Being in the website design business, the thing that seems to always delay projects is copywriting. Even from clients who claim that they have their copy already written and set to go somehow don't have it ready in time and projects get delayed. I can think of just 1 instance where a client walked in with a binder and CD of all their content before we even started design (man, was that nice). So I realize that not everyone out there is a writer, but thank God there are copywriters out there, right?

So this tip may not be for you if you're not a writer. I don't mind writing and can often just come up with copy without too much effort. If you're like that and if you want to promote your website, then there are some great opportunities out there for you.

Basically, what you'd do is write a somewhat generic article about your business industry - not about your business per se. So, for me, my business is website development, so I might write an article (like this) about how to promote your website or maybe the top 10 things to remember when creating a website or picking a website developer - something like that. At the bottom of that article, I'd then write a short, 3-4 line bio and include a link back to my website.

What happens next is, you submit your article to a site that will distribute it for you. One I just found is called iSnare.com. For like $2, they'll take your article and submit it to sites that want articles dealing with their industry. The great thing is, these articles are posted on other websites as news and your link then appears on them. So not only do you get another link pointing back to your website but you get to prove your knowledge about your industry to the audience that you want to reach. It's sort of like product placement in a way but you're giving away some of your knowledge in exchange for it and everyone wins.

I sort of discovered this technique again while setting up some of my domain names at WhyPark.com where they match these kinds of articles up to your domain name and keep refreshing that domain's website with fresh content so that your domain names are active. You can then sell or develop those domain names later and those domains will be worth more because they're already getting traffic and may be ranked alright on search engines.

So if you have the time and can write a pretty decent article, I'd suggest signing up for iSnare.com and sending out 5-10 articles to see what happens.

Tony Herman is an owner of a website development firm in Madison, WI called Webstix, Inc. where they specialize in website design, content management systems and website promotion. (see how that works?) :-)

Did you know that Yahoo gives free local listings to businesses? You can even list your website URL and pick primary and secondary categories. Hey, it's one more link ("vote" if you think in SEO terms) to your site and it's from a Yahoo domain. So don't just sit there reading this, go set one up if you haven't yet!

Yahoo Local Listings

-T

So you've got some fancy phone number that forwards to wherever you go but your caller ID doesn't show that phone number - it shows the number that you're calling from. The expectation can't be that you want people to ignore the number on caller ID and instead dig up this special other phone number you have. That's not what people are used to. They're used to hitting redial on their cell phone, office or home phone since it's so easy, right? So don't get mad when people can't get a hold of you. :-)

For technology to work well, it has to work as people would expect. You can't expect people to conform to some other system just for the technology you've chosen. Apple (and maybe Microsoft) know this very well.

Another example. We've got a web design project now that's using a flash based video player. The client didn't want the YouTube logo on their videos and they have some videos that are just for members, so releasing these videos to the whole world via YouTube just wouldn't work. Well, we're finding out that it's not easy to get a video player to work just like it does on YouTube. The client knows (and I know) that people expect it to work just like YouTube, so we've been on this project a long time, trying to get that player to meet those expectations. Sending something else out there that's below people's expectations causes problems.

I guess my point is that getting things technologically right just doesn't "happen" on its own. There are often large teams of people working on the smallest part of a project and you may never even know all the man hours that goes into something since the expectation is that "it should just work".

I guess that's why politics is often so frustrating. :-)

-T

I've been using the new Firefox 3 browser a couple of weeks now, I guess, and it's great. They seemed to have combined how the Camino browser looks with the Mac version - meaning, the buttons on pages look like Mac style buttons. That's fine, I suppose, but it just makes more of a difference between Mac and Windows so from a web developer point of view, I'm not too thrilled about that.

But the address bad, dubbed the "Awesome Bar" is truly that - awesome... almost scary. It seems to know what site I'm looking for next like it's reading my mind. It happens several times a day, saving me time. I think I'm the kind of user that can move so much more faster than the computer allows me. When I do demonstrations, people ask me how I get around through different programs so quickly. Anway, this awesome bar has saved me lots of time, I just love it.

The great thing is that you don't have to start typing a URL. I saw someone trying to find a site the other day and he was typing in "http://www" and I said forget that and start typing in the name of the page and within a few seconds, he found the page. So it's something to get used to and you have to kind of change you habits.

-T