (I am paraphrasing and condensing things a bit). I asked him what the response was from patients. Since the site additions had only been up for a couple weeks, I was the first to see them. 

Earlier in the week, we ventured over to Red Sky for a fantastic chili cookoff. After thoroughly testing the 5 varieties of chili, all I can conclude is that 1) chili is delicious, and 2) I can't have a photo taken of me and not look completely ridiculous.

At any rate, it  was a lot of fun to see Carew Co. peeps and Red Sky peeps "in the wild."  

The other day I had a conversation with a friend who had purchased a website elsewhere and was having some frustrations over what he assumed he would get and the product that was actually delivered.  With this conversation in mind, I think there are 7 questions (at least) you need to figure out before deciding on someone to build your online business.   

Search engine optimization is always a hot topic with our clients. Everyone wants their websites to rank #1 on Google for their industry, and rightly so. But competition is fierce and getting fiercer. Getting more traffic to and results through your website via search engines is not an overnight process, but it's not necessarily rocket science either. 

The main reason we aren't supporting IE6 on our new website design is because it's a crappy browser. It doesn't support web standards.  It's 8+ years old (in internet years, that is like 120 years old - we've done the math). It's full of pop-ups, adware, malware, and other insidious things that will hurt your browsing experience and possibly the stability of your computer. It doesn't play by the rules, it sucks and we're not going to support it anymore on our site. 

I just talked to a client who is trying to decide between using stock content for a dental website or writing his own.  Of course, as a dentist, he only gets paid for performing dentistry on people, so he doesn't want to waste time.  My recommendation was to use our content for a framework, but to write everything himself.  Use a professional if you want it to sound perfect, but the ideas should come from you. 

Being a dentist, I am one link between Valitics and real world applications.  Reciprocal links occur when one website links to another and vice versa.  The goal of any external link is to send search engine bots (How search engines retrieve data) to your site.  This is often called "link juice."  The more link juice going to your site the better chance you have of ranking well. 

If you are a business owner, maybe you don't think you have time to participate in social media marketing.  The good news is you don't have to Tweet the longitude and latitude of your exact whereabouts every 10 minutes to participate.  In fact the key to a good social media presence is relevance.  Tell people something they want to hear and they will listen.  Keep in mind that may be something useful and insightful on Twitter or it may just be who you are, what you do and what makes you unique.  Here are some good stating ideas you should consider for participating in "bare bones" social media. 

When businesses and organizations search for a website design company, they are looking for the performance to cost ratio.  It really boils down to the return on investment.  If the site has high traffic or has the potential for high traffic, then a website that costs a lot to develop but fulfills every specification the owner wants provides good ROI.  In small to medium-sized businesses, there is usually a budget cap and also a limit on the ROI with increased development costs.  This is especially true in local and regional markets.